United States urges Bangladesh not to send back Myanmar refugees

The US State Department has urged Bangladesh to “respect its international obligations” and allow fleeing Muslims from Myanmar to enter the country. Bangladeshi guards have turned back more that 660 Rohingya Muslims since Monday.

AP Photo/Fareed Khan
US urges Bangladesh not to send back Myanmar refugees

The United States on Wednesday voiced concern that Bangladesh was turning away Muslims fleeing religious violence in Myanmar and urged the Dhaka government not to send them back.

"We are concerned that Bangladeshi authorities appear to have intercepted and turned back persons fleeing the ethnic and religious violence in Burma," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said, using Myanmar's former name.

"We have been urging the government of Bangladesh to respect its international obligations under the relevant refugee conventions and to continue its longstanding policy of non-refoulement of refugees," she said.

Non-refoulement refers to a principle of international law that forbids turning over a victim of persecution to his or her persecutor.

Bangladeshi guards have turned back 16 boats carrying more than 660 Rohingya Muslims, most of them women and children, since Monday as they tried to enter from Myanmar across the river Naf, according to local officials.

Around 25 people have been killed and a further 41 people were wounded in five days of unrest in western Myanmar between Buddhists and Muslims.

The Rohingya are considered one of the world's most persecuted groups, with Myanmar not officially recognizing them as a minority.

Rohingya children from Myanmar sit on a boat as they try to get into Bangladesh in Teknaf

Rohingya children from Myanmar sit on a boat as they try to get into Bangladesh in Teknaf June 13, 2012. The UN Refugee Office (UNHCR) has called on Bangladesh to keep its borders open given the rapid escalation of violence in the northern Rakhine State of Myanmar, UN spokesman Martin Nesirky told reporters on Tuesday. REUTERS/Andrew Biraj (BANGLADESH - Tags: SOCIETY IMMIGRATION CIVIL UNREST MARITIME)

UN Envoy Visits Burma’s Stricken Rakhine State

Vijay Nambiar, the U.N. envoy to Burma, leaves Sittwe Airport in Burma's Rakhine state, June 14, 2012.

BANKGOK - The U.N.’s special envoy to Burma, Vijay Nambiar, returned Thursday from a visit to Burma's western Rakhine state, where sectarian violence has killed 21 people and destroyed scores of homes.

Nambiar said he spoke with people caught up in the violence who are still "in a state of shock," and unwilling to return to their homes. There has been widespread violence in the area recently between Buddhists and Muslims, who are members of the ethnic minority known as the Rohingya.

Speaking to VOA by phone from the Burmese capital, Rangoon, he said the city of Maungdaw, where the conflict erupted, is now largely calm, but that the situation in the state's capital Sittwe is still tenuous and he was unable to visit some areas. Nambiar confirmed that 21 people died in the fighting.

Nambiar praised both the Border Affairs minister who traveled with him, and President Thein Sein, who responded by sending in the military to bring the situation under control, and declaring a state of emergency he described as "prompt, firm, and sensitive."

"This is an issue which has the potential of impacting on the entire reform process and requires to be handled very sensitively and in line with the international norms of international conduct," he said.

Burmese President Thein Sein said he is committed to equal justice and the rule of law in dealing with the aftermath of the conflict, he added.

Rohingya have long been viewed by the government and most Burmese as immigrants who are not entitled to citizenship or other benefits of the state. The recent fighting has led to a rash of inflamed rhetoric on websites and in domestic media coverage against Rohingya.

Violence broke out on June 3 when a mob of Buddhists in Rakhine allegedly attacked a bus and killed 10 Rohingya passengers in apparent retaliation for an earlier rape and murder of a Buddhist woman, allegedly by three Rohingya.

It will take time to address the longstanding ethnic and sectarian tensions, said Nambiar.

"I think increasingly everybody is conscious of the need to move away from such kind of ethnic stereotypes and characterizations of this nature because they realize that that is harmful to the entire project of reform," he said. "And I think while it is true that the messages that are being purveyed by being stressed by the top leadership need to filter down to the lower levels and there is still a lot of work to be done."

U.N. refugee agency official Preeta Law, a deputy representative in Burma, warned the fighting could have an impact on the effort to resettle Rohingya refugees now living in camps across the border in Bangladesh. "Of course in a situation of this kind of violence that's happened right now, in the immediate term, this would not be something that we would be looking at at this time," Law said.

Boats carrying women and children fleeing the violence have been turned back by the Bangladeshi government, despite the agency's plea to keep their border open.

 UN envoy visits unrest-hit Myanmar

A UN envoy arrived in Myanmay after a state of emergency was declared in Rakhine state, which has seen a deadly rise in sectarian violence. Bangladesh has turned down calls from the UN refugee agency UNHCR to let in the fleeing Rohingya.

