This is that time of the year when Christians, along with others who opt to celebrate Christmas as a secular holiday, think of those who are less fortunate than they are. It is a time, like Ramadan in our part of the world, when people become imbued with compassion for those in need of a helping hand. And there are a lot of these folks, destitute and oppressed, around.
Destitution is the ultimate assault on the human spirit. Economists refer to those who suffer it as BoP, or bottom of the pyramid, a term they borrowed from a radio address delivered by former US president Franklin D. Roosevelt in April 1932, when he spoke of how “these unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten” and for planners in the developed world “who build from the bottom up and not from the top down, who put their faith in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid”.
There are three billion people in the world today who live in extreme poverty, half of them living on less than one dollar a day, deprived of basic human needs and that includes food, water, sanitation, clothing, shelter, health care and education. Consider this: According to Unicef, 22,000 children die each day due to poverty. And “they die quietly in some of the poorest villages on earth, far removed from the scrutiny and the conscience of the world”. Nearly a billion people entered the 21st century unable to read a book and that does not include 72 million children of primary school age who are not in school, but clearly should be. Infectious diseases continue to blight the lives of the poor — and so it goes with these depressing statistics about what we used to call in less politically correct times the “underdeveloped world” but we now refer to charitably as the “developing world”.
If destitution assaults the human spirit, then oppression fragments it into raw wounds — till, choking for air, you rebel against your condition. There are a lot of oppressed people in the world today — what Franz Fanon called the “wretched of the earth” — and their oppression is different only in degree, not in kind. If I were to ask you who might be the most oppressed people in the world today and you guessed, let’s say, North Koreans, I would say you guessed it wrong. The most oppressed people in our time are Muslims.
Muslims? Yes, Muslims, oppressed by provincial or national governments all the way from Chechnya to the Philippines, from China to the Crimea and from Myanmar to Palestine. The people of Chechnya were consistently crushed by Joseph Stalin’s Russia as much as by Vladimir Putin’s. Stalin, who had accused Chechens of being “Nazi sympathisers” (for Chechens, it was actually a case of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”), initiated a ferocious policy of “pacification” in February 1944 that ended in the deportation of the entire population of that Muslim republic — men, women and children, the sick and the infirm — to the Khazak steppe in Central Asia, in the middle of an exceptionally cold winter. As many as 78,000 died on the way. More recently, Putin waged two cruel wars against these determined people, that killed more than 100,000 Chechens and levelled Grozny, their once quaint and rustic capital.
In the Philippines, Muslims fared badly too. Despite the historic evidence of Islam spreading throughout the islands from the 13th to the 16th centuries, the archipelago came under Spanish rule in the late 16th. The Spaniards converted many natives and labelled those who remained Muslim Moro, a pejorative term in Spanish. They were told by the Spaniard conquerors, who had brought with them the intolerant traditions of the Inquisition, to convert or be executed. Those who managed to remain Muslim were essentially natives of the islands of Mindanao and Sulu, which had not been invaded. And it is there where we encounter today’s Muslim insurgency, mounted against the Iliaga militias (essentially government-sponsored thugs), known for their atrocities against the Muslim population. In 1971, for example, they massacred 65 Muslim worshipers at a mosque in Mindanao.
Then we have the Muslim community of Uighurs, who inhabit Xinjiang Province in China’s far northwestern corner, where they have long chafed under Beijing’s iron fist, where dissent is met with repression and where, should you have a complaint that you are rash enough to air in public, expect to be dragged into a “court” that would, with impressive ease, sentence you to life in prison.
In the Crimea, the Muslim Tatars, like their counterparts in Chechnya, have bitter memories of their 1944 deportations by Stalin’s Russia — an event that for years tore them apart from their native peninsula. Now with Russia back in control, oppression has started again. “Russian security forces have searched the homes of leaders of the Muslim minority group for banned books”, wrote Michael Birnbaum of the Washington Post on December 1. “Young Tatar men have been kidnapped off Crimean streets. Tatar activists are sitting in jail. A few have been killed. Some Tatars say they fear to venture out of their houses.”
In Myanmar, if you are a member of the Muslim community, expect, at best, to be denied citizenship and, at worst, to have your home, your mosque and your business torched — just for being a Muslim.
And in Palestine, a country close to home and dear to heart, we are all too familiar with the dreadful fate that has befallen Palestinian Muslims, along with their Christian brothers, at the hands of an upstart colonial movement that ran, from the outset, a failed experiment in apartheid, ethnic cleansing, larceny and outright land robbery.
Meanwhile, how merry could our Christmas have been this year, given the massive destitution and egregious oppression we see all around us today?
Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.
