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President Obama and Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi hold a news conference at her residence in Rangoon, Burma, last year. (Nyein Chan Naing/European Pressphoto Agency)

By Editorial Board
July 7, 2015

JOURNALISTS IN Burma are “stifled” by a “climate of fear,” Amnesty International reported recently, finding “repression dressed up as progress.” The military government, after several years of pretend negotiations, recently vetoed constitutional changes that would have limited its power. Peace talks with ethnic groups have collapsed.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration, in its annual human rights report released just over a week ago, cheers a “trend of progress since 2011.”

Wai Wai Nu, a Burmese activist who recently visited Washington, is not surprised by the discrepancy. “The international perception is quite different from the reality,” she told us. “The human rights situation is deteriorating.”

Conditions in Burma, a Southeast Asian nation of about 56 million people also known as Myanmar, did improve in 2012. Wai Wai Nu herself, imprisoned in 2005 at age 18 because her father was a pro-democracy politician, was released along with hundreds of other political prisoners. Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, the democracy leader who had spent the better part of two decades under house arrest, also was freed and allowed to contest and win a by-election for parliament. The U.S. government, eager to pocket a foreign-policy success, eased its sanctions on the generals and former generals running the country.

The administration’s hope, shared by Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, was that the regime would negotiate its own demise, in the fashion of South Africa’s apartheid government. Alas, the generals seem to be reading from a different script. They have eagerly shed their pariah status, welcoming an influx of investment, but they seem determined that there will be no Nelson Mandelas in their country. Elections are scheduled for the fall, but Aung San Suu Kyi will not be permitted to run for president, and one-quarter of parliament seats will be reserved for the military without election.

Things are especially bad for the ethnic minority known as Rohingya, of which Wai Wai Nu is one, and for other Muslims. “People can demonstrate freely — against Muslims,” Wai Wai Nu noted. “But when people ask for their rights, or their education, or their land, they are arrested and charged.” And not only Muslims: Phyo Phyo Aung, another young former political prisoner, recently led a protest march — and was charged with violating the law in every township she walked through. There’s an “illusion of change,” Yan Htaik Seng, a project manager with BBC Media Action, told us, but censorship and fear-inspired self-censorship keep the media in a straitjacket.

U.S. officials hope that fall elections, even if held under an imperfect constitution, will empower pro-democracy parties enough to spur further change. That remains the sensible goal in a season of disappointment. But its fulfillment would be more likely if the administration acknowledged reality and adjusted policy accordingly, including, as Amnesty International argued, by pushing for an end to repression. As the organization’s Southeast Asiaresearch director Rupert Abbott said, “Authorities are still relying on the same old tactics — arrests, surveillance, threats and jail time to muzzle those journalists who cover ‘inconvenient’ topics.”

Oma Salema, 12, holds her undernourished brother, one-year-old Ayub Khan, 1, at a camp for Rohingya in Sittwe, Myanmar, this month. Photo: New York Times

By Annie Gowen
June 27, 2015

Mohammed Islam is a Rohingya Muslim who has lived in a refugee camp in Bangladesh since he was nine, after his family fled religious tension in his home country of Myanmar.

His life is one of uncertainty coupled with despair, which has deepened in recent weeks because of a Bangladesh government proposal to move 32,000 Rohingya refugees to a remote island that swamps at high tide.

"We don't want to die," he said in an interview. "We are already persecuted; we don't want to suffer more."

Islam, now 29, is an activist at the Nayapara camp, a foetid assemblage of tarp-roofed huts in the touristy Cox's Bazar beachfront area in southern Bangladesh. He said he and other refugees don't want to leave to move to a barren, 40-square-kilometre island in the Bay of Bengal, a two-hour speedboat ride away.

"The refugees are deeply concerned," he said of the island, which completely floods when the tide rolls in. "We are not willing to move from this place until they find a solution."

The remote island, Thengar Char, disappears completely under water at high tide, and has no roads or barriers to flooding, according to an AFP report. Accounts from locals and a forest department official who oversaw the planting of mangroves on Thengar Char in 2011 gave an indication of the challenges, according to AFP.

"At high tide the entire island is under three to four feet (0.9 metres to 1.2 metres) of water," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "It is impossible to live there."

About 32,000 Rohingya Muslims live in two government-run camps in the Cox's Bazar area, according to the United Nations, but the government estimates that hundreds of thousands of other Rohingyas live illegally in Bangladesh, a country of more than 155 million.

The stateless Rohingya Muslims have long been victims of persecution in Myanmar. Their situation worsened during violent ethnic clashes in 2012 between Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar's Rakhine state that resulted in more than 100,000 Rohingya being confined to displacement camps.

More than 25,000 Rohingya and others have fled both Bangladesh and the Myanmar camps since January, according to the United Nations, precipitating an international crisis after thousands became stranded at sea attempting to enter Malaysia and Thailand.

Bangladesh's Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, criticised the migrants in remarks last month, saying they were "mentally sick" for wanting to leave Bangladesh, adding, "they are tainting the image of the country along with pushing their life into danger".

Mrs Hasina had reportedly visited Cox's Bazar in the northern hemisphere autumn and decided that the grimy Rohingya camps were an impediment to tourism, officials said. A plan to relocate them was launched.

Gowher Rizvi, an adviser and special representative to Mrs Hasina, said that the proposed move was still in the preliminary stages and that no final decision had been made.

"There are a large number of Rohingyas, as you know, in Cox's Bazar area, which is not ideal for keeping people there," he said. "There have been discussions about whether or not a better or more suitable location can be found."

(Photo: AFP)

By Rebecca Hamlin
May 29, 2015

Last Thursday, after weeks of refusing to open their borders, the governments of Indonesia and Malaysia caved to international pressure and began offering assistance to Rohingya asylum seekers stranded in the Andaman Sea between those two countries. Their smugglers had abandoned ship, leaving thousands of people adrift in rickety boats without adequate food or water. 

