World

The United States said Thursday that a long-awaited UN report reaffirmed its view that China is carrying out genocide against the Uyghur people, as Beijing furiously labeled the world body an accomplice of the West.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres stood by the human rights report on the western region of Xinjiang and called on China to follow the text’s recommendations to end “discriminatory” practices against the Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim people.

The landmark report — released minutes before UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet left office — detailed a string of rights violations including torture, forced labor and arbitrary detention, bringing the UN seal to many of the allegations long made by activist groups, Western nations and the Uyghur community in exile.

The report said that China may have carried out “crimes against humanity” but stopped short of calling Beijing’s treatment of the Uyghurs “genocide,” a term used since January 2021 by the United States and since embraced by legislatures of a number of other Western nations.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, however, said the substance of the report “deepens and reaffirms our grave concern regarding the ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity that PRC government authorities are perpetrating against Uyghurs.”

“We will continue to hold the PRC to account and call on the PRC to release those unjustly detained, account for those disappeared and allow independent investigators full and unhindered access to Xinjiang, Tibet and across the PRC,” he said in a statement, using the acronym for the People’s Republic of China.

Beijing hit back hard against the report — more than a year in the making — and maintained firm opposition to its release, sharing a more-than-100-page document from the Xinjiang provincial government defending its policies.

“The so-called critical report you mentioned is planned and manufactured firsthand by the US and some Western forces, it is wholly illegal and invalid,” foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told a regular briefing Thursday.

“The report is a hodgepodge of misinformation, and it is a political tool which serves as part of the West’s strategy of using Xinjiang to control China,” he added.

– ‘Politicization’ of UN work –

Bachelet, who had faced stinging US criticism for visiting China in May and not immediately releasing the report, said she had decided a full assessment was needed of the situation inside the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR).

The former president of Chile was determined to release the document before her four-year term as the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights expired at the end of August — and did so with 13 minutes to spare at 11:47 pm in Geneva.

“I said that I would publish it before my mandate ended and I have,” Bachelet said in an email to AFP Thursday.

“The politicization of these serious human rights issues by some states did not help.”

Guterres was “concerned” by what he had read in the report, his spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters.

“The secretary-general very much hopes the government of China will take on board the recommendations put forward in the assessment of the HCHR,” the High Commissioner for Human Rights,” Dujarric added.

China has been accused for years of detaining more than one million Uyghurs and other Muslims in the region.

Beijing has vehemently rejected the claims, insisting it is running centers for vocational education designed to curb Islamic extremism.

“Allegations of patterns of torture or ill-treatment, including forced medical treatment and adverse conditions of detention, are credible, as are allegations of individual incidents of sexual and gender-based violence,” the report said.

The UN Human Rights Office could not confirm how many people were affected by the centers but concluded that the system operated on a “wide scale” across the entire region.

Campaigners have also accused China of forcibly sterilizing women, and the report cited “credible indications of violations of reproductive rights through the coercive enforcement of family planning policies.”

– ‘A game-changer’ –

Campaign groups have said the report should act as a launchpad for further action.

Human Rights Watch’s China director Sophie Richardson said the “damning” findings of sweeping rights abuses showed why Beijing “fought tooth and nail” to prevent its publication.

The response from the Uyghur activist community was mixed, with some groups praising the report, while others wished it had gone further in its condemnation.

Uyghur Human Rights Project executive director Omer Kanat called the report “a game-changer” for the international response to the Uyghur situation, but Salih Hudayar, a Uyghur-American who campaigns for Xinjiang independence, said the document was missing the word “genocide.”

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The head of the UN nuclear agency on Thursday said the “physical integrity” of a Russian-held Ukrainian nuclear plant had been “violated” following frequent shelling, on his team’s first visit to the facility.

Russian forces seized control of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in southern Ukraine, Europe’s largest, and the surrounding region shortly after the February 24 invasion.

Both sides have traded blame for recent shelling near the plant lying on the frontline, sparking fears of a nuclear disaster. 

