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11-06-2021
Bureau Report + Agencies
LONDON/ BEIJING/ ISLAMABAD/ The human rights organization Amnesty International has said China is committing crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, the north-western region that is home to the Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities.
In a report published on Thursday, Amnesty called on the UN to investigate, saying China had subjected Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslims to mass detention, surveillance, and torture.
Agnès Callamard, the secretary general of Amnesty International, accused Chinese authorities of creating “a dystopian hellscape on a staggering scale”.
“It should shock the conscience of humanity that massive numbers of people have been subjected to brainwashing, torture and other degrading treatment in internment camps, while millions more live in fear amid a vast surveillance apparatus,” Ms Callamard said.
She also accused the UN Secretary General António Guterres of “failing to act according to his mandate”.
Guterres “has not denounced the situation, he has not called for an international investigation”, Ms Callamard told the media “It is incumbent on him to protect the values upon which the United Nations has been founded, and certainly not to stay silent in front of crimes against humanity,” she said.
In a 160-page report based on interviews with 55 former detainees, Amnesty said there was evidence the Chinese state had committed “at least the following crimes against humanity: imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law; torture; and persecution.”
The report follows a similar set of findings by Human Rights Watch, which said in an April report that it believed the Chinese government was responsible for crimes against humanity.
China has been accused by some Western nations and rights groups of pursuing a genocide against the Turkic ethnic groups in Xinjiang – though there is dispute over whether the state’s actions constitute a genocide.
The author of the Amnesty report, Jonathan Loeb, said at press conference on Thursday that the organization’s research “did not reveal that all the evidence of the crime of genocide had occurred” but that it had so far “only scratched the surface”.
China routinely denies all accusations of human rights abuses in Xinjiang.
Experts generally agree that China has detained as many as a million Uyghurs and other Muslims and imprisoned hundreds of thousands more in its crackdown in Xinjiang, which began in 2017.
There have been widespread reports of physical and psychological torture inside prisons and detention camps in the region.
China has also been accused of using forced sterilization, abortion, and population transfer to reduce birth rate and population density, and of targeting religious leaders to break religious and cultural traditions.
China denies those accusations, and says its camps in Xinjiang are voluntary vocational and de-radicalization programs for combating terrorism in the region.
In its report, Amnesty said counter-terrorism could not reasonably account for mass detention, and that the Chinese government’s actions showed a “clear intent to target parts of Xinjiang’s population collectively on the basis of religion and ethnicity and to use severe violence and intimidation to root out Islamic religious beliefs and Turkic Muslim ethno-cultural practices”.
