The International Organization for Migration (IOM) said recently that the speed and scale of people fleeing Myanmar has triggered a humanitarian emergency in Bangladesh, where hundreds of thousands of refugees now depend on humanitarian assistance for shelter, food, water, and other life-saving needs.
According to the IOM-hosted Inter Sector Coordination Group (ISCG) of aid agencies, an estimated 536,000 people have fled Myanmar and arrived in Cox’s Bazar over the past 47 days. The United Nations has said that, prior to the August influx, infrastructure and basic services in Cox’s Bazar were already under strain as it hosted over 200,000 displaced Rohingya.
“These people are malnourished, and there is insufficient access to clean water and sanitation in many of the spontaneous sites. They are highly vulnerable. They have fled conflict, experienced severe trauma, and are now living in extremely difficult conditions,” the IOM said.
The Rohingya crisis is one of the worst Human Rights disasters of the modern world. As stated before, in many ways, it is a replay of the Nazi terrorization, expulsion and murder of the Jewish people, which occurred in the 1930s and 1940s. A few countries, such as Denmark, protected their Jewish citizens, but no country in the 1930s condemned on the international stage the Jewish persecution. When the condemnation did come, it was too late.
It is only now — when half of the Rohingya population has been brutally driven out from their homes; their villages destroyed by fire; many killed, wounded and raped — that the United Nations and some countries have spoken out against the persecution of this ethnic minority by the Myanmar (formerly Burma) Military.
The Rohingya people are Muslim by religion, small farmers and peasantry, and there are no rich and powerful Rohingya. They are extremely peace-loving people. They number about one and a half million. The Myanmar Military and Government have long been persecuting the Rohingyas. They have been denied their citizenship, and many years before the eruption of the present crisis, they were harassed and public opinion was encouraged to hate them.
According to a recent United Nations human rights report, brutal, well-organized, coordinated and systematic attacks have been carried out against the minority Muslim Rohingya community with the intention of not just driving them away, but also preventing their return.
The [UN human rights] team has documented consistent accounts of the Myanmar security forces surrounding or entering villages or settlements, sometimes accompanied by Rakhine Buddhist individuals, firing indiscriminately at Rohingya villagers, injuring some and killing other innocent victims, setting houses on fire, and announcing in other villages that the same would befall them if they did not comply with the order to immediately abandon their homes.
The UN report also cites testimony from witnesses that security forces committed extrajudicial and summary executions, rape and other forms of sexual violence, torture and attacks on places of worship. Specific attacks particularly targeted the educated in the Rohingya society, such as teachers, businessmen, religious and community leaders – “people with influence” – in an effort to diminish Rohingya history, culture and knowledge.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, who described the Government operations in northern Rakhine state as “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing,” also urged the Myanmar Government to immediately end its “cruel” security operation. By denying the Rohingya population their political, civil, economic and cultural rights, including the right to citizenship, he said, the Government’s actions appear to be “a cynical ploy to forcibly transfer large numbers of people without possibility of return.”
The destruction of the Rohingya community is a most shameful and shameless episode in human history. The silence of the international community has been very disappointing, if not shocking. The international community must act now. The authorities in Burma must not be allowed to get away with the atrocities meted out against an ethnic minority of its own populace.
