Despite the visit of Aung San Suu Kyi's (ASSK) representative to Dhaka and her own announcement to figure out why Muslims (not Rohingyas or even her pre-crisis term Bengalis) were fleeing Rakhine have not stopped the exodus of Rohingyas. They are still crossing the border into Bangladesh to escape the genocidal attacks perpetrated by the regime led by ASSK and Buddhist vigilante groups supported by the state. There are now one million Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh which include those who were already living in refugee camps resulting from previous waves of ethnic cleansing. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNCHR), about 15,000 Rohingyas crossed border into Bangladesh in the week beginning October 15. And gun fires are to be heard every night from the Myanmar side. These refugees are languishing in paddy fields waiting for permission to move from the border by the Bangladesh authorities.
Media reports from Dhaka indicated that Myanmar had agreed to repatriate Rohingya refugees and a joint working committee would be established to give effect to the repatriation process. But the Myanmar government officials distanced themselves from media reports coming out of Dhaka that Myanmar would resettle Rohingya refugees now residing in Bangladesh. They also claimed that Bangladesh officials did not use the term "Rohingya" during their meeting in Dhaka. They further pointed out the Bangladesh government identify them as "undocumented Myanmar nationals'' not as "Rohingyas''. It was further claimed that at the meeting Myanmar just agreed to form a joint committee to check 2415 people for repatriation agreed in 2005. Also according to the media reports, Bangladesh discussed about security cooperation with Myanmar. At the initial stage of the current Rohingya refugee influx to Bangaldesh, to stem the tide of refugees the Bangladesh government also offered to work with Myanmar to crack down on Rohingya insurgents. Why the security cooperation with Myanmar has become now an important issue is not very clear when more than half a million Rohingya refugees have already crossed border into Bangladesh. Myanmar also has other ongoing insurgency problems in other parts of Myanmar. Why Bangladesh is trying to get involved in Myanmar's internal security problems is not also very clear. But at the same time it is clearly apparent that there are continuing rifts between the two countries on the repatriation process.
The Myanmar Social Welfare Minister Win Myat Aye rather gave a very ominous sign of a further expansion of the "clearance operation'' ( i.e, further ethnic cleansing of the Rohingyas) that began in October 2016. Even more ominous signs are emerging in the wake of the genocidal attacks against the Rohingyas which began on August 25 this year. The same minister declared "according to the law, burnt land becomes government managed land'', implying the Rohingyas will never be allowed to go back to their burnt-out villages. During the campaign aimed at driving the Rohingyas out of Rakhine state, the Myanmar army has used terror tactics including murder, rape, pillage, and arson. While the persecution of the Rohingya minority has been going on for a long time, it has escalated many folds under the National League for Democracy (NLD) government, led by ASSK.
ASSK has always insisted to call the Rohingyas as Bengalis, although now she refers to them as Muslims. Back in 2013, when a diplomat raised the issue of the Rohingyas with her, she told the former in no uncertain terms not to call them Rohingyas and asked him to call them Bengali. Just last year she told another diplomat how Muslims have overran Indonesia after being a minority for centuries. She also expressed her reason for not granting citizenship to the Rohingyas as she feared that would encourage more Muslims coming from Bangladesh. She even further raised the spectre of Muslim threats faced by Rakhine Buddhists with the diplomat. She is in effect trying to create a historical grievance against Muslims for her own country based on the misrepresentation of historical experience of another South East Asian country. She is in effect trying to portray a sense of victimhood by creating a counterfactual historical narrative based on her bigotry. She appears to be creating a fear of Muslims overrunning her country where Muslims constitute only 3.0 per cent of total population of which two-thirds are Rohingya Muslims. She now displays all the psycho-pathological symptoms of a Islamophobe. She is trying to turn an ethnic conflict into a religious conflict. She has now joined the Myanmar army to finish the "unfinished business'' of cleansing the Rakhine state of the Rohingyas. She is also using very selective and distorted historical experiences of her country to justify the pogroms that are being carried out against the Rohingyas.
This sudden influx of more than half a million Rohingya refugees into Bangladesh over and above those refugees who have already been languishing in the refugees camps almost caught the Bangladesh government unprepared. But despite all odds, the Bangladesh government decided to give shelter to the refugees involving enormous financial burden to the country. While the people in Bangladesh are generally sympathetic to the plight of the refugees, it is creating political tensions within the country centred around the issue of how best to deal with the crisis. Each political party is giving twist to the crisis from its own political point of view for point scoring. This is further widening the already existing political fractures in the country.
