Thursday, August 9, 2012

Rohingya Muslims call world’s attention to Myanmar killings

Source : International The News

Karachi

The central leader of the Rohingya Solidarity Organization of Myanmar, Muhammad Imran Saeed, who is in town to acquaint the people of Pakistan with the ongoing Muslim-non-Muslim riots in Myanmar (formerly Burma), narrated the atrocities being perpetrated on the Arakan Muslims of Myanmar by the non-Muslim majority.
Addressing a Press conference at the Karachi Press Club (KPC) Thursday afternoon, he said that it was an attempt on the part of the Myanmar government to “eliminate the Rohyinga race” and according to him, 135 mosques had been pulverised.
He condemned the attitude of the Bangladesh Government towards the issue and said that instead of sympathising with their persecuted Muslim brothers and sisters, the Bangladesh government was adopting a punitive stance towards them and issuing shoot-at-sight orders in case any Rohingya Muslim was found crossing over into Bangladesh territory.
As for Pakistan, he said that while he was impressed by the way the people and private organizations were incensed at the killings, he was not satisfied with the stance of the government of Pakistan and felt that it was somewhat lukewarm. In fact all the speakers expressed their dismay over the overall apathy of the Muslim world on the issue and called upon the Islamic countries to wholeheartedly support the cause of the Rohingyas.
Speakers also called on United Nations agencies like the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) to immediately dispatch aid and observers teams to the site of the rioting and help the Muslims out of their ordeal.

He suggested that media teams and human rights organizations from Pakistan should go to Myanmar and see for themselves the havoc being wrought on the Muslims by the non-Muslims “in complicity with the Myanmar Government”.
Intikhab Alam Suri, President, Human Rights Network, narrating the sequence of events, said that on My 28, a Buddhist girl embraced Islam and married a Muslim man, which, he said, made the Buddhist community very indignant and they resorted to vengeance by stopping a bus carrying Muslim pilgrims and killing some of them. Regretting the killing of Rohingyas by the Bangladesh Government, and condemning international agencies for their biased stance, he said that when the sectarian killings were taking place in East Timor, the Western powers and UN agencies lost no time in dispatching their aid teams and military personnel. If, he said, the whites were facing such a situation in some part of the world, the western countries lost no time in dispatching their troops. But now that the Muslims were being killed “in such large numbers”, all these “self-proclaimed custodians of human rights” were not bothering to even bat an eyelid.
Speakers said that this phenomenon in Myanmar was nothing new and was actually an outcome of Britain’s divide-and-rule policy. They traced the genesis of the problem to 1942 when the UK government, not being able to subdue the Muslims of Arakan, made it part of Burma which gave leeway to the successive Burmese governments to suppress the Muslims.

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