In early 2019, Albanian-Canadian historian and journalist Orsi Jazeksi believed reports about human rights abuses in western China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (Xinjiang) were lies.
Testimonies from people evacuated from the region and reports from human rights organizations highlight the extent of large-scale human rights violations. Xinjiang’s Muslim minority, the majority of them Turkic-speaking Uyghurs, have been stripped of basic freedoms, their cultural and religious heritage destroyed, and at least 1 million people detained in a vast network of camps. It is reported that it has been done.
The international community took note, and the United Nations also expressed concern.
But Mr. Jazeksi was not convinced.
He told Al Jazeera that he was “convinced that this report was a plot concocted by the United States and Western countries to discredit China and divert attention from its own human rights record regarding Muslims.”
The Chinese government itself vehemently rejects this claim, acknowledging the existence of the camps but insisting they are vocational training centers necessary to combat suspected extremism.
To find out the truth for himself, Jazeksi contacted the Chinese embassy in Tirana about visiting Xinjiang. He was soon invited on a media tour for foreign reporters from mostly Muslim countries, and in early August 2019 he was on a plane to China.
“I went to defend the Chinese government,” he recalled.
However, he soon realized that defending the Chinese story was a much more difficult task than he had anticipated.
During their first few days in Xinjiang, he and other foreign journalists had to sit through a series of lectures by Chinese officials about the history of the region and its people.
“They portrayed Xinjiang’s indigenous people as immigrants and Islam as a religion foreign to the region,” Jazeksi said. “That was wrong.”
His disillusionment only lasted when he and other journalists were taken by their Chinese hosts to one of the so-called vocational training centers on the outskirts of the region’s capital, Urumqi.
“They said it was like a school, but it was clearly a high-security location in the middle of the desert,” Jazeksi said.
“They also said that the people staying there were not allowed to leave, so it was clearly a prison and not a school, and that the people who were there were prisoners, not students.”
Once they entered the scene, Mr. Jazekshi had the opportunity to interact with several Uyghurs, but it quickly became clear that they were not the “terrorists” or “extremists” that the Chinese government had claimed. Ta.
“I’ve talked to people who were brought there simply to practice Islam, for example by getting into a religious marriage, praying in public, and wearing a headscarf. ” he said.
“One of them said she was no longer a Muslim and now believed in science and Chinese President Xi Jinping.”
Jazeshi confronted the Chinese officials who accompanied him.
“I told them what they were doing was very wrong,” Jazeksi said.
The exchange led to an altercation between Jazeksi and some of the Chinese hosts.
When he finally left Xinjiang, he was deeply shocked.
He intended to expose the lies of the West, but instead he witnessed massive repression.
“What I saw was an attempt to eradicate Islam from Xinjiang,” he said.
“Western Agenda”
Since Jazeshi’s visit, the UN Human Rights Council has found that China’s restrictions and deprivations in Xinjiang may amount to crimes against humanity.
The US government and lawmakers from Australia, Canada, France and the UK have labeled China’s treatment of Uyghurs and other Turkic-speaking Muslims in the region a genocide. Meanwhile, several countries have imposed economic restrictions on goods from Xinjiang in response to evidence of forced labor in the region.
Amid criticism, the Chinese government continues to arrange visits to Xinjiang for diplomats and journalists, mainly from Muslim countries.
Chinese media have reported that at least five such media tours will take place in 2023, with visits by diplomats and Islamic scholars to Xinjiang also being arranged.
Moiz Farooq, editor-in-chief of Daily Ittehad Media Group and Pakistan Economic Net, visited Xinjiang in mid-December as part of a media delegation from Pakistan.
Like Jazeksi in 2019, Farouk went to Xinjiang with the intention of seeing for himself that the stories he had heard were not true.
“There is a lot of propaganda out there about Xinjiang and I wanted to witness it with my own eyes,” Farouk told Al Jazeera.
Unlike Jazeshi, Farouk left Xinjiang impressed with the region’s level of development, ensuring that local Muslims lived a largely free and contented life.
“I could talk to as many different people about living standards as I wanted in bazaars and restaurants, and neither I nor the rest of the delegation were restricted at all,” he said.
