Hundreds of Muhammadiyah Students Demonstrate Solidarity with Rohingya

Solo, C Java, (Antara Sumbar) - Hundreds of Muhammadiyah students held special activities to demonstrate their solidarity with the Rohingya ethnic minority, here, Thursday (Sept 7).

"Today, the students of Muhammadiyah Kota Barat, from kindergarten to senior high school, offered prayers and collected donations for Rohingyas," Muhammad Arifin, a spokesman of the Muhammadiyah Education Institution.

A total of 773 students participated in the event organized to encourage students to demonstrate empathy and solidarity for the oppressed.

The money collected from the event will be channeled to the Muhammadiyah Disaster Management Center.

Meanwhile, the Surakarta Police in Solo, Central Java Province, have collected donations for the Rohingya Muslims.

Hundreds of officers of the Surakarta Police participated in the humanitarian activity, and they spontaneously donated money, Adjunct Senior Commissioner Ribut Hari Wibowo, head of the Surakarta Police, remarked.

In Sumenep, Madura Island, East Java Province, some 30 members of the Indonesian Muslim Student Association staged a rally to express solidarity with the Rohingya Muslims.

"This is a human tragedy. We must show solidarity with the Rohingya. We must stop acts of brutality committed under whatever pretext," Nouval, a coordinator of the rally, said.

They offered prayers and collected donations for Rohingyas.

Aljazeera reported that as many as 300 thousand Rohingya Muslims could flee to neighboring Bangladesh to escape from violence in northwestern Myanmar, and the UN officials have warned of a funding shortfall for emergency food supplies for the desperate refugees.

According to estimates issued by UN workers in Bangladesh's border region of Cox's Bazar, arrivals since the latest bloodshed started two weeks ago have already reached 146 thousand.

Numbers are difficult to establish with any certainty due to the turmoil, as the Rohingya escape operations by Myanmar's military.

However, UN officials have raised their estimate of the total expected refugees from 120 thousand to 300 thousand, Dipayan Bhattacharyya, a spokesman for the World Food Programme in Bangladesh, noted.

"They are nutritionally deprived on arrival, as they have been cut off from a normal flow of food for possibly more than a month," he informed Reuters news agency.

"They were definitely visibly hungry and traumatized," he added. (*)

Editor: Vicha Faradika