International New York Times | 6 Nov. 2014
SITTWE, Myanmar — The Myanmar
government has given the estimated one million Rohingya people in this
coastal region of the country a dispiriting choice: Prove your family
has lived here for more than 60 years and qualify for second-class
citizenship, or be placed in camps and face deportation.
The
policy, accompanied by a wave of decrees and legislation, has made life
for the Rohingya, a long-persecuted Muslim minority, ever more
desperate, spurring the biggest flow of Rohingya refugees since a major
exodus two years ago.
In the last three weeks alone, 14,500 Rohingya have sailed from the beaches of Rakhine State to Thailand, with the ultimate goal of reaching Malaysia, according to the Arakan Project, a group that monitors Rohingya refugees.
The crisis has become an embarrassment to the White House ahead of a scheduled visit by President Obama
to Myanmar next week. The administration considers Myanmar a
foreign-policy success story in Asia, but is worried that renewed
conflict between Buddhist extremists, who are given a free hand by the
government, and the Rohingya could derail the already rocky transition
from military rule to democratic reform.
Mr. Obama called President Thein Sein of Myanmar last week, urging him to address the “tensions and humanitarian situation in Rakhine State,” the White House said.
In
his most public appeal to the government yet, Mr. Obama asked the
Myanmar leader to revise the anti-Rohingya policies, specifically the
resettlement plan. Myanmar must “support the civil and political rights
of the Rohingya population,” he said.
The
Rohingya have faced discrimination for decades. They have been denied
citizenship, evicted from their homes, had their land confiscated and
been attacked by the military. After one such attack in 1978, some
200,000 fled to Bangladesh.
The
latest flare-up began with an outbreak of sectarian rioting in 2012, in
which hundreds of Rohingya were killed and dozens of their villages
burned to the ground by radical Buddhists. Since then, close to 100,000
have fled the country, and more than 100,000 have been confined to
squalid camps, forbidden to leave.
As
conditions in the camps have deteriorated, international pressure has
mounted on the government to find a humane solution. Instead, the
government appears to be accelerating a strategy that human rights
groups have described as ethnic cleansing.
For
many Rohingya, the new policy, called the Rakhine Action Plan,
represents a kind of final humiliation, said Mohamed Saeed, a community
organizer in a camp on the edge of Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine State.
“People really fear this plan,” he said. “Our community is getting less and less. This is where they want us — out.
Many
Rohingya came to Myanmar in the 19th century when the British ruled all
of what is now India, Bangladesh and Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.
But the government’s demand for proof of residence since 1948 is too
onerous for many, who either do not have the paperwork or fall short of
the six-decade requirement, human rights advocates say.
Those
who can prove their residence qualify only for naturalized citizenship,
which carries fewer rights than full citizenship and can be revoked.
Moreover, they would be classified as “Bengali,” rather than Rohingya,
suggesting that they are immigrants from Bangladesh and leaving open the
possibility of deportation.
Under
the plan, those Rohingya who cannot meet the standards for naturalized
citizenship or refuse to accept the Bengali designation would be placed
in camps before being deported.
Human Rights Watch described the plan as “nothing less than a blueprint for permanent segregation and statelessness.”
The
government asked the United Nations refugee agency to participate in
the resettlement, but the agency refused, a spokesman said.
The
Rakhine Action Plan is but one element of a host of policies and
tactics aimed at marginalizing the Rohingya. This year, in line with the
government’s position that they are foreigners, the Rohingya were
prevented from participating in the national census.
Legislation
introduced in Parliament two months ago, and expected to pass, would
ban Rohingya from voting in next year’s election. Parliament is also
considering a bill that would ban interfaith marriage, a measure human
rights advocates say is designed to stoke anti-Muslim sentiment.
The
policies come on top of an increasingly dire situation in Rohingya
camps and villages. In the camps around Sittwe, where about 140,000
Rohingya live, health services are virtually nonexistent.
The main medical provider, Doctors without Borders, was chased out six months ago and has not been able to return.
In
the villages around Maungdaw, a Rohingya-dominated town near the border
of Bangladesh, there has been a sudden increase in the arrests of young
Rohingya men and boys, United Nations officials and human rights
advocates said.
The
Border Guard Police arrested more than 100 Rohingya on charges of
holding illegal gatherings and over refusals to participate in the
action plan. Chris Lewa, the director of the Arakan Project, said the
arrests were part of a campaign to force the men to leave the country.
For
many, the high-risk boat trips to Thailand en route to Malaysia, a
Muslim country that quietly tolerates the refugees, begin at a gray
sandy beach at Ohn Taw Shi, a fishing village fringed by coconut trees
on the outskirts of a camp for the displaced.
