Donald Trump hears ‘tough’ details of China’s Xinjiang camps as he meets detained Uygur scholar Ilham Tohti’s daughter

US president has first public meeting with anyone from China’s Uygur community, and makes first remarks on their internment
Action needed on China, he is told as he also meets Falun Gong practitioner and Tibetan Buddhist at gathering of victims of religious persecution

Xinjiang

Owen Churchill

Published: 11:52am, 18 Jul 2019

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United States President Donald Trump met victims of religious persecution from around the world on Wednesday, including one Uygur woman and three other people from China.

The Oval Office meeting with 27 individuals from 17 countries marked the first time in his presidency that Trump has publicly met anyone from China’s Uygur community, or made open remarks about their mass internment in the country’s western Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.

Upwards of 1 million Uygurs and other Turkic Muslim groups are reported to be detained in high-security camps in Xinjiang and subjected to political indoctrination.

Beijing calls the camps “vocational training centres”, a claim that was recently undermined when scholarly research unearthed official documents detailing evidence of coercive internment and political brainwashing.

“That’s tough stuff,” said Trump on Wednesday in response to an account by Jewher Ilham of the network of camps in Xinjiang and the ongoing imprisonment of her father, the prominent Uygur scholar Ilham Tohti.

Tohti was seized at an airport in Beijing in 2013 while attempting to travel to the US with his daughter for a one-year residency at Indiana University, and later sentenced to life in prison for crimes of inciting separatism.

Trump appeared not to know in detail about the internment camps in Xinjiang – which are believed to have begun in early 2017 – asking Ilham where in China the camps were located.

The president also heard accounts from Yuhua Zhang, a practitioner of the spiritual movement Falun Gong whose husband is detained in China, and Nyima Lhamo, a Tibetan Buddhist whose uncle died while imprisoned in Sichuan.

Uygur economist Ilham Tohti was jailed for life in 2014 on separatism charges. Photo: AFP

Zhang urged Trump to take action against China’s ruling Communist Party. “Just words, it doesn’t work,” she said, to which Trump nodded.

The White House meeting came as the US administration hosted its second Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom, a three-day gathering in Washington of religious leaders, government officials and victims of faith-based persecution from around the world.

Samuel Brownback, Trump’s envoy for religious freedom at the State Department, the agency that hosts the ministerial, said during Wednesday’s meeting that the US was leading the way when it came to defending people of faith around the world.

“Many other allies are coming along,” he said, “but we’re the main country to stand up and fight for their religious freedom.”

In recent weeks a cleft has formed through the international community in response to China’s mass internment programmes in Xinjiang. Soon after 22 mostly European members of the United Nations Human Rights Council signed a letter condemning the camps in July, the foreign ambassadors of 37 other countries issued a rebuttal in support of Beijing’s policies in the region.

The Chinese government said the support of the 37 nations, which include a number of Muslim majority states such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, was “a powerful response to the groundless accusations made against China by a small number of Western countries”.

Senior US officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Vice-President Mike Pence, have verbally castigated Beijing over its policies in Xinjiang.

At the same time, however, the US administration has held up economic sanctions against Chinese officials over the camps for fear of derailing progress in trade negotiations with Beijing.

“Americans will never tire in our efforts to defend and promote religious freedom,” said Trump at Wednesday’s Oval Office meeting. “I don’t think any president’s taken it as seriously as me.”

Also at the gathering was a survivor of March’s mass shooting at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, and 2018 Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia Murad, a member of the Iraqi Yazidi minority who survived months of captivity by Islamic State in 2014.

“Your families are very proud, and our country is very proud, and your countries are very proud, for those of you who aren’t from the United States,” Trump said to those in attendance, the majority of whom suffered persecution at the hands of their own countries’ governments.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Trump hears ‘tough stuff’ about Xinjiang camps

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