‘Members Being Treated As Enemies Of State On Basis Of Religion’
Nick Cumming-Bruce
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| Uighurs |
Geneva:
United Nations human rights experts expressed alarm on Friday over what they said were many credible reports that China had detained a million or more ethnic Uighurs in the western region of Xinjiang and forced as many as two million to submit to reeducation and indoctrination.
In the name of combating religious extremism, China had turned Xinjiang into “something resembling a massive internment camp, shrouded in secrecy, a sort of norights zone,” Gay McDougall, a member of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, said in the opening session of a two-day review of China’s policies in Geneva.
Accounts from the region pointed to Muslims “being treated as enemies of the state solely on the basis of their ethno-religious identity,” McDougall said, citing reports from activists and scholars that many had disappeared and that even the most commonplace religious practices had become grounds for punishment.
Raising questions about the fate of Uighur students who had returned to Xinjiang from overseas, McDougall said that more than a hundred had disappeared, some had been detained and others had died in detention.
In opening remarks at Friday’s session, Yu Jianhua, China’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, praised China’s policies toward minorities, saying they were aimed at promoting unity and harmony, and said that economic progress in the region had lifted 20 million people out of poverty in the past five years. Yu, leading a delegation of 48 senior officials, offered no response to the committee’s questions, but he is scheduled to address them when the meeting resumes on Monday morning.
Chinese officials have said that tightened security measures and limits on the religious practices of Uighurs, who are mostly Sunni Muslim, are aimed at trying to prevent violent, anti-state episodes in Uighur areas, which they have attributed to separatism, terrorism and religious extremism. Uighur advocates say the harsh security measures fuel resentment.
The UN session on Friday was the first time China has had to answer publicly for a crackdown on Uighurs and other minorities in Xinjiang, and it coincided with a groundswell of international alarm over the scope and intensity of the measures.
Beijing tightened controls and surveillance of Xinjiang’s population after an eruption of violence aimed at Han Chinese, the dominant ethnic group in China, in Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi, in 2009 and an attack in Beijing in 2013 attributed to Uighur Muslims.
More than one-fifth of all arrests in China in 2017 occurred in Xinjiang, whose 11 million people make up less than 2% of China’s population, the Hong Kong-based advocacy group China Human Rights Defenders said in a report last week drawing on official data. Scholars and activists estimate that a million people are now held in hundreds of re-education camps across Xinjiang and that roughly two million other people are undergoing some form of coercive re-education or indoctrination. NYT
Chinese officials have said that tightened security measures and limits on the religious practices of Uighurs, who are mostly Sunni, are aimed at trying to prevent violent, anti-state episodes in Uighur areas which they have attributed to separatism, terrorism and religious extremism
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