Isaac & Mike
The Muslim Rohingya population in Myanmar is treated so poorly that they must flee the country, where their prospects are still very bleak. The Rohingya people have been in in Myanmar many generations, but the Burmese treat them as if they were all illegal immigrants. This is apparent when “there are 1.33 million Rohingya in Burma" and "only 40,000 have citizenship". This lack of citizenship allows them to be discriminated against in a society that strongly dislikes them. In 2013 there was a massive wave of violence against the Rohingya people by “radical Buddhist monks ". This has forced over 100,000 people into government camps where they are then not allowed to leave. This isolation cuts the Rohingya people away from the general population, and deprives them of “education, healthcare, employment" and many other things. Besides just a physical separation of the group, there are also social separations. The Burmese government passed a law that forces the Rohingya to apply for permission to marry where they are faced with unfair requirements and prevented from marrying the main population. This mistreatment of the Rohingya is so wide spread in Myanmar that "even Aung San Suu Kyi, a leader known as a model of political courage and moral probity" refuses to acknowledge the issue. The massive amount of discrimination causes the Rohingya people to attempt to flee Myanmar. Due to being held hostage by their own government, they must rely on smugglers to attempt to flee. Now many Rohingya are stuck in a limbo between foreign countries that refuse to accept them and their home witch they cannot return to. The smugglers who took them out of Myanmar mainly seek profit, leaving these stranded refugees in hazardous and often deadly situations.
What is happening in Myanmar violates the UDHR and many other UN covenants that Myanmar has ratified. The rights to live as part of a society, the right to hold public office, the right to vote, the right to work, the right to own property, the list goes on. These and many others are being directly violated by the Buddhist majority in the country. A major source of their woes is the lack of citizenship for these people. The government denies citizenship for the Rohingya because of the lack of official paperwork even though many had been living in the area for hundreds of years. The denying of citizenship violates the UN convention on the rights of children by denying them the right to be a citizen of their nation of home birth, a document the Myanmar ratified.
Another right that is of great importance that is violated is the right to life. In Myanmar the government does nothing to protect the Rohingya from Anti-Muslim riots. “120,000 asylum seekers have left from Myanmar and Bangladesh this year.” Many of these people who are smuggled across the Indonesian Sea die in route to their destinations. Then when they reach Malaysia or Thailand, hundreds die at the hands of the respective governments because they refuse to let them ashore. The plight of these refugees is in some ways similar to that of the Syrian refugees.
Questions:
- How should the U.N intervene in helping the Rohingya people .
- should the U.S rethink it's 2012 lifting of sanctions from Myanmar, or take another approach?
- Should Buddhist leaders in other countries be responsible for trying to calm the Buddhist population of Myanmar.
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