US to seek support at UN to ‘call out’ China over treatment of Uygurs, Mike Pompeo says
- He says Washington will try to ‘rally the world’ against Beijing attempting to ‘brainwash coming on 1 million Uygur Muslims in internment camps’
- Secretary of state dismisses Chinese claims that the camps are meant to ‘educate and to save’ people influenced by religious extremism
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday said the United States would use the United Nations General Assembly this month to persuade countries to help “call out” China over treatment of its Uygur Muslim minority.
Asked after a speech at Kansas State University how Washington had been promoting an end to the oppression of Uygurs in China, Pompeo told the audience: “Insufficiently, because it’s still going on”.
“We are going to have this UN General Assembly in the third week in September. We’ll do a number of gatherings, where our efforts will be to get other countries to sign up to help us call out this activity,” Pompeo said.
“We want freedom for those folks. We have lots of challenges with China, but this is about their fundamental unalienable rights for those particular individuals.”
Pompeo, an evangelical Christian who has portrayed himself as a champion of religious rights, reiterated past comments, saying that the treatment of the Uygurs and other Muslim minorities in China “may well end up being one of the worst stains on the world this century”.
“It’s of that magnitude,” he said, adding that the challenge was to “rally the world” against it.
“We have done so today with some success, but not nearly enough, to call this out and work with the Chinese government, to convince them – to convince the Chinese Communist Party – that this isn’t in their best interests … that it’s not the right way to treat … other human beings,” Pompeo said.
He dismissed Chinese claims that the camps were meant to “educate and to save” people influenced by religious extremism.
China’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
China has consistently denied any mistreatment of Uygurs in what it calls vocational training centres, which it says have been extremely successful in combating extremism and violence.
Hundreds have died in unrest in Xinjiang in recent years, blamed by Beijing on Islamists and extremists. Rights groups and exiles say the violence is more a reaction against China’s suppression of the Uygur people.
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In a speech on tackling extremism in Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi on Friday, China’s deputy propaganda minister Jiang Jianguo said the world had a responsibility to come together to counter terrorism, state news agency Xinhua reported.
The international community should “clearly oppose ‘double standards’ in countering terrorism and extremism, and further form a consensus and cooperate against terrorism and extremism,” Xinhua cited Jiang as saying.
