Bilawal Bhutto condemns inhuman treatment of Rohingya

KARACHI: Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari on Monday condemned the violence against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar and called for an end to it.

The PPP chairman in a statement urged the world powers to play their part to stop the genocide of Rohingya Muslims and ensure fundamental rights to them.

Latest violence against Rohingya in Buddhist-majority Myanmar has triggered outcry across Muslim world urging Nobel Prize Winner leader Aung San Suu Kyi to condemn and take measures for ending violence against the Muslims.

More than 2,600 houses have been burned down in Rohingya-majority areas of Myanmar’s northwest in the last week, the government said on Saturday, in one of the deadliest violence against the Muslim minority in decades.

About 58,600 people have fled into neighboring Bangladesh from Myanmar, according to UN refugee agency UNHCR, as aid workers there struggle to cope the crisis.

Myanmar officials blamed the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) for the burning of the homes. The group claimed responsibility for coordinated attacks on security posts last week that prompted clashes and a large army counter-offensive.

But the persecuted people fleeing to Bangladesh say a campaign of arson and killings by the Myanmar army is aimed at trying to force them out.

The treatment of Myanmar’s roughly 1.1 million Rohingya people is the biggest challenge facing leader Aung San Suu Kyi, accused by Western critics of not speaking out for the Muslim minority that has long complained of persecution.

The clashes and army crackdown have killed nearly 400 people and more than 11,700 “ethnic residents” have been evacuated from the area, the government said, referring to the non-Muslim residents.

It marks a dramatic escalation of a conflict that has simmered since October, when a smaller Rohingya attack on security posts prompted a military response dogged by a large number of rights abuses.