Every child deserves the right to joy, to education, and to dignity — equally.
Why should any child be denied this, simply because of their race or religion?

As my brother Smar Nyi Nyi wrote so beautifully:

To be born human is not a choice.
We arrive in this world — your child, my child — equally.
But some are born to poor parents,
Some to uneducated ones,
Some to those with darker skin.
For these reasons, society judges the child.
Should they live their lives in fear, shame, and limitation?

Children who grow up incomplete,
Who feel unsafe,
Who are bullied,
Who suffer from emotional trauma —
These children face heavy burdens even before their lives have truly begun.

All children deserve:

• Equal happiness
• Equal education
• Equal rights and recognition

Why should these be denied based on the color of their skin, their name, or their parents’ faith?

Smar Nyi Nyi

လူဖြစ်နည်း
သူ့အလိုဆန္ဒ နဲနဲမှမပါ
လောကထဲ ရောက်လာကြတဲ့
သင့်ကလေး သူ့ကလေး
အတူတူလို့ တွေးစမ်းသူ့မိဘက လူဆင်းရဲ
သူ့မိဘက ပညာမဲ့
သူ့မိဘက အသားညို

သူ့မိဘဆိုတာတွေနဲ့
ကလေးကကြောက်လန့်
ဒီလိုဘဲရှင်သန်စေတော့မှာလား

မဝလင်တဲ့ကလေး
မလုံခြုံတဲ့ကလေး
ဝိုင်းပါယ်ခံရတဲ့ကလေး
ဉာဏ်ရည်မပြေ့တဲ့ကလေး
စိတ်ဒါဏ်ရာနဲ့ကလေး
အနာဂါတ်အတွက် ရင်လေးလို့ပါ

ကလေးအားလုံး
တန်းတူပျော်ရွှင်ခွင့်
တန်းတူစာသင်ခွင့်
တန်းတူခံစားခွင့်
ဘာအတွက်နဲ့မရှိရမှာလည်း

လူဆိုရင် လူလိုတွေး
ကလေးတွေအပေါ်လူစိတ်မွေးမှ
လူပီသတဲ့လူ
လူစစ်တဲ့လူ ။ ။

Sadly, this is not a rhetorical question in Myanmar today.

The military regime continues to practice institutionalized racism, not only against Muslims but also against Hindus and the Chinese-Burmese community. The SPDC’s National Registration officers have issued directives that anyone who is not a “pure-blooded” Burmese Buddhist must be officially recorded as a mixed-blood person — whether that’s accurate or not.

This means that Burmese Muslims are forcibly registered as “mixed Indian,” “Pakistani,” or “Bengali” — regardless of their family’s long and loyal history in the country.

This is blatant racial discrimination.
This is open Apartheid.
This is the beginning of genocide — using identity documents to isolate and exclude.

In our own family, this cruel policy has become painfully real.

Our nephews and nieces — the younger siblings in our family — are now issued different registration cards than their parents or older brothers and sisters. Although born to the same citizens, they are now labelled differently. This injustice marks the beginning of a lifelong struggle for them. They are forced to start life from an unfair position — stigmatised and rejected before they even begin to dream.

What will this one government-issued document do to their hopes?

How will they see their country — Myanmar — when it refuses to see them?

By branding these children as “other,” the SPDC has told them they are not welcome. In doing so, they have already shattered our children’s sense of belonging. The future that should be open and full of possibility is now darkened with uncertainty and alienation.

The constant emphasis on “purity” by the SPDC’s narrow-minded ideology denies the truth of what Myanmar really is — a rich mosaic of diverse peoples. Their attempt to forge unity through forced homogeneity is a dance with shadows, leading the nation backwards under a false tune of nationalism.

What will happen to our children’s dreams?

Will they forever be made to compromise, to tone down their aspirations, to feel that they are second-class citizens?

Their joy, their vision, their energy — these are Myanmar’s greatest hopes. And yet, they are struck down before they have even begun.

Let us not forget:

• We Burmese Muslims are fully Burmanized in culture.
• We differ only in religion.
• We speak Burmese, dream in Burmese, and our hearts beat for Myanmar.

Our ancestors were loyal subjects of Burmese kings. After independence, Prime Minister U Nu’s government recognized us as full citizens. And General Aung San himself promised:

“To the Indians and Chinese residing in this country…
If they choose to join us, we will welcome them as our own brethren.
The welfare of all people in this country — regardless of race or religion —
has always been the one purpose that I have set out to fulfill.
In fact, it is my life’s mission.”

But the current military regime — an illegitimate force — has broken this sacred promise. It has practiced Apartheid and is committing slow genocide by denying identity, equality, and future to millions of Burmese children.

We must say clearly:
We are not outsiders.
We are Burmese — in every way that matters.
We have no foreign loyalties. Even if Myanmar were at war with the ancestral lands of our forefathers, we would still stand by Myanmar.