China offers deal with Taliban in power grab
BEIJING: China has offered to help the Taliban rebuild Afghanistan in exchange for their co-operation in eliminating terrorist groups it says are stoking unrest among its Muslim Uighur population.
Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban’s deputy prime minister and the man who led the negotiations with the US to end the 20-year war, met Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, for talks in Qatar this week.
He attempted to assure him that the security situation in Afghanistan was “under control” despite increasing attacks from the terror group Islamic State’s affiliate Isis-K.
In response, Mr Wang pledged that China would help to “rebuild the country”, and called for US President Joe Biden to lift sanctions against Afghanistan. After the Taliban seized power, more than $US9bn ($12bn) in Afghan central bank reserves held in the US was frozen.
Beijing is keen to expand its influence in the unstable region, and the meeting is the clearest indication yet of the role in Afghanistan China wants to play following the withdrawal of NATO troops.
Mr Wang told Mr Baradar Afghanistan was “facing a historic opportunity to achieve reconciliation and advance national reconstruction”. But he added that the Taliban had to combat “terrorist threats” and crack down on the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, which he claimed threatened “China’s national security”.
Beijing has long said that the group, associated with a small number of Uighur Muslims who travelled to Afghanistan in 1998, is behind the supposed terrorist threat used as justification for a brutal crackdown in northwestern Xinjiang province.
It is unclear whether the organisation still exists in any operational form, despite Beijing’s push to cast it as the force behind unrest in its Muslim-majority province.
The US has branded China’s actions in Xinjiang genocide, a judgment that is supported by several Western nations, including Britain.
More than a million mostly ethnic Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang have been detained and subjected to forced sterilisation, “re-education” and torture, or forced to perform slave labour, according to international observers.
Human rights organisations have accused Muslim countries of an orchestrated silence on the abuses in deference to China.