The Open Discussions and The Gulf Cultural Club
Invite you to a seminar on
Deafening silence on Rohingya Muslims
Speakers
Assed Baig*
Massoud Shajarah**
The plight of the Muslims in Myanmar is bleak. The atrocities that have been and are being committed against them by the military is tantamount to genocide. Despite pleas for Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi to take a stand and stop the onslaught on these powerless people, she has remained silent. The Nobel peace prize winner is facing international criticism for her government’s handling of a crisis in the Muslim-majority Rakhine region, where soldiers have blocked access for aid workers and are accused of raping and killing civilians and burning whole villages inhabited by the Rohingya Muslims.
The Burma Campaign UK today called on the British government to immediately halt training programmes being provided for free to the Burmese military.
Date: Tuesday 12th September 2017
Time: 6.30pm
Venue: Abrar House, 45 Crawford Street, W1H 4LP
Dinner will be served
Please register by text – 07795 660 438 for catering purposes.
*Assed Baig is a trained broadcast and print journalist and has worked around the world including the Central African Republic, Myanmar and Libya. He has also worked as a reporter for Channel 4 News and the BBC. He was born and bred in Birmingham but currently works out of London. Pakistan, Kashmir, Bosnia and Somalia are some of the countries he has reported from as well as having spent time living in Syria and Mauritania. He has specialist knowledge of the Muslim community and Islam.
**Massoud Shadjareh is chair of the Islamic Human Rights Commission. He is a veteran human rights campaigner, who began his activism on campus at UCAL Berkley during the anti-Vietnam protest movement in the late 1960s. He came to the UK in 1971 and has worked in the voluntary sector for some 15 years. In 1997 he helped to set up the Islamic Human Rights Commission with a group of other activists working on different international and national projects. IHRC is a campaign, research and advocacy organization based in London, UK. He currently sits on the Home Office Stop and Search Review community panel, which is addressing the disproportionality of stops against minorities. He has authored several papers and reports on Islamophobia and human rights, including, The Oldham Riots, Muslim Profiling, Islamophobia: The New Crusade and Whose Rights Are They Anyway?, published by the British Council. Shadjareh has completed postgraduate studies in Cambridge and London in International Relations. He lives in London with his wife and four children
