Uyghur Groups Call for U.N. Human Rights Chief to Resign

Uyghur rights groups, including the Campaign for Uyghurs in Washington, DC, and the World Uyghur Congress, based in Germany, are calling on U.N. Human Rights Commissioner Michelle Bachelet to resign after her long-delayed visit to China turned into a whitewash of the Uyghur genocide.

Bachelet did offer some mild criticism of China’s treatment of the Uyghurs after her visit, and stated her trip was not meant to be an “investigation.” Chinese state media treated the visit as exactly that, crowing that Bachelet had vindicated the regime in Beijing and exposed human rights complaints from the Uyghurs as “conspiracy theories.”

Radio Free Asia (RFA) on Tuesday quoted Uyghur leaders who were outraged at Bachelet for refusing to challenge China’s claims that the massive concentration camps littering Xinjiang were “vocational training centers,” and that Beijing’s repressive campaigns against the Uyghurs were justifiable as “deradicalization’ and “anti-terrorism” programs.

Campaign for Uyghurs executive director Rushan Abbas denounced Bachelet’s heavily stage-managed trip to Xinjiang as a “Potemkin-style sham,” a reference to the infamous Russian practice of building lovely fake villages to conceal poverty and misery.

“The high commissioner has disgraced herself and her office by refusing to investigate China’s genocide and adopting, repeating the Chinese regime’s narrative, further cementing their propaganda in the U.N.,” Abbas told RFA.

Abbas said Bachelet should resign because “her comments seem custom-made for Beijing’s propaganda machine, and she neglects the duties of her office and the founding principle of the U.N.”

Salih Hudayar, founder of the East Turkistan National Awakening Movement – East Turkistan being the name many Uyghurs prefer for Xinjiang, viewing it as captive territory illegally occupied by China – also invoked the specter of Potemkin villages in his critique of Bachelet’s visit.

Hudayar said the Bachelet debacle has “shown us that nobody cares about our human rights, and that restoring East Turkistan’s independence is the only solution to end the ongoing genocide and ensure our peoples’ very existence and freedoms.”

“East Turkistan’s struggle isn’t a struggle for the U.N.’s fake human rights,” he said. “It’s an anticolonial struggle to ensure our nation’s existence.”

World Uyghur Congress President Dolkun Isa said Bachelet’s statements left the impression that “the U.N. is in bed with Communist China, a regime that has been committing the Uyghur genocide for the past five years.”

“It is truly stunning to see that Ms. Bachelet did not act as the highest human rights official at the U.N. but rather as a mouthpiece of the Chinese communist government during and after her trip,” he said.

Isa called for Bachelet to resign because she has “completely discredited the role of her office and the authority of the United Nations as a champion of human rights in the world.”

International human rights activists strongly criticized Bachelet’s trip to Xinjiang, especially her apparent willingness to be used as a propaganda asset by the Chinese Communist regime, but most stopped short of demanding her resignation. 

A notable exception was Frederick John Packer, a University of Ottawa law professor who served on the drafting committee at the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights, where Bachelet’s position was created. 

Packer said he was in “shock” at Bachelet’s conduct, which has “badly compromised” the U.N. Human Rights Commission.

“The world cannot afford this. She must resign along with those who advised this awful course,” he said.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry on Tuesday lashed out at U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken for criticizing Bachelet’s visit and restating the charges of genocide against China. Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian – a top peddler of China’s most deranged and insulting conspiracy theories – delivered a rambling diatribe that pretended the U.N. had cleared China of all human rights charges.

“The denigrating accusations about ‘genocide,’ ‘crimes against humanity.’ and ‘detention camps’ in Xinjiang in Secretary Blinken’s speech are nothing but the biggest lies of the century,” Zhao howled.

After presenting China’s repression of Tibet as an act of “peaceful liberation” and claiming the tyrannical crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong was an act of prudent political hygiene, Zhao invoked “American Indians,” Martin Luther King, Jr., school shootings, and even the United States response to China’s deadly Wuhan coronavirus to argue the United States has no moral standing to criticize Chinese abuses.

“The U.S. should earnestly respect China’s sovereignty, security and development interests, and stop fabricating and spreading lies and rumors of all kinds to smear and denigrate China, and stop interfering in China’s internal affairs in the name of so-called human rights issues,” Zhao demanded.