Pakistan’s Deliberate Blind Spot, the Plight of China’s Uighur Muslims

                                     Pakistan Prime Minister, Imran Khan

“Frankly, I don’t know much about it,” claimed Imran Khan on the plight of China’s Uighur Muslims and refused to comment further.

Islamophobia in China
Islamophobia in China
Islamophobia in China

Just across the border from Pakistan, in the north-west of China, over 11 million Uighurs (a Muslim minority group) live in Xinjiang Autonomous Region or East Turkestan; making up around 45% of the local population.

The Uighurs are going through one of the world’s worst humanitarian and existential crises.
Since April 2017, there have been numerous reports about the brutal oppression of the Uighurs at the hands of the Chinese authorities. More than a million ethnic Muslims in China’s Xinjiang are detained in Nazi-style concentration camps, where they are subjected to atrocities and are pressured to renounce their religion.
The Chinese government, under the ever-powerful Xi Jinping (the latter-day Mao Zedong) has detained as many as one million members of the Uighur minority in “re-education” facilities in drastic efforts to control and indoctrinate the Muslim minority. Muslim inmates are cut off from the outside world and are even subjected to forced labor.

“These people who are detained provide free or low-cost forced labor for factories,” said Mehmet Volkan Kasikci, a researcher in Turkey.

The situation outside the camps is hardly any better for the woebegone Uighurs, who suffer severe restrictions on their freedom to practice their religion, travel, or communicate with relatives outside the country.

Former detenu Omir Bekhali described daily life in the camps:
Former detenu Omir Bekhali described daily life in the camps:

As published in an interview with the Associated Press


In 1949, Uighurs represented 75% of the total population whereas now they are down to 46%.
In Nazi-style concentration camps; live organs are taken from Muslims and then sold for as much as $165,000 to transplant recipients around the world. The nightmare of Hitler and the purges of Stalin and the Gang of Four is upon the Uighurs.
China has destroyed historic mosques in Xinjiang, demolished thousands of other mosques (almost 70%) in Kashgar city and confiscated religious books, including the Quran in an attempt to culturally eviscerate an entire society.  After this crackdown China has also passed a law to "implement measures to Sinicize" Islam within the next five years which means China is trying to modify and make Islam compatible with Chinese prescriptions.


Imran Khan’s speech: Hypocrisy at its finest


Pakistan, an Islamic Republic has over the last decades often spoken out loudly in defense of Islam and Muslims with India being a political target. In the last two years, China has been committing brutal excesses on innocent Uighurs by outlawing Islamic practices. Recently there has also been an international outcry against the Chinese tyranny. Yet in an interview to the Financial Times, Imran Khan (who professes to be the guardian angel of Muslims worldwide) denied knowledge of the Chinese treatment to Uighur Muslims. In normal circumstances, Pakistan never misses an opportunity to spring to the purported cause of Muslims. Imran Khan and the Pakistani establishment keep on saying that “Muslimness” is being attacked in India. Every now and then, Imran Khan calls for justice to Kashmiri Muslims but he remains blithely insensitive to the plight of hundreds of thousands of Uighur Muslims.

Prime Minister Imran Khan in Beijing to seek funds

Why did the prototypical Islamic State (as Pakistan likes to see itself), choose to keep mum on the ill-treatment of the Uighurs of China?

In an interview with the Financial Times, former international cricketer and present Prime Minister of Naya Pakistan, Imran Khan was asked about his stance on China’s treatment of the Uighur Musilms. On the question, Imran Khan appeared clueless and blatantly dodged the question. This is not the first time that the Pakistan PM showed the world that Pakistan will exploit the cause of Muslims to desired political advantage. In at least two interviews he claimed not to know anything about China’s Islamophobia.

"Cold, hard interests will always carry the day" in international relations, said Micheal Kugelman, deputy director, Asia Program at the Washington-based Wilson Center.

For Pakistan, Uighurs seem to live in a perfect world, enjoying all the rights of a Chinese citizen.
Imran Khan has become an obsequious servitor of China’s expansionist policy exemplified by the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC),  which China terms a “corridor of opportunity”. In other words, Imran Khan couldn't risk facing up to the fact that the $75 billion ‘corridor of opportunities’ is a ‘corridor of servility’ to China. Sino Pak duplicity is evident in the wiping out of the Uighur Islamic Identity while refusing to  designate Masood Azhar, the Jaish-e-Mohammed chief, as a global terrorist. China is now Pakistan’s partner in terror both in and out of China. The world which assumed that the typically outspoken Prime Minister of Pakistan would take a bold stand to demonstrate sympathy cannot afford Pakistan’s shameful hypocrisy towards the Muslim minorities of China.

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