Over the past six weeks, more than half a million Rohingya refugees have fled their homes in the state of Rakhine in northwest Myanmar and fled to neighbouring Bangladesh, crossing minefields and taking to the ocean to avoid persecution and murder at the hands of Yangon’s security forces and soldiers. Indeed, the trip to flee persecution in their homes is so perilous that on Wednesday night alone, the bodies of 15 Rohingya refugees washed up on the beaches of Cox’s Bazaar in Bangladesh.
The Rohingya are being singled out for one reason — and one reason alone — they are Muslim. Myanmar is made up of more than 130 officially recognised peoples, but for generations now, officials there have refused to recognise the religiously distinct group as belonging to their ethnically diverse state. Instead, for decades, gangs of vigilantes armed with machetes and guns burn mosques to the ground, target the Muslim minority, torch their homes and businesses. And since mid-August, Myanmar’s soldiers have been waging a full-blown military campaign on the desperate and unarmed Rohingya.
At the UN Security Council on Thursday in New York, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the Rohingya’s sudden and desperate plight as “the world’s fastest developing refugee emergency and a humanitarian and human rights nightmare,” and he has previously described Myanmar’s actions as a textbook case of ethnic cleansing. Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, was equally frank in her lambasting of the government of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi: “We cannot be afraid to call the actions of the Burmese [Myanmarese] authorities what they appear to be — a brutal, sustained campaign to cleanse the country of an ethnic minority. And it should shame senior Burmese leaders who have sacrificed so much for an open, democratic Burma.”
Myanmar has denied that there is a coordinated campaign to eradicate the Rohingya, and say that 56 per cent of their villages remain intact. That’s cold comfort for the 44 per cent that have been burned to the ground and with more than half a million now dependent on humanitarian contributions — if they were lucky enough to make it to Bangladesh. Yes, the UN can put emergency plans into place — and the UAE is there to help its brothers in any way it can as always — and that’s urgently required. What’s also urgently required is that Myanmar is once again shunned and isolated as it was before. The government there is no different from the junta that ruled before.
