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Its been two years since the UNHCR published a damning report about a range of human rights violations against the predominantly Muslim Uyghur ethnic group in China’s remote western region of Xinjiang.
The report, issued in August 2022, found that Chinese actions may have constituted “crimes against humanity” and highlighted what it called highly “credible” accounts of abuses, including “torture, forced sterilization, sexual violence and forced separation of children.”
Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the International Service for Human Rights and the World Uyghur Congress have now issued a joint statement calling for action from the UNHCR Volker Türk to update and take action on the report’s recommendations.
“The ongoing absence of public reporting by the high commissioner to follow up the atrocity crimes documented by his own office risks undermining the trust placed in his office by victims and survivors”
Türk mentioned Xinjiang on the 12th June at the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva saying that he “continued to engage with China on a range of human rights issues, including the serious concerns my office identified in the Xinjiang region.”
The joint statement said this did not go far enough and that Türk did not provide “any specifics about his engagement with the government, a substantive update on the situation in Xinjiang, nor an assessment of the implementation of the report recommendations by his office.
In June 2021 Amnesty accused China of creating a “dystopian hellscape” where Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities faced “mass internment and torture amounting to crimes against humanity.” Amnesty said the minority groups had been forced to abandon their religious traditions, language and culture, and subjected to mass surveillance, supporting previous allegations of genocide and ethnic cleansing committed within a network of hundreds of detention centres. Aside from the Uyghurs and Kazakhs, the Hui, Kyrgyz, Uzbek and Tajik minorities in Xinjiang have also been swept up in the campaign.
On Tuesday Human Rights Watch published research that identified about 630 villages in Xinjiang where the Chinese authorities have changed the names of villages with religious, historical, or cultural meaning for Uyghurs into names reflecting recent Chinese Communist Party ideology, the top three most common replacement village names are “Happiness,” “Unity,” and “Harmony.”
“The Chinese authorities have been changing hundreds of village names in Xinjiang from those rich in meaning for Uyghurs to those that reflect government propaganda,” said Maya Wang, acting China director at Human Rights Watch. “These name changes appear part of Chinese government efforts to erase the cultural and religious expressions of Uyghurs.”
This recent development tells us a few things. Firstly that China is relatively unconcerned about the public relations fallout from the UNHCR report of 2022, they have no reason to be as neither the UN nor the rest of the international community have acted on it.
Secondly it would appear that China is sufficiently unconcerned as to not bother to hide its actions in Xinjiang and thirdly that its appears highly unlikely that China has ceased its crimes against the Uyghurs documented by Amnesty in 2021 and the UNHCR in 2022.
The UNHCR report in particular was a huge propaganda score for the West and as such we were initially wary of it, but as time has gone by and additional eye witness accounts of the truly horrifying nature and scale of the atrocities being inflicted on Uyghur detainees have continued to emerge, it sadly seems all too clear that genocidal actions are taking place in Xinjiang.
The International Criminal Court rejected calls by exiled Uyghurs in 2020 to investigate China for genocide because China is not a signatory to the Rome Statue. It seems highly unlikely that a case will be brought forward via the International Court of Justice either as China does not accept their jurisdiction.
So China feels it has little to worry about as regards charges of genocide brought against it. Reporting from Xinjiang is very difficult and confronting a global economic and military superpower on a moral issue is beyond the courage and morality of most in the contemporary political and media class of all the superpowers.
A few weeks on from the 2022 UNHCR report, the global news factories lost all interest in the Uyghur’s fate and recent developments have understandably been overshadowed by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, nevertheless it is unconscionable that China be given a free pass to continue atrocities against their own citizens in Xinjiang in an attempt to erase their culture, beliefs and history.
As usual it is up to us to ensure that the Uyghurs suffering heinous psychological and physical abuses are not forgotten, in particular the office holder of the UNHCR must be compelled to act on the recommendations of their own report. We will post follow ups to this article in the weeks and months ahead, including ways in which we can all help.
Here are some links for now:
https://www.uyghurcongress.org/en/ [World Uyghur Congress]
https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/asia-and-the-pacific/east-asia/china/report-china/
https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/06/18/china-hundreds-uyghur-village-names-change
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