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2 Beijing keeps Islamabad
honest By Tarique Niazi
China's relations with Pakistan, which are
close and warm as never before, have come under
severe strain lately from the growing militancy in
Pakistan. The Pakistani military's storming last
week of the Red Mosque (Lal Masjid) has been an
important indicator of the tenor of the
relationship.
The most recent source of
stress is the July 8 execution-style killing of
three Chinese nationals who owned a small business in
a
town near Peshawar in North-West Frontier
Province.
The killings were widely seen as
revenge for the government's crackdown on
religious militants holed up in the Red Mosque in
Islamabad. On June 23, these militants and
students from a madrassa (seminary)
associated with the mosque abducted seven Chinese
nationals, six of them women, who worked at a
massage parlor in Islamabad.
They believed
the parlor was a front for prostitution, which
they vowed to eliminate as part of their anti-vice
campaign. Outraged by the kidnapping, the Chinese
government made a visible departure from its usual
diplomatic courtesies to publicly demand that
Pakistan ensure the safety of its citizens. Hours
after the demand, all abductees were freed
unharmed.
After the latest slayings,
Beijing again went public with its condemnation of
the "violent attack". Its ambassador to Islamabad,
Luo Zhaohui, told Pakistan in a public statement
to investigate the attack, "round up the culprits,
properly handle the follow-up issues, and take
effective measures to protect the Chinese in
Pakistan". In a show of further concern, Zhaohui
rushed his deputy chief of mission to lead a team
of diplomats to Peshawar to "deal with the issue".
President General Pervez Musharraf's order to
storm the mosque was in part Pakistan's response
to China's pressure.
Chinese diplomats in
Pakistan do not characteristically voice their
concern in public, even for their own citizens'
safety. They have preferred to limit their public
utterances to the expression of "full confidence"
in Pakistani authorities and reserve plain talking
for private sessions.
It is, therefore,
ironic for observers to see Beijing get tough with
Pakistan, given a relationship that in Chinese
President Hu Jintao's words is "sweeter than
honey". The recent shift in Chinese posture is,
nevertheless, the result of gathering threats to
Chinese nationals, who are often employed in
remote and troubled parts of the country,
especially in Balochistan province and
northwestern Pakistan.
Musharraf is often
characterized as Washington's "man in Pakistan".
But Islamabad's recent actions reveal more of a
Chinese hand behind the scenes.
China
in Pakistan About 8,500 Chinese work in
Pakistan, almost three times the number of
Americans. Of these, 3,500 are engineers and
technicians assigned to a variety of
Sino-Pakistani projects. The remaining 5,000 are
engaged in private businesses.
China's
investment in Pakistan has jumped to an all-time
high of US$4 billion. Its 60 companies make up 12%
of the 500 foreign firms operating in Pakistan.
The Chinese presence has grown dramatically since
the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, which
brought Beijing and Islamabad together to build a
naval-cum-commercial port at Gwadar, a coastal
town in Balochistan.
This port alone,
where construction began in 2002, employs 500
Chinese engineers and technicians. This growing
Chinese presence forces Beijing to go beyond
diplomatic niceties to protect its human and
non-human interests in Pakistan.
And
Pakistani authorities spare little effort to
safeguard China's interests. Soon after the
abduction of the seven Chinese on June 23,
Islamabad laid siege to the Red Mosque, whose
radical clerics are believed to have inspired the
incident.
On July 2, the government
ordered 15,000 troops around the mosque compound
to flush out militants. On July 4, it arrested the
leader of the militants, Maulana Abdul Aziz, who,
in a strange twist, is believed to have close
relations with Pakistani intelligence agencies.
After apprehending the leader, government
troops moved to choking off the militants'
supplies of food, water and power. But as soon as
word of the revenge killing of three Chinese on
July 8 reached Islamabad, it created a "perfect
storm" for Musharraf. Embarrassed and enraged, he
reversed the troops' strategy and ordered them, on
July 10, to mount an all-out assault at the
mosque, in which Aziz' brother and deputy, Abdul
Rasheed Ghazi, together with scores others, was
killed.
This is not the first time that
Musharraf has done Beijing's bidding. He has
hunted China's foes, especially members of the
Uighur minority and their sympathizers among
Uzbeks and Tajiks. On October 2, 2004, his troops
killed Beijing's "Osama bin Laden", the leader of
the East Turkestan Islamic Movement of Xinjiang,
Hasan Mahsum. Xinjiang is China's only
Muslim-majority autonomous region.
Mahsum
had taken refuge in South Waziristan, one of
Pakistan's six Federally Administered Tribal
Agencies (FATA), where the Taliban have
established the "Islamic Emirate of Waziristan".
Pakistan has, however, economic and strategic
interests in securing Xinjiang, which borders its
northwestern edge, including the northernmost tip
of the FATA.
Xinjiang is linked with
Pakistan through the legendary Karakoram Highway,
which runs along the old Silk Road. Beijing is
investing about $88 billion in the development of
western China, including
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