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A Pakistani father’s ordeal: China seized his Uighur son and sent his daughters to an orphanage

By ALICE SU, SHASHANK BENGALI, SHAH MEER BALOCH

Sakandar Hayat wanted it to be a special Ramadan. He and his teenage boy Arafat left northwestern China and crossed the border into Hayat’s native Pakistan. It was a journey to bring father and son closer together. But it would end up tearing their family apart. The two had been in Pakistan for three weeks when they received a phone call from back home in the Chinese region of Xinjiang. Hayat’s wife, an ethnic Uighur, had been detained. He and Arafat raced to the border, where Chinese police were waiting. They arrested Arafat, a Uighur like his mother, saying he would be questioned on what he had done in Pakistan.

“Don’t separate us,” Hayat begged the police. “Question him in front of me. I’ll be silent and he will speak truth.”

“You’ll have your son back in a week,” the police told him that day in 2017.

Arafat would be lost to him for two years.

Hayat is one of hundreds of Pakistanis who have suffered from China’s suppression of Muslims in the Xinjiang territory that is home to about 10 million ethnic Uighurs. Rich in minerals, gas and oil, the vast region is dotted with concentration camps where Chinese authorities have locked up more than a million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities, according to human rights groups, survivors, victims’ families and United Nations experts.

But increasingly, China’s campaign against Uighurs has spilled across its borders, entangling men such as Hayat, a Pakistani garment trader who, with his wife, raised three children while trapped between the politics and ambitions of two countries.

Hayat’s saga reflects how Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s hard-line vision of crushing dissent extends beyond consolidation of power at home to blocking criticism from foreign governments, even when their own citizens are mistreated. The silence of Pakistan, which has been outspoken on oppression of Muslims across the world but has refrained from criticizing China — a major economic benefactor and potential provider of COVID-19 vaccines — reflects how many nations are wary of jeopardizing their ties to Beijing. The Times interviewed four Pakistanis married to Uighurs who have been separated from their families, two Pakistani Uighurs who have been threatened by Pakistani security forces, and one Chinese Uighur who fled abroad via Pakistan after being detained in a camp. Fearing retaliation from authorities in both countries, several of them asked not to be named, although The Times reviewed their marriage and identification documents. “It is very hard to leave your heart, your children, to live in a place worse than a prison,” Hayat said. After his wife and Arafat, who was then 19, were detained, Hayat was denied a visa to China for two years. The couple’s two daughters, who were 7 and 12 at the time, were sent to an orphanage in Kashgar without his consent.

He pleaded with Chinese and Pakistani officials for information on his family with no response until 2019, when Chinese officials said his son was receiving “education,” a euphemism for the camps where Beijing says minorities are receiving “vocational training” to combat “extremism, separatism and terrorism.”Those who have been inside the camps tell a different story. Mohammed, a Uighur from southern Xinjiang who had been doing business between China and Pakistan since the early 2000s, told The Times that he had been detained for seven months. He was arrested when he crossed the border in June 2018, he said, then held in a camp with his hands chained together in a room of 35 people.

Every morning, they woke up at 4 a.m. for lectures about the Chinese Communist Party’s care for Uighurs, he said.

“The party is feeding you,” he remembered being told. “Uighurs are nothing without this party. If there was no Communist Party, Uighurs would have died of hunger.”

He and others were then forced to sing songs praising the party and Xi. After that they did morning exercise, running in circles as the sun rose. They were fed hot water and a piece of bread, and led to five hours of Chinese-language lessons. No one was allowed to speak Uighur, Mohammed said.

Once every month or so, the camp guards would make detainees watch as they burned prayer mats, beads and religious books that they’d confiscated from Uighur homes.

“You people are not Turks. Uighurs are Chinese. You are one of us, Chinese,” they would tell the detainees.

“China is a dungeon, our homes are torture cells, and death or execution is waiting for me and my family there.”

MOHAMMED, A UIGHUR FROM SOUTHERN XINJIANG

He said camp guards beat him with electric batons, questioned why he went to Pakistan and accused him of working for the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, an anti-China militant group that has sent fighters to Syria. They asked if he prayed, and when he said “no,” they beat him and said, “Are you not a Muslim?”

“If you talk slowly they will beat you. If you become loud they will beat you more. I asked them, ‘How should I talk? How should I answer? Don’t beat me, I will answer everything clearly,’” Mohammed said. But the beatings persisted.

Mohammed was finally released on condition that he bring his wife and children in Pakistan back to Xinjiang and act as an informer for Chinese authorities. His other family members in Xinjiang would be collateral.