But why did thousands of people attempt such a risky voyage? The Rohingya people are a Muslim ethnic minority in predominantly Buddhist Myanmar, where they are the target of extreme persecution. The Burmese government has stripped them of their citizenship and banned the use of the term Rohingya (as if that act would erase them from existence).

Government scapegoating of the Rohingya has become a nation-building tactic in Myanmar, leading to bouts of ethnic cleansing and mass displacement. In short, compared to the untenable conditions at home, even a high-risk escape plan is appealing for many.

As the numbers of Rohingya asylum seekers fleeing Myanmar by boat have increased in recent months, the Thai, Indonesian, and Malaysian governments have been vocal about their reluctance to offer protection.

The Australian government has also refused to assist any boat people in the region. Prime Minister Tony Abbott has been adamant in his claim that “If we do the slightest thing to encourage people to get on boats this problem will get worse, not better.”

The trouble with Abbott’s statement is that the evidence suggests otherwise. The ineffectiveness of deterrence policies cannot be proven definitively, because we can never know how many more people might have attempted to seek asylum in their absence.

Nevertheless, the data on asylum-seeking indicates strongly that people flee persecution no matter how dangerous their journey will be, as I discuss in detail in my book. Uncertainty, and even danger, are often preferable to the certain suffering they face at home.

For example, despite sustained efforts by the European Union to deter illegal border crossing, Europe’s border control agency recently reported several record-breaking years of illegal entries. The number of asylum applications lodged in Europe in 2014 was 615,000. That’s an all-time high.

The majority of people filing these applications are from Syria, Libya, and Eritrea. They continue to pay smugglers and attempt the dangerous, often deadly, journey across the Mediterranean because of instability in their home countries.

Similarly, despite the militarization of the U.S./Mexico border, and despite consistently low acceptance rates for asylum seekers from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, last summer tens of thousands of predominantly women and children attempted the extremely dangerous journey north, because of a spike in gang violence in Central America.

Australia has been a pioneer in asylum-seeker deterrence, but since its notorious Pacific Solution was implemented in 2001, the boats have kept on coming. Asylum seekers continue to pay smugglers to help them attempt the dangerous ocean journey, despite the certainty of detention in offshore prisons if they are apprehended.

In fact, the number of asylum seekers in Australian detention centers has only gotten larger since the Pacific Solution began.

Asylum seeker destination countries use deterrence policies not because they actually work, but because they play well politically.

In the post-Cold War era, accepting refugees carries very little geopolitical strategic value. Instead, asylum seekers can look a lot like undocumented immigrants, and boat arrivals can look a lot like an invasion.

Even when deterrence policies do successfully deflect asylum seekers, they don’t stay home. Rather, they flee to poorer countries that are far less able to handle arrivals.

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the countries currently hosting the largest number of refugees are Pakistan, Lebanon, Iran, Turkey, Jordan, Ethiopia, and Kenya.

The Rohingya keep leaving Myanmar even in the face of extreme uncertainty. Most have fled to Bangladesh, which is not exactly a land of economic opportunity. The remainder have come to Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia, none of which are signatories to the UN Refugee Convention. Asylum seekers who make it ashore in these countries must live in limbo, with few rights or future prospects.

Countries can claim that asylum seekers are expensive and burdensome. They can claim that poor, uneducated, migrants are unappealing, or difficult to assimilate.

However, the claim that deterrence strategies save lives or prevent or reduce human trafficking is not strongly supported by the available evidence. The plight of the Rohingya is a case in point.

Rebecca Hamlin in an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Grinnell College. She is the author of Let Me Be a Refugee: Administrative Justice and the Politics of Asylum in the United States, Canada, and Australia (Oxford, 2014).

A rescued Rohingya child recovers at a hospital in Indonesia on Tuesday. (Romeo Gacad/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images)

By Editorial Board 
May 20, 2015

THE MONTH of May has brought a terrifying humanitarian crisis to the seas of Southeast Asia. Thousands of people, Rohingya Muslims from Burma and Bangladesh, fleeing persecution and poverty, are adrift on rickety boats in the Andaman Sea and the Straits of Malacca, risking their lives in search of a better life. But Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia have turned unwelcoming. There is a very real chance thousands will die at sea from hunger, dehydration or drowning.

The 1 million Rohingya Muslims are being persecuted in Burma, also known as Myanmar, where they are denied citizenship and in many cases crowded into squalid camps. Rohingya also live in poverty across the border in Bangladesh. One of the consequences of the continuing maltreatment of the Rohingya has been their steady exodus by sea to seek improved conditions in Malaysia, where thousands have landed in recent years. The escape route has often involved treacherous dealings with human traffickers in Thailand, aided and abetted by the Thai navy, a story that was detailed by Reuters in a seriesthat won the Pulitzer Prize in 2014.

The Rohingya exodus from Burma’s coastal Rakhine state, where they are concentrated, surged in the first three months of this year. The number leaving reached 25,000, about double that in the same period of the past two years and more than in all of 2012. Meanwhile, Thai authorities have cracked down on human traffickers who ran the underground routes taken by the Rohingya to Malaysia. Last year, the State Department’s annual Trafficking in Persons Report found that Thailand was not meeting minimum standards to combat trafficking, and the country was downgraded to the lowest level, which could lead to sanctions.

Thai authorities moved against the traffickers and their illegal transit camps, where fleeing Rohingya were extorted for money — those who could pay went on, and those who could not were beaten and left to die. Since May 1, the Thai authorities have exhumed more than 30 bodies from shallow graves, apparent victims of the traffickers. The crackdown appears to have scattered the smugglers, who have abandoned refugees at sea.

The migrants on the water are in desperate shape, and thousands may be adrift. Navy ships from Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia have in recent days intercepted boats packed with hungry migrants, given them food and water and sent them away. No country wants them, and none wants to encourage an unstoppable exodus. Thailand on Monday announced the formation of a “transit area” for temporarily housing the refugees. All three nations ought to focus on saving lives of those now drifting, rather than turning their boats into floating coffins.

The larger responsibility lies with Burma and the state’s reprehensible treatment of the Rohingya minority, a problem that festers in what was supposed to be Burma’s transition from military rule to a more open society. The nightmare at sea began with despair at home. Until that is remedied, the boats will keep coming.

