Human Rights Watch (HRW) claims that China is still committing crimes against humanity in the area of Xinjiang in the country’s northwest by violating the rights of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities living there.
“Over the past year, Chinese officials have maintained their abusive’strike hard’ policies, crushing the rights of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims,” Maya Wang, assistant Asia director at HRW, stated in a news release on August 31. When faced with crimes against humanity, member states of the United Nations should not remain mute.
The Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other indigenous peoples of Xinjiang have been subjected to extensive and systematic attacks by the Chinese government since 2017. As part of their mission, they’ve been locking people up in concentration camps and forcing them to assimilate.
The United Nations released a harsh report on rights breaches perpetrated by the Chinese government in Xinjiang a year prior to the HRW study.
Human Rights Watch said that China’s recent announcement that it would continue its counterterrorism operations in the area was evidence that atrocities were still being committed.
On August 26, when visiting Xinjiang, Xi made a remark on “the outcomes of [China’s] Xinjiang policies.” He vowed to “consolidate hard-won social stability,” “forge a consciousness of a united Chinese nation,” and “ensure the public [in Xinjiang] has correct views…on ethnicity, history, and religion.”
The testimonials of former prisoners and family members have fueled a guerilla advocacy effort that has attracted outsized worldwide attention to the suffering of ethnic Kazakhs imprisoned in China since Beijing’s dragnet expanded in 2017.
The U.S. Department of State estimates that 2 million people of Xinjiang’s indigenous, largely Muslim, ethnic groups, including Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and others, have been detained.
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