UN Xinjiang Report Casts Serious Doubts on Impartiality and Credibility of UNCHR
Located in the ancient city of Kashgar, "Guli's Home", a local resident's yard converted into a tourist resting place, has become a hot tourist attraction where visitors can experience everyday life in Kashgar. The development of tourism has brought changes for local people's life. Image Credit: (Xinhua/Ma Kai)
Written by: William Ging Wee Dere
In the final minutes of Michel Bachelet’s tenure as the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights, her office was pressed to release the highly anticipated Report on Xinjiang. The report was released in the night of August 31, 2022, 10 minutes before Bachelet’s term ended at the stroke of midnight. This rush to judgement is telling. What is even more telling is that Bachelet did not sign the Report. The western media called it, “Bachelet’s Report.” So far, she has not publicly commented on it nor come out to defend it. The positive light from the report is that it does NOT claim Uygur “genocide” because there is no evidence nor for the claim of “1 million” detainees. Canadian parliamentarians should take note.
Even though Bachelet visited China and Xinjiang in May 2022, the report does not cite from any of her exchanges in meetings with Chinese “civil society organizations, academics, and community and religious leaders and others” during the visit. There is no explanation in the report for this exclusion of exchanges by the head of the UNCHR during the China visit.
Following her May 2022 visit to Xinjiang, tremendous pressure was applied to her by the West and human rights groups for not criticizing China firmly enough. The report was drawn up by her office, where over 80 per cent of the staff comes from the US and Western countries. It became a political football between the West led by the US who insisted on its release and on the other hand criticized by China saying its release “will intensify politicisation and bloc confrontation in the area of human rights, undermine the credibility of the [office], and harm the cooperation between OHCHR and member states.” Supported by “40 to 50 other countries,” China wanted the anti-China report to be withdrawn.
The report officially titled, “Assessment of human rights concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, People’s Republic of China,” is mainly secondary source material with few original research cited, and it claims to have interviewed 23 Uygurs, 16 Kazakhs and 1 Kirgiz. There were few direct quotes from the interviews and it is not disclosed where or when the interviews took place nor the names of the interviewees, except for one case, Gulbakhar Jalilova.
Focus on sexual abuse and torture of women
Gulbakar Jalilova is a Kazakh national of Uygur descent and claimed to have been detained in Xinjiang for 15 months in 2017-18. Her case was spotlighted by the Falun Gong Epoch Times and the western media featured her as a cause célèbre for the sexual violence and torture of women in the “vocational training camps.” The Chinese Global Times refuted her claims saying that “Gulbahar had never been to any vocational education and training center during her time in Xinjiang.” The Kazakh national was detained by police for allegedly financing terrorist activities. She is presently living in Turkey (Türkye per its government) and peddles her story to the western media.
Of the 40 people “with direct and first-hand knowledge of the situation XUAR (Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region)” interviewed for the UN Report, 24 were women. The report admitted that “over one third” have been previously interviewed by “researchers, civil society and journalists.” Again, no names were provided, presumably for security reasons. However, if some of the women are the same ones that made the rounds in western media to provide the narratives of “rape, torture, forced sterilization and forced separation from children,” then various sources have thoroughly de-bunked their cases.
Even though they were not named in the UN Report, four of the more prominent women featured in the western media to backstop the claims of sexual abuse and torture in the vocational training camps are: Mihrigul Tursun, Zumrat Dewut, Sayragul Sawutbay, and Gulzira Auelhan.
Mihrigul Tursun claimed that she was detained in a vocational training center and witness the deaths of nine women, and she later escaped. According to the Global Times, the truth is that Mihrigul was never imprisoned in China, nor did she study in a vocational center. She was detained for 20 days in April 2017 by the Public Security Bureau on suspicion of inciting national enmity and discrimination of her home county of Qiemo in the Bayin'gholin Mongol Autonomous Prefecture of Xinjiang. In 2018, she voluntarily relinquished her Chinese passport and left China on an Egyptian passport for the US. In November 2018, she testified at the National Press Club in Washington and at Congressional hearings on China.