A Rohingya migrant cries as he sits with others in a boat drifting in Thai waters off the southern island of Koh Lipe in the Andaman on May 14, 2015. (Christophe Archambault/AFP via Getty Images)

By Ishaan Tharoor
Washington Post
May 19, 2015

It takes a lot to forsake your home, clamber on to a crammed, rickety boat, and venture out into the uncertainty and danger of the high seas. But this is precisely what tens of thousands of people from Burma's Rohingya ethnic minority have done in recent years, leaving before the monsoon season settles in and their fates become even darker.

Some drown in the Andaman Sea; others, abandoned by the human traffickers they are forced to trust, drift without water and food aboard what activists describe as "floating coffins." And unlike many migrants rescued by European governments in the Mediterranean, the Rohingya can't even trust in the goodwill of Southeast Asia's governments.

In the past week, thousands of Rohingya have become subjects of an unseemly game of regional "ping-pong," their boats pushed back by governments not keen on accommodating any more asylum seekers. On Friday, in a notable exception, one vessel with 800 passengers was allowed to make landfall in Indonesia.

"If I had known the boat journey would be so horrendous," said a 19-year-old Rohingya refugee, who had lost her brother at sea, "I would rather have just died in Burma."

The spur of the crisis is in the remote, western part of that country, also known as Myanmar, where the majority of the roughly 1.3 million Rohingya live. As WorldViews has discussed before, even though the Rohingya can trace their origins in what's now Burma over many centuries, the Muslim minority is refused citizenship status by the Burmese state, which classifies them as "Bengali" interlopers from across the border.

In 2009, during an earlier Rohingya boat people crisis, a leading Burmese diplomat scolded foreign journalists for feeling sympathy for the would-be refugees, saying they "are as ugly as ogres."

Mob violence and ethnic pogroms, which flared in 2012, led to tens of thousands of Rohingya fleeing to squalid displacement camps. Denied adequate recourse to state services in both Burma and Bangladesh, many Rohingya endure malnutrition, abuse at the hands of local authorities, and restrictions on everything from movement to access to education to their ability to get married.

The United Nations recently described them as one of the world's "most persecuted minorities." A report this month from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum warned that rising Buddhist nationalism and anti-Muslim sentiment in Burma made the Rohingya a "population at grave risk for additional mass atrocities and even genocide." It is estimated that a tenth of the community's population has attempted to leave their homeland in the past few years.


If you want to get a sense of how profound the denial of rights for Rohingya is, consider this: Burmese officials have already indicated that they won't attend a meeting on the refugee crisis, to be hosted by Thailand later this month, as long as the name "Rohingya" is even invoked at the session — something that would indicate de facto recognition of the minority. Even Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, a leader of the Burmese opposition and a celebrated figure of global conscience, has remained shamefully silent on the plight of the Rohingya.

Other regional governments, including Thailand and Malaysia, have said the burden of housing the Rohingya is not theirs to shoulder alone. "We cannot welcome them here," Malaysian Deputy Home Minister Wan Junaidi Jaafartold CNN when asked about his country's policy of turning the illegal migrant boats away. "If we continue to welcome them, then hundreds of thousands will come from [Burma] and Bangladesh."

Part of the problem is the presence of economic migrants from Bangladeshamong the Rohingya asylum seekers. They travel along well-established trafficking networks that convey would-be migrants through Thailand's jungles into Malaysia, a Muslim-majority country that until recently was a favored destination for Bangadeshi migrants and Rohingya refugees. It is believed that a recent Thai crackdown on the land routes, where countless duped Rohingya and Bangladeshis are thought to be held in slave-like conditions by traffickers, led to the influx of Rohinyga on the seas.

The crisis ideally ought to be resolved by ASEAN, Southeast Asia's leading geopolitical bloc. But it is a notoriously toothless institution. Unlike the European Union, ASEAN shies away from taking moral stands on issues of human rights and democracy. Current signs, and the absence of popular sympathy for the Rohingya, seem to suggest that not much will change.



'This is going to put on display ASEAN's impotence,'' Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a political scientist and director of the Institute of Security and International Studies at Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University, told the Associated Press. ''This is another reflection of ASEAN's ineffectual cohesion.''

The plight of the Rohingya, as Hong-Kong based journalist Heather Timmons observes, also ought to win the attention of Asia's two most important leaders — Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who met last week. But the duo's lofty rhetoric of shared dreams and regional progress notwithstanding, their countries are deeply invested in Burma, including in projects that have an adverse effect on the Rohingya in Rakhine state.

For a stateless people, the world is a most uncharitable place.

Ishaan Tharoor writes about foreign affairs for The Washington Post. He previously was a senior editor at TIME, based first in Hong Kong and later in New York.

Women and children wait in line for medical care at the makeshift Aung Clinic which serves many Rohingya with a few dedicated staff giving free medical care. (Paula Bronstein/ for The Washington Post)

By Ishaan Tharoor
May 7, 2015

The official American institution memorializing the Holocaust sounded the alarm this week of the threat of a new genocide facing the beleaguered Rohingya of Burma, one of the world's most neglected communities. A reportpublished by the Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide, a wing of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, charted the persecution, violence and systematic discrimination endured by this Muslim minority, and warned that it was a "population at grave risk for additional mass atrocities and even genocide."

The plight of the 1.3 million Rohingya is well-documented, if not particularly well-known. The majority live in Burma's Rakhine state, on the western border with Bangladesh and India. Even though many Rohingya can trace their roots in Burma through a number of generations, they are not recognized as citizens of the Burmese state, which has insisted on classing them as "Bengali" — a designation that suggests they may be interlopers from across the border. They therefore struggle for access to basic state services in what's already an underdeveloped, fractious, multi-ethnic nation, also known as Myanmar.

The partial democratization that's taken place in Burma, once dominated by a dictatorial military junta, has not helped the Rohingya. In recent years, the climate of hostility has, as the report puts it, led to the Rohingya being "subject to dehumanization through rampant hate speech, the denial of citizenship, and restrictions on freedom of movement, in addition to a host of other human rights violations."

