Chinese official in Xinjiang slams UK genocide declaration
24 April, 2021
A spokesperson for the Xinjiang region called accusations of genocide “counter to the reality” as China came under more pressure this week over its treatment of the Uighur ethnic group in the remote border area.
The British Parliament approved a nonbinding motion on Thursday (Apr 22) having said that China’s policies amounted to genocide and crimes against humanity. Human Right Watch appealed to the UN earlier in the week to investigate the allegations of crimes against humanity.
“The motion adopted by the British side was totally groundless,” Xu Guixiang, the deputy director-general of the Communist Party’s publicity department in Xinjiang, said on Friday.
“Your choice was made based on remarks by some politicians, some so-called academic institutes, some so-called authorities and scholars and some so-called witnesses.”
In recent years, an estimated 1 million people or more have already been confined in camps in Xinjiang, according to foreign governments and researchers. The majority are Uighurs, a largely Muslim ethnic group,
Authorities have been accused of imposing forced labor, systematic forced contraceptive and torture.
The Chinese government has flatly rejected the allegations. It has characterised the camps, which it says are actually closed, as vocational training centers to instruct Oriental, job skills and regulations to support monetary development and combat extremism.
China saw a wave of Xinjiang-related terrorist attacks through 2016.
Xu said that hotels in Kashgar, a historic Silk Road city in Xinjiang, were empty a couple of years ago and entrepreneurs unwilling to invest as tourism fell off due to terrorism fears. He said the government's policies have restored a hard-won stability.
The Foreign Ministry labeled the genocide allegations “a monstrous lie concocted by international anti-China forces".
"THE UNITED KINGDOM already faces several problems in the home. Those British lawmakers should mind their own business and take action tangible for their own constituency,” ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said at a daily briefing Friday.
Britain was the most recent Western country to make a genocide declaration. The US government and the parliaments of Belgium, the Netherlands and Canada have also accused Beijing of genocide, although Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been reluctant to utilize the term.
Human Rights Watch, in a written report that recommended a UN commission of inquiry to research the allegations and identify the perpetrators, said it hadn't documented genocidal intent.
However, “if such evidence were to emerge, the acts being committed against Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang ... could also support a finding of genocide”, the report said.
Source: