Albanian-Canadian historian and journalist Olsi Jazexhi believed in early 2019 that reports about human rights violations in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (Xinjiang) of Western China were lies.
Accounts from people who had fled the area as well as reports from human rights organisations were painting a picture of human rights abuses being perpetrated on a massive scale. Muslim minorities in Xinjiang – the majority of whom are Turkic-speaking Uighurs – were reportedly being deprived of basic freedoms, their cultural and religious heritage was being destroyed and at least 1 million of them had been interned in a vast network of detention camps.
The international community had taken notice and the United Nations had raised its concerns.
But Jazexhi was unconvinced.
“I was certain that the stories were a scheme constructed by the US and the West to discredit China and divert attention away from their own human rights records regarding Muslims,” he told media.
The Chinese government itself vehemently rejected the allegations, acknowledging the existence of the camps but describing them as vocational skills training centres necessary to combat alleged extremism.
To see the truth for himself, Jazexhi contacted the Chinese embassy in Tirana about visiting Xinjiang. He was soon invited to join a media tour for foreign journalists mostly from Muslim countries and in early August 2019, he was on a plane bound for China.
“I went to defend the Chinese government,” he recalled.
But he quickly found that defending the Chinese narrative was a far more difficult task than he had anticipated.
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