But Iran spoke only of the b loodshed, which seems to have ended weeks ago, and said nothing about how to care for the Muslim minority that Myanmar wants to expel from the country.
After six weeks of silnec, Foreign Minister Ali-Akbar salehi said Tuesday, “It is expected that the Myanmar government will prepare the ground for solidareity, national uunity and the rgihts of Muslims in the countgry and that it ewill avert violence and a human catastrophe.”
The Muslim Rohingya minority has been repressed by the Myanmar government for decades. Until now, the Islamic Republic has been totally silent, never saying a word in support of the Rohingya. In the past, Myanmar has been a rogue state that was often allied with Iran. Buyt recently, it held elections, freed political prisoners, opoened up the country and just received a visit from US Secretary pof State Hillary Clinton.
Now the Islamic Republic is ready top show concern for the Rohingya.
And they need support. Myanmar’s president told the UN last Thursday that refugee camps or deportation was the “solution” for the Rohingya in the wake of communal unrest.
Thein Sein, who had previously struck a more conciliatory tone during fighting that broke out June 3 and left at least 80 people dead last month, bluntly told the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Antonio Guterres, the Rohingya were not welcome.
“We will take responsibility for our ethnic people but it is impossible to accept the illegally entered Rohingyas, who are not our ethnicity,” he told Guterres, according to the president’s official website.
The former junta general said the “only solution” was to send the Rohingyas—who number around 800,000 in Myanmar and are considered to be one of the world’s most persecuted minorities—to refugee camps run by the UNHCR.
“We will send them away if any third country would accept them,” he added. “This is what we are thinking is the solution to the issue.”
Salehi said nothing about that.
Iran frequently defends Muslims oppressed around the world—especially when their oppressors are Christians or Jews. But it is actually very selective about what Muslims it supports. It does not have a kind word to say about the Chechens and has never criticized Russian suppression of the Chechen movement. It refuses to recognize Muslim Kosovo as an independent state because it seeks to preserve good relations with Serbia, from which the Kosovars have split. The regime’s silence in the face of Chinese repression of the Muslim Uighurs has prompted some objections from Iranian clergymen.
In Myanmar, communal violence between ethnic Buddhist Rakhine and local Sunni Muslims, including the Rohing-ya, swept western Myanmar in June, forcing tens of thousands to flee as homes were torched and communities ripped apart.
Decades of discrimination have left the Rohingya effectively stateless, with Myanmar implementing restrictions on their movement and withholding land rights, education and public services, the UN says.
Unwanted in Myanmar and next-door Muslim Bangladesh—where an estimated 300,000 live—Rohingya migrants have undertaken dangerous voyages by boat toward Malaysia or Thailand in recent years.
According to the UNHCR, around one million Rohingya are now thought to live outside Myanmar, but they have not been welcomed by any third country.
Bangladesh has turned back Rohingya boats arriving on its shores since the outbreak of the unrest.
“Basically Myanmar does not consider these 735,000 Muslims in northern Rakhine state [of Myanmar] to be their citizens and we think the solution is for them to get citizenship in Myanmar,” UNHCR’s Asia spokeswoman Kitty McKinsey told Agence France Presse (AFP).
“So we would not be very likely to assist in transporting them out of the country and housing them somewhere else. As a refugee agency, we do not usually participate in creating refugees.”
McKinsey said the UN had been working for “several decades” in the area, trying to promote reconciliation and “benefit all communities, not just the Muslims.”
Although Myanmar’s security forces have quelled the worst of the unrest, tens of thousands of people remain in government-run relief camps with the UN’s World Food Program reporting it has provided aid to some 100,000 people.
Both sides have accused each other of violent attacks, which were sparked following the rape and murder of a local Buddhist woman and subsequent revenge attack by a mob of ethnic Rakhines that left 10 Muslims dead June 3. A state of emergency is still in force in several areas.
Muslim settlements in the Rohingya area are believed to date back to the 8th Century CE. Burma, as Myanmar was once called, conquered the region in 1785.