Expert questions Pakistan's hypocrisy on expressing solidarity with 'Muslims'

While the international community is concerned about the growing plight of Rohingyas Muslims in Myanmar, Pakistan has been adopting double standards when it comes to expressing solidarity with different communities and the 'Muslim' ethnic communities like Baloch and Uighurs in other countries, according to an expert.

Underlining the state sponsored persecution of Baloch, Sindhi, Pakhtun and other ethnic communities within Pakistan, the author, Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, has highlighted that some civilised nations are capable of accepting hypocrisy when it comes to atrocities being carried on certain people by selecting some instances of suffering and to use it as an opportunity to demonstrate that we are a part of the civilised world and condemn violence.

"The state persecution within Pakistan? No one can deny the manner in which the state has usurped the freedoms of ethnic communities who have asserted their identity, claimed resources, and demanded a democratic power-sharing arrangement. Even today military 'solutions' are employed liberally within Pakistan to address what are clearly long-standing political conflicts. And the truth is that most of the Baloch, Sindhi, Pakhtun and other ethnic communities that demand their rights and are criminalised in exchange are very much Muslim," Akhtar says in his editorial in the Dawn.

Baloch activists have been protesting for decades against extra-judicial killings by the Pakistan Army and enforced disappearances of the people of Sindh and Balochistan.

"Our sentiments vis-a-vis other disenfranchised 'Muslim' communities are similar - Kashmiris top the list, but Bosnians, Pales­tinians and Chechens are also beneficiaries of our 'Muslim' solidarity. Standing with the oppressed is an entirely laudable endeavour. But in picking some instances of suffering and remaining shamefully silent on others, we demonstrate only how much hypocrisy supposedly civilised 'nations' are capable of, Akhtar said.

Pakistan government has never raised the issue of Kurds, who have been discriminated and massacred by the Turkish governments and suffered due to Iraqi state violence.

Mocking the Pakistani nationalist narratives, the author said Islamabad has never raised the sufferings of West African communities like the Yoruba and Igbo who have been victims of state-sponsored pogroms across the territorial boundaries of Nigeria, Togo and Benin.

Pakistani governments has been maintaining silence on the issue of Sri Lankan Tamils, who are the most oppressed minority communities in the world, the military operation against the Tamil separatist movement i.e. LTTE during which many humanitarian experts alleged war crimes as because Islamabad has close ties with Sri Lanka .

Akhtar states, "Bred on standard Pakistani nationalist narratives, we justify silence over all these examples of state terror by serving up the religion card: they aren't Muslims, so why should we care?"

Pakistan, whose friendship with China is 'higher than the Himalayas, deeper than the deepest ocean' has remained completely silent on the atrocities being carried on the Uighurs , the Muslim Turkic ethnic group living in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region bordering Pakistan to the north and China seeks to transform by building CPEC.

Pakistan is not making any hue and cry at the manner in which the Chinese state has suppressed their basic freedoms, and is now steadily facilitating the influx of ethnic Han Chinese into Xinjiang to fundamentally transform the region's social mores.

The international community expressed concern over the exodus of Rohingyas Muslims from Myanmar to Bangladesh.

Aktar states,"Pakistanis have been bred on the notion that Muslims constitute an extra-territorial community of sorts; hence our solidarity with the Rohingyas and lament of their neglect by the rest of the (infidel) world."

He concludes by saying, "It would be much better to stand with the 'wretched of the earth' everywhere, and stop victimising the most vulnerable ourselves and look no further than the way we treat Christians, Hindus and other 'non-Muslims" .

-ANI