Britain must defend Burma's Muslim Rohingyas
The abuse of the Rohingyas by the Burmese government is a human rights catastrophe.
By RUSHANARA ALI
The Rohingyas have lived in Burma for generations, but under the 1982 Citizenship Law they are not recognised as citizens. Photograph: Getty Images.
The past year has seen impressive progress in Burma – the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and hundreds of political prisoners, preliminary ceasefires with many ethnic minorities in Burma and the first elections in 20 years which saw pro-democracy candidates elected to parliament. Alongside this internal progress, international progress is being made with sanctions being suspended and political relationships starting to form, not least with an invitation from Prime Minister David Cameron to Burma’s President Thein Sein to visit the UK later this year.
Burma’s President Thein Sein has been working hard to convince the world his government is changing. Yet this story of progress and reform hides a far more complex and troubling truth. Burma is taking some initial, fragile steps towards democratisation, but there is still a very, very long way to go. Several hundred political prisoners remain in jail, a brutal war continues many ethnic minorities including the predominantly Christian Kachin people in northern Burma, and there are still systematic human rights abuses – civilians in Kachin talk of forced labour, torture and extra judicial killings and at least 75,000 people have been forcibly displaced.
And there is the tragedy that is the plight of the Muslim Rohingyas. In June, a devastating cycle of violence spiralled out of control in Arakan State in western Burma. Sparked by the rape and murder of a Buddhist Rakhine woman allegedly by Muslim Rohingyas, decades of racial and religious hatred erupted into several weeks of sectarian violence in which hundreds were killed, dozens of villages torched and at least 90,000 people displaced. Both communities committed violence, but the Rohingyas were the primary victims.
The effects were seen far wider than Arakan State. Throughout Burma, and among Burmese exiled communities abroad, including in the UK, blatant and shocking anti-Muslim racism came to the fore with threats against Rohingyas as well as those who campaign for them and crude comments on social media depicting the Rohingyas as “Bengalis” and “terrorists”.
Back in Burma, as the violence subsided, the security forces began a violent crackdown going house to house arresting Rohingyas who have now seemingly disappeared without charge and without trial. Those who could flee had nowhere to run except the jungle. Those who could not flee faced jail or death. This is a human rights and humanitarian catastrophe in the making.
Underlying this entire issue is the question of citizenship. The Rohingyas have lived in Burma for generations, but under the 1982 Citizenship Law they are not recognised as citizens. The Burmese government, and many in Burmese society, describe them as “illegal immigrants”. For years, they have faced severe restrictions on marriage, movement, education and religion in Burma, because they are deemed “foreigners”. They are among the most persecuted, marginalised people in the world.
Bangladesh, however, will not take them either. Although an estimated 200,000 Rohingya refugees have lived in dire conditions along the Bangladesh-Burma border for years, Bangladesh refuses to give sanctuary to any more. Those fleeing the current crisis have been turned back from the border, sent to face an uncertain fate. Those who have escaped from Burma on boats have been turned away from Bangladesh’s shores, often to die in stormy seas or be shot at by Burmese troops.
In early July, President Thein Sein escalated the crisis even further, by reportedly telling the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees that his government will not recognise them. On the same day Britain opened a trade office in Naypyidaw and the US lifted sanctions, Thein Sein wanted to hand the entire ethnic group to the UNHCR to look after until they could be resettled in a third country. He described the 800,000 Rohingyas in Burma as “a threat to national security”.
There is an urgent need for international pressure on President Thein Sein, to repeal the 1982 Citizenship Law and introduce a new law that is based on international norms and human rights. No one born in Burma should be denied citizenship. No ethnic group should be written off as “a threat to national security”. Such racial and religious intolerance is unacceptable.
The British government must make this issue a priority. If Burma is to become a truly free nation, with all the responsibilities and benefits that come with that, it must respect human rights for all its people. Britain must push for open access for humanitarian aid and human rights monitors to all areas of Burma, the release of all political prisoners and for an immediate stop to the violence and persecution - including rewriting the Citizenship Law. Without this, the process of reform and reconciliation in Burma cannot move forward.
