Prime Minister Imran Khan’s purposeful ignorance of a modern genocide
“We respect the way they are.” said PM Imran Khan in an interview when asked about Uighur Muslim Genocide in Western China. He went on to brand the West’s dismissal of the Kashmiri’s and taking up the cause of the Uighur Muslims as “Hypocrisy”.
With the above remarks, the PM choose to turn a blind eye to the horrors being inflicted upon the Uighurs in China- a situation intensified since the arrival of Xi Jinping to power; who in his 2014 declaration of the “People’s war on terror”, decided that the biggest threat to peace in China was the existence of Muslims.
This situation has grown so dire that it bears an eerie resemblance to one of the darkest periods in human history- the Holocaust.
So what is going on in China? Cultural Re-Education or Destruction?
“The next generation will lose its language”; says Ayup, a Uighur activist, while raising the curtains on what the government has designated as vocational camps, with 1 million Uighur Muslims imprisoned within them. These camps and other policies involve the complete destruction of their past identity. Ranging from
Prohibiting the practice of their own language and religion, banning practices such as praying and fasting
Demolishing mosques, Uighur kindergartens and schools.
Prohibiting them to give their children Muslim names, along with strict prohibition of the Arab dialect.
Refusal of the any of these prohibitions incites heavy punishment, which starts to paint a picture similar to some of the atrocities that took place 80 years ago.
The State is everywhere, even when it’s not?
The Question: How does the State keep an eye on citizens it deems an apparent threat to peace?
What fuels China’s policy of incarceration is excessive control over every aspect of Uighur life- religious, familial, social and cultural, monitoring each and every movement and action taken by the Uighur Muslims on a daily basis. Even by installing a threat in their own smartphones, as the IJOP software uses machine learning to generate a detention list. Getting featured in this list usually means an end to “normal” life as these people are sent to “re-education” camps in the snap of a finger.
Ethnic Cleansing and genocide.
From forced abortions to sterilization, the Chinese Government has apparently used every tool in the box to bring down the Uighur Muslim population. Xinjiang in far western China, home to most of the Uighurs and other ethnic Islam cultures, had the sharpest known decline in birthrates between 2017 and 2019 of any territory in recent history.A figure so grim that it rivals Poland from the 1940s.
Why is Pakistan choosing to turn its back on the atrocities being committed virtually in its own backyard?
The sympathies of Pakistan, which is a self-proclaimed Islamic State, have very clear political connotations. As PM Imran Khan himself said, “China has been one of the greatest friends to us in our most difficult times.”
China is the pedestal which enables Pakistan to stand on its own two feet, with international backing and billions of dollars in aid, any opposition of China’s policies by Pakistan is akin to international suicide.
So as Pakistan calls out the international community for their “hypocrisy”, the state of Uighur Muslims gets worse by the day as Xi Jinping’s “People’s war on terror” starts resembling the “Final solution” proposed by Nazi Germany in 1941.
Sources: Associated Press, Guardian, Reuters, Hindustan Times
Written By: Meghna Singh, Prabhpreet Singh
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