Silence on Oppression of Muslims Shocking: Analyst(+Video)

Watch the Interview:

Interview with Raza Kazim, spokesman of the Islamic Human Rights Commission

Myanmar’s democracy icon Ang San Suu Kyi and Nobel Peace prize winner has not spoken out against atrocities and ethnic cleansing proposal against the Rohingya people.
Myanmar’s democracy icon Ang San Suu Kyi and Nobel Peace prize winner has not spoken out against atrocities and ethnic cleansing proposal against the Rohingya people.

The silence from Ang San Suu Kyi is deafening as Myanmar’s President Thein Sein, a former junta general said on Thursday that the “only solution” was to send nearly a million Rohingya Muslims – one of the world’s most persecuted minorities — to refugee camps run by United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

“We will send them away if any third country would accept them,” he added. “This is what we are thinking is the solution to the issue.”

The UN refugee agency has snubbed the idea of setting up refugee camps to accommodate the Rohingyas. The UN says decades of discrimination have left the Rohingyas stateless, with Myanmar implementing restrictions on their movements and withholding land rights, education and public services.

For the past two years, waves of ethnic Muslims have attempted to flee the country in the face of systematic oppression by the Myanmar government. The government of Myanmar refuses to recognize them claiming the Rohingyas are not native and has classified them as illegal migrants, although they have lived in Myanmar for centuries.

Press TV has conducted an interview with Spokesman, Islamic Human Rights Commission, Raza Kazim from London to further discuss the issue.

The video also offers the opinions of two additional guests: Prof., Shahid Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Institute of Science and Technology, Ghulam Taqqi Bangash and author and Islamic Studies expert, Kevin Barrett. What follows is an approximate transcription of the interview.

Press TV: We’re looking at about a million and a half roughly of these Muslims that have been ordered by the President of Myanmar to be sent to refugee camps. This is a severe decision by President Thein Sein, isn’t it?

Kazim: It is quite a shocking decision and again I would like to reiterate that the silence from [Myanmar’s pro-democracy leader] Ang San Suu Kyi is quite deafening and quite problematic considering that she’s going around promoting herself and being promoted as the beacon of democracy, that she has been so silent on this particular issue.

It is worrying that what kind of a democracy and what kind of a world Myanmar is going to become. And also with regards to this, I understand that you had the ambassador of Bangladesh to Britain earlier on and he was saying that a lot of these people who are being turned away at the borders of Bangladesh are those that are criminals and terrorists and so on and so forth.

We’ve heard this kind of language before and on the other hand they’re talking about this idea that if they’re taken in to Bangladesh that this will encourage the ethnic cleansing to actually take place.

I think it is shocking that at a time when the attacks on the Rohingyan Muslim community have gone up significantly that this is something that is continuing.
And I would beg to differ slightly with one of your earlier guests – this is something that isn’t new. The attacks have been dated back to the eighteenth century and this kind of tension and this kind of attacks on the Rohingyan Muslims have been going on for some time.

We need to remember that a lot of these people have actually had no kind of arms or any way of resisting the oppression that’s being metered out to them whereas in Palestine for example you have got the situation that people have got a means of resisting with arms against the Israeli occupation and the Israeli barrage. This is something that is not an option that is available to these Rohingyan Muslims and they are, you know, in some senses a sitting duck.

It is shocking that the world has been silent and has been selective in terms of which kind of people they’re prepared to promote in terms of getting rights; but these people who have had this problem metered out to them for such a long time and this situation has escalated in recently years quite considerably, nothing is actually being done about it. the entire artcie at: Suu Ky’s silence on oppression of Muslims shocking: Analyst