Meanwhile, India's anti-Rohingya and pro-Myanmar stance is complicating the situation for the government. This is causing division between pro- and anti-Indian political forces to further widen. The Bangladesh Finance Minister A.M.A Muhith recently declared "In a sense, Myanmar has declared war by sending the Rohingyas to Bangladesh. They are trying to jeopardise our economy by sending people from their country''. This is clearly a rebuff to the Indian stance on the refugee crisis. But, on the other hand, at least some Bangladeshi security experts also consider the Rohingyas themselves or at least some Rohingyas as serious threat to national security because of their likelihood of becoming Jihadists or already being Jihadists (as understood in the current Western political discourse on Islam and as encapsulated in the Muslim terrorist dialectic). These security experts rely on analytical models developed and used by the Western security experts on "Islamic terrorism''. These Bangladeshi security experts have no doubt that ARSA is a terrorist outfit with Jihadist orientation and they justify their claim on the sole basis of its leader's diaspora origin but not on what he says on ARSA's objectives. In this regard, these security experts are on the same page with the Myanmar army. These security experts appear have made a Faustian pact completely disregarding the terrible human catastrophe.
It appears that these security experts have been at work to build a Rohingya terrorism enterprise in Bangladesh and like many other business enterprises this enterprise is also geared to the idea of maximising economic rent (or more precisely terrorism rent). Looking at such a terrible humanitarian crisis from the prism of terrorism is also contributing to the intensification of Islamophobia that comes along with it. Such an attitude will create further political crisis as it will inevitably lead to confrontation between pro-Islamic and the secularist forces, further exacerbating the political tension within the country. A very vocal section of the secularists in Bangladesh has attitudinal and behavioural similarities with the French secularists in the sense both subscribe to the idea that anything is secular so long it is not Islam or Islamic. Therefore, recognising and analysing them is central to understanding their real political agenda. At the same time, if the crisis continues without any sign of its resolution, it will inevitably lead to despair; and despair can find its expression in extremism.
This humanitarian disaster is also creating political tension in the South East Asian region. Philippine's Foreign Secretary Alan Cayetano as the current head of ASEAN issued an statement on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly but made no mention of the violence against the Rohingyas. This led Malaysia to disassociate from the statement but that did not yield any retraction from Manila. The statement also provoked criticism from Jakarta.
While the USA and European Union (EU) have condemned the Myanmar regime, led by ASSK, they have not criticised her directly. They are in the process of taking some limited actions as realpolitik prevents them to go too far. However, it was President Barack Obama who lifted sanctions against the Myanmar regime in 2016 and established closer ties with them. He even declared that Myanmar had made strides in improving human rights while the Myanmar army was carrying out genocidal attacks on the Rohingyas. Many did voice disapproval of Obama's decision to lift sanctions against Myanmar but of no avail. Not surprisingly, Obama is also a Peace Nobel Laureate like ASSK and many also consider him a war criminal. India, considered by the government an ally of Bangladesh, has aligned with Myanmar. Meanwhile, China did not criticise the Myanmar government's genocidal atrocities against the Rohingyas but offered humanitarian aid and willingness to mediate between the two countries. Russia refused to acknowledge any ethnic cleansing took place let alone genocide.
Rohingya refugees have been forced to take shelter in squalid refugee camps in border areas in Bangladesh. They have not come to Bangladesh to seek economic opportunities or share our food or compete for jobs. They are crossing border into Bangladesh to save their lives from genocidal attacks perpetrated by the Myanmar army and the Buddhist vigilante groups. The root cause of the crisis is the refusal of the Myanmar state to recognise their (Rohingyas) claim to their ethnicity and citizenship. Unlike in other countries, in Myanmar it (recognition of ethnicity) is the sine qua non to attain citizenship. Their all attempts to negotiate their ethnicity claim, politically, also failed. Full recognition of their ethnicity claim is neither negotiable nor anything short of that will result in the resolution of the terrible humanitarian crisis which Bangladesh is now shouldering.
The writer is an independent economic
and political analyst.
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