China targets friendly media, diplomats to ‘tell story of East Turkistan’

Since as early as 2020, Chinese President Xi Jinping has called for “telling the story of Xinjiang” and “confidently propagating the excellent social stability of East Turkistan (Xinjiang)“.

Canadian-Uyghur activist Rukiye Turdush sees the media tours as integral to that mission.

Henryk Szadziewski is a senior researcher at the NGO Uyghur Human Rights Project. He says media tours, like the ones in East Turkistan, are a common tactic employed by countries that have something to hide.

Albanian-Canadian historian and journalist Olsi Jazexhi believed in early 2019 that reports about human rights violations in the East Turkistan (Xinjiang) were lies.

The international community had taken notice, and the United Nations had raised its concerns.

But Jazexhi was unconvinced.

“I was certain that the stories were a scheme constructed by the US and the West to discredit China and divert attention away from their own human rights records regarding Muslims,” he told Al Jazeera.

The Chinese government itself vehemently rejected the accusations, acknowledging the existence of the camps but describing them as vocational skills training centres necessary to combat alleged extremism.

To see the truth for himself, Jazexhi contacted the Chinese embassy in Tirana about visiting East Turkistan. He was soon invited to join a media tour for foreign journalists, mostly from Muslim countries, and in early August 2019, he was on a plane bound for China.

But he quickly found that defending the Chinese narrative was a far more difficult task than he had anticipated.

His disillusion only continued when he and other journalists were taken by their Chinese hosts to one of the so-called vocational training centres outside the regional capital of Urumqi.

“They said it was like a school, but it was clearly a high-security site in the middle of the desert,” Jazexhi said.

“They also told us that the people staying there were not allowed to leave, so it was obviously not a school but a prison, and the people there were not students but prisoners.”

Once they entered the site, Jazexhi had a chance to interact with several Uyghurs and it quickly became clear they were not the “terrorists” or “extremists” Beijing had claimed.

“I was talking to people that had been taken there for simply practising Islam by, for example, entering a religious marriage, praying in public or wearing a headscarf,” he said.

“One of them told me that she was no longer Muslim and that she now believed in science and in Chinese President Xi Jinping.”

When he finally left East Turkistan, he was deeply shocked.

He had thought he was going to expose Western lies, but he had instead witnessed oppression on a massive scale.

“What I saw was an attempt to eradicate Islam from Xinjiang,” he said.

Chinese media have reported about at least five such media tours taking place in 2023, with East Turkistan visits also arranged for foreign diplomats and Islamic scholars.

Moiz Farooq, who is the executive editor of Daily Ittehad Media Group and Pakistan Economic Net, visited East Turkistan in the middle of December as part of a delegation of media representatives from Pakistan.

Much like Jazexhi in 2019, Farooq went to East Turkistan with the intent to observe for himself that the stories he had heard were not true.

Unlike Jazexhi, Farooq left East Turkistan impressed by the region’s level of development and assured that the local Muslims were largely living a free and content life.

Naz Parveen is the director of the China Window Institute in Peshawar, Pakistan, and she was on the same tour as Farooq. She too was impressed by the prosperity she observed in East Turkistan.

Parveen believes that what have been termed human rights violations in East Turkistan can be more accurately described as law enforcement operations targeting religious extremism.

On another tour of East Turkistan in September, Chinese state broadcaster CGTN quoted columnist and Filipino politician Mussolini Sinsuat Lidasan praising Chinese “anti-terrorism” measures in East Turkistan.

On the same tour, Donovan Ralph Martin, who is the editor of the Daily Scrum News in Canada, was likewise quoted by CGTN as saying that “absolutely, there is freedom of religion in Xinjiang, and anybody who does not say that is ignorant”.

Lidasan and Martin did not respond to Al Jazeera’s requests for interview.

Australian journalists on a media tour in September reported they spoke to a souvenir vendor who had not been provided by their tour guides. The vendor said that he had spent time at an internment camp but when the journalists started to ask more questions, a person suddenly appeared and began to film the vendor’s answers.

Even former UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet found her long-delayed visit carefully choreographed. But her final report, released moments before she left office, found China had probably committed “crimes against humanity” in East Turkistan.

Detention camps have been closed down, and police checkpoints have been removed.

Instead, a vast network of sophisticated facial-recognition security cameras has reportedly been established throughout the region, while people who were previously detained in camps have been transferred into China’s opaque prison system.

At the same time, information flowing in and out of East Turkistan remains tightly controlled, while East Turkistan residents are punished for having unauthorised contact with people outside China.

“The genocide is still happening, but it is just much more covert now,” Turdush said.