Latest Highlight

RB Channel

 
I am a physician and a human rights activist. I am greatly concerned about the persecution and ethnic cleansing of Rohingiya Muslims of Arakan. Does your vision include a pluralistic Burma with equal rights for all, including religious minorities?





Aung San Suu Kyi:
Democracy does mean pluralism and democracy means equal basic human rights for everybody. I am confident that we can build up a really strong and united Burma. The signs are all here.
In some ways, the sufferings we have undergone together have built up a tremendous feeling of trust among each other. Our sufferings have united us. I think the world has opened up in such a way that different cultures are able to reach across to each other.

We all live in the same country - we have lived in the same country for centuries and because we have lived together so closely, we have had our problems. You have more problems with your neighbours than with people who live very far away from you - that's only natural. But I think we can also learn to be very, very good neighbours in the same way because we all live in this country we can learn to be very good and loving towards each other. We can learn to trust each other, we can learn to work together, we can learn to live together and I think that learning process has already begun.

Read More : http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/talking_point/aung_san/html/transcript.stm
Burma's exiled MuslimsAbout 3,000 Rohingya families are awaiting deportation in Saudi prisons, but like the rest of their people, they have nowhere to go

Syed Neaz Ahmad guardian.co.uk, Monday 12 October 2009 09.00 BST Article historyThey have been described as some of the world's most persecuted refugees, and among the most forgotten, too. During my imprisonment in Jeddah I saw and met hundreds of inmates from Burma.

Thousands of Burmese Muslims from Arakan – often called Rohingyas – were offered a safe haven in Saudi Arabia by the late King Faisal, but with the change in monarch the rules changed too. What was to have been a permanent abode of peace for these uprooted people has now turned into a chamber of horrors.
There are about 3,000 families of Burmese Muslims in Mecca and Jeddah prisons awaiting deportation. Women and children are held in separate prisons nearby. The only contact the men have with their wives and children is through mobile phones.
But the interesting question is: where will they be sent when they are eventually deported? Burma doesn't want them. Bangladesh, with a large population and poor economy, doesn't have the inclination or the ability to handle a refugee population of this size. The Rohingyan refugees in Bangladesh are having a rough time as it is. Other Muslim countries play silent spectators.

Pakistan's offer to accept some of the Rohingyas – those awaiting deportation in Saudi prisons – is seen as a mere diplomatic exercise. Against the background of Islamabad's shabby treatment of some 300,000 stranded Pakistanis living in camps in Bangladesh, Rohingya inmates look at the Pakistani overture with suspicion.

The people who call themselves Rohingyas are Muslims from what is known as the Mayu frontier area, the Buthidaung and Maungdaw townships of Arakan (Rakhine) state, a province isolated in the western part of the country across the Naaf river which forms the boundary between Burma and Bangladesh. After Burma gained independence from the UK in 1948, the ethnic and religious group first favoured joining Pakistan but later called for an autonomous region instead.
The Burmese government, however, has consistently refused to recognise the Rohingyas as citizens. According to Amnesty International, in 1978 more than 200,000 Rohingyas fled to Bangladesh, following the Burmese army's Operation Nagamin. Most – it is claimed – were eventually repatriated, but about 15,000 refused to return. In 1991, a second wave of about a quarter of a million Rohingyas fled Burma to Bangladesh.

In Bangladesh, it is estimated that there are more than 200,000 Rohingyas, 28,000 of them in overcrowded camps. There are a further 13,600 registered with the UNHCR in Malaysia (although there are thousands yet unregistered), an estimated 3,000 in Thailand and unknown numbers in India and Japan.
Some Rohingyas have resided in Malaysia since the early 1990s, but continue to be rounded up in immigration operations and handed over to human traffickers at the Thai-Malaysia border. About 730,000 remain in Burma, most of whom live in Arakan state.
Conditions in Arakan state continue to deteriorate, increasing the likelihood of further outflows into neighbouring countries. It's an irony that countries in Asia and elsewhere – particularly Muslim countries – have shown little or no desire to help ease the situation.

The UNHCR spokeswoman in Asia, Kitty Mckinsey says: "No country has really taken up their cause. Look at the Palestinians, for example, they have a lot of countries on their side. The Rohingyans do not have any friends in the world."
The late King Faisal's decision to offer them a permanent abode in Saudi Arabia was a noble gesture. However, later Saudi rulers have found the Burmese Muslims a thorn in their side. With strict regulation on their employment and movement within the kingdom, they are easy targets for extortion and torture.
There are said to be about 250,000 Burmese Muslims in Saudi Arabia – the majority living in Mecca's slums (Naqqasha and Kudai). They sell vegetables, sweep streets and work as porters, carpenters and unskilled labour. The fortunate ones rise to become drivers.

In Saudi Arabia it is not uncommon for poor Rohingyas to marry off their young (sometimes underage) daughters to old and sick Saudis in the hope of getting "official favours". But this hasn't worked for many. Rohingyan wives of Saudi men, who have to survive as second class human beings on the periphery of society.

