International hesitance emboldening Myanmar govt.: Analyst

According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), nearly 21,000 Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar have escaped persecution and violence to the neighboring Bangladesh in the past two months. Myanmar’s military forces have launched a new wave of crackdown on Muslim minorities since an alleged attack on the country’s border guards on October 9, which left nine policemen dead. At least 30,000 Rohingya Muslims have been internally displaced in Rakhine, while thousands of others have tried to reach Bangladesh over the past month to seek refuge.

Catherine Shakdam, director of Shafaqna Institute for Middle Eastern Studies, told Press TV’s Top 5 that the international community’s inaction for holding accountable Myanmar’s government and military has emboldened them to continue persecution and massacre of Muslims in the Rakhine state.

“There is no form of sanctioning. There has been no widespread condemnation that would force Myanmar to actually change its policies,” because “Myanmar somehow is a friend of the West and so nobody can criticize” it for its crimes against Muslims, Shakdam said on Tuesday.

The international community has done nothing to stop persecution of Muslims in Myanmar; so, the “military institution [in Myanmar] is determined to demonize ... an entire religious community just because they can,” she noted.

Censuring international hesitance to go after the Myanmar government, she noted, “There’s a lot of hypocrisy and double standard and lip service being paid to human rights issues and in the case of Myanmar, it is a tragedy, which is happening and those people have been abandoned by the international community.”

She also criticized some Islamic countries for keeping silence over the agony of the Rohingya Muslims, noting that “most countries, for example Saudi Arabia, have said nothing.”

Pointing to the role of Nobel Peace Prize winner, Aung San Suu Kyi, in the crackdown on the Muslim community in the Southeast Asian country, Shakdam stated, “It is an insult to the meaning behind this prize that she continues to hold it even though she is managing a genocide.”

Rakhine state has been the scene of communal violence at the hands of Buddhist extremists since 2012. Hundreds of people have been killed and tens of thousands have been forced from their homes and live in squalid camps in dire conditions in Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.

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