Amnesty warns of new Asian refugee crisis as monsoon season ends | Asian Correspondent

Amnesty warns of new Asian refugee crisis as monsoon season ends | Asian Correspondent
 Michele Penna Oct 23, 2015 


Newly arrived migrants gather at Kuala Langsa Port in Langsa, Aceh province, Indonesia earlier this year. Pic: AP.

As a controversial election approaches in Burma (Myanmar), a new report by Amnesty International this week put the spotlight on human rights abuses in the country. Entitled “Deadly Journeys” and largely based on interviews recorded in the Indonesian province of Aceh, the document dwells at length on the refugee crisis that engulfed Southeast Asia last spring and warns that a new humanitarian disaster may ensue with the end of the monsoon season.

That people are trafficked in Southeast Asia is no secret – quoting the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Amnesty writes that about 63,000 people were smuggled through the Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea in 2014 alone – but in 2015 things took a turn for the worse.

The crisis began early this year, when Thai authorities cracked down on bases used by traffickers. Deprived of their safe havens, the latter abandoned thousands of people to their fate at sea (up to 10,000 people were affected in the Andaman Sea as of May this year, wrote the International Organization for Migration.)

Some were probably lost forever in the ocean, while others reached the shores of neighboring countries, where initially they were met with indifference. The first instinct of Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand was to push them back – something that contravenes international laws, says Amnesty – before eventually providing some support.

The reason why all this concerns Burma is that many of those who put their life at risk are Rohingya Muslims from Rakhine State, the country’s western province where this small Muslim minority has suffered discrimination for decades.

The Rohingyas were stripped of their citizenship in 1982 by a citizen law which did not include them in the list of 135 officially recognized minorities – thus effectively turning them into unrecognized foreigners – and their recent history is marred by violence.

A sick migrant is helped by friends to board a truck that is taking them to a local hospital upon arrival in Simpang Tiga, Aceh province, Indonesia. Pic: AP.

Severe clashes with Rakhine’s Buddhist majority took place in 2012, when communal tensions flared. A 2013 report by Human Rights Watch found that the violence had displaced “125,000 Rohingya and other Muslims, as well as a smaller number of Arakanese”.

According to UN estimates quoted by Amnesty, about 416,600 people are currently affected by inter-communal violence and in serious need of humanitarian assistance. Many have no choice but to escape to sea, where they become prey to smugglers who get them on board – by hook or crook, it seems – and then ask their families for ransom.

“Virtually every Rohingya – women, men and children – who spoke with Amnesty International said that they had either been beaten by the boat crews or had witnessed other passengers being beaten,” states the research, citing victims who said that the beatings were sometimes repeated and extremely methodical. Some passengers were reportedly murdered after failing to pay the smugglers or died from dehydration.

The crisis died out toward June, as the monsoon swept across the region, making travel by boats dangerous. Fears are now growing that as the monsoon dwindles to an end, the smugglers will go back to their occupation and a new crisis may begin.

“There is a serious risk of another humanitarian disaster unfolding at sea in late 2015,” writes Amnesty.

This is why, according to the humanitarian organization, Southeast Asian countries should work on a better response in case a new crisis erupts, providing refugees with material help and avoiding sending them back to Burma, where they are likely to be abused.

As for Burma, Amnesty merely prescribes an old medicine which nearly all humanitarian agencies operating in the area urge Naypyidaw to take: ending the discrimination against Rohingyas and integrating them into society.

Whether this will happen is very much in doubt. Authorities have always refused to acknowledge the problem and the issue has become a no-go zone for political leaders, including for Aung San Suu Kyi and the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD), whose candidates have shown little willingness to address the problem – fearing, some argue, an electoral backlash from the country’s Buddhist majority.

Rakhine and Rohingya: hopes for a peaceful future? | New Mandala

Rakhine and Rohingya: hopes for a peaceful future? | New Mandala

 

JAMES GIGGACHER, 

18 JUNE 2015

A young Rohingya boy in a camp for the internally displaced. Photo by European Commission DG Echo on flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/69583224@N05/

Politician delivers powerful testimony on plight of Rohingya in Myanmar, calls for international assistance.

One of the many highlights from the 2015 Myanmar/Burma Update at The Australian National University earlier this month was hearing from long-time Rohingya politician U Kyaw Min.

First elected in 1990 to the seat of Buthidaung in Rakhine State, he was sentenced to 55 years jail with four members of his family for political activities in 2005. Fortunately the Democracy and Human Rights Party member and his family were released by presidential amnesty in 2012.

In light of May’s Asian migrant crisis, which saw thousands of Rohingya bounced back and forth between Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, U Kyaw Min’s talk during the conference’s session on communal violence provided powerful and timely testimony.

Highlighting a lack of citizenship and the 1.5 million internally displaced Rohingya living in camps “no better than concentration camps” in Rakhine State as critical challenges, U Kyaw Min said the Myanmar government was not interested in addressing the issue.

“Persecution, distortion, arrest. This is what the Rohingya face. Desperate and stripped of their rights, the Rohingya, who can’t enter Myanmar proper, flee,” he said. “Smugglers have taken advantage of this. What was a small-scale business is now large.

