Ozil on East Turkestan, Turkey’s tools to exploit Uighurs case

Mohamed Abdel-Ghaffar

Mesut Ozil, a German-Turkish footballer and a close friend of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, posted a statement on his social media accounts on Friday, calling Uighurs “fighters who resist persecution”.

He also accused China of burning Qurans, closing mosques and the killings of religious scholars.

Ozil’s criticism of China’s treatment of ethnic Muslims was “deceived” and “misled”, according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

“Despite all this, Muslims stay quiet,” he posted in Turkish, alongside the proposed flag of East Turkestan, a region in northwest China now known as Xinjiang province.

The Chinese Football Association added that his social media posts were “unacceptable”.

On Monday, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Geng Shuang further denounced Ozil’s comments, saying “there is no history record of the so-called the State of East Turkestan”.

“I don’t know if [Mesut Ozil] has ever visited Xinjiang before, but I can tell that he is deceived by false news reports and misled by unfounded and false statement[s]”.

Geng Shuang added that the Arsenal footballer was welcome to visit the far western Xinjiang region to see the situation there for himself.

The history of the region dates back to the pre-BC era, when the Chinese and Turks shared rule in 1000 BC, and then became part of the Turkish Empire from the eighth century until 334 BC.

A dispute occurred in the modern era between China and Russia, after Russia occupied the territory in 1934, before it was invaded by Germany during World War II, and the events varied until 1944, when the independence of East Turkestan was declared.

Some have questioned the intentions of Ozil after his tweet, especially since Ankara has contradictory positions on that issue, which it seeks to exploit in favor of its president, Erdogan.

Turkey aims to revive its relationship with this region, regardless of all the developments that occurred after that. Turkestan, also spelled Turkistan, literally means land of the Turks in Persian.

Turkish attitudes towards the Uighur Muslims changed according to the economic and political crises that Ankara is going through. In February 2019, Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesman Hami Aksoy said camps which reportedly hold a million ethnic Uighur people are a “great shame for humanity”.

“The policy of systematic assimilation against the Uighur Turks carried out by the authorities of China is a great shame for humanity,” Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesman Hami Aksoy said in a statement late on Saturday.

“It is no longer a secret that more than 1 million Uighur Turks incurring arbitrary arrests are subjected to torture and political brainwashing in internment camps and prisons,” Aksoy said.

With the pressure of the economic crises that struck the ruling Justice and Development Party due to the wrong policies of the Turkish president, which led to an increase in unemployment rates in the country, and the loss of the Turkish lira to more than 20% of its value, Erdogan resorted to China to discuss ways to support investment between the two countries.

Erdogan further affirmed during a conference at the Turkish embassy in China that there are some bodies that seek to take advantage of the Uighurs case to destabilize the Turkish-Chinese relations.

Moreover, Chinese authorities have deemed the East Turkestan Islamic Movement as the most urgent security threat in China, especially after its cooperation with other international terrorist organizations.