News:
According to the news piece published on The Guardian on 20th May, 2015, Malaysia and Indonesia have said that they will offer shelter to 7,000 refugees and migrants adrift at sea in rickety boats but made clear that their assistance was temporary and they would take no more. More than 3,000 have landed so far this month in Malaysia and Indonesia together with Thailand, the two south-east Asian countries have pushed away many boats that approached their shores despite appeals from the United Nations to take them in. While the latest statement signaled a shift in policy by Malaysia and Indonesia that would allow the migrants to come ashore, they underlined that the international community also had a responsibility to help them deal with the crisis.
Comments:
The issue of the Rohingya Muslim refugees, who fled the brutal persecution of Myanmar government, and economic migrants from Bangladesh came under global attention after several boats crammed with hundreds of illegal migrants and refugees were blocked by the Malaysian, Indonesian & Thai authorities from coming ashore and forcefully towed back out to the deep sea exactly when those helpless people were in urgent need of humanitarian assistance. Later, under international pressure these South Asian states sat together on 20th May and agreed to provide temporary assistance to these fateless people. Many people saw this as a glimmer of hope and a positive step towards solving the issue. But if we take a closer look, we will see these as only empty talks and will not bring any real solution to the Rohingya Muslims. Firstly, these states are only talking about providing temporary shelter to the Rohingya migrants. The question still remains where these stateless people will go after that. Secondly, these states offered only shelter for 7,000 of the migrants stranded at sea. However, thousands of Rohingya Muslims are continuously fleeing from the coastal state of Myanmar due to state-sanctioned persecution by the Buddhist terrorists. Thirdly, these regimes are not at all concerned to solve the root cause of the problem – that is the brutal persecution of the Rohingya Muslims in their own country, where they are brutally killed, tortured, raped, expelled from their own lands, their rights to citizenship snatched away, being forced live in prison-like ghettos, denied basic human rights and labeled as illegal migrants by the apartheid Myanmar government.
In fact, unjust concepts like “nationalism” and “nation-states” are keeping our rulers silent over the unspeakable torture and ethnic persecution of our fellow Muslim brothers and sisters in other lands and not allowing them to welcome those helpless Muslims to their own lands. These treacherous rulers, who are firmly holding on to the flag of nationalism by protecting the artificial borders created by their colonial masters and refusing to welcome their Muslim brothers when they are in dire need of protection, have failed to uphold the hadith of Rasulullah ﷺ:
المسلم أخو المسلم، لا يظلمه، ولا يخذله
“The Muslim is the brother of his fellow Muslim. He does not oppress him, nor does he abandon him…”
This rotten concept of nationalism also eliminates “humanity” from the face of the earth. Hundreds of nations of this world are standing still, silently watching and letting helpless people suffer and die in the deep sea out of starvation simply because they are people of different nationalities. This is in sharp contrast with the history of the Khilafah, when the Khulafa used to proactively respond to save any human being from oppression. In 1492, Ottoman Khalifa Bayezid II sent his entire naval fleet to rescue 150,000 Spanish Jews during the Spanish Inquisition and welcomed them to settle in the land of Khilafah open arms. Not only that, in 1453 the great Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II encouraged expelled Jews from the entire Europe to settle in Ottoman lands and issued a proclamation to all Jews stating, “…..Let him dwell in the best of the land…. with silver and with gold, with wealth and with cattle. Let him dwell in the land, trade in it and take possession of it.” Today, in the absence of the Khilafah, Muslim rulers are pushing back their own Muslim brothers, giving them the status of refugees or turning a blind eye on hundreds and thousands of brutally tortured Muslims all over the world only because they are branded as people of a different nationality. So, it is high time for the Muslims to get rid of the inhuman concept of nationalism, eliminate artificial borders and be united under the Khilafah, which will rescue the oppressed Muslims in the every corner of this world and mobilize her mighty army against the oppressors.
Written for the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir by
Fehmida binte Wadud