Select passages from the BBC article:
The UN has accused China of "serious human rights violations" in a long-awaited report into allegations of abuse in Xinjiang province.
China had urged the UN not to release the report - with Beijing calling it a "farce" arranged by Western powers.
The report assesses claims of abuse against Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities, which China denies.
But investigators said they uncovered "credible evidence" of torture possibly amounting to "crimes against humanity".
They accused China of using vague national security laws to clamp down on the rights of minorities and establishing "systems of arbitrary detention".
The report, which was commissioned by the UN's Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights, said prisoners had been subjected to "patterns of ill-treatment" which included "incidents of sexual and gender-based violence".
Others, they said, faced forced medical treatment and "discriminatory enforcement of family planning and birth control policies".
The UN recommended that China immediately takes steps to release "all individuals arbitrarily deprived of their liberty" and suggested that some of Beijing's actions could amount to the "commission of international crimes, including crimes against humanity".
...
China denies all allegations of human rights abuses in Xinjiang.
In response to the Xinjiang Police Files, China's foreign ministry spokesman told the BBC that the documents were "the latest example of anti-China voices trying to smear China". He said Xinjiang enjoyed stability and prosperity and residents were living happy, fulfilled lives.
China says the crackdown in Xinjiang is necessary to prevent terrorism and root out Islamist extremism and the camps are an effective tool for re-educating inmates in its fight against terrorism.
It insists that Uyghur militants are waging a violent campaign for an independent state by plotting bombings, sabotage and civic unrest, but it is accused of exaggerating the threat in order to justify repression of the Uyghurs.
China has dismissed claims it is trying to reduce the Uyghur population through mass sterilisations as "baseless", and says allegations of forced labour are "completely fabricated".
Criticism of the report (Reddit comment):
A lot more underwhelming that I expected. Seems to boil down to a few main points:
- The XUAR has seen a large rise in acts of terrorism related to religious extremism
- To prevent this, China implemented a system of "Vocational Education and Training Centres" (VETCs) to rehabilitate and educate away the extremism
The concern then follows:
- China has implemented a system of policing that is overly vague and overreaching, that allows the government to easily place citizens in the VETCs.
- China trains their police force in ridiculous manners to identify religious extremism
- Once transferred to a VETC, the conditions there are brutal and more akin to a torturous prison.
- There are also concerns of erasure of religion and attempted forced birth control
My issue with the report, is the use of a small amount of interviews declared credible, to then corroborate the rest of the sources. These sources include the classic and long debunked Zenz, Xinjiang Police Files, unofficial document translations (long history of bias in translations), etc. Given the long history of terrible witness reliability (Nayirah testimony, SK $900,000 reward to NK defectors, Iraq's WMDs, etc), I'm still going to hold off on agreeing with the accusations of genocide.
There are certainly geopolitical objectives at play here: the Belt and Road Initiative comes to mind.
But I think a lot of counterterrorism is overtly done in opposition to the politics of the terrorists. So there's an objective beyond simply stopping the violence, but it's not necessarily hidden.
But I think a lot of counterterrorism is overtly done in opposition to the politics of the terrorists.
I recall reading it was a response to ISIS coming over the border, so another one of those American destabilization projects that got out of hand, again.
iirc it was Uyighers who had gone to Syria and been radicalized there returning to China and beginning to radicalize their communities. Hasn't been a problem with any other Islamic sects
Looks like we're both right due to the War in Afghanistan. Uighers who fought in Afghanistan moved on to support the TIP in Syria. And ISIS members leaving Afghanistan have also been crossing the border.
It keeps happening! But this time I'm sure they aint sending them weapons anymore :blob-no-thoughts:
I don't doubt that the conditions of some of the re-education centers are bad, and that there are some people running them that are abusive. That does not mean it's a genocide, however.
There was a pretty big thing with 1000 casualties in Urumqi I think in 2009
yeah I remember reading about several mass terrorist stabbing incidents committed by Uighur separatists. China's questionable handling of the press meant that reports were very limited, so there was very little reporting about them in the Western press. This was before the Wests' total focus on demonization of China and when Islamic terrorists attacks were a regular occurrence in the West. The CPC could've used these terrorists attacks to show the world that they were also dealing with Islamic terrorism and maybe get some sympathy, but maybe I'm giving the West too much credit...
yeah, its impossible for me to take western claims about human rights abuses towards muslims seriously. What a joke.
Literally all of these things have occured in ICE detention centers :mao-wtf:
It's not, but it raises the question of why the U.N. is doing a special report there and not in El Paso. And of course why Americans are suddenly more concerned about Muslims halfway across the world than they are about people in their own backyard.
Whatever one thinks of China's actions here, the bias could hardly be more apparent.
I'm getting a 404 on that, but the link looks more like a press release and less like a 50-page report compiled after sending investigators.
Shit, where are the U.N. observers at the jails in any large U.S. city?
they actually did make a report regarding imprisonment, refugees and kids in cages in the US. They admit they could only visit three states, couldn't see Guantanamo despite the US pinkie promising they were trying their best to close it, and a couple places refused the UN personnel entry. One of which was the Homan Square facility, a blacksite run by Chicago cops.
