Dharamshala, 14th March: According to reports, Pakistan, which is heavily reliant on Chinese loans and investments to boost its failing economy, has condoned all of China’s human rights violations. According to Di Valerio Fabbri of Geopolitica.info, Pakistan has buried its own Muslim identity in order to back Beijing in the Uyghur crisis, as well as in Hong Kong and Tibet.
Earlier Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan turned a blind eye to the suppression of Muslims in China’s Uyghur community, saying the situation in the Uyghur Autonomous Region was not what the Western media portrayed, according to Fabbri. Even as 243 global groups called for action against China for human rights breaches on the eve of the Winter Olympics, Pakistan accepted all of China’s human rights transgressions, according to Fabbri.
“The Pakistan side expressed its ‘commitment to One-China Policy’ and support for China on Taiwan, the South China Sea, Hong Kong, Xinxiang, and Tibet,” according to a joint statement issued after a meeting between Imran Khan and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing.
“The 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics will open amid atrocity, crimes and other grave human rights violations by the Chinese government, 243 NGOs from around the world said today,” Human Rights Watch warned in a statement released in January.
However, while speaking to a group of visiting Chinese journalists in Islamabad, Imran Khan disclosed the true motivation for his support for China’s abuse of fellow Muslims in Xinxiang. He agreed that the Chinese version differed significantly from what was being reported in the Western media.
Imran Khan, the self-proclaimed defender of Islamic causes, has little choice but to back China’s Xinxiang crackdown on Uyghur Muslims. Leaders in Pakistan, caught in the web of the Belt and Road Initiative and more reliant on China for economic help, have little choice but to publicly embrace China’s policies, including the oppression of fellow Muslims.
Khan pledged to the Chinese during his visit to Beijing for the Winter Olympics to strengthen the centerpiece BRI project in China, the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which is beset by challenges in Pakistan. People in Pakistan are dissatisfied with CPEC because of concerns like coercive land acquisition, poor compensation, and the military’s overpowering involvement in public life.
Khan also signed a deal with China to start the second phase of the CPEC on his visit to Beijing, and in the process endorsed China’s abuse of fellow Uyghur Muslims. Imran Khan was a skeptic of CPEC before assuming power, citing the secrecy surrounding it and unequal investment priorities, which left some Pakistani regions neglected.
According to Geopolitica.info, a report published in 2021 by the US-based international development research lab AidData stated that a significant portion of Chinese development investment under the CPEC consisted of loans at or near commercial rates, rather than grants.
Approximately half of this so-called development funding was in the form of export buyers’ credit, the money granted to Pakistan by Chinese institutions for the acquisition of equipment and goods to be purchased by Chinese enterprises collaborating on project implementation. The details of these loans do not appear in Pakistani official books.
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