Xinjiang in focus as UN rights chief visits China
Beijing asserts it has nothing to hide and welcomes all
Beijing, May 23: Allegations of human rights abuses in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region are the dominant issue on a visit by the United Nations' top rights official that starts Monday.
Michelle Bachelet’s visit is the first to China by a UN high commissioner for human rights since 2005, but rights groups warn it threatens to whitewash the ruling Communist Party abuses in Xinjiang.
China has locked up more than a million members of its Uyghur, Kazakh and other Muslim minorities in what critics describe as a campaign to obliterate their distinct cultural identities.
China says it has nothing to hide and welcomes all those without political bias to visit Xinjiang and view what it describes as a successful campaign to restore order and ethnic cohesion.
Bachelet will begin her six-day visit in the southern city of Guangzhou before travelling to Kashgar and the Xinjiang regional capital of Urumqi. Details have been tightly held and China’s entirely Communist Party-controlled media have not reported on her visit.
A key question is whether Bachelet will be allowed to visit the nowlargely empty internment camps that China calls reeducation centres and meet with figures imprisoned over calls for greater religious, political and cultural freedoms, such as Ilham Tohti, an economist and winner of the Sakharov Prize.
China has also been accused of using forced labour, coercive birth control and separating children from their incarcerated parents, and monitoring group The Dui Hua Foundation says fasting for Ramadan or selling Islamic books has also been targeted.
It’s also not clear whether Bachelet will be able to meet with officials who have led the crackdown in Xinjiang, including former party secretary Chen Quanguo, now an official in Beijing. Bachelet plans to speak with high-level national and local officials, civil society organisations, business representatives. — AP