Yasmin Ullah’s parents left their village of Sinya Pra, Buthidaung township in Rakhine, in 1995, slightly more than a decade after Myanmar’s generals had stripped the Rohingya ethnicity of their citizenship. That year was 1982. It would be seven years before Aung San Suu Ki would be put under house arrest, thirty four years after British colonial rule ended, inaugurating a few decades during which the Arakanese were considered one among the 132 ethnicities of then-Burma who had been in the land for generations, comprising Muslim Rohingya and Buddhist Rakhines. Years later, between Metrotown and Surrey, I find Yasmin. I ask her, inevitably, at some point, about Suu Ki, whose image has at times overshadowed the hundreds and thousands of images of fleeing Rohingyas:
“The Western media created the image of Suu Kyi of the NDL (National Democratic League) as the face of Burma’s problems, and subsequently, their all-in-one solution. When elections were permitted and she became the quasi-de facto leader, it became the justification for opening up Burma—no matter what residue of military fascism and persecution continued. She was the green light for a blueprint of routes for the freight of the world economy since 1982…And it wasn’t just, or, primarily, the West, at all, of course. China, critically, has been supporting the Burmese regime out of crude, vested interests. And it is no surprise that the land in which we- the Rohingya- live, has been demarcated for special economic zones, for Chinese capital.”
A boat without a motor
While the worldly and iconic Suu Ki was under house arrest, while the innumerable minorities of Burma, i.e. the Karen, the Shan, the Mon, were organizing their resistance against the dictatorship that had begun systematic persecution since 1962, the Rohingya were stripped not only of political rights, freedom of movement and the right to marry, their businesses were shut down, and their ability to sell produce from their land severely curtailed. After decades of economic suffocation, confiscation of their land, wealth and property, the diaspora that managed to not become permanent refugees in bordering Bangladesh attempted to support their families even as the huge exodus of desperately disenfranchised and destitute labour got fed into the modern-day-slave-and-prostitution markets in Thailand, routes cut deep into her teak forests, bleeding into the Andaman Sea and the Indian Ocean, further into Indonesia, Malaysia and, even, the Philippines. But when a fraction of a fraction of them washed up in Trang province of Thailand in January 2011 and were set adrift, landing 700 km from the Andaman and Nicobar islands of India in a boat without a motor, it was like the world was ‘re-discovering’ them, again- as ‘boat people.’ The alternative protocol was sending them to offshore detention centers.
By soil, by blood.
But 1982 is also the year I was born. Here, in Canada. I was Canadian ‘by soil,’ but my family left for Bangladesh, anyway—a nation still healing from its genocidal birth, 1971—only to move soon after to Thailand. There are two ways to become a ‘citizen’: by soil, or by blood. Rohingyas are granted neither. Yasmin’s journey, unbeknownst to either of us, met mine from the other direction—she had come to Thailand, almost a decade after. She would grow up to study next to the campus where I grew up; I would never know her people existed until I read the news one day about five dozen ‘boat people’ who were detained in the southern city of Ranong. I had vaguely heard of the ‘Rohingya refugees’ in Cox Bazaar, Bangladesh’s beach town, and the longest running coastline in the world. I would never know, though, what they looked like, until I saw fifty young boys smiling through their strange wounds– from beatings by those who ‘owned’ them as they fled to find work, at shore, or sea– at the bit of light that came into the one room where they were ‘kept’.
In January of 2009 when stranded migrants who were being smuggled in boats were detained in Ranong, a Thai district in the South where the trade had been going on for years, small groups of Thai humanitarian groups attempted to move them from the what was basically a small prison to the central detention center in Bangkok and demanded the ASEAN that an Asian Human Rights Commission grant the Rohingyas the status of ‘People of Concern’—with refugee rights—to no avail. Yasmin, when she finished her schooling in Thailand had to admit herself into the Detention Center, in order to get out.
