Ziaur Rahman has history in four countries but a secure home in none. The 23-year-old from the Rohingya ethnic group grew up in Bangladesh after his family fled Myanmar, only to be kidnapped by people traffickers last year and shipped to Thailand.
He was freed in an anti-people smuggling operation in October and sent to a shelter, but ran away fearing for his safety. He was re-arrested, sold to another broker and ended up in Malaysia, where he now works as a cook — and worries about both his sick mother in Bangladesh, and his people.
“I have an ambition to help my mother and help my nation,” a tearful Rahman says in a telephone interview. “Everywhere is dying for the Rohingya. Everywhere is killing and beating and trafficking, everywhere.”
The Rohingya’s troubles have been revealed in gruesome detail in recent weeks. Haunting footage has shown desperate people stranded on the Indian Ocean, denied safe harbour on the dangerous journey from Myanmar and Bangladesh to neighbouring states.
Graves containing more than 150 bodies have been dug up at dozens of smugglers’ camps on either side of the Thailand-Malaysia border. With thousands of people still thought to be at sea, and no full accounting of the findings at the camps, there could yet be even grimmer revelations.
The crisis is emerging as a big test of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), which is due to launch a single economic market by the end of the year. The parallels with the Mediterranean migrant deaths in Europe, while not exact, are obvious. As in Europe, Southeast Asian countries that have long relied economically on immigrant labour are adopting increasingly harsh border policies and nationalist rhetoric.
Just as Europe’s approach to deadly boat sinkings in the Mediterranean has been condemned as inhuman, so some Asean states are facing criticism for turning migrant vessels away — and for failing to tackle smuggling networks in which officials are allegedly complicit.
“Worldwide, we are in the midst of what I can only call a perfect storm,” says William Lacy Swing, director-general of the International Organisation for Migration, who has appealed for an end to the “toxic narrative” around immigration. “We have more people on the move than at any time in recorded history. We also have the largest number of forced migrants in history.”
The Indian Ocean drama has thrown an uncomfortable spotlight on Myanmar, gnawing away at the plaudits it has received for easing repression since the military handed over power in 2011. With elections this year, activists say the Rohingya’s dire situation is getting worse.
Neither the quasi-civilian government backed by the military, nor their arch-rival Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace laureate, has pushed for better treatment for a minority group of more than 1 million that is mostly denied citizenship and other basic rights. There are few votes in sticking up for a group of Muslims that has been targeted for years by militants from the Buddhist majority, leading to hundreds of deaths and forcing more than 140,000 into squalid camps.
“They are probably one of the most deserving people of asylum in the world — and one of the most persecuted,” says Chris Lewa, who has worked with the Rohingya for many years and runs the Arakan Project, a non-governmental group that tracks movements of migrant boats around the region. “The Rohingya need a long-term solution.”
Southeast Asian states use millions of foreign migrant workers, many of them low-skilled and working illegally. Thailand has previously faced criticism from the EU and the United States after the exposure of problems such as forced labour in its fishing fleets, with Washington last year placing it on a blacklist of countries accused of failing to tackle human trafficking.
Ironically the present crisis was triggered by the Thai authorities finally cracking down on longstanding illegal smuggling routes. Suddenly brokers could not bring their human cargoes onshore, so they began dumping them in May on islands near the coast, or simply abandoning them at sea. Thousands of smuggled people have since disembarked, many in Indonesia and others back to Myanmar or Bangladesh, but as many as 2,000 are estimated to still be out on the water.
An emergency 17-country international conference in Bangkok agreed to step up search-and-rescue operations and address the root causes of the exodus without naming the Rohingya or stating what countries should do.
More than half of the migrants are believed to be Rohingya. The Arakan Project says there has been a dramatic rise in departures of smugglers’ boats from the areas it monitors in Myanmar and Bangladesh. It estimates the number of people leaving rose from 9,000 in the 2011-12 smuggling season, to more than 68,000 in the present one.
The estimated 1.1 million Rohingya in western Myanmar, many of them in Rakhine state — the centre of the troubles — are in the cruel bind faced by other stateless people, with every country insisting they belong somewhere else. Some Rohingya trace their roots in the country back centuries, others arrived during the British colonial period up to 1948. All are widely, and pejoratively, labelled “Bengalis”, who are told they should go back to Bangladesh. Those that do are then typically denied Bangladeshi citizenship on the grounds that they are from Myanmar.
