Myanmar president says Rohingyas not welcome

Myanmars president Thein Sein said that Rohingya people are not welcome in the country, and that refugee camps or deportation was the only solution for communal unrest. Muslim Rohingyas have long been discriminated against in Myanmar, with authorities withholding land rights, education and public services Thursday, July 12th 2012, 09:54 AM http://india.nydailynews.com

MUNIR UZ ZAMAN/AFP/GettyImages A Rohingya Muslim woman from Myanmar holding her six day old baby and her family, who tried to cross the Naf river into Bangladesh to escape sectarian violence, cry in a Bangladeshi Coast guard station in Teknaf on June 19, 2012, before being sent back to Myanmar. Myanmar's president told the UN Thursday that refugee camps or deportation was the "solution" for nearly a million Rohingya Muslims in the wake of communal unrest in the west of the country.

Thein Sein, who had previously struck a more conciliatory tone during fighting that left at least 80 people dead in Rakhine State last month, told the chief of the United Nations refugee agency the Rohingya were not welcome. "We will take responsibility for our ethnic people but it is impossible to accept the illegally entered Rohingyas, who are not our ethnicity," he told UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres, according to the president's official website. The former junta general said the "only solution" was to send the Rohingyas -- which number around 800,000 in Myanmar and are considered to be some of the world's most persecuted minorities -- to refugee camps run by UNHCR. "We will send them away if any third country would accept them," he added. "This is what we are thinking is the solution to the issue." Communal violence between ethnic Buddhist Rakhine and local Muslims, including the Rohingya, swept the state in June, forcing tens of thousands to flee as homes were torched and communities ripped apart. Decades of discrimination have left the Rohingya stateless, with Myanmar implementing restrictions on their movement and withholding land rights, education and public services, the UN says. Unwanted in Myanmar and Bangladesh -- where an estimated 300,000 live -- Rohingya migrants have undertaken dangerous voyages by boat towards Malaysia or Thailand in recent years. According to the UNHCR around one million Rohingya are now thought to live outside Myanmar, but they have not been welcomed by a third country. Bangladesh has turned back Rohingya boats arriving on its shores since the outbreak of the unrest.

"Basically Myanmar does not consider these 735,000 Muslims in northern Rakhine state to be their citizens and we think the solution is for them to get citizenship in Myanmar," UNHCR's Asia spokeswoman Kitty McKinsey told AFP. "So we would not be very likely to assist in transporting them out of the country and housing them somewhere else. As a refugee agency we do not usually participate in creating refugees." McKinsey said the UN had been working for "several decades" in the area, trying to promote reconciliation and "benefit all communities, not just the Muslims". Ten aid organization staff, including some from the UN, were detained in Rakhine in the wake of the unrest, according to a situation bulletin by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) last week. Three people -- two from the UN and another international aid worker -- are thought to have appeared in court on June 9. "They have been charged and appeared in court but they have not been tried," an unnamed aid worker told AFP. Although security forces have quelled the worst of the unrest, tens of thousands of people remain in government-run relief camps with the UN's World Food Program reporting that it has provided aid to some 100,000 people. Both sides have accused each other of violent attacks, which were sparked following the rape and murder of a local Buddhist woman and subsequent revenge attack by a mob of ethnic Rakhines that left 10 Muslims dead on June 3. A state of emergency is still in force in several areas.

UN refugee chief rejects Myanmar presidents call for world body to take care of Rohingya
Press, By Associated Press,

YANGON, Myanmar The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees on Thursday rejected a suggestion by Myanmars president that the world body resettle or take care of ethnic Rohingyas who have settled in the Southeast Asian country. UNHCR chief Antonio Guterres told reporters it was not his agencys job to resettle the Rohingya, who live in western Myanmar but without Myanmar citizenship. On his website, President Thein Sein said he told Guterres in a meeting Wednesday that the solution to ethnic enmity in Myanmars western Rakhine state was to either send the Rohingya to a third country or have the UNHCR look after them. Clashes last month between Buddhist Rakhines and Muslin Rohingya left at least 78 people dead and tens of thousands homeless. The Rakhine consider the Rohingya to be illegal immigrants from neighboring Bangladesh. Thein Sein described the violence at the time as a threat to the democratic and economic reforms his government launched after decades of repressive rule by a military junta. The resettlement programs organized by UNHCR are for refugees who are fleeing a country to another, in very specific circumstances. Obviously, its not related to this situation, said Guterres. Thein Seins reported suggestion to Guterres left unclear exactly how many people he had in mind. The U.N. estimates there are about 800,000 Rohingya in Myanmar. The count includes people of Bengali heritage who settled centuries ago, as well as people who may have entered the country in recent decades.