AP Photo/Fareed Khan

UN envoy visits unrest-hit western Myanmar

A top UN envoy arrived in strife-torn western Myanmar on Wednesday as security forces grappled with sectarian violence that has left dozens dead and hundreds of homes burned down.
A state of emergency has been declared in Rakhine state, which has been rocked by a wave of rioting and arson, posing a major test for the reformist government which took power last year.
A dusk-to-dawn curfew has been imposed in many areas.
Vijay Nambiar, UN chief Ban Ki-moon's special adviser on Myanmar, flew into the capital of Rakhine to visit Maungdaw, a town near the border with Bangladesh where the violence flared on Friday.
He was accompanied by Myanmar's Border Affairs Minister General Thein Htay and 15 Muslim religious leaders from Yangon.
"We're here to observe and assess how we can continue to provide support to Rakhine," Ashok Nigam, UN resident and humanitarian coordinator who was also in the group, told AFP.
An uneasy calm pervaded Sittwe, which has been rattled by gunfire in recent days and was drenched by heavy rains on Wednesday.
Local residents have been seen roaming the streets wielding knives, swords and sticks, while people from both the mainly Buddhist ethnic Rakhine and Muslim Rohingya communities have been forced to flee their homes.
The Buddhists and Rohingya have both accused each other of violent attacks.
The UN has evacuated most of its foreign staff from Maungdaw, which is its main base in the state and has a large population of stateless Rohingya Muslims.
Around 25 people have been killed and a further 41 people were wounded in five days of unrest, an official told AFP on Tuesday. He did not give details of how they died or whether they were Buddhists or Muslims.
Rohingya leaders say the real number of dead is much higher but AFP could not verify the allegation and has been unable to visit many of the affected areas for security reasons.
The toll does not include 10 Muslims who were killed on June 3 by a Buddhist mob in apparent revenge for the rape and murder of a woman, sparking the violence in Rakhine.
Rakhine, a predominantly Buddhist state bordering Bangladesh, is home to a large number of Muslims including the Rohingya, described by the United Nations as one of the world's most persecuted minorities.
The Myanmar government considers the Rohingya to be foreigners, while many citizens see them as illegal immigrants and view them with hostility, describing them as "Bengalis".
Hundreds of Rohingya, many of them women and children, have attempted to flee to Bangladesh in rickety boats in recent days, but have been turned away.
Border guards on Wednesday said they had refused entry to another three vessels, although a single six-week-old baby girl found floating alone in a boat was rescued and placed with a local family.
The Dhaka government has rebuffed international calls, including by the UN refugee agency UNHCR, to let in the fleeing Rohingya.
The United States has urged an immediate halt to the sectarian unrest.
A leader of Rohingya refugees living in Bangladesh camps appealed for help from Aung San Suu Kyi on Wednesday, accusing the democracy icon of ignoring the plight of the minority group, who the UN says has suffered decades of discrimination in Myanmar.
"Aung San Suu Kyi hasn't done or said anything for us, yet the Rohingyas including my parents campaigned for her in the 1990 elections," Mohammad Islam, of Nayapara camp in the border town of Teknaf, told AFP.
A spokesman for the opposition leader's National League for Democracy party said the former political prisoner had instructed him to work "to help both sides equally" before she left Wednesday on a historic trip to Europe.
The veteran activist, who will formally accept her 1991 Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on Saturday, has remained largely silent on the unrest apart from calling for "sympathy for minorities", while key figures in the democratic movement have said the Rohingya are not one of Myanmar's ethnic nationalities.

Burma’s Rohingya Dilemma

Yesterday in Rangoon I witnessed firsthand the tensions that are gripping not only Arakan State but also, increasingly, other parts of Burma.

Walking around the city, I saw Buddhists and Muslims smiling as they came and went from temples and mosques that were full of people praying for peace. At the same time, however, I noticed that police had been deployed near Shwedagon and Sule pagodas, the city’s most famous religious shrines.

Beneath its calm exterior, Rangoon seems to be bracing for an outbreak of sectarian conflict. The question on everyone’s lips is whether the violence in Arakan State will spread to Burma’s largest city, which is home to people of many faiths, including Buddhists, Muslims and Hindus.
Aung Zaw is founder and editor of the Irrawaddy magazine. He can be reached at aungzaw@irrawaddy.org.

One man I spoke to, a businessman, said that he has enough food and water in his house to last a month—just in case. He even confided that his stockpile included weapons.

But even as fear of religious conflict grips the city, there are many who insist that the situation in Arakan State is not really about religion at all. One prominent public figure taking this position is Ko Ko Gyi, the 88 Generation leader who last week declared that the “Rohingya issue”—that is, the status of Arakan State’s Muslim minority—is essentially a matter of sovereignty.

When I asked him what he meant by this, he said that it wasn’t for other countries to decide who qualifies to be recognized as a citizen of Burma. He said he sympathized with the Rohingya, many of whom have suffered as refugees in other countries, but added that they still could not be considered one of Burma’s 135 ethnic groups.

