Hina in China

Hours before Ma Zhauxu, the Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, declared Pakistan clear of any role in the Kashgar terrorist attacks early last month, Beijing had officially asked Islamabad to ignore the much ballyhooed Xinjiang official's comment blaming the carnage on terrorists trained in Pakistan.
But the Pakistan government felt that was not enough to clear the fog of suspicion and mistrust that forces perennially hostile to Pak-China friendship were trying to generate in the wake of that comment. So not only did the Foreign Office issue a strongly worded statement ruling out the possibility of Pakistani soil being used by the miscreants who carried out the Kashgar attacks, but ISI chief Lt.Gen Ahmad Shujha Pasha was dispatched to Beijing to clear up any misunderstanding over the issue. Now that President Asif Ali Zardari would be visiting Urumqi, capital of Xingjian, next week to attend the China-Eurasia trade fair, it was thought prudent that Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar should go to Beijing to refresh Pakistan's commitment of enhanced anti-terror co-operation.
Foreign Minister Hina's visit was timely in that the question whether the Kashgar attacks were the handiwork of the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) separatists, did come up at the press conference after her meetings with the Chinese officials. Aware of the fact that in the early 1990s when the then president, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, was in Beijing as the chief guest at the Asian Games, the miscreants had created trouble in that region in a plot to undermine the importance of that visit, this time the Pakistani authorities were rightly circumspect. She assertively ruled out any rift between Islamabad and Beijing over fighting the terrorists, while the embassy reportedly kept the Indian journalists out of the media event to secure her statement from misreporting - as was the case with the Kashgar official's remark which she insisted was "misconstrued".
Ever since Xingjian was taken over by Communist China, its fuller assimilation into the Chinese mainstream has been Beijing's lingering concern. Not only are the Uighurs religiously and racially a different stock, they nurture the dream of a separate homeland. And that precedes in time by many decades, the emergence of the global jihad in the wake of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. So the unrest that occasionally explodes into riots in various cities of Xingjian is largely a manifestation of the cultural deficit that exists between the Uighurs and the incoming Hans, and Beijing is quite conscious of this fact. No surprise then following the bloody riots in Urumqi in 2009, in which some 200 were killed, the Chinese government sanctioned a five billion dollars modernisation-cum-development package for the Xingjian province, as well as created a Special Economic Zone for Kashgar on the pattern of Shenzen, near Hong Kong.
In fact, it is this massive drive for fuller integration of this region into the Chinese mainland politics and economy that is causing frustration to quarters who have been angling for quite some time to foment trouble in this region by supporting the separatist forces. If these quarters - in pursuance of their objective to raise a two-front military machine as India's ex-army chief Deepak Kapoor wanted or the Pentagon's aversion of China planting its 'footprints in Indian Ocean' (read Gwadar seaport) - can vigorously espouse the cause of the Tibetan exiles, why wouldn't they support the separatist elements in Xingjian? They are out on a much more serious and equally dubious game plan in the strategically located and mineral-rich Chinese territory. The slogan that the miscreants are Pakistan-based jihadists is absolutely hollow - for whatever number of them had come here were eliminated immediately. Not only the ETIM chief Hasan Masum was killed some eight years ago, the number two, Abdul Haq Turkistani, was eliminated last year; in addition to the capture and extradition of some 30 followers by the Pakistan security outfits. But that doesn't mean that the threat to Pak-China relationship has disappeared; it remains there given that the region appears to be fast emerging as the main battlefield of another Great Game, asking both Islamabad and Beijing to be perpetually vigilant.