Freespace - A Rohingya dilemma

THE Rohingya migrant tragedy playing out in the Andaman Sea over the past few weeks has been heart-wrenching but at the same time, full of complications.
For the moment, the worst has been staved off for the estimated 7,000 people stranded out at sea as Malaysia and Indonesia agreed to accept them temporarily.
But this measure is at best a sticking plaster, with the situation promising no easy solution.
While this is the first time that the Rohingyas plight has played out so vividly in the international media, the dilemma over the community has been festering over the past three decades.
In 1982, the Myanmar government enacted its Citizenship Law excluding the Rohingyas from its list of "national races". Overnight, the 1.3 million-strong Rohingya community in the westernmost Rakhine state became stateless persons. Faced with worsening persecution, many gambled their lives on dangerous journeys to reach safer pastures.
I first met the Rohingyas in 2002 when, as a reporter, I covered an incident at the discreet headquarters of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Kuala Lumpur. A group of Rohingya asylum seekers had broken into the agency's compound, seeking shelter.
Tired of being shoved from one place to another, and failing to meet the UNHCR's stringent requirement for them to prove "well-founded fear of persecution" in order to qualify for refugee status, they resorted to this desperate measure. It did not do them any good as the group was eventually handed over to the police and deported after a spell in one of Malaysia's notorious detention camps.
It would not be the last that I would hear of them. About a year after the incident, I received a call from one of the members of the group asking for photographs of that fateful day to support his re-application to the UNHCR. Deported after his arrest, Abdul Salam had made his way back to KL through well-trodden human trafficking routes. According to him, irregular migrants like himself were regularly sent across to Thailand by Malaysian authorities. Once across Sungai Golok, human traffickers would herd them into trucks to be transported to jungle camps just like those uncovered in Thailand recently that contain mass graves.
Abdul Salam languished in captivity for months until his family and friends saved up enough money to pay for his release. Upon payment of his ransom, he was put into the trunk of a car with five other people and smuggled back across the border into Malaysia. Anyone unable to raise enough to buy their way to freedom were put to work as slave labour on Thai fishing trawlers. In this brutal cycle of exploitation, the remains of those who perish are often dumped overboard or into shallow graves in the thick jungles along the Malaysian-Thai border.
In my subsequent interviews with numerous Myanmarese asylum seekers, I discovered that almost all of them had to go through this experience to get to our soil, with some experiencing this purgatory multiple times if they were unlucky enough to be arrested.
The Rohingyas were also not the only asylum seekers coming from troubled regions in Myanmar. I met Chin, Kachin, Karen and Shan persons, all seeking to escape conflict, persecution or forced labour back home. Between 2002 and 2012 when I re-engaged with the Myanmar asylum seekers again as a volunteer teacher, their numbers ballooned from the tens of thousands to at least 150,000 by some estimates.
As Malaysia is not a signatory to the UN Refugee Convention, only a small minority would have a chance to be resettled abroad, leaving the rest to eke out an uncertain living in our shadow economy.
Much as our humanitarian instincts want us to give a home to those in desperate circumstances, the reality is that no government would be willing accept an unstemmed flow of migrants indefinitely. Even less likely those who are poor, poorly educated and lacking in skills.
The plight of the Rohingyas and other Myanmarese asylum seekers can only be effectively addressed when countries and leaders come together to negotiate a political solution. Asean has to step up, much as the European Union has in order to deal with boatloads of war refugees from the Middle East and Africa. Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia may be the ones in the spotlight for their proximity to Myanmar but other countries are also under humanitarian obligation to shoulder part of the responsibility.
As Chair of Asean this year, Putrajaya should take a bold stance to press for the issue to be tabled for discussion at regional level and not let the matter slide.
Countries from further afar need to re-evaluate their foreign and trade policies vis-à-vis Myanmar in view of the government's persistent attempts to evict their own unwanted people. Every country signing trade and investment deals with Myanmar without taking into account its actions to cause untold misery, whether it is the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, China, Korea or Japan, is complicit in the persecution of Myanmar's ethnic minorities.
Lastly, world leaders with global and moral authority must speak up for those who have remained voiceless for so long.
For those who pinned their hopes on Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi to take a stand for the equal rights of the Rohingyas to live free from fear in Myanmar, it is time to realise that this is not a fight that the Lady will take on, whether her silence is due to the precariousness of her own position or that she shares the regime's views on racial apartheid.
The Rohingyas will need many more to speak up for them to ask only for the most basic of human right to be able to live and survive in their homeland.
Mun Ching enjoys travelling off the beaten path to discover the grittier but more revealing parts of the region we call home. Comments: letters@thesundaily.com