PRC’s ‘horrific’ abuse of Uighurs condemned by 30 nations on sidelines of U.N. meeting
The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s) repression of Uighurs in Xinjiang captured headlines globally the week of the United Nations General Assembly in New York in late September 2019, despite the PRC’s campaign to silence criticism of its abusive treatment of the ethnic minority at the U.N.
Led by U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan and his counterparts from Canada, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, more than 30 nations, 20 nongovernmental organizations and Uighur victims convened on the sidelines of the U.N. meeting “to demand and compel an immediate end to China’s horrific campaign of repression,” Sullivan said, news agencies reported.
The PRC has arbitrarily detained more than 1 million Turkic Muslims, predominantly Uighurs, in China’s western region of Xinjiangin internment camps since April 2017 for expressing their cultural and religious identities, according to the U.N. and other organizations. (Pictured: A woman visits a Uighur graveyard on the outskirts of Hotan in China’s Xinjiang region, where the Chinese government has interred more than 1 million ethnic Uighurs and other Muslim minorities.)
At the September 25, 2019, meeting, Sullivan refuted the PRC’s claim that the camps are vocational training centers and part of a program to rehabilitate “terrorists,” according to Agence France-Presse. “This is a systematic campaign by the Chinese Communist Party to stop its own citizens from exercising their unalienable right to religious freedom.”
Sullivan said member states must ensure that the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights has “immediate, unhindered and unmonitored” access to Xinjiang to closely monitor alleged human rights abuses by the PRC, Reuters reported.
Various human rights organizations and former camp detainees have alleged serious abuses of the Uighurs in the camps, ranging from cruelty and forced labor to torture and suspicious deaths.
The U.N. Human Rights Council heard testimony September 24, 2019, in Geneva, Switzerland, that the PRC is engaged in widespread harvesting of human organs from persecuted religious and ethnic minorities, the Business Insider website reported. The China Tribunal, a group backed by an Australian human rights charity that’s investigating the issue, made the allegations.
Meanwhile, the PRC has “waged an aggressive campaign to prevent discussion of Xinjiang at the United Nations,” The New York Timesnewspaper reported September 24, 2019.
The PRC has used diplomatic and economic levers to effectively buy or coerce their silence, the newspaper detailed in its report. PRC officials have persuaded even Muslim countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East to support China on this issue, the newspaper concluded, for fear of risking financial backing.
For example, in 2018, the PRC helped Turkey obtain a U.S. $3.6 billion loan for energy and transportation. Since then, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s president, has backed Chinese President Xi Jinping politically, The New York Timesreported.
“Many, many governments are looking the other way and self-censoring on the issue of Xinjiang,” Daniel R. Russel, assistant U.S. secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs during President Barack Obama’s administration, told the Times. “Beijing is notoriously prickly about its self-declared ‘core interests,’ and few countries are willing to put the economic benefits of good relations with China at risk — let alone find themselves on the receiving end of Chinese retaliation.”
Senior U.S. officials, however, continue to openly criticize Beijing. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo previously denounced the PRC’s treatment of the Uighurs as the “stain of the century.”
U.N. human rights chief Michelle Bachelet has repeatedly pressured China to give U.N. officials access to investigate allegations of disappearances and arbitrary detentions, especially in Xinjiang, Reuters reported. However, the PRC, through its coordinated campaign, has sought to undermine support for such an inspection at the U.N., The New York Timesreported.
“History will judge the international community for how we respond to this attack on human rights and fundamental freedoms,” Sullivan told the meeting, Agence France-Presse reported.
