Viewpoint
Heartless World Ignores Plight of Rohingya Refugees on Approach of Monsoon Fury
By: Kayhan Int’l Staff Writer
With the month of June nearing its end and July around the corner, along with its heavy monsoon rains, the plight of the world’s most persecuted people, uprooted from their ancestral homeland and living as refugees in makeshift camps set up on largely loose hilly soil of an impoverished neighbouring country, appears to assume catastrophic proportions.
These worsening conditions on the heels of mass massacres, expulsions, rape of the helpless, and poverty in a foreign land, are staring point blank in the eyes of the million-plus Rohingya Muslims of Arakan, in the Cox Bazar area of Bangladesh.
These are the people at whose sufferings the world has chosen to turn a blind eye, when it could have forced the racist regime of Myanmar to end the genocide and ethnic cleansing in what it calls Rakhine state.
On June 6, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the UN Development Programme (UNDP) jointly announced signing of a Memorandum of Understanding with Myanmar in order to create conditions for "conducive to voluntary, safe, dignified, and sustainable refugee returns from Bangladesh, and their reintegration in the country.”
Now twenty days have passed and no practical step has been taken in this regard. Observers point out that the ambiguous wording of the MoU are actually in favour of the heartless regime, which has no intention to take back what it views as a poverty-stricken and stateless ethnic people with no political voice, on a depopulated land where it has settled its Buddhist co-religionists to reap the riches from the deserted farmlands of the Rohingya Muslims.
The irony is that the much acclaimed Myanmar State Councillor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi continues to provide silken cover for the brutality of her military through her dismissal of the carnage going on under her rule.
This "cruel lady” – as the Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, has rightly called her – who knows what flamboyant dresses to wear in her middle age during meeting with senior officials of world countries and what deceptive words to use while conferring with them with a "seductive smile” on her face that hides a killer conscience, is without the least doubt a party to crimes against humanity, despite her claims to defend democracy.
The UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy on sexual violence Primila Patten of Mauritius has also gone public with her exasperation over Suu Kyi’s refusal to engage substantively on the issue of the Myanmar military’s systematic sexual violence against thousands of Rohingya women and girls – many of whom did not make it to the refugee camps in Bangladesh’s Cox Bazaar. Patten said: "Suu Kyi should know that inactivity in the face of genocidal actions can carry moral and legal responsibility.”
It is indeed racism on a grand scale stirred up by Myanmar’s military junta, which has its own reasons for designating the Rohingya Muslim’s as non-Burmese foreigners in spite of the fact that these people have been living in Arakan or Rakhine for over eight centuries, long before the region was annexed by an expansionist Burma.
The fact is the ancestral land of the Rohingyas contains large natural gas resources, and is greedily eyed by big multinational corporations which are acting in collusion with the Myanmar military. It is an undeniable reality that the multi-nationals are profiting from the killings and displacements of the Rohingya Muslims.
This explains why the US, China and other major powers have closed their eyes to the genocide of the Rohingyas. Ironically, this hydrocarbon factor has made even some Arab regimes of the Persian Gulf complicit in secretly supporting the Myanmar military junta, while chanting empty slogans, with no practical steps, for the return of the Rohingyas to their homeland.
This is not something to be surprised about, in view of the current open dalliance of Saudi Arabia and the other Arab regimes with the illegal Zionist entity, by betraying the cause of the fellow-Arab Palestinian people and their 70-years of unfulfilled aspirations to return to their homes and hearths.
Under the circumstances, the only sanctuary that has been offered to the more than one million Rohingya refugees has been from one of the poorest nations in the world, Bangladesh, whose resources are now stretched to the limit. Fifty-eight percent of those refugees are children, many of them orphans who witnessed the execution of their parents and other family members. These children continue the generations-old history of being stateless. They are the most vulnerable of the vulnerable.
Now, with monsoon rains to splash the region in all their fury, will the heartless world nations, especially the oil-rich Arab states which are bushy killing fellow Arabs in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Bahrain, and other parts of the Arabian Peninsula, waken their frozen conscience to the plight of their Rohingya Muslim brethren?