Many people in Myanmar dont recognize as legitimate settlers even those of Bengali heritage who came in the 19th century, when Myanmar was under British rule and called Burma. Large exoduses of Rohingya to Bangladesh in the 1980s and 1990s because of persecution, and their subsequent return, also add to the confusion over who is an illegal immigrant. Thein Sein told Guterres that according to Myanmar law, those Bengalis who settled in Myanmar before the country gained independence from Britain in 1948 and their children are regarded as citizens. However, post-independence immigrants are officially considered illegal and threatening to the countrys stability. In practice, it is difficult for many people of Bengali heritage to obtain citizenship, and they face discriminatory legal restrictions on movement, marriage and reproduction. We will take responsibility of our ethnic nationals but it is impossible to accept those Rohingyas who are not our ethnic nationals who had entered the country illegally. The only solution is to hand those illegal Rohingyas to the UNHCR or to send them to any third country that would accept them, Thein Sein told Guterres, according to his website. Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Op-Ed Contributor

Myanmar Ethnic Cleansing in Myanmar

By MOSHAHIDA SULTANA RITU U
Published: July 12, 2012

For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew ytopinion Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT @andyrNYT. LAST spring, a flowering of democracy in Myanmar mesmerized the world. But now, three months after the democracy activist Daw Aung San Suu Kyi won a parliamentary seat, and a month after she traveled to Oslo to belatedly receive the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, an alarm bell is ringing in Myanmar. In the villages of Arakan State, near the , Bangladeshi border, a pogrom against a population of Muslims called the Rohingyas began in June. It is the ugly side of Myanmars democratic transition a rotting of the flower, even as it seems to bloom. Cruelty toward the Rohingyas is not new. They have faced torture, neglect and repression in the Buddhist-majority land since it achieved independence in 1948. Its majority constitution closes all options for Rohingyas to be citizens, on grounds that their ancestors didnt live there when the land, once called Burma, came under British rule in the 19th century (a contention the Rohingyas dispute). Even now, as military rulers have begun to loosen their grip, there is no sign of change for the Rohingyas. Instead, the Burmese are trying to cast them out. The current violence can be traced to the rape and killing in late May of a Buddhist woman, for which the police reportedly detained three Muslims. That was followed by mob attacks on Rohingyas and other Muslims that killed dozens of people. According to killed
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Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, state security forces have now conducted mass arrests of Muslims; they destroyed thousands of homes, with the impact falling most heavily on the Rohingyas. Displaced Rohingyas have tried to flee across the Naf River to neighboring Bangladesh; some have died in the effort. The Burmese media have cited early rioting by Rohingyas and have cast them as terrorists and traitors. In mid-June, in the name of stopping such violence, the government declared a state of emergency. But it has used its border security force to burn houses, kill men and evict Rohingyas from their villages. And on Thursday, President Thein Sein suggested that Myanmar could end the crisis by expelling all of its Rohingyas or by having the United Nations resettle them a proposal that a United Nations official quickly rejected. This is not sectarian violence; it is state-supported ethnic cleansing, and the nations of the world arent pressing Myanmars leaders to stop it. Even Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi has not spoken out. In mid-June, after some Rohingyas fled by boat to villages in Bangladesh, they told horrifying stories to a team of journalists whom I accompanied to this city near the border. They said they had come under fire from a helicopter and that three of six boats were lost. Some children drowned during the four-day trip; others died of hunger. Once in Bangladesh, they said, the families faced deportation back to Myanmar. But some children who had become separated from their parents made their way to the houses of villagers for shelter; other children may even now be starving in hide-outs or have become prey for criminal networks. Border guards found an abandoned newborn on a boat; after receiving medical treatment, the infant was left in the temporary care of a local fisherman. Why isnt this pogrom arousing more international indignation? Certainly, Myanmar has become a destination for capital investment now that the United States, the European Union and Canada have accepted the governments narrative of democratic transition and have largely lifted the economic sanctions they began applying after 1988 (measures that did not prevent China, India, South Korea, Thailand, Singapore and multinational oil companies from doing business with the Burmese). Still, when
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Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton visited Myanmar late last year and welcomed its first steps toward democratization, she also set down conditions for strengthening ties, including an end to ethnic violence. The plight of the Rohingyas begins with their statelessness the denial of citizenship itself, for which Myanmar is directly responsible. Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, though not as powerful as the military officers who control Myanmars transition, should not duck questions about the Rohingyas, as she has done while being feted in the West. Instead, she should be using her voice and her reputation to point out that citizenship is a basic right of all humans. On July 5, the secretary general of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, appealed to her to speak up to help end the violence. To be sure, Bangladesh can do more. Its river border with Myanmar is unprotected; thousands of Rohingyas have been rowing or swimming it at night. But even though Bangladesh has sheltered such refugees in the past hundreds of thousands of Rohingyas live here now, legally or illegally it has been reluctant so far this year to welcome them, out of fear of encouraging an overwhelming new influx. Already, such fears have aroused anti-Rohingya sentiment among some Bangladeshis, and initially Bangladeshs government tried to force the refugees back without assisting them. After some villagers risked arrest by sheltering refugees in their homes, the government began to offer humanitarian aid, before sending them back on their boats. Bangladesh should shelter the refugees as it has in years past, as the international community is urging. But the world should be putting its spotlight on Myanmar. It should not so eagerly welcome democracy in a country that leaves thousands of stateless men and women floating in a river, their corpses washing up on its shores, after they have been reviled in, and driven from, a land in which their families have lived for centuries. Moshahida Sultana Ritu, an economist, teaches at the University of Dhaka, in Bangladesh.