KUALA LUMPUR: About 200 protesters rallied outside Myanmar’s embassy in Malaysia Friday urging Kuala Lumpur to sever diplomatic ties with Yangon over deadly violence against Rohingya Muslims.
The noisy protest was led by the powerful youth wing of predominantly Muslim Malaysia’s ruling party, the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), after Friday prayers.
“If the Myanmar government fails to follow our demands, we will demand our government to stop the bilateral relationship,” Armand Azha Abu Hanifah, a member of the UMNO youth, told the crowd.
The demonstration comes after Malaysia on Tuesday summoned the Myanmar ambassador to voice its “deep concern” over spiralling violence against the Rohingya Muslim minority.
The protesters chanted “Long Live Rohingya”. They also carried banners with the words “Don’t kill the innocent life” and placards saying “Myanmar stop killing Rohingya”.
Abdullah Muhammad, 25, a Rohingya migrant living in Malaysia, wore a headband inscribed with the words “Save Rohingya”, and called for an end to the killings.
In the last two weeks alone, 270,000 mostly Rohingya civilians have fled from Myanmar’s Rakhine state to neighbouring Bangladesh, after raids by Rohingya militants against security forces triggered a military crackdown.
Witnesses said entire villages have been burned.
Over 1,000 people — more than twice the government’s total estimate — may already have been killed in Rakhine, mostly Rohingya, said Yanghee Lee, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar. Scores more have died trying to flee the fighting.
The Rohingya have long been subjected to discrimination in mostly Buddhist Myanmar, which denies them citizenship and regards them as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, even if they have lived in the country for generations.
Malaysia has criticised Myanmar’s de facto leader leader Aung San Suu Kyi for not speaking out for the 1.1 million Rohingya minority.
Analysts said the worsening crisis could hurt Myanmar’s diplomatic ties, especially with Muslim-majority countries in Southeast Asia such as Malaysia and Indonesia where there is growing public anger over the apartheid-like treatment of the Rohingya.
Malaysia’s summoning of the Myanmar ambassador on Tuesday was a rare diplomatic rebuke in the Southeast Asian regional bloc, where non-interference in the internal affairs of members is the norm.
As of June this year, there are 59,100 Rohingya refugees registered with the UN Refugee Agency in Malaysia.
