Across the Muslim world, religious and ethnic minorities have suffered under the rule of authoritarian governments. In Turkey, Abdullah Demirbas, the former Kurdish mayor of the Sur municipality and a prominent human rights activist, was arrested by the authorities due to the kindness that he displayed to Christians, Jews and many other minority groups, prominent human rights lawyer Irina Tsukerman reported.
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In Iran, the new Iranian national ID card only allows Iranians to obtain citizenship if they are Muslim, Jewish, Christian or Zoroastrian. There is no longer any other category, thus denying citizenship to Yarsanis, Mandeans, Bahais and Yazidis.
In Syria, Christians, Yezidis and Kurds continue to suffer grave atrocities despite the collapse of the ISIS "caliphate."
Throughout the Islamic world, minorities are systematically oppressed. The question remains, has the coronavirus crisis made the persecution of minorities in the Muslim world worse or better?
Human Rights Watch recently documented that during the coronavirus crisis, the Turkish authorities have failed to ensure adequate water supply to the Kurdish areas in northern Syria that they control.
Inside Turkey proper, MEMRI reported a number of anti-Semitic incidents in the wake of the coronavirus crisis.
In an exclusive interview, Turkish journalist Rafael Sadi related that despite such claims, all of the minorities in Turkey, including the Jews, are suffering just as much from the coronavirus as the rest of the Turkish population.
Similarly, Iran has blamed both America and Israel for the pandemic, after initially neglecting it and enabling it to spread all over the world. However, the maltreatment of minorities in Iran remains just as bad under the coronavirus threat as it was beforehand. According to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, "Iran's human rights record is one of the worst in the world. Last fall, the regime killed 1,500 people who peacefully protested the dictatorship's mishandling of the economy. Soon after, it blew up a passenger airliner out of the sky, killing everyone on board."
However, as much as all Iranians suffer, minorities generally fare worse in Iran. Furthermore, non-Muslims do not have the right to testify against a Muslim in court. This remains the situation, with and without the coronavirus. As Iranian journalist Neda Amin reported, "Regarding the coronavirus, there is no difference between the minorities and the Muslims. The Iranian regime does not care about any citizen, so everyone equally is getting sick and dying."
Shipan Kumer Basu, president of the World Hindu Struggle Committee, reported that the Pakistani government has not provided proper provisions to the Hindu community, which is presently under lockdown. This policy was implemented in a country where 1,000 Hindu and Christian women and girls are abducted, raped and forcefully converted to Islam every year. In Bangladesh, the government is in denial regarding how many citizens got coronavirus yet has utilized the occasion in order to clamp down upon Rohingya refugees.
Although it is likely that minorities in the Muslim world would have continued to suffer regardless, the coronavirus pandemic made an already horrific situation even worse. In times of crisis, it is typical for authoritarian governments to find convenient scapegoats rather than to take responsibility for their own shortcomings in responding to the coronavirus and the minorities serve as a convenient scapegoat.
For this reason, their plight is likely to worsen in the foreseeable future.
