No peace for Rohingyas

The Rohingyas are driven from their country in increasing numbers, condemned to a life afloat

Once again, the Rohingya people of northern Myanmar have risen to the top of the news agenda. Global news channels have broadcast scenes of utter desperation as Rohingyas, often in the company of Bangladeshi migrants, drift helplessly in the Andaman Sea, the people smugglers having abandoned them and no state wanting them. At a recent meeting of the states that are receiving the latest influx of migrants — which Myanmar did not attend — it was finally agreed, very reluctantly, to begin a limited humanitarian operation more designed to head off international opprobrium than ease the plight of desperate people. The Rohingya have been persecuted for decades by successive Myanmar governments, with Buddhist extremists sowing fears about Muslim minorities in Myanmar — and finding a ready public ear. Even the vaunted Nobel prizewinner Aung San Suu Kyi appears to pander to the anti-Rohingya lobby, doing little for her international reputation as she does.

Pakistan expressed its concern in a statement through the foreign ministry, which urged the Myanmar government to grant citizenship and other rights to the Rohingya, but that is a faint hope even though it represents the most appropriate of outcomes. Nothing is going to ease the travails of the Rohingya unless and until long-held entrenched positions shift. The foreign minister is going to be taking up the matter at the next OIC Council of Foreign Ministers session in the hope of evolving a common position among member states, but again that is a faint hope given the divisions within the OIC. Beyond this, there is little that Pakistan can do. The Rohingyas have no champion shouting their cause to the world, have no economic leverage and by virtue of their stateless status in Myanmar have no political representation either. They are a threat to nothing and nobody, and driven from their country in increasing numbers, condemned to a life afloat — a people comprehensively failed by the wider world.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 30^th,  2015.

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