July 13, 2009
 

China's national newspaper took a while, didn't it?

A week ago, fierce riots erupted in Urumqi (or Urumchi or however you want to pronounce it), forcing Hu Jintao to return home from the G8 summit in Italy. Perhaps the President wasn't too sure if the various administrative, governance, police & riot control mechanisms would work. Or maybe he just wanted to send a strong message across ...

In any case, I kept monitoring "The Hindu"'s editorial section for any mention of the rioting, including the events that led to the rioting involving Uighurs and Han Chinese, the Chinese government's response, etc. But of course, there was no word. Maybe the text of the editorial had been sent to the Chinese government for approval and they were too busy dealing with the problem on hand - just as it happened in March 2008 when there was rioting in Tibet.

Then again, I really didn't expect a mouthpiece to do much better than publish [perhaps verbatim] what the Chinese Embassy's Press Officer had to say.

Interestingly enough, there is a Pakistani angle to this as well. The Xinjiang province (of which Urumqi is the capital) borders Afghanistan & Pakistan. Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and other Pakistan-based terror organizations have provided training to Uyghur organizations which have been opposing the Chinese government's policies in Xinjiang, including the mass influx of Han Chinese in the area. Further, Pakistan's Dawn newspaper reported that in 2001, thousands of Uighurs were trained and recruited by the Lashkar-e-Toiba and Hizb-ul-Mujahideen in order to fight in Kashmir.

China has, for a while now, been stepping up pressure on Pakistan to do something about the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement and Eastern Turkestan Liberation Organization and had in fact sent Pakistan a list of terrorists from those organizations that it wanted to be investigated & prosecuted.

Perhaps some Pakistani government officer, who saw the words 'list', 'investigate', 'prosecute' & 'terrorism', thought that this was in fact India's list of 20, and immediately forwarded it to the department head with the note 'Most urgent' where it sat collecting dust until Asif Ali Zardari got a polite call from Hu Jintao last week.

Labels: china, pakistan, riots, terrorism, the hindu, uighurs, urumqi, xinjiang