A tweet made by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo blasting Iran’s top leader for failing to speak out over China’s detention of large contingents of its Muslim minority population is likely to cause dismay in Beijing.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei “fancies himself the leader of the Islamic world, but his regime has been totally silent as China — the top buyer of Iran’s oil — has persecuted and detained hundreds of thousands of its Muslim citizens,” Pompeo wrote on Twitter.
Pompeo is one of the most senior officials in Trump’s administration to raise the plight of the Uighurs. Last month, a group of legislators asked Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to restrict the travel and freeze the assets of top Communist Party officials over their role in the persecution of Uighurs, Bloomberg reported.
The United States is looking more closely at the crackdown by China on Muslims in the Xinjiang region, US Assistant Secretary of State Manisha Singh told a congressional hearing, as Washington considers imposing sanctions against Chinese senior officials and companies linked to allegations of human rights abuses.
A UN rights panel said last month it had received credible reports that up to a million ethnic Uighurs may be held in extra-legal detention in Xinjiang, and called for them to be freed.
Chinese abuses in Xinjiang should be addressed through engagement with the government, the new EU ambassador to China said on Friday, a contrast to the position of US officials.
Nicolas Chapuis, who took up his posting this week, told reporters the European Union had been taking note of reports on abuses in Xinjiang, and had raised the issue with China, but it needed facts.
"The union's stance is that we are working in the United Nations framework," Reuters quoted Chapuis as saying.
"We believe in dialogue. We believe in engagement, and first of all, we need the facts," he said, without elaborating.
