UK report on Xinjiang nothing but lies

On Thursday the UK Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee published a report purportedly on human rights in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. Alleging human rights abuses against Uygur Muslims and others in the region, it urged the government to take tougher action against China, including a partial Winter Olympics boycott and cotton trade ban.

Despite the committee’s claim that evidence of serious human rights abuses in Xinjiang is “irrefutable”, the report — Never Again: The UK’s Responsibility to Act on Atrocities in Xinjiang and Beyond — fails to offer any evidence to refute.

Instead, once again, it resorts to the highly charged accusation that genocide against the ethnic minority groups in Xinjiang is being carried out, and presents the written submissions of members of the overseas Uygur community, whose authenticity is readily called into question, given the fact that some Uygur organizations overseas such as the World Uyghur Congress have actually acted as sponsors of terrorist forces in Xinjiang.

The attitude of some more authentic and reputable international organizations which the Foreign Affairs Committee contacted to solicit evidence it desires seems more revealing. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization “provided us with a wholly inadequate response to our concerns about cultural destruction in Xinjiang”, the committee said, something that made it “particularly disappointed”. The International Council on Monuments and Sites ignored the committee entirely, as it admits.

But this should come as no surprise, because the US State Department’s Office of the Legal Advisor already concluded many months earlier that there was “insufficient evidence” to prove that genocide is being carried out in Xinjiang. It is deplorable that the UK committee continues to trumpet this unfounded genocide theory in the tireless effort to smear China.

And it is shameful that the committee should use falsehoods to try and force Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government to formulate policies against China. For example, to ensure that Beijing “faces consequences” when it hosts the 2022 Winter Olympics. Which prompted Johnson to make it clear that he was “instinctively” against sporting boycotts.

Such give-a-dog-a-bad-name-and-hang-him tricks have been played before by the West. The so-called evidence of weapons of mass destruction paved the way for the US-led Iraq invasion that devastated that country. The United Kingdom played its part in that war, which has become a stain on its national conscience. It is sad that some of its politicians have not learned any lessons from that and are bent on the same chicanery to generate antipathy toward China.