Sultan M Hali
CANADA has joined the fray in accusing China of committing genocide of Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. Canada’s Ambassador to the United Nations Bob Rae is calling on the UN to investigate whether China’s persecution of ethnic Muslim Uighurs in its Xinjiang province is a genocide. Rae told the CBC on November 15 that he has asked the UN Human Rights Council to investigate China’s treatment of the country’s Uighurs in Xinjiang. Last month a Canadian parliamentary subcommittee concluded in a report that China’s treatment of the Uighurs is a genocide.
The Chinese government has bent backwards in the near past refuting charges by the Occident of running concentration camps where the Uighur Muslims of Xinjiang are being incarcerated and spending time in squalor, and are being tortured. Renowned academics from around the globe were invited to visit Xinjiang and see the indoctrination centers, which have been mislabelled as ghettos and concentration camps. To prove their fake propaganda, doctored videos and photographs of Nazi era camps where Jews were detained, are presented as evidence of Chinese brutality towards the Muslims. This scribe was part of the group of academics, who toured the length and breadth of Xinjiang and found ethnic minorities being happily trained in the re-indoctrination centres.
The group were minor offenders, who had been misled by extremists, separatists and terror mongers to indulge in insurgency. China, like the rest of the world has faced challenges of three evils named earlier, which have plagued the entire world. Each country has taken steps to eradicate the scourge of extremism, separatism and terrorism according to its own laws and resources. The faces of terror may be different but their heinous agenda is the same. It takes the name of Al-Qaeda, Islamic State (IS) or in China, the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM). The levels of success have differed in different countries but in China, it has been a success story.
The Chinese government adopted a two-pronged strategy to deal with the challenge. Hard core terrorists and serious offenders were arrested, tried and punished while minor offenders were sent to the re-indoctrination centres, where they are given lectures on the Chine Constitution, Law and provided vocational training so they can lead meaningful and prosperous life. The second aspect of the strategy was to remove the sense of deprivation of the Uighur Muslims. Xinjiang became more involved in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s mega Belt and Road Initiative where huge development projects have been launched giving ample opportunity to the Uighurs to raise their quality of life while their children are being provided quality education.
When the propaganda campaign of China’s detractors regarding the concentration camps failed and the lies were nailed with diplomats from around the world being invited to Xinjiang to see the truth for themselves, a fresh salvo was fired, casting aspersions on the Chinese government that the Uighur Muslims were being barred from practising Islam. Diplomats and top-notch Muslim clerics were invited to visit Xinjiang, count the number of Mosques, Islamic training centres and the religious freedom enjoyed by the Chinese Muslims. The protagonists of the propaganda campaign to besmirch China forget that Muslims are a very sensitive group of people. Whether they belong to Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Malaysia, Iran, Indonesia, Pakistan or Bangladesh, they are ready to defend fellow Muslims at the slightest hint of Islamophobia, as France is facing after the Charlie Hebdo episode. The Muslim ambassadors and religious leaders returned satisfied as they saw the Uighur Muslims enjoying religious freedom and state facilities provided them by no other country.
The latest tirade by China’s opponents is accusations of forced birth control of the Uighurs, ethnic cleansing and genocide. The broadside fired by the Canadian Ambassador to the UN appears to be part of the same campaign. The Globe and Mail of Canada’s correspondent in China, during a news conference in Being on November 16, addressed the question to Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian to offer his comments on the Canadian UN Ambassador’s statement.
Maintaining his calm, Zhao Liian logically nailed the false accusation. Rejecting Ambassador Bob Rae’s report, the Chinese spokesperson presented hard statistics to refute the charge of forced birth control to limit Uighur births and genocide. He quoted relevant figures, informing that Canada’s population growth rate in 2019 was 1.42%, and most of the increase came from immigrants. Contrarily, he shared statistics from the growth rate of the population of Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. Zhao Liian apprised that from 2010 to 2018, the population of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang rose from 10.17 million to 12.72 million, an increase of 2.55 million or 25%, which is about twice the increase of the whole Xinjiang population, which stood at 14%. The growth rate was also significantly higher than, or in fact 12.5 times that of the Han population, which stood at 2%, and about 18 times that of the Canadian population.
Relations between Canada and China are at an all-time low because of Beijing’s continued detention of two Canadian citizens. Ottawa believes that the detention is in retaliation for the arrest of Huawei Executive Meng Wanzhouwho, apparently at the behest of the US, which has been in a trade war with China. Canada has also joined Western allies in targeting Beijing’s recent actions in Hong Kong, which is totally an internal matter of China. It is sad that Justin Trudeau’s Canada which is supposed to be balanced, is being swayed by unsubstantiated reports.
—The writer is retired PAF Group Captain and a TV talk show host.
