Most people in Western societies know nothing about them. Major media largely ignore them. They number around two million, mostly in Myanmar and Bangladesh. Most are Muslims, smaller numbers Hindus.
Called one of the world’s most persecuted people, they live in remote areas around Myanmar/Bangladesh border areas.
Despite living in these areas for centuries, they’re considered aliens in Myanmar, their native country, with no rights.
Its regime, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate/National League for Democracy President/1st State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, consider them illegal Bangladesh immigrants. More on her appalling silence and inaction below.
Rohingyas are denied citizenship, free movement, and opportunities for employment. They’ve been brutally treated for decades.
In 1982, Myanmar’s government enacted a nationality law, stripping their citizenship. In the early 1990s, a military crackdown forced hundreds of thousands to become refugees in Bangladesh, India, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
Tens of thousands are internally displaced in Myanmar, living under deplorable conditions – victims of slow-motion genocide.
Humanitarian groups are barred from providing aid, including the UN. Its special investigator on Myanmar Yanghee Lee believes the country wants them all expelled.
The world body calls Myanmar home to “the largest community of stateless people in the world.” It called for rectifying this deplorable situation – while doing nothing to help achieve it.
Evidence it obtained indicates “summary executions, enforced disappearances, arbitrary arrests and detentions, torture and ill-treatment and forced labor” – crimes against humanity against its people.
They’re being silently slaughtered, Western media largely ignoring their brutal treatment. Since late August, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said around 60,000 Rohingyas fled violence in Myanmar for Bangladesh.
It’s some of the worst in years, regime forces massacring them and burning their villages, the world community ignoring their suffering.
Suu Kyi is one of many undeserving Nobel laureates. She refused to condemn the deplorable treatment of Royingyas in her country.
Law Professor Penny Green explained “(i)n a genocide, silence is complicity, and so it is with Aung San Suu Kyi.”
Given her moral and political capital, she could effectively challenge “vile racism and Islamophobia which characterize Burmese political and social discourse.”
Instead, she seeks political support to fulfill her own ambitions, ignoring horrendous mistreatment of over a million Myanmar Rohingyas.
In an earlier interview, she disgracefully blamed both sides. According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide, “(w)e left (Myanmar), deeply concerned that so many preconditions for genocide are already in place.”
Despite disturbing ongoing horrors, Suu Kyi is mute. According to journalist Mehdi Hasan, “(h)er refusal to condemn, or even fully acknowledge, the state-sponsored repression of her fellow countrymen and women, not to mention the violence meted out to them by Buddhist extremists…makes her part of the problem, not the solution.”
She’s no moral icon, just another self-serving dirty politician, uncaring about Rohingya suffering.