Pan-Islamic group head to visit China

The head of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, the world’s largest Muslim grouping, is to visit China for the first time in June, the OIC said in Jeddah yesterday.
OIC Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu is to travel to Beijing for high-level meetings from June 17-21, almost one year after bloody fighting between Muslims and Han Chinese in western China.
It will be the first-ever visit to the country by a head of the 57-member, pan-Islamic organization, which is based in the Saudi city of Jeddah.
It was not clear whether his trip would include the far-west Xinjiang province where the majority of China’s Muslims live and where violence erupted last July.
“The secretary general will meet Chinese officials to discuss how to develop closer relations,” an OIC official told AFP.
The visit comes just ahead of the first anniversary of the July 5, 2009 outbreak of violence between ethnic Han Chinese and mainly Muslim Uighurs in the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi.
The fighting over several days left nearly 200 dead and more than 1,600 injured, and drew strong criticism of Beijing from several Muslim countries.
In August 2009, an OIC delegation visited Chinese Muslim population centres to gather information on the living conditions of Chinese Muslims.
Estimates of the number of Muslims in China vary widely, but Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao during a visit to Cairo last year put the number at 20 million in 10 separate ethnic groups.
China has been building economic ties with Muslim nations in the Middle East and Africa.