More than 4,000 Rohingya people originally from Burma have been evicted from their homes in Bangladesh and now fear deportation. The Rohingya left their traditional homeland in the Arakan State of Burma fleeing persecution and forced labor policies at the hands of the Burmese military government. In November Bangladeshi authorities began evicting Rohingya asylum seekers from their new homes, forcing the Rohingya to set up temporary shelters without clean water or adequate food supplies. Many Rohingya people have stated their fears that the Burmese government will kill them if they are forced to move back.
The Rohingya, a Muslim group, have been suffering human rights abuses by the Burmese military government for decades. In the last two decades Bangladesh has taken in close to half a million Rohingya refugees. Only 100,000 of the refugees were permitted to live in Bangladesh; the rest were sent back to Burma. In Burma the Rohingya were subjected to rape, slavery, torture, execution, restrictions on movement and the seizure of land and citizenship. Since September 11, 2001, the persecution and repression of the Rohingya have intensified.
The determination of the Burmese government to exterminate the Rohingya has even caused many Burmese people to believe that the Rohingya are a foreign ethnic group. The government’s propaganda has caused other ethnic groups persecuted under the military junta to take up arms and attack the Rohingya. The belief that the Rohingya are not indigenous to Burma only spread with the Citizenship Act of 1982. Under that law, the Rohingya are denied citizenship because of the government’s contention that they could not provide evidence that they were settled in the country before 1823. Verification of their indigenous status is made difficult due to the fact that the British government brought many Muslims into the Arakan region during its rule.
But there is some historical evidence that backs up the Rohingya’s claim as an indigenous people of Burma. The original name of the Arakan region was Rohang, dating back at least a thousand years. Many scholars have suggested that the Burmese government is manipulating the historical record of various religious and ethnic groups for its own purposes.
The Rohingya’s struggle has left them without a homeland and without any recognition of their fundamental human rights. Their lack of mobility, due to restrictions on travel, has caused them to suffer economically, socially and has limited their access to health facilities. These limitations, coupled with the severe discrimination and persecution they face in Burma, offers the Rohingya little hope for a peaceful life in their homeland. The Asian Forum of Human Rights and Development (Forum-Asia) is urging the United Nations refugee agency to intervene, and the government of Bangladesh is being pressured to abide by international humanitarian principles and ensure that the Rohingya are not deported to Burma.
