During the past four years, the Chinese Communist Party has undertaken a brutal campaign of repression targeting the Muslim population of its northwestern Xinjiang province. Yet the world’s Muslim countries, who have so often rallied to condemn Israel’s imagined crimes against Palestinians, or the policies of the U.S.-led War on Terror, or even criticism of Islam in Western Europe, have been remarkable silent about this very real, and very cruel, wave of persecution. Ilan Berman explains why:
Over the past several years, as part of the signature foreign-policy initiative known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Beijing has made massive investments throughout the Middle East, Africa, and Asia in everything from infrastructure to telecommunications. In the process, it has succeeded in buying the silence of Muslim states regarding how it treats their co-religionists.
Examples of this passivity abound. Take Turkey, where President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s prior condemnation of China’s domestic conduct petered out after China’s Central Bank offered a $1 billion bailout to stabilize the country’s ailing economy last summer. Or Saudi Arabia, [which like Turkey positions itself as a leader of the Sunni world], where a slew of recent deals made China a key partner in the country’s “Vision 2030” development plan, turning the House of Saud into an apologist for Beijing in the process. And in Pakistan, the government of Prime Minister Imran Khan has repeatedly refused to . . . criticize China’s treatment of the Uighurs because of past assistance from Beijing.
All this compliance was showcased in a July 2019 letter to the United Nations in which no fewer than 37 nations (more than a third of them majority Muslim) officially threw their support behind China’s Xinjiang policy.
Read more on The Diplomat: https://thediplomat.com/2020/07/china-outmaneuvers-the-muslim-world/