“There I saw Muslims freely enjoying and practicing their religion.”
Mr. Farooq does not believe that reports and reports by human rights organizations and UN agencies detailing human rights violations in Xinjiang are accurate.
“It was the Western world’s challenge to show the worst of Xinjiang, and we now know that story is not true because we saw how happy they looked.” [Muslims in Xinjiang] I’m alive,” he said.
Naz Parveen is director of the China Window Institute in Peshawar, Pakistan, and was on the same tour as Farooq. She, too, was impressed by the prosperity she saw in Xinjiang.
Echoing the Chinese government’s explanation of the situation, Parveen believes that what he calls human rights violations in Xinjiang can be more accurately described as law enforcement operations targeting religious extremism.
For Parveen, this trip reinforced that idea.
“We visited bazaars and mosques and saw people praying and receiving teachings from imams,” she told Al Jazeera.
“Everywhere I went, I saw people living normal lives, peaceful and contented lives, so the horrors I read about Xinjiang did not match what I saw. .”
On another trip to Xinjiang in September, Chinese state broadcaster CGTN quoted columnist and Filipino politician Mussolini Sinsuat Ridasan praising China’s “anti-terrorism” measures in Xinjiang.
On the same tour, Donovan Ralph Martin, editor of Canada’s Daily Scrum News, was similarly quoted by CGTN as saying, “There is absolutely religious freedom in Xinjiang, and anyone who doesn’t say that is ignorant. ” he is said to have said. .
Mr. Ridasan and Mr. Martin did not respond to Al Jazeera’s requests for interviews.
Challenge to the story
Since the beginning of 2020, Chinese President Xi Jinping has called for “telling the story of Xinjiang” and “confidently promoting Xinjiang’s excellent social stability.”
Canadian Uyghur activist Rukie Turdouche sees media tours as essential to that mission.
“He wants to change the narrative on Xinjiang,” she told Al Jazeera.
Henryk Szajewski is a senior researcher at the NGO Uyghur Human Rights Project. He says media tours like the one in Xinjiang are a common tactic employed by countries with something to hide.
“The aim is to refute criticism of your human rights record by amplifying your story to others, giving it more credibility,” he told Al Jazeera.
“In reality, if they want to show that, for example, Uyghurs enjoy freedom of religious belief and expression, usually they will take you to the Id Ka Mosque in Kashgar, but if you The people it speaks to are often tightly selected and cannot be challenged.”The nation’s version of Uyghurs. ”
The Pakistani delegation, which was joined by Farooq and Parveen, visited Id Ka Mosque.
Regarding the more spontaneous encounters with Uyghurs on such tours, Tardouche said that based on his talks with Uyghurs who have lived in conditions of fear and been under close surveillance by the state for years, foreign journalists have been unable to reach them. I don’t have much confidence in that conclusion. Advertisement.
“Uyghurs and other ethnic Turks in Xinjiang have little choice but to remain silent or go along with Chinese propaganda,” she said.
Australian journalists on a media tour in September reported speaking to souvenir shops that were not served by tour guides. The seller said he had spent time in a concentration camp, but when the journalists started asking more questions, a person suddenly appeared and began filming the seller’s answers.
Even former United Nations human rights chief Michelle Bachelet noted that her long-delayed visit had been carefully planned. But in her final report, released just before she left office, she found that China had probably committed “crimes against humanity” in Xinjiang.
However, Maya Wang, Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said there have been signs that some security measures in Xinjiang are being eased in recent years.
Concentration camps were closed and police checkpoints were removed.
Instead, a vast network of advanced facial recognition surveillance cameras has been established across the region, and people previously held in camps have reportedly been transferred to China’s opaque prison system.
At the same time, information entering and exiting Xinjiang is strictly controlled, and Xinjiang residents are punished for having unauthorized contact with people outside China.
“The genocide is still happening, just more secretly now,” Tardouche said.
Despite the controversy surrounding the organized tour, Turdouche and Jazeksi believe that visits to Xinjiang should continue as long as foreign journalists and officials challenge the narrative presented.
“They should leave,” Jazeksi said.
“And they should tell the truth about what they are seeing and what they are not seeing in Xinjiang.”