The inescapable conclusion one may reach after the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights (UNHCHR) released its much awaited report on the plight of the Uyghur Moslem minority in China’s Xinjiang province is that it is better late than never. Interestingly, the High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet could muster courage to make the report public only minutes before her four-year-long term ended. It seems like the UNHCHR was, for so long, dithering in releasing its findings as if it was scared of incurring China’s wrath. There is tell-tale evidence that China tried to exert pressure on the UN body to not publish the report. North Korea, Venezuela and Cuba are also reported to have lobbied with the UN for withholding the report. The fact that the UNHCHR could finally let the world know about its findings, which are a severe indictment of China’s authoritarian regime committing “crime against humanity” in Xinjiang, is a welcome development. The report is replete with details on alleged persecution of the minority population in China.
The damning report says China has committed “serious human rights violations” against Uyghur Moslems that could amount to crimes against humanity. The thrust of the report is that the Commissioner’s office found credible evidence of torture and other human rights abuses. The forms of torture included beating people after strapping them by their hands and feet to a “tiger chair” and raping women and putting them in extended solitary confinement.
Many others appeared to have been “waterboarded”. According to the report, individuals were “being subjected to interrogation with water being poured in their faces”. The UN did not call this genocide, as the US government and others have termed it. But it was highly critical of the Chinese government’s anti-extremism doctrine, which served as a pretext to unleash horrifying atrocities on the minority population. It said the laws and regulations have been deliberately made vague so that the lines between legitimate concerns and suspected criminality get blurred. For example, the High Commissioner found China equated having a beard or a social media account with extremism.
The so-called vocational education and training centres into which the Uyghurs were herded off to are in effect large-scale arbitrary detention centres. The report has rubbished Beijing’s claims that these facilities were schools or training centres where participants were free to join and leave. The UN body got consistent accounts that indicate a lack of free and informed consent to being placed in the centres. It is impossible for the detainees to leave such heavily guarded centres of their own free will.
Two-thirds of the former detainees interviewed by the UNHCHR reported being subjected to treatment that would amount to torture or other forms of ill-treatment. Detainees were also forced to take medication or injections without explanation of what it was. It noted persistent claims of sexual abuse and violence in the facilities. In keeping with doctrines followed by advocates of majoritarian politics in many other countries in Asia, the Chinese government, according to the report, made a “clear link between frequency in childbirths and religious extremism”.
In other words, the repressive regime of Beijing considered a higher number of childbirths in the Uyghur community as an attempt to increase their population so that more members could take to extremism. The result was “violations of reproductive rights through coercive enforcement of family planning policies”, including allegations of forced abortions, contraception and sterilisations. It noted Xinjiang’s rate of sterilisation was 243 procedures for every 100,000 inhabitants, compared with a national average of 32.
China has for obvious reasons slammed the report as a western conspiracy to defame the current regime. But Uyghurs living in the US and other countries have welcomed it. The report sets the stage for proper investigation by member countries of the UNHCHR into the allegations of persecution in Xinjiang. It is now up to the proponents of human rights to take China head-on as the evidence compiled by the UN body is found to be credible enough.