BISHKEK (TCA) — Senior diplomats from permanent missions of eight countries to the United Nations Office in Geneva arrived in Beijing on February 15 and will pay a visit to China’s northwest Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region through Tuesday, China’s Xinhua news agency reported.
Those diplomats, from Pakistan, Venezuela, Cuba, Egypt, Cambodia, Russia, Senegal and Belarus, are visiting at the invitation of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
During talks with the delegation, Jiang Jianguo, deputy head of the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, said that since the 1990s, the “three evil forces” — terrorism, extremism and separatism — have organized and conducted thousands of violent terrorist attacks in Xinjiang, causing massive casualties and injuries of people and substantial property damage.
Based on international anti-terrorism experience and its own reality, Xinjiang has made obvious progress in recent years by means including setting up vocational education and training centers, Jiang said, adding that people’s sense of gain, happiness and security have been greatly lifted.
China’s Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng said when holding talks with the delegation that the world is faced with rising instability, uncertainty and insecurity, thus multilateralism should be insisted on.
All parties should respect other countries’ own human rights development paths, jointly oppose supremacy of human rights and promote the healthy development of the human rights causes in the world, Le said.
Members of the visiting delegation spoke highly of China’s development paths, concepts and achievements. They also expressed willingness to make joint efforts with China to promote all parties to treat various kinds of human rights issues equally and prevent the issue from being politicized, Xinhua reported.
In August 2018, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination published a report claiming that more than one million ethnic Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities were being detained in massive “no rights” “counter-extremism” camps and another two million were being held in reeducation camps.
In January, Shohrat Zakir, the chairman of the Xinjiang regional government and an Uyghur himself, stated that the United Nation’s estimate was a “rumour” and that the facilities were temporary vocational training and educational facilities that had proven to be “extremely effective” in reducing extremism, teaching residents about the law and helping them learn Mandarin Chinese, Russia’s Sputnik news agency reported.
