Beijing denies detaining 1 million

BEIJING — China blamed “anti-China forces” on Tuesday for the growing criticism of Beijing’s policies in a far western region where large groups of ethnic Uighurs are being detained in internment camps.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said anti-China forces had made “false accusations against China for political purposes” after a U.N. human rights committee raised concern over reported mass detentions of ethnic Uighurs. He also said a few foreign media outlets misrepresented the committee’s discussions and were smearing China’s anti-terror and crime-fighting measures in Xinjiang.

In Xinjiang, authorities responding to sporadic violent attacks by Muslim separatists have imposed a heavy security crackdown and detained an estimated hundreds of thousands of members of the Uighur and Kazakh Muslim minorities in indoctrination camps. Former detainees have provided The Associated Press among the first accounts of life inside these camps in which they were forced to denounce Islam and profess loyalty to the party.

In recent weeks, China has come under pressure from some Western governments and rights groups to release people held in such centers or account for the whereabouts of people whose overseas relatives say have gone missing.

A U.N. committee member last week cited estimates that over 1 million people in China from the country’s Uighur and other Muslim minorities are being held in “counter-extremism centers” and 2 million others have been forced into “re-education camps.”