“I moved to Canada mainly not to pursue further education, but due to the increasingly harsh living conditions for refugees and the sentiment against any resettlement in Thailand in general. I can never become Thai no matter how hard I try. Therefore, when an opportunity to resettle in a third country presented itself, I jumped onto it only to find out as a stateless person, I can never board a plane without a passport or an exit permit.”
For they are a stateless people. A ‘people of concern’, which the UNHCR has the mandate to protect. Their most obvious sanctuary, however, a prison, a boat, a camp. Their indigeneity is a question of history; their humanity a question put time and again by—of all people—the fundamentalist Buddhist clergy of the fascist-military Burmese state, who played an integral role in ‘mentally clearing’ the road for the ethnic cleansings/clearings. The discourse of fear, propagated and amplified by the present climate of Islamophobia, is deeply paradoxical: it reduces ‘Buddhists’ to a race, in danger of ‘extinction’. The self-fulfilling prophecy worked in reverse: even the UN called the Rohingya purges a textbook case of ethnic cleansing. Meanwhile, Daniel Feierstein, in 2014, published ‘Genocide as Social practice,’ in which he showed that the Rohingya had already undergone the first four stages of ‘genocide’, namely, stigmatization, harassment, isolation, systematic weakening, and were well into the fifth stage, the complete destruction of a group, which is normally followed by the erasure of the group from memory and history, the sixth stage. The purges of June 2012, supposedly incited by the rape of a Buddhist woman, wherein eventually 140,000 Rohingya were detained in IDPs and systematically tortured or killed as more such ‘incidents’ triggered more atrocities, the recent atrocities of October 2016, February 2017 (all in lockdown areas) and the indiscriminate burning of villages and people in August 25th 2017, supposedly triggered by an attack by the ALA (Arakan Liberation Army) on 6 security checkpoints, all constitute these final stages. The ISCI (International State Crime Initiative) of Queen Mary’s University had corroborated as much, much earlier.
But the UN has only mustered the will to call it ‘possibly’ a genocide, to date. Why?
“Because calling it genocide immediately puts responsibility on the members to act. Renata Lok-Dessallien, the UN resident and humanitarian co-ordinator in Myanmar, was recently recalled from her position because got too close to Burmese officials and was suppressing reports that could have prevented the massacre. Nothing goes in or out of Rakhine state outside of military sanction. And not much is sanctioned.”
In 2011 and 2015 the Rohingya and migrant-labour slave markets and routes were exposed both in the sea and in Thailand; the boats with starving laborers/migrants were turned back, shipped over, or lost in the sea. Meanwhile, the refugee camps of Bangladesh doubled as half of the 1.3 million Rohingyas of Rakhine state fled in eight weeks across the border and many more remained in the no man’s land between. But Bangladesh would not even claim that they are refugees, if possible—they refused the offer to immigrate some to the West when the West was willing back in 2010. Today the west, including Canada, for all their humanitarian talk, is not willing; today, Chinese capital and Burmese strategic interest have a will, and India and Japan, who have agree to fund the interment/’repatriation’ camps, and even Pakistan and Australia who have been arming the military, will pave the way.
The irony: Bangladesh could do nothing to stem the flow of a third of the Rohingya population as they fled after the latest purge. They tried. Just like the Burmese generals tried. After the media attention died down, the talk of building islands to ‘detain’ the refugees started materializing; after the news reports on landmines and shooting to force them out, the rapes and crime against humanity to force families out from precious land, the shooting in the strip of land between the two nations where almost 6000 Rohingya are stranded in the last few weeks by the Burmese military got a fraction of the media attention the crisis had gotten in the winter.