“But I will not go back to China,” he told The Times in an interview in Rawalpindi. Scars from the chains, beatings and electric shocks still marked his wrists, arms, back and feet. “China is a dungeon, our homes are torture cells, and death or execution is waiting for me and my family there.”

A few days later, he left Pakistan as well. The Times was not able to confirm what happened to the family members he left behind.

Although Pakistan is one of many Muslim nations that has refused to criticize China’s repression of Uighurs, “it’s also probably the country with the least room for maneuver,” said Andrew Small, a senior transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

China provides Pakistan with tens of billions of dollars in loans and expanding military cooperation. Pakistan buys nearly 40% of China’s arms exports. It is also the flagship site for Xi’s Belt and Road global infrastructure initiative, which includes a 2,000-mile “China-Pakistan Economic Corridor” of roads and railways from Kashgar to the Arabian Sea.

Given this relationship, Pakistan has always felt “obliged to be accommodating” with Chinese requests, “even when it wasn’t entirely comfortable,” Small said.

Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper recently published a column about how Chinese pressures to quiet criticism of investment projects or the Uighur plight were strengthening authoritarianism in the Muslim nation. Censorship in Pakistan was “already in overdrive” before Chinese influence, the column noted: “But free speech opponents will be grateful for a patron that shares their disdain for dissent.”

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has repeatedly denied knowledge of China’s actions in Xinjiang. He told the Financial Times, Al Jazeera and the Turkish news channel TRT World in interviews last year that he “doesn’t know much” about the Uighurs.

“I will say one thing about China,” he told Al Jazeera. “For Pakistan, China has been the best friend.”

Pakistan also joined 36 other countries including Russia, Saudi Arabia and Syria in signing a letter to the United Nations last year defending China’s “education and training centers” and praising China’s “remarkable achievements in the field of human rights.”

China’s grip on Xinjiang, which is more than triple the size of California, wasn’t always so brutal, said Bacha, a 63-year-old Pakistani trader from Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. He had lived in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital, since 1988 and married a Uighur there in 2001.

Security measures had escalated dramatically in 2009, after riots in Urumqi left nearly 200 people dead. Ethnic tensions rose as the Communist Party encouraged Han Chinese people and companies to move to Xinjiang. Many Uighurs viewed them as opportunists who took the best jobs and exploited Xinjiang’s resources at the expense of locals.

The Chinese government tried to quell unrest through assimilation and force, banning religious dress, promoting patriotic education and blanketing the land with checkpoints, police and security cameras.

But ethnic violence escalated alongside state violence: Uighur attacks on civilians and police erupted in 2012, 2013, and 2014, including an attempted plane hijacking, knife assaults, bombings, and a car crash into a crowd in Tiananmen Square.

In 2016, a party hard-liner named Chen Quanguo, known for cracking down on Tibet, came to Xinjiang. Chen engineered a mass surveillance and detention campaign, implemented through a mandatory state app that collected data from Uighur phones and determined who to put in camps by algorithm.Detainees were chosen for reasons as innocuous as growing beards, using WhatsApp, or communicating with family members abroad, according to reporting by Human Rights Watch and Chinese government documents leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.Han cadres were also sent into Uighur homes, often moving in with Uighur women and children while their men were detained, to drill them in “loving the Party,” rejecting religion and becoming more “Chinese.”

“You are being watched and instructed what to do,” Bacha said. “Fear looms over your head. Fear travels in the air.” In 2016, Bacha’s in-laws fled to Turkey with two of his children. Chinese police then detained his wife and three other children, ages 3, 4, and 5.

After petitioning the Pakistani Foreign Ministry and Chinese authorities, he was told recently that he could get Pakistani passports to bring his children out — but not his wife. She has been sentenced to 6 ½ years in prison. Authorities have not explained why.

Members of the Pakistani Uighur community, comprising families who left Xinjiang and became Pakistani citizens in the late 1940s, spoke of similar intimidation inside the Muslim nation.

One Pakistani Uighur shop owner in Rawalpindi told The Times that he had been detained for two weeks by plainclothes Pakistani security officers in late 2018. He said he was taken from his home in a black hood, chained in a dark room and questioned if he had connections with the East Turkestan Islamic Movement.

“The interrogators told me, ‘Don’t raise a voice against China here, even in personal gatherings,’” said the shop owner, 53, who believes his uncle in Yarkand, in Xinjiang, is also in a camp. Fearful of endangering his relatives in Xinjiang further, he has not contacted them for three years.

