Angry Planet - The Report the U.N. Didn't Want You to See

Episode Date: September 26, 2022

The vast majority of Chinese people come from a single ethnic group—the Han. So what’s life like for the millions of people who aren’t Han? Tough, it’s fair to say. Ask any Tibetan.But one group has been singled out for particular persecution, the Uyghurs. There are about 12 million Uyghurs, they mostly live in a province called Xinjiang and mostly Muslim.And the Chinese appear to be trying to wipe out at least their culture. Many countries have condemned the Chinese for this, but the United Nations has been slow, slow, slow to take any action.That’s finally changed with a new report.Joining us to talk about the situation are two people working for Human Rights Watch, Louis Charboneau, at the UN, and Sophie Richardson, who works on issues in China.Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. People live in a world with their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. Hello, and welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt. The vast majority of Chinese people come from a single ethnic group, the Han. So what's life like for the millions of people who aren't Han? Tough, it's fair to say. Ask any Tibetan. But one group has been singled out for particular persecution, and it's the Uyghurs. There are about 12 million Uyghurs, and they live mostly in Xinjiang province, and most of them are Muslim.

The Chinese appear to be trying to wipe out at least their culture. Many countries have condemned the Chinese for this, but the United Nations has been slow, slow, slow to take any action. That's finally changed with a new report. Joining us to talk about the situation are two people who work for Human Rights Watch, Louis Charbonneau and Sophie Richardson. Thank you so much for joining us. We've talked about the Uyghurs once before on the show, but would one of you be able to sum up the situation as it is now?

Sure, I can take that one. Human Rights Watch has spent 25 years documenting gross human rights violations in this region that mostly have to do with the central Chinese government's perception of a distinct Uyghur identity as a threat. And this really accelerated in about 2014 with a strike hard against violent extremism campaign that's the authorities arbitrarily detain upwards of a million people simply on the basis of their ethnicity, their religion, their language. We've watched the authorities essentially criminalize the practice of Islam. We've watched authorities separate families across borders, but even within the confines of this region, institutionalizing children as young as four and five as part of an effort to really break the bonds of family cultural transmission. and we've seen authorities move into people's homes to monitor their behavior.

It's pretty Orwellian stuff. And has anything specifically changed that brought out the report? What's different? Why is the UN talking about it now? Well, I think there are a couple of different reasons. You know, one is simply the scope and the scale and the severity of these violations, you know, that have been going on at sort of a heightened degree for the last four or five. years. Groups like ours, journalists, scholars, Uighur diaspora communities have published a lot of

hard evidence of violations. You know, and that in turn has created pressure on particularly the UN's Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to do its own reporting as it can and should in the face of human rights crises. You know, maybe someday we'll know all of the details of what led to, you know, be literally 11th hour and 51st minute. on the last day publication of the report, but it is nevertheless, you know, the first time that a high commissioner has published a report specifically focused on violations by the Chinese government, and it's potent stuff that it suggests, that that report suggests the Chinese government's conduct may rise to the level of crimes against humanity.

What's the population that we're talking about here? Can we put numbers to it? Like, how many people? Meaning how many people have been detained or how many people are there in Xinjiang? How many people have been detained, and what is life like in that province? And what's the population of the province? So there are now roughly 25 million people across this region. And now less than half of them are Uyghurs or other Turk communities. For decades, 50, 60, 70s, 80s, those Turkic communities were still in the majority. But as a result of state-sponsored inward migration, the population has shifted,

leading a lot of these communities to feel like they have been colonized. in some respects. We share the view that upwards of a million people have been arbitrarily detained in what we refer to as political re-education facilities, but that's separate from shocking numbers of people, many of them we believe to have been wrongfully detained in the formal legal system. You know, and in both in both kinds of detention, you know, we've documented physical abuse, psychological violence, sexual violence, the deprivation of the rights. to adequate food and medical care, people being forced to relinquish their religious beliefs, to have to learn to speak Chinese rather than speaking in Uyghur.

I think the uniquely awful realities of arbitrary detention really are in the name. People are being detained without any sort of formal process, right? There's no warrant. You're not calling a lawyer. You have no idea how long you're going to be there. Your family doesn't know where you are. And you don't know what you need to do in order to be released. So we've also referred to the very fact of those prolonged arbitrary detentions as themselves a form of psychological torture.