Zumrat Dewut claimed that she was detained in a “concentration camp,” injected with drugs and forcefully sterilized. Reality check is that her third child was born by caesarian section, and she voluntarily agreed to a tubal ligation at the hospital. There was no forced sterilization. She also claimed that her father was detained and died under unknown circumstances. The truth as reported by the Global Times, is that Zumrat left China with her Pakistani husband and three children in 2018 for Pakistan and later for the US in January 2019. As reported by her elder brother, their father lived a normal life and was neither interrogated nor detained. He died of heart disease. This case was given star treatment by Radio Free Asia, the US state-financed mouthpiece. In October 2019, she testified at a US State Department hearing on "human rights crises in Xinjiang" to repeat her lies on her “forced sterilization” and that her father had been interrogated to death.
Sayragul Sauytbay (Sawutbay) claimed she was a teacher in one of the “camps” and acclaimed by the western media as a “whistleblower” of the “concentration camps.” She is a Kazakh and claimed that China is destroying their culture and language. She now lives in Sweden and gives frequent interviews to the western media. In March 2020, she received the US State Department “International Woman of Courage Award” from Mike Pompeo.
A reality check from China Daily explains that Sauytbay never taught or stayed in a vocational and education training center and she was never detained before she illegally left China for Kazakhstan. Furthermore, according to the China Daily:
“In April 2016, Sayragul Sauytbay was appointed head of the Central Kindergarten of Chahanwusu Town, Zhaosu County, Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture. On 19 March 2018, she became an elementary school teacher in Chahanwusu. Half a month later, on 4 April, she asked for leave from the school. The next day, she left China illegally.
To set the record straight, Sayragul Sauytbay lied about her experience. She claimed to be a medical-university graduate who had worked as a doctor, but the truth is she only attended nursing course at a vocational school in Ili and has never been a doctor. She initially said she was an instructor at an education and training center, but later claimed to be a victim interned and tortured, subjected to medical experiment and forced to eat pork in the "concentration camp". As a matter of fact, she has never worked or studied at any education and training center, still less been subjected to any compulsory measure. Her whole account of the center is nothing but smear and slander.”
Gulzira Auelhan’s case was widely reported by the Globe and Mail and the BBC. Gulzira is a Kazakh woman born in Xinjiang. She gained international notoriety during the WUC Tribunal in September 2021 by claiming that she was tortured in a “tiger chair,” which is described in the UN Report. She left China with her Kazakh husband for Kazakhstan in 2019. She claimed that she was kept in 4 separate “Chinese Communist Party camps” for 15 to 19 months (the length of time depends on whichever western media source she told the story to). Reality check from China Daily alleges that she is a fraudster who defaulted on a 40,000 Yuan bank loan before leaving China.
Despite the fact that the UN Report failed to name any of the witnesses that they interviewed, the Chinese media named 8 of the well-known women who have been making the rounds to the western media, congressional hearings and human rights NGO’s about various sexual abuses and torture in Xinjiang. The Chinese press has debunked all their stories.
UN Report Bibliography Tells the Tale
The first hint that this UN report is based primarily on anti-China and the National Endowment for Democracy financed Xinjiang human rights industry sources, is the link to the 1927-page bibliography given on page 1 of the Introduction. Typing in the link “Bibliography of Select News Report & Academic Works,” compiled by Magnus Kiskesjö leads directly to Uyghur Human Rights Project, affiliated to Canada’s Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project and the World Uyghur Congress. This conglomerate of organizations is working for the separation of Xinjiang to destabilize China on behalf of US interests. They rely on right-wing politicians like Marco Rubio in the US and Pierre Poilievre in Canada, and media interests like the National Post and Epoch Times to weaponize human rights. They also draw on imperialists like Justin Trudeau and Mélanie Joly to bring their anti-Beijing message to the Canadian mainstream.
