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By Matthew Pennington – KashmirDispatch.com
Myanmar’s downtrodden Rohingya Muslims have been denied citizenship, targeted in deadly sectarian violence and corralled into dirty camps without aid. To heap on the indignity, Myanmar’s government is pressuring foreign officials not to speak the group’s name, and the tactic appears to be working.
UN officials say they avoid the term in public to avoid stirring tensions between the country’s Buddhists and Muslims. And after Secretary of State John Kerry recently met Myanmar leaders, a senior State Department official told reporters the US thinks the name issue should be “set aside”.
That disappoints Tun Khin, president of the activist group Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK. He said by not using it, governments are co-operating with a policy of repression. “How will the rights of the Rohingya be protected by people who won’t even use the word ‘Rohingya’?” he said.
Myanmar authorities view the Rohingya as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, not one of the 135 officially recognised ethnic groups. Long-standing discrimination against this stateless minority, estimated to number 1.3 million, has intensified as Myanmar has opened up after decades of military rule. More than 140,000 Rohingya have been trapped in crowded camps since extremist mobs from the Buddhist majority began chasing them from their homes two years ago, killing up to 280 people.
Racism against the Rohingya is widespread, and some see in the communal violence the warning signs of genocide.
The United States has called on the government to protect them. When President Barack Obama visited Myanmar less than two years ago, he told students at Yangon University: “There is no excuse for violence against innocent people. And the Rohingya hold themselves — hold within themselves the same dignity as you do, and I do.”
Yet neither Kerry this month, nor top human rights envoy Tom Malinowski during a June visit, uttered the term at their news conferences when they talked with concern about the situation in Rakhine state, where sectarian violence is perhaps worst. Buddhist mob attacks against Rohingya and other Muslims have spread from the western state to other parts of the country, sparking fears that nascent democratic reforms in the nation could be undermined by growing religious intolerance.
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