The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has last Wednesday released a long-awaited report into the Chinese Government’s treatment of ethnic Uyghurs in China’s Xinjiang province last Wednesday. The report is just as damning as many in the international community expected it to be, concluding that serious human rights violations have been committed arbitrarily against the Uyghurs and “other predominantly Muslim communities” in Xinjiang.
The abuses, including “alleged patterns of torture, or ill-treatment, including forced medical treatment and adverse conditions of detention”, as well as “individual incidents of sexual and gender-based violence”, have long been attributed to the CCP’s operations concerning Uyghurs in Xinjiang, but now that they have been codified in an official UN report, the issue has now been brought to the forefront of international attention. The report concluded with a damning assessment, stating that the abuses outlined in the report “may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.”
The Uyghurs, an ethnically Turkic people that have historically populated Xinjiang in north-western China, are predominantly Muslim, and differ from the majority Han population of the rest of China in language, culture, appearance, and religion. The CCP is not known for its tolerance of ethnic minorities, and sees its minority populations as a potential source of internal strife. Ever since deadly attacks by Xinjiang independence movements in the early and mid-2010s, the CCP has cracked down hard on the Uyghurs, with the number of arbitrary detentions, as well as the amount of internal security job vacancies posted by the CCP, increasing dramatically since then.
The CCP frames its abuses against the Uyghurs as “anti-terror activities”, using organisation such as the Turkestan Islamic Party, an Islamic fundamentalist organisation with ties to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and responsible for numerous deaths within Xinjiang, as scapegoats to conduct their abuses against the Uyghurs.
The UN report conspicuously avoided use of the term “genocide” to describe what is happening in Xinjiang, despite widespread acceptance that the CCPs ultimate goal with these abuses is to erase, or to at least severely limit the growth an proliferation of Uyghur culture. Their use of forced sterilisation and birth control has led to a steep decline in the growth of the Uyghurs population, and heavy restrictions on travel has meant that any attempts by Uyghurs to escape Xinjiang have been stymied.
The CCP has expectedly fought hard against the report, releasing its own counter-report accusing the UN of effectively being a puppet of the US and western powers attempting to destroy the Chinese people. The counter-report states that there is no such thing as ‘forced Labour’ in Xinjiang, and that it has been operating fully within international law.
It says that evidence of racial discrimination in Xinjiang is “groundless”, and that the labour camps it has built in the region are “learning facilities established in accordance with law intended for de-radicalisation.” It concludes with the assertion that the US and other western nations are themselves responsible for causing “human rights disasters” and of committing “numerous crimes” both at home and abroad, and that the UN’s resources would be better spent investigating them instead.
Spokespeople for the CCP who have come out to attack the UN’s report have all used the most inflammatory and accusatory language, calling the UN merely a mouthpiece for western aggression, accusing the report of being anti-China in spirit. The CCP have attempted to block the release of this report at every stage, putting great pressure on the UN not to publish it. Collecting evidence for the report was made as difficult as possible by the CCP, with UN investigators prohibited from talking to inmates of these labour camps, and having to be supervised by CCP officials every step of the way. If these camps were truly just “re-education camps” intended to de-radicalise great swathes of the Uyghur population as the CCP has stated, it could very easily allow the UN complete access to its facilities and records and allow their truth to be told, but their version of events is quite clearly not reality.
The CCP refers to itself as ‘the Chinese people”, and sees any attack on its dangerous, cruel, and illegal policies as an attack on the people of China themselves. The fact is, the UN, the US, the west, the international community in general, has no quarrel with the people of China. Their quarrel is with the CCP, its wanton violation of human rights laws, and ‘by-any-means’ suppression of ethnic identity in its autonomous regions to maintain order.
The CCP is not representative of the Chinese people as they have never, and will never, hold elections to determine what their people actually want front their government, as it would surely lead to their downfall. Only prolonged and intense pressure from the international community on the issue of this Uyghur genocide will make the CCP walk back its policy, but the only surefire way to ensure human rights and freedoms are respected in China is the removal of the CCP, and the introduction of true elective democracy in China.
stay safe
/e