On the final day of a rare and controversial visit to China, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said on Saturday that she had asked Beijing to review its anti-terrorism policies to avoid “arbitrary measures” against Muslim minorities.
Bachelet said, however, that the six-day trip, which included a visit to Xinjiang — an autonomous region in the northwest where Beijing is accused of repressing ethnic Uighurs — was not an investigation into the country’s human rights policies, but an opportunity. to “talk frankly” with the authorities.
“I have raised questions and concerns about the application of counterterrorism and deradicalization measures, especially about the impact on the rights of Uighurs and other predominantly Muslim minorities,” she said during an online press conference.
Beijing is accused of holding 1 million Uighurs and other Muslim minority people in detention centers, of sterilizing women and forcing them to perform forced labour.
The trip was organized in a “closed cycle”, with participants isolated inside a bubble to prevent the spread of Covid-19 and without the presence of foreign media.
The 70-year-old former Chilean president denied that her meetings in Xinjiang were supervised by the Chinese regime. She also said that the authorities in the region had guaranteed the “dismantling” of the network of “professional training centers” that humanitarian organizations qualify as forced re-education camps.
The first visit by a United Nations human rights leader to China in 17 years was criticized by activists and politicians in Western countries.
“Some Western countries did their best to disrupt and undermine the High Commissioner’s visit, but the plot was unsuccessful,” Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu said in an online statement after the press conference.
The executive director of the international organization Human Right Watch, Kenneth Roth, played down Bachelet’s argument that her visit was valuable because she was able to speak openly with Chinese officials.
“This kind of behind-the-scenes talk is exactly what the Chinese government wants, no public reports, no pressure to end its intense crackdown on Uighurs and others,” Roth tweeted.
Amnesty International Secretary General Agnes Callamard said in a statement that the visit “was characterized by photos taken with senior government officials and manipulation of statements by Chinese state media, giving the impression that she was directly involved in a highly predictable propaganda” by the Chinese government.
After a video meeting Bachelet had with leader Xi Jinping, state media suggested that she supported China’s view on human rights. Her office clarified, however, that her comments did not contain a direct endorsement of China’s record on this issue.
Leaked Xinjiang documents and photos raise pressure for sanctions
The release last week of thousands of leaked documents and images from Xinjiang police districts has heightened pressure on the international community to impose economic and diplomatic sanctions on the regime led by Xi Jinping.
The 1.6 million km² province —an area similar to that of Amazonas—, after all, is an important financial cradle: from there, 19% of global cotton production, 25% of tomato derivatives and at least 40% of polysilicon come from there, raw material for the electronics and solar panel industries, according to data from the Washington-based research group C4ADS.
“Governments can, at the very least, ensure that they are not complicit in these human rights abuses by passing laws that prohibit companies from having production in their supply chains that violates Uighur rights,” he tells Sheet Koen Stoop, policy coordinator for the World Uighur Congress in the European Union (EU).
But Stoop, a member of this global network of Uighur organizations, a Muslim people with strong ties to Central Asia, doubts that the large-scale leak, initially reported in outlets such as the BBC and Le Monde, will actually change governments’ attitudes. “We hope, of course, that it will be a wake-up call for the international community, but the truth is that this is the third, fourth or fifth alert.”
Dubbed the “Xinjiang Police Archives”, the documents were obtained in two mostly Uighur counties in Xinjiang. The province of 25 million people, official data show, has 10.9 million people of the Han ethnicity — the predominant one in China — and 11.6 million Uighurs, in addition to other Muslim minorities.
There are more than 2,800 photos of detained Uighurs, dozens of documents, some of them from high-ranking Chinese regime figures, and 23,000 files of people arrested and placed in re-education camps. All date from 2017 to 2018, early years of Beijing’s breakthrough.
The importance, explain those involved, is to be the first information package that demonstrates the repressive nature of the re-education camps. Among the reasons for the detention of many who appear in the files is their involvement in what are described as terrorist attacks committed in the past, dating back to the 1980s.
Memetimin Memet, 35, for example, was sentenced to ten years in prison. His file states: “The suspect learned the practice of worship and the scriptures [islâmicas] for about a month in 1994; he grew a beard for about three months, from May to August 2006.”
