China’s state broadcaster did not show Sunday’s match between Arsenal and Manchester City after Mesut Özil’s messages that criticised the country’s policy towards its Muslim Uighur minority.
The Global Times Newspaper said on its Twitter account on Sunday that CCTV took the decision after midfielder Özil’s comments on Saturday had “disappointed fans and football governing authorities”.
Özil’s posts called Uighurs “warriors who resist persecution” and criticised both China’s crackdown and the silence of Muslims in response. “(In China) Qurans are burned, mosques were closed down, Islamic theological schools, madrasas were banned, religious scholars were killed one by one. Despite all this, Muslims stay quiet,” Özil, who is a Muslim, said in his posts.
An Arsenal spokesman told Reuters that they had no official statement on the issue after CCTV’s decision to show a taped game between Tottenham Hotspur and Wolverhampton Wanderers instead of the originally planned fixture. CCTV did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The north London club shared a post from its official account on China’s Twitter-like Weibo platform, which read: “The content he expressed is entirely Ozil’s personal opinion.
“As a football club, Arsenal always adheres to the principle of not being involved in politics.”
Arsenal received angry responses on Weibo, with one showing a shredded Ozil football shirt next to a pair of scissors.
Others called for the midfielder to be expelled from the club.
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A search on Weibo for the hashtag translatable as “Özil issues inappropriate statement”, which had been one of the top trending topics on the platform, returned no results on Saturday afternoon. Weibo frequently censors discussion of sensitive topics, particularly amid a push by Beijing to clean up its internet.
The Chinese Football Association told the government-backed news outlet, The Paper, on Saturday it was “outraged and disappointed” by Özil’s remarks, describing them as “inappropriate”. “Özil’s comments are undoubtedly hurtful to the Chinese fans who closely follow him, and at the same time his comments also hurt the feelings of Chinese people. This is something we cannot accept,” the news outlet quoted an unnamed official from the association as saying.
The United Nations and human rights groups estimate that between one million and two million people, mostly ethnic Uighur Muslims, have been detained in harsh conditions in Xinjiang as part of what Beijing calls an anti-terrorism campaign.
China has repeatedly denied any mistreatment of Uighurs.
