The mass exodus of Rohingya out of Rakhine State, Burma/Myanmar has been staggering. Recent months have seen unrelenting violence and bloodshed, usually aimed at civilians. Burmese news outlets have reported that ninety percent of the Rohingya population in Rakhine State have fled their homes and currently reside in Bangladesh, just next door. According to the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Bangladeshi refugee camps now hold approximately 688,000 Rohingya refugees.
Not every single Rohingya village has been attacked — many don’t wait that long. The threat of what has happened in many villages is too great a risk to stand and wait around for. Rape has been a commonly used weapon against many there. The Associated Press interviewed many women on the Bangladeshi border:
The women spoke of seeing their children slaughtered in front of them, their husbands beaten and shot. They spoke of burying their loved ones in the darkness and leaving the bodies of their babies behind. They spoke of the searing pain of rapes that felt as if they would never end, and of dayslong journeys on foot to Bangladesh while still bleeding and hobbled.â€
There have also been reports of throwing infants across trees, burning families in their homes and beating people of all ages to death. A report of the military coming through, slaughtering people and then burning their faces beyond recognition with acid came out earlier this year. Another report of a mass grave with ten Rohingya bodies inside got two Reuters journalists jailed for their efforts. Despite the stories to the contrary, these reports continue find their way to the surface.
This type of violence upon their neighbors is not looked at casually for most Rohingya. Many have fled the the Burmese military before they reach their villages; some have fled as soon as any sort of Burmese authority arrived within their village. Half of one village simply up and left when a Burmese police regimental base was built in their town — many agree that the risk is too great when dealing with the authorities.
And the risk of travel through an unforgiving jungle and a river where people are constantly drowning is not lost on them. But they try anyway.
Doctors Without Borders published a report late last year, reporting the violent deaths of 11,393 Rohingya people in the first 31 days of fighting. Over 1,200 of them were children under the age of five, most of which shot, burned at home or in the miscellaneous section of violent deaths. 6.9% of all children under the age of five that died in that month, died because they were beaten to death. Over 70% of all Rohingya deaths in that month were violent ones.
The United Nations has called these efforts by the Burmese military “textbook ethnic cleansing” and the U.S., particularly ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley, has also been adamantly critical of the Burmese government’s actions. Those actions have now culminated in 90% of the Rohingya having left their entire state for the refuge of a neighboring country.
Featured image courtesy of the Associated Press.
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I appreciate that. One of my law school classmates said something similar once. He’d served for several years in the Army and was going back as JAG for a second military career, and we got to talking about the best way to support our troops as they serve. He thought about it for a while, taking my question seriously. He said doing something right here at home, creating peace and a sense of community among neighbors to prevent those kinds of conflicts from happening here is probably the most meaningful thing anyone could do. I don’t know that I work at it *daily*, but I remember his words often, and I pay closer attention to opportunities to listen or serve or reach out in friendship than I would probably otherwise be inclined to do. It doesn’t seem to be the sort of thing that makes life any easier elsewhere in the world, but maybe there’s one less place where bad things are happening today, however small and simple.
That is a great question, and I wish I had an answer for you. I wish there were a clear path to a solution.
When I was a kid, I grew up in Pakistan and my dad ran a free eye clinic in the north. After 9/11 and the attack on my school, we left for Thailand. My dad later told me of leaving Pakistan then — it was a hard place, especially then, but he loved the people there and felt like there was still so much work to be done and so much he could offer.
But where he was headed, there was so much he could offer too (and his family would be safe).
He just figured there’s only so much you can do. Whether that’s in your community, family or for some big country-driven cause or aid work or whatever. Just contribute! I slack in that respect daily.
Somewhere along the way (in a college history class I suspect) I remember reading passages from news articles about slavery written around the early-to-mid-1800s. If memory serves, the articles were originally printed in newspapers in the northern U.S. states and in Great Britain, and I remember thinking, I wonder what their reaction was as the people of that day read those articles. I wonder if they shook their heads and thought it was such a shame that Southerners treated their slaves like that. I wonder if they felt powerless to do anything. I wonder if they felt the need to write opinion letters to the newspapers, or break the horrible laws to free slaves immediately, or lobby Congress to make laws that overrode the states, or wanted to sanction the Southern economy by boycotting their slave-labor products, or if they talked about going to war before the Civil War. I wonder how many articles it took to reach a critical mass of strong public opinion…and if that critical mass made a difference in how the Civil War turned out. As I read about the plight of the Rohingya and the North Koreans and others, I find myself in a not-so-dissimilar position, wondering what I will actually do with the knowledge, directly or indirectly.