On
a recent day, a froth of waves lapped the shore, a few open wooden
boats lay untended, waiting for use at night. The police slept in the
afternoon heat in a wooden shack about 500 yards away.
A
smuggler, Chan Thet Maung, a cellphone hooked to his pants and earplugs
dangling from his neck, said that when the wooden boats were filled
with Rohingya, they sailed north for about five hours to connect with
larger vessels. There, in waters off the Myanmar-Bangladesh border,
multidecked boats sometimes idle for days or weeks, manned by armed and
often brutal crews, waiting for a full complement of passengers bound
for Thailand, the United Nations refugee agency said in an internal
report.
The
annual smuggling season, which begins in early October when the monsoon
season ends, got off to a fast start, the smuggler said. The police
wanted $2,000 — $100 for each of the 20 passengers — on a recent boat
trip, but the smugglers had offered slightly less, he said.
The trip was aborted, but another attempt would be made soon, he said.
Local
officials abet the smuggling trips, according to Matthew Smith, the
director of Fortify Rights, an organization that studies ethnic groups
in Myanmar.
“The
regional trafficking and smuggling begins with the complicity of
Myanmar authorities,” he said. “We’ve documented Myanmar police and
armed forces taking payments as high as 7 million kyat in return for a
boat’s passage to sea.” Seven million kyat is approximately $7,000.
In
some cases, the Myanmar Navy escorted boats filled with fleeing
Rohingya and operated by criminal gangs out to international waters, Mr.
Smith said.
Most
Rohingya who want to leave the camps or the villages in northern
Rakhine pay brokers $200 just to board a boat. Once in Thailand, the
refugees must pay smugglers an additional $2,000 for the second leg to
Malaysia.
Some,
like Nor Rankis, 25, who said she wanted to join her estranged husband
and brother in Malaysia, do not pay anything, an almost certain sign she
will be sold into servitude by traffickers in Thailand.
“I
don’t want to live here; I cannot survive,” she said one evening as she
waited for a smuggler to take her away. She had packed a few things in a
pink plastic basket: a bottle of perfume, a new sarong and a box of
vitamins — though nothing to protect her against the equatorial sun that
would beat down on her across the Bay of Bengal.
For
better-off Rohingya in Sittwe, brokers can arrange documents for a
ticket on the daily 90-minute flight to Yangon for $4,000. Regular
passengers pay $88.
A
20-year-old Rohingya student, whose family pooled savings for the
$4,000, said his broker gave more than 75 percent of the cost to
immigration officials. Like all Rohingya students, he was expelled from
the university in 2012.
The
student, who declined to be identified for fear of retaliation, said
the broker escorted him with officials of the Department of Immigration
and Population in a government car from the camp to Sittwe airport.
“I was shaking with nerves,” he said. “But the broker gave me heart, and I was waved through the departure gate.”
In
Yangon, the nation’s commercial capital, Rohingya say they have an
easier existence. Long-established Rohingya families run businesses
there, and documents are not scrutinized as carefully as in Rakhine,
where segregation has become entrenched.
A
spokesman for Rakhine State insisted the Rohingya did not belong in
Myanmar and defended the Rakhine Action Plan as necessary because the
higher Muslim birthrate threatened the Buddhist majority.
“There
are no Rohingya under the law,” said the spokesman, U Win Myaing,
assistant director of the Ministry of Information. “They are illegal
immigrants. If they need labor in the United Arab Emirates, why don’t
they ask people to go there?”
Some
government officials have described the Rakhine Action Plan as a draft
proposal, rather than official policy. But the government has already
begun to carry out the plan in at least one camp, Myebon, 60 miles south
of Sittwe.
In
a gesture in advance of Mr. Obama’s visit, the government released 15
political prisoners in early October, including three Rohingya. Among
them was U Kyaw Hla Aung, 75, a prominent lawyer, who was jailed after
the violence in Sittwe in 2012.
One
of the few Rohingya trained as a lawyer — Rohingya have since been
barred from studying law or medicine — Mr. Kyaw Hla Aung said that it
was illogical for the government to insist that Rohingya were not
citizens.
“My
father was head clerk of the courts in Sittwe for 40 years,” he said in
his bamboo house in one of the camps. “I was a stenographer for 24
years in the courts and then a lawyer. How can they say we are not full
citizens?”
After
a few nights of waiting for a smuggler, Ms. Nor Rankis waded into the
inky Bay of Bengal to a small wooden boat, jammed with a score of
others, headed, she hoped, for Malaysia.
“I’m depending on God,” she said. “That’s why I dare to go.”
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