Suu Kyi seeks to ignore Rohingyas' plight to gain votes: Activist

Press TV has interviewed Reza Nadim, a member of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee of the UK, in London, to discuss the plight of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.

Following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: Certainly things look quite bleak for Myanmar’s Muslims at this point. How do you feel about that?

Nadim: What the Muslims in Myanmar have been going through is nothing new. It is only now we are seeing much more light being shed on their plight. I mean for decades now they have been treated as second class or no class citizens. They have been denied the right to have health care, education, children are suffering in refugee camps and now we find even the case of Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who has actually made sure that there are no Muslims standing for her party. So of the 1,151 candidates not even one of them is a Muslim considering that Muslims make up four to ten percent of the population in Myanmar.  

Press TV: I am glad you mentioned Ms. Suu Kyi because it is interesting she said that people are exaggerating what is happening to Rohingya Muslims. Is she correct? Are we exaggerating the situation?

Nadim: No. The thing is that you just have to look at independent reports from people, from like Amnesty International, other organizations out there, independent reports that have gone out and there is no exaggeration. If anything, we are not seeing the full-scale of what the Muslims in Myanmar are going through.

Aung San Suu Kyi, the only reason why she downplays the suffering of the Muslims is because she is trying to play on the fact that there are some hard extremist Buddhists in the country and she desperately needs their votes and that is why this peace laureate, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, has chosen to ignore and not come out in criticizing the plight that the Muslims are facing at the hands of Buddhist extremists.   

Press TV: And how do you feel with the fact that Myanmar is being brought back into the international fold quite wholeheartedly? You know, everyone is really accepting of it, no one really speaks in detail about Rohingya Muslims and the atrocities that they are suffering?

Nadim: … The reason why many people do not speak about the plight of the Muslims in Myanmar is because right now we are facing the war on terror narrative where Muslims are evil, they are Islamists, they are Jihadists, etc. So to see Muslims as victims of another extremist religious group does not fit into the wider narrative and that is why the UK Prime Minister David Cameron does nothing to speak out about this. The fact that we see other state heads speak out about this, this is all again, this is just silence on the issue.

So I am not surprised about it but it is sickening to see that a country that is supposedly trying to become a democracy is making sure that almost up to ten percent of its population are not being represented or heard or even looked after in the state just because they are Muslims.

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