Some non-Burmese have reacted to Ko Ko Gyi’s remarks with a certain amount of consternation, believing that he, as a former political prisoner, should have stood up for the rights of an undeniably oppressed group. But inside Burma, his words were welcomed and spread quickly on Facebook, while local journals that reported his views soon sold out. The consensus among Burmese, it seems, is that the Rohingya are illegal migrants from neighboring Bangladesh—a view that also treats this as an issue of sovereignty rather than religious animosity.

Indeed, many—especially ethnic Arakanese—have been resentful of the portrayal of this as a religious conflict, even though many have resorted to racial and religious slurs in their verbal attacks on the “Bengalis,” as they prefer to call the Rohingya.

The Arakanese are fiercely proud of their ethnic identity, even drawing a strong line between themselves and their fellow Buddhists, the ethnic Burman majority. In the minds of many Arakanese, then, this is a struggle to preserve that identity. They believe that if they don’t push back against the Rohingya, their own culture will be threatened by an influx of “aliens” from a country many times more populous than their own homeland.

For other observers, however, the concerns are very different, but no less pressing. Tin Oo, a veteran leader of the opposition National League for Democracy, which just months ago finally joined the government-led reform process by entering Parliament, told me he worried that the violence in Arakan State could delay this delicate transition to a more democratic form of governance.

As a former commander-in-chief of Burma’s armed forces who was once posted in Arakan State, Tin Oo said that the region has always had the potential to become a breeding ground for sectarian violence. If it finally realizes that potential now, it could be a serious setback for those arguing for the need to open the country further, he said.

So far, President Thein Sein has handled the situation in Arakan State carefully, imposing a state of military emergency under Section 413 of the country’s 2008 Constitution—the first since his government came into power last year—but also urging all sides to set aside their differences in a television address to the country.

“If we stick to endless hatred and revenge by killing each other, it’s possible that the danger will be more widespread, not only in Arakan State,” warned Thein Sein, adding that the country’s “fledgling democracy” could easily become a casualty of the violence.

I happened to be with a group of former generals during the broadcast of Thein Sein’s speech, but it was difficult to know what they thought about the issue. One who was sitting next to me signaled his agreement with the president’s words, but then fell silent, as if resigned to the cycle of violence that seems to fuel conflict after conflict in the country.

Many people I spoke with agreed that this was a major challenge for Thein Sein. “It’s not going to be an easy ride,” said one diplomat.

While it was still far from clear how this situation would turn out for the president, some observers seemed relieved when he allowed senior UN officials to visit Arakan State—in marked contrast to the former regime’s instinctive impulse to hide the country’s dirty laundry from the eyes of outsiders.

Some long-time political observers whispered, however, that hardline elements within the military may have had a hand in the violence, though they could offer no hard evidence. Others said that the army wanted to launch a military operation to drive out the Rohingya, but the president did not give the green light.

In an effort to increase transparency, last week the government formed a committee to investigate the rape and murder of an ethnic Arakanese woman that sparked the violence, as well as the lynching of a group of Muslims that led to a series of attacks and counterattacks by Rohingya and Arakanese mobs.

While many educated Burmese saw this as a step in the right direction, on the streets, popular opinion was more in favor of taking a hard line against the Rohingya.

Many decried the corruption of immigration officials, who they blamed for letting the “Bengalis” into the country in the first place. One wealthy businessman, who had hastily raised a large amount of money to donate to Arakanese displaced by the violence, even suggested building a strong fence to defend the country from further incursions.

Even a veteran political activist bristled when he heard that the US had expressed concern over the Rohingya issue. “I want to know how the US handles its border with Mexico and how they treated Muslims after 9/11,” he said angrily.

In the absence of any hard information about what is actually happening in Arakan State right now—due, in part, to government efforts to rein in “irresponsible” media—and the lack of a healthy, rational debate on the status of the Rohingya, it seems unlikely that the situation there will improve anytime soon. And that’s bad news for everybody.

Rohingya from Myamnar rally near Myanmar Embassy in Kuala Lumpur

An ethnic Rohingya from Myanmar and living in Malaysia holds a placard during a rally near the Myanmar embassy in Kuala Lumpur June 15, 2012. — Reuters pic

An ethnic Rohingya from Myanmar and living in Malaysia, holds a placard during a rally calling for a stop to the killings and violence toward the Muslim Rohingyas in Myanmar, near the Myanmar embassy in Kuala Lumpur June 15, 2012. Thousands of displaced Muslim Rohingyas and ethnic Rakhine Buddhists were in need of food, water and shelter in northwestern Myanmar on Thursday after fleeing the country's worst sectarian clashes in years. Houses were burnt down late on Wednesday in two villages near the Bangladesh border, but there were no reports of further deaths. Scores of people are feared to have died in the rioting that broke out in Rakhine state on June 8. REUTERS/Samsul Said (MALAYSIA - Tags: CIVIL UNREST CONFLICT)