The Ethnic Cleansing Going On Right Now You Probably Haven't Heard About
Posted On July 6, 2014
Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims have fled their homes, their leaders tortured and killed. This is unfortunately a little known story published by http://www.takepart.com/. The Xaverian Missionaries wish to make the plight of the Rohingya Muslims known. Please pray and act, share this deep concern with others.
Written by Mr. Joseph Allchin, a journalist based in Dhaka, Bangladesh, who writes regularly for the Financial Times.
The abrupt turn has occurred since the spread of a virulent ethnic nationalism, a dangerous sequence of events that has led to the displacement of an estimated 200,000 of Burma’s Muslim minority—called Rohingya—many of whom now live in ragged camps near the border with neighboring Bangladesh. At least 192 and perhaps as many as 1,000 were killed in 2012, and 1,345 more have since died trying to flee the country, according to the U.N. High Commission for Refugees, and earlier this month it announced that the exodus of Rohingya fleeing violence and persecution continues, with 15,000 having left in the first four months of 2014. Rohingya refugees have been sold into sex slavery, Reuters reported last year; others are reportedly being used as drug mules. In April, U.N. special rapporteur on human rights Tomas Ojea Quintana stated that the “long history of discrimination and persecution against” the Rohingya Muslim community “could amount to crimes against humanity.”Burma today is supposedly undergoing a transition to democracy. Though President Thein Sein’s shift consisted largely of just a veneer of political liberalization, it’s been followed by a wave of investment from U.S. and European companies, effectively funding and supporting Thein Sein’s government while it has sat idly and even abetted a nightmare of religious and racial persecution for at least one of the country’s many minority groups.
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| Rohingya families crowd a tented camp on the outskirts of Sittwe, Myanmar. (Photo: Paula Bronstein/Getty Images) |
The trouble in Rakhine started a little more than a month after I watched Suu Kyi being greeted by adulation. A 27-year-old Buddhist named Thida Htwe was allegedly raped and murdered in Rakhine. The rape was purportedly committed by a group of young Rohingya. Burma is majority Buddhist; Rakhine State borders Bangladesh, a Muslim nation. The accusation that Muslims had defiled and killed a Buddhist woman brought to the fore a centuries-old resentment of Burma’s Muslim community, unearthing accusations that the Rohingya were illegitimate Burmese and responsible for a host of the country’s problems. Mobs largely composed of Rakhine’s Buddhists burned, looted, and attacked communities of Muslim Rohingya.
“We used to go to their village and us to theirs,” says Rohingya Jamal Hussein, 55, a farmer. “After the 2012 riots we felt that if we left the house, we would be killed; when we went to the market we used to get called ‘kalar.’ ” The term is the Burmese version of the n-word.
As the 2012 violence spread, thousands of Rohingya fled by sea, washing up on beaches in Thailand and beyond. Around 80,000 are thought to have fled in 2012. The violence has continued sporadically ever since.
Zahida, 25, says she came to Bangladesh a year and a half ago, after Buddhist mobs killed her husband, father, and brother. Rakhine Buddhists “burned our village,” she told me in the town of Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, near the Burma border. “People came and tried to confiscate our property, like our cows. When we refused, they came in a mob and tried to grab the Rohingya women; some were raped.”
She says her husband fought back and killed one of the attackers. A few nights later, she told me, “military and [others] came to my house and called to my husband. My husband woke up and went out of the house, and they told him, ‘You have to come with us for a walk,’ so he went with them. After a few days I heard my husband was killed by them.”
Though unverifiable, Zahida’s account is consistent with a Human Rights Watch report describing mob attacks and a government vehicle dumping 18 “naked and half-clothed” bodies at the entrance of a displaced persons camp, “sending a message consisten
t with a policy of ethnic cleansing.”
t with a policy of ethnic cleansing.”
Zahida’s grief is still raw, a year and a half later, as she describes how three of her male relatives were killed in separate incidents. The death of her brother seems particularly affecting. “He was a religious teacher,” she says. “The government came to his house and said, ‘You went to spread your religion.’ It was the military border guards.” Zahida cradles her five-year-old son as she wells up with grief.
A few days later, she continues, “another religious teacher was called by the border guards and asked if he wanted [her brother’s] body. They said, ‘We have killed him. If you want his body, you can have it.’ ” When the corpse arrived, Zahida says, she saw that her brother’s arms, legs, tongue, and penis had been cut off. She says her grandfather was killed in a similar manner.
Farmer Jamal Hussein, 55, tells a similar story. “Just over a year ago Rakhine people came and
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| Mohamed Idris says he fled his home in Burma for neighboring Bangladesh after a government census refused to count anyone who identified as Rohingya. (Photo: Joseph Allchin) |
attacked the Rohingya people,” he told me. The local Rohingya community had recently protested an attack on a religious group en route to a nearby town. “It was a Friday evening. Both my sons were killed by the Rakhines; that’s why I came to Bangladesh,” he continues. On their way to the market one day, witnesses told him, Rakhines stabbed his sons, Karim, 15, and Nurul Islam, 20, to death.
Rohingya camps like the one where Zahida and Jamal live are on both sides of the border. None offers much in the way of aid. The Burmese camps are largely cut off from the rest of the country, creating a dire shortage of basic food and medical supplies, according to NGOs and press reports. NGOs providing assistance were recently hounded out by Rakhine mobs after a rumor circulated of an NGO member desecrating a Buddhist prayer flag. U.N. Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Kyung-wha Kang called the conditions in the camps “appalling,” with “wholly inadequate access to basic services including health, education, water and sanitation.”
Conditions for the Rohingya today may be even worse than when the U.S. Embassy described the region as a “vast internment camp” six years ago.
“The military has effectively sealed the Rohingyas off from the world and keeps them at the bare subsistence level—it is an internment camp,” the embassy reported in cables released by WikiLeaks. “Infant mortality [was] four times the national average; 64 percent of children under five are chronically malnourished and stunted growth is common. Teachers are scarce, with one for every 79 students vs. the 1:40 national average.”
Despite the high levels of infant mortality, the government has committed to a two-child policy—but only for Rohingya.
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