RIGHTS-BURMA: Rohingya Issue Figures in Regional Summit

• by Marwaan Macan-Markar (cha-am, thailand)
• Thursday, February 26, 2009
• Inter Press Service

The issue - a regional solution to help the Rohingya Muslim minority fleeing years of oppression in Burma - is threatening to overshadow other pressing concerns to be addressed during a pivotal summit of the Association of South-east Asian Nations (ASEAN).

Leaders of the 10-member regional bloc were to have concentrated most of their energies on the makeover they are giving ASEAN, which was formed in 1967 to stop the spread of communism during the height of the Cold War. The 14th ASEAN summit being held here is the first since the coming into force, last December, of the ASEAN charter, making the bloc a rules-based entity.

‘’The world will take ASEAN more seriously now because we are now living under a charter; it demands compliance,’’ Surin Pitsuwan, secretary-general of ASEAN, told a gathering of foreign correspondents on Wednesday evening in the Thai capital. ‘’Because, when you commit, your commitment is sanctified by law.’’

The summit’s agenda includes over 30 key documents to be signed as part of a blueprint to create an ASEAN Community by 2015, enabling this region, which is home to 570 million people, to talk with one voice on security, economic, social and cultural issues.

The global economic downturn - and the region’s response - is also up for discussion by the leaders who come from the 10 countries that range from the wealthy to those burdened by poverty. The members of the bloc include Brunei, Burma (or Myanmar), Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

But now, the largely sidelined problem of the Rohingyas threatens to become the proverbial elephant in the room that the ASEAN leaders will find hard to ignore. More so since the bloc has been criticised previously for being a ‘’talking shop’’ and a ‘’club of government leaders’’ after summits failed to offer solutions to political problems that affected the region’s citizens at the time.

The Rohingya issue burst into the international media spotlight in January, when reports revealed that boatloads of them had washed up on Thailand’s southern beach in December and had subsequently been forced back to sea.

Some of those cast adrift were found by the Indian navy, while others ended up in Indonesia’s northern province of Aceh. Human rights activists say that the fate of over 1,000 Rohingyas, driven back to the sea on the orders of the Thai military, remains unknown.

Besides Burma, the source of South-east Asia’s new boat people, other countries in the region that have been affected are Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia. Since late 2006, thousands of Rohingyas have been departing in boats from Bangladesh, Burma’s western neighbour, for a life free of political, cultural, social, economic and religious abuse.

The Rohingyas fleeing what some describe as ‘’ethnic cleansing’’ in predominantly Buddhist Burma’s Arakan state, in the west of the country, is the latest chapter of a refugee narrative going back decades.

In 1991-92, some 250,000 Rohingya refugees fled to Bangladesh to escape widespread oppression by the Burmese junta. In 1978, an estimated 200,000 refugees crossed over to Bangladesh to escape a spree of killings, rape and destruction of mosques, according to global rights watchdog Amnesty International.

A Rohingya leader drew attention to this grim picture in a letter he wrote to ASEAN leaders ahead of the summit. ‘’The Rohingya problem is a problem of religious and political persecution that affects countries in the region and beyond,’’ wrote Nurul Islam, president of the Arakan Rohingya National Organisation (ARNO), an umbrella group of Rohingya political movements.

‘’Those who are still at home (in Arakan) are living in sub-human condition, facing ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘crimes against humanity’.’’

‘’It is essentially a regional and international issue the root cause of which needs to be properly addressed,’’ added the letter seen by IPS.

‘’The (Rohingyas) are victims of systematic, persistent and widespread human rights violations, including denial of citizenship rights, severe restrictions on freedom of movement, education, marriage and religion, forced labour, rape, land confiscation, arbitrary arrest, torture, extra-judicial killings and extortion on a daily basis,'' the letter said.

This, however, will not be the first time that Burma’s military regime has triggered a crisis that threatens to shred the agenda of an ASEAN summit. In 1998, a year after Burma was admitted into ASEAN, the country’s pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi was held hostage in a car around the time of a summit in the Philippines.

In 2003, a brutal attack by the junta’s thugs on Suu Kyi and members of her political party, the National League for Democracy, upset the agenda of the ASEAN summit that year, which was to address concerns about North Korea.

‘’Lot of ASEAN meetings have been held hostage to Burma’s actions,’’ Debbie Stothard of ALTSEAN, a regional human rights group, told IPS. ‘’ASEAN leaders have helped create this problem by letting the junta abuse the regional bloc for its own interest.’’

For now, Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, the host of this weekend’s summit, has hinted that a ‘’regional solution’’ is needed for the Rohingya crisis. He is receiving support from Indonesia, the region’s giant and the world’s most populous Muslim country, where the fleeing Rohingyas have found a sympathetic hearing.

Yet ASEAN, true to form, is not prepared to place the Rohingya discussions on the official agenda of the summit.

Summit insiders confirmed to IPS that an ASEAN solution for the persecuted Rohingyas will be taken up during informal sessions of the government officials and the region’s leaders.

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

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