Ethnic violence in 2012 led to tens of thousands of Rohingya fleeing to miserable, squalid camps; countless others have chosen to leave the country altogether, sometimes at hideous cost. The waters of the Andaman Sea as well as the jungles of Thailand still hold the unclaimed corpses of many Rohingya, whose vulnerable position on the margins of the Burmese state have made them prey to human traffickers.

The Simon-Skjodt Center's report was in part based on a fact-finding mission to Burma's Rakhine state this March, where the researchers found what they deemed were "early warning signs of genocide" in Burma. Earlier research and advocacy conducted by the Holocaust Memorial Museum has included studies on the violence in the Darfur region of Sudan, as well as the Central African Republic.

"We’re very cautious when we invoke the term genocide, knowing that it can be quite polarizing and sometimes even unhelpful," says Cameron Hudson, the Center's director. "But there is a combination of factors — many of which you saw in 1930s Germany and 1990s Rwanda — that are quite concerning."

To be sure, slaughter and upheaval of the scale referenced by Hudson are so far not in the cards in Burma, but it's his institution's mandate to spot the roots of such potential mass violence.

"What we're talking about here is the targeting of a specific group, based on their religious and national identity," he says. For the Rohingya, their continued denial of citizenship rights — a U.N. General Assembly resolution passed in December demanding Burma recognize the Rohingya was dismissed with derision by the Burmese government — has been reinforced by a growing Buddhist nationalism among some Burmese.

The report found the Rohingya to be the subject of "rampant hate speech" in Burma. It also documented widespread impunity for those carrying out violence against the persecuted minority, as well as worrying trends of local and national discrimination against the Rohingya, including the restriction of their movement and likely their ability to be able to vote in elections expected for later this year.

No wonder the U.N. recently described the Rohingya "as one of the most persecuted minorities in the world."

Questions that Hudson and his colleagues asked of local government authorities about the group's treatment were met with responses that "were not at all satisfactory," he says.

What has disappointed many outside observers, including Hudson and his team, has been the relative indifference of Burma's pro-democracy camp to the plight of the Rohingya. This includes the Nobel laureate Aung Sang Suu Kyi, who's now a prominent opposition politician.

"One of the things that concerned us the most was that this pro-democracy segment has been largely silent on the issue," says Hudson. The Rohingya's desperate lack of wider support within the country leaves them particularly exposed in the febrile, fractious Burmese political scene.

"This [upcoming] election could be the flashpoint that sets off an episode of mass killing," warns Hudson.

You can read the full report here.

Burmese Buddhist monks shout slogans as they march to protest against a resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly calling on Burma to grant citizenship to Rohingya, Friday, Jan.16, 2015, in Rangoon, Burma. (AP Photo/Khin Maung Win)

By Ishaan Tharoor
February 13, 2015

In 2009, Burma's then consul general in Hong Kong sent a letter to local newspapers and fellow diplomats posted in the Chinese territory. It was addressing concerns over the treatment of refugees from Burma's Rohingya population, a Bengali-speaking Muslim minority long marginalized in the country. Incidents of shipwrecked boats bearing half-starved, desperate Rohingya from Burma had won wider attention in the region.

Ye Myint Aung, the Burmese envoy in Hong Kong, hoped to dissuade others from feeling sympathy for the Rohingya. His method for doing this was by revealing his shocking racism. The Rohingya, he said, "are as ugly as ogres," and do not share the "fair and soft" skin of other Burmese ethnic groups.

Therefore, the Burmese consul general concluded, "Rohingya are neither Myanmar people nor Myanmar’s ethnic group," using the other name for Burma while trotting out his government's long-standing contention that the Rohingya are interlopers in Burma and don't deserve citizenship rights.

More than half a decade has past since then and the situation in Burma has changed for the better. The country has opened up. The secretive, dictatorial military junta that once held sway has allowed the advent of a fledgling, albeit heavily curtailed democracy. Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi was freed from decades of house arrest and is now a main leader of the opposition.

But the miserable condition of the Rohingya, a forgotten, stateless people, persists. The U.N. deems them "one of the most persecuted minorities in the world." There are some 1.3 million Rohingya, the majority of whom live in Burma's Rakhine state, on the western border with Bangladesh and India, and struggle to access basic state services. As WorldViews reported last year, around 140,000 Rohinigya eke out a squalid existence in ramshackle camps, displaced by ethnic and sectarian strife in 2013 and neglected by the Burmese government.

Recent U.N. calls on the Burmese government to grant the Rohingya full citizenship rights, including a General Assembly resolution passed in December, have been received with hostility. Angry anti-Rohingya marches this week persuaded the government to scrap tentative plans to give Rohingya carrying temporary documents the right to vote in an upcoming referendum.

Much of the ire is fanned by a hard-core of nationalist Buddhist monks. Certain groups play an outsize role in fanning sentiment against the Rohingya, whom they like to characterize as "Bengali" illegal immigrants rather than a distinct Burmese ethnic group. (Never mind that many generations of Rohingya have lived on what's Burmese soil.)

Ashin Wirathu, a Buddhist cleric notorious for his xenophobic rhetoric, even earned a spot on the cover of TIME magazine's International edition, with the cover line: "The Face of Buddhist Terror." The saffron-clad Wirathu dubs himself the "Burmese Bin Laden," and indulges in frenzied, un-monk-like speeches calling for tough action on Muslims. He raises the fear of forced conversions and terrorism. Last year, he addressed a gathering of nationalist monks in Sri Lanka, another nation with a Buddhist majority, warning of "a jihad against Buddhist monks."

But critics say Wirathu and his ilk, more often than not, are the ones inciting mob violence against Burma's Muslims, including non-Rohingya Muslims. Hundreds have died in recent years amid riots and tit-for-tat attacks.