A 14-strong team of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency arrived at the facility on Thursday to conduct “security and safeguards activities” after a risky journey across the frontline and early-morning shelling of the area.

“It is obvious that the plant and physical integrity of the plant has been violated several times,” IAEA head Rafael Grossi told reporters after returning to Ukrainian-controlled territory.

Grossi said part of the IAEA mission will stay at Zaporizhzhia “until Sunday or Monday” to continue the assessment, without specifying their number.

The Argentine described the visit as productive and said he gathered lots of information.

Wearing bright blue flak jackets and helmets, the IAEA team crossed into Russian-held territory, reaching the facility at around 1200 GMT. 

After the inspection, in a video released by the Russian RIA Novosti news agency, Grossi said: “We have achieved something very important today and the important thing is the IAEA is staying here.”

A dawn shelling attack on the area had forced one of the plant’s six reactors to close.

Energoatom, Ukraine’s nuclear agency, said it was “the second time in 10 days” that Russian shelling had forced the closure of a reactor. 

It said the plant’s emergency protection system kicked in shortly before 5:00 am (0200 GMT), shutting reactor five, with the attack damaging a back-up power supply. 

– ‘Stop playing with fire’ –

“It is high time to stop playing with fire and instead take concrete measures to protect this facility… from any military operations,” Robert Mardini, chief of the International Committee of the Red Cross, told reporters in Kyiv.

He warned the consequences of hitting the plant could be “catastrophic”, saying “the slightest miscalculation could trigger devastation that we will regret for decades.”

After Russian forces seized the plant on March 4, Energoatom shut two reactors, followed by a third after shelling on August 5. With a fourth undergoing repairs, Thursday’s incident leaves only one of the six reactors working. 

Mardini said it was “encouraging” the IAEA team was inspecting the plant because the stakes were “immense”.

On leaving Zaporizhzhia, Grossi said his team would be travelling through areas where “the risks are significant” but had decided to go ahead anyway due to the “very important mission to accomplish”. 

– Shelling and saboteurs –

The neighbouring town of Energodar came under sustained attack at dawn, with Russian troops firing “mortars and using automatic weapons and rockets”, its mayor Dmytro Orlov said. 

But Moscow accused Kyiv of smuggling in up to 60 military “saboteurs” who reached the area near the plant at dawn, prompting Russian troops to take “measures to annihilate the enemy”. 

Ukraine has accused Russia of deploying hundreds of soldiers and storing ammunition at the plant. 

Kyiv also suspects that Moscow intends to divert power from the plant to the nearby Crimean peninsula, annexed by Russia in 2014 — a view held by other international figures including British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. 

Meanwhile, Ukrainian troops pressed ahead with a counter-offensive in the nearby region of Kherson to retake areas seized by Russia at the start of the invasion.

In its morning update, the presidency said “heavy explosions continued for the last 24 hours” across Kherson, while five people were killed and 12 others wounded in the eastern Donetsk region. 

– Back-to-school gunfire soundtrack –

Despite the conflict, now in its seventh month, September 1 marked the start of a new school year for children across Ukraine.

In the southern Mykolaiv region, children were back in front of screens for online classes as all school attendance was cancelled due to the ongoing fighting.

On her first day back, nine-year-old Antonina Sidorenko, who lives in a hamlet near the frontline, was doing her online lessons with the distant crackle of gunfire in the background. 

“I’m happy to be back at school but I would be even happier if there was no war because I miss my teacher and my friends,” she told AFP, saying her best friend had fled to Poland. 

Veteran Cambodian opposition figure Sam Rainsy went on trial in France on Thursday in defamation cases brought against him by the prime minister and a top police official of his home country.

The France-based Rainsy, 73, is accused in relation to two separate complaints filed by Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen and his son-in-law and deputy national police chief, Dy Vichea, over Facebook posts dating back to 2019.

