The Times recently published an Associated Press piece on the Rohingya, the Muslim ethnic minority in Myanmar who are seeking refugee status in Bangladesh. As the AP piece emphasizes so heart-breakingly, succinctly, as ” Muslims, they were unwanted in Buddhist Myanmar. As foreigners, they are unwanted in Muslim Bangladesh.”
The government seems to be capable of getting the macro-issues, like trade and investment, right. Its much more suspect whether the government even cares about the micro-issues, like re-emerging conflict in the Hill Tracts, censorship of particular media and dismissing particular calls to redress injustice. Now, again, as if to remind the interested reader: we have the Rohingya. And yet again, it seems the government is incapable, uninterested and worse, unhesitatingly unjust when dealing with these persecuted people.
The AP piece summarizes, their condition almost to the present day:
“In recent months, Bangladesh has cracked down on the group, arresting and repatriating many and stepping up security along the porous border to prevent more from arriving. At the same time, the government discouraged aid groups from giving most of those here food, fearing it would attract a huge new influx of refugees, a government official told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.”
“International rights groups have decried their fate and Bangladesh’s refusal to grant the vast majority of them refugee status, which would give them access to nearby camps where they could receive a full aid package of food, shelter and education provided by international agencies.”
The remainder of the piece relates the historic conditions under which the Rohingya have suffered. Today they are storm battered refugees without country and countrymen.
The Rohingya might think they are the lords unwanted children. How can one think otherwise when Muslims cannot find solace and succor in a Muslim country? Certainly, this thought has crept across my mind and as much as I might like to shutter it down, the thought surfaces like flotsam on a cresting wave, when I read the following:
“On Friday, Malaysian authorities said they picked up 93 Rohingya who said they had been at sea for 30 days in a crowded wooden boat after apparently being chased out of Thai waters.’
”They said they were sailing aimlessly in the hope of finding a country that will accept them,” said Zainuddin Mohamad Suki, an officer with the Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency. The passengers were likely to be sent to a detention center, he said.”
As for those Rohingya standing awake and alive in Bangladesh–a miserable and desperate lot–some are working laborer jobs, some are begging for rice to feed their starving children. Others are being forced into jails and detention camps, because the government of Bangladesh, one of the most densely populated countries in the world, claims that it cannot absorb 200,000 more poor people.
This argument might make sense if there were some fact to which the government could point, some fact that demonstrates that such and such amount of money is going toward poverty reduction in such and such a way–this group and that will soon emerge from the ranks of the extreme poor. Instead, it is the case that the government does not even know precisely how many poor people live in how many villages. 200,000 is certainly a large number of mouths to feed. But if the government is not feeding all the mouths it had promised to feed in the first instance, the least it could do is not deliver death sentences to the 200,000 Rohingya who thought they had escaped persecution.
