Özil is right to shine light on Uighur plight

THAT sort of languid style of his seems to get under people’s skin. It’s a fine line between insouciant genius and lazy git and people are under the impression – rightly or wrongly – that he leans more towards the latter than the former a little too often. We get that. We get how a player like that could frustrate the bejaysus out of you. At times it feels like he’s practically in a smoking-jacket and slippers as he lounges around the Emirates waiting for something to turn up that takes his fancy.

He’s become something of a lightening rod for criticism at Arsenal and took the fall for Germany’s failings at the World Cup in Russia last year. The criticisms of him from inside German football didn’t seem especially fair and possibly had a political edge to them too. Mesut Özil, you see, has forged close links with the president of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Erdogan was the best man at Özil’s wedding last year and their relationship didn’t prove especially popular with a certain section of people in Germany.

The German-Turkish identity is a tricky one and we’ll leave it to people more knowledgeable than us to shift through that, but there are legitimate enough reasons to be critical of Özil for palling around with an ultra-nationalist, authoritarian, proto-dictator like Erdogan. A man responsible for what’s been dubbed an attempted ethnic cleansing of the Kurds in northern Syria by many human rights organisations.

For that reason alone it’s understandable that people might be inclined to take what Özil says on human rights issues with a pinch of salt. That said what he said last week about the plight of the Uighur Muslims in eastern China was important and needs to be applauded and amplified. There are thought to be as many as one million Uighurs being held in concentration camps at the moment – an outrage that needs to be called out, even if by a somewhat flawed messenger given his past associations.

Maybe and hopefully it’s a sign that Özil is becoming more aware of injustices in the world. Maybe it will spark him into a reassessment of his buddy Erdogan’s regime in Ankara and next time he might speak out on behalf the Kurdish minority in his ancestral home.