What does a re-education camp really mean? What are they trying to re-educate people too? Yeah, it's a great question since some of the people we've written about who are being re-educated are university professors, doctors, lawyers. These are not people who are short on education. But really, it's a, it's the Chinese government. its euphemism essentially for erasing people's distinct identity and cultural markers, meaning that people are forced to learn Chinese, that they are punished for speaking Uyghur, that they're not allowed to worship as they see fit, that they spend hours and hours and hours a day, almost in sort of cultural revolution like Xi Jinping thought class of being forced to participate in your political rallies, singing patriotic songs.

this sort of thing. You know, and really the way you wind up getting out of one of these facilities is by proving to your minders that you are not just sufficiently politically loyal, but that you have abandoned these markers of a distinct identity. It's funny. The word Orwellian gets tossed around so much these days. Like, this is the definition. Like, this is actually it. This is what he was writing about in 1984 in so many ways. And it's the story I've been, because I write a lot about, like, surveillance capitalism and kind of all of this stuff that I feel like I've been watching get pioneered in this

province over the past 10, 20 years. Can you, I struggle with understanding, like, when this started and why it started, can you take us back? Well, I'm not sure you want to go all the way back to 1949 or earlier. We could do the Ming Dynasty if you want, but I'm guessing that's not that you have. in mind. The Chinese government has, you know, particularly, and I think uniquely took advantage of the U.S.'s war on terror to essentially wander or try to put forward the idea that it, too, faced a significant threat of terrorism in this particular region, even though the evidence to

substantiate that was then and now extremely thin. To be clear, there have been violent attacks on the state, but there's very little evidence to suggest that those are an anyway, organized, connected to actors outside the country, or that they aren't just a function of local disputes with authorities. There was an attack in Xinjiang shortly after Xi Jinping visited in 2014, and I think we now can see that that in particular helped accelerate in a disturbing way his decision and ensuing policies essentially to forcibly erase people's distinct identity as a way of quelling the problem as he perceived it. Now, I think it's important to understand that not only are all of these policies,

obviously in tension with internationally human rights law, but we're also talking about a region that is, on paper, ostensibly autonomous and where, you know, the local communities ought to have a lot more control over their daily realities. You know, this has just turned out to be a pretty sick oxymoron. since they have less than zero control. But this has been the government's narrative that it is cracking down and carrying out these campaigns in the name of combating terrorism.

We obviously are of the view that states have an obligation to provide public security, but not at the expense of any individual's human rights and even less the human rights of millions of people against whom there's literally no evidence that they have committed anything even close to being a crime. And in fact, part of our research has shown the authorities' willingness to treat as criminal, perfectly legal behavior. We reverse-engineered a police app that was designed specifically to, for example, track whether people were praying too much or what the authorities thought was too much, whether people were going out the front door instead of the back door of their house or if their behavior was changing in ways authorities found suspicious. And so there's

almost no way for people to go through their daily lives without being worried whether perfectly ordinary behavior might actually draw the attention of the authorities and result in there being arbitrarily detained or formally prosecuted. Tell me a little bit more about this app. It's called the Integrated Joint Operations Platform or IJOP. And we had actually had interviewees describe to us in the summer of 2018 when they had been detained by police, that police were clearly using a particular app to ask some questions about their names and their ID numbers and sort of basic personal information, but that the officers were then obviously responding to prompts this app was offering up as they were entering information.

And that ultimately it seemed to be the app that was making decisions about whether those people should be detained for further investigation. And we then, as a, as partly as a result of work that we were doing separately about Chinese government abuses of surveillance technology, actually found part of the app online, downloaded it and worked with some friends to reverse engineer it, because what we wanted to understand was what behavior the authorities had decided was problematic. It was, I mean, it was very clear that we were not seeing massive numbers of people detained in the formal legal system for conduct that was obviously a violation of clearly written and codified law. So what was it that the authorities were worried about?

Well, as it turned out, just about anything, you know, so the app aggregates information from a number of different sensory streams across the region, everything from Wi-Fi sniffers to, you know, it's a region that's just awash and surveillance cameras and other tools. So, for example, you know, we had cases where people, had been stopped because video surveillance cameras had identified them pulling up to a gas station and putting gas in a car that was not registered to them, to that specific individual. We had cases of people who had a cousin who was studying in Malaysia, and that the person

who was in Xinjiang had talked to that cousin a couple of times, and that was considered suspicious. So we were able to see that there was something like 36 different behavior types that authorities had not just decided were suspicious, but had literally baked into this as a way of assessing who did detain. So you have to interact with this app to live and get through your day. And if you step out of line in any small way, using and step out of line I'm using very broadly, because it just seems like it's very broad, then you can end up in a re-education camp or detained is what, right, is kind of what it looks like.

