SOUTH-EAST ASIA: Burma's Muslim Rohingyas - The New Boat People

• by Marwaan Macan-Markar (bangkok)
• Sunday, February 22, 2009
• Inter Press Service

Rohingyas are an ethnic minority in predominantly Buddhist Burma. Home for them is a part of the Arakan state in the western reaches of that military-ruled country, also known as Myanmar.

For years a steady trickle of Rohingyas fleeing by boat across the Andaman Sea went largely unnoticed. Between October 2006 and March 2008, more than 8,000 Rohingyas had set sail from Bangladesh, Burma’s western neighbour, with hopes of finding a better life in affluent Malaysia and Thailand.

All that changed with a burst of reportage in the international media since mid-January, exposing the tragedy that befell many of these migrants.

Stories grew out of accounts that Thais, with military backing, had allegedly beaten and cast adrift the fleeing Rohingyas in mid-sea in boats with no engines or provisions.

The whereabouts of over 1,000 Rohingyas forced back into the sea in mid-December remain unknown, say human rights researchers monitoring this tragedy. The few who survived to tell the tale of Thai ill-treatment were those picked up by Indian naval authorities in the Andaman Sea. Other survivors surfaced in Indonesia’s Aceh province.

‘’The Rohingyas are like moths flying to the light. They do not know what will happen when they get there,’’ says Enayet Ullah, summing up the desperation of his community searching for a better life in foreign countries.

The journey by sea is the latest route of hope, adds Enayet Ullah, a Rohingya who fled Arakan decades ago for a safer life in Thailand and who, later, founded the Burma Rohingya Association of Thailand to raise awareness about his persecuted community.

The numbers who are taking the risky sea-bound journey have reduced to a trickle from the mass exodus of Rohingyas from Arakan in 1991-92. An estimated 250,000 Rohingya refugees fled to Bangladesh to escape oppression of the Burmese junta, states a study done by The Arakan Project, a Bangkok-based independent human rights group that monitors the plight of the Rohingyas.

That wave of refugees matched the 200,000 Rohingyas who fled Arakan for Bangladesh in 1978 during the Burmese military's 'Dragon King' operation that was a form of ethnic cleansing.

The operation, targeting minorities, saw ‘’widespread killing, rape and destruction of mosques and further religious persecution,’’ according to the global rights watchdog Amnesty International.

There were many Rohingyas who fled Burma in the years prior to that. They account for the over 1.5 million who now belong to a diaspora that exists in places as spread out as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, India, Malaysia and Bangladesh.

The Rohingya disapora is now larger than the community they left behind in Burma - estimated at around 750,000.

‘’The oppression has got worse now,’’ says Kyaw Tin, a 40-year-old Rohingya living in exile in Thailand who communicates monthly with his family in Arakan. ‘’Our people are victims of forced labour; at least four days a week. They are banned from leaving their villages to visit a neighbouring village without permission from the authorities.’’

The junta’s oppression of Rohingyas is also apparent in policies that have no parallel across the rest of the country. The young men and women of this community are banned from getting married unless they get clearance from four different authorities, one of whom them from the thuggish Burmese border police, known by its local acronym NaSaKa.

As a result of this order, ‘’any cohabitation or sexual relations, sometimes even simple meetings between the couple without official marriage permission is considered an infringement of this order and punishable with lengthy jail sentences,’’ reveals The Arakan Project in an October 2008 study, ‘Official Marriage Authorisations: A curse for Rohingya women’.

Depriving the Rohingyas of food supplies, opportunities to farm and gaining education is the norm in the three townships of Buthidaung, Maungdaw and Rathedaung in northern Arakan where this minority has been caged in. Poverty and regular food shortages have resulted in chronic malnutrition, with some researchers estimating it as high as 60 percent among children under five years.

‘’There is 80 percent illiteracy, there are very few schools and the travel restriction prevents Rohingya children who finish a secondary education from going to a university in another part of Burma for higher education,’’ says Chris Lewa, the lead researcher of the Arakan Project. ‘’There is a total lack of hope among the Rohingyas in Arakan, even among the educated people.’’

Rohingya leaders expect little from the junta. A ruling that followed the army seizing power in 1962 stripped the Rohingyas of citizenship and denied them a place at the table accorded to Burma’s over 100 ethnic groups.

‘’It is the aim of (the regime) to make a clean sweep of the Rohingyas from their ancestral homeland of Arakan,’’ says Nurul Islam, president of the Arakan Rohingya National Organisation (ARNO), an umbrella group of Rohingya political movements. ‘’The regime has declared Rohingyas as non-nationals rendering them stateless in their own homeland.’’

‘’[The Rohingyas] have become victims of institutionalised human rights violations and crimes against humanity, including denial of citizenship rights,’’ the ARNO head revealed in an e-mail interview from London, where he currently lives. ‘’They are victims of forced relocation, land confiscation, arbitrary arrest, torture, extra-judicial killings and extortion on a daily basis.’’

‘’Due to these extreme conditions, the Rohingyas are leaving their hearths and homes for various destinations, basically in search of safe shelter and protection,’’ he added.

© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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