Thoughts on the upcoming Oslo Conference
In recent
weeks, Rohingyas stranded in rickety boats in the Andaman Sea
has caused international alarm. There are several thousand of these migrants in
boats off the coasts of Thailand ,
Malaysia and Indonesia with
dwindling supplies of food and water. In spite of their sad plight, they are
unwanted by any of these ASEAN countries. It is estimated that some
130,000 of them have fled by boat their ancestral home in the Rakhine state of
Myanmar (also known as Burma) since mid-2012, and many – probably thousands – have
succumbed to death just trying to do so. Many Rohingyas were smuggled or
trafficked to Thailand
and held in camps until they paid hefty sums of money to reach the Malaysian
border, which has been a favorite destination for these migrants that has
already housed 45,000 of them; but now the Malaysian government has
ordered its navy to repel them from its borders.
The
Rohingyas have been fleeing Buddhist Burma for quite sometime, largely since
the 1970s as a result of a plethora of state policies that are brutal, savage
and an anathema to everything we consider moral, noble, right, fair and decent
in our time. Not a single of the Articles enshrined in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights is honored by the Buddhist government in its
treatment of the Rohingya people. The Burmese government had effectively made
them stateless in their own country with no rights and made them the most
persecuted people on earth. As a result of such unfathomable violations of
human rights, a majority of the Rohingya have ended up living as refugees or
unwanted people in many parts of our world, especially, Saudi Arabia , Pakistan ,
Bangladesh and the Gulf States .
The
repression of the Rohingyas has gradually intensified since the relaxation of
international embargo on President Thein Sein’s government in 2011. In June and
October 2012 there were large scale ethnic cleansing drives on Rohingyas in
Rakhine State to exterminate or drive them out of the country. Hundreds of
thousands lost their homes, which were destroyed by the marauding and genocidal
Buddhists with support from the local and central government and the racist
politicians and monks. Some 140,000 of them are now forced to live in
concentration camps. To make things worse for the persecuted Rohingya, the
government in March revoked white cards - or "temporary registration
certificates" - that had been issued to hundreds of thousands of
Rohingyas. This meant that they no longer have the right to vote in upcoming
elections in November.
In utter
desperation, the Rohingya have become the stranded boat people of our time.
Aptly put, they are forced to brave death at sea to escape 'open-air
concentration camps' in genocidal Burma .
In the
midst of this rapidly worsening condition of the Rohingyas, a high level 3-day
conference to end Myanmar ’s
persecution of the Rohingya people is scheduled to open on May 26 in Oslo , Norway .
State Secretary Morten Høglund from Ministry of
Foreign Affairs and Ola Elvestuen, Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party (Venstre)
will contribute to the discussion of the plight of the Rohingyas. At the conference, iconic leaders from
diverse backgrounds including George Soros, Nobel Peace laureates Mairead
Maguire, Desmond Tutu, and José Ramos-Horta, and the former prime ministers of
Malaysia and Norway - namely Tun Dr Mahathir Mohammad and Kjell Magne Bondevik
- will join hands with the representatives of the two generations of Rohingya
refugees and activists as well as international human rights researchers and
scholars of genocides and mass atrocities. Tomas
Ojea Quinta and Yanghee Lee, former and present UN Special Rapporteurs on the
situation of human rights in Myanmar
respectively, will also share their expertise with the audiences and other
participants. Dr. Maung Zarni, a human rights activist and co-author of
the journal article, “The Slow Burning Genocide of Myanmar ’s Rohingya” will also share
his views. [While I was invited, I declined
because of a conflict of schedule which won’t permit me.]
One would
have thought that no conscientious human being would dare challenge the noble objectives
of the Oslo
conference. Apparently not true!
Derek
Tonkin of Network Myanmar
is one such individual. He has been working for the murderous Myanmar regime
promoting its cause and advocating for outside investment. In his latest article,
he sounds infuriated about the Oslo
conference. His opinion is highly biased and does not surprise me a bit.
I shall
pick just a few points of his latest article. [There are plenty more which
could have been discussed; but I felt it is unnecessary to waste my time and
those of my readers. On the British-era demographic controversy, an interested
reader may like to read my detailed analysis of the subject in my book
- Muslim Identity and Demography in the Arakan
State of Burma
(Myanmar ), which is available in the
Amazon.com]
Tonkin is critical of Dr. Maung Zarni’s thesis of the
‘Slow burning genocide of Myanmar ’s
Rohingya’. He claims that Dr. Zarni has claimed in his work, co-authored with Alice Cowley, that the present-day
problems of the Rohingya only started in 1978. That would be a misreading of
the work.