Despite having only 13 days, what they found was more than enough to warrant, by :LIB: standards, sanctions on at least individuals of the US government, if not entire sectors of industry
edit: also the language they use to get around saying "jail" or "prison" is darkly hilarious, these poor people get sent to "places of deprivation of liberty" instead. literally 1984
you're doing the whataboutism thingy, this isn't reddit
joined 2 days ago
oh makes sense
In all likelihood, our politicians are gonna try and use this to further escalate tensions with China. They may even get that war they seem to be salivating over. Pointing out similar and/or more severe human rights abuses at home is mostly an attempt to preempt the narrative and divert war-fever.
Your irritation is warranted. It's kinda ironic that internal resistance to our own hegemony can end up centering the American perspective in a lot of the same ways supporting it does...
I'm not doing the whataboutism here
hence the "thingy". You're doing the thing where you pretend that judging two things equally and looking at them in the context of the big picture is "whataboutism"
I’m just bored of Americans trying to make everything about themselves to be honest.
cool you can start by not speaking english then. Most anti-American thing you can do
You’re aware that other people speak english too, right?
yes, and it would stop all sorts of brainworms transmission if they didn't
I just don’t care to hear about it all the fucking time on unrelated issues.
this isn't an unrelated issue.
All roads lead to Rome as they say.
As the magnetic pole of the current hegemon, it is extremely difficult to talk about something and not find yourself relating it back to the Imperial Core; while it is an accurately assessed phenomena that people (particularly USians) can't shut the fuck up about the US, I don't know that it's avoidable to an extent or that it's necessarily rooted in exceptionalism.
I'm illustrating the bias.
Say you occasionally come into work a few minutes late, and every single time your boss reams you out and formally writes it up. A coworker comes in late as much or more, but at most they get a "you're late!" comment and it's left at that. Are you both being treated the same?
america, being the progenitor of our liberal rules-based-order morass we inhabit currently as well as enjoying hegemon status since basically 1945 and especially post Soviet Union, inserts itself like a miasma pretty much everywhere whether we like it or not
Because lopsided focus is an essential element of Western propaganda, the primary function of which is to prop up American hegemony.
You might be surprised at how little introspection Americans can do given the millions of deaths caused by the explicit actions of their military. They can and usually do place more time and effort on 1/1000th of the people impacted by less horrific outcomes in [bad country].
Worse, the impact of this propaganda is an essential component in the US' violence. A populace that thinks [bad country] is bad and needs to be "defended" against will provide consent for the bombing, starvation, and general deprivation of millions.
And of course why Americans are suddenly more concerned about Muslims halfway across the world than they are about people in their own backyard.
Because Americans love to be mad about things across the world. It's things they can't actually do anything about.... unless of course the US military were to get involved. :porky-happy:
I'm not sure you are correct about the U.N. not doing reports on the U.S. border
It doesn't need to be a conspiracy in the smoke-filled room sense (although countries absolutely turn diplomatic screws over stuff like this). A lot of times, you just don't get to a point in your career where you'd be charged with putting a report like this together if you have the type of politics that would make you skeptical of a report like this.
Hugh is just here to waste our time like a greased pig. No need to bother debating him.
Eh, this is an issue where a lot of leftists have a lot of opinions, and usually trolls here out themselves far more obviously.
I think it’s a flawed report but I’m not sure it’s flawed because of some American conspiracy.
Everyone point and laugh at the two day old account. :farquaad-point:
Your ignorance of CIA Ops and US Hegemonic Imperialism that everyone else around here has already read-up on?
The first lesson of propaganda is emphasis.
Why did this report happen in the first place? Why are there not similar reports given mass incarceration and detainments? What is the pattern of who is targeted by these reports?
Always ask, "why are we talking about this and not something else? Is the same questioning applied equitably to all parties in the category?"
An example: anticommunist tabulations of "death tallies" in communist countries fail to apply a reasonable standard, sure. But most importantly, they don't even make an attempt to apply the same standard. Amartya Sen looked at this question for India and found the same order of magnitude more capitalism-caused deaths happening every decade in India as even the most ridiculous counts for, e.g., the entire history of the Soviet Union (including when jokers include the deaths of Nazi soldiers in their tallies). What is the dominant narrative and understanding in the West? That communist countries oppress and kill en masse. Zero introspection. Zero attempt at a comparison. Used to vilify the other and entrench oppression at home.
