Daily Times

Anyone visiting a market in Lahore lately might have heard the crimes of the Myanmar government against the Rohingya Muslims blared out on a set of speakers, followed by a call to shut down shops and march in protest. Turn to a passer-by or a shopkeeper and he will remark in agreement: “It is terrible indeed what is happening to them. Muslims all over the world are oppressed.” This is true, and especially so in our own country. Just a month ago, an entire busload of Ismaili Muslims in Karachi were slaughtered by Sunni extremists. The Shia Hazara community routinely suffers large massacres at the hands of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. The events of the last couple of years are particularly unforgettable. Even Sufis are not spared such fates, as the bombing of Baba Farid’s shrine has proven. The Taliban alone, whom our retrograde classes and reactionary mullahs cannot bring themselves to condemn, have killed tens of thousands of Pakistanis, most of them Muslims. So one need not look as far as Burma for evidence that Muslims are persecuted for being Muslims; here, in Pakistan, there is plenty of bloody Muslim persecution to be in awe of.

And what of the white in our flag? Every year, the Christian, Hindu and Ahmedi communities in our country are attacked by mobs and religious extremist organisations. Their dwellings and places of worship are burned down. Their lands and possessions are stolen. They are charged with blasphemy, they are lynched and their women are violated. Can anyone say with a straight face that these communities have not been reduced to desperation? Our state is responsible for their pathetic situation, for it is precisely by draconian decrees on religious affairs that we have arrived at this culture of violent intolerance. The result is that many of these religious groups are now seeking asylum abroad since they are neither safe, nor treated with dignity in Pakistan. One major newspaper reports that 200,000 Hindu and Sikh refugees have fled Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan to live in India. This year, 4,300 Hindus and Sikhs from Pakistan have received Indian citizenship. A newspaper reports that thousands of Christians have fled Pakistan in recent years. Christian representatives in Thailand alone claim that there are 10,000 registered asylum seekers. After the bombing in Quetta two years ago, the Australian government gave 7,000 Hazaras asylum. They are our Rohingyas.

Our government officials, conservative upper and middle classes and mullahs are the most vocal critics of Myanmar’s mistreatment of the Rohingya Muslims, but they are pretend humanitarians, with not a bone of empathy in their bodies for the suffering of the people. If they did, they would have organised their efforts towards protecting our own religious groups from harm and abolishing the discriminatory relationship of the Pakistani state with its people with the same fervour — the very things that they condemn the Myanmar government for, in the case of the Rohingya Muslims. In view of this hypocrisy, the tears shed by the powerful in our society over Myanmar’s treatment of the Rohingya Muslims are nothing but a facade.

The real reason for the mullah and conservative lobby’s active “empathy” for Muslims in Chechnya and Myanmar and conspicuous silence on our own domestic security crisis is that acts of violence are acceptable, when perpetrated by their militant allies or by foreign Islamist powers against Muslims or others. They share the same goal: the imposition of a Wahabi form of Shariah. The Myanmar state for example, besides inflicting mass violence on the Rohingya Muslims, routinely subjects them to forced labour and extortion and confiscates their possessions without justification. The state also denies them citizenship rights and does not allow them to travel without official permission. The Rohingya Muslims do not have access to legal recourse or representation in Myanmar. All of this oppression is not very different from the treatment meted out by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and UAE to Muslim labourers, who arrive from Pakistan or Bangladesh to end up living in containers. Yet, we will never hear the humanitarian mullahs in Pakistan bleat about the oppressiveness of these Gulf monarchies. According to WikiLeaks, $ 100 million flow from the Gulf states to their madrassas every year. Given that the mullahs and associated political parties in Pakistan are bent on fulfilling their vision of a backward society based on hundreds of years old practices, a vision that they share with the Taliban, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Islamic State and the Gulf monarchies, they do not criticise the actions of these parties against fellow Muslims or other religious groups in any country.

The more likely reason that they pounce on issues involving the oppression of Muslims by non-Muslim forces is because it gives them the opportunity to organise armed rebellions in those territories. Recall how vocal the religious conservatives were over the issue of Chechnya. It later turned out that the religious conservatives were not only vocal, but also provided training grounds in Pakistan and Afghanistan for Chechen fighters. It is not unlikely that the religious right in Pakistan now fantasises about the possibility of organising the Rohingya Muslims in their refugee camps into a fighting force, which would retaliate against the heathen Myanmar state to impose Shariah there. This is how they may exploit the Rohingya situation.

Charity begins at home, the saying goes. Our troubles will not go away with a mere military success against the Taliban. Our state must truly transform, and the entire class of religious fanatics and associated conservatives will have to be swept away. Without a transformation, our own Shia Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Sikhs, Ahmedis and Parsis will remain victims of terrorism. Let us put our own house in order, so that our condemnations of human rights violations abroad do not appear hollow. We cannot emancipate the Rohingyas without emancipating ourselves.

The author can be reached at isbarlas@gmail.com