ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) on Monday submitted an adjournment motion in the National Assembly over the Rohingya crisis.
The motion submitted by PTI Vice Chairman Shah Mahmood Qureshi, Dr Arif Alvi, Asad Umar and Shafqat Mehmood demanded that the assembly should immediately raise the issue of persecution of Rohingya Muslims. The PTI leaders have also stated that houses have been torched in Rohingya-majority areas of Myanmar’s Rakhine region.
It said that due to the sensitivity of the issue, a national policy on Rohingya crisis must be developed after an extensive discussion in the Lower House of Parliament.
Meanwhile, nearly 90,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh since violence erupted in Myanmar in August, pressuring scarce resources of aid agencies and communities already helping hundreds of thousands of refugees from previous spasms of violence in Myanmar.
Rights monitors and Rohingya fleeing to neighbouring Bangladesh say a campaign of arson and killings by the Myanmar army aims to force them out.
The treatment of Buddhist-majority Myanmar’s roughly 1.1 million Muslim Rohingya is the biggest challenge facing leader Aung San Suu Kyi, accused by Western critics of not speaking out for the minority that has long complained of persecution.
The number of those crossing the border, 87,000, surpassed the total of Rohingya who escaped Myanmar after a much smaller insurgent attack in October that set off a military operation beset by accusations of serious human rights abuses.