Pakistani men claim wives held in camps for Muslims
ISLAMABAD — The last time Chaudhry Javed Atta saw his wife was over a year ago — the Pakistani trader in dried and fresh produce was leaving their home in northwestern China’s heavily Muslim Xinjiang region to go back to his country to renew his visa.
He remembers the last thing she told him: “As soon as you leave, they will take me to the camp and I will not come back.”
That was August 2017. By then, Atta and Amina Manaji, from the Muslim ethnic Uighur group native to Xinjiang, had been married for 14 years.
Atta is one of scores of Pakistani businessmen — and he says there are more than 200 — whose spouses have disappeared, taken to what Chinese authorities tell them are education centers.
Beijing has been accused of interning members of its Muslim population — by some reports as many as 1 million — to “re-educate” them away from their faith. It is seen as a response to riots and violent attacks that the government blamed on separatists. Ethnic Uighurs and Kazakhs in China have said that ostensibly innocuous acts such as praying regularly, viewing a foreign website or taking phone calls from relatives abroad could land one in a camp.
“They call them schools, but they are prisons,” Atta said. “They can’t leave.”
Pakistanis often rally loudly in defense of Islam and Muslims whenever they are perceived offended around the world — most recently over cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad. In 1989, protests spread from Pakistan elsewhere, leading to the fatwa by Iran’s Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini against author Salman Rushdie for his depiction of Islam in his book Satanic Verses.
But political and economic factors, including concerns about losing out on vast Chinese investments, have kept Pakistan and other Muslim countries silent about the plight in China of fellow Muslims, the Uighurs.
“Cold, hard interests will always carry the day” in international relations, said Michael Kugelman, deputy director of the Asia Program at the Washington-based Wilson Center. “The Muslim world’s deafening silence about China’s treatment of Muslims can be attributed to its strong interest in maintaining close relations with the world’s next superpower.”
For Atta, it’s not just the separation from his wife.
He has also had to leave their two sons, who are 5 and 7 years old and whose passports were confiscated by the Chinese government, in the care of his wife’s family. Otherwise, he said, the authorities would have put them in an orphanage. The Associated Press has previously reported that the government is placing the children of detainees and exiles into dozens of orphanages across Xinjiang.