Another Pakistani Uighur, Muhammed Umer Khan, has faced pressure from Pakistani authorities for trying to promote Uighur language and culture. Khan, whose parents migrated to Pakistan from Kashgar in 1967 to escape oppression by the Chinese Communist Party, founded the Umer Uyghur Trust in 2008 and opened a small school near his home in Rawalpindi in 2010.

But Pakistani authorities soon visited Khan, ordering him to close the school because it was “damaging China-Pakistan relations.” When he refused, he said, plainclothes government agents destroyed the school, smashing computers and confiscating study materials. Khan tried to reopen the school in 2015, but it was forcibly closed again within one month. In 2011, he and his brother were temporarily banned from leaving Pakistan. In 2017, he was detained by Pakistani officers for nine days.Since early 2019, an organization funded by the Chinese Embassy called the “Ex-Chinese Assn.,” which runs Mandarin schools for Uighurs in Pakistan, has also begun asking Pakistani Uighur families to register the names and addresses of their family members in China.

Pakistani Uighurs were told that the Ex-Chinese Assn. wanted their relatives’ information to ensure their children were eligible for the schools. But Khan worried the information would be used for surveillance — or to arrange the extradition of Pakistani Uighurs to China. “I am afraid,” said Khan, 47. “Even though we are living in a free Muslim country, China holds so much suppression over the Uighur community here. So then what are they doing with Uighur people living in China?” Azeem Khan, the general secretary of the Ex-Chinese Assn., did not respond to requests for comment.

Members of the Pakistani-Uighur community say some Uighur families of Pakistanis were released from camps late last year, in part because of pressure from international media and diplomats. The Chinese government also claimed in December 2019 that “students” in the camps had “graduated.”

But release doesn’t mean freedom. Many move straight from camps to prison or factory labor and are still unable to leave Xinjiang. When a resurgence of the coronavirus hit the region this summer, much of the province was put under an extremely strict lockdown, with residents confined to their homes and forced by local authorities to drink traditional Chinese medicine.

In 2019, a Times reporter asked Zhao Lijian, then deputy chief of mission at the Chinese Embassy in Islamabad, for comment on the Pakistan-Xinjiang cases.

“We have been helping these Pakistani husbands in all possible ways,” he said in a phone call. “The Chinese Embassy is providing assistance to the families.”

Then he sent separate WhatsApp messages to the reporter, who is Pakistani, asking to not publish The Times story.

“There are negative stories against China in Western countries. They are mostly propaganda against China.… They have an agenda to oppose China,” wrote Zhao, who is now a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry. “Pls restrain yourself from doing this in Pakistan.”

Authorities in Xinjiang declined to comment. The Chinese Foreign Ministry said in response to further inquiry from The Times in August that “forces with ulterior motive have been nonstop instigating, hyping, creating rumors, and slandering” its policies in Xinjiang, but that “China lauds Pakistan for always firmly supporting the Chinese stance on the Xinjiang question. The two sides have used friendly negotiation on the basis of mutual respect to address related affairs.” Hayat, the man who lost his son at the border, is still fighting to reunite with his family. In July 2019, Hayat finally received a visa and went to Kashgar, where he stayed in a hotel because authorities would not allow him to stay at home. His wife, who had been transferred from a camp to a prison, was released that September. She suffered liver and heart problems after detention, but wouldn’t talk about what happened inside.

Hayat’s son, Arafat, was also released on condition that he sign a two-year labor contract with a Chinese telecommunications company. He was promised a salary of $250 a month — but some months he received less than $200, and others he wasn’t paid at all, Hayat said — and can only leave two days a week.

Hayat said he had visited government officials in Kashgar and asked for his son’s release from the work program, but no one responded. He returned to Pakistan in December when his visa expired and is trying to get Pakistani passports for his children so they can leave.

There were rumors in the community that other Pakistani spouses had agreed to deals with Pakistani and Chinese intelligence services, in which they promised to not speak about what happened if they could get their families back.

They became like Hayat’s wife after her release, he said: alive, but silent.

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-09-25/china-pakistan-uighurs-xinjiang-silence

#Coronavirus cases on the rise in #Pakistan - Nearly 800 new coronavirus infections, 7 deaths reported across country

 Amid a steady rise being witnessed in the coronavirus infection, another 798 people were tested positive during the past 24 hours, raising the over a number of cases in Pakistan to 309,015.

