Albanian Canadian scholar Olsi Jazexhi seemed to be the perfect foreign writer for the Chinese government to invite to Xinjiang, its westernmost province and home to the ethnic Uyghur Muslim minority so mistreated by Beijing that its critics have called it cultural genocide.
"My initial intention was to visit Xinjiang myself to investigate and to prove the West wrong," Jazexhi tells VOA.
During an interview for a journalist visa at the Chinese Embassy in Tirana, Albania, in 2019, he says he told the consular official, "I want to produce a story where I can show the world that all this talk about the Uyghur is in a way orchestrated, and by people in the West. And there is nothing true about it."
Since 2018, Beijing has been inviting diplomats, journalists, and writers like Jazexhi on controlled tours of western Xinjiang province as part of its efforts to tell the world that all is well, despite what the U.N. says are China’s possible crimes against humanity committed against the Uyghurs.
Chinese state media says that more than 1,200 people from 100 countries and regions, including officials from international organizations, diplomats, journalists and religious leaders, have visited Xinjiang from the end of 2018 to February 2021.
State media often quote those who go on the tours as they extol what is presented to them as the region’s economic development and religious freedom, while attacking Western media and governments for “peddling disinformation” and publishing “fake news” about re-education camps where Uyghurs are tortured and forced to abandon their religious and cultural practices.
Jazexhi should have been one of them.
The Chinese government took him and 19 other writers, mainly from Muslim countries such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the UAE, on an all-expenses paid, 10-day trip in Xinjiang to visit factories and farms and show China's efforts in Xinjiang's economic development.
Ilshat Hassan Kokbore, director of China affairs at the rights group World Uyghur Congress, told VOA that Chinese authorities invite foreign media to visit Xinjiang and ensure "they will only see the singing and dancing performances of Uyghurs on the stage, but not the blood and tears of Uyghurs struggling in concentration camps and prisons."
But in Beijing’s effort to dismiss the allegations of abuse, they also took Jazexhi’s group to what they called a “vocational training center” where ethnic Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and Uzbeks were not allowed to leave and told him they were taken there for practicing Islam.
"So what the Chinese government was doing, it was jailing these people. And in this, the vocational centers there were forcing them to renounce Islam," Jazexhi said.
Jazexhi said the group also saw posters of Chinese President Xi Jinping in mosques in Aksu and Kashgar, which violate Islamic precepts against images of idolatry. While in Urumqi they saw a mosque converted into a shopping mall.
Jazexhi said he was not the only Muslim in his group, which included Turkish and Arab reporters, who were shocked. But he was the only one who condemned the detention conditions while others told the outside world there were no rights violations in Xinjiang.
Jazexhi said several Arabs in his group told him they wouldn't publish stories about what they saw because it could create a diplomatic crisis between their countries and China.
He said that after he complained about the treatment to Chinese authorities, they called him a "fake journalist" and interrogated him as a suspected intelligence agent before he was released and left China.
VOA was not able to independently confirm Jazexhi’s account of the trip, which he told to media and published on his YouTube channel.
Liu Pengyu, the spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, denied that any so-called “re-education camps” exist in Xinjiang. In an email response to VOA, Liu called the vocational education and training centers in Xinjiang schools that are “no different from the Desistance and Disengagement Program of the U.K., or the de-radicalization centers in France.”
Liu said in 2019 “all trainees at the vocational education and training centers have completed their training, secured stable employment in the society and are living a normal life.”
He then denounced “anti-China forces in the West, including the United States,” for “fabricating and spreading a large amount of groundless disinformation about Xinjiang by distorting facts to smear China’s image” and welcomed “interested foreign friends to visit Xinjiang to see with their own eyes all the changes and development that are truly happening there."
Jazexhi teaches history and civilization courses at the International Islamic University of Malaysia.
Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report.
