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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.
At last a voice of moderation and reason within Myanmar itself discussing the Rohingya crisis. The lack of animus from someone who has languished for seven years in prison is truly inspirational.
There must be a two-pronged – political and economic – approach within Myanmar itself: the return of citizenship to Rakhine Musilms requiring a fair process that is acceptable to all. Secondly, addressing the serious under-development in Rakhine state itself in an equitable way. Rakhine Buddhists are themselves not seeing the benefits on Myanmar’s return to the world economy.
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If this man is the voice of the Kalar in Yakhine, I dread for their future.
A litany of contradictory and outright fault in claiming historical coexistence.
Heavy emphasis, mostly unsubstantiated claim to degree of atrocious nature of present camp condition.
Still calling for a citizenship using the very bad example of “Colonial Justification”.
Veil threat of no total arm struggle now, comparing with other true ethnic group, and citing UN claim as legitimacy for absolute citizenship.
Th status of Kalar in Yakhine need to be resolved from a new paradigm with followingn characteristics:
1) Stop/avoid claiming legitimacy that both side will not accept.
2) Assure the existing majority culture as venerable.
3) Resist using the ignorant west, useless careless way to goad this government with DASSK in mind.
4) Coexistence require give and take especially in Yakhine where only the land and the culture are the only important factors presently.
These are just a few common sense point to consider for a dialogue to ensue.
As for now staring from square one independently is more promising than holdong on to the west and OIC insistent.
If an arm struggle should ensue, all bets are out.
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That ambitious power-hungry “lady”, the human rights icon of Burma (that even Bono from U2 used to worship) should have gone to Arakan or perhaps even to Bangladesh, to help resolve this “ugly Rohingya problem” instead of going on a pilgrimage to China to listen to Jinping Xi’s lecture about “One Belt, One Road” prosperity for Asia under Chinese hegemony with pipelines and railway lines from Kunming to Kyaukphru (which is in Rakhaing State!) and all that rubbish.
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The real crime of this regime is taking away the “Hope” of the Kalar.
The ‘Hope” entail “a residency status/statue” that must come from proper legislation.
So please do not malign DASSK no more for whatever the plight of the Kalars that was predetermined by the Colonial ambition of the British. The true devils advocate.
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Well Mr Giggacher, I thank you for your encouragement to “think some more”. But once U Kyaw Min is involved, we do not need to “think some more”.
“Rohingyas have been in Rakhine from the creation of the world. Arakan was ours; it was an Indian land for 1,000 years.” –Mr Kyaw Min
Such completely fabricated narratives came out from the mouth of U Kyaw Min. The agenda is part of a curriculum taught in every mosque and madrasa of Maungdaw and Buthitaung. The Rohingya must take back “their” land. Anyone, even with a white face, speaks about contraception is a government spy. No doubt, WHO family planning efforts have failed miserably. This policy against contraception pays off. The 1982 census shows 29% Muslims in Rakhine. Now they become 40% in 2014 and have twice fertility rate compared to Buddhist Rakhine, and are well on the path to become majority and to demand a separate Muslim state.
It’s not surprising that Thailand takes over a million of Burmese refugees and migrants, but refuses to take these Bengali Rohingya. In their camps, they protest for three meals a day with snacks, in the name of “the rights to food”, but refuse to help and work for the “infidels”. In Rakhine the situation is nothing new. They resent when you call them “Kalars” but they will call you “infidels” in their Bengali language and think your women deserve a rape. They managed to earn hatred even from their cousins in Bangladesh. “We’ve found a family having 18 children. Is this acceptable?” said a Bangladeshi official at Rohingya camps, not long before a riot against Rohingya broke out.
If you really want peace, then forgo your agenda about a separate Muslim state, stop the skyrocketing birth rates, guarantee the Buddhist Rakhine that there would never be a Muslim takeover, learn their language, integrate with the majority and tell the truths about when you came to Myanmar.
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I want to add while It’s true that the 140,000 people are not allowed to leave their camps because their citizenship status must be verified, the government allows anyone to donate, give food and shelter to them. In a country where 50% of children are suffering malnutrition, their conditions are even better than displaced Kachin refugees who receive scant media coverage and get only half of their food.
Who bears responsibility for this standoff? Politicians like U Kyaw Min are pushing their “Rohingya” agenda with complete disregard to the of suffering of their own people. If a compromise term like “Rakhine Muslims” was proposed and accepted, the government can easily move forward. Even the term “Rohingya” might be acceptable to many people if their politicians did not associate the term with fabricated claims that Rakhine was previously a Muslim kingdom.
There are even claims that their leaders even denied food rations to anyone cooperated with the government during the census. Current Rohingya leadership is using their own people as hostages to promote their political agenda.
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The man said the Rohingya have lived in Rakhine State for centuries. True since the British colonial masters let them in, with an extremely tenuous connection to the history of
Mrauk U.
During WW2 they had tried a violent takeover armed by the British ‘to fight the invading Japanese’ by murdering the governor first followed by ethnic cleansing of the Rakhine in northern Arakan where for example Buthidaung is now 90% of Bengali descent.
They approached Jinnah unsuccessfully to have northern Arakan annexed or subsumed into East Pakistan.
They then launched a Mujahid rebellion that took a number of years to quell after Burma became independent.
They have changed tack since and a ‘peaceful takeover’ is under way by sheer population pressure armed with an uncontrolled birthrate.
In a country like Burma there is no way they can upgrade an Islamic enclave to a de facto or de jure Islamic caliphate, in a creeping, step-wise or violent manner, either carving one out in the north or encompassing the whole of the Arakan which they still unashamedly and falsely claim as theirs from the ninth century (nothing has incensed the Bamar as well as the Rakhine more than this rewriting of history that a lot of Westerners swallowed hook, line and sinker, not least the BBC).
The oh so liberal West including “nope, nope, nope” Australia as well as their Muslim brethren of the Umma, above all Saudi Arabia, are welcome to embrace the Rohingya with their ‘peaceful ways’. Leave Thailand and the Philippines alone; they have enough of the same problem themselves.
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