It's a worrying development in a diverse nation that's just emerging from the straight-jacket of authoritarian rule. Perhaps the most depressing indication of the Rohingya's plight is the relative silence of Suu Kyi, a global icon for democracy and human rights. The Nobel laureate, in keeping with Burmese government policy, refuses to even say the word "Rohingya" — which in Burma's polarized context would be an act of recognizing the community's rights, let alone its very existence.

Ishaan Tharoor writes about foreign affairs for The Washington Post. He previously was a senior editor at TIME, based first in Hong Kong and later in New York.

Nov. 9, 2014Mosboba Hatu, 60, is held by her daughter Roshida, 35. Roshida says her mother has tuberculosis, but there have been no tests to diagnose her illness because the family says it cannot afford them. Paula Bronstein/For The Washington Post

By Annie Gowen
November 12, 2014

MYEBON, Burma — This summer uniformed immigration workers descended on a squalid refugee camp in one of the remotest parts of Burma, a township called Myebon that is best accessible by boat.

Once, majority Buddhists and minority Rohingya Muslims lived peacefully together here, but the Rohingya have been closed off in a refugee camp for more than two years after a wave of religious violence swept the country, ­leaving thousands displaced. As part of a plan to mitigate a humanitarian crisis that has brought international condemnation, the Burmese government is now trying to register the long-persecuted Rohingya as official citizens.

The catch? To be accepted, they must provide extensive documentation and renounce the term Rohingya — embraced by an estimated 1 million people — and allow themselves to be listed as another ethnicity. If they refuse, they could be placed in detention camps and shipped to another country, according to an early draft of the plan.

“I have been Rohingya for 66 years,” said Albella, a resident who uses only one name. She wept as she described workers forcing her to lie on her citizenship application. “It’s more than a betrayal,” she said. “I no longer trust my own identity.”

Obama administration officials say the Rohingya crisis is a top priority for President Obama as he heads to Burma this week for an Asian summit. Obama earlier spoke to President Thein Sein and urged the government to revise its plan and take measures “to support the civil and political rights of the Rohingya population,” according to the White House.

The Obama administration has backed efforts by Burma, also known as Myanmar, to move from a military regime toward democracy, nearly doubling the amount of aid and easing economic sanctions. But the transition has been marred by rising anti-Muslim sentiment, unresolved ethnic insurgencies and slow progress on constitutional reform.

About 135,000 Rohingya in the western state of Rakhine are still being held — ostensibly for their own safety — as virtual prisoners in camps with scarce food, water and health care. Leaders say ­dozens have died, many from preventable conditions such as malnutrition.

U.S. officials have been troubled by the citizenship verification project, said Tom Malinow­ski, the assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor. Burmese authorities are pressuring the Rohingya to say they are Bengali, a term the government prefers because it considers them to be illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, even though many have lived in the country for generations.

“It’s good that they say they want to legalize as much of the Rohingya population as possible, but the way they have gone about it so far creates a potentially bigger problem, since they’ve required Rohingya to self-identify as Bengali, which most find offensive and many will not do,” Malinowski said.

Khin Soe, director of the state’s immigration department, dismisses criticism that the government is violating the Rohingya’s rights or trying to force them out of Burma. “It is not true. This is just their concerns and worries,” Khin Soe said. “We are just verifying the citizenship. Our job is to classify the citizens and non­citizens and to make them have some kind of legal identity.”

Human Rights Watch and the Rohingya themselves have accused the Burmese government of a campaign of ethnic cleansing, a charge the government denies.

“What is happening is no accident,” said Kyaw Min, a Rohingya leader. “It is a deliberate, intentional plan to finish the existence of the Rohingya.”

Virtually stateless

The Rohingya have lived for centuries in the predominantly Buddhist Southeast Asian nation of more than 55 million people, but they were long persecuted by Burma’s brutal military junta.

A 1982 citizenship law rendered them virtually stateless. The government is now pushing to verify as many Rohingya as possible using that law’s strict requirements, which include proof of family records dating back three generations. The plan also proposes a large-scale resettlement of the refugees by next spring.

Conditions for the Rohingya are so desperate that more than 87,000 have made the dangerous exodus on handmade boats to Malaysia, Indonesia and ­Thailand in the past two years. Many fear that if they can’t prove they are citizens, they will be rounded up into detention camps and killed, Kyaw Min said.

Once on the water, the refugees face human traffickers, injury or death.

“I’m not scared,” said Khin Maung Than, 39, a Rohingya who is building a boat to take his family to Malaysia. “The situation here is worse than the sea. Let me die there.”

Like an ‘uprooted’ tree

The trouble in Myebon township started two years ago, during the ­Buddhist-Muslim violence sparked by the alleged rape of a Buddhist woman by Muslim men.

Right-wing Buddhists blocked the Muslims from going to the market, told their fishermen to come in from the sea and kept their village surrounded for more than five months. Every day, the trapped people could hear a ­Buddhist monk exhorting people over a loudspeaker to keep up the blockade to starve the Muslims to death.

Ultimately, the impasse erupted in violence in which Buddhist mobs torched homes and blinded people with arrows, said Cho Cho, a leader in the camp.

“We had been living in a village with these people for years,” she said. “We drink the same water, live on the same land. Now the students were throwing rocks at their Muslim teacher.”

Cho Cho keeps a book of the dead with the names carefully lettered in curly script — the 25 who died that day, the two who were killed later when they tried to go to the river to fish, and the 54 who have died in the camp since the government moved them there in November 2012.

More than 3,000 Muslims now live in the Myebon camp, cut off from the outside world. Government health workers come five days a week, but there is no emergency service. Most subsist on rations from the World Food Program. They are low on firewood because they cut down all the trees. They have had no soap or sanitation supplies for months.

That’s why, when immigration workers showed up, some Rohingya were willing to give in to the demand that they be called Bengali. They dream of being able to move freely once again, Cho Cho said. Immigration officials who visited and made speeches early on were quite convincing in their arguments, she said.

“They said, ‘You should not see the short term, only see the long term,’ ” she recalled. “ ‘Look at the faces of your children and grandchildren.’ ”

About 1,100 ended up applying. So far, 40 have been able to provide enough documentation to be granted citizenship; 169 others were given naturalized citizenship. The fate of the rest is unclear.