“Much of what the regime has been trying to do is take whatever people have done in the past and take it as an indication that they need to be re-educated or punished,” explains Adrian Zenz of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, thinks tank based in the USA. “And often the assumption is that the whole family has problems, so relatives are also detained.”
Zenz, a German anthropologist, is one of the leading names studying the situation in Xinjiang. It was he who received the thousands of files from an anonymous source who did not want to be identified for fear of reprisals and, together with a team, translated and organized them. Part of the material shows images of items seized by the police for being considered illegal. There are prayer mats, hijabs — an Islamic veil that covers the hair and neck — and handwritten verses from the Koran.
Another document brings an assessment made by the Minister of Public Security in June 2018, after visiting Xinjiang. Zhao Kezhi says the local administration has been successful in combating what he describes as terrorism “despite the situation of detentions severely exceeding the capacity of local prisons.”
Researchers such as Adrian Zenz and human rights organizations project that, since 2017, 1 to 3 million Uighurs have been detained in Xinjiang, both in prisons and in re-education camps. Minister Kezhi, in the same document, says that since the previous year, “more than 20,000 dangerous terrorist gangs have been destroyed, which is more than five times the total of the last ten years”.
Sought, the Chinese embassy in Brazil said that the country has already clarified, several times, “the unfounded accusations against China in relation to the so-called ‘issue of human rights’ in Xinjiang”. And he mentioned answers given by the country’s foreign ministry spokesman, Wang Wenbin, during a press conference on Tuesday (24).
At the time, Wenbin said the recent leak was yet another case of defamation of Xinjiang by anti-China forces. “It’s exactly the same trick they used to play before. The lies and rumors they spread cannot deceive the world or hide the fact that Xinjiang enjoys peace and stability, its economy is thriving and its people live and work in peace. “
Zenz sees economic sanctions on Beijing and Chinese officials as the most effective way to get the regime to change its stance on the Uighurs, who have a growing diaspora in Turkey. “A picture speaks a thousand words, and Chinese propaganda often says ‘to believe it, come here and see for yourself.’ Now, even if we don’t go there, we see what’s happening.”
Another document from the “Xinjiang Police Archives” is internal guidance on how security officers should act in the event of riots at re-education centers. Guards are instructed to fire warning shots if inmates do not accept verbal orders. And if that doesn’t work, they can shoot to kill.
Approximately 2% of the Chinese population is Muslim, according to Pew Research Center projections. Another 18.3% are Buddhists and 5.2% are Christians. About 22% belong to what the center calls “traditional religions”, those closely associated with an ethnic group. More than 51.8% of Chinese would not have any religion.
Pressure is growing not only in the economic arena, but also in demanding investigation and justice mechanisms — it is no wonder that the leak was published precisely the week that Bachelet is in China. Dozens of international NGOs have asked the high commissioner to take an incisive stance on the issue.
“Bachelet’s tenure has been marked by a lack of public diplomacy on China; when you compare that with the other crises she has had to deal with, such as Myanmar and Ukraine, the difference in language and frequency is immense,” he says. Brazilian Raphael Viana David, program director for Asia at the International Human Rights Service (ISHR), based in Geneva, Switzerland.
Bachelet had been negotiating a visit to China since 2018. Pressured by organizations to carry out remote monitoring of the situation in Xinjiang in the face of the delay in negotiations, she did so. The document, reports Viana, was ready last September. To date, however, the material has not been made available to the public.
Organizations such as ISHR demand not only the release of the report, but also that the Chilean make the historic opportunity of the recent visit the kick-off for international justice processes, such as investigations of possible crimes against humanity or cultural genocide against the Uighurs.
In the end, the expectation would be to create a mechanism for monitoring and investigating the matter under the UN umbrella. Something like that, however, would have to be approved by the Commission on Human Rights — that is, get the favorable vote of the member countries. “This is where the challenge comes in, because China puts pressure on several of these nations”, says Viana — Brazil, which has Beijing as its main trading partner, is part of the council.
