When children become unimportant to a society, that society has forfeited its future. —L. Ron Hubbard
Mohamad Imran Bin Zohor was born a Rohingya Muslim, part of a minority religion in Burma targeted for genocide.
Mohamad detailed his journey in a hearing this spring before the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF)—a hearing that explored the impact of religious freedom violations on children.
On reaching land, he was sold to human traffickers and beaten until he managed to escape, only to be recaptured and imprisoned for more than two years.
“Over a decade later, nothing has changed. The Rohingya are still persecuted. Children are still being detained.”
Mohamad’s experience echoes that of many other innocents. Across too many countries, defenseless girls and boys are abducted from their communities, forbidden to participate in their parents’ religion, beaten and starved into submission and, as in Mohamad’s case, locked away.
Advocates testified as witnesses at the hearing, recounting atrocities committed by China, Pakistan, Burma and other nations in efforts to suppress religious communities by targeting their youngest members.
In China, Uyghur Muslim and Tibetan Buddhist youth are forbidden to study or practice their faith. Tens of thousands are separated from their families and placed in state-run boarding schools that prohibit religious teaching, while millions of Chinese Christian children are forced to renounce their religion in front of their teachers and fellow students.
Uzbekistan and Tajikistan now severely restrict all religious instruction and participation.
Religious minorities in Pakistan are targeted through forced conversions and marriages. Young Hindu and Christian girls are abducted, pressured to convert and forced into sham marriages with their captors. Courts have accepted falsified documents claiming the victims are adults, binding them to their abductors under color of law.
In Mohamad’s country, Rohingya Muslim children were slaughtered alongside their parents in a genocide carried out by the military. Those who survived were displaced and left without family, community or tradition. “We are an indigenous people of Burma, yet we have been treated as if we never belonged,” Mohamad told the hearing. “We were targeted not only for who we are but for what we believe. I was born into a life where I did not exist in the eyes of my country.”
The countries named at the hearing are among the worst offenders. But the warning is not confined to them. Anywhere a child’s faith and conscience are treated as problems to be corrected, religious freedom is already at risk.
While Mohamad spoke from his own lived experience, the other witnesses spoke as experts on religious freedom violations targeting children. Sociologist Dr. Gyal Lo, scholar Vladyslav Havrylov, and Legal Aid Society Director of Inclusion and Development Maliha Zia described their work to alleviate conditions faced by disenfranchised and traumatized youth in different countries. They also discussed their efforts to bring about change that could improve those children’s lives.
The common denominator among the witnesses was a plea to the United States to use its power and influence to impose economic sanctions on the offending nations, demand the release of children from detention centers, and invest in resettlement, education and long-term care.
Mohamad’s life was saved and America opened its doors to him after UN officials visiting his detention center found him too sick to move. They secured his release and arranged for his resettlement in the US, where he is now a citizen and college graduate, pursuing further studies at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business.
“I am building a future, but I cannot forget where I came from because right now Rohingya children are still living the life I once lived,” he said.
Mohamad told the hearing that just two weeks earlier, about 250 Rohingya refugees were reported missing when their boat sank in the Andaman Sea during a dangerous journey like the one he barely survived more than 10 years earlier.
“Over a decade later, nothing has changed,” he said. “The Rohingya are still persecuted. Children are still being detained.”
Then, in words spoken on behalf of all the witnesses, he added, “They are still waiting for someone to see them, for someone to care. That is why I am here today.”
