{"id":56754,"date":"2018-03-17T12:51:21","date_gmt":"2018-03-17T07:51:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tns.world\/?p=56754"},"modified":"2018-03-17T12:51:21","modified_gmt":"2018-03-17T07:51:21","slug":"chinese-crackdown-separates-pakistani-husbands-from-uighur-wives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tns.world\/?p=56754","title":{"rendered":"Chinese crackdown separates Pakistani husbands from Uighur wives"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0<\/strong>Islamabad\/Gilgit March 17 (TNS): <\/strong>\u201cWhere is Mama?\u201d screams Ahmed\u2019s 10-year-old daughter in a WeChat message he can hardly bear to replay.<\/p>\n

Like many traders in Pakistan\u2019s northernmost region of Gilgit-Baltistan, Ahmed fell in love with a Chinese woman on a work trip across the border. And like dozens of others, he has now been forcibly separated from the woman he married \u2013 and the child they had together \u2013 for months.<\/p>\n

Last week lawmakers in Gilgit-Baltistan demanded that authorities in China\u2019s Xinjiang province immediately release from detention at least 50 Chinese women married to Pakistani men, some of whom have been held for a year on vague charges of extremism.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is absurd. We are well-off people and my wife is a housewife,\u201d Ahmed told the Guardian, on condition of not publishing his real name. \u201cNow our life is destroyed.\u201d<\/p>\n

He last heard from his spouse, who belongs to China\u2019s Uighur Muslim minority, on 22 December. He worries she is not receiving the medicine she needs to treat her epilepsy. The last words she said to him were \u201cI miss you. We need your care now.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Chinese government often professes a bond \u201cdeeper than the deepest ocean, sweeter than honey\u201d with its old ally\u00a0Pakistan, and construction is under way on the China-Pakistan economic corridor (CPEC), a \u00a344bn, 1,990-mile trade route from Xinjiang through Gilgit-Baltistan to Pakistan\u2019s southern coast.<\/p>\n

But Beijing is wary of unrest in its Muslim population. After the 2014 murder of 29 people by knife-wielding terrorists in a train station, Uighur men in Xinjiang are no longer allowed to have long beards and parents cannot call their children Muhammad. According to a report by Radio Free Asia, a US-funded news group, at least 120,000 Uighurs have been placed in squalid \u201cre-education\u201d camps in the province.<\/p>\n

The men from Gilgit-Baltistan say their wives are being held in these centres. \u201cOfficials say my wife is at school, that she is learning Chinese and Chinese law,\u201d Ahmed told the Guardian. \u201cBut school is morning you go, evening you come home. You cannot call school where a person is detained and not coming home for many months.\u201d That, he said, was prison.<\/p>\n

Xinjiang authorities are not renewing the visas of Pakistani husbands, forcing them to leave their children behind in the province. One told local media that, despite having secured a visa from the Chinese embassy in Islamabad permitting him to re-enter the country, he was blocked at the border.<\/p>\n

\u201cI begged them to let me enter,\u201d he said. \u201cMy wife, my two-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter were there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Separated from both her parents, Ahmed\u2019s daughter, who is in the care of her Chinese grandparents, has started to act \u201cpsychotically\u201d, throwing tantrums and crying all the time, he said. Once every 15 days his wife is permitted a five-minute call with their daughter \u2013 something not all the families in his situation are lucky enough to receive.<\/p>\n

According to Adrian Zenz, of the European School of Culture and Theology, the roundup has little to do with a genuine analysis of the threat posed by the women. Under the control of Chen Quanguo, a hardline leader appointed in 2016, the Xinjiang government has started to detain \u201canybody travelling internationally who is a Muslim\u201d, with particular focus on a list of 26 countries, including Pakistan.<\/p>\n

Whether the women would be released depended on the \u201cguts of the Pakistan government\u201d, he said. Other countries with economic ties to\u00a0China\u00a0have kept quiet.<\/p>\n

A member of the Gilgit-Baltistan assembly, Javed Hussain, told the Guardian that the protracted detentions were generating anger in the community. \u201cWe have heard nothing from the federal government since we passed a resolution demanding they take action,\u201d he said, pushing for \u201cconcrete steps\u201d to follow quickly.<\/p>\n

Yet silence could also come at a cost. If the government does not soon secure the release of their spouses, Ahmed said, the affected husbands would call for widespread protests, even shutting down the border and threatening CPEC, which is considered vital for Pakistan\u2019s future prosperity.<\/p>\n

The religious community would then \u201cconsider it a matter of honour\u201d to get their wives back, he said. TNS\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0Islamabad\/Gilgit March 17 (TNS): \u201cWhere is Mama?\u201d screams Ahmed\u2019s 10-year-old daughter in a WeChat message he can hardly bear to replay. Like many traders in Pakistan\u2019s northernmost region of Gilgit-Baltistan, Ahmed fell in love with a Chinese woman on a work trip across the border. And like dozens of others, he has now been forcibly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":56755,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-islamabad","category-national"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56754"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56754\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56756,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56754\/revisions\/56756"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/56755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}