When asked about the Chinese government’s abusive treatment of the Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang, Imran Khan stumbles.
Pakistan’s prime minister, Imran Khan, has repeatedly spoken out for the rights of Muslims. Following the Christchurch attack in New Zealand, he said on Twitter that he blamed “these increasing terror attacks on the current Islamophobia post-9/11 where Islam & 1.3 bn Muslims have collectively been blamed for any act of terror by a Muslim.” He said his government would grant citizenship rights to Afghan refugees.
While still in the political opposition in 2017, he wrote to the United Nations secretary-general condemning the “hypocrisy” of the international community in failing to protect the rights of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. He has repeatedly criticized human rights violations by Indian security forces against Kashmiris and committed Pakistan’s support on their behalf.
Which is why it was so extraordinary that when asked about the Chinese government’s abusive treatment of the Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang in northwest China, Imran Khan stumbled and said, “Frankly, I don’t know much about that,” explaining that the issue was “not so much in the papers.”
Perhaps he demurred from criticizing China because for Pakistan, on the brink of an economic crisis, Beijing’s support “has been a breath of fresh air,” as he himself put it to Turkish broadcaster TRT earlier this year. Perhaps he had not read it in the papers because, as US academic Muhammad Hamid Zaman discovered, articles on this issue are rejected by Pakistan media.
