Source: Washington Monthly
Of all the ethnic, racial, and religious minorities in the world, wrote the Economist last year, the Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic group, may well be the most persecuted people on the planet. Today nearly two million Rohingya live in western Myanmar and in Bangladesh. Inside Myanmar they have no formal status, and they face the constant threat of violence from paramilitary groups egged on by nationalist Buddhist monks while security forces look the other way. Since 2012, when the latest wave of anti-Rohingya violence broke out, attackers have burned entire Rohingya neighborhoods, butchering the populace with knives, sticks, and machetes. They beat Rohingya children to death with rifle butts and, quite possibly, their bare hands. Since then, half the population of Myanmar’s Rohingya has been displaced. Some have tried to escape to other Southeast Asian nations on rickety boats often operated by human traffickers. If the migrants do not die of dehydration or heatstroke, they are frequently picked up by pirates or the Thai navy—which may not be much better than getting nabbed by pirates. Exhaustive reporting by Reuters seems to suggest that Thailand’s navy is closely involved in shuttling Rohingya refugees into slave labor in Thailand’s seafood, fishing, and other industries. Rohingya women who do not have enough to pay traffickers are forced into marriages or prostitution.
Even if the Rohingya make it out of Myanmar, past the pirates, modern-day slavers, and Thai navy ships, there are few places for them to go. In nearby nations like Malaysia or Indonesia there is some sympathy for their co-religionists, but they are not willing to give the Rohingya permanent refuge. The Rohingya living in Malaysia operate in the shadows, working in the informal economy, unable to send their children to public schools, with no prospects of resettlement anywhere else.
No prominent nation outside of Southeast Asia is willing to do much for the minority group either. The Rohingya have no close ethnic or linguistic ties with a regional or global power: the Uighurs, a persecuted Muslim minority in western China, for instance, have ethnic and linguistic ties to Turkey. Bangladesh, from which some Rohingya originally migrated, is itself desperately poor and not interested in having the Rohingya settle there. Indeed, Bangladeshi security forces have often forcibly repatriated Rohingya, or kept them in squalid camps along the Bangladesh-Myanmar border. No Western nations have opened their doors for the Rohingya the way they have, for instance, for the Tibetans who make it out of China.
Categories: Asia, Minorities, Muslims, Myanmar, The Muslim Times