By Zhoukoudi
Pakistan Government has recently handed over nine militants of the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) to the Chinese government. Pakistani paper, `The Nation’, quoting top officials sources stated that President Zardari also asked Interior Adviser Rahman Malik to proceed to Beijing on an emergent visit to discuss the security issues confronting the NWFP and re-assure the Chinese authorities of all assistance in preventing the ETIM militants to launch attacks from the Pakistan soil.
Such quick action to pick up and hand over the militants and the assurances of all out efforts at the highest level was a response to the grave concerns voiced by the Chinese authorities to visiting Pakistani leaders.
Meng Jianjhu, Chinese Minister for Public Security, personally complained to President Zardari in Shanghai in February this year about ETIM and reports that it was plotting incursions into China from Pakistan’s troubled tribal areas. A month later in March, China despatched a Special Envoy to Islamabad to highlight new threats posed by Turkistani militants and to demand immediate action.
A video message, posted on internet forums on January 20 this year by Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) warned that they “….are proceeding along the jihad path in order to rescue our oppressed brothers in East Turkistan from the hands of the Communists. We are plotting for the Chinese to suffer the torture of Allah or else by our hands”.
Abdullah Mansur, a TIP Commander, stated in the message, “fighting the atheist Communists is the obligation of every Muslim’.
A series of incidents last year, on the eve of Olympic games in Beijing, unnerved the Chinese to take strong measures to suppress any kind of protests and intensify pressure on the Pakistan government to arrest and hand over the Turkistani militants, who are closely aligned with the Taliban and Al-Qaida. In January last year, a Uighur sleeper cell was unearthed in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uighurs Autonomous Region (XUAR). This was followed by an aborted attempt by three Uighurs, one of them a woman, to blow up a civil aviation plane flying from Urumqi to Beijing on March 7 last year. The attempt, however, was thwarted by security guards on board the plane.
Over 1000 Uighurs, including a large number of women, held a demonstration against the Chinese authorities at Khotan in the Xinjiang province on March 23 last year. The demonstration was in protest against the alleged death, in custody, of Mutallip Hajim, a popular philanthropist, who had been arrested on charge of belonging to the sleeper cell. The women were also protesting against a long standing order banning women from wearing scarves over their head. They defiantly covered their heads with scarves. The local authorities, who had initially denied reports of the demonstration, later admitted that a small number of elements tried to incite splittism.
NWFP-KIDNAPPINGS
Two Chinese Engineers were kidnapped in the NWFP on August 21 last year by the Taliban and Uighur militants. While one of them was escaped, the freedom of the other was bought by tapping the contacts of local contractors of Chinese telecommunication companies operating in the area.
The militant-drug dealer nexus is also evident as many Pakistani networks were exposed and arrested for involvement in the drug trade in the Xinjiang province. For instance, on July 25 last year, Xinjiang police arrested 40 foreign suspects, many of them Pakistanis. In another incident the next day (July 26, 2008), customs officials reportedly cracked a transnational drug trafficking network. Two Pakistani nationals were arrested the operation.
Pakistan and China have signed three agreements on fighting militancy and extremism, the latest being the one signed directly with the provincial government of the NWFP. It is stated that the Uighurs’s movement enjoyed support of a Pakistani political and religious party.
For a while the Chinese authorities have been putting pressure on Pakistan for concerted measures against the Uighurs militants. ‘Eliminate their hideouts (in the NWFP) – has been the constant refrain from Beijing to Islamabad.
What ever be the official Pak view, not many Pak experts share the Beijing perception. They aver that much of the problem is only a creation of China, which is now boomeranging on itself.
Cyril Almeida, writing in The Dawn on April 30, 2009 stated, “The Soviet presence in Afghanistan in the 1980s caused alarm in China, a Communist rival, and the Chinese government was more than happy to facilitate Uighurs wanting to join the Afghan jihad. After the war ended, the Uighurs predictably stuck around in Pakistan’s madrassas and Afghan militant camps, eventually joining the Taliban and becoming yet another ingredient in Pakistan’s toxic brew of militancy.”
Pakistani leaders fully cooperated whenever they were called upon to do the Chinese bidding on the Uighurs. Former President Pervez Musharraf, while on a visit to China on April 10 last year, readily agreed to address local Muslims in Urumqi and appeal to them to co-operate with the local authorities. Similarly, many other Pakistani leaders obliged the Chinese requests, keen on maintaining good relations with ‘the all weather friend’.
Says Ziad Haider, a research analyst at the Henry L. Stimson Centre in the US, ‘Pakistan has maintained a sympathetic, yet never openly friendly, posture towards the Uighurs. They have closed Uighur settlements, arrested and deported Uighurs and killed many alleged Uighur militants’.
For the Pakistan army considers the Al Qaida, Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammad and Harkat-ul-Mujahideen as `strategic allies’ for its agenda in India’s Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), and Afghanistan. Other foreign terrorists are disposable commodities on demand and when it suits the needs of Pak army.
Put differently, Pakistan has neatly compartmentalised its militants into two categories – useful and disposable to meet the foreign policy prescriptions vis-à-vis China, India and Afghanistan. What a way to eliminate terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan.
