Commentary on Political Economy

Friday 10 December 2021

 ‘Uighur genocide directed by Xi’

The panel found Xi Jinping and other senior officials bore ‘primary responsibility for acts in Xinjiang’. Picture: AFP

The panel found Xi Jinping and other senior officials bore ‘primary responsibility for acts in Xinjiang’. Picture: AFP

By Sha Hua

5:20PM December 10, 2021

An independent panel wrapped up its year-long examination of China’s treatment of Uighurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, concluding that China’s policies in the region amounted to a form of genocide.


The Uighur Tribunal said late on Thursday it had found that the Chinese government, through policies including what it described as forced birth control and sterilisations, intended to partially destroy the Muslim Uighur community and its way of life.


The UK-based panel of lawyers, academics and activists also said that Chinese President Xi Jinping and other senior officials bore “primary responsibility for acts in Xinjiang”.


Human rights activists and some scholars say Chinese authorities have locked up a million or more Uighurs and other minorities in internment camps as part of a sweeping ethnic-assimilation campaign.


Beijing, which didn’t take part in the proceedings, has called them a provocation by anti-China forces. On Thursday, a Foreign Ministry statement said the panel’s finding was “a political farce staged by a handful of contemptible individuals”.


The Chinese government has rejected allegations of mistreatment of Uighurs, saying it is fighting terrorism and separatism and that the camps have been used for “vocational education”.


The panel, chaired by Geoffrey Nice, an international human rights lawyer, was launched last September at the urging of Uighur activists and based its judgment on reports, newspaper articles and testimonies from dozens of victims and experts over two hearings in June and September.


The panel’s nine members – three academics, two lawyers, two doctors, a businessman and an ex-diplomat – also said they found “without reasonable doubt” that the Chinese government has committed crimes against humanity against the Uighur ethnic minority, citing testimonies of rape, torture and forced abortions as well as evidence of mass internment and family separation.


Watchtowers on a high-security facility near what is believed to be a re-education camp where mostly Muslim ethnic minorities are detained, on the outskirts of Hotan, in China's northwestern Xinjiang region. -

Watchtowers on a high-security facility near what is believed to be a re-education camp where mostly Muslim ethnic minorities are detained, on the outskirts of Hotan, in China's northwestern Xinjiang region. -

Their conclusion was also based on leaked Chinese government documents that shed additional light on the role Mr Xi played in directing the Communist Party’s campaign in Xinjiang. The documents show Mr Xi warning about the dangers of religious influence and unemployment among minorities, and emphasising the importance of “population proportion”, or the balance between minorities and Han Chinese, for maintaining control in the region.


Mr Nice said that the panel had repeatedly written to the Chinese government and invited it to take part in the hearings. He said the inquiry recognised different political cultures between China and Western democracies, focusing only on the “clearest breaches of international standards and law to which (China) is fully committed, acting with caution and care to reach its decisions”.


Genocide, as defined by the UN’s genocide convention, encompasses “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. Using the term to describe China’s policies in Xinjiang, home to roughly 14 million Turkic-speaking Uighurs and other predominantly Muslim minorities, has been a flashpoint in legal and public debate.


Mr Nice acknowledged that designating government policies in Xinjiang as genocide could devalue the term in the absence of evidence of mass killings and that comparisons with the Holocaust, evoking images of people sent off on trains to extermination camps, were “unhelpful”.


The Communist Party’s policies in Xinjiang have also led to sanctions from the US and other Western countries.


On Wednesday, the US House of Representatives passed the Uighur Forced Labor Prevention Act, banning imports from Xinjiang over concerns over the use of forced labour in the production process. On Monday, the Biden administration announced a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics, with Australia, Britain, and Canada following suit.


The Wall Street Journal

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