THE Myanmar government’s “Rakhine State Action Plan” would establish discriminatory policies that would deprive Rohingya Muslims of citizenship and lead to them being relocated to permanent refugee camps. The recently released plan, according to Human Rights Watch, is “a blueprint for permanent segregation and statelessness” and does not recognize the term Rohingya, but refers to the nationals as “Bengalis,” a term that expands and solidifies the discriminations and underpin the decades long persecution of the Rohingya. If the centuries old Myanmar’s Rohingya registered as “Bengali”, it will further instigate the government to force them to Bangladesh’s lands.
The action plan is also a concern for Bangladesh as more than 500,000 registered and unregistered Rohingya refugees live inside Bangladesh without any legal rights or provisions. They lead a pitiful life, as Bangladesh officially does not recognise them.
The Rohingya crisis has been weighing on the world’s conscience for decades. The UN Human Rights Council lists Myanmar’s 800,000 Rohingya Muslims among the world’s most persecuted minorities. Residents of Myanmar for over 600 years, Rohingyas have been stripped of their Myanmar citizenship. Myanmar’s Buddhist majority has repeatedly perpetrated oppression and expulsion on them for centuries. After Myanmar army’s 1978 “Dragon King” operation drove 300,000 Rohingyas to Bangladesh, the junta enacted the draconian Burma Citizenship Law in 1982 with the malicious intent of making the Rohingyas stateless, “resident foreigners,” to be repatriated worldwide.
Since sectarian violence erupted in 2012, an estimated 140,000 Rohingyas displaced have been living in camps around Arakan State, where they are wholly dependent on international humanitarian assistance. There are also 126,000 non-camp Rohingyas, according to UNHCR. But the Buddhist extremists supportive government has failed to arrest those responsible for the coordinated “ethnic cleansing” of Rohingya communities.
The Rohingyas are the most persecuted minority in the world, according to the UNHCR reports. They were excluded from the March-April 2014 nationwide census and face tight restrictions on freedom of movement, employment, livelihoods, access to health care, and freedom of religion. The recent plan includes a nationality verification process that started in August and is supposed to register all “Bengalis” by March 2015. Any Rohingya refusing the pejorative label “Bengali” would be denied the right to be considered for citizenship.
It should be the responsibility of the international community to urge the Myanmar government to develop a citizenship plan based on the principle of non-discrimination, one that upholds the rights of displaced people to return voluntarily, in safety and with dignity, to their homes or places of habitual residence, or to resettle voluntarily in another part of the country. Myanmar’s democratic leader Aung San Suu Kyi should reject the discriminatory and derogatory blueprint, drafted by the military government, to devise the nation towards democracy. The government’s unfairness against the ethnic community is uncivilized which is also a deviation from the Buddha’s universal teachings.