The situation in western Myanmar goes some way to explaining the dynamics on the ground. The Buddhists in Rakhine are also a minority which has been persecuted by the government. And life in modern Myanmar is tough for almost everyone in what, outside the consumer bubble of big cities such as Yangon, remains a poor country.
But the discrimination against the Rohingya from central government down has been severe. They are mostly barred from citizenship, denied jobs and suffer restrictions on their movement. The government this year scrapped the Rohingya’s white identity card and the voting rights that go with them. Another new law, widely seen as being aimed at the Rohingya, allows the state to force individuals into compulsory three-year “birth spacing” between children, a measure that plays to nationalist propaganda.
While it is hardly a shock to see Myanmar’s military-dominated establishment take a tough line, some commentators have been disturbed that Suu Kyi has not condemned persecution of the Rohingya — or even used their name. Her critics say it reflects not just electoral politics but also the legacy of her Myanmarese nationalist father. In an interview with the “Financial Times” in February, she would go no further than calling for an acknowledgment of the fears of both sides. Her National League for Democracy party called for the dispute over citizenship to be resolved fairly.
But Myanmar may face growing pressure from countries that have supported the post-2011 changes. Barack Obama said the country needed to end discrimination against the Rohingya if it wanted its transition to succeed.
“There is a growing realisation that you can’t just park the Rohingya crisis in a corner and continue with [the narrative of] ‘reforming Burma’ and ‘democratic Burma’,” says Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director of Human Rights Watch, referring to Myanmar by its former official name. “There is a recognition that this is going to impact on other issues.”
Another alarming aspect of the crisis has been the discoveries of the networks of transit camps on the Thai-Malaysia frontier, where migrants were penned, beaten and ransomed until their families paid sums typically amounting to about $2,000 (Dh7,346). It is a problem that has long been hidden in plain sight — with rights groups and media reporting on their existence. Zahid Hamidi, Malaysia’s Home Affairs Minister, said he suspected camps discovered on his country’s side of the border had been in use for at least five years.
There is still little sign of either a full reckoning over these abuses, or of a much more generous approach to migrants from the main Southeast Asia transit and destination states. While Malaysia and Indonesia relaxed their closed border policies slightly to allow migrants still at sea to land, pending internationally funded resettlement within one year, no one wants to take people longer term, partly due to the expense but also to avoid provoking local opposition.
Since the discovery of a mass grave of 26 people at a smugglers camp in Thailand, the ruling military hasn’t released a comprehensive report detailing how many camps and graves it has found. Malaysia has reported discovering 28 camps and 139 graves, some containing multiple corpses, but it still has not given a final body count.
General Thanasak Patimaprakorn, Thailand’s Foreign Minister, bristled when asked about the country’s record on investigating human trafficking and in dealing with alleged complicity by military personnel and other officials. Asked why successive Thai governments had failed to tackle the problem until now, he said he did not want to blame previous administrations and pointed to the difficulties of finding camps deep in the jungle.
He said 44 people had already been arrested, although he acknowledged the number did not include any military officers. However, a major-general turned himself in after an arrest warrant was issued for him later.
As Southeast Asian states take a hard line, the West, in particular Europe, is unable to exert much moral pressure. The EU suspended a search-and-rescue operation in the Mediterranean, and then saw migrant drownings soar to more than 1,700 in the first four months of this year. In Asia, Australia has been condemned by rights groups for its policy of paying the Cambodian government to take in migrants now held in Pacific island camps.
It is hard to be optimistic about the Rohingya’s prospects after the approaching natural pause in the smuggling for the monsoon. Myanmar shows no sign of budging and hit out at “finger pointing” by its critics. In Thailand and Malaysia, vested interests who have profited from the trade threaten attempts to dismantle it, while there seems little chance either country or their neighbours will agree to take in more migrants.
Other potential long-term destinations, such as Europe, are also reluctant. Tony Abbott, Australia’s prime minister, had a simple answer to Rohingya hoping for safe haven on his country’s soil: “Nope, nope, nope.”
Back in Malaysia, Rahman wants to be an interpreter. He speaks Rohingya, Bengali, English, Burmese and Arabic, with varying degrees of proficiency. But he doesn’t hold out much hope of being able to exploit qualities that, had he been born in another place, might have launched him to professional success.
“I see only problems, I only see impossibilities,” he says, reflecting on what it means to be Rohingya. “Possibilities I can’t see, for reasons of race, religion, ethnicity — and our culture.”
–Financial Times
