The fate of the Burmese Rohingya is being settled in front of our very eyes. As with many other populations that have faced ethnic genocide, such as the Rwandans and the Kosovar, the world does not care about the Rohingya. Not only is a return home filled with the same dangers that had forced the entire Rohingya population to get up and leave, they are not welcome in their new homes either. In Myanmar this week, another twenty Rohingya were killed after an attack by a military helicopter. The Myanmar government – which is yet to take action against military personnel who have been accused of genocide by the UN – claimed that the killed individuals were ‘terrorists.’ To say that the military attack on the remaining Rohingya was a surprise would be a joke. The reality is that there have been no international consequences for Myanmar over the ethnic genocide of the Rohingya. India and Bangladesh both remain committed to ‘repatriating’ Rohingya refugees back to Myanmar, despite no assurances that anything has changed on the ground.
Cox’s Bazaar in Bangladesh has become the world’s largest refugee camp, but the Bangladesh government still wants the Rohingya to return to Myanmar, and so continues to deny them fundamental rights. Rohingya children are denied the right to schooling in Bangladesh, despite having lived their for over a year and a half; notably, Bangladesh has done this before in the case of the Biharis too. But what seems stranger is that the Bangladesh police stepped in to prevent 115 Rohingya refugees from being smuggled to Malaysia in small fishing boats. The move was part of a series of operations which have been held to ensure that Rohingya refugees do not leave the poor conditions they live in at Bangladeshi refugee camps. In the meanwhile, the plans of the Bangladesh government to move 23,000 Rohingya refugees to an unsettled island prone to cyclones have come under criticism from the UN and other human rights activists. The Rohingya moved there would be left trapped without any economic opportunities and little protections when the floods come. The response of so-called independent governments to the Rohingya crisis seems to be to just exacerbate human rights violations. Instead of solving the Rohingya question, the current approach is going to leave it as an open wound for decades to come.
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