Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi flew to Myanmar on Sunday afternoon, Sept. 3, at the instruction of President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo to meet with the Myanmar government following an increase in violence and persecution of the Rohingya Muslim minority.
Marsudi, who arrived in Myanmar at midnight, will sit with a number of Myanmar’s government and military officials, as well as the country’s state counsellor and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Aung San Suu Kyi. The de facto president and Marsudi will talk discuss Indonesia’s proposal to provide humanitarian aid to the Rohingya community in Rakhine State.
President Widodo said earlier in a press release that the Foreign Minister was sent “to stop and prevent violence, to give protection to everyone, including Muslims in Myanmar,” as reported by the local media.
The statement by the president was a response to mounting calls by groups in Indonesia, home to the world’s largest Muslim population, for the government to intervene in the humanitarian crisis in Myanmar.
Early on Sunday morning a petrol bomb was thrown at the Myanmar embassy in Jakarta, which the police said caused a small fire, a day after groups of activists held a street protest calling for the violence on Rohingya Muslims to be stopped and the Nobel Prize Committee to withdraw the Nobel Peace Prize from Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
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