Who will still be able to deny, relativize or ignore the fate inflicted by China on one of its minorities? Admittedly, no one has ever believed the official explanation from Beijing, which presents the internment camps for the Uighurs and other Muslim ethnic groups in the Xinjiang region as vocational training centers. The multiple testimonies of survivors that have appeared in the press in recent years have already recounted the arbitrary targeting of populations, the prison system, forced sterilizations and indoctrination to erase the distinctive signs of these cultures.
The Xinjiang Police Files, however, bring another dimension to this tragedy. These documents coming directly from the Chinese security forces and published, Tuesday, May 24, by The world and thirteen other international media confirm from the inside the obsession with security and the essentially totalitarian effort deployed to reshape a population. They describe, with the terrifying precision of a user manual, the grinding machine to which entire families are delivered, suspected by association, interned simply because of being close to another prisoner, or because of a “strong family religious atmosphere”.
And the machine is running at full speed if we trust the head of the region at the time, Chen Quanguo. The latter welcomes, in speeches internal to the Chinese Communist Party, that the “four breaks” have been “well done”namely to break the lines of families, the roots of populations, their relations with the outside world and even with their “origins”.
These revelations come at a time when the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, is on a long-negotiated visit to China, including Xinjiang. The terms of the move have not been made public. The chances of a real independent field investigation, without obstacles, without staging, are very low, and the Chinese authorities could, on the contrary, divert the sequence to derive from it a validation of their radical policy.
call to reason
The former Chilean leader’s response to the worsening abuses in Xinjiang has so far been particularly muted, as has that of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, not to mention the silence of the countries quick to denounce anti-Muslim racism only about Western countries. This state of affairs reflects Beijing’s new influence on the international system, its ability to influence the vote, in the UN assemblies, of many countries that the regime supports economically.
It is also the sign of an assumed brutality in international relations and the illustration of a new era of impunity. The latter was reinforced by the Sino-Russian joint declaration of February 4, a profession of faith in favor of a new world order, fundamentally revisionist, written on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine.
Although China has interned at least a million Uighurs, no one is seriously considering punishing it for these human rights violations. And what big Western brand would be ready to alienate the huge Chinese market? For all of Beijing’s interlocutors and partners, the “Xinjiang Police Files” must however be a final call to order and to reason: we must keep our eyes wide open on the reality that China represents today.