A little background on CNN's report on the Rohingya

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CNN International is running a sensational report about how Rohingya refugees were pushed off of Thailand and landed in Malaysia.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/03/13/malaysia.refugee.arrests/index.html?iref=allsearch

Here is the basic report from CNN.com

(CNN) -- Malaysian authorities have arrested a boatload of ethnic minorities fleeing Myanmar off the holiday island of Langkawi.

The Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency says the 93 Rohingya men, aged between 16 and 50 years old, are being detained by immigration authorities in Malaysia.

The Rohingya are an ethnic Muslim minority from western Myanmar who say they have been persecuted by that country's ruling military junta and have long sought refuge in other places.

A local Rohingya representative said that Thai authorities had towed the boat carrying the 93 boys and men out to sea and given them supplies, before cutting them adrift to float south into Malaysian waters

Here is the story of the Rohingya

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya

The Rohingya is a Muslim ethnic group of the Northern Arakan State of Western Burma (also known as Myanmar). The Rohingya population is mostly concentrated in two bordering townships of Arakan to Bangladesh, namely Maungdaw and Buthidaung, and is spread in three townships of Akyab, Rathedung and Kyauktaw.

Here are the facts:

There are approximately 100,000 Rohingya in refugee camps on the Burma/Thai border.

There is only one reason that Thailand will not accept these refugees into first asylum camps. That reason is the United States nor any other developed country including Australia a country that has a history of seeking migrants, nor Malaysia - their ethnic 'home, want to resettle them.

The resettlement into Bengladesh has ended and the Bengladesh now want to return them to Burma.

A little background: After the communists took over North Vietnam there was a large migration of mostly Catholic refugees to the South, but about 40,000 ended up in Thailand. Thailand was told that the United States would take these refugees, please give them temporary asylum.

The United States reneged on that promise and never resettled any of those Vietnamese. The Thais eventually absorbed them and gave the Vietnamese citizenship.

When hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians went to Thailand after the Khmer Rouge and the 'fall' of South Vietnam, Thailand gave primary asylum with ironclad promises that they would all be resettled. When the numbers of incoming refugees reached a ratio of about 30 incoming refugees to 1 resettled refugees the Thais would start forcibly repatriating refugees back to Cambodia.

Overnight the numbers would increase.

I can guarantee that Thailand would provide refuge to all of the Rohingya on a single condition, that the US guarantees permanent resettlement.

The US and Thailand are not the bad guys here, it is the criminal regime of Burma that is trying to expel an ethnic group that has lived there for generations.

CNN should get off its high horse and stop slanting its coverage against the Thais. They are still a relatively poor country that doesn't have the resources sufficient to bring up the living condition of its own rural poor.

The Thai position on the Rohingya is the same as the US, except that the US is a much richer country.

If CNN thinks that the Rohingya should be given first asylum sanctuary in Thailand then the real question is why won't the US, and other developed countries, offer permanent asylum in their countries.

We all know that in today's economic situation the US is not going to undertake hundreds of thousands of refugees it had no hand in creating, and neither is Thailand.

The tragic situation of the Rohingya will continue until there is regime change in Burma, but for that matter the terrible suffering of tens of millions of Burmese will also continue, as the entire country is a defacto refugee camp.