As I mentioned in some of my
speeches, lectures and articles, the persecution of the Muslims of Arakan can
at least be traced back to the time of Bodaw Paya’s invasion and conquest of
Arakan in 1784 when tens of thousands were killed; some 200,000 fled to Bengal
(today’s Bangladesh ).
As I have noted elsewhere, the tension between Rakhine plus Burman Buddhists
and Muslims in Arakan worsened during the Second World War when emboldened by
the fascist Japanese occupying forces, Muslims were ethnically cleansed from
many parts of Arakan by their Buddhist (mostly Rakhine) exterminators. [Note:
Some 600,000 Indians were forcibly evicted from other parts of Burma in the early 1940s; tens of thousands died
on their way back to India .]
So, surely the pogroms did not start in 1978.
Contrary to overwhelming
documentary evidences, Tonkin claims that there was no desire
from the Burmese government to push out the Rohingya from Arakan in 1978. He is
referring to the Naga-Min (King Dragon) Operation of February 1978-79, which
resulted in exodus of some 200,000 Rohingyas to Bangladesh , and the death of at
least 12,000. This is tantamount to claiming that the Rohingya voluntarily
chose to flee to Bangladesh .
This is a disingenuous claim, an absurd theory!
In his support of the hated Ne Win regime, Tonkin does not
quote any Rohingya refugee that fled to Bangladesh in 1978-79 but a British
official, the representative of the same government that had created the mess
in the first place when Burma was granted independence while ignoring the
precarious matter of this Muslim community that had geographical and historical
ties with southern Chittagong (of Bangladesh) and had sided with the British
during the Japanese invasion and occupation of Arakan. [As a scheming
businessman, he has no qualms today that his friendly Rakhines were on the side
of the fascists and killing British soldiers and their supporters during World
War Two.]
Dr. Abid Bahar (now a professor with Dawson College ,
Montreal , Canada )
did field research work interviewing the refugees who had fled to Bangladesh . His
thesis work presents an entirely different picture than what Tonkin
would claim in his support of the murderous Ne Win regime. He says, "If Ne Win had really wanted to get rid of
200,000 'Rohingya' said to be illegal immigrants at the time, their unexpected
flight to Bangladesh would have been too good an opportunity to miss and he would
never have let them back in again. He had after all forced some 300,000 Indians
to leave Burma
between 1963 and 1967, in the process confiscating all their assets, and this
hadn't exactly improved Indian-Burmese relations. But Indian Government concerns
had left him totally unmoved (and no doubt there were many Muslims shopkeepers
and small businessmen among those sent packing in 1963-67)." [Note: Tonkin ’s remark above tries to give the impression that
many of those evicted Muslims were ordinary shopkeepers and small businessmen.
Facts are, however, different. Quite a few of those evicted Muslims were very
successful, big businessmen who lost everything. I have met a few of those
Muslims who were forcibly evicted by Ne Win.]
Well, the case of Indians living in Burma in the 1960s was quite different than that
of the indigenous Muslim population of Arakan (irrespective of how Tonkin and his Rakhine criminal buddies like to deny
their “R” identity), whose ancestors had settled in Arakan before the Rakhine Buddhists.
Most of the Indians living in Rangoon and
some other cities like Mandalay
were brought in by the British colonial government for a plethora of reasons.
Many dockyard coolies were brought in to load and unload ships. Some Muslim
businessmen (esp. from Surat and Gujarat) were
attracted by the opportunity to expand their business empire in places like Rangoon . Many Hindu
clerks, officers, police and soldiers worked for the British Raj. And then
there were the much-hated Chettiar money lenders, who were all Hindus. The
riots of 1930s and 1940s against the Indians had hardened the Burmese attitude
towards them, and Ne Win was able to exploit such national grievances against
them when he expelled them en mass, confiscating their properties, much like what
President Idi Amin would later do with the British subjects, most of whom were
Indians, in Uganda after he had come to power.
Tonkin sounds as if the fleeing Rohingyas took refuge in Bangladesh by
dint of their own volition and were not forced to do so. He is either a
pathetic liar or an ignorant person. I am not aware of any group of human
beings who had left en mass their ancestral home without any pressure. [Here we
are not talking about individual migrations but of a group migration numbering
more than a quarter million people in a short duration.] During the Naga Min
operation, many Muslims of Arakan were murdered and many Rohingya women and
girls were raped by Ne Win’s security forces, terrorizing the entire community,
thus setting the scenario for their exodus. And yet in his disingenuous attempt
to whitewash Ne Win’s crime, Tonkin says,
"The Arakan Muslims, on the other
hand, were not a threat to his [Ne Win's] Burmese Road to Socialism, and as they
were mainly farmers were in a very real sense 'sons of the soil'."
