Considering that the Chinese state deems Islam a mental illness, it might come as a surprise that some Muslim countries would support the incarceration and torture of other Muslims, but no, thirty-seven countries, including Algeria and Saudi Arabia, have written to the UN to support Beijing, likely in retaliation to the letter sent by some twenty mainly Western countries denouncing the internment of muslims in China’s Xinjiang region, reported today the AFP.
This letter, co-signed among others by Russia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, North Korea, Algeria, Nigeria, the Philippines and Syria, was announced by China this Friday on the last day of the 41st session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, according to the same source.
“We commend China’s remarkable achievements in the field of human rights,” said the letter, also signed by Myanmar, the Philippines, Zimbabwe and others.
“We take note that terrorism, separatism, and religious extremism have caused enormous damage to people of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang,” it said.
Envoys from across the EU – along with Australia, Canada and Japan, and New Zealand – had earlier co-signed a text denouncing China’s conduct in Xinjiang, where one million people, mostly ethnic Uighurs, are reportedly being held in internment camps.
Rights groups and former inmates describe the internment sites in Xinjiang as “concentration camps” where mainly Muslim Uighurs and other minorities are being forcefully assimilated into China’s majority ethnic Han society.
Echoing China’s defence of the camps, Friday’s letter described them as “vocational education and training centres.”
China condemned the “distortions” and “hypocrisy” of Western media and the countries criticizing its actions in Xinjiang. It said that the region’s people “feel much better and much more happy and secure”
Signers of the pro-China letter, including Russia, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela, also took the opportunity to repeat a position frequently expressed in the UN’s Human Rights Council opposing the “naming and shaming and publicly exerting pressure on other countries” by calling them to account for human rights violations.