With the month of June nearing its end and July around the corner, along with its heavy monsoon rains, the plight of the world’s most persecuted people, uprooted from their ancestral homeland and living as refugees in makeshift camps set up on largely loose hilly soil of an impoverished neighbouring country, appears to assume catastrophic proportions.
These worsening conditions on the heels of mass massacres, expulsions, rape of the helpless, and poverty in a foreign land, are staring point blank in the eyes of the million-plus Rohingya Muslims of Arakan, in the Cox Bazar area of Bangladesh.
These are the people at whose sufferings the world has chosen to turn a blind eye, when it could have forced the racist regime of Myanmar to end the genocide and ethnic cleansing in what it calls Rakhine state.
On June 6, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the UN Development Programme (UNDP) jointly announced signing of a Memorandum of Understanding with Myanmar in order to create conditions for "conducive to voluntary, safe, dignified, and sustainable refugee returns from Bangladesh, and their reintegration in the country.”
Now twenty days have passed and no practical step has been taken in this regard. Observers point out that the ambiguous wording of the MoU are actually in favour of the heartless regime, which has no intention to take back what it views as a poverty-stricken and stateless ethnic people with no political voice, on a depopulated land where it has settled its Buddhist co-religionists to reap the riches from the deserted farmlands of the Rohingya Muslims.
The irony is that the much acclaimed Myanmar State Councillor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi continues to provide silken cover for the brutality of her military through her dismissal of the carnage going on under her rule.
This "cruel lady” – as the Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, has rightly called her – who knows what flamboyant dresses to wear in her middle age during meeting with senior officials of world countries and what deceptive words to use while conferring with them with a "seductive smile” on her face that hides a killer conscience, is without the least doubt a party to crimes against humanity, despite her claims to defend democracy.
The UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy on sexual violence Primila Patten of Mauritius has also gone public with her exasperation over Suu Kyi’s refusal to engage substantively on the issue of the Myanmar military’s systematic sexual violence against thousands of Rohingya women and girls – many of whom did not make it to the refugee camps in Bangladesh’s Cox Bazaar. Patten said: "Suu Kyi should know that inactivity in the face of genocidal actions can carry moral and legal responsibility.”
It is indeed racism on a grand scale stirred up by Myanmar’s military junta, which has its own reasons for designating the Rohingya Muslim’s as non-Burmese foreigners in spite of the fact that these people have been living in Arakan or Rakhine for over eight centuries, long before the region was annexed by an expansionist Burma.
The fact is the ancestral land of the Rohingyas contains large natural gas resources, and is greedily eyed by big multinational corporations which are acting in collusion with the Myanmar military. It is an undeniable reality that the multi-nationals are profiting from the killings and displacements of the Rohingya Muslims.
This explains why the US, China and other major powers have closed their eyes to the genocide of the Rohingyas. Ironically, this hydrocarbon factor has made even some Arab regimes of the Persian Gulf complicit in secretly supporting the Myanmar military junta, while chanting empty slogans, with no practical steps, for the return of the Rohingyas to their homeland.
This is not something to be surprised about, in view of the current open dalliance of Saudi Arabia and the other Arab regimes with the illegal Zionist entity, by betraying the cause of the fellow-Arab Palestinian people and their 70-years of unfulfilled aspirations to return to their homes and hearths.
Under the circumstances, the only sanctuary that has been offered to the more than one million Rohingya refugees has been from one of the poorest nations in the world, Bangladesh, whose resources are now stretched to the limit. Fifty-eight percent of those refugees are children, many of them orphans who witnessed the execution of their parents and other family members. These children continue the generations-old history of being stateless. They are the most vulnerable of the vulnerable.
Now, with monsoon rains to splash the region in all their fury, will the heartless world nations, especially the oil-rich Arab states which are bushy killing fellow Arabs in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Bahrain, and other parts of the Arabian Peninsula, waken their frozen conscience to the plight of their Rohingya Muslim brethren?