The Rohingya crisis in Burma has become “a protracted, squalid, stateless status-quo”
Last month Yanghee Lee, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in Burma (also known as Myanmar), criticised the Burmese government’s attitude towards its own Rohingya people. In Burma’s Rakhine province, there are currently more than one million Rohingya – an Islamic ethnic group – living in apartheid-like conditions.
Don’t feel too guilty if you don’t know much about this humanitarian crisis; coverage in the mainstream western media has been gradually tailing off since 2012. What you should be made aware of, though, is the fact that the Rohingya were previously recognised as the most persecuted people in the world. Just let that sink in. It has actually been possible to identify one ethnic group as the world’s most persecuted people.
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The Burmese government is complicit in the persecution of the Rohingya, a group it declared stateless through the passing of the country’s 1982 citizenship law. With that law, the Burmese government effectively declared the Rohingya to be illegal immigrants from neighbouring Bangladesh. Subsequently, Burmese officials have made it impossible for them to seek any help and now, following clashes with Burmese Buddhists in 2012, 140,000 Rohingya currently live in displacement camps.
“The displacement camp is no different to a concentration camp,” says Nurul Islam, chairman of the London based Arakan (Rakhine) Rohingya National Organisation (ARNO). Formed in 1998, ARNO campaigns for the self-determination of the Rohingya within the Burmese federation, as well as the repatriation of displaced peoples and “the establishment of a welfare society based on equality, liberty, democracy, human rights and freedom for all peoples”.
While the crisis has been on-going for the last five decades, Islam says that the Rohingya are now waiting for the rest of the world to increase pressure on the Burmese government. “[The Burmese government] are persecuting their own people,” he says. “It is now up to the international community to help us. People are dying; all the ingredients for genocide are in place – a slow genocide is taking place in Burma.”
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/02/rohingya-crisis-burma-has-become-protracted-squalid-stateless-status-quo
The above article is from today
Burma - Human Rights Watch
Violence against Muslims
Communal violence against Muslim communities in central Burma spread during 2013, with a series of apparently coordinated attacks against Muslim communities and property. In late March, Burmese Buddhist mobs attacked Muslim communities in the central Burmese town of Meiktila. At least 44 people were killed and 1,400 mostly Muslim-owned businesses and houses were destroyed. Burmese police forces failed to intervene during much of the violence and in most cases did not act to protect Muslim lives or property; in some instances they actively participated in the anti-Muslim violence. More than 12,000 people were displaced by the violence, and many remained in government-protected displacement camps in the town at time of writing.
Similar outbreaks of violence were reported during the year in Pegu and Okkan north of Rangoon, and in Lashio in Shan State. In October, attacks against Kaman Muslims in southern Arakan State around the town of Thandwe killed at least six people and destroyed nearly 100 houses. The attacks coincided with a visit to the region by President Thein Sein. Authorities arrested senior Arakanese political party members accused of instigating the violence.
Legal proceedings against perpetrators of violence were initially asymmetrical, with more Muslims tried and sentenced in more cases than Burman Buddhist instigators. However, in June, 25 Buddhists involved in violence in Meiktila were sentenced for murder and arson, in July, 6 suspects were arrested in connection with the killing of Muslim pilgrims in 2012 that sparked violence in Arakan State, and in September two men were sentenced to five years in prison for arson and violence in Okkan. At time of writing, no members of the security forces were known to have been disciplined or prosecuted for involvement in violence.
In some cases, anti-Muslim violence and hate speech is being spread by nationalist Buddhist monks such as U Wirathu, active proponent of the so-called 969 movement that has urged Buddhists to boycott Muslim businesses and refrain from marrying Muslims and converting to Islam. U Wirathu has even drafted legislation that would ban such marriages and conversions. Key political leaders such as Aung San Suu Kyi did not publicly denounce this movement in 2013, although in an important speech in April, President Thein Sein warned that the rise in communal violence had the potential to derail the fragile reform process.
http://www.hrw.org/world-report/2014/country-chapters/122738
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