Hutong Cat | A damning UN report on China’s treatment of minorities in Xinjiang

A UN report confirms crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, but expect no action from China

The United Nations (UN) report on serious human rights violations in China’s Xinjiang released early Thursday elicited responses on expected lines: Widespread condemnation of Beijing’s hardline policies in the remote region and a strong rebuttal from Beijing, which called the report “groundless”.

To some others, the report has come too late, and said that the damage to the Uyghur community has already been inflicted.  (AFP)

“Based on a rigorous review of documentary material,” the report by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), said that the extent of “…arbitrary detentions against Uyghur and others, in context of “restrictions and deprivation more generally of fundamental rights, enjoyed individually and collectively, may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.”

The two sets of polarised opinions might have been along expected lines but less expected was the damning nature of the report itself against China’s treatment of minorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR).

Given the delay in releasing it, Beijing’s reported efforts to have it buried without ceremony and human rights chief Michelle Bachelet’s seemingly underwhelming fact-finding mission to China in May – the unequivocal description of Beijing’s policies as “crimes against humanity” wasn’t really expected.

Bachelet released the report literally minutes before her four-year term ended, in itself an indicator of China's influence and pressure against its release.

Despite the misgivings over the delay in the report’s release and Beijing’s insidious influence, the report’s assessment and recommendations essentially gave the UN’s stamp of approval on a long list of allegations made — repeatedly — by members of the Uyghur community living in exile, global rights groups and western countries against Chinese policies against minorities in Xinjiang.

To some experts, the UN’s failure to mention the word genocide in the report weakened the overall message of severe and deliberate rights violations; the word “genocide,” was used by the US and an unofficial tribunal in Britain, The Uyghur Tribunal, last year to describe the treatment of minorities in Xinjiang.

To some others, the report has come too late, and said that the damage to the Uyghur community has already been inflicted.

Nevertheless, the report confirmed that wide ranging and devastating crimes had been committed against Muslim minorities in Xinjiang.

It accused China of carrying out ‘serious human rights’ violation against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in the province — China’s largest and among the least populated — saying there’s credible evidence to call Beijing’s actions in the region as “crimes against humanity”.

The report said that “allegations of patterns of torture, or ill-treatment, including forced medical treatment and adverse conditions of detention, are credible, as are allegations of individual incidents of sexual and gender-based violence.”

It outlined accusations of torture, forced medical procedures including sterilisations, as well as sexual violence against Uyghur Muslims.

Furthermore, the report said that Chinese government policies in the region have “transcended borders”, separating families, “severing” contacts, producing “patterns of intimidations and threats” against the wider Uyghur diaspora who have spoken out about conditions at home.

These are serious allegations, allegations which have been levelled earlier by rights groups and investigative media reports based on satellite images – of “vocational education and training camps” (VETCs) — and internal Chinese documents.

The UN assessment was initiated following the first allegations were brought to the attention of the global body in late 2017.

Then in August, 2018, an UN human rights panel said it had received many credible reports that one million ethnic Uyghurs in China were being held in what resembles a “massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy.”

Gay McDougall, a member of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, had then cited estimates that two million people mostly from the Uyghur community had been forced into “political camps for indoctrination” in XUAR.

In June, 2020, a joint statement by 50 UN Special Rapporteurs and human rights experts, called on China to address concerns about the treatment of ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang besides Tibet and on the charge of using excessive force against protesters including in Hong Kong.

The same call was repeated June, 2022, ahead of the 50th session of the Human Rights Council, by a group of UN experts who urged China to cooperate fully with the UN human rights system and “grant unhindered access to independent experts who have received and addressed allegations of significant human rights violations and repression of fundamental freedoms in the country”.

The new report seems to be a culmination of this process, which began at least four, long years ago.

(The OHCHR is yet to respond to HT’s questions on the reasons behind the delay in releasing the report.)

After issuing a 131-page response to the 48-page OHCHR report denying wrongdoings and abuses, China’s or the ruling Communist Party of China’s (CPC) response has been two-pronged: To dismiss the report in anger through the Chinese foreign ministry, calling it a western “smear campaign” for the international audience, and to entirely black it out for its captive, domestic audience.

“But perhaps the most revealing fact to note today, 48 hours after the release of the Xinjiang report, is that there has been almost no reporting at all inside China. If the external messaging of the China’s leadership has been all about pique, its internal messaging has been about creating a vacuum,” the China Media Project, which is based at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre and monitors trends and in journalism and communications in China, said in a analysis of China’s response.

The silence, the analysis says, tells its own story, “…of Xinjiang as a matter so sensitive to China’s leadership that the only voices permitted to speak are the megaphones intended for external audiences.”

It’s likely that China will continue to do more for “external audiences” in the days to come as it has been doing since 2018 — arrange more choreographed group tours for diplomats and journalists to Xinjiang.

Like it did this August for some 30 envoys and representatives from Islamic countries.

China's state-run English television channel, CGTN, quoted Hassane Rabehi, Algerian ambassador to China, gushing: “The fruit here is so sweet, just like the life of the people here”.

Rabehi’s statement, made before the report was released, sounds tone-deaf and jarring against its grim assessment and recommendations.

“It (the report) also calls for a prompt (Chinese) Government investigation into allegations of human rights violations in camps and other detention facilities, “including allegations of torture, sexual violence, ill-treatment, forced medical treatment, as well as forced labour and reports of deaths in custody.”

On that, expect nothing.

Sutirtho Patranobis, HT’s experienced China hand, writes a weekly column from Beijing, exclusively for HT Premium readers. He was previously posted in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he covered the final phase of the civil war and its aftermath, and was based in Delhi for several years before that

The views expressed are personal