True, the Rohingyas were not a threat to Ne Win's
socialism, and yet his hostile policies led to the Naga Min operation that
created the exodus of the Rohingya people. In a military-run government, it
would be preposterous to suggest that President Ne Win was not accountable for
the pogrom that led to the death of over 12,000 Rohingya. It was the world
opinion and international pressure, esp. those from the UN, which motivated Ne
Win to take back the refugees. Many Rohingya, however, did not want to go back
because of the discrimination that they had faced in Burma since her independence. The
once prosperous Muslim community had found itself increasingly marginalized.
They lost their jobs, businesses, land and much of personal properties, and
were being treated as ‘unwanted’ in the land of their birth. As Tonkin himself quoted soon after Burma ’s
independence many Rohingyas were “compelled to leave their
ancestral homes as a result of a deliberate Burmese policy to remove them. Massacres by armed forces occurred on 10 and 11 November 1948, and
the military told surviving 'Rwangyas that unless they vacated Maungdaw and
Buthidaung they would be tortured and butchered like animals and that they were
appointed to wipe out the Rwangyas from Maungdaw and Buthidaung'."
[Reference: Confidential Records Branch CRiV-10/51 in the National
Archives of Bangladesh .]
Interestingly, however, almost in a confessional way, Tonkin says that the Rohingyas driven away from their
home in 1978 were truly the 'sons of the soil' of Arakan. Is he not the
same person who does not mind lecturing the whole world that the Rohingya are
outsiders from Bangladesh ?
Is he not the same person whose website promotes anti-Rohingya polemics by the
regime supporters like him? Which Derek Tonkin to believe who has mastered the
art of hypocrisy, half-truths and lies?
Tonkin tries to justify Ne Win era crimes on citizenship
by saying: "That those Rohingya, possibly as many as
two-thirds of their Arakan Muslim communities who enjoyed full citizenship
under 1948 legislation, did not receive new IDs was in my analysis due to
the recalcitrance and corruption of Rakhine State officials, though central
government did nothing to resolve this gross injustice. That is, it was State
inaction rather than State action which was to blame, not the provisions of the
1982 Act."
Interesting observation! I don’t know how Tonkin came about the figure that two-thirds of Arakanese
Muslims comprised the Rohingya population. What comprised the remainder 1/3? Is
he implying that the remainder had moved from Bangladesh ? If he did, he is
mistaken or spreading lies. There is no proof of any influx from Bangladesh in the post-liberation period, let
alone during the Pakistan
era (pre-1971). Aside from that false allegation, does not the central
government under a military dictator owe the sole responsibility for why the
'sons of the soil' were not issued ID cards in spite of their ‘enjoying’ 'full
citizenship' under 1948 legislation?
While Tonkin is
dismissive about the obvious discriminatory nature of the 1982 Citizenship Law,
and criticizes Dr. Zarni for his thesis that the Law had led to the creation of the security-legal
framework built around the statelessness of the Rohingya people, he fails to tell
us that if the Law was so benign then why are the Rohingyas today stateless? It
is difficult to excuse Tonkin ’s nonchalant
attitude on this crucial issue. Does not he realize that Ne Win’s statement
where he said, “Racially, only pure-blooded nationals will be called
citizens” is racism in its worst form? In his speech, Ne Win calls the Rohingya
and other racially Indian Muslims and Hindus ‘kalas’, which is a very
disrespectful term akin to ‘niggers’ in the English language. And I need not
quote Ne Win’s offensive statement about them to show his hatred of them. A student of history would concur that the
British had epitomized racism; it is no accident that Tonkin
sees no problem with Ne Win’s racism!
As an ex-British government servant, Tonkin
is always very generous in his comments about the British era statistics and
records. He says, "The degree of
detail is impressive, the training of the enumerators detailed, the concern to
record every possible variation found in ethno-linguistic analysis truly
remarkable." The facts about the census are just the opposite. It is
unreliable and highly flawed (my book
discussing the British era demography vis-à-vis the so-called Baxter Report
points this problem), which has been well recognized and discussed by many unbiased
area historians. The census data not only failed in providing accurate
estimates of population, but its categorization of people by so-called
ethnicity is highly controversial. They are not consistent either. As I
have mentioned during my talk at Gerald Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan , during the British colonial
period, its Military Command recorded the Muslim Rohingyas as “Arakanese” and
catalogued the Rakhine Buddhists as “Maghs”.
