[Demonstrations also erupted in numerous other Muslim countries and communities, from Ukraine to Indonesia. In Afghanistan, protesters rallied last weekend in the capital, Kabul, holding up posters that said “Stop Killing Muslims” and called Suu Kyi a “satanic” criminal. Suu Kyi’s campaign for democracy won her the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, which some critics said should now be revoked.]
By
Pamela Constable
 |
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Pakistani demonstrators
take part in a protest in Karachi against the Burmese
government over the
treatment of Rohingya Muslims on Sunday.
(Rizwan
Tabassum/AFP/Getty Images)
|
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Until recently, most
Pakistanis knew little to nothing about the problems of Rohingya Muslims in
Burma. They could talk in great detail about the plight of Muslims in Indian
Kashmir and were familiar with an array of international Muslim causes, from
Palestinian rights to the Arab Spring. But the Rohingya story was almost
unknown here.
Except in one place: an impoverished pocket
of Karachi, the huge port city on the Arabian Sea, where tens of thousands of
Rohingya migrants have lived peacefully for half a century, working on fishing
boats or docks. The older ones originally fled a repressive military regime,
escaping on foot or by boat.
Two weeks ago, word began to reach the
Rohingya community in Karachi that something terrible was happening in their
homeland. On social media, relatives described military troops raiding and
torching homes in Burma’s Rakhine state. News videos showed thousands of people
leaving. Soon almost 300,000 had fled to Bangladesh, a coastal neighbor on the
Bay of Bengal, which was once part of Pakistan.
In Karachi, a Rohingya fisherman named Noor
Mohammed, 50, told a news agency that three members of his family were killed
in Rakhine in the past week. A woman said her sister had tried to reach
Bangladesh by boat but was being held by boat owners demanding a large payment.
The Rohingya Muslims are a stateless minority
in Buddhist-majority Burma, which has a powerful military. After political
violence erupted in August, the military said its crackdown was in response to
insurgent attacks on police posts. On Tuesday, the U.N. human rights
commissioner called the repression “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”
[Rohingya militants in Burma: Terrorists or
freedom fighters?]
By last week, the outrage had spread far
beyond Karachi’s fishing community. In cities and towns across Pakistan, people
were suddenly organizing demonstrations to protest the Rohingyas’ plight —
lawyers, tradesmen, civic groups, clerics, journalists, tribal leaders and
university communities all joined in. The phrase “Rohingya genocide” flashed
across nightly newscasts.
“This is a human crisis of grave proportions.
It is hard for me to believe what I am reading, hearing and watching,” said
Sajid Ishaq, chairman of the Pakistan Interfaith League. “I urge the U.N. to
stir from its slumber and react as it did in the case of East Timor,” he said.
The former Portuguese colony faced bloody suppression in a struggle for
independence from Indonesia, which it won in 2002.
On Friday, thousands of demonstrators
converged on Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, after weekly prayer ceremonies,
clashing with riot police near the high-security diplomatic zone. They
attempted to reach the Burmese Embassy but were stopped by shipping containers
placed across key streets. The march turned into a peaceful sit-in that lasted
until late evening.
On Monday, leaders from religious and secular
political parties joined rallies across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province to urge the
“civilized world to stop the mass execution of Burmese Muslims”; call on the
government to cut ties with Burma; and condemn Aung San Suu Kyi, the country’s
de facto leader and former democratic crusader, for her “criminal silence” on
the repression.
Pakistani officials, while trying to contain
public demonstrations, lodged formal protests with Burmese diplomats. Prime
Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and his cabinet, after meeting over the weekend,
said in a statement that the “brutal and barbaric acts” against the unarmed
civilian population constituted “state terrorism.”
Demonstrations also erupted in numerous other
Muslim countries and communities, from Ukraine to Indonesia. In Afghanistan,
protesters rallied last weekend in the capital, Kabul, holding up posters that
said “Stop Killing Muslims” and called Suu Kyi a “satanic” criminal. Suu Kyi’s
campaign for democracy won her the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, which some critics
said should now be revoked.
In an odd twist, an Islamist party in
Afghanistan, Hezb-i-Islami, blamed the Taliban for spurring anti-Muslim
violence in Burma when the group tried to destroy the famous Bamiyan Buddha
statues in 2001. Taliban officials, in turn, said they welcomed the show of
international support for “the Muslims of Burma.”
In Pakistan, the most powerful criticism came
from Malala Yousafzai, an activist for girls’ education who won the Nobel Peace
Prize in 2014 after she survived a Taliban attack. In a statement, she said she
had “repeatedly condemned” the “tragic and shameful treatment” of the Rohingyas
in Burma. “I am still waiting for my fellow Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi to
do the same.”
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