Choosing between conscience and interest: Can the support of more than 100 countries for China stop the Uyghur genocide?

On March 4, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk noted that China is currently violating the fundamental rights of Uighurs and Tibetans, and called on China to improve its human rights situation. He also asked China to implement the recommendations made by the Office of the UN Human Rights Commission and other human rights organizations. These demands, of course, refer to laws, policies and practices related to human rights abuses, including those of Uighurs and Tibetans. However, China has consistently denied committing crimes such as mass internment camps and genocide against Uyghurs.

On March 5, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Mao responded to Volker Turk's remarks at a press conference. He argued that more than 100 countries in the world have supported China's human rights policies in Uygur, Tibet and Hong Kong, which is proof that China is justified in this regard.

It is known that Michelle Bachelet, the former commissioner of the UN Human Rights Commission in 2022, published a " Report on the Human Rights Situation in Xinjiang " a few hours before leaving office, in which China's high-pressure repression policy against the Uyghur population constituted a crime against humanity. The possibility was emphasized. However, the Chinese government once denied the statements of the UN Human Rights Commission's report. The UN report says that allegations of Chinese violence against Uyghurs are indeed credible. Although the UN report did not use the term "genocide", several Western countries such as the United States condemned the issue as genocide. However, China has strongly denied that it committed genocide, insisting that its policy on the Uighurs is "the best way to fight extremism, terrorism and separatism".

Indeed, it has been two years since the UN Human Rights Commission's report on Uyghurs was published, but there has been no change in the situation of Uyghurs. Instead, propaganda to justify the Chinese Uyghur genocide is growing stronger.

On January 23 of this year, the UN Human Rights Committee's regular human rights review working group discussed China's human rights issues in Geneva, and representatives of UN member states held a dialogue with Chinese representatives on the issues of Uyghur, Tibet and Hong Kong. However, nearly 120 of the 160 countries that participated in the meeting rated China's human rights situation as "good". An African diplomat who attended the meeting and did not want to be identified said that he was summoned by Chinese representatives before the meeting and received special requests and recommendations on supporting China. Reuters also revealed that at the beginning of January this year, Chinese embassies in many countries sent letters of invitation to support China when China's human rights issues are discussed in Geneva.

In the minutes of the UN Human Rights Commission China Human Rights Review Conference , an expert asked, "How many people are living in the training centers, how long are they staying, and are they being forced into labor?" The Chinese representative's response to the question is even more infuriating. In other words, the representative of China responded by saying that the training centers are not detention centers or forced labor, but rather schools for the elimination of extremism, and that "those studying in training schools are involved in terrorist activities but have not committed crimes." However, in the so-called " Xinjiang-related press conferences " that China has been holding continuously for several years , it has always emphasized that the people in the "education center" are people who have committed minor crimes. It is interesting that, in the interviews of Chinese or foreign reporters to the camps, there was no information about the Uyghurs who were interviewed in the statement that they had "committed a crime". Instead, there were reasons such as "they came to the camps voluntarily, the purpose of coming was to clear their minds of extremist ideas and become new people."

In its 2019 White Paper , China justified itself by saying that the purpose of establishing the camps was to "eliminate terrorism before it occurs, that is, in its cradle." However, establishing an "educational center" with the aim of "predetermining the nature of a problem that has not yet occurred, linking it to terrorism and eliminating it" was extremely absurd and extremely illogical for a sane person. Despite this, the Chinese continue to justify their crimes with such lies to this day.

Indeed, in the past ten years since the internationalization of the Uyghur issue, there has been no improvement in the Uyghur situation due to the lies of China and the many countries that "believe" in this lie!

It is a pity that the "support of more than 100 countries for China in the UN" that China is not talking about is not "from the point of view of justice and human rights" as Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Mao said! It is clear that China is fooling the world community with its open lies and illogical fallacies, and the countries supporting China have not fallen to the point of being indistinguishable, of course! The fundamental problem here is that these countries supporting China are either dependent in one way or another on China's economy, burdened by China's debt, or politically authoritarian against Western democratic values. So these countries, in the choice between conscience and interest, chose interest without hesitation, that is, they put their interests above human rights. China, of course, skillfully exploited their weakness, that's all.