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ရခိုင္ျပႆနာေျဖရွင္းေရး
ဦးသိန္းစိန္ ေခါင္းေဆာင္သည့္ အစိုးရကိုယ္တိုင္က ၀င္ေရာက္ က်ဴးလြန္မႈကို နိုင္ငံတကာက ရက္စြဲအတိအက်ျဖင့္ ေထာက္ျပလာခဲ့ျပီ ျဖစ္သည္။
ဤျဖစ္စဥ္ၾကီး တစံုလံုးကို အစမွ အဆံုး ေသခ်ာစြာ ေဖၚထုတ္ျပီး ေနာက္ကြယ္မွ ၾကိဳးကိုင္ ေဆာင္ရြက္ေနသူမ်ား အပါအ၀င္ ဦးေဆာင္ က်ဴးလြန္ၾကသည့္ တရားခံအားလံုးကို လူမ်ိဳး ဘာသာ၊ အသားအေရာင္ မေရြးဘဲ ဥပေဒစိုးမိုးေရး အေျခခံျဖင့္ ထိေရာက္စြာ ေဖၚထုတ္ အေရးယူနိုင္မွသာ ေနာင္သည္လို အျဖစ္ဆိုးမိ်ဳး မျဖစ္ေအာင္ ကာကြယ္ တားဆီးနုိင္ပါမည္။
ရြာတရြာတြင္ သူၾကီးကုိယ္တိုင္က ျပစ္မႈ က်ဴးလြန္ေၾကာင္း စြပ္စြဲခံရေသာ အမႈ၌ သူၾကီးသားကို စံုစမ္းစစ္ေဆးေရးအဖြဲဲ႕ေခါင္းေဆာင္ ထားျပီး အမႈ ေဖၚထုတ္ခိုင္း၍ မရပါ။
ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံ၌ တရားစီရင္ေရး ယႏၱရား တခုလံုးမွာ လြတ္လပ္မႈ လံုး၀ မရွိဘဲ စစ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားအား ဆန္႕က်င္ ရပ္တည္ရဲသည့္ အေနအထား မရွိပါ။
လူ ့အခြင့္အေရးေကာ္မီတီ ဆိုသည္ မွာလည္း သမၼတရံုးအဖြဲ႕၏ အစိတ္အပိုင္း တခုကဲ့သုိ႔ ျဖစ္ေနျပီး သူၾကီးတူ အဆင့္ေလာက္သာ ရွိပါသည္။
ျဖစ္ပြားခဲ့သည့္ အဓိကရုဏ္းၾကီး၌ ဦးသိန္းစိန္ကုိယ္တိုင္က မိမိတို ့အစိုးရ နွင့္ စစ္တပ္၏ လက္ခ်က္ မည္သို ့မွ် ပါ၀င္ ပတ္သက္ျခင္း မရွိေၾကာင္း သက္ေသျပရဲသည္ ဆိုလွ်င္ နိုင္ငံတကာ စံုစမ္းစစ္ေဆးေရးေကာ္မရွင္ တရပ္ ေစလႊတ္ေပး ေရး အတြက္ ကုလသမဂၢသို ့အျမန္ဆံုး ပန္ၾကားရန္ ေတာင္းဆိုသည္။
ေနာင္ သည္လို အျဖစ္ဆိုးမ်ိဳး ကို မုခ် ေရွာင္လႊဲနိုင္ရန္မွာမူ စစ္အာဏာရွင္စနစ္ကို အျမစ္မွေန၍ ေခ်မႈန္းဘို ့လိုပါသည္။
တိုင္းရင္းသားေပါင္းစံု လူထုၾကီးတရပ္လံုး လက္တြဲၾကဘို ့အခ်ိန္ေရာက္ပါျပီ။ သို႔မွသာ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရးယႏၱရား တစံုလံုးကို ျပင္နုိင္မည္ျဖစ္ျပီး ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းသာယာသည့္ ျပည္ေထာင္စုၾကီး ေပၚလာနိုင္ပါမည္။