Hun Sen contests Rainsy’s allegation that he was behind the 2008 death in a helicopter crash of national police chief Hok Lundy, who was Dy Vichea’s father.

“Hun Sen killed Hok Lundy using a bomb placed inside his helicopter,” Rainsy claimed on Facebook.

The leader of Cambodia’s government “decided to murder Hok Lundy because he knew too much about Hun Sen’s misdeeds”, he added.

Dy Vichea has brought a second case against Rainsy over another Facebook post.

The hearing was expected to last just the single day, with judges then retiring to issue a verdict within weeks.

Entering the court, Rainsy told AFP that he expected “true justice” from France.

He told the court in French that Cambodia was currently a country with “no freedom of expression, where all those who want to tell the truth end up dead, in prison or in exile”. 

“I would like to help put an end to this culture of violence and impunity,” he added, describing “Facebook as “my only window of expression”.

But Luc Brossollet, a lawyer representing both top Cambodian officials, argued that the allegations on Facebook were defamatory.

“Whether you are an opponent or not, there is a certain line that you cannot cross and that is the one of the truth,” he said.

“The things that form the factual basis of Sam Rainsy’s accusations are hopelessly empty and grotesque and do not constitute evidence of the serious accusations we are examining,” he said.

But defence lawyer Jessica Finelle told AFP that judges ought to “recognise that it is in the public interest for Sam Rainsy to denounce crimes committed by Hun Sen within a dictatorship”.

– ‘Exonerate him’ –

Her client “has been persecuted for 30 years by Hun Sen. The only weapon remaining to him is freedom of expression, to testify about what he has experienced and condemn what political opponents and human rights defenders are suffering in Cambodia”, she said.

Rainsy was one of the founders of the Cambodia National Rescue Party, the southeast Asian nation’s main opposition movement.

He spent years fighting Hun Sen — who has ruled for the past 37 years — before seeking refuge in 2015 in France, where he is a dual national.

Rainsy is the target of many court cases in Cambodia, where he says he is being persecuted for political reasons.

The government there accused him of an attempted coup when he sought to return in 2019.

“In his home country, Sam Rainsy is the victim of a slew of trials, the regime is trying to muzzle him,” said another of his lawyers, Mathias Chichportich.

The French tribunal should “enshrine Sam Rainsy’s right to express his political struggle” and “exonerate him”, he added.

“His words are founded on a solid factual basis.”

Although Rainsy’s party performed strongly in the 2013 elections, it was dissolved four years later.

In 2018, Hun Sen’s movement swept every seat in Cambodia’s parliament, a result that was fiercely contested.

Since then, increasing numbers of dissidents have been arrested and prosecuted.

Dozens of opposition figures were sentenced in a mass trial in June, with Rainsy receiving an eight-year prison sentence in his absence.

He has already been jailed in absentia for terms of 25 and 10 years for trying to topple Hun Sen, who is expected to run again in new elections next July.

The Brazilian Amazon recorded its worst month of August for forest fires since 2010, with an 18 percent rise from a year ago, according to official data released Thursday.

The Brazilian INPE space agency said its satellites had recorded 33,116 fires in the rainforest, a key buffer against global warming, in August this year, compared to 28,060 in the same month last year.

At least 3,358 fires were recorded on August 22 alone, the highest number for any 24-hour period since September 2007, it said.

The number was nearly triple that recorded on the so-called “Day of Fire” — August 10, 2019 — when farmers launched a coordinated plan to burn huge amounts of felled rainforest in the northern state of Para.

Then, fires sent thick, gray smoke all the way to Sao Paulo, some 2,500 kilometers (1,500 miles) away, and triggered a global outcry over one of Earth’s most vital resources burning.

Between January and August, the INPE recorded 46,022 fires — a 16 percent rise from the same period in 2021.

The Amazon had not burnt more in a month of August — usually the worst for fires in the Brazilian dry season — since 2010, when 45,018 were recorded.