“Our question is the non­citizens. Where will they be taken?” said Khin Thein of the Rakhine Women’s Network, which opposes the citizenship drive.

Hla Shwe, 44, said that Rakhine Buddhist leaders had earlier threatened to cut off their food and water if they did not start using the term Bengali instead of Rohingya.

“We tried our utmost not to apply with the Bengali identity, but we were fearful, so in September we applied,” Hla Shwe said. “I feel as if I was a tree that was uprooted. For so many days I was unable to take a regular meal.”

Hla Shwe and Cho Cho sat in front of a bamboo shelter, under an overhang to escape the hot sun, as residents from the camp toted water and one neighbor rocked a baby in a swing handmade from a tarp.

A woman named Nu Har Bi came by to show off her new citizenship card, which lists her as Bengali, even though she is Rohingya. Despite the fact that she had been granted full citizenship, she has been unable to leave the camp, she said.

“This is the question we want to know,” she said. “Has the government tricked us?”



By Editorial Board
November 3, 2014

IN HIS speech at West Point in May, President Obama basked in the promise that democracy was moving ahead in Burma, or Myanmar, “which only a few years ago was an intractable dictatorship and hostile to the United States.” Thanks to the courage of Burma’s people and to the exercise of U.S. leadership, he declared, “we have seen political reforms opening a once-closed society.” He added that “if Burma succeeds we will have gained a new partner without having fired a shot.” 

It is not that easy. The administration was so eager to declare victory and end sanctions on Burma’s economy that U.S. leverage now is more limited than it should be. But when he goes to Burma for his second visit as president, to attend a regional summit on Nov. 12, Mr. Obama must acknowledge the nation’s leadership and military are sliding backward. Despite U.S. efforts to accentuate the positive, there have been serious setbacks for ethnic tolerance, free expression and political plurality. 

The president may have sensed this, and he made important phone calls on Oct. 31 to President Thein Sein and opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. According to the White House, he emphasized the importance of an “inclusive and credible process” toward landmark elections next year. A vital step in this process is to allow the constitutional changes that would give Aung San Suu Kyi a place on the ballot. The election is the first that her National League for Democracy has contested since the 1990 vote was ignored by the military. The party boycotted the 2010 vote, when Aung San Suu Kyi was under house arrest.

Thein Sein needs to get the message. He will have to be much more forthcoming than the empty gesture offered Friday, when he convened a roundtable meeting with Aung San Suu Kyi and others. Afterward, she lamented that it was stage-managed so that remarks were brief, adding that the meeting was not what she had hoped for.

The media in Burma have been freer in the past two years, but the recent death of journalist Aung Kyaw Naing while in military custody is another alarming sign amid frequent complaints from journalists of harassment and intimidation. The army claimed the journalist was a “communications captain” for an armed group — which the group denied — and that he was killed while trying to escape military custody. These claims are dubious. Perhaps it is difficult for military leaders to understand the functioning — and criticism — that comes with a free press, but it will be much more difficult to establish lasting change if a journalist can be killed with impunity. A full and impartial investigation is needed.

A major threat to the promise of a free and democratic Burma is the continued ethnic violence, and in particular the government’s ill-considered plan for the long-persecuted Rohingya Muslims, which would further isolate them. Mr. Obama ought to make it clear to Burma’s president that being inclusive is the only way to begin to reach that “success” he described at West Point.

Children study at a religious school teaching daily classes in Islamic studies at the Say Tha Mar Gyi IDP camp. (Paula Bronstein/Washington Post)

By Annie Gowen
July 29, 2014

SITTWE, Burma — A little girl balances a bag of donated rice on her head as she begs for her family of eight. Other children play in fetid, trash-clogged pools of water. And at a religious class at a makeshift mosque, more than a third of the children had not eaten that day. Or the day before.

The United Nations says that 135,000 ethnic Rohingya Muslims are still stuck in refugee camps on the western coast of Burma, two years after the government rounded them up in the wake of religious violence that left villages scorched, thousands homeless and more than 200 dead.

Rohingya, a long-persecuted ethnic minority, have been forced to live as virtual prisoners in temporary huts, scraping by on donated bags of rice and chickpeas and whatever fish they could pull from the ocean. The situation is so dire that some 86,000 people have tried to flee by boat, and Human Rights Watch has accused the government of a campaign of “ethnic cleansing.” Yanghee Lee, the United Nations special rapporteur for human rights in Myanmar, said Saturday that the situation was “deplorable” and that restrictions on movement have had a severe impact on the Rohingyas’ access to jobs, water and sanitation, health care and education.

“The Muslim community . . . continues to face systematic discrimination, which include restrictions in the freedom of movement, restrictions in access to land, food, water, education and health care, and restrictions on marriages and birth registration,” Lee said.

The humanitarian crisis worsened over the winter, after the Burmese government suspended operations of the aid group Doctors Without Borders in the area, leaving more than 700,000 people without proper medical care, and said only late last week that the doctors could return. Violence forced other organizations to evacuate, then struggle to ramp up aid again.

Now, children are starving. Aid workers say they have seen an alarming uptick in child malnutrition in recent months because for so long, local hostilities hindered their access to mothers and pregnant women and interrupted water, food and sanitation supplies.

“What we have observed from March to June is a dramatic increase in admissions for severe acute malnutrition. We saw the figures doubling,” said Bertrand Bainvel, Unicef’s representative in Burma. “We’re all still very concerned about the situation.”

‘Economic isolation’

The Rohingya camps are spread out over miles of the western state of Rakhine, some so remote they are reachable only by boat. With so much time having passed, life has established a rhythm of its own for the residents. In some camps, small markets have sprung up, with goods supplied by Rakhine traders on the outside, the same ethnic group they have long clashed with.

Fish from the nearby ocean dries on long poles, and some residents have planted gardens next to their huts with donated seeds to augment the meager food supply. They are not allowed to leave for the most part, although the residents near the town of Sittwe can take trips in guarded trucks to the one remaining Muslim neighborhood across town.

