A stateless people

REUTERS

This Rohingya village was burned during fighting between Buddhist Rakhine and Muslim Rohingya communities last month. Scores are feared dead in the recent violence.

This village in northwest Myanmar has the besieged air of a refugee camp.

It is clogged with people living in wooden shacks laid out on a grid of trash-strewn lanes. Its children are pot-bellied with malnutrition.

But Takebi’s residents are not refugees. They are Rohingya, a stateless Muslim people of South Asian descent now at the heart of Myanmar’s worst ethnic strife between a tiny Muslim minority and the Buddhist majority which threatens the Burmese Spring.

Rohingya activists claim a centuries-old lineage in Rakhine, which, like the rest of Burma, is predominantly Buddhist. The government regards them as illegal migrants from neighbouring Bangladesh and denies them citizenship. “There is no ethnic group named Rohingya in our country,” immigration minister Khin Yi said in May.

Communal tensions had been rising in Myanmar since the gang rape and murder of a Buddhist woman in May that was blamed on Muslims. Six days later, apparently in retribution, a Buddhist mob dragged 10 Muslims from a bus and beat them to death.

Violence then erupted on June 9 in Maungdaw, one of the three Rohingya majority districts bordering Bangladesh, before spreading to Sittwe, the biggest town in Rakhine.

Muslim protesters hold a banner during a rally calling for an end to the violence against ethnic Rohingya in Rakhine State of Myanmar, in Jakarta, Indonesia. Communal violence in western Myanmar between Rakhine Buddhists and Muslim Rohingyas prompted a government crackdown in the region last month.

AP

Scores are feared dead, and 1 600 houses burned down.

One measure of the pressure the Rohingya are under is the growing number of boat people. During the so-called “sailing season” between monsoons, thousands of Rohingya attempt to cross the Bay of Bengal in small, ramshackle fishing boats. Their destination: Muslim-majority Malaysia, where thousands of Rohingya work, mostly illegally.

Boat people

Last season, up to 8 000 Rohingya boat people – a record number – made the crossing, says Chris Lewa, director of the Arakan Project, a Rohingya advocacy group based in Thailand. She has studied their migration patterns since 2006.

The violence in Rakhine could cause a surge in Rohingya boat people when the next sailing season begins in October, Rohingya leaders say.

“The number of boat people will increase and increase,” said Abu Tahay, chairman of the National Democratic Party for Development, a Rohingya political party.

In what could be the start of a regional refugee crisis, many Rohingya are already attempting the shorter voyage to neighbouring Bangladesh.

Bangladesh, like Myanmar, disowns the Rohingyas and has refused to grant them refugee status since 1992. Now, according to a Bangladeshi commander, hundreds have been turned away.

At Shah Pari, a Bangladeshi island on the Naf River dividing Bangladesh and Myanmar, Lieutenant Colonel Zahid Hassan of the Bangladesh Border Guard said the force had sent back 14 wooden country boats since the violence flared in early June, bearing about 700 men, women and children.

Hassan said the boat people were given food, water and medicines before being turned back. His men are now holding back local Bangladeshi villagers and limiting how far fishermen can go out into the river to prevent them from helping would-be “illegal intruders”. Peace has been restored since Myanmar imposed its state of emergency, he said, and his men are telling the boat people it is safe to return.

Asked to explain why majority-Muslim Bangladesh did not feel an obligation to take the Rohingyas in, he said: “This is an over-populated country.”

Government officials say they already harbour about 25 000 Rohingyas with refugee status, who receive food and other aid from the UN, housed in two camps in south-eastern Bangladesh. Officials say there are also between 200 000 and 300 000 “undocumented” Rohingyas – with no refugee status and no legal rights. These people live outside the camps, dependent on local Bangladeshis in a poverty-plagued district for work and sustenance.

Among them is 48-year-old Kalim Ullah, a Rohingya father of three living in a slum where children bathe in a brown pond. He fled here in 1992, after violence that followed the watershed 1990 vote won by Suu Kyi and overturned by the military. He holds up a hand to show a halfstump where his thumb had been before he says it was shot off by a Myanmar soldier.

“They tortured me and I was evicted from my house so we came to Bangladesh,” he said. “Now I am waiting for repatriation, I am waiting for democracy in my own country.”

Myanmar’s neighbours have quietly pressed the country to improve conditions in Rakhine to stop the outflow of refugees.

Perhaps as a result, Thein Sein’s government this year began easing some travel restrictions, says Rohingya leader Kyaw Min. But these small gains look likely to be suspended or scrapped after the recent bloodshed.

The Rohingya in Myanmar are usually landless as well as stateless, and scratch a living from low-paid casual labour. Four in five households in northern Rakhine State were in debt, the World Food Programme reported in 2011. Many families borrow money just to buy food.