But more problematic is Tonkin ’s
inability to understand that denial of the right of a group to self-identity
constitutes a serious crime. If the so-called Mohamedans or Arakanese Muslims,
or Chittagonians of Arakan choose to call themselves as Rohingya, they have
every right to do so. I am not sure, if in his delusional mind and
despicable arrogance, Tonkin has forgotten the
simple fact that Muslims are not Mohamedans [again a term concocted by the
missionary English Christians who falsely believed that Muslims worship Prophet
Muhammad (S)].
As hinted above, Tonkin
does not tell his audience that the British record does not mention Rakhine as
a people, but only as Maghs or Buddhists. So, Tonkin 's
hostility to the Rohingya term depicts his deplorable bias.
Another problematic feature of his article is the
condescending advice he gives towards a balanced discussion on Arakan. He
should be reminded that his Rakhine genocidal maniac friends were invited to
come and share the same podium with us in Tokyo
and Bangkok ,
and they chose not to attend. For years, even to this day, these criminal inciters
of genocide have refused to include Rohingya people in any discussion about the
future of Arakan state. I don't recall Tonkin
about reminding them that the Rohingya who comprise slightly less than half the
population in Arakan are a legitimate group to have such a dialogue. Instead,
his Rakhine-appeasing writings show that he is more interested in his silly, and
often self-conflicting, way to disprove the very existence of the Rohingya
people. He is delusional and in his unfathomable denial, he is oblivious of the
pre-British 17th century Bengali literature that talks about the
ancestors of today’s Rohingya people. I am sure no argument of mine would cure
his serious mental sickness. He has to find his own cure.
Obviously, Tonkin is
irate about Maung Zarni and other right activists and researchers for poking
his blurry eyes to open up and see the Rohingya problem from the eyes of the
suffering people, who are termed by the UN as the most persecuted people on
earth. And no matter how Tonkin may try to hide the crime of his patrons in
Myanmar, the world now knows better that the Rohingya people are facing
genocide, and need our help to stop their extinction. The Oslo Conference is a
much desired event to bring this tragedy to an end.
I can see why Tonkin is
upset. He is in the losing side – the side of mass murderers, the holocaust
deniers. His delusional remark - In the last 100 years, the wheel has
indeed turned full circle. It is no longer the Buddhist Rakhine who are
threatened with extinction, but the "Mahomedans" – says it all. [Much in contradistinction
to his false accusation 100 years ago Rakhines did not feel threatened by
Muslims.] One can only pity an old fool who has not learned when to call it
quits. Tonkin ’s falsity is simply mind
boggling! It is inexcusable and pathetic!
Enough
from such unabashed supporters of the criminal Myanmar regime!
What can
we do to stop the plight of the Rohingya people, esp. their desperate maritime
movements? I hope the Oslo Conference succeeds in mobilizing the world
community to stop their plight, including finding temporary homes for those
stranded migrants.
As noted
by U.N. human rights chief Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, the flow of desperate
Rohingya migrants across the Bay of Bengal will continue unless Myanmar ends
discrimination against them. "Until the Myanmar government addresses the
institutional discrimination against the Rohingya population, including equal
access to citizenship, this precarious migration will continue," he said
in a statement.
It is
important that the world community press the rogue regime in Myanmar to stop
its persecution of the Rohingya people. As I noted before, ASEAN is partly
responsible for ignoring the problem, which has now become a wider humanitarian
crisis. In the mean time, countries like Thailand ,
Malaysia and Indonesia have
a moral imperative - if not a legal requirement - to allow migrants to take
shelter. It is understandable that some countries may be unwilling to act
because by doing so they are more likely to be exposed to the principle of
non-refoulement, whereby refugees cannot be forcibly returned to places where
their lives or freedoms may be threatened. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
in May 2015 urged governments in the region to remember their obligations to
keep their borders and ports open to abandoned people at sea and to ensure that
"the prohibition on refoulement is maintained".
“I am
appalled at reports that Thailand ,
Indonesia and Malaysia have
been pushing boats full of vulnerable migrants back out to sea, which will
inevitably lead to many avoidable deaths. The focus should be on saving lives,
not further endangering them,” Zeid said.
He said the latest report of the Thai navy forcing a boat carrying several hundred people back out to sea after supplying it with provisions was “incomprehensible and inhumane".
Will the
conscience of world leaders wake up to stop the plight of the persecuted
Rohingya people so that they can live as free human beings like most of us?
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