China’s treatment of Muslims ‘completely different’ from western media portrayal — PM Khan

ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Imran Khan has said reports by the United States and western media about the treatment of Muslims in the far western Chinese region of Xinjiang presented a “completely different” picture than what had been observed by Islamabad’s envoy in Beijing during a visit.
The prime minister was responding to a question during a CNN interview, broadcast on Sunday, about China’s treatment of its Muslim minority in Xinjiang where rights groups accuse Beijing of widescale abuses against Uyghurs and other minority groups, including torture, forced labor and detention of 1 million people in internment camps.
China calls the camps re-education and training facilities, denies abuses, and says it is combating religious extremism.
Last month, the United Nations’ human rights chief said she was talking with China for a potentially imminent trip to Xinjiang region in what could provide rare close-up foreign scrutiny of the abuse accusations.
The issue has soured relations between Beijing and the West, bringing genocide accusations from Washington and a diplomatic boycott of the ongoing. Winter Games. China has denounced an international smear campaign.
“Two sides are completely different, what China is saying is completely different to what US is saying or western media is saying,” Khan told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria. “That’s why we asked our ambassador [In China] to give us his opinion and it not what is appearing in western media.”
“We had our Ambassador Moinul Haque in China, who went to Xinjiang, and according to his observations, the picture is not what has been portrayed in western media,” Khan added.
The prime minister also wondered why there was no similar “indignation” in western media about rights violations in Indian-administered Kashmir.
Kashmir is divided between India and Pakistan, with both countries claiming the territory in full and ruling it in part. The two nuclear-armed neighbors have fought two wars over the territory. More than 50,000 people have died in a revolt that erupted in 1989, government figures show. Human rights and separatists put the toll at double.
India has deployed tens of thousands of police and soldiers to keep the peace in the disputed Muslim-majority region after revoking its constitutional autonomy in 2019 to weld the region more tightly to the country.