Can We Allow Fate of those in the SS St. Louis to Repeat?
In recent
weeks, Rohingyas stranded in rickety boats in the seas
of Southeast Asia has caused international
alarm. There are several thousand of these migrants in boats off the coasts of Thailand , Malaysia
and Indonesia
with dwindling supplies of food and water. Nicholas Kristof of the New York
Times calls it ‘a scene of a mass atrocity.’
If the seas will not kill them, starvation will.
According to Tom Andrews, a former member of Congress who is
president of United to End
Genocide, “The Andaman Sea is about to become a floating mass grave,
and it’s because of the failure of governments, including our own, to do what
is necessary.”
In spite
of their sad plight, these fleeing refugees are denied temporary shelter in any
of these ASEAN countries. “Not only is
there not a search-and-rescue operation going on right now — with thousands out
to sea — but governments are towing these people out from their shores back to
open sea, which is tantamount to mass murder,” says Tom Andrews.
It is
estimated that some 130,000 of them have fled by boat their ancestral home in
the Rakhine state of Myanmar (also known as Burma) since mid-2012, and many –
probably thousands – have succumbed to death just trying to do so. Many
Rohingyas were smuggled or trafficked to Thailand and held in camps until
they paid hefty sums of money to reach the Malaysian border, which has been a
favorite destination for these migrants that has already housed some 45,000 of
them; but now the Malaysian government has ordered its navy to repel them from
its borders.
The Rohingyas have been fleeing Buddhist Burma for quite
sometime. Soon after Burma ’s
independence many Rohingyas were “compelled to leave their ancestral homes
as a result of a deliberate Burmese policy to remove them.” Massacres
by armed forces occurred on 10 and 11 November 1948, and the military told
surviving Rohingyas that unless they vacated Maungdaw and Buthidaung (northern Rakhine
towns close to Bangladesh, then East Pakistan) they would be tortured and
butchered like animals and that they were appointed to wipe out the Rohingyas
from Maungdaw and Buthidaung. [Reference: Confidential Records Branch
CRiV-10/51 in the National Archives of Bangladesh .]
Soon
after the military came to power in 1962, largely since the 1970s the condition
of the Rohingyas worsened as a result of a plethora of state policies that are
brutal, savage and an anathema to everything we consider moral, noble, right,
fair and decent in our time. Not a single of the Articles enshrined in the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights is honored by the Buddhist government in
its treatment of the Rohingya people. Most
of them who had hitherto enjoyed full citizenship under 1948 legislation did
not receive new IDs. Through its 1982 Citizenship Law, the Burmese
government had effectively made them stateless in their own country with no
rights and made them the most persecuted people on earth. As a result of such
unfathomable violations of human rights, a majority of the Rohingya have ended
up living as refugees or unwanted people in many parts of our world,
especially, Saudi Arabia , Pakistan , Bangladesh
and the Gulf States .
The repression
of the Rohingyas has gradually intensified since the relaxation of
international embargo on President Thein Sein’s government in 2011. In June and
October 2012 there were large scale ethnic cleansing drives on Rohingyas in the
Rakhine State to exterminate or drive them out of the country. Hundreds of
thousands lost their homes, which were destroyed by the marauding and genocidal
Buddhists with support from the local and central government and the racist
politicians and monks. Some 140,000 of them are now forced to live in
concentration camps. To make things worse for the persecuted Rohingya, the
government in March revoked white cards - or "temporary registration
certificates" - that had been issued to hundreds of thousands of
Rohingyas. This meant that they no longer have the right to vote in upcoming
elections in November.
In the
last few days alone, dozens of Rohingya homes and boats were burned down by
racist Buddhists and government security forces in northern Muslim majority
areas of the Rakhine state further escalating the crisis and pushing them to the
brink of despair. It is not difficult to understand why more than 3500 of them are
now in the seas of the Southeast Asia . [By some estimates, this number can be more than 20,000.]
In utter
desperation, the Rohingya have become the stranded boat people of our time.
