Chinese President Xi Jinping visited this week the Xinjiang region, in the extreme northwest of China, where Beijing is accused of human rights violations against the Chinese ethnic minority of Uyghur Muslim origin.
The human rights representative was unable to speak to the Uyghurs or their families when he visited Xinjiang.
According to the official Xinhua news agency, Xi Jinping has designated Xinjiang as a “key area” in the “One Belt, One Road” international infrastructure project. This initiative, launched by Beijing, provides for the construction of ports, railways, highways and power plantsopening new trade routes between Asia, Europe and Africa.
It was Xi’s first visit to the region since 2014. That stay was marked by a bomb attack on the last day. This year was particularly bloody, with another attack on civilians in the city of Urumqi and a third at Kunming station in southwestern China, leaving dozens dead.
In 2009, Xinjiang was the scene of ethnic clashes between the Han majority and the Uyghurs.
The authorities then launched a wide-ranging crackdown in the region, resulting in the detention of more than a million Uyghurs in indoctrination centers, according to human rights organizations.
Several Western governments have called the campaign in the region, which they say also includes “sterilizations and forced labor”, as “cultural genocide”.
The United States and the European Union have imposed sanctions against officials responsible for extrajudicial arrests, family separation and imprisonment of people for having studied abroad or having contacts abroad.
Beijing has denied those accusations, pointing out that the camps are centers where students receive “vocational education and training”, with the aim of “eliminating the social environment that breeds terrorism and religious extremism”.
Xi met with leaders of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC), a supra-governmental body that operates its own courts, schools and health care system under the military system imposed on the region after the Communist Party’s rise to power in 1949. This organization was also subject to US sanctions.
EITHER The Chinese leader “learned about the history of the XPCC in the cultivation and surveillance of border areas,” reported Xinhua.
Xinjiang borders Russia, Afghanistan and other Central Asian countries, which China has tried to lure into its orbit through economic incentives and security pacts.
During a rare visit to China last May, Michelle Bachelet, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, urged Beijing to avoid “arbitrary” measures in Xinjiang.
Source: Observadora
