US support of Uygurs opportunistic

To some US politicians, it seems that simply being a Uygur is enough to provide a true picture of China’s Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. When four overseas Uygurs told heartwrenching stories about their brethren housed in “camps” in Xinjiang at a conference hosted by the US State Department at the United Nations Headquarters in New York on Tuesday, they played their assigned roles well, inciting a China-bashing chorus denouncing Beijing’s “systemic oppression” of Uygurs in a region that is home to many ethnic groups.

The conference was held on the sidelines of the General Assembly to garner support “to demand and compel an immediate end to China’s horrific campaign of repression,” US Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan said.

But there was a big gap between the stories told by these overseas Uygurs and the reality in the region, and they carefully avoided saying a word about what Xinjiang was like before the vocational education and training centers, or “camps” as they suggestively called them, were introduced about three years ago.

There has been no terrorist or extremist attack in the past three years, while, prior to that, thousands of terrorist and extremist attacks had wreaked havoc on not only Xinjiang but elsewhere in China since the 1990s, pushing the region to the brink of falling into the hands of extremists, secessionists and terrorists from home and abroad.

Rather than evidencing a “horrific campaign of repression” against Muslims in Xinjiang as Sullivan claimed, the centers have proved effective in not only preventing the Uygurs — particularly those poorly educated living in remote and backward areas — from being systemically brainwashed by extremist ideology, but also in helping them acquire skills and knowledge so they can pursue a better life.

The human rights of the trainees, including the right to religious freedom, are strictly protected by law.

Instead of being denounced, the centers should be recognized as an institutional innovation of China contributing to the global anti-terrorist cause.

Although China welcomes foreign diplomats and officials of international organizations to go to the schools to see for themselves, the US not only refuses to do so, it also tries to pressure others not to go, and even criticizes those that do, including Vladimir Voronkov, head of the UN Office of Counter-Terrorism, which offers food for thought about Washington’s true intentions.

The Uygur secessionist group might be one of the few Islamic outfits in the world that doesn’t export oil to the US to be endorsed by Washington. But then having a stick with which to beat China obviously trumps the administration’s Islamophobia.