Can Help Come for Myanmar's Rohingya?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

 

The Rohingya are a Bengali-speaking ethnic minority that live mainly in the northern region of Myanmar’s Rakhine State, bordering Bangladesh. Numbering around one million in Myanmar at the start of 2017, they are one of the many ethnic minorities in the country and represent its largest percentage of Muslims.

But the government of Myanmar in 1982 stripped the Rohingya of citizenship and even excluded them from the 2014 census. It considers them illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.

While tensions were already evident between Muslim Rohingya and the Buddhist majority, 2012 saw a major turning point with the outbreak of mass violence in June in Rakhine state.

In the wake of the violence, Buddhist extremist groups in the country, such as the notorious 969 Movement led by Buddhist clergy, were emboldened to escalate their activities.

The most recent problems began in August 2017 after Rohingya militants launched deadly attacks on more than 30 police posts.

A group calling itself the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), formed in 2013, claimed responsibility. Led by a small cadre of Rohingya émigrés from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the group wants self-governance for the Rohingya.

Two months later, they attacked three Burmese border posts along Myanmar's border with Bangladesh, killing a number of soldiers.

Myanmar troops, backed by Buddhist mobs, in turn began to burn Rohingya villages and attacking and killing civilians. At least 6,700 Rohingya, including at least 730 children under the age of five, were killed in the month after the violence broke out, according to medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières.

The massive numbers of refugees who fled to Bangladesh in 2017 joined hundreds of thousands of Rohingya who had fled Myanmar in previous years.

Kutupalong, the largest refugee settlement in the world according to Filippo Grandi, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, is home to more than 613,000 refugees alone.

An estimated 190,000 live in settlements in the vicinity, along with 330,000 of the most affected host communities.

Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina told the UN General Assembly last September that the international community must “understand the untenability” of the status quo.

The head of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, a UN body, warned last Oct. 22 that “there is a serious risk of genocide recurring” against the estimated 600,000 members of the Rohingya Muslim minority still living in the country.

The mission said that Myanmar should be held responsible in international legal forums for alleged genocide against the Rohingya.

Marzuki Darusman told the General Assembly’s human rights committee that “if anything, the situation of the Rohingya in Rakhine state has worsened,” citing continued discrimination, segregation, restricted movement, insecurity and a lack of access to land, jobs, education and health care.

Myammar’s leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, once a human rights icon and winner of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, has repeatedly denied allegations of genocide. She claimed that human rights organizations had arrived at conclusions based on unverified claims and without any real investigation.

Myanmar’s UN ambassador, Hau Do Suan, noted his government doesn’t recognize the fact-finding mission, calling its views “one-sided” and based on “misleading information and secondary sources.” Its government has barred Darusman from entering the country.