In 2009, Burma's then-consul general in Hong Kong sent a letter to local newspapers and fellow diplomats posted in the Chinese territory. It was addressing concerns over the treatment of refugees from Burma's Rohingya population, a Bengali-speaking Muslim minority long marginalized in the country. Incidents of shipwrecked boats bearing half-starved, desperate Rohingya from Burma had won wider attention in the region.
Ye Myint Aung, the Burmese envoy in Hong Kong, hoped to dissuade others from feeling sympathy for the Rohingya. His method for doing this was by revealing his shocking racism. The Rohingya, he said, "are as ugly as ogres," and do not share the "fair and soft" skin of other Burmese ethnic groups. Therefore, the Burmese consul general concluded, "Rohingya are neither Myanmar people nor Myanmar's ethnic group," using the other name for Burma while trotting out his government's long-standing contention that the Rohingya are interlopers in Burma and don't deserve citizenship rights.
More than half a decade has passed since then and the situation in Burma has changed for the better. The country has opened up.
But the miserable condition of the Rohingya, a forgotten, stateless people, persists. The UN deems them "one of the most persecuted minorities in the world." There are some 1.3 million Rohingya, the majority of whom live in Burma's Rakhine state on the western border with Bangladesh and India, and struggle to access basic state services. About 140,000 Rohingya eke out a squalid existence in ramshackle camps, displaced by ethnic and sectarian strife in 2013 and neglected by the Burmese government.
Recent UN calls on the Burmese government to grant the Rohingya full citizenship rights, including a General Assembly resolution passed in December, have been received with hostility. Angry anti-Rohingya marches last week persuaded the government to scrap tentative plans to give Rohingya carrying temporary documents the right to vote in an upcoming referendum.
Much of the ire is fanned by a hard-core group of nationalist Buddhist monks. Ashin Wirathu, a Buddhist cleric notorious for his xenophobic rhetoric, even earned a spot on the cover of Time magazine's international edition with the cover line: "The Face of Buddhist Terror."
But critics say Wirathu and his ilk, more often than not, are the ones inciting mob violence against Burma's Muslims, including non-Rohingya Muslims. Hundreds have died in recent years amid riots and tit-for-tat attacks.
It's a worrying development in a diverse nation that's just emerging from authoritarian rule. Perhaps the most depressing indication of the Rohingya's plight is the relative silence of Aung San Suu Kyi, a global icon for democracy and human rights. The Nobel laureate, in keeping with Burmese government policy, refuses to even say the word "Rohingya"--which in Burma's polarized context would be an act of recognizing the community's rights, let alone its very existence.
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Ishaan Tharoor writes about foreign affairs for the Washington Post.
Editorial on 02/17/2015