(Ahlul Bayt News Agency) - Myanmar’s President Thein Sein insists that Rohingya Muslims must be expelled from the country and sent to refugee camps run by the United Nations.
The country’s current government, run by military figures and accused of massive rights abuses, refuses to recognize nearly-one-million-strong Rohingya Muslims
community, which the UN calls one of the world’s most prosecuted people.
The government claims the Rohingya are not native and classify them as illegal migrants although they have lived in the country for generations.
Interview with Mohamed al-Asi, Imam of Washington Islamic Center from Washington, regarding the issue. What follows is an approximate transcript of the interview.
Q: Myanmar's Muslims keep suffering and the world remains silent, what does that mean and what does that tell you?
Al-Asi: What is happening is truly a human tragedy and if it were happening to another religious minority in some other country in the world, it would have been headline news. Obviously this is not occupying any headlines anywhere.
With the exception of the statement that was made in your report, two governments in the world, in the whole world two governments took notice of this; the government in Turkey and the government in Iran.
It tells us that Muslim blood is cheap; Muslim lives are dispensable and Muslim population are a fair target as it were for the type of dictatorship that are in action as we see playing out in this human tragedy with potentially hundreds of thousands of Muslims being dislocated and then governments playing kickball with them.
They try to move from Myanmar over the borders across the river into Bangladesh and the government in Bangladesh is trying to force them back into the terrible state of the affairs that they find themselves in, in Myanmar.
We have not seen as of yet and we have not heard any international organization; there are organizations in the United Nations that are concerned with human rights; no one has taken up their cause.
I think this is not the time to go begging for help and support from such organizations that have in the past shown us that they have a record of looking the other way when these such things happen. The blood spill has not dried up in the theater of massacre of Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina just 15 years ago and this is another one of these tragedies and I think it puts in the spotlight the Organization of Islamic Cooperation previously known as the Organization of Islamic Conference which would be the first expected to highlight the plight of these poor human beings who happen to be Muslim and this is going to put them to the test.
In other situations where Muslims are dislocated, many times it is between one Muslim country and the rest. But in this case, because of the British colonialism dating back to the 19th century which put these Rohingya Muslims in a legal limbo in which they are characterized as being non-indigenous part of the, what was called, Burma at the time and still up until now, no one has looked into their affairs and with these massacres and with what was called ethnic cleansing by some Western sources notably The New York Times, its correspondent and human rights watch to be fair and honest to just a couple of voices that stood out and expressed themselves on this issue.
So I think the Organization of Islamic Cooperation right now is in the balance and its chairman who happens to be of Turkish descent, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, they do not prove themselves in doing something to alleviate the dire circumstances of thousands of Muslims now who are under the gun, then this war should send a very strong message to the rest of the Muslims in the world that such organizations are useless and cannot render any type of assistance when assistance is needed particularly in this type of circumstance that we are looking at here.
Q: Then what do you think would be a fair solution to the crisis?
Al-Asi: I think a fair solution would be that those who are in positions of diplomacy and political quo to come down on a government right now that is fashioning itself as a democratic government.
I mean if there is a military junta that rules there, but it has opened up to Western interest and you have a Noble Peace Prize winner right now who was in England, Aung San Suu Kyi, who regrettably, as your report said, did not come out and expressed the type of democratic expectations that are in the balance.
It is a very, very telling comment to say that a country that goes from being a military dictatorship to a democracy opens up that chapter with ethnic cleansing and a wholesale slaughter of its Muslim population.
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