Aptly put, they are forced to brave death at sea to escape 'open-air
concentration camps' inside Myanmar . Like
the Jews on-board the SS St. Louis, fleeing Hitler’s Germany
in 1939, who were denied landing in Cuba
and the USA ,
the Rohingyas are denied landfall today.
Obviously,
we have learned nothing from the experiences of those returning Jews of the SS
St. Louis, many of them dying in the Jewish Holocaust!
In the
midst of this rapidly worsening condition of the Rohingyas, a high level 3-day
conference to end Myanmar ’s
persecution of the Rohingya people is scheduled to open on May 26 in Oslo , Norway .
State Secretary Morten Høglund from Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ola
Elvestuen, Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party (Venstre) will contribute to the
discussion of the plight of the Rohingyas. At the conference, iconic leaders from
diverse backgrounds including George Soros, Nobel Peace laureates Mairead
Maguire, Desmond Tutu, and José Ramos-Horta, and the former prime ministers of
Malaysia and Norway - namely Tun Dr Mahathir Mohammad and Kjell Magne Bondevik
- will join hands with the representatives of the two generations of Rohingya
refugees and activists as well as international human rights researchers and
scholars of genocides and mass atrocities. Tomas
Ojea Quinta and Yanghee Lee, former and present UN Special Rapporteurs on the
situation of human rights in Myanmar ,
respectively, will also share their expertise with the audiences and other
participants. Dr. Maung Zarni, a human rights activist and co-author of
the journal article, “The Slow Burning Genocide of Myanmar ’s Rohingya” will also share
his views. [While I was invited, I declined
because of a conflict of schedule, which won’t permit me to make the trip to Oslo .]
What can
we do to stop the plight of the Rohingya people, esp. their desperate maritime
movements? Finding the solution must start with Myanmar . Lately, the U.N. human rights
chief Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein has stated, "Until the Myanmar government
addresses the institutional discrimination against the Rohingya population,
including equal access to citizenship, this precarious migration will continue."
And yet, Myanmar government
is in the denial of the very existence of ‘Rohingya.’ It considers the
Rohingyas as the ‘Bengalis’ who had intruded from Bangladesh and refuses to attend a May 29 regional meeting with officials from 15 countries to solve the crisis. Zaw Htay who heads the office of Myanmar
President Thein Sein said on Friday that Myanmar 's
government "will not attend a regional meeting hosted by Thailand if
'Rohingya' is mentioned on the invitation". What arrogance! And the sad
reality is many of the states, including the USA , are caving in to such arm-twisting
tactics of the rogue regime.
It is
important that the world community press Myanmar to stop her persecution of
the Rohingya people. As I noted before, ASEAN is partly responsible for
ignoring the problem too long, which has now become a wider humanitarian
crisis. It can’t afford closing its eyes like an ostrich to the crisis any
more. It has a moral imperative - if not a legal requirement - to allow
migrants to take shelter. It is understandable that some countries may be
unwilling to act because by doing so they are more likely to be exposed to the
principle of non-refoulement,
whereby refugees cannot be forcibly returned to places where their lives or
freedoms may be threatened. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in May 2015
urged governments in the region to remember their obligations to keep their
borders and ports open to abandoned people at sea and to ensure that "the
prohibition on refoulement is maintained".
“I am
appalled at reports that Thailand ,
Indonesia and Malaysia have
been pushing boats full of vulnerable migrants back out to sea, which will
inevitably lead to many avoidable deaths. The focus should be on saving lives,
not further endangering them,” U.N. human rights chief Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein
said.
He said the latest report of the Thai navy forcing a boat carrying several hundred people back out to sea after supplying it with provisions was “incomprehensible and inhumane".
I hope
the Oslo Conference succeeds in mobilizing the world community to stop the persecution
of the Rohingya people of Myanmar ,
including finding temporary homes for those stranded migrants in the seas. They
need all our help before it is too late and we are forced to hear the same old tired statement of past generations of genocide
apologists — “we didn’t know.”
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