by Hugh Fitzgerald
The Burmese who want the Rohingya out claim they are Muslims from what is now Bangladesh who infiltrated across porous borders into northern Burma, where they carried out massacres of the local Burmese. Defenders of the Rohingya claim they are Burmese, not Bengali. Have you ever seen pictures of the Rohingya? Do you know what people in Bangladesh look like, and what the indigenous people of Burma look like?
Look at the photograph here of the Rohingya who’ve landed in Indonesia (instead, of, say, Sydney or Lampedusa) and see what you think.
Boats carrying about 500 members of Myanmar’s long-persecuted Rohingya Muslim community washed to shore in western Indonesia on May 10, with some of the people in need of medical attention, a migration official and a human rights advocate said.
The men, women and children arrived on two separate boats, one carrying around 430 people and the other 70, said Steve Hamilton, deputy chief of mission at the International Organization for Migration in Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital.
Teams were racing to Mantang Puntong in Aceh province, where the boats landed, Hamilton said.
Rohingya Muslims have for decades suffered from state-sanctioned discrimination in Myanmar.
Attacks on the religious minority by Buddhist mobs in the last three years have sparked one of the biggest exoduses of boat people since the Vietnam War, sending 100,000 people fleeing, according to Chris Lewa, director of the Arakan Project, which has monitored the movements of Rohingya for more than a decade.
Lewa confirmed that nearly 500 Rohingya landed in Indonesia early May 10.
Some were apparently weak due to lack of food and water, she said.
Though their first stop has in the past been Thailand, where the Rohingya waited in jungle camps while brokers collected hefty “ransoms” from family members before allowing them to continue their journeys onward, tactics have changed in recent months.
They are now being held on boats at sea, Lewa said, estimating that 7,000 to 8,000 Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants are currently parked in the Malacca Straits, unable to disembark because of crackdowns on trafficking networks in Thailand and Malaysia, their primary destination.
Tightly confined, and with limited access to food and clean water, Lewa said she worries that the migrants’ health is steadily deteriorating. Dozens of deaths have been reported in the last few months.
Any chance Indonesia will give them Refugee Status?
They are all Indians (Indian Muslims) from long time ago.
instead of saying whats wrong with the Burmese that wont take them in, we should ask whats wrong with Bangladesh that they are fleeing?
Of course the conditions in Bangladesh are bad (and getting worse) thanks to Islam; but there is always the push and pull factor, the obligation of ‘hijra'(migration) to make the world Islamic.
Abu Ala Maududi, the founder of Jamaat-e-Islami, puts it this way in his book, Jihad in Islam: