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Cast out and abandoned
Helen Jarvis reports on the persecution of the Rohingya and the inadequate response of the international community, in an article for the Australian newspaper Red Flag.
June 17, 2015
Rohingya refugees wait for medical care in Bangladesh (Pierre Prakash)
Rohingyas in exile and their supporters have for years been documenting the increasing abuse. Their status and rights as one of Burma's formally recognized ethnic groups have been stripped away--to the point that they are labeled "Bengali immigrants" and forced into squalid and overcrowded refugee camps.
The majority of the country's Rohingyas are not in camps, but in neighborhoods that have been described as "vast open prisons." Their movement is severely restricted by armed guards. The government says that this is "for their own protection." George Soros, who escaped from Nazi-occupied Budapest in 1944, visited one of these neighborhoods. He described it as "a ghetto."
Rejected and oppressed by the Burmese government, about half of the Rohingya population, more than 1 million people, have fled to Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia and Indonesia. Some have made it to Canada, the UK and Australia.
Successive military governments since the 1970s have demonized the Rohingyas--the only Muslim community with its own ancestral geographic pocket along Burma's colonial borders--as "a threat to national security."
While earlier generations often found acceptance in other countries, such possibilities are becoming ever more remote, as countries in the region adopt the barbaric anti-refugee policies, instituted in Australia by both Liberal and Labor governments.
The majority of the country's Rohingyas are not in camps, but in neighborhoods that have been described as "vast open prisons." Their movement is severely restricted by armed guards. The government says that this is "for their own protection." George Soros, who escaped from Nazi-occupied Budapest in 1944, visited one of these neighborhoods. He described it as "a ghetto."
Rejected and oppressed by the Burmese government, about half of the Rohingya population, more than 1 million people, have fled to Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia and Indonesia. Some have made it to Canada, the UK and Australia.
Successive military governments since the 1970s have demonized the Rohingyas--the only Muslim community with its own ancestral geographic pocket along Burma's colonial borders--as "a threat to national security."
While earlier generations often found acceptance in other countries, such possibilities are becoming ever more remote, as countries in the region adopt the barbaric anti-refugee policies, instituted in Australia by both Liberal and Labor governments.
Tutu's appeal was amplified by six other fellow Nobel Peace laureates: Mairead Maguire from Ireland, Jody Williams from the U.S., Tawakkol Karman from Yemen, Shirin Ibadi from Iran, Leymah Gbowee from Liberia and Adolfo Pérez Esquivel from Argentina. They said: "What Rohingyas are facing is a textbook case of genocide in which an entire indigenous community is being systematically wiped out by the Burmese government."
http://socialistworker.org/2015/06/17/cast-out-and-abandoned