The latest figures released by the National Command and Operation Centre (NCOC) on Friday morning show that the same period also saw seven coronavirus patients dying. As a result, the death toll has now reached 6,444. Sindh continues to be the most affected province in the country, where 135,246 people have so far contracted the virus.

The similar figures for other provinces and regions are: Punjab 98,864, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) 37,525, Islamabad 16,324, Balochistan 14,838, Gilgit-Baltistan (GB) 3,608 and Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) 2,610. Meanwhile, 348 people fully recovered from the infection caused by the coronavirus during the past 24 hours, thus increasing the overall number of recoveries to 294,740.

It means the number of closed cases [deaths + recoveries] in the country now stands at 301,184. On the other hand, the active cases have again surged to 7,831 after dipping below the 6,000 level, as more people are contracting the virus in recent days, especially after the reopening of educational institutions.

Of these active cases, 544 patients are in critical condition and being treated in the intensive care units of different hospitals across the country. As far as the testing is concerned, 37,504 tests were administered in Pakistan during the past 24 hours after which the overall number increased to 3,344,019.

As many as 39,296 students were randomly tested for the novel coronavirus at 763 schools across Punjab, according to the Primary and Secondary Healthcare Department. Of them, 38,716 samples came back negative while 81 students were turned out to be positive.

Meanwhile, 26 new coronavirus cases have been detected at educational institutions of Balochistan, the health department said on Friday. With the latest detection of the Covid-19 cases, the number of total cases that have been reported at the educational institutions of Balochistan stands at 406. The health department has conducted 4,237 tests so far to detect the deadly virus in the educational institutions.

https://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2020/09/25/coronavirus-cases-on-the-rise-in-pakistan/

Nawaz Sharif has spoken. But can he change the Pakistan Army’s game?

 

AYESHA SIDDIQA 

@iamthedrifter

The duo of General Bajwa and ISI DG Faiz Hameed have managed to drag the military deeper into politics, but their hybrid government formula is not working.

As the crisp autumn sun in London peered through my window, it made me nostalgic for home in Pakistan. Could I and many others like me, for whom home has been made inaccessible by a powerful military leadership ever more eager to punish dissenting voices, hope to return, now that the former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has spoken up? Can Sharif change the political value system so that people don’t have to abandon home to save their lives?

Addressing virtually, at the All-Parties Conference held on 21 September, Nawaz Sharif, himself in exile in London, spoke bravely about the military and its agencies as the “State above the State”. Is he ready to push back a military that is well-entrenched in power politics, today? Sharif’s words voiced the concern of many thinking Pakistanis, or even the average man on the street who is not blinded to the fact that the present Imran Khan government represents civilian rule at its hollowest— the government denotes a hybrid martial law rather than a democracy. But the more important question is that can Nawaz Sharif succeed in his journey? And should this be considered a moment that carries the potential of delivering Pakistan from the clutches of the Army General Headquarters?

Sharif making a comeback

But, what’s for sure is that the months to come will become messier. With his speech, Sharif, who had kept silent for almost a year, has become relevant to Pakistan’s politics yet again. Obviously, Imran Khan and his cabal will try to push back. All the possible tricks from the bag – the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), the Federal Investigation Agency, and media gag – will be used to fight back. Not that the political indecency that we may see will be new to Pakistan’s politics.

The two primary political parties, the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and the Pakistan Muslim League – Nawaz (PML-N), had a bitter relationship that began to smoothen only after Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto signed the Charter of Democracy in 2007. The charter couldn’t really take off after Bhutto’s assassination – neither leadership was generous towards the other during the decade of 2010. The military, in fact, succeeded in playing one against the other and manipulating their respective leadership’s greed for power to its advantage. While both parties completed their tenures – the PPP from 2008-2013 and PML-N from 2013-2018 — the prime ministers could not complete their terms.

This also makes Sharif the most conscious and experienced in shenanigans and manipulation of Army General Headquarters, or the GHQ. Of all the political players, he seems to be the one with greatest clarity about how the military is deadly for the country’s democracy. He is also conscious of the fact that the GHQ looks a bit more desperate than it was, perhaps, six months ago. Some of the observers of Pakistan’s politics were conscious that some channels were initially able to air most of Nawaz Sharif’s speech, thus, the conclusion that someone in the military’s corridors didn’t want to impose utter silence. Prime Minister Imran Khan and his political groupies later pushed back by stopping any debate on Sharif’s speech in the media and painting it as part of some ‘Indian’ conspiracy. The Army chief, General Qamar Bajwa and his ISI chief Lt. General Faiz Hameed, fired a warning shot against thosedragging the Army into politics as the Army “did not have a role in politics”. Interestingly, Parliament elected in 1988 was told that the Inter-Services Intelligence, or the ISI, did not have a political wing when it had one all along.

