Repression of Uighurs in Xinjiang: China Does Everything to Discredit the UN Report.
Michelle Bachelet is staking her legacy as head of the institution on this highly anticipated report.
Until now, China has only been moving behind the scenes to try to bury a report by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on repression in Xinjiang, where Uighurs and other Muslim minorities are victims of a policy of forced assimilation.
On July 26, 2022, China changed its strategy by publishing an open letter presenting the report as the work of “certain anti-Chinese forces, full of political ulterior motives”.
On its Twitter account, the Chinese mission in Geneva wrote: “An open letter from almost a thousand NGOs opposing the publication of the so-called Xinjiang study by the OHCHR (The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights), and calling on the OHCHR to stand on the right side of history and not publish a study full of lies”.
The maneuver is crude: the letter is published by the official daily China Daily, and the NGOs in question are all associations closely linked to the Chinese Communist Party, of which more than seven hundred are based in Xinjiang, such as the Xinjiang Association for State-Owned Enterprises, some official associations of friendship with countries close to China, including the Pakistan-China Friendship Association, but above all, many that have nothing to do with the Xinjiang issue: Chinese Flower Association, Great Wall Society and Chinese Dart Players Association, are thus among the signatories.
Drafted by the teams of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the report has been ready since the fall of 2021, but its publication has been postponed since then, apparently pending a trip by the High Commissioner, Michelle Bachelet, to China, which finally took place in May 2022 and during which she visited Xinjiang. The United States and the European Union have urged Bachelet to release it.
UN seal on a sensitive issue
The UN organization seems to be playing for time: the report is now “being finalized”, after having been sent to China for comments. It should be published by the end of Ms. Bachelet's mandate, August 31, 2022, a spokesperson was recently quoted by Reuters. According to a source within the High Commission, the information gathered in the dossier is based on interviews with Uighurs and “open” sources such as the work of NGOs, researchers, and journalists over the past four years, and satellite images. They are not exceptional, but they have the merit of bringing the seal of the UN on this sensitive subject.
For several weeks, the Chinese mission in Geneva has been discreetly circulating a letter requesting the non-publication of the report, among the forty-seven delegations of the Human Rights Council, as revealed by the Reuters agency on July 20, 2022. With this open letter, Beijing changes its strategy.
If they are doing this, it is because they know that they can no longer prevent the publication of the report. So they are starting a new sequence: it is now a matter of discrediting it. It is daring, but the aim is to be able to say, in the Chinese press and abroad, especially in developing countries: there are NGOs from all over the world who are opposed to it, so you see it is a machination led by the West within the UN.
The exercise is delicate: so far, most of the criticism against the policy of forced assimilation in Xinjiang has come from NGOs, the media, and political representatives of Western countries. A UN report would be more significant. The content of the open letter betrays a reluctance to attack the United Nations head-on.
On the one hand, it celebrates Ms. Bachelet's visit to China in May 2022: “We believe that you have seen with your own eyes that Xinjiang has benefited from sustainable economic development and religious harmony”. On the other hand, it accuses the report written by Ms. Bachelet's team of being “based on false accusations fabricated by anti-Chinese forces”.
Michelle Bachelet's selective indignation raises questions
China is not at its first attempt: in 2019, to respond to a letter from forty democratic countries denouncing Chinese policy in Xinjiang, it mobilized mostly authoritarian countries to support its action “to fight terrorism” in Xinjiang. This exercise was repeated the following year with more signatories on the Chinese side.
Enough to allow the nationalist daily Global Times to claim an accounting victory: “More countries support China on Xinjiang, in the face of the siege led by a clique led by the United States”, says June 15, 2022 tribune.
During her tenure, which began in 2018, Michelle Bachelet has been widely criticized for her selective outrage: the former Chilean president has, for example, called on France to investigate the “excessive use of force” during the yellow vest protests and denounced “systematic racism” after the death of George Floyd in the United States.
But she has never directly criticized China, despite revelations since late 2017 about the “re-education” camps where more than a million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities have been interned in Xinjiang and the imposition of liberticidal national security law in Hong Kong in 2020.
She probably hoped that her reserve would not jeopardize a trip to China to talk directly with Chinese leaders about these issues. But her visit was disappointing: her few interlocutors were handpicked by the Chinese authorities. At the end of her stay, she limited herself to very diplomatic criticism, stating: “It is very important that the responses against terrorism do not lead to a violation of human rights”.
The publication of the report on Xinjiang and its final content will be decisive for her record as the head of the UN institution. His credibility is clearly at stake.
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