Yeah, in effect. I mean, people were getting stopped in question about all manner of perfectly legal behavior. And, you know, some of that authorities have decided now constituted suspicious behavior and triggered at least further investigation and in some cases actual arbitrary detention. All right, angry plaintiff. listeners, we're going to pause there for a break. We'll be right back after this, unless you're listening on Substack, in which case, there are no ads. All right. Welcome back. Angry Planet listeners. We were talking about that U.N. report that they didn't want you to read.

So this, it really is one of the definitions of genocide, though. I'm killing off a culture, an entire culture. I wondered if you agree with that assessment. And also, I'm so curious, like, how a country could think that's a great idea. Well, maybe I can amend that a tiny little bit. No, please do. I don't think a country has decided this is a good idea. I think Xi Jinping and his political allies in the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party have decided it's a good idea. I want to make sure that the responsibility goes or lies with the people we know to be connected with and responsible for, you know, these,

these horrific policies. And indeed, this is why we've called not just for sanctions against many of these individuals, but called for investigations and prosecutions, which is what is meant to happen when governments are suspected of committing atrocity crimes. And we have characterized the violations of crimes against humanity, which are extremely serious under international human rights law, and urged that the Chinese government not be given the same kind of free pass that it's been given for gross human rights violations in the past. And we've actually argued that many of the kinds of diplomatic intervention that have been deployed supposedly in service of improving the human rights situation inside the country have not only

failed, but we're so inconsequential as to effectively emboldened Chinese authorities to commit even worse violations. Can you elaborate on that? Can you get in some of the specific instances and what happened and what the response was? Sure. I mean, we've had 30 years of at least a dozen governments. and multilateral institutions like the European Union pursuing bilateral human rights dialogues with the Chinese government over the years or, you know, offering up statements when a particular

human rights defender gets a harsh sentence, for example, when, when Leo Shapoah, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, was sent to prison or when he died in detention, you know, we or occasionally governments will work to free a particular Chinese government critic or take communities in, as refugees or asylum seekers. None of these efforts have ever really imposed a deterrent cost on any individual Chinese leader or, for example, a party secretary in a region like Xinjiang. And so when we've got governments now saying back to us, for example, that the Chinese government is, you know, too important to challenge or that to press ahead with a demand for accountability now is hard, we say, look back on the last 30 years and what is it that you've done to prevent us, you know,

from arriving, for more importantly, 12 million Uyghurs and far larger numbers of people across China from enduring progressively worse violations. The Chinese government now commits violations beyond its borders. And if you don't step up now, I think we can assume that, you know, these trends only get worse over time. And so to find ways of imposing costs on the Chinese government now extremely important. If not now, when? What else is the world waiting for? Well, that's one of the most interesting things about the release of the report.

If we can talk about Michelle Bachelet for a second. As you said, it was, wasn't it literally just seconds before she ended her term that this report was finally released? I mean, they've been working on it for, you can tell me how long. but what are the circumstances? Well, there are people who say it was nine minutes, people say it was 11 minutes, people who say it was 13 minutes before midnight. I think we can allow for a little slippage between time zones. But Lou, do you want to take this one?

Yeah, sure. I mean, this report was nearly four years in the making. And I want to go back to a point that Sophie made and talk a bit of about the evolution of how countries have been responding to the situation in Xinjiang and Chinese human rights abuses in general. The situation in Hong Kong and the stripping of rights for Hong Kong happened at the same time as people would be becoming increasingly aware of what was going on in Xinjiang with the Uyghurs and the other Turkic Muslim communities. And then, of course, Of course, Tibet has always been there. And then there's the rest of China. There are the dissidents.

