- Stars (0)
Construing the Rohingya Crisis: Tracing indifference and Injustice in a Narrative of Displacement and Refugee
Ankur Jyoti Bhuyan — Global Research Forum on Diaspora and Transnationalism, New Delhi-110019, India.
This paper endeavours to engage with the Rohingya crisis, visually explained as the boat people. The attempt is to transcend the immediate context of a stranded people and explore the larger world of reference, compelling the people to take suicidal voyage. In absolute definiteness, their lives unfold a reality of endless hatred, abuses, rights violation and continuous persecution inside Myanmar. These unjust acts in epistemic way unfold conspicuous intention of categorical indifference to the existence of the group. The displacement and refugee crisis are but half reality of a naked truth of state sponsored dehumanizing efforts. However, it would be more appropriate to state the case as one of domestic as well as global injustice fundamentally embodied in abandonment, the extreme form of indifference.
This paper attempts to decipher the Rohingya issue and construe it as an enduring injustice embodied in indifference as well as abandonment. It is with this argument that the paper starts with a brief account of the historiography of the Rohingyas, giving some sense to understand the trajectory of their current predicament. The next section would seek to trace the root, events and pattern of probable genocide inflicted on these people. This section would establish the violence, marginalization and state sponsored atrocities to recover the pattern of a radical and enduring injustice. The last section arrests the state of stolidity on part of international community as well as abandonment of the population by the Burmese government. This would eventually prove their case as one of enduring injustice embodied in indifference.
Anyone keeping an eye on the recent international events would recognize the Rohingya’s identity as one of absolute marginalized. However, notwithstanding the highlights of international media calling for an end to their plight, the world largely seems to be unaware of the essence of this long-standing issue. Therefore, before harping into any instant assessment, there is a need to be inquisitive about the history of the beleaguered Rohingyas. Interestingly, their history and existence is a site of contesting claims. While the Rohingyas presents their own recorded past and attract the intellectual sympathy, the Majority Buddhist population of Myanmar have thoroughly denied the claims with their counter narrative. An anatomy of the life graph of this community would be provided in this section to crystallize the crisis. Again in 1982, a new citizenship law was brought rendering most of these people stateless (BBC, 2015). The act and the policies of the then government insisted on recognizing only the ethnic groups living in the country before first Anglo –Burmese (1824-1826) as legal citizens of Myanmar (Chan, 2005). This was the beginning of a dark era that was to follow the Rohingya population for an indefinite period. The rest of the history was destined to be an era of displacement, statelessness and abandonment for about one million populations in the western coast of Myanmer.
Injustice is an act involving unfair treatment and undeserved suffering, resulting in moral or material loss for the victim in a particular world of reference. While the tools inter alia exploitation, oppression, discrimination and humiliation generate sites of victimization, the degree of sufferings may vary from case to case. The life graph of the Rohingyas too unfolds a tragedy of group injustice in an enduring and radical pattern. Their condition has not merely generated sympathy from the world media and intellectuals; rather, a more fundamental question has appeared, if they are the world’s least wanted people (Naing & Sichel, 2015). According to the United Nations, the Rohingyas are the world’s most neglected and persecuted minority. More painfully it has continued to be a long history of persecution and alienation. However, this has to be understood in terms of discrimination and marginalization from citizenship discourse as well as their condition of statelessness and refugee due to displacement. Therefore, it is a case of domestic radical injustice as well as context of global injustice. Intentionally and arbitrarily they were kept outside the list of government recognized 135 ethnic identity groups (Philips, 2013). They have been denied access to citizenship facilities and subjected to all sorts of humiliation, discrimination and inhuman tortures. Abjection, tortures, arbitrary detention and other physical or mental harassment have been perpetrated at the tacit behest of police, security forces and Myanmar authorities.
In the meantime, in 1978, the Myanmar government launched illegal immigration crack down programme, operation Nagamin (Dragon King) and about 200,000 Rohingyas were forced to flee to Bangladesh and around 10,000 of them died, particularly women and children, due to mal nutrition and illness (Zarni, 2014). Then, the 1982 law not merely stripped the Rohingyas of most of the citizenship facilities and termed them Bengali economic migrants, but also gave credibility to xenophobic rhetoric of government as well as Buddhist monks. They have been subject to abuses, abjection, humiliation, communal riots and systematic dehumanization. Examples are there in plenty of dehumanization of Rohingyas under national law. They have no property rights, no identity cards, they are subject to curfews, and they are denied access to higher education or government positions; they have exorbitant marriage fees and Rohingya couples are limited to two children (Philips, 2013).
The lives of the Rohingyas have unfolded to be a wretched one. United Nation was categorically right while terming them the most persecuted minority in the world. The quotidian lives of this community have been an experience of traversing an endless terrain of humiliation, segregation, discrimination and atrocities. In the first instance, they are victims of domestic injustice in the hands of Buddhist neighbours, government authorities and military personnel, insinuating a proposed context of genocide. On the other hand, as displaced refugees, they have been subjected to detention, arrest and often spotted stranding on sea shore. However, the ubiquitous presence of radical injustice continues to pervade their quotidian lives resulting from indifference of multiple actors. With conclusive evidence, one may assert, the Rohingyas are an abandoned population.
