Including 14 Arabs 62 countries defend China's violations against Uyghur Muslims

62 countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Morocco, issued a statement defending China's violations against the Muslim Uyghur minority.

On Thursday, 62 countries, including 14 Arab countries, defended the Chinese violations against the Muslim Uyghur Turk minority in the autonomous region of East Turkestan (Xinjiang) in the northwest of the country.

This came in a counter-statement issued by the 62 countries in response to a statement issued earlier Thursday by 43 countries, including Turkey, regarding the Chinese government's widespread violations of human rights against the aforementioned minority.

The 14 Arab countries that signed the counter-statement are Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, the Emirates, Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan, Yemen, Mauritania and Somalia.

Other countries, including Iran, Myanmar, Pakistan, Venezuela and Bangladesh, have also signed it.

These countries said in their statement that they "oppose the baseless allegations against China with political motives based on disinformation and interference in the internal affairs of that country under the pretext of human rights."

In the statement, she stressed that "all countries must abide by the purposes and principles of the United Nations Charter, impartiality and objectivity," according to Anadolu Agency.

Earlier Thursday, 43 countries signed a statement condemning the Chinese government's violations against the Uyghur Turk minority.

Among the 43 countries are Turkey, the United States, Britain, France, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Honduras, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden.

The statement said, "Credible reports indicate the existence of a large network of political re-education camps, where more than a million people were arbitrarily detained."

In their statement, representatives of those countries expressed "particular concern about the situation in Xinjiang."

Since 1949, Beijing has controlled the "East Turkistan" region, which is the homeland of the Muslim "Uyghur" Turks, and calls it "Xinjiang", meaning "the new frontier."

Official statistics indicate that there are 30 million Muslims in the country, 23 million of whom are Uyghurs, while unofficial reports confirm that the number of Muslims is about 100 million, or about 9.5% of the total population.

In its annual human rights report for 2019, the US State Department noted that China's detention of Muslims in detention centers "aims to erase their religious and ethnic identity."

However, China often claims that the centers that the international community describes as "concentration camps" are "vocational training centers" and aim to "clear the minds of those held in them of extremist ideas."