The Rohingya Muslims are an ethnic minority in Burma, the predominantly Buddhist Southeast Asian nation of more than 55 million people. Tensions between the Rohingya and their ethnic Rakhine Buddhist neighbors existed long before the recent flare-up of violence.

During five decades of harsh military rule in Burma, the Rohingya were persecuted by the government, human rights experts say, forced to endure hard labor, relocations, rape and torture. Although Rohingya have lived in Burma for generations, a strict 1982 citizenship law rendered many of them stateless, and the government continues to consider them refugees from Bangladesh. This year, census workers refused to count those who identified themselves as Rohingya.

Ye Htut, the spokesman for the Burmese president, Thein Sein, bristled when the word “Rohingya” was used in an interview.

“I would like to point out that the government of Myanmar and Myanmar people didn’t accept the word Rohingya,” Ye Htut said. “We recognize there are Islamic Bengalis in our country.” But, he said, “We recognize there are tensions and challenges in our country, especially communal violence.”

Phil Robertson, the deputy director of Human Rights Watch in Asia, said that the government has engaged in a policy of “social and economic isolation of the Rohingya” for years, particularly since June 2012, when three Muslim men allegedly raped a Buddhist woman.

Since then, Robertson said, “It’s been a downward spiral in terms of humanitarian access and accountability. The situation is going badly downhill. You have about 140,000 people in displaced persons camps and another 40,000 locked in their villages without adequate access to food and medical services.”

Ye Htut said that the Rohingya are being kept in the camps for their own protection.

The crisis has given rise to widespread international outrage, and questions about whether the United States — which eased economic sanctions on Burma after the government began a process of democratic reform in 2011 — has painted a rosier picture of the emerging democracy than is warranted.

“No one is turning a blind eye to anything. In fact we’re working continually to help address problems on the ground,” said Derek Mitchell, the U.S. ambassador to Burma. “What we are doing out here is in anticipation of continued reform, although we need to remain patient as the country deals with increasingly difficult issues going forward.”

Doctors Without Borders said in a statement Friday that they were “cautiously optimistic” after the government’s surprise announcement that they could return to the area after they were expelled in February for treating victims of a January clash that left more than 40 Rohingya dead — a confrontation the government denies took place. Some, however, viewed the news with skepticism, arguing it could be a public relations ploy ahead of an expected visit by U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry in August.

The group was the main provider of medical care for more than 700,000 people in Rakhine state, and the ouster of the 600 staffers and the shuttering of clinics and traveling medical teams left huge gaps. The government compensated with a small mobile team that now numbers around 100.

The impact of the suspension has been profound. One recent humid day in the back of a makeshift pharmacy at a camp just outside Sittwe, dozens of Rohingya waited in line to receive a few tablets of donated medicine. A woman, Ommar Khulsom, 30, clutched her feverish newborn niece. The little girl’s mother had suffered from edema throughout her pregnancy and had been under the care of Doctors Without Borders, a local staffer who had worked with the aid group said. When they were forced out, however, her treatment stopped. The night she gave birth, the woman bled to death.

Looking for hope

Maung Hla Tin, 33, a carpenter and camp leader, said that about 50 people had died in his section, including more than a dozen babies, in the past two years. His area was without food for 15 days in April, and a nongovernmental organization completely stopped delivering soap, fresh water and other sanitary supplies, which gave rise to widespread diarrhea and other diseases, he said.

“We have no hope,” he said.

The government’s unexpected decision to allow Doctors Without Borders back into the camps followed a June meeting at which local leaders, U.N. officials, civil activists and others drew up an action plan to address the crisis. While that was viewed as a positive step, some feel little is being done to address the larger question of the Rohingya’s fate.

“In the long term, solutions must be found” for the displaced people and thousands of others living in isolated villages, said Pierre Peron, spokesman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Rangoon.

Many Rohingya said they fear they may never resume normal lives.

“We’re suffering here. We want to go back to our homes,” said Thin Mg, 44, who had a small goods trading business before the violence displaced his family. “One day is like one year.”

Women and children wait for medical care at the makeshift Aung clinic, which serves many Rohingya Muslims with a few staff giving free medical care. (Paula Bronstein/for The Washington Post)

By Annie Gowen and David Nakamura
Washington Post
July 7, 2014

RANGOON, Burma — President Obama recently singled out Burma as a U.S. foreign policy victory — a country that had emerged from decades of military rule and turned toward the West, thanks in part to American diplomacy.

If Burma succeeds, the president told West Point cadets recently, “we will have gained a new partner without having fired a shot.” But two years after Obama made a historic visit to the Southeast Asian nation, the achievement is in jeopardy.

Burma’s government has cracked down on the media. The parliament is considering laws that could restrict religious freedom. And revered opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who welcomed Obama to her home in 2012, remains constitutionally barred from running for president as the country heads into a pivotal election next year.

The situation is most dire in Burma’s western reaches, where more than 100,000 Rohingya Muslims are living as virtual prisoners, with little access to health care and food. The fast-deteriorating conditions prompted Tomás Ojéa Quintana, a former United Nations special rapporteur for human rights, to say in April that there is an “element of genocide” in the Rohingyas’ plight.

The setbacks have raised the stakes for Obama’s scheduled November visit to a regional conference in Burma, during which the administration had hoped to showcase the country’s progress as part of its strategic “rebalance” toward Asia. Now even some of Obama’s allies on Capitol Hill have begun to question whether the administration has moved too quickly to embrace Burma’s leadership.

“We have a moral obligation despite the political benefits” of improving ties, said Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-N.Y.), who has introduced a bill to link additional U.S. aid to human rights reforms. “We’re for having a relationship with Burma, but only if they respect human rights and the rule of law.”

A woman holds her son as she waits for rations of rice from the U.N. World Food Program. (Paula Bronstein/for The Washington Post)
To be sure, Burma is no longer the dictatorship it was five years ago, when it allowed no free elections or public dissent. The government has conditionally released hundreds of political prisoners, abolished censorship and permitted a democratically elected parliament. The president’s spokesman, Ye Htut, said critics are not giving the country enough credit for what it has done.

