As China takes advantage of the souring in Pakistan's relationship with the US, Islamabad seems ready to please China at any cost — including Pakistan's long-term interests. Anwar Hashmi reports.
Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari recently celebrated Eid-ul-Fitr in China's Muslim majority province Xinjiang, where the violence in July-August was blamed on training camps in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. During his stay in China he said it was his dream that the peoples of China and Pakistan could travel to each other's countries without passports. A few months earlier he had called China his 'second home'.
Mr Zardari went on to say his Eid prayers in a mosque in Xinjiang's capital city of Urumqi, which was once the scene of Muslim rebel terror. He took with him his son Bilawal, who is the chairperson of the ruling Pakistan People's Party (PPP), daughter Asifa, so-called Prime Minister of 'Azad' Kashmir Choudhary Abdul Majid, and Syed Mehdi Shah, whom Pakistan calls the Chief Minister of Gilgit-Baltistan, which is called a province despite having no constitutional status. China was pleased to welcome the so-called Prime Minister and Chief Minister of what it itself calls a disputed region. But China's duplicity is not the subject of this article. The subject is the possibility of China exploiting the US-Pak divorce, and Pakistan's rulers rubbing out the border between Xinjiang and Gilgit-Baltistan and other parts of occupied Kashmir and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. The present government, in order to curry favour with anti-US fundamentalists, seems to go to any extent to oblige China, ignoring Pakistan's long-term interests and its place in the world as an independent country. Before Pakistan's Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar's visit to Beijing, its ambassador Masud Khan revealed his country's future plans re relations with China. He told Urdu BBC that China and Pakistan were jointly fighting terrorism. (It is the Muslims of Xinjiang that China calls terrorists.) Mr Khan said China wanted to bring prosperity to Xinjiang, the prosperity which would ultimately benefit Gilgit-Baltistan, Punjab and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. He said the soil of Pakistan would work as a bridge for China down to the Gwadar Port for trade. Mr Zardari was confirming this plan when he told a Chinese TV Channel in Beijing that his country wanted to be a connecting route for crude oil supply to China from across the world. 'We are looking at energy coming to China through us,' he said. China is concentrating on development activities in Xinjiang to win over local Muslims. It is going to start the first Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in the west of Kashgar. Mr Zardari was in Xinjiang apparently for two reasons: one, to assure the Chinese leaders that the ISI was not holding training camps for the East Turkistan Islamic movement (ETIM); and two, to participate in the first China-Eurasia Exhibition, which was held from September 1-2 and was supposedly aimed at enhancing trade between China and Pakistan. It is not known if Mr Zardari's visit to Urumqi helped to lessen the Xinjiang Muslims' alienation from Beijing. In fact development programmes are not the answer to their problems. On the contrary, they resent development because it is seen as a trick to bring more Han Chinese to Xinjiang, thus making the Muslims Red Indians in their own land. The Muslim population has been more than halved in the name of development, which has caused an influx of Han Chinese to Xinjiang — the real beneficiaries of this development. It is like the Baluch nationalists, who reject the government's development programmes because they are meant to drown their resentment against the denial of their rights. In the case of Xinjiang, the Chinese Government has ruthlessly employed the weapon of Han Chinese migration to the Uyghur Muslims' movement for liberation from China, which annexed Xinjiang to its territory in 1949. The movement became more radicalised during the 1980s' Afghan war, called a jihad by the US, which was then promoting militant jihadi culture in Pakistan. Uyghur Muslims took part in this jihad and, as a result, became more inspired to get rid of Chinese control over their land. It was after this that the East Turkestan Islamic Movement was launched in the 1990s to spearhead the liberation movement. The Pakistani rulers' denials notwithstanding, the people of Gilgit-Baltistan say that ETIM activists receive their training there. China, therefore, is equally concerned about Gilgit-Baltistan. It has plans to upgrade the Karakoram Highway, a project that will cost about $500 million. China will build the 165-km Jaglot-Skardu and 135-km Thalest-Sazin roads in Gilgit-Baltistan. The two roads will cost approximately Rs. 45 billion, and China will bear 85 per cent of the total cost while Pakistan will pay the remaining 15 per cent. China is also helping Pakistan build 17 mega projects in the energy sector in Gilgit-Baltistan and 'Azad' Kashmir, where it is raising the Mangla Dam. Also, there is a plan to construct a rail link with Pakistan. They say wolves in Mongolia hide and patiently watch deer grazing. Once they are too full to run fast, the wolves pounce on them. India has a somewhat similar experience with China. Drugged by Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai, India never suspected that China had aggressive designs against it. Now Pakistan is high on the 'all weather friendship' drug. However, in the late 1950s and the early 1960s, Gen Ayub Khan, who had snatched political power in 1958, was suspicious about China. It was for this reason that he proposed a Joint Defence pact to then Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. It was the time when India, with missionary zeal, was advocating non-alignment and it considered China its best friend. Mr Nehru cold-shouldered the proposal by asking: defence pact against whom? Gen Ayub could not make so bold as to name China. Thus ended Gen Ayub's proposal and soon (1963) Pakistan and China tied a knot of 'all weather friendship' against India in which Pakistan gave away a very large chunk of the fertile Hunza Valley area in Gilgit-Baltistan (later renamed Aksai Chin) as a dowry to China. Dr Satyanarayan Sinha wrote a book in 1961 entitled The Chinese Aggression — A First-Hand Account from Central Asia, Tibet and the High Himalayas. The author, while in the Soviet Union, talked to some informed Russians about China. One of them was Apresoff, who served as the Soviet Union's Consul-General in Urumqi from 1953 to 1957. He learnt in 1957 that the Chinese were getting Soviet military supplies of eight to ten divisions in the deserts of Sinkiang (now Xinjiang). The Kremlin could see in China's demand for so many weapons a clear picture of its designs. These designs, he said, were to capture the fertile northern territories of India. China's lifeline in Sinkiang was coming to an abrupt end in the deserts of the Takla Makan. In the long run, it was impossible to maintain this position. The Chinese plan was to connect that military link of Sinkiang through the fertile Himalayas regions to gain new vigour and then to connect it further with the south-east part of the country on the way back to Peking. These designs, said Apresoff, were frustrated by the abrupt stoppage of Soviet military supplies to China in March 1960, and by revolts by Sinkiangese nationalists who were instigated and supported by Russian weapons. The Soviets had not accepted Chinese control over Xinjiang, although to the outside world, the Soviet Union and China were two great Communist comrades who always denied any rift between them. The above quotation from The Chinese Aggression illustrates China's long-term plans to overrun fertile Gilgit-Baltistan. Now is the best time for this sweet invasion, when Pakistan is in its weakest state — it has all but isolated itself from the world because of its connections with terrorism and its alienation from the United States, whose dollars kept Pakistan's economy afloat. China certainly cannot replace the US in the life of Pakistan. The US did not exploit Pakistan's natural resources, yet this is precisely China's main interest in Pakistan — and, of course, its hostility towards India.