Rohingya: A Crime Against Humanity

Description: 

"Persecuted and oppressed in Myanmar, Rohingyas flee across the border into Bangladesh. Starving and stateless, they live in squalid makeshift camps. The recent ethnic clashes between Rohingya Muslims and the Rakhine Buddhists in the Rakhine (Arakan) province of Myanmar have attracted global attention. It is as if a veil had been lifted to reveal a hideous blemish. The terrible ethnic and religious violence recently happened in June 2012, in Myanmar’s western state of Rakhine, pitted Buddhists against the mostly Muslim Rohingyas minority. The latest—when an ugly incident of rape and murder of a Buddhist woman allegedly by three Rohingyas—turned into a disaster for the Rohingya Muslims community in Myanmar. According to United Nations (UN) reports, there are more than 800,000 Rohingyas residing in Myanmar, mostly in the province of Rakhine, and many hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees in other countries. Thus, Rohingyas are one of the most persecuted minorities in the world. The ruling Junta stripped Rohingyas of all the rights of a citizen through a law called “Citizenship Law” in 1982, thus making Rohingyas the only stateless community of the world. However, the ruling Junta in Myanmar did not want to know nor let others know that the Rohingyas have a long history, a language, a heritage, a culture and a tradition of their own that they had built up in the Rakhine, through their long history of existence there. Moreover, through their “criminal propaganda”, the Buddhist majorities have been feeding so much misinformation against the Rohingya. According to Siddiqui (1999), the level of disinformation has reached such an alarming level that if some of the people were to talk with a Rakhine Buddhist, they would say that the Rohingyas are refugees in Rakhine and they do not belong to Myanmar, but that they belong to Bangladesh. However, such allegations are unfounded. Some scholars distinguished that in fact the forefathers of Rohingyas had entered into Rakhine from time immemorial (Karim, 2000)..."

Creator/author: 

Shamsiah Abd Kadir

Source/publisher: 

"Academia.edu" (USA)

Date of Publication: 

2015-03-23

Date of entry: 

2019-10-19

Grouping: 

  • Individual Documents

Category: 

Countries: 

Myanmar, Bangladesh

Administrative areas of Burma/Myanmar: 

Rakhine State

Language: 

English

Local URL: 

Format: 

pdf

Size: 

2.82 MB (10 pages)

Resource Type: 

text

Text quality: 

    • Good