‘In Xinjiang, we only have campuses’
GENEVA: A top Chinese diplomat claimed on Friday that detention centers for Muslims in China’s western province of Xinjiang are “campuses, not camps” and said they are eventually going to be c l osed as a “t r ai ning programme” for ethnic Uighurs is downsized.
At the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, executive vice foreign minister Le Yucheng reiterated China’s insistence that the detention centres are designed to provide training and f i ght regional terrorism.
He also claimed that officials from around the world, including from the UN, had visited the region and that the detention centres in Xinjiang are “actually boarding schools or campuses, not camps” as reported by critics.
The US state department said this week that China has “significantly intensified” a campaign of mass detentions of minority Uighurs over the last year, with between 800,000 and 2 million people from the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region interned in camps.
The centres have drawn con- demnation from across the world.
Le told reporters he had recently visited some Uighur centers in Xinjiang - and played ping pong and ate halal food there. He didn’t specify when the detention centres would be closed, other than telling reporters later that would happen “at the appropriate time”.
He also took aim at a Us-led event in Geneva on Xinjiang - calling that “unacceptable” interference in Chinese sovereignty.
The envoy’s comments came as China was responding to more than 200 recommendations by other countries on ways that Beijing could improve human rights as part of a Human Rights Council process known as the Universal Periodic Review.
All UN member states undergo such screening, generally every four to five years. Le said China had accepted 82 percent of the recommendations presented during the review last November. The council formally adopted the review of China without a vote on Friday.
The US pulled out of t he 47-country Geneva-based UN body last year, alleging it has an anti-israeli bias. PARIS/BAGHOUZ: France has repatriated several orphans or isolated children aged five and under from camps in the north of Syria where they’d been held as prisoners of war by Kurdish forces.
France has so far refused requests by the US and Syrian Kurds t o t ake back French nationals who’d j oined t he Islamic State (IS), saying they should be judged by the Syrian militias or Iraqi forces that captured them.
However, the government has s ai d i t would c onsider accepting women and children on a case-by-case basis.
“The decision was t aken because of the age of these particularly vulnerable children,” the French foreign ministry said in a statement on Friday. “As for French adult fighters and jihadists who followed Daech (French name for IS) to the Middle East, the French position has not changed - they must be judged where they committed their crimes. It’s a question of both justice and security.”
The children will receive special medical and psychological checks, and their relatives have been informed, according to the statement.
The French government also thanked the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) for their help.
According to estimates by the Soufan Center, a non-government organisation dedicated to research on global security issues, about 2,000 French have joined the IS. Some went as families, while others married and had children while in Syria.
Meanwhile, an aid group, the International Rescue Committee, says that nearly 3,000 people have arrived at a tent settlement in northeastern Syria over the past two days after leaving the last area held by the IS.