All the worst August figures since then — 30,900 fires in 2019, 29,307 in 2020, 28,060 in 2021 and 33,116 in 2022 — happened during the four-year term of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who will be seeking re-election next month.

“This uncontrolled increase in fires in the last four years is closely related to the increase in deforestation,” said Mariana Napolitano of WWF Brazil.  

“The Amazon is a humid rainforest and, contrary to what happens in other biomes, fire does not arise spontaneously. Fires are always linked to human action,” she added.

According to experts, fires are mainly caused by farmers who illegally clear land by burning vegetation. 

Deforestation in Brazil is also at an historic high: in the first half of 2022 some 3,988 km2 were lost, a record since INPE’s Deter satellite monitoring system began collecting data in 2016.

Bolsonaro, an agribusiness ally, faces international criticism for a surge in Amazon destruction on his watch.

But he rejects the censure.

“None of those who are attacking us have the right. If they wanted a pretty forest to call their own, they should have preserved the ones in their countries,” he wrote on Twitter last month.

“The Amazon belongs to Brazilians, and always will,” said Bolsonaro.

Poland on Thursday estimated the financial cost of World War II losses to be 1.3 trillion euros (dollars) and said it would “ask Germany to negotiate these reparations”.

“It is a major sum of 6.2 trillion” Polish zloty, said Jaroslaw Kaczynski, head of the ruling Law and Justice party and widely considered to be Poland’s de facto leader.

Most of this sum “is compensation for the deaths of more than 5.2 million Polish citizens,” he stressed.

Kaczynski said that receiving reparations would be a “long and difficult” process.

“It is a decision we will implement,” he said, speaking on the anniversary of Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939.

Kaczynski was speaking at a conference dedicated to the presentation of a report on Poland’s losses in the 1939-1945 war.

Since coming to power in 2015, Poland’s governing Law and Justice (PiS) party has often championed the issue of war reparations.

Work on the reparations report began in 2017, when the conservative government insisted that Germany had a “moral duty” in the matter.

– German position ‘unchanged’ –

Germany has often rejected Poland’s claims, pointing to a 1953 decision by Poland to renounce claims against East Germany.

The German government on Thursday turned down the Polish call to negotiate on reparations.

“The German government’s position is unchanged, the reparations issue is closed,” a foreign ministry spokesman said in an email to AFP. 

He cited the 1953 decision, calling it a “significant foundation for Europe’s order today”.

The liberal Polish opposition believes the report is mainly intended for domestic political purposes, coming as it does a year ahead of parliamentary elections. 

“The PiS initiative on war reparations has been appearing for several years, whenever PiS needs to build a political narrative,” said Donald Tusk, chairman of the main opposition Civic Platform (PO). 

“This is not about any reparations from Germany, but a political campaign” in Poland, he added, with Kaczynski seeking to “rebuild the support of the ruling party through this anti-German campaign”.  

– ‘Unbelievably criminal, unbelievably cruel’ –

But Kaczynski insisted that the reparations report needs to be acted upon.

“We have not only prepared a report… but we have also taken a decision, a decision on further action,” Kaczynski said.

“That action is to ask Germany to negotiate these reparations. And this is a decision that we will implement,” he added.

“The Germans invaded Poland and did us enormous damage. The occupation was unbelievably criminal, unbelievably cruel and caused effects that in many cases continue to this day.”

Apart from the overall death toll put at 5.3 million, the new report provides other shocking statistics, including that 2.1 million Polish citizens were deported to labour in Nazi Germany.

As a result of being forced to undergo pseudo-medical experiments and detention in concentration camps, 590,000 Poles were disabled.

Over the duration of the six-year World War, Poland lost 50 percent of its lawyers, 40 percent of the doctors and 35 percent of university professors. 

Human losses were calculated as the loss of wages that a person would have earned for the rest of his or her life, and thus the loss to the national GDP. 

Material losses were also tallied at an estimated 800 billion zlotys (170 billion euros).

The total figure also includes multi-billion losses related to cultural and artistic assets and in the banking sector.