China In Eurasia

SARAJEVO -- The former grand mufti of Bosnia-Herzegovina is facing accusations of helping to whitewash Beijing's human rights abuses in Xinjiang against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities after he visited China's western province and praised the Chinese Communist Party's policies.

As part of a government-organized visit on January 8 to Xinjiang in cooperation with the World Muslim Communities Council, a U.A.E.-funded organization, Mustafa Ceric, who served as grand mufti from 1999 to 2012 and held a variety of other influential roles within Bosnia's Islamic community, toured the region along with a delegation of more than 30 Islamic clerics and scholars from 14 countries.

The tour received widespread coverage from China's domestic and international media outlets, with a focus on comments made by Ceric where he praised China's growing global role and "the Chinese policy of fighting terrorism and de-radicalization for achieving peace and harmony in [Xinjiang]."

The comments echo Beijing's justification for its treatment of Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs, and other Muslim groups in Xinjiang, which has been the site of a brutal crackdown launched by Beijing in recent years that swept up more than 1 million people in detention camps and prisons. The United States and several Western parliaments have said that China's abuses in Xinjiang amount to genocide and crimes against humanity, while the United Nations said in an August 2022 report that Beijing had committed "serious human rights violations."

Leaders from Bosnia's Islamic community moved quickly to distance themselves from Ceric's statements as the delegation of Muslim scholars and clerics also faced international criticism from rights groups and the Uyghur diaspora for helping shield China from scrutiny.

"China, by inviting so-called World Muslim Communities Council leaders to [Xinjiang], is still trying to deceive the world," Dolkun Isa, president of the World Uyghur Congress, wrote on Twitter following the delegation's tour. "It is a fact that China has been engaging in a genocidal policy toward Uyghurs, and at the same time, China declared war against Islam."

Mustafa Prljaca, adviser to Husein Kavazovic, Bosnia's current grand mufti, told RFE/RL's Balkan Service that the country's Islamic leadership had nothing to do with Ceric's visit and that the grand mufti's office did not agree with his statements about Chinese policies in Xinjiang.

"We have different views, based on the information that we have," he said.

In addition to Ceric, the trip was attended by Mevlud Dudic, the president of the governing body of the Islamic community in Serbia, who also praised Beijing's policies in Xinjiang.

As with Ceric, other Islamic leaders in Serbia sought to distance themselves from the comments and the tour as a whole, with Samir Skrijelj, secretary-general of the governing body of the Islamic community in Serbia, telling RFE/RL that the religious body has no affiliation with the delegation brought to Xinjiang and that Dudic went on the trip in his own personal capacity.

While China's policies in Xinjiang have received resounding criticism from Western capitals, many governments from Muslim-majority countries have refrained from criticizing Beijing or have even defended its actions, which analysts attribute to China's expanded economic and diplomatic power across the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia in the last decade.

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The delegation that brought Ceric and Dudic to Xinjiang was organized by the World Muslim Communities Council, which is funded by the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) state. Ali Rashid al-Nuaimi, the chairman of the group, is an Emirati lawmaker and member of the U.A.E. Federal National Council for the Emirate of Abu Dhabi. Nuaimi also drew criticism from Uyghur groups for comments to Chinese state media where he said that Beijing's policies in Xinjiang were necessary and condoned by Islamic leaders around the world.

"Here [in Xinjiang] we look at all Muslims as Chinese. They should be proud to be Chinese nationals," Nuaimi told CGTN during an interview while on the tour.

Since early reports about Beijing's internment camp system in Xinjiang emerged in 2017, an abundance of credible evidence -- including testimonies, open-source data, and leaked Chinese government documents -- has revealed abuses including forced labor, mass detention, surveillance, and forced sterilization.

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In response to the growing scrutiny, researchers and some governments say that Beijing has orchestrated a global campaign to shape world opinion about its abuses in Xinjiang and treatment of Uyghurs there that consists of spreading disinformation, search-engine manipulation, tightly managed media tours, and enlisting social-media influencers to push propaganda and its own narrative to international audiences.

