CPEC: understanding the behemoth facts and myth
Once fully operationalised, BRI would provide a viable alternative to the present predatory economic system
The writer is a retired major general and has an interest in International Relations and Political Sociology. He can be reached at [email protected] and tweets @20 Inam
A lot has been said about the One-Belt One-Road initiative (OBOR), or as the Chinese call it the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). It attracts unwanted attention, as no superpower in human history has been able to undertake a project so enormous, that it covers most continents and two-thirds of the world, is inclusive of all major areas of modern economy, and is undertaken by a non-white, non-European power the Peoples’ Republic of China (PRC).
AFP
Five relatives of a Uyghur trader who died after being freed from an internment camp in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) are in prison, according to officials, while one other is believed to have died in a camp after being ordered home from Egypt.
Kurbanjan Abdukerim, 54, passed away four days after his Feb. 23 release from one of the facilities in the XUAR’s vast network of camps, where authorities are believed to have held up to 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities since early 2017, his former neighbor Zibibulla recently told RFA’s Uyghur Service, speaking from exile in an undisclosed location in Europe.
AFP
A young Uyghur man has been confirmed imprisoned after being forced to return to northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) for the “crime” of having studied abroad in Egypt, according to official sources.
Bakihaji Helil was handed a nine-year prison sentence in 2017 after returning home to Atush (in Chinese, Atushi), a county-level city of around 270,000 people that is the capital of Kizilsu Kirghiz (Kezileisu Keerkezi) Autonomous Prefecture in the cotton- and grape-growing region of southwestern XUAR.
The young man was among nearly 5,000 Uyghur students who were ordered back to the region from Egypt, where he was enrolled at Al Azhar University in Cairo, an independent researcher based in Turkey named Abdureshit Niyaz, who had previously lived in the North African nation, recently told RFA’s Uyghur Service.