So this has all been out there. But the situation in Xinjiang became increasingly bad. And it was reaching the public thanks to the, as Sophie said, the work of academics, our work, other human rights organizations that published reports. There have been important media reports. And so a small group of countries were going to senior UN officials, including the Secretary General. They were meeting with him privately. And I can tell you that four years ago, it was difficult to get a double-digit number of ambassadors to go into the Secretary General's office and ask him to raise human rights in Xinjiang, in China, on his next visit to Beijing when he met with Xi Jinping and other senior Chinese officials. It was very difficult to get a group of people

to actually go in there. And then, according to diplomats that I've spoken to, who were in the room and asked the Secretary General to do this, he was not very welcoming of it. You know, Some said that the Secretary General was not exactly dismissive, but he didn't like the idea that they were telling him how to do his job. On the other hand, you'd get the Secretary General telling people that he needed countries to support him so that he could stand up to countries that are powerful like China or like the United States. So the question we always asked was, well, which is it? Do you want the countries to tell you what you should be doing or do you not want them to? So in the end, the country kept going to his office. And these were delegates from the United States, from Germany, from Britain, but also from Turkey, Canada, the Netherlands, Australia. these were governments that were telling the Secretary General, hey, look, you need to at least raise these things. And then the Secretary General would sort of raise human rights in Xinjiang, but he always talked about it in terms of counterterrorism.

And he would say, now, when you're engaged in counterterrorism, you need to respect human rights, which is fine. We agree with that. The problem is, is when you present. the situation in Xinjiang as complying with human rights standards while combating counterterrorism, you're basically confirming the Chinese narrative that this is a bunch of terrorists that they're dealing with. And so we wrote privately and publicly to the Secretary General and asked them to stop pushing the Chinese narrative to stop talking about counterterrorism and to talk about it for what it is, which is namely ghastly human rights abuses that are going on as we speak,

as Sophie said, arbitrary detention, torture, family separation. And the report that Michelle Bachelet put out also talked about things like the use of family planning for the pop for women in Xinjiang. So there is a lot of very creepy stuff that's been going on. So the Secretary General was reluctant. to put pressure on the Chinese government. They're an important country. Now they're the second biggest contributor after the United States to the UN budget. So they carry a lot of water at the UN, and a lot of countries are afraid of them. But increasingly, more and more countries were willing to step up and to call the Chinese out publicly.

It became untenable for the Secretary General to stand back and do absolutely nothing. And he would often get, or his spokesperson would get grilled at the daily UN press briefing by reporters who are saying, hey, what are you guys doing about the situation in Xinjiang? Is the Secretary General raising the situation there with Chinese leaders? And they would get evasive responses, you know the type, a lot of humming and hawing. In the end, there was this decision made by the High Commissioner, now former High Commissioner, to do some kind of investigation to publish a report and to look at the situation there. We expected this report to be out long ago. In December, Michelle Bachelette's spokesperson said that the report would be out

in a couple weeks. The report had been done since at least November of last year. And And so in December, they're like, okay, it'll be out in a few weeks. We're like, okay, we're looking forward to seeing it. Then came the Beijing Olympics. And all of a sudden, there was some news reporting about how, well, the Chinese have told the high commissioner, do not publish that report before the Olympics and ruin all the joy and fun surrounding the Beijing Winter Olympics. And then there was discussion about her making a visit to Xinjiang, which

had long been in the making. The High Commissioner had said she wanted to go to Xinjiang and she wanted unfettered access. She wanted to go where she wanted. She didn't want it to be a managed visit. The Chinese were basically like, no, you will come for a friendly visit, not an investigation. She agreed. The Secretary General agreed. And then, of course, the report was delayed again. We were worried it would never come out. A number of no diplomats told me the same. They were also worried. UN officials privately told us that they were worried that the report wouldn't come out. It did come out. She promised it would come out. And I wouldn't say it was worth the weight, but it has some very powerful elements to it, possible crimes against humanity. There is a lot to

work with. And that's the long and winding road of how we got to this report. But now this report is going to have a very long shelf life for years to come. And it does provide the basis for the accountability that we're talking about. People should be tried. They should be prosecuted. There should be, and more sanctions. There are already individuals who are designated by governments. But we need to go much further than this. And we need there now to be a formal UN investigation. We would like the Human Rights Council to do it. There are a number of ways that it could happen.

The Secretary General could do it, but we don't have any illusions about his willingness to mandate a formal investigation of possible crimes against humanity in China. Not going to happen at this point. But we hope that the Human Rights Council can be. do something and we have other possibilities in the UN. That's where we're at now. We're trying to see if countries can take a step forward beyond simple condemnations. We already have, you know, around 50 countries regularly calling China out for the abysmal abuses in Xinjiang, but we still have a long ways to go. To speechify for a second, I find it incredible. incredible that the world is going to stand back and watch this happen again.