U.S. officials said Obama will make clear to President Thein Sein that his government must address the human rights issues and allow a truly democratic election in 2015 if it expects to maintain good relations with the United States.

“As far as Burma’s come in the last three years, they’re getting to the really hard stuff now,” said Tom Malinowski, assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor. “That’s why there are some acute problems and legitimate fears about prospects for full success.”

A change in attitude

Burma, also known as Myanmar, sits in a strategic location between China and India. From 1962 onward, it was ruled by secretive, brutal military regimes. The United States imposed stiff economic sanctions after the Burmese military killed thousands during a student uprising in 1988.

But by 2010, the Obama administration began to see signs that Burma’s generals were looking to open up the country and move away from their close ties with China and North Korea. The generals released Suu Kyi — who had won the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize for her pro-democracy struggle — from house arrest.

By 2011, “the prospects for progress were better than at any time in a generation,” former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton wrote in her recent memoir, “Hard Choices,” which devotes a chapter to Burma. She wrote that “those early days of flickering progress and uncertain hope remain a high point of my time as Secretary.”

The State Department began a policy of matching “action for action,” rewarding the Burmese government’s reforms with a gradual easing of sanctions.

Clinton went to Burma in 2011. The following year, Suu Kyi was elected to parliament, and Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to visit.

Since then, Burma has changed rapidly. For decades the country retained the aura of a fading colonial outpost, with crumbling buildings and few Western goods available. Now in Rangoon, the country’s commercial capital that is also known as Yangon, construction cranes compete for attention on the skyline with the historic gold Shwedagon Pagoda. Restaurants serving Australian tenderloin and sushi are opening, as are Mercedes and Jaguar dealerships.

The country of more than 55 million people remains one of the poorest in the world. Chinese investment far outpaces that of the United States — about $14 billion compared with about $243 million. Western companies have been slow to arrive because of infrastructure problems and a lack of qualified workers.

Military’s grip endures

Despite the political opening, the Burmese military still holds extraordinary power under a constitution that guarantees the armed forces a quarter of the seats in parliament and reserves key ministry posts for officers.

Burmese and foreign human rights activists worry that the government has slowed or even reversed its progress toward democracy.

In his 2012 meeting with Obama, Thein Sein made 11 commitments to implement additional democratic reforms and human rights protections. But activists and U.S. congressional leaders say his government has delivered on few of them.

For example, the Burmese president pledged to reach a cease-fire in predominantly Christian Kachin state, one of several areas of this majority-Buddhist country where armed ethnic groups have long clashed with the military.

Since a cease-fire in the state fell apart three years ago, the Burmese military has burned churches and destroyed villages, activists say. The human rights group Fortify Rights recently alleged that the military has tortured more than 60 civilians there in the past three years. The government has denied the torture allegations.

Meanwhile, the country’s political situation has become complicated by the rise of a movement of extreme Buddhist nationalists, who are freer to operate in the less repressive environment.

Nationalist monks seeking to protect their religion from the spread of Islam are pushing for laws that would block interfaith marriage and make it more difficult for people to convert. The monks — backed by a petition signed by thousands of citizens — want non-Buddhist men to convert before marrying Buddhist women or face 10 years in prison. The laws are being drafted in parliament with the support of the government, according to Ye Htut.

Then there is the matter of the Rohingya, a long-persecuted Muslim minority who are not considered citizens although many have lived in the country for generations. In 2012, thousands of Ro­hingya were displaced after their villages were torched by Buddhists angry that Muslim men had allegedly raped a Buddhist woman.

Rohingya girls pump drinking water at the Dar Paing camp outside Sittwe. (Paula Bronstein/for The Washington Post)
Two years later, more than 100,000 Rohingya live in overcrowded camps. Health conditions worsened recently after the government suspended Doctors Without Borders and other aid groups following two more rounds of violence, although some humanitarian workers have begun returning.

Ye Htut said that long-running peace talks continue with ethnic militias, including those in Kachin state, and that the government is trying to ease tensions between Rohingya Muslims and Buddhists.

He said Washington should show more appreciation for Burma’s reforms, which include opening up the government-dominated economy and allowing private newspapers to operate.

“Some people in Congress have tried to shift the goal posts again and again instead of recognizing our progress,” Ye Htut said.

Still, the fragility of the reforms has been underlined in recent months as authorities arrested several local reporters on what rights groups call politically motivated charges that include defamation and revealing state secrets. The government has also instituted tighter press registration laws.

“There are a lot of people in Washington who think there is this great success story” in Burma, said David S. Mathieson, senior researcher on Burma for Human Rights Watch. “But there are a lot of indicators that they’re heading south very quickly.”

Obama plans to raise concerns about the Rohingya and the government’s unfulfilled promises when he visits Burma, a White House official said.

“When we talk about our democratization agenda in Asia, Burma is example number one,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of diplomatic sensitivities. “It’s a big play, but it’s a risky play. We know that. And that’s why we are continuing to invest in our relationship.”

Political activism

Suu Kyi’s party launched a petition drive to remove a part of the constitution that gives the military veto power over constitutional changes that could open the door to broader reforms.

On a sweltering day in downtown Rangoon, volunteers sat outside the party’s headquarters collecting signatures, an activity that would have been unheard of in the days of the military junta.

Music praising Suu Kyi blasted from loudspeakers. Nobody seemed to be afraid of speaking out, although one man who was wearing a pro-democracy ­T-shirt asked that he not be photographed.

One democracy campaigner, Zin Mar Aung, said she and other activists were harassed with anonymous text messages and death threats after they criticized the proposed interfaith-marriage law. She worries that the petition drive won’t work because the military does not want to fully give up power.

“We think their reforms have stagnated,” she said. “We think liberalization is over and the regime doesn’t want to give power through democratic elections.”

Nakamura reported from Washington. Khine Thurein in Rangoon contributed to this report.


    • Rohingya Exodus