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.
This trip takes place almost behind closed doors, 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 precise places Michelle Bachelet will visit have been made public, which raises questions about the real latitude she will have on the ground.
Worried, Uighurs in the diaspora and human rights associations are urging the 70-year-old former Chilean president not to be drawn into a propaganda operation by the communist regime.
Xinjiang (north-west), long hit by 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, and even of imposing “forced labor” and “forced sterilizations”.
Washington accuses Beijing of committing “genocide”. China denounces the “lie of the century” and presents the camps as “vocational training centers”, intended to combat religious extremism.
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.
” Staging “
Present Tuesday and Wednesday in Xinjiang, populated by 26 million inhabitants, nearly half of whom are Uyghurs, Michelle Bachelet will notably visit the regional capital Urumqi.
In 2014, an attack against civilians killed around 40 people there. Riots in 2009 resulted in the death of nearly 200 people, the vast majority of Han (the majority ethnic group in China) beaten or stabbed by Uyghurs.
Ms. Bachelet will also go to Kashgar, in southern Xinjiang, where the Uyghur population is very large and where the security campaign is known to be particularly fierce.
“I hope she can ask the Chinese government where my mother is,” Jevlan Shirememet, a 31-year-old Uyghur who lives in Turkey, told AFP and says he hasn’t heard from her for four years. .
Nursimangul Abdureshid, a Uyghur living in Turkey, 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 nearly 16 years in prison, in particular for “preparation (of) violent and terrorist acts”, she recently discovered in a database revealed by AFP and reputed to come from a leaked police records.
“If the UN team does not have unlimited access to Xinjiang, I will not accept their so-called reports,” said Nursimangul Abdureshid.
leaked photos
However, China has already clearly stated its objectives.
During a one-on-one Monday with Michelle Bachelet, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi expressed hope that his stay would help “clarify misinformation” about his country, according to his ministry.
“We hope that this visit will allow you to get to the bottom of things, to talk about facts and reality, in order to silence rumors and lies”, he underlined.
Michelle Bachelet is the first UN human rights official to visit China since 2005, after years of negotiations with Beijing over the terms of her visit to Xinjiang.
“Mrs. Bachelet must understand that what is at stake is the world’s confidence in the United Nations,” said Raphael David of the International Service for Human Rights (ISHR).
During a videoconference Monday with representatives of foreign embassies, the former Chilean president assured that she would go to detention centers, diplomatic sources told AFP.
To increase pressure on the UN delegation, a consortium of foreign media released a series of documents on Tuesday purporting to come from the hacking of local police computers.
Among them are thousands of photographs, including identity photographs, presented as having been taken in the “detention camps” of the region and showing the faces of many “detained persons”, including adolescents and the elderly.