The nearly 2000-page Bibliography overwhelms with links to various articles and papers by the usual players in the western media. The strategy seems to repeat the concoctions in quantity if not quality until people’s minds are saturated and the concepts of Uygur genocide and human rights abuses are accepted as gospel. This strategy was used by Goebbels in Nazi Germany with some success. The majority of the sources are the usual materials being circulated over the last few years by anti-China players like Adrian Zenz, Australian Strategic Policy Institute (funded by the Defence Dept ($5 million in 2020) and the arms industry), media sources such as BBC and New York Times. The UN Report does not hide the use of these sources, as it normalizes the fabrications of the extreme accusations. One example is the latest “Xinjiang Police Files” compiled and circulated by Adrian Zenz. The “Xinjiang Victims Database” is produced by ASPI. These fabricated files have been debunked elsewhere.
The UN Report used one-sided sources and did not balance the research by using alternative sources from the Chinese and others cited by this article.
This article won’t analyze the numerous disinformation in the Report. They have been debunked by other sources, such as The Grayzone.
The report is evidence-free. It hedges all of its speculation and claims with words like “may” as in “may constitute crimes against humanity.”
The use of these legal weasel words makes the accusations ambiguous and not definitive but gives the human rights industry ammunition to fire at China. As shown in a video by Fernando Munoz Bernal, FerMuBe on Youtube, the word “may” was used in the report 36 times, “possibe”- 14 times, “could be” – 13 times, “alleged” – 12 times, “appears to be”- 6 times. So, all these accusations have an uncertain and inexact meaning due to the use of these words pre-fixing the claims. Bernal is a Colombian teaching English in China and produces videos on life in China.
Using Legalese to Confuse
With the lack of direct evidence, the report’s writers with the mind of a condescending or patronizing lawyer parsed through China’s laws and regulations from a western and colonial understanding, to supposedly show how China undermines individual freedoms in the fight against terrorism. The report spent a great deal of ink picking through China’s laws to demonstrate the violation of human rights and essentially saying that we would not have such confusing laws in the West.
The report has only one article out of the 153-article long document describing the terror campaign in Xinjiang. Article 12 states, “The Government reported that ‘from 1990 to the end of 2016, separatist, terrorist, and extremist forces launched thousands of terrorist attacks in Xinjiang, killing large numbers of innocent people and hundreds of police officers, and causing immeasurable damage to property.’” Article 12 goes on to say, “There were also a series of violent incidents in different Chinese cities outside XUAR, killing scores of people, and which the Government, for its part, has consistently characterised as terrorist in character.”
The report cannot help but continue to say, “At the same time, the involvement of numbers of Uyghur as fighters in armed groups, including in Afghanistan and Syria, subject to UN counter-terrorism sanctions, continue to be reported and remain a cause for concern for both the Chinese authorities and more widely in the international community.” The report in Footnote 28 cites Reuters that there are “up to 5,000 Chinese Uighurs fighting in militant groups.” The UN counter-terrorism sanctions report has 3500 trained Uygur fighters of the ETIM in Syria and 500 ETIM fighters in Afghanistan. Article 12 only gives a brief executive summary of the decades long campaign of the separatists and foreign supporters to destabilize China and to terrorize the people. The report does not say that the majority of those killed, maimed and affected by the violent terror campaign were Uygurs.
Article 13 gives the results of the counter-terrorism campaign:
“In May 2014, in the wake of these developments, the Government launched what it termed a “Strike Hard’ campaign to combat terrorist threats, which it linked to religious “extremism” and separatism in XUAR. In a 2019 White Paper, the Government stated that “since 2014, Xinjiang has destroyed 1,588 violent and terrorist gangs, arrested 12,995 terrorists, seized 2,052 explosive devices, punished 30,645 people for 4,858 illegal religious activities, and confiscated 345,299 copies of illegal religious materials.” The Government has asserted the success of its approach, reporting that there have been no terrorist incidents in XUAR since 2016.”
The report then spent the next 22 Article to dismiss China’s legal system as an instrument to violate people’s human rights in XUAR. It is beyond this article to dive into the minutiae of legal arguments and counter-arguments. However it should be pointed out that when Bachelet was in China, she met with senior officials from:
The Supreme People’s Procuratorate
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs
The National Ethnic Affairs Commission
The Ministry of Public Security
The Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security and;
All-China Women’s Federation
They all held talks with the High Commissioner respectively. The report should have reported on the exchanges between Bachelet and the Chinese officials, especially those from the Supreme People’s Court and Procuratorate, if they were so concerned with China’s laws on terrorism.
