Protecting Militants: China Blocks UN Listing Of
Pakistani As Globally Designated Terrorist
China, at the behest of Pakistan,
has prevented the United Nations
from listing a prominent Pakistani militant as a globally designated terrorist.
China’s protection of Masood Azhar, who is believed to have close ties to
Pakistani intelligence and the military, raises questions about the sincerity
of a Pakistani crackdown on militants as well as China’s willingness to use its
influence to persuade Pakistan to put an end to the use of militants as
proxies.
The United States, Britain, France
and India have long wanted the United Nations Security Council Sanctions
Committee to designate Mr. Azhar on the grounds that his organization,
Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), has already been proscribed by Pakistan as well as the
international body.
Mr. Azhar, a fighter in the
anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan and an Islamic scholar who graduated from a
Deobandi madrassah, Darul Uloom Islamia Binori Town in Karachi, the alma mater
of numerous Pakistani militants, is believed to have been responsible for an
attack last year on India’s Pathankot Air Force Station. The militants, dressed
in Indian military uniforms fought a 14-hour battle against Indian security
forces that only ended when the last attacker was killed. Mr. Azhar was briefly
detained after the attack and has since gone underground.
Mr. Azhar, who was freed from Indian
prison in 1999 in exchange for the release of passengers of a hijacked Indian
Airlines flight, is also believed to be responsible for an attack in 2001 on
the Indian parliament in New Delhi that brought Pakistan and India to the brink
of war.
JeM despite being banned continues
to publicly raise funds and recruit fighters in mosques. Indian journalist Praveen Swami quoted
Mufti Abdul Rauf Asghar, Mr. Azhar’s elder brother, as telling worshippers
gathered in a mosque in Punjab in late January to commemorate a militant who
had been killed in India: “Islam is a world power and cannot be destroyed.
Whoever tries to destroy it will be destroyed himself. Jihad is the most
important obligation of our faith.”
Pakistani indulgence of JeM and
Chinese connivance in preventing Mr. Azhar, a portly bespectacled son of a
Bahawalpur religious studies teacher and author of a four-volume treatise on jihad
as well as books with titles like Forty Diseases of the Jews, from being
designated has raised eyebrows in both Pakistani and Chinese policy circles.
Opening a window on apparent
differences between civilian and military branches of government, Pakistani
Foreign Minister Aizaz Chaudhry last year reportedly warned a gathering of political,
military and intelligence leaders that Pakistan risked international isolation
if it failed to crack down on militant groups. Mr. Chaudhry noted that
Pakistan’s closest ally, China with its massive $46 billion investment in
Pakistani infrastructure as part of its One Belt, One Road initiative, was
increasingly questioning the wisdom of protecting Mr. Azhar at Pakistan’s
behest.
Chinese vice foreign minister Li
Baodong last year defended his country’s repeated shielding of Mr. Azhar by
suggesting that attempts to designate the JeM amounted to using
counter-terrorism for political goals. “China is opposed to all forms of
terrorism. There should be no double standards on counter-terrorism. Nor should
one pursue own political gains in the name of counter-terrorism,” Mr. Li said.
Chinese policy analysts with close
government ties squirm when asked about China’s repeated veto of efforts to
designate Mr. Azhar. The analysts suggest that the Pakistani military and
intelligence’s use of proxies like Mr. Azhar in their dispute with India over
Kashmir has sparked debate about the wisdom of sinking $46 billion into
Pakistan.
China’s hopes that the investment in
infrastructure would persuade the Pakistani military and intelligence to
seriously back away from using militant proxies have so far remain unfulfilled.
The investment is part of China’s
larger effort to link Eurasia to China through infrastructure. It expects that
the linkage will spur economic development both in Pakistan and China’s
troubled north-western province of Xinjiang where China’s harsh measures against
the cultural practices of the Uighurs have sought to pre-empt Islamist
violence.
Responding to the civilian
government’s effort to crackdown on Jaish-e-Mohammad, including last year’s
freezing of its accounts by the State Bank of Pakistan, Mr. Azhar defended the
group’s contribution to Pakistan’s defence of Kashmir as well as the jihadist
movement at large.
“When we entered the tent of the
jihadist movement. it had no branch in Kashmir, nor was there lightning in Iraq
or Syria. There were just two fronts, in Afghanistan and Palestine, one of them
active and one of them shut. We have watched as the jihad we befriended grew
from a glowing ember into the sun; from a small spring into a river, and now,
as it is about to become a great ocean,” Mr. Azhar wrote in the group’s
magazine.
A BBC
investigative documentary last year traced jihadist thinking in
Britain to a month-long visit to Britain in 1993 by Mr. Azhar, who at the time
headed Pakistani militant group Harakat ul Mujahideen.
Mr. Azhar gave 40 lectures during
his fund-raising and recruitment tour and was feted by Islamic scholars from
Britain’s largest mosque network. More and more scholars joined his entourage
as he toured the country before moving on to Saudi Arabia. A passionate and
emotive speaker, women reportedly took off their jewellery and
handed it to Azhar after listening to his speeches.
“It was Azhar, a Pakistani cleric,
who was the first to spread the seeds of modern jihadist militancy in Britain –
and it was through South Asian mosques belonging to the Deobandi movement that
he did it,” says BBC reporter Innes Bowen.
Indian analysts believe that
shielding Mr. Azhar serves China’s purpose of keeping India preoccupied with
the threat of political violence. China’s is moreover grateful for successful
Pakistani efforts to stop the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (IOC) that
groups 57 Muslim nations from criticizing Chinese policy in Xinjiang. Finally,
the analysts say, shielding Mr. Azhar constitutes retaliation for India’s
hosting of the Dalai Lama.
In defending Mr. Azhar with one eye
on India, China is walking a fine line that threatens to undermine its
massively funded policy objectives in Pakistan, a country that for years has
been reeling from militancy that has fuelled sectarianism at home and created
militant groups that at times have turned on their Pakistani masters.
By doing so, China risks allowing
militancy to further fester in a country where militancy is not confined to
small groups but has been woven into the fabric of significant segments of
society. Attempting to heal what is an open wound requires not only economic
development but also a Pakistani and Chinese counter-terrorism strategy that
refrains from making politically opportunistic compromises.
Eurasia
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