Silence of Muslim states allowing Uighurs to suffer in China: British journalist

Highlighting the hypocrisy of Muslims-majority states like Pakistan for their silence over atrocities committed by Chinese Communist Party on Uighurs, British Journalist Nice Cohen said that Muslims in China suffer in silence because the Muslim majority countries are tightlipped.

In an opinion piece in Guardian, Cohen writes China is turning criticism of its disastrous record on incubating the Covid-19 virus and its atrocities against its Muslim minorities into crimes. "The people who should be shouting the loudest are bowing their heads in reverential silence," he writes.

"Muslims suffer in silence is that the Muslim-majority countries that raged against Rushdie, Jyllands-Posten and Charlie Hebdo have decided to stay silent. They use the idea of Muslim solidarity only when it suits them," he exclaims.

The Chinese Communist Party is reverting to type, and reviving the totalitarian fear of the Mao era, the journalist says.

To bring down numbers of the largely Muslim Uighurs of Xinjiang, the China scholar Adrian Zenz reports, the Communists are forcing women to be sterilised or fitted with contraceptive devices. If they resist, the state sends them to join the one million Uighur people and other Muslim minorities detained in what the state defines as "re-education" camps.

Cohen says that reporters are free to cover China's suppression of democracy in Hong Kong, for the time being at any rate, but cannot get near Xinjiang without taking extraordinary risks. "With no footage of their suffering, millions can suffer unnoticed in the dark," he said.

"But the main reasons why Muslims suffer in silence is that the Muslim-majority countries that raged against Rushdie, Jyllands-Posten and Charlie Hebdo have decided to stay silent. They use the idea of Muslim solidarity only when it suits them," he writes in the article.

Cohen highlighted the hypocrisy of Muslim majority nation by cited the example of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria and other Muslim-majority states that pose as defenders of the Muslim faith but helped to block a western motion at the United Nations calling for China to allow "independent international observers" into the Xinjiang region in July 2019.

Iran issues occasional criticisms but wants Chinese support in its struggle against the Trump administration and so keeps its complaints coded.

"Their hypocrisy is almost funny, if you take your humour black. Iran, Egypt, Syria and dozens of other countries that could not tolerate a magical realist novel can live with the mass sterilisation of Muslim women. They will give concentration camps a conniving wink of approval, but draw the line at cartoons in a Dsh newspaper," he says.

Cohen believes that many have been bought off. "China is now a more active and influential voice at the United Nations because so many countries are benefiting from billions of dollars in Chinese investments through its "Belt and Road" infrastructure programme," he points out.

( With inputs from ANI )