“Both the Thai and Bangladeshi government have an obligation under customary international law of ‘non-refoulement’, not to return anyone to a country where their life or freedom is at risk. The Thai government repeatedly has set boats adrift; both the Thai and Bangladeshi government are not party to the 1951 Refugee Convention under the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and the latter set boats adrift in 2015. Unable to do so before the exodus in 2017, they have now signed an agreement with Burma to a repatriation that amounts to refoulement, and, to sending hundreds of thousands to a remote island that is more or less uninhabitable for most of the year with in Bangladesh. “
The Bangladeshi government, as early as January, had announced its plans to move the Rohingya refugees to remote ‘chars’, islands that are not just prone to flooding, but earmarked for cyclones, death and devastation—not even the poorest boatman of Bangladesh would go and live there. The government recently announced that the project is set to go. China has the contract for the island; Japan and India for the camps; but even Muslim countries like Pakistan have armed the Burmese army, just as the US has, for years. Meanwhile, Canada remains mum about refoulement, ambiguous on genocide and is hesitant on immigration.
So, after all the aid (from Canada), after all the talk (of Canada), after the necessary but limited fund raising: the Rohingya refugees who faced rape, torture and mass killing at the hands of the military, police and Rakhine militias, are being ‘solved’: by being sent back to camps of internment in the country from which Rohingya are still fleeing.
Why?
“The very fact that genocide itself was not collectively declared is the underlying cause: not only would it compel action, against the generals, and to protect the refugees both in and outside Burma, it would hold up a mirror to all those who are profiting from and enabling genocide. But it is precisely because of this interlocking set of causes and consequences that we, here in Canada and in the world, can do something.”
For More Information
https://www.ctvnews.ca/mobile/world/un-recalls-top-official-in-myanmar-canadian-renata-lok-dessallien-1.3629524
http://www.thestateless.com/2017/05/the-concept-of-citizenship-in-burma-and-the-status-of-rohingyas.html
https://www.amnesty.org/en/countries/asia-and-the-pacific/myanmar/report-myanmar
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/world/asia/rohingya-refugees-bangladesh.html
https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/21/asia/rohingya-bangladesh-repatriation-intl/index.html
Join us March 23rd, as Colour Connected Against Racism and the Social Justice Center welcome Yasmin Ullah, Professor Ross Michael Pink of Kwantlen Polytechnic University and Sanzida Habib, Research Associate at CISAR, who will discuss their personal and professional engagement, and present papers followed by a discussion moderated by professor Habiba Zaman of SFU, in solidarity with the March against Racism on March 24th.
Responsibility to Protect: Stopping Refoulement & Genocide in Burma
A Rohingya and Canadian Perspective
March 23rd Friday 7: 30 to 9:30 pm at the Global Lounge
https://www.facebook.com/events/1975874796009220/
Rohingya Human Rights Network Executive Member, and student activist at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Yasmin Ullah, will speak about her personal story as a Rohingya refugee and interconnected issues (context) around the genocidal drives that reached an apogee in August of 2017. Professor Ross Michael Pink from the Political Science Department of Kwantlen Polytechnic University will join her, discussing the implications of Canadian policy and the potential for international action, or, what we can do to stop the continuation of the atrocities and the fraud of repatriation which is happening under the gaze of the international community. Finally, UBC Research Associate at the Center for India and South Asia Research (CISAR) Professor Sanzida Habib will present the paper “Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh: The Political Economy of a Humanitarian Crisis.” She uses a political economy perspective to examine this humanitarian crisis as a complex geopolitical economic issue rather than merely a religious one, such as Buddhists versus Muslims. Her co-writer, Professor Habiba Zaman of the Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies department of SFU will moderate the discussion and Q&A session.
They will cover five broad areas for discussion: One, why repatriation of Rohingya Refugees stranded in Bangladesh under the current Agreement must be stopped; two, the complicity of the international community in the financing of this refoulement; three, how each of these issues revert back to the underlying problem, the need to declare genocide, and four, what actions can be taken against Burmese generals and from Canada, including the R2P (Responsibility to Protect), and five, how land and economic interests have been catalysts of the genocide and continue to inform the real motivations behind the silence and complicity of various nations (i.e. those who are funding the internment camps to which the ‘repatriated’ refugees would return).
