Last August 25, 2019, I was at the steps of Parliament Hill with human rights activists and several people gathered in solidarity with the fate and the terrible situation the Rohingya people are going through.
It is sad to keep bringing this topic about what this marginalized and oppressed community is going through and the total silence of the rest of the world.
Below is my speech from two years ago. Almost nothing has changed, except that more Rohingya are in refugees camps in Bangladesh and Canada has not done much to bring any Rohingya refugees to the country. Also, on a symbolic level, Aung San Suu Kyi was stripped of her Canadian honorary citizenship. More need to be done!
“We are gathering this afternoon in solidarity with the horrible plight of the Rohingyas people from the Myanmar Rakhine region, who are being chased from their homes, burned, slaughtered and killed by the ultranationalist military forces of the Myanmar.
On Thursday, Amnesty International said that fresh satellite imagery, fire detection data, photographs and videos along with eyewitness accounts showed “an orchestrated campaign of systematic burnings” of the villages of the Rohingyas people.
This is what the Burmese military call “Clearance operation”. This is what the United Nation human rights chief calls “ethnic cleansing”.
And this is how a teacher in a Burmese village named Maung Nu who escaped and recounted her last hours in their homes and the long journey that followed ddescribed it this week, to the Washington Post:
“I can’t count how many…We were all watching what the military did. They slaughtered them one by one. And the blood flowed in the streets.”
And this is just one horrible story.
By now, there are about 400,000 Rohingyas, mainly women and children, almost a little bit than half of the entire population that lives in Myanmar, that fled their hometowns to the borders with the Bangladesh.
Despite the international condemnation, the Burmese military and their “new friend” the Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, are not budging and are not stopping the massacre. Instead, they are calling this an internal issue and a national security matter. She even recently declared that the Burmese government is fighting “militant insurgency”. One can only wonder, who is fighting who?
The Rohingya, are considered to be among the world’s most persecuted people. They are denied the right to citizenship in Myanmar despite having lived there for generations, making them effectively stateless.
The Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu wrote a letter to Aung San Suu Kyi urged her to condemn the violence committed against the Rohingyas
“If the political price of your ascension to the highest office in Myanmar is your silence, the price is surely too steep”
Malala Yousefzai, the young Nobel Laureate urged Aung San Suu Kyi to
And even the Dalai Lama spoke and denounced what some are doing under the name of Buddha, he said:
“They should remember, Buddha, in such circumstances, would have definitely helped those poor Muslims. So, still I feel that (it’s) so very sad … so sad,”
It was overdue that our Prime Minister Trudeau spoke few days ago with Aung San Suu Kyi and shared his “deep concerns” about the massacre of the Rohingyas and other ethnic groups but obviously this is not enough. We need to do more.
So what can we do, as Canadians:
– We should sign petitions, one of them, is to ask Prime Minister Trudeau to revoke Aung San Suu Kyi from her honorary citizenship
– Send donations to humanitarian groups that help Rohingyas in Bangladesh
– Require from our government, that our Canadian Ambassador to Myanmar, Karen MacArthur, visit the afflicted Rohingya villages. Her presence will show the Myanmar government that Canadian people care and are closely watching the situation,
– Canada should send more humanitarian aid to Bangladesh so they can help all the refugee influx. The $2.55 millions in additional aid, the Canadian government just announced is so little and won’t be enough. Canada can do better.
And finally, Prime Minister Trudeau should be speaking to his American and Chinese counterpart and share his deep concern about the Rohingyas people. The US and China are the most powerful governments that would make the generals of Rangoon listen and stop the ethnic cleansing that being conducted these days on the Rohingyas.”
Credit: Pleas note that the picture above was graciously and generously taken by Zulf Khalfan/Aptword
Monia Mazigh 