I'm not saying it's exactly the same as any previous thing, but... Are we, though? I don't know. It seems like, you know, a few sanctions ain't going to do it. Yeah. I mean, it does feel like a few sanctions ain't going to do it. But, like, this kind of stuff, like, imagine, like, as they were just describing, like, the way we talked about this, even just a couple years ago is way different than the way we're

talking about it now. Right? I can't remember like no cable news program was talking about the Uighurs five years ago. Now it's now it's coming up. Now it's becoming a political point in America that people are batting around. I think that's a really important point and that people have actually heard or not everyone, but many people have heard of Uyghurs. They have heard of Xinjiang. They have heard of the horrific abuses that are going on in China. And one of the things that we have found in my work dealing with, often diplomats from developing countries, from Latin America, from Africa, they don't have intelligence agencies like the U.S. and European Union countries.

So they don't know what's going on there. And so often they have said to us, they're like, okay, we hear. the U.S. and the U.K. and human rights walk talking about some of these abuses, and then the Chinese government denies it all, right? They're all about denial, misinformation, and outright lying. And then they do all these weird propaganda things about how everyone's super happy in Xinjiang, the happiest Muslims in the world, live there. But I think, you know, what's important about this new UN report is that these countries who've been looking for some kind of international credible report that is not coming from the United States, right? It's not the Trump

administration. It's not the Biden administration. It's not Germany. It's not Britain. It's the United Nations. And so I think that for a lot of these countries in Africa, in Latin America, and in Asia in some of the other Asian countries. Hopefully this will be enough to move them several notches over. We also hope that Muslim countries will stop keeping silent or aiding and abetting the Chinese government. We've seen in the Muslim countries that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who also have horrific human rights records on their own, They've been standing by China and have been will as supporters of China.

And so we have a divided Muslim world. And we need to work on getting them to stand up for their fellow Muslims. But this is a human rights issue. It's not just it's not a religious issue. It's a human rights issue. And so we need the Muslim countries. We need, we need countries in Africa, in Asia. the countries in Europe, and not all of the European countries have been willing to speak out

against China. We need all of them on board. So we have our work to do. Hopefully, Michelle Bachelet's report will make that work a little bit easier. It's still early days. People are still digesting the report. And we had to wait a long time, but it is a doozy in a way. So hopefully it's going to move some minds. I think that's a perfect place. stand, although it's a little unusual for us. That's almost an optimistic note. It is. We usually go out on a, on a sad note. But maybe for this, it looks like Sophie may have a sad note for us, actually. No, I was actually going to provide you with a slightly more optimistic one. I'm just looking that apparently a Chinese diplomat issued up a joint statement at the Human Rights Council this morning on behalf of 20 governments. A mere 20. Ouch. prop. Yeah.

a big drop in what they've gotten in the past. And how many of those governments were actually asked whether they wanted to sign or whether the Chinese government, once again, just signed them up, leaving them in a position to ask to be removed. But I think the Chinese government's bullying tactics, even in an arena like the Human Rights Council, are not liked. And I think this is an opportunity for governments, you know, not just ones who've historically cared to work on these issues.

issues, but ones who have found out that Chinese government aid certainly does come with strings attached to take a strong position in support of a horrifically persecuted community, but also in support of the integrity of the international human rights system. I think they can see that in the not too distant future, they themselves are going to be facing Chinese government human rights violations in their own countries if they aren't already, and that they've got a pretty strong interest in making this system work. Thank you both so much. Sophie Richardson and Lou Scharbeno for coming on the show and taking us through all of those.

Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks. That's all for this week, Angry Planet listeners. As always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin Odell. It was created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like us, if you really like us, please go to AngryPlanit.com or AngryPlinetpod.com. Kick us $9 a month.

hit ad-free versions of the regular program and bonus episodes. Next episode is already recorded. It is about extremism reporting in the Pacific Northwest, Twitter beefs, and what's actually going on with the American Redoubt movement. Don't worry, we are going back to Ukraine. Russian mobilization is a big story. You've got to cover it. As well as what's going on in Iran night right now,

we're just looking for the right person to talk to. Bonus episode also should be out next week, which is all about nine. 11. We will be back next week with two stories about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until then.