When you read this report, when you talk about this report, you're already an unwitting victim of a propaganda effort, even if you don't think the report is good or even if you think the report is good but the decision to make such reports is unbalanced. It got you thinking about the bad things done by the bad country, which is the primary reason such reports happen.
worldnews mods are the worst. Good thing I copied it beforehand
Everything the UN is accusing China of happened and is still happening in US controlled or US influenced parts of Northern Syria and Iraq in general, after the collapse of ISIS hundreds of thousands of refugees were put in camps, detentions centers, and prisons. The conditions of which have predictably allowed ISIS to rebuild itself in small corners of Syria and Iraq thanks to deliberate US policy to just level whole villages (and Mosul)
No vocational training, no refugee support system, no jobs, nothing, just straight up martial law and all the abuses little and big that come with it, never been an issue for the west, in fact the predominate response to the post-ISIS crisis seemed to have been "keep them out of the west, because they're all brainwashed by living under the rule of ISIL"
The post-ISIS refugee crisis is one of the world's biggest, probably only behind the Rohingya crisis (oh look another crisis involving a muslim minority the west doesn't care about)
If any UN sources uses Adrian Zenz, US think-tanks, or US influenced groups as a foundation then the entire report to bullshit, rotten apples and all that
By way of supplement to the extensive body of documentation, OHCHR also conducted, in accordance with its standard practice and methodology, 40 in-depth interviews with individuals with direct and first-hand knowledge of the situation in XUAR (24 women and 16 men; 23 Uyghur, 16 ethnic Kazakh, 1 ethnic Kyrgyz). Twenty-six of the interviewees stated they had been either detained or had worked in various facilities across XUAR since 2016
So they didn't have people on the ground, just vague "extensive documentation" which could mean anything from Zenz crap to Chinese official documents, and the whole crux of the report seems to center around 40 interviews done remotely......:side-eye-1:
Over one third of the 40 interviewees had either not been interviewed by others, or had been interviewed in the past by researchers, civil society or journalists, but opted not to publicly share their experience prior to speaking to OHCHR. Where the assessment quotes directly from an account of an interviewee, OHCHR has accepted the statement as assessed and described to be truthful and relevant, unless stated otherwise
Also, strangely doesn't confirm whether these interviewees live in Xinjiang or not, no transcripts, no cross-referencing, just "take our word for it, the interviewee said so"
Also, what about the other two-thirds who were previously interviewed by "civil society and journalists", which "civil society", which journalists interviewed them and when, what's the context, how were they even interviewed if there's such a crackdown?
China needs to release the Uyghurs they're torturing. Don't believe me, listen to this guy we interviewed: a Uyghur who China released
I about figured as such that there are random acts of racial tension, after all the Chinese constitution calls out chauvinism as being prevalent in China and, after all, there was a bunch of riots following bombings that were very ethnicity related.
Not genocide and it likely aint good, but probably getting better considering there hasnt been bombings in a while. But of course some things here are likely obfuscated. I remember reading a thing about some Tibetan girl that got ignored by police in a domestic and wound up dead. Enough uproar caused the police involved to be sentenced to prison within like 6 months, which honestly I feel like thats a quick timeline. Ultimately theres gonna be some serious issues that need to be addressed in regards to chauvinism and I wouldnt be surprised to see China and Vietnam really advancing on this issue in the next couple decades as they develop more infrastructure and become more whole and interconnected.
I think the report is very reasonable. A few cases of abuse and abuse of power is something I will totally expect from an operation this big. And it's nowhere close of the second Holocaust or whatever.
I would agree with you if the sourcing for the report wasn't so biased. The fact that ASPI and Zenz were cited throws the whole thing into question.
I mean that it's still not that trustable. They've Interviewed like 40 random people and used that as evidence.
My point is that this report actually feels more reasonable than whatever the westoids have been saying.
I don't even believe it's random. I think the interviewees were all affiliated with the DC-based World Uyghur Congress. The sourcing basically means it's a rehash of what westoids were already saying. It's just the cautious wording that makes it FEEL reasonable.
So I know what to say later, what is the rebuttal?
Also I thought the easiest debunk was the one about Chinese mosques being demolished, which can be disproven with Google Maps and 5 minutes.
http://www.scio.gov.cn/m/zfbps/32832/Document/1713594/1713594.htm consistent population growth for one thing
the forced birth control claim, which is the easiest thing in the world to see through
several paragraphs of explanation
I agree with you, but what you wrote requires a fair amount of attention and thought.
I read that the person who put out this report was one day away from not working for the UN any more.
Be curious to see where they end up working next. My guess: some American think tank or NGO funded by the state department.
I think the thing about liberal and American hegemony is that they don't even have to outright pay these people to do or say these things (although it does happen and does speed the process along). These systems self-select for people holding the ideology of the ruling class by their own mechanisms
She just saved chilean left (as in actual left, the people who where fighting agaisnt the cops and goverment in the 2019 protests) yesterday by appearing in the Apruebo commercial to change the Pinochet constitution where she drinks tea with other old ladies (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxNrwB9NktI)
It might sound like sarcasm but fuck she went all in and if it saves the campaign I declare my eternal love for her (in not China related issues)
As others have said in this thread, she seems just as harsh if not harsher against human rights abuses in the US, Israel, et al. She seems alright.
Well, hope they investigate inappropriate behavior and torture by officials, and fix their shit.
Cool. Now do ICE. Oh wait. They won't. Because the UN is a dog on the US's leash.
