Washington/Beijing, June 25 (IANS) The recent meeting between US President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping has drawn attention after official statements from both Washington and Beijing following the talks made no mention of human rights concerns, including allegations of abuse against Uyghurs by Chinese authorities.
The omission comes amid Trump’s increasingly warm rhetoric towards Xi, whom he recently described as a “friend” and a “good man”, a report has stated.
According to a report in an online magazine, The Diplomat, Uyghur activist Rushan Abbas had hoped that President Trump’s visit to Beijing last month would provide a long-awaited breakthrough in efforts to secure the release of her sister, Gulshan Abbas, who has been imprisoned in China for nearly eight years.
Just days before Trump’s visit to Beijing, the US Senate and House of Representatives adopted resolutions urging the US President to press for the release of six individuals detained by the Chinese Communist Party, including Gulshan Abbas.
“I am asking the leader of the free world to look a dictator in the eye and demand the return of my sister, a soul who has been stolen by the machinery of hate,” The Diplomat quoted Rushan Abbas as saying in a May 14 commentary in American newspaper ‘The Hill’.
The report noted that Trump’s meetings with Xi yielded no immediate progress on the long-standing plight of the Uyghurs, with neither Washington nor Beijing indicating that human rights issues were discussed during the talks.
Several Uyghurs told The Diplomat that they have lost confidence in efforts to lobby Washington and are increasingly seeking alternative avenues to help friends and family members detained or placed under surveillance in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
“The fact that he (Trump) met with Xi, in spite of the ongoing genocide, is itself the biggest loss for us. The prerequisite should have been, ‘You end this genocide and then come sit down and talk with us’,” said 33-year-old activist, Salih Hudayar.
Hudayar, who lives in Fairfax, Virginia, with his parents, wife and three children, reportedly left southern Xinjiang during childhood and has been unable to communicate with relatives in China for almost 10 years.
“Since 2017, the Chinese government has reportedly imprisoned more than one million members of Turkic ethnic groups, most of whom are Uyghurs – a mostly Muslim ethnic group who live in the northwestern region of Xinjiang. Many have been arbitrarily detained in a network of ‘re-education camps’ in the name of combating extremism and subjected to forced labour, surveillance, family separation, religious restrictions, and sterilisation,” the report detailed, highlighting the atrocities on Uyghurs by Chinese authorities.
Sophie Richardson, former China director at US-based Human Rights Watch, called on members of Congress to refrain from participating in formalities during Chinese President Xi’s reciprocal visit to Washington in September.
“Demonstrating some real political opprobrium on the occasion of something like a state visit will be a test of whether people who are concerned about these issues are willing to go a bit further,” The Diplomat quoted Richardson as saying.
–IANS
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