Where the Army’s civilian planning failed

While it’s still early to conclude that the military leadership has reached a consensus regarding Imran Khan’s future, the two facts that must be reckoned with are that the Bajwa-Hameed duo have managed to drag the military even deeper into politics, and that their hybrid government formula (military ruling the State with a civilian façade) has not worked because of inherent incapacity of both the military and civilian leadership.

Imran Khan was brought forward and selected to run the government primarily to deal with civilian (only) corruption and get resources from abroad. His cancer hospital project had given the hope that he could build institutions and attract funding, especially from Pakistani diaspora abroad. Not only has Khan failed to bring in money— his own supporters abroad are not sending huge amounts to Pakistan any more— butwithin two years, external sources, in the form of China and Saudi Arabia, alsoseem to have dried up.

Of course, Khan alone is not to be blamed for the foreign policy faux pas. The Army GHQ is equally responsible for miscalculating Beijing’s patience while Islamabad practically brought the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) to a halt so that the military could negotiate its share and take control of the project. Its attempt to carve an alternative alignment with Turkey at its center, in the process exacerbating bitterness with the long-term ally, Saudi Arabia. At this juncture, even playing a central role in negotiating the American peace deal with the Taliban is not likely to deliver more dividends because Washington, now, has its own communication channels with the militants and is likely to be less dependent on Islamabad.

The other important issue pertains to rumors of discomfort within the Army over Bajwa and Faiz’s maneuvering and management of the Service in a manner that makes some within the officer cadre weary and nervous. If anything, the two Generals seem to have pushed the Army in the direction of an increasingly uncomfortable relationship with the society. The Pakistan military, which enjoys a different relationship with the society as compared to militaries in Latin and South America during the 1970s and the 1980s, is gradually moving in a direction from where its oppression has become more visible. From gagging of the media and manipulation of the judiciary to disappearance of people – increasing fear in the name of fighting a 5^th generation warfare is likely to increase the military’s vulnerability.

For Nawaz, old tactics won’t work

But the million-dollar question is: will the combined opposition or Nawaz Sharif on his own be able to fight those in power? At the minimum, it means pushing the envelope to the degree where the military realises it must abandon Imran Khan and his government. If Sharif plays a game of lesser stakes, he will only be able to remove Khan, perhaps get into power, but then accommodate a lot of what military wants. This would be like yesteryear. The maximum, of course, is changing the course of the country’s politics and ensuring a more stable transition to democracy.

Though Sharif’s speech was forceful and confrontational, it was typical as well. While criticising the current Army leadership and holding it responsible for the political mess, Nawaz Sharif was careful in conveying that he cared about Kashmir and national security. He also talked about corruption— not in his own party but that in the Imran Khan government, which in itself is a reminder of the 1990s when both PPP and the PML-N played the corruption card against each other. For a more substantive shift to democracy, the old tactics will not do.

As the Opposition parties gear up their respective support to agitate against Imran Khan with a plan for a final big get together in January 2021, Sharif will have to deal with the reality of managing his own party from abroad. As he prepares his determined daughter, Maryam, for the role of fighting the political battle on his behalf, he will also have to deal with the fact that the majority of his own party members, who would be involved in the fight, are happy to compromise.

Both, the PPP and PML-N leadership, will have to rise above the constant ‘behind-the-back’ compromise with the military as was demonstrated by passing of the anti-money laundering Bills that have a direct bearing on Pakistan and its position on the FATF list. It seems that the Army and ISI chiefs got together with leaders from both parties to insist upon supporting the Bills. It was afterwards that about 11 members from the PML-N and eight from the PPP absented from voting, which is considered highly controversial and antithetical to civil liberties. You cannot run with the hare and hunt with the hounds.

The two major political parties in Pakistan are showing the same kind of weariness as dynastic parties in the rest of South Asia. Nawaz Sharif and even Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, have miles to run to recreate their parties and develop the depth which could eventually push back the military into proverbial barracks for good. The PPP and the PML-N have been around long enough to learn that absence of structure to fight back and constant accommodation of the military in power politics may ensure transition but not bring transformation to democracy. The parties will have to negotiate with the military but a substantive conversation will mean not using the old methods and military clients in their parties. Until then, the speech was a good first one but still a long way from the real change that can bring shine to the eyes of those waiting to return home.