UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet begins a long-awaited visit to China’s Xinjiang region on Tuesday, where Beijing is accused of waging a fierce crackdown on Uyghur Muslims.
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This trip is being done discreetly for the time being, the UN delegation being required to integrate, in the name of the epidemic situation in China, a health bubble which keeps it away from the foreign press.
No details on the specific places that Michelle Bachelet will visit have been made public, which raises questions about the real latitude she will have on the ground.
Especially since the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Wang Yi, told him on Monday that he expected above all a visit which could “clarify the disinformation” of which China considers itself a victim.
Worried, Uyghurs in the diaspora and human rights associations urged the 70-year-old former Chilean president not to be drawn into a communication operation orchestrated by Beijing.
As of Tuesday, the official New China news agency assured that Michelle Bachelet, in front of Wang Yi, had “congratulated China for its significant achievements in economic and social development and the promotion of the protection of human rights “.
Words that Ms. Bachelet’s spokesperson has neither confirmed nor denied.
Xinjiang (Northwest), long hit by bloody attacks attributed to separatists and Uyghur Islamists, has been the subject of repression in the name of anti-terrorism for several years.
Western studies accuse China of having interned at least a million Uyghurs and members of other Muslim minorities there in re-education camps, even of imposing “forced labor” and “forced sterilizations”.
Washington accuses Beijing of “genocide”. China denounces the “lie of the century” and presents the camps as “vocational training centers”, intended to combat religious extremism.
Attacks
Beijing says it does not impose any sterilization, but only applies the birth control policy in place across the country, previously little practiced in the region.
Present Tuesday and Wednesday in Xinjiang, Michelle Bachelet must go to the regional capital Urumqi, scene in the past of several attacks targeting civilians.
Ms. Bachelet will also travel to Kashgar, in southern Xinjiang, where the Uyghur population is the majority and the security campaign is known to be particularly fierce.
Nursimangul Abdureshid, a Uyghur living in Turkey, however, said she had “not much hope” that the UN visitors could “bring any change”.
“They have to visit victims, like members of my family, not participate in scenes prepared in advance” by Beijing, she told AFP.
Her brother was sentenced to almost 16 years in prison, in particular for “preparation (of acts) violent and terrorist”, she recently discovered in a file revealed by AFP and reputed to come from a leak of the police records.
“If the UN team does not have unlimited access to Xinjiang, I will not accept their so-called reports,” said Nursimangul Abdureshid.
“Anti-Chinese”
Michelle Bachelet is the first UN human rights official to visit China since 2005, after years of tough negotiations with Beijing over the terms of her visit.
“Ms Bachelet needs to understand that what is at stake is the world’s trust in the United Nations,” said Raphael David of the International Service for Human Rights (ISHR).
According to her services, the former Chilean president will discuss in particular with members of civil society working on human rights.
In this context, a consortium of foreign media on Tuesday published documents believed to be from the hacking of Xinjiang police computers.
Among them are thousands of photographs, presented as having been taken in “detention camps” and showing the faces of many “detainees”.
Charges which are “the latest example of the denigration of Xinjiang carried out by anti-Chinese forces”, castigated Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for Chinese diplomacy, on Tuesday.
The head of German diplomacy, Annalena Baerbock, for her part “demanded clarifications” during an interview with her Chinese counterpart Wang Yi.