"Covert and overt online information campaigns have been deployed to portray positive narratives about the [Chinese Communist Party's] domestic policies in the region, while also injecting disinformation into the global public discourse regarding Xinjiang," stated a 2021 report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a Canberra-based think tank.

Beyond Ceric and the highly publicized visit, Bosnian authorities also found themselves ensnared in controversy involving Xinjiang in 2021.

In July of that year, Bosnian Foreign Minister Bisera Turkovic signed a joint statement at the UN Human Rights Council along with more than 40 other -- mostly Western -- countries that expressed alarm about the human rights situation in Xinjiang and called for an international inquiry.

In response, Milorad Dodik, who was then the Serbian representative of the Balkan country's tripartite presidency, sent an official letter to the UN where he asked for Bosnia's signature to be withdrawn from the statement.

The country's presidency is part of the complex administration established by the Dayton peace accords that ended its 1992-95 war by creating administrative entities within state structures that represent its three main ethnic groups: Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats.

Sefik Dzaferovic, who held the Bosniak presidential seat at the time, and Zeljko Komsic, who is still the Croats' presidential representative, were both in favor of supporting the statement and backed the Foreign Ministry.

Neighboring Serbia, with which Bosnia's Serbian community closely aligns, has drifted closer to China in recent years, with Belgrade becoming one of Beijing's closest European partners.

Dodik was ultimately overruled through a vote, but continued to defend his position, saying that criticizing Beijing over Xinjiang would lead to a "serious disruption of good and friendly relations with the People's Republic of China."

Written by Reid Standish based on reporting by Meliha Kesmer and Predrag Zvijerac of RFE/RL's Balkan Service.

The human rights crises that unfolded in 2022 caused immense human suffering but also opened new opportunities for global leadership on human rights, the acting executive director of Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on January 12 as the organization released its annual world report on human rights.

Tirana Hassan referred to a new model for global leadership on human rights in her introduction to the Human Rights Watch World Report 2023, saying that in a world in which power has shifted, it is no longer possible to rely on a small group of governments in the northern part of the globe to defend human rights.

The responsibility must fall on individual countries -- big and small -- to apply a human rights framework to their policies and then work with each other to protect and promote human rights, she said.

"The past year has demonstrated that all governments bear the responsibility of protesting human rights around the world," Hassan said. "Against a backdrop of shifting power, there is more space, not less, for states to stand up for human rights as new coalitions and new voices of leadership emerge."

The 712-page report looks at the state of human rights in nearly 100 countries where the independent international organization works.

It cites atrocities committed by Russia in its war in Ukraine, China's treatment of Uyghurs, actions by the Taliban that have put millions of Afghans at risk of starvation, and protests in Iran prompted by opposition to the mandatory hijab for women as among the "litany of human rights crises in 2022."

Hassan said the world's mobilization around Russia's war in Ukraine "reminds us of the extraordinary potential when governments realize their human rights obligations on a global scale."

Moscow has accompanied its brutal military actions in Ukraine with a crackdown on human rights and anti-war activists, "throttling dissent and any criticism of Putin’s rule," she said. But one positive outcome of Russia's actions has been to activate the full global human rights system created to deal with such crises.

This extraordinary response showed what is possible for accountability, but the challenge will be for governments to "replicate the best of the international response in Ukraine and scale up the political will to address other crises around the world until there is meaningful human rights improvement."

On Iran, she said the protests against the mandatory use of the hijab are just the most visible symbol of repression.

"The demand for equality triggered by women and schoolgirls has morphed into a nationwide movement by the Iranian people against a government that has systematically denied them their rights, mismanaged the economy, and driven people into poverty," she said.

Hassan also blasted U.S. President Joe Biden, who she said "eviscerated" his pledge to make Saudi Arabia a "pariah state" over its human rights record with a "bro-like fist bump with Saudi Arabia's Mohammed Bin Salman."

She also said the Biden administration, despite its rhetoric about prioritizing democracy and human rights in Asia, has tempered criticism of abuses and increasing authoritarianism in India, Thailand, the Philippines, and elsewhere in Southeast Asia for security and economic reasons.