Canada urged to help Muslims in Myanmar

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This article was published 14/09/2017 (2956 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When he arrived in Winnipeg in 2015, the Rohingya Muslim refugee told the Free Press he was relieved to be in a safe country and he was determined to do something for those still in peril in Myanmar.

Now, Mohamed Tayeb is doing something: he’s calling on fellow Canadians to speak out against the ethnic cleansing that’s claimed the life of his cousin and sent close to 300,000 Rohingya in Myanmar fleeing for their lives to neighbouring countries.

“He was killed three days ago by the military,” Tayeb said Wednesday of his cousin, whose son died as well. “They were trying to escape, and they shot and killed them.”

Advocates for the Rohingya, an oppressed Muslim minority in overwhelmingly Buddhist Myanmar, say hundreds of Rohingya civilians have been killed by security forces. Myanmar’s government has repeatedly denied claims the Rohingya are facing genocide. It has brushed away evidence of human rights violations as fake news and “propaganda.”

The UN human rights chief said this week at the start of a UN Human Rights Council session that the violence and injustice faced by the ethnic Rohingya minority in Myanmar, where UN rights investigators have been barred from entry, “seems a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”

Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, a Jordanian prince, noted that the UN refugee agency has reported that 270,000 people have fled to neighbouring Bangladesh in the last three weeks, and pointed to satellite imagery and reports of “security forces and local militia burning Rohingya villages” and extrajudicial killings. He said he was “further appalled” by reports of Myanmar authorities planting land mines along the border.

“The Myanmar government should stop pretending that the Rohingya are setting fire to their own homes and laying waste to their own villages,” he said, calling it a “complete denial of reality” that hurts the standing of a country that recently enjoyed “immense good will.”

The country is facing criticism from around the world.

In Canada, a petition urging the Trudeau government to revoke honorary Canadian citizenship to Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, has garnered nearly 17,000 signatures since it was posted on Change.org a week ago.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke with Suu Kyi on Wednesday to express “deep concerns” over treatment of Muslims and other ethnic minorities in her country.

The Prime Minister’s Office was silent on the issue of citizenship in its summary of the call, issued shortly after Trudeau took questions from the media at a cabinet retreat in St. John’s, N.L.

The timing meant reporters were unable to ask the prime minister about his conversation with Suu Kyi.

When Canada bestowed honorary citizenship on her in 2007, Fareed Khan said he was hopeful Suu Kyi would stand up for persecuted minorities in Myanmar. A decade later, the man in Gatineau, Que., launched a petition asking for her citizenship to be revoked.

“When you get someone like that who’s been given a peace prize, you think they are going to be a symbol and serve as an example of how to address issues in society relating to protecting civil liberties, that they will stand up when atrocities are taking place,” Khan said. “She has fallen so far from that pedestal. I think that’s tragic in itself.”

Trudeau and Suu Kyi discussed “the need to defend and protect the rights of all minorities” and Trudeau offered Canada’s support to help build “a peaceful and stable society in Myanmar,” the summary said.

Suu Kyi will skip this month’s UN General Assembly meetings to address the problems at home, Myanmar’s government said Wednesday.

The crisis erupted on Aug. 25, when an insurgent Rohingya group attacked police outposts in Myanmar’s Rakhine state. That prompted Myanmar’s military to launch “clearance operations” against the rebels, setting off a wave of violence that has left hundreds dead and thousands of homes burned — mostly Rohingya in both cases.

Tayeb was not surprised Suu Kyi has done nothing to protect the Rohingya in Myanmar. When he arrived in Winnipeg in 2015, it was shortly after elections swept the former human rights hero’s opposition party to power.

“I don’t think (it) will improve Rohingya lives,” Tayeb said at the time. Before fleeing Myanmar, Tayeb’s family was thrust into hardship when the government confiscated their property. It sent him to do forced labour in a prawn fishery. He fled to Cambodia.

“Before I left, I was beaten,” said Tayeb, who was born in Myanmar but, like most other Rohingya Muslims, had no rights.

On Wednesday, during a lunch break from his full-time factory job in Winnipeg, the permanent resident of Canada said he was glad to sign the petition calling for Suu Kyi’s Canadian citizenship to be revoked. He said she’s turned a blind eye to ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, leaving many innocent people at risk.

“It’s absolutely not safe,” said Tayeb, who has been trying to connect with relatives who fled to Bangladesh and others hiding from the military in Myanmar close to the border.

Khan, who volunteers with the National Council of Canadian Muslims, said he plans to present the petition to Trudeau and hopes it pushes Canada to take action.

“In my lifetime, I’ve seen genocide three times — in Cambodia, Rwanda and the Balkans,” Khan said. “After the genocide by Nazi Germany, they said ‘never again’. Do those words have any meaning?”

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca