China's pre-genocide of Uyghur Muslims

It was a wonderful start to Imran Khan’s ascent to premiership that the Dutch cartoon contest was cancelled. Appears Foreign Minister Qureshi was convincing in his dialogue with the Dutch and a crisis and killings were averted. This foreign policy winning streak is continuing, at least in some sensitive issues.  

“China is treating Islam like a mental illness” is the title of an article in a recent issue of TheAtlantic. And the deeply nationalistic, hardline rule of President Xi Jinping looks at Islam like the diseases of depression or addiction. He has interned one million Uyghurs in internment camps, called “re-education camps” to “cleanse” the mind of Islam which is likened to an ideological illness, akin to a virus in their brain. Here they are brainwashed to praise the Communist Party, sing nationalistic songs all day, study President Xi’s vision of China, confess to and apologize for praying. They are also forced to eat pork and drink alcohol. For resistant subjects there is torture, solitary confinement and death. 

The Qing Dynasty reasserted control of Xinjiang in the 19^thcentury. Xinjiang, population ten million, is in northwest China and borders Pakistan’s Gilgit Baltistan to the south. The Uyghurs are Turkic people, linguistically, culturally and ethnically close to Central Asia, despite a long history of Chinese rule. In 1933 and again in 1944, ETIM or East Turkestan Islamic Movement, tried to secede and China responded ruthlessly. Chinese officials deny the existence of the internment camps, and have hinted at terrorist activity in Xinjiang, but there is no evidence of this. 

Many of the Han, the predominant Chinese group, have migrated to Xinjiang in another effort toward Sinification of Xinjiang. This Sinification was proceeding at a languid pace until a couple of years ago when Chen Quanguo arrived. Quanguo had created an intense surveillance system in Tibet from 2011-2016 and was so successful in crushing dissent there, that his system has been implemented in Xinjiang. 

It is this century’s new Gulag. And is considered pre-genocidal. Reminiscent of the Rohingya genocide by Myanmar. 

Teachers ask children to spy on parents and report their praying or reading the Quran, neighbors spy on neighbors, the entire population is monitored through GPS technology and DNA-sampled. Men are sent to internment camps, and satellite images show expansion of the internment camps, and in some villages men cannot be seen, only women and children. There are ghost towns where no one talks to others. Women are sent to internment camps also.   

Ramadan is banned, no beards or veils can be publicly visible, passports have to be surrendered and saying salam-alaikum can send you to an internment camp. Qurans have been burned and mosques have been closed down. Factories and hospitals are converted into re-education camps. When they come a black hood is placed over the head, and in the internment camps prison uniforms, shaved heads and political indoctrination begin. Baths are rare and washing of hands and feet is not allowed, as it resembles ablution. If the prisoners comply they are released, if they do not, insanity or death await. Those who have left the internment camps and then China itself have told the same story of conditions in Xinjiang. 

Assimilation into the Chinese mold takes the form of internment camps and orphanages, both of which are overflowing. Communistically called “child welfare guidance centers” these massive orphanages house Uyghur children separated from their parents, where they are locked up like farm animals in a shed. Sinification of these children, needless to say, is easy. 

Rebiya Kadeer, President of the World Uyghur Council said: “the real intent is to eliminate Uyghurs as a distinct ethnic group”. Turkey and Malaysia have protested but the most vocal protest has been from the most unlikely places: US Vice-President Mike Pence called on the Chinese government to release the one million prisoners that it is holding in re-education camps for political indoctrination and denunciation of religious beliefs. US Senator Marco Rubio and American UN representative Nikki Haley have been similarly excoriating.  

China has arrested 50 Uyghur women married to Pakistani men in Gilgit-Baltistan. And Pakistan has done nothing in response. 

Pakistan’s Federal Minister for Religious Affairs, Pir Noorul Haq Qadri, recently said that strict regulations and laws fuel rather than counter extremism. To promote religious harmony, China should exercise patience, the minister told China’s ambassador to Pakistan, Yao Jing. He also suggested that a delegation of Pakistani scholars should visit Xinjiang to help. 

Canceling the Dutch cartoon contest was important, and kudos to Religious Affairs Minister Qadri for protesting to China.  Seems Pakistan is trying to be the voice of the Muslim world. These efforts are a good start but have not continued with the war in Yemen. More on that travesty another day. 

