By Mohammad Raashid
The Uyghur community in China has been struggling for its rights for a long time but their voice has been constantly ignored and remained unheard for a long time. It is a time to listen to their grievances and their miseries now, at least they deserve their basic human rights, their sociolect-economic rights, the rights to live with freedom and to practice their religions without any pressure.
Among them some of their relatives had left China because of these very reasons almost 50 years but what about the remaining people? They had been deprived more offensively being treated as a minor community, they had to face the brutality of the strict Chinese policies and most of all genocidal attempts to wipe them out from China. It is against very basic human rights and is considered the most heinous violation of human rights. The persons who left China because of these restrictions are trying to help their brothers and sisters to live honourable life according to their beliefs and standards.
Muhammad Omar khan (Uyghur), Head of the Omar Uyghur Trust, said that China has always been pursuing a money trap policy. He further said, “Chinese offered loans at the heavy interest rate and then take back the money with much more margins than usually we expect, hence it has been creating its capital more and more and growing its economic and soft power rapidly”.
Mr khan is on the view that China is purely a business-minded state and it always prefers its state interest first before helping any other state. The loans it offered are not loans but vicious cycles in which when anyone has been trapped it becomes more and more difficult for that state to come out from it. The same thing is the Chinese policy towards Pakistan, it has been trapping Pakistan in a vicious cycle of heavy loans on heavy interests, on the other hand, the U.S.A is a most trusted ally of Pakistan, and it has always helped Pakistan by offering loans on the low-interest rate and then whensoever Pakistan needed financial help it always rescheduled the loans and made it easier for Pakistan to pay back the loan. Now, when Pakistan has been facing the worst economic crisis, China is pretending just like a silent observer and is not trying to help Pakistan to come out from this grave economic crisis although it’s not a big deal for China, an emerging superpower to help Pakistan by giving it loans on the low-interest rate. In this scenario, the US can help Pakistan as it had been helping it for seven decades always because the US needed a trustworthy ally in this region and to counter China the U.S.A can go to any limit. Pakistan has the chance to grab the opportunity by settling its foreign policy matters with consensus.
The U.S. has put some serious accusations against China which has a long list but most of these are about human rights violations. The U.S. stated that China has committed crimes against humanity and violated the human rights of the Muslim majority in the Xinjiang region in western China, including forced labour, sterilization of Muslim women and arbitrary detention of more than 1 million Uyghur Muslims in imprisonment camps. In contrast, Beijing denies the allegations and says people of all ethnic groups live happily in Xinjiang.
According to Abdulhakim Idris, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Uyghur Studies, many Muslim-majority countries receive billions of dollars from China in the name of financial investment. He added, “In China, Uyghurs and other Muslims have difficulties protecting their religious rights and cultural identity.”
Mr Abdulhakim Idris said, “By receiving billions of dollars from China, these countries are not only forced to remain quiet on the genocidal atrocities against Uyghur Muslims in East Turkistan but also commanded by Beijing to do whatever the PRC wants,”.
According to the U.N. report, the entire legal framework that China has adopted to counter terrorism and religious extremism is in contradiction with basic human rights standards. It’s arbitrary, it’s vague, it’s politicized, and it doesn’t offer the kind of legal guarantees and remedies that should be present, especially concerning deprivation of liberty. The report says that if you have to put people in imprisonment cells there should be legal procedures to be followed according to the law and constitution. In these imprisonment cells thousands of people had been suffering for a long time about them no one is sure that either they are still alive or have been dead.
A second key factor is the number of very serious violations identified, including torture, enforced disappearances, intimidation, suppression of religious or cultural expression and deprivation of religious rights. According to analysts, both the legal basis and the conduct of the campaign deeply violate basic human rights and are serious crimes against all humanity and this issue becomes more sensitive when a UN agency has verified it and condemned it strongly. The international community and especially Pakistan should take a stand against all of these inhuman activities and brutalities against the Uyghur community and Muslim minority in Xinjiang.
Omar Khan (Uyghur) underlined that China has set Pakistan in a golden chain trap and wants it to be the same country as Xinjiang since it conquered Xinjiang 100 years ago. The Uyghurs community wants their Xinxiang province to become an independent Uyghur Muslim state on the world map. Mr Khan urged that Muslims countries should come up and support them not China because the Uygur Muslim community in that region suffering badly.
About Author
Mohammad Raashid is senior journalist, has experienced of working in several international news organisations. As an international journalist, he worked in several countries especially, US, Afghanistan and Pakistan. He extensively covered war on terror for different international media.
