By Choekyi Lhamo
DHARAMSHALA, Oct. 7: The UN Human Rights Council on Thursday voted not to debate on the treatment of the Uyghur and other Muslim minorities in East Turkestan, known widely as Xinjiang. The Council rejected the motion by 19 votes to 17 and 11 countries abstaining during the process. China welcomed the move while others condemned it as “shameful”.
The Chinese government foreign affairs spokesperson Hua Chunying tweeted that this result sets an example for ‘truth and justice’, “This is a victory for developing countries and a victory [to] truth and justice . . . Human rights must not be used as a pretext to make up lies and interfere in other countries’ internal affairs, or to contain, coerce & humiliate others.”
Most of the countries that voted “no” were Muslim-majority countries including Indonesia, Somalia, Pakistan, UAE and Qatar whereas the eleven countries that abstained include India, Malaysia and Ukraine. The Chinese government received global criticism for their treatment of the Uyghurs, with the UN human rights office even saying that the scale of abuses may even amount to “crimes against humanity”.
The existence of detention centres in Xinjiang was first revealed in 2018, with at least one million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities being held in the facilities by the repressive Chinese regime. Initially, the PRC rejected such claims, but later admitted that they were camps working as “vocational training centres to tackle extremism”. Former UN Human Rights Commissioner Michelle Bachelet was allowed to visit the sensitive region in May this year, but experts have argued that it was a tightly choreographed by Beijing.
The delayed Xinjiang report by the UN was only published on August 31, right before the end of Bachelet’s term as the UN High Commissioner. The report found that “serious human rights violations” had been committed to “the extent of arbitrary and discriminatory detention of members of Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim groups … may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.”
It’s a crying shame that the world’s worst human rights abuser has been aloud to go scot free despite being accused of crimes against humanity by the report by Michelle Bachelet who visited East Turkistan before releasing her damning report on August 31 2022. It is well known through out the world that communist China has a dismal human rights. At the 47 member state Human Rights council, 17 countries voted in favour while 19 countries against and 11 abstained in a vote to hold debate on East Turkistan at its next session in March. It was a test of political and diplomatic clout of China versus the democratic west. Communist China used its traditional allies like Cuba to throttle any discussion by preempting it by covering China’s atrocities in Tibet and East Turkistan by making statements by the Cuban delegate: “We note China has undertaken a series of measures in response to terrorism and extremism in accordance with the law to safeguard the human rights of all ethnic groups in East Turkistan”! This was to justify the concentration camps built for Ughur incarceration, where women were raped with impunity and men murdered in torture chambers. To back up the validity of their crime, it further added, “There was no single terrorist attack in East Turkistan in the last three years”! The concentration camps where at least a million Ughurs are indoctrinated to give up their religion, culture, language and procreate and women forcibly sterilised in order to destroy the Uighur people are all couched with a veneer of preventing terrorism. The Communist regime has done exactly the same in occupied Tibet for the last seventy years!
The true evil nature of the communist regime is, it buys off poor countries and countries with extremely poor human rights record to support China’s agenda in the numbers game in the United Nations. Just to give a few samples, these countries supported China: Angola, Baharain, Belarus, Cambodia, Cameroon, Congo, Cuba, Egypt, Eritrea, Gabon, Iran, Iraq, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Syria, UAE, Uganda and Zimbabwe. All these countries are poor and dependent on Chinese “development projects” in return for plundering their natural resources and in the case of Nepal, Sri Lanka and Pakistan, their national sovereignty!
The failure to censure communist China’s insidious human rights abuse endangers not only the rights of those who live in China but all occupied territories like Tibet, East Turkistan, Mongolia and Hong Kong/Macao.
This is a ominous sign that the world is in danger of falling into a abyss of human rights abuse that has been prevalent in communist China where the regime murders its citizens with impunity and not a single policeman or politician or leader is held accountable. In China, eighty million Chinese were slaughtered by the CCP but not a single Communist leader was held responsible. In occupied Tibet, 87, 000 Tibetans were slaughtered in 1959 during the great Tibetan Uprising according Chinese documents obtained by Tibetan guerrillas during their raids on Chinese convoys crossing from Tibet East Turkistan. Yet, not a single Chinese official or law enforcement personnel were held responsible. From 1951 till 1985, the CTA estimated 1.2 million Tibetans were killed as a direct result of Chinese occupation but not a single investigation was conducted. Chinese police kill Tibetans with impunity as we saw with the incident of a Tibetan man pushed into the river to die just for protesting about random phone search without declaring they were Chinese police! No punishments are meted for crimes committed against Tibetans and other so called ethnic minorities but are in fact rewarded for killing them! Most of the hundreds of Tibetans and Ugyurs disappearing every year are all murdered and summarily buried without the knowledge of their families! Under the influence of communist China, the world is getting more autocratic and human rights abusers like communist China, Burmese regime, Putin’s Russia, Belarus, Afghanistan, Phillipines and North Korea are having a field day in arbitrary arrests, jailing, torturing and murdering their citizens!