Anger as UN commissioner ‘parrots Beijing’s line on Uighur camps’

China has declared a propaganda victory after a rare visit by the United Nations high commissioner for human rights.

UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet holds a virtual meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Guangzhou. Picture: AFP

China has declared a propaganda victory after a rare visit by the United Nations high commissioner for human rights that they say debunked Western “disinformation” about the persecution of Uighur Muslims.

During her six-day visit to the Xinjiang region of China, Michelle Bachelet did not denounce the mass rights abuses alleged to have been carried out there. The US has claimed that the Beijing government restricted what she could see and manipulated her trip.

The visit, the first of its kind in 17 years, came amid new evidence that President Xi Jinping had promoted the large-scale detention of Muslims in so-called “re-education camps” which resemble prisons, with armed guards ordered to shoot anyone who tried to escape.

Liz Truss, the UK Foreign Secretary, and Antony Blinken, the US Secretary of State, had joined calls for Ms Bachelet to investigate these and other allegations of persecution against the Uighuir people.

But Ms Bachelet, at the end of a visit during which she toured the ancient town of Kashgar, one of the centres of China’s alleged crackdown, delivered an underwhelming report.

At a press conference on Saturday she used Chinese propaganda terms to describe the detention camps as “vocational education and training centres” and said she was “unable to assess the full scale” of such camps, where about two million Uighur people are thought to have been detained between 2017 and 2019.

Ms Bachelet, a former president of Chile, stressed that her trip was not an investigation but an “opportunity to hold direct discussions with China’s most senior leaders” on human rights.

She said that she had encouraged the Chinese government to “undertake a review of all counter-terrorism and de-radicalisation policies to ensure they fully comply with international human rights standards, and in particular that they are not applied in an arbitrary and discriminatory way”.

But Chinese state-run media outlets praised the high commissioner for her efforts to “penetrate the Western opinion poisoned by extreme forces, [and] to understand the truth”.

“We sincerely hope Ms Bachelet will bring Xinjiang – the comprehensive, real one as she has experienced in person – to more people in the West who are willing to know the truth,” read an editorial in The Global Times, a Communist Party newspaper.

In Washington Mr Blinken expressed concerns over “the conditions Beijing authorities imposed on the visit”, which he said failed to enable “a complete and independent assessment of the human rights environments”, including in Xinjiang, “where genocide and crimes against humanity are ongoing”.

Mr Blinken said that the UN commissioner had not been able to have private discussions with Uighur families as the Chinese authorities took steps “to restrict and manipulate her visit”.

“We are further troubled by reports that residents of Xinjiang were warned not to complain or speak openly about conditions in the region, that no insight was provided into the whereabouts of hundreds of missing Uighurs and conditions for over a million individuals in detention,” Mr Blinken said.

Ms Bachelet, however, described her discussions with people from different sectors in China as “open” and said meetings were unsupervised and had been organised by the UN.

Dilxat Raxit, spokesman for the World Uyghur Congress campaign group, called for Ms Bachelet’s resignation, while another Uighur activist, Rayhan Asat, called her comments as a “total betrayal” on Twitter.

Ma Zhaoxu, a Deputy Foreign Minister, said Ms Bachelet got to see a real Xinjiang, “completely different from the one demonised in the Western media”.

He said Ms Bachelet was presented with China’s policies on ethnic and religious affairs, as well as the measures and results of counter-terrorism and de-radicalisation, toured an exhibition on the subjects and had face-to-face conversations with religious representatives.

“Clouds cannot overshadow the sun, and truth will debunk all lies,” Mr Ma said. “It needs to be pointed out that certain western countries, out of ulterior motives, went to great lengths to disrupt and undercut the high commissioner’s visit, their plot didn’t succeed.”

THE TIMES