Food insecurity had worsened since 2009, which called for urgent humanitarian assistance. A 2010 survey by the French group Action Against Hunger found a malnutrition rate of 20 percent, far above the emergency threshold set by the World Health Organisation.

The Rohingya are overseen by the Border Administration Force, better known as the Nasaka, a word derived from the initials of its Burmese name. Unique to the region, the Nasaka consists of officers from the police, military, customs and immigration.

“They have total power,” says Abu Tahay, the Rohingya politician. Documented human-rights abuses blamed on the Nasaka include rape, forced labour and extortion.

Rohingya cannot travel or marry without the Nasaka’s permission, which is never secured without paying bribes, activists say.

The former military government has in the past called these allegations “fabrications”.

“There are hundreds of restrictions and extortions,” says Rohingya leader Kyaw Min.

“The Nasaka have a free hand because government policy is behind them. And that policy is to starve and impoverish the Rohingya.”

Speaking in Myanmar’s parliament last September, immigration minister Khin Yi made no mention of alleged abuses, but said the Nasaka was vital for preventing “illegal Bengali migration” and cross-border crime.

At Takebi’s market, an agitated crowd gathered before the violence erupted to tell a reporter of alleged abuses by the authorities and ethnic Rakhine: a Rohingya rickshaw driver robbed and murdered, extortion by state officials, random beatings by soldiers at a nearby army post.

Some Burmese officials have betrayed bias against the Rohingya in public statements.

Rohingya people are “dark brown” and “as ugly as ogres”, said Ye Myint Aung, Myanmar’s consul in Hong Kong, in 2009.

He went on to extol the “fair and soft” complexions of Myanmar people like himself.

The sectarian hatred in Rakhine towns and villages is echoed online. “It would be so good if we can use this as an excuse to drive those Rohingyas from Myanmar,” one reader of Myanmar’s Weekly Eleven newspaper comments on the paper’s website.

“Annihilate them,” writes another.

A nationalist group has set up a Facebook page called the “Kalar Beheading Gang”, which has almost 600 “likes”.

Meanwhile, the Kaladan Press, a news agency set up by Rohingya exiles in the Bangladesh city of Chittagong, blamed the violence on “Rakhine racists and security personnel”.

Not far from Sittwe is Gollyadeil, a fishing village with a jetty of packed mud and a mosque that locals say dates back to the 1930s. The stateless Rohingya villagers here face fewer restrictions than their brethren in the sensitive border area to the north. They can marry without seeking official permission and travel freely around Sittwe district.

Even so, jobs are scarce and access to education limited, and every year up to 40 villagers head out to sea on Malaysia-bound boats.

“If they make it to Malaysia, they can send home a lot of money,” says fishmonger Abdul Gafar, 35.

Ask shopkeeper Mohamad Ayub, 19, how many villagers want to leave Gollyadeil, and he replies, “All of us”.

For every Rohingya who makes it to Malaysia, hundreds are blocked, or worse.

Many are arrested before even leaving Myanmar waters. Others are intercepted by the Thai authorities, who last year were still towing Rohingya boats back out to sea, Human Rights Watch reported, “despite allegations that such practices led to hundreds of deaths in 2008 and 2009”.

“When someone tries to enter the country illegally, it’s our job to send them back,” says Major General Manas Kongpan, a regional director of Thailand’s Internal Security Operations Command, which handles the boat people.

“Thailand doesn’t have the capacity to take them in, so people shouldn’t criticise.”

Sayadul Amin, 16, set sail in March in a fishing boat crammed with 63 people. The weather turned bad, and Sayudul’s boat was pounded by waves.

By day five, they ran out of water and his friend, also a teenager, died. They prayed over his body, he said, then tossed it overboard.

The boat eventually ran aground somewhere on Myanmar’s Andaman coast, where local villagers summoned the authorities to arrest the boat people.

Jailed

The adults were jailed in the southern Myanmar town of Dawei, while immigration officials escorted Sayadul and the other minors back to Sittwe by bus. The journey took several days and he saw more of Myanmar than most Rohingya ever do.

“There were satellite dishes on all the houses,” he said with wonder.

On her historic visit to Myanmar last year, Hillary Clinton praised the country’s leaders for trying to resolve decades old wars between government troops and ethnic rebel armies. But the Rohingya stir far greater nationalist passions that could prove even more destabilising and intractable than conflicts in Kachin State and other ethnic border regions.

Rohingya leaders have long called for the scrapping of the 1982 Citizenship Law, which was enacted by the former dictatorship and rendered stateless even Rohingya who had lived in Myanmar for generations.

“We are demanding full and equal citizenship,” says Kyaw Min, the Rohingya leader.

Judging by the inflammatory rhetoric pervading Myanmar, that demand is unlikely to be met before next year’s potentially controversial census.

The last one, in 1983, left the Rohingya uncounted. – Reuters