“The Myanmar government says the Rohingya are an internal issue. It is their right to solve it their way. But what is happening is real genocide.”

U Kyaw Min also called on foreign governments, including Australia, to do more to help the Rohingya.

“International governments must take action to combat this injustice. We want to live peacefully, we have lived peacefully.

“Up until recently the different groups in Rakhine State have been living peacefully side-by-side. Without one group the other group cannot survive. But since 2012 there has been no cooperation.

“There is no business, the economy is suffering. The people are suffering. And the Rohingya cannot leave.

“I hope we can dream together, Rakhine and Rohingya. I hope for a peaceful and proper future together.”

Have a listen to U Kyaw Min’s speech here or in the player below. And let us know what you think.

My take is that whatever you think of the Rohingya issue, U Kyaw Min’s testimony compels you to think some more.

Rohingya stalemate tests Myanmar | New Mandala

Rohingya stalemate tests Myanmar | New Mandala

 

NICHOLAS FARRELLY

 – 3 JUNE 2015POSTED IN: BURMA

Myanmar’s brittle international reputation has taken a pounding the past month, with countries across Southeast Asia calling on the leadership to do much better.

Last week the government was forced into a regional dialogue that seeks resolution to the immediate migration crisis around the Andaman Sea countries. But Myanmar’s leadership is dragging its feet, seeking any excuse to divert attention from the dire conditions facing Muslims in northern Rakhine State.

The reason that desperate people have fallen prey to human traffickers is that conditions for the Rohingya, whether in Myanmar or Bangladesh, are designed to be intolerable. Is it any wonder that thousands take to the sea, risking their lives for a small chance at a better future?

What we now know is that too many never finished that journey. Starved and abused, unknown numbers – possibly hundreds — ended up in mass graves across southern Thailand and Malaysia. This evil in our midst requires a serious response from the governments of ASEAN, and the wider community of respectable international citizens.

In a world of increasing inter-connection, information transfer and cultural enmeshment our responsibilities might start at home but they can’t stop there.

In this case the international outcry is directly connected to the internal management of Myanmar affairs. For a generation, diplomats and officials have relied on the old mantra that ASEAN’s preference for non-interference precludes meddling in domestic political and security affairs.

Yet the scrutiny that Myanmar faces right now goes well beyond attention to government policy. Many are beginning to ask hard questions about Myanmar social attitudes and the anti-Muslim views that have become mainstream.

During the dark decades of military rule it mattered little what the Myanmar people thought. Resistance to the generals sparked many times but never came close to toppling their dictatorship. The mass of people obviously had their ideas, but there were few outlets for broadcasting them and only limited opportunities to get hold of good information.

Since the liberalisation unleashed by the government of President U Thein Sein the entire system has shifted. Nowadays information comes in unstoppable waves, much of it funnelled through the echo chamber of Facebook. People who grew up without ready access to any uncensored news now struggle to judge the authority of a million different voices.

The algorithmic logics of the Web, combined with the power of popular endorsement, ultimately determine the visibility of different ideas.

This changes the equation for leaders as their every gaffe, grimace or grin can be repackaged for consumption by thousands, even millions, within a matter of hours. This multiplication effect is new everywhere, but it has specific implications as Myanmar seeks to manage the ongoing fallout of violence and desperation in northern Rakhine State.

We learn online that some Myanmar citizens hold unflinching views about Rakhine State. They see their country at risk from illegal migrants from Bangladesh and have been told that the Rohingya are “Bengali” interlopers. They are unwilling to accept negotiation with such foreigners.

Such sentiments are put aggressively by Rakhine State’s elected leaders who have determined that no compromise is possible. Their State is officially home to one “national race” that professes the Islamic faith, the Kamein, but there is no space for those claiming to be Rohingya.

Hate speech is one of the outcomes and today’s internet allows unfiltered views, no matter how ignorant, to get plenty of attention. The nationalist zealotry that has accompanied today’s more open political climate means that moderate ideas and more tolerant perspectives are quickly elbowed aside by the most brazen, and often spiteful, interpretations of events.

Yet none of this fully explains why Myanmar – a multicultural society premised on the inclusion of dozens of major ethnic groups with different traditions, languages and ambitions—is so unwilling to accept a relatively modest number of people, almost all of whom live in a distant corner of the country that most people will never have the chance to visit.

It is precisely because of a lack of exposure to conditions for the Rohingya that the picture of northern Rakhine State has been popularly distorted. So much effort is expended on trivial distaste for the “R” word that the requirements of humanitarian compassion are too often overlooked. And demands for “balance” miss the fact that the keel was broken long ago.

It’s fair to assume that Myanmar still wants to build a reputation as welcoming and inclusive. Tragically, the Rohingya, and some other Muslim groups, are dehumanised to the extent that even horrific crimes against them fail to generate public or official sympathy.

It is unclear that such attitudes will change without leaders in Myanmar taking big risks to move public sentiment, including online. A solution to the ongoing humanitarian and citizenship crisis won’t come from pandering to instincts of exclusion and fear.

Nicholas Farrelly is a Fellow at the Australian National University.