Mindsets, Mercy and the Qatra effect

We might be witnessing a tectonic shift in Pakistan’s socio-politics. Prime Minister Imran Khan’s address to the nation was so ambitious that some think he has promised the nation the moon. 

In individual lives and those of nations, idealism is a good thing, particularly when it is backed up with a solid action plan. In goal setting you shoot for the stars, and settle for an average or slightly above average result. Cynicism and supercilious criticism only perpetuate the status quo. And if there is one nation on earth that cannot survive the status quo it is Pakistan. 

Imran Khan had an exhaustive list and dealt with education to agriculture, corruption to climate change. His reading glasses are testimony to the fact that he had a thought out plan of action for each item. As an aside, I must say, that his reading glasses have to go. During his oath taking, it was hugely awkward to see him flip out his sherwani and dig out his glasses. He needs a quick visit to an ophthalmologist who will fix him up with trifocals so when he talks and then reads, he doesn’t have to go from handsome to grandma; he would just keep the trifocals on and rest his arm from the back and forth, and sport a scholarly look all at the same time.  

The changes that Imran Khan lists are only possible with a change of mindset. Seventy-one years of explosive population growth, an imploding economy topped with baffling corruption has served to fashion the Pakistani psyche. Time was that the middle class, the classic perpetuators of morality, maintained integrity and faced adversity with the rules they grew up with.  But who can live on love and fresh air? Especially over the last thirty years or so, you see survival of the fittest on full display. 

My first brush with corruption was in 1982 when the clerk in Dow Medical College’s office demanded money for release of my mark sheet. But 2016 will go down in my family’s history as giving all of us PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. My mother, my daughter and I had traveled to Karachi so that Ammi could collect my late father’s pension. In current day Pakistan, your two options to get anything done are doling out money or applying influence. Those government servants know how to break you. I chose influence application to greasing palms. And my distress was worsened at the plight of the many desperate faces roaming those halls that didn’t have the connections I did. 

The trend isset at the top. Everything, small or substantial, matters. To his credit Imran Khan knows this. His ill-fitting sherwani caused a buzz on social media and it seems a regular tailor stitched it. Brave to wear a Peshawari chappal at his inauguration. Wearing that chappal, Imran Khan gives many messages; he is thumbing his nose at Western culture, showing pride in our own and underscoring simplicity. When there is no fear of retribution and the Whistleblower Law comes into effect, there will be a nationwide movement to self-correct. Or else get turned in. 

That Islam insists on honesty and principles becomes an empty lecture when leaders drive away in bullet and bombproof Mercedes and BMWs, not one but fifteen at a time, into mansions with 500 servants and food to feed a squadron. A three-bedroom home with two cars is a great start! Changing that mindset that has been groomed and nurtured for decades is the challenge. Except for the elite one senses a national enough-is-enough frustration. How and why is life so difficult at every step from the time one gets up till the day is done? 

There is in fact a danger of the pendulum swinging the other way and the elite and corrupt getting street justice. Imran Khan assiduously avoided vengeance. And it is important to maintain this. A mindset change has to happen but it must be modulated to achieve results and not revenge. 

I was very touched by his repeat explanation of creating rahm or mercy in our hearts. One really notices its absence in Pakistan. How do people live with themselves spending millions of rupees on a wedding outfit and the many wedding functions, when all around them are starving children begging on the streets? Mercy has been squashed out of our hearts and we’re blind to the misery around us. I was looking through clothes at a boutique on M. M. Alam Road in Lahore in July 2013; most of the outfits were Rs. 25,000 and above. The power went out and the generator quickly hummed in. Under his breath the salesman said that the power outage didn’t matter to him for his six children sweated in the day and studied by candlelight at night. I asked him how much he made and he said Rs. 25,000 a month. I left the store and cursed our nation’s inequity.

Qatra qatra darya ban jaata hai-drops coalesce to form a river. The cost of the Bhasha Dam is estimated to be Rs. 1450 billion. The small Rs. 10 SMS donation created by the Supreme Court, and then larger donations from Pakistanis and Overseas Pakistanis, can be the drops that can easily coalesce to give us the dam. 

All of us, within and outside Pakistan should do at least one thing to change things. Plant a tree, clean your street, educate a child; the opportunities are limitless. Imran Khan has great minds in his cabinet and advisers. In five years if we achieve even half of his “lofty” goals, we will easily see Naya Pakistan.