The Rohingya tragedy is one of the worst man-made tragedies in recent history. A look at Bangladesh's predicament in 1979 would help those with the powers to resolve the tragedy if they were sincerely interested in resolving it that still does not seem to be the case.
In 1979, the military government of General Ne Win had forced nearly a quarter million Rohingyas to Bangladesh. He had reason to do so. His government that was failing badly needed a scapegoat. The Rohingyas were the scapegoats because they were Muslims that the country's militant Buddhists and military hated deeply. Ne Win used that hatred for saving his failing regime and created the Rohingya tragedy.
Foreign journalists, who had covered that influx, were aghast with the way the Burmese military had pushed such a huge number of Rohingyas to Bangladesh, almost overnight. They had said at that time to the officials of the Bangladesh foreign ministry who had been with them that in their careers of following crimes against humanity worldwide, they had not seen the cruelty that the Burmese military had imposed upon the Rohingyas to flee the land that had been theirs and their ancestors for many hundreds of years before the Barman Buddhist rulers annexed it in 1784.
President Zia was in power at the time. His government had negotiated with the Burmese military successfully in sending back almost all the Rohingya refugees to their country. No one seriously inquired what it was that had motivated the ruthless Ne Win regime to take the refugees back. There was a bilateral agreement under which the refugees had returned, overtly. But what was not revealed was a message that the Bangladesh government had given to the Burmese military diplomatically, that if they did not take back the refugees, Bangladesh would arm them and send them back to their country.
That, of course, was a ploy but that had worked. Bangladesh did not and also could not carry out such a course of action, that of arming the Rohingyas. Before he relinquished power as the Chairman of the Socialist Party in 1988, General Ne Win's regime passed the Myanmar Citizenship Law in 1982 under which the Rohingyas were declared stateless! That law was the cover for low-grade ethnic cleansing that forced a great part of the Rohingya population to flee their country to Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, and Thailand. That law had emboldened the Myanmar military to force another influx of a quarter million Rohingyas to Bangladesh that the Bangladesh government was again able to send back through bilateral negotiation. The US Ambassador in Dhaka Marcia Bernicat has recently said that the bilateral agreement under which Bangladesh had succeeded in sending back the Rohingya refugees in 1992 should be the basis of repatriating the refugees to Myanmar this time also.
The US Ambassador's suggestion, well-meaning no doubt, may not succeed as it had in 1992. For one, the latest influx has brought an unprecedented number of 600,000 refugees to add to the 400,000 already in the country adding to a stupendous 1.0 million Rohingyas in Bangladesh. There are other major differences with the 1992 influx to allow something similar to the 1992 agreement to send back the 1.0 million Rohingyas.
This time, however, international attention has focused on the Rohingya problem like never before mainly through the efforts of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and the international media that could help achieve a sustainable resolution to the Rohingya tragedy.
These recent developments have brought out clearly that the Myanmar military is engaged in genocide and ethnic cleansing that dismissed the absurd explanation that their military had done nothing unusual to the Rohingyas except take action against the terrorists of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) that had killed four Myanmar soldiers. Unfortunately, India, China, and Russia did not see the Myanmar military's action as anything like ethnic cleansing. In fact, they accepted Myanmar's narrative. It is surprising that they did not consider ARSA's riff-raff status as a terrorist organisation and that 600,000 Rohingyas had fled as a result of Myanmar military's action against them.
The solution of the Rohingya tragedy is not very complex if only those in whose hands the solution lies were to call a spade a spade to bring the tragedy to an end. That solution has been underlined by the Jordanian Queen Rania in an interview she gave with CNN's Christiane Amanpour recently. The Queen had visited the Rohingyas in their pitiful refugee camps in Bangladesh, saw their plight first-hand and very easily identified the problem and also the way to solve it. Only those, who think they understand better, act to complicate the problem and make it complex to protect their own interests.
Christiane Amanpour tried to lead the Queen towards the interests of those who can resolve the Rohingya problem but instead act to complicate it. She described the ARSA as a dangerous terrorist organisation based simply on the fact that it that had killed four members of the Myanmar military that must be nipped in the bud. She also suggested that the Rohingya problem could be a breeding ground for international terrorism.
The Queen did not enter into any discussion with Christiane about ARSA's potential. Instead, she stated politely and confidently that the horror and terror that she saw in the faces of women and children in the refugee camps suggested that inhuman cruelty in Rakhine had forced the refugees to flee from the Myanmar military. She agreed with the CNN interviewer about the possibility that the Rohingya problem could be used by the international terrorists as a fertile breeding ground but from a totally different perspective.
She stated that the only way to deny the international terrorists from using the Rohingya crisis as a fertile recruiting ground their cadre was to create the conditions that would allow the Rohingyas to return to their homes to live there without fear.
With that answer, she veered from the direction that Christiane Amanpour was perhaps trying to lead her - that the action of the Myanmar military against ARSA was necessary and that the important task in resolving the Rohingya tragedy was to deal with the prospects of so-called Islamic terrorism. The Queen dismissed that by stating that nothing could justify the actions of the Myanmar military that had forced such a humungous number of innocent men, women, and children to flee.
The CNN correspondent's angle appeared to be the same that the United States and the West have made repeatedly in the past whenever Muslims have been accused of terrorism, real or perceived. Christiane Amanpour did not see what Queen Rania saw as plain as water, that there was simply one narrative: the Rohingyas are being terrorised right under the nose of the powerful nations on earth. For Christiane Amanpour, the fact that ARSA terrorists were Muslims appeared to be more important than the hundreds of thousands of innocent victims of Myanmar military's cruelty. She did not even appear to be knowledgeable about the ARSA. She was not interested to learn from the Queen whether she had found evidence among the Rohingyas that she saw, victims of "a textbook case of ethnic cleansing."
For Christiane Amanpour, the 600,000 Rohingyas in Bangladesh, the genocide and the ethnic cleansing against them appeared to be matters of "collateral damage". It was indeed very unfortunate that she did not use the interview with the Queen to expose the Myanmar's now undeniable crimes against humanity. She showed the same mindset of the western correspondents that have viewed the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women, and children in Afghanistan and Iraq as collateral damages during President GW Bush's war on terror.
The crisis concerning the Rohingyas shows no signs of a resolution. And it would not be resolved unless those with the power over the Myanmar military were to talk to international leaders like Jordan's Queen Rania for guidance. The problem would be solved only when the Rohingyas feel confident like any other citizen of Myanmar to return to their country that happens to be Myanmar. The first step towards that would be to annul the 1982 Myanmar Citizenship Law and acknowledge the Rohingyas as one of its 130-odd ethnic groups in Myanmar that would entitle them to their citizenship that was illegally taken away from them.
POSTSCRIPT: Queen Rania said in the Kutupalong Camp in Bangladesh: "I urge the UN and the international community to do all that they can to stop the suffering and the violence that is being committed against the Rohingya Muslims, not because it is our job to do so, but because that is what justice demands." With a resolution of the Rohingya crisis nowhere in sight, one can only say three cheers for Queen Rania for the courage to stand against evil.
The writer is a former Ambassador.