Those whom I met in Jeddah prisons seem to have accepted the situation as a fait accompli. But it is unfortunate that they are being made to suffer in a country considered to be the citadel of Islam.
The deaths of two teenagers held for seven months at Ranong detention centre highlight the inadequacies of government policies and facilities to deal with boat people
Writer: Piyaporn Wongruang
Published: 23/08/2009 at 12:00 AM
Newspaper section: NewsThey say that despair can kill a man, and so it did with two teenage Rohingya held in the Ranong detention centre for seven months. Two doctors who treated the detainees at the centre said the pair basically starved themselves to death after becoming dispirited and refusing to eat or exercise. The official reason for the two teenagers' deaths is "natural causes" caused by cardiac arrest.
WAITING: Rohingya refugees at the immigration detention centre in Bangkok.
"Their minds were just so sick that they lost enthusiasm for everything," said one of the doctors based at the centre who preferred to remain anonymous. "They refused to take food and they refused to move around. They told me that they were desperate and didn't know what to do with their lives any more. They told me that it's better to kill them than to detain them like this."
The deaths go to the heart of Thailand's problems dealing with illegal immigrants and refugees, and the inadequacy of current policies and facilities to deal with the growing number of cases.
Abdul Salam, 18, died on June 30 on the way to Ranong Hospital. Hammatula, 15, was found dead in the detention centre at 4am on Aug 13, a day after a medical check by one of the doctors. The two were among 78 ethnic Muslim Rohingya boat people fleeing Burma who were intercepted by the navy near Surin Island on Jan 26, and sent to the centre a few days later.
Abdul's and Hammatula's bodies were covered in wounds, after allegedly being tortured by the Burmese military during their boat trip, according to the doctor at the centre. The medical team treated the teenagers' wounds in the first few months of their detention, but the pair were overwhelmed by a sense of hopelessness. According to the same doctor, they gradually became fatigued, hardly moving and sitting or lying down most of the time.
Sanitsuda Ekachai
Bangkok Post
August 27, 2009

If decency is measured by how we treat those inferior to us, then we cannot call ourselves decent, given our heartlessness towards migrant workers.
Last week, two Rohingya teenage boys wilted and died inside Ranong detention centre. Doomed for a life in a limbo behind bars, they just lost the will to eat, to move, to live. Out of intolerable despair, they simply perished.

One was 18, the other only 15.
Imagine their mothers' grief.
The week before, police in Samut Prakan province raided a cultural festival of ethnic Karen migrant workers while they were in the middle of a religious ceremony. It so happened that it was also Her Majesty the Queen's birthday and Mother's Day that day, so a ceremony to express filial gratitude and to pay homage to he Queen was also part of the festival.

Still the police thought what they were doing posed a threat to society. More than 150 workers were arrested and immediately sent to the immigration centre for deportation.

Many of them are legally registered migrant workers. Many have wives and children back here. Imagine their families' shock and agony...

This is probably the crux of the problem - our inability to imagine the suffering of the downtrodden, which narrows our minds and shuts our hearts - although we take pride in calling ours a Buddhist country.

Of course, we can continue pointing the finger at the ruthless Burmese junta for drowning us with endless waves of war and economic refugees. In fact, this is what many of us do to free our troubled conscience whenever we hear of abuse. But the blame game does not address another important part of the oppression problem - our own heartlessness.

It is estimated that there are more than two million migrant workers in Thailand. Most of them are ethnic minorities who have fled extortion, persecution and harsh poverty in lawless Burma. The Muslim minority Rohingya, for example, are not even recognised as Burmese citizens and, according to the Burmese junta, must be expelled. The Karen, meanwhile, are considered dangerous rivals who must be suppressed.

In Thailand, these people are often subjected to slave-like work conditions. If the Thai workers faced the same plight overseas, however, we would be fuming and frothing with anger against such inhumanity.

Whenever there arises a tragic case of rights abuse at home, we will hear human rights activists lecturing the authorities about Thailand's duty to protect basic rights and freedoms of migrant workers in accordance with various international declarations and rights conventions.

Mostly it is a useless exercise. Not because these rights are not locally applicable, but for these principles to materialise, the parties concerned must share a moral common ground: "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you."

Which is not the case here. Why so? Ask the authorities and they will chime in condescendingly: "We need to protect our national security." The overwhelming influx of illegal immigrants is stealing scarce resources from lawful Thai citizens, they charge. Besides, these people carry with them a host of diseases. Their strange language and culture also make it difficult to monitor their criminal activities, thus posing a threat to society.

Being nice only attracts more of them to come, they insist.

Sadly, this heartlessness prevails because it strikes a chord with mainstream society.
It is not that we are inherently cruel. It is only that we are the products of racist nationalism which permeates every social institution in our society.

Yes, prejudice is human when we are still trapped in the "we/they" dichotomy driven by instinctive group preservation. But it is another matter when we let it grow into inhumanity to legitimise what is otherwise unacceptable cruelty.

We must rethink our racist nationalism. Not only to save our souls. When identity politics of the downtrodden can easily turn ugly, undoing racism is a necessity to save our children and our country from ethnic violence.

    • Rohingya Exodus