Burma: Impending mass exodus – Neighboring countries must protect refugees

Following a bloody “cleansing” by the armed forces in the west of Burma, a mass exodus of the persecuted Rohingya minority is to be expected. The Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) urges the neighboring country Bangladesh to at least provide temporary refuge to Rohingya who were forced to flee from the armed forces. “In the scope of its responsibility to protect the civilian population, the international community must ensure that the Rohingya will find refuge – and there must be generous support for Bangladesh to ensure that the country will cope with the refugee crisis,” explained Ulrich Delius, the STP’s Asia-expert, in Göttingen on Friday. During the last few weeks, border guards from Bangladesh had sent hundreds of Rohingya refugees back to Burma. Now, it is expected that up to 35,000 Rohingya will try to find protection in Bangladesh.

According to the STP, the escalating violence in the north of Rakhine state in Burma is a consequence of the power struggle between the army and the country’s democratic leadership under Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. The unprecedented wave of attacks of armed forces against unarmed Rohingya villagers are to be seen as a response to assaults on three border posts on October 9, 2016, committed by unknown attackers. Since then, many Rohingya have experienced torture, rape, murder, abduction, as well as the arbitrary destruction of their houses. Local human rights activists have reported more than 420 deaths, 440 displaced persons, 190 rapes and more than 1,250 destroyed houses.

By means of the ethnically motivated “cleansing”, the army is apparently trying to warn the State Counsellor and Foreign Minister Aung San Suu Kyi not to try and restrict the army’s influence in political life any further. “It is tragic that the disenfranchised and persecuted Rohingya are once again being instrumentalized in a power struggle,” Delius criticized. “Since the unrest in 2012, Buddhist nationalists have been instrumentalizing the Rohingya question as well, as an attempt to sharpen their national and international profile – while the Rohingya, as always, are the ones who have to suffer.”

In Burma, the approximately 1.3 million members of the Muslim minority are denied citizenship rights and have been systematically persecuted and discriminated against for decades.

Header Photo: Evangelos Petratos EU/ECHO via flickr