Myanmar's anti-junta activists launch online solidarity campaign for persecuted Rohingya Muslims
Anti-junta protesters and social media activists in Myanmar have launched a campaign to show solidarity with Rohingya Muslims who were persecuted and forced to leave their homeland of Western Rakhine state due to a military crackdown in 2017.
On Sunday, a large number of activists and civilians flooded social media to post pictures of themselves wearing black and flashing a three-finger salute of resistance, in posts tagged "#Black4Rohingya."
"Justice must (be) served for each of you and each of us in Myanmar," said prominent rights activist Thinzar Shunlei Yi on Twitter.
A protest rally was also organized in Myanmar's largest city of Yangon, with black-clad demonstrators holding signs in Burmese that said they were "protesting for the oppressed Rohingya."
By afternoon, the #Black4Rohingya hashtag was trending on Twitter in Myanmar, with more than 180,000 mentions.
In 2017, a bloody military campaign in Myanmar's Rakhine State sent some 740,000 Rohingya fleeing across the border into neighboring Bangladesh carrying accounts of rape, mass killings and arson.
The UN believes the government of Myanmar might have committed ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity in its crackdown.
The military has long claimed the crackdown was justified to root out insurgents. Civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi back then also defended the army's conduct by travelling to the Hague to rebut charges of genocide at the UN's top court.
The Myanmar public was largely unsympathetic to the Rohingya's plight. The latest show of support from the ethnic Bamar-majority population is a far cry from previous years, when even using the term "Rohingya" was a lightning rod for controversy.
A prominent Europe-based Rohingya activist said the online campaign is a yearly effort to raise awareness -- but Sunday was "the first time" he had seen it go viral in Myanmar.
"I am so happy to see those inside Myanmar joined this campaign. I am more hopeful to have a stronger solidarity from them," Ro Nay San Lwin said.
Since the military ousted Suu Kyi from power in a February 1 coup, an anti-junta movement demanding a return to democracy has grown to include fighting for ethnic minority rights.
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