China’s Fight for Human Rights of Development, Poverty Alleviation and Freedom from Terrorism
The report mentioned China’s poverty alleviation program in passing and linked it to “forced labour”. The excellent and thorough paper by Casey Ho-yuk Wan devastates the UN Report on all levels. Quoting extensively from Wan’s piece on development:
“UN General Assembly Resolution 41/128 confirmed that “the right to development is an inalienable human right and that equality of opportunity for development is a prerogative both of nations and of individuals who make up nations.” The right to development is defined as a person’s right to “enjoy economic, social, cultural and political development”.
The assessment (UN Report) makes no mention of the right to development. More substantial discussion of China’s poverty alleviation programs as well as discussion of other initiatives and policies such as promotion of entrepreneurship, efforts to protect and develop intangible heritages, and fostering a favorable foreign trade environment, could have provided a fuller picture of the efforts of the Government of China to promote the right to development in Xinjiang.
The assessment does not engage in these discussions, presenting instead an incomplete and unidimensional picture of China’s poverty alleviation programs in Xinjiang. That the OHCHR would decide to present such is perplexing given the OHCHR’s on-the-ground visit to Xinjiang in May 2022. That the OHCHR is seemingly unable to explain why it chose not to engage in a substantive discussion of the right to development, despite the OHCHR’s mandate to promote and protect the right to development, and draw on its experiences and observations during its visit to Xinjiang, as well as to solicit and cite the opinions of non-governmental Chinese and Chinese-language sources who may be direct witnesses to China’s poverty alleviation programs and its efforts to protect peoples’ rights to development, is concerning. Such a decision raises the question of the OHCHR’s capacity and willingness to fulfill the mandate of constructively engaging with China on human rights matter in an impartial, objective, and non-selective manner respectful of China’s sovereignty and domestic jurisdiction, consistent with the OHCHR’s mandate.”
The US laws and sanctions on Xinjiang are violating the Uygur people’s human right to development, as they also violate other countries human rights (e.g., Cuba, Venezuela) with sanctions.
An indication of China’s emphasis on the economic, cultural and social development of XUAR is the recent appointment of Ma Xingrui as the Communist Party Secretary of Xinjiang. Ma, an aerospace engineer by training and member of the CPC Central Committee, was the governor of Guangdong province, an economic power, before this shift. His predecessor Chen Quanguo, a member of the CPC Politburo set up the vocational and education training centers in Xinjiang. He moves on to head the CPC Central Rural Work Leading Group. Foreign observers say that the Chinese government is confident enough that Chen has brought XUAR terrorism under control to put the focus on development with Ma’s appointment.
Canada Offers Nothing New
Mélanie Joly, Minister of Foreign Affairs issued her statement on the following day of the UN Report. The statement expressed the usual concern of human rights abuses in Xinjiang. She repeated from the Report that these abuses “May constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.” She echoed the trope of “1 million detainees,” although the UN Report does not say that. She then lined with “our Five Eyes allies, the G7 and the United Nations Human Rights Council” to condemn China. What is ominous is that she said Canada will address the issue of “forced labour.” If she read the Report, there was no definitive conclusion of “forced labour.”
The truth is out that the UN Report was a one-sided hashing of old materials produced by the anti-China forces with the support of the US and its Western allies. Many in the Global South are not taken in by this hoax, including from many Muslim majority countries. There are no actionable items that Canada can take based on the “mays”, “possible,” or “alleged” crimes against the Uygurs. Anyone who may still be on the fence should download and read this 48-page report to see how one-sided and dishonest it is.
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William Ging Wee Dere is the author of the award-winning “Being Chinese in Canada, The Struggle for Identity, Redress and Belonging.” (Douglas & McIntyre, 2019). He was a political organizer and a leading activist in the 2-decade movement for redress of the Chinese Head Tax and Exclusion Act.
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