There still has a little of humanity left among the humans that inhabit planet earth but it is generally confined to the victims of disasters caused by Mother Nature. Humanity or human conscience is practically as good as dead when it comes to disasters that humans inflict upon fellow humans.
Nature of course smiles sarcastically when it sees how humans can go into denial when they kill one another in hundreds of thousands that natural disasters cannot even come close to, as killers of the human kind. Thus we have seen the World War I and the World War II, the Vietnam War, the Korean War and the so-called War on Terror undertaken by the United States and its allies in Afghanistan and Iraq. All these wars were avoidable but have nevertheless occurred and undertaken by those who claim that they are the defenders of the humankind.
We are living in one of the most hypocritical periods of human history. Those that are claiming to be the defenders of human values are killing fellow humans in the most inhuman ways possible. And in this madness, nations are forgetting their own history for their immediate narrow national interests. We are watching such hypocrisy right at our doors, as hundreds of thousands of Rohingyas are fleeing a genocide that has been active right under our noses, those of our neighbours, India and China, and also of the international community.
The Rohingyas have lived in the Arakan for several centuries. The Arakan was a part of the Mughal Empire. Prince Shuja, the brother of Emperor Aurangzeb, had taken sanctuary there in the court of the Muslim rulers when he was forced to flee for life in the war of succession among the sons of Emperor Shah Jahan. He had died there. It was only when the Muslim rule in India was crumbling that the Buddhist Barman rulers from the southern Burma crossed the mountainous barriers and established Buddhist rule in the Arakan for the first time.
That was 1774. It was during the rule of the Barmans that the Mongoloid races settled in Arakan in large numbers, and that started the conflict between the Rohingyas who were Muslims and the Mongoloid races that were Buddhists. And it was during that period that many hundreds of thousands of Rohingyas were forced to flee and settle in the greater Chittagong area and not the other way around as the Myanmar government has attempted to establish -- surprisingly without contest from Bangladesh or the regional powers including India or the rest of the world.
The British regained control of Arakan in 1826 but retained the racial/ethnic status quo that meant continued oppression of the Rohingyas at the hands of the majority Buddhist groups. In 1935, Great Britain separated Burma from British India, and that sealed the fate of the Rohingyas and started the process of writing the Rohingyas off from all record books. Nevertheless, even in 1947 when the British were in the process of granting the Burmese freedom, the Rohingyas were still alive in the records and the documents.
The Burmese Citizenship Act accepted all ethnic groups living in Burma by the name Burmese citizens. In that group, the Rohingyas were also accepted as an ethnic group with the right of Burmese citizenship. It was in 1962 when the military under General Ne Win took power that the fate of the Rohingyas took an ugly turn. The military was determined to establish in Burma a military-led dictatorship based on Buddhist nationalism where Muslims had no place. In 1982, the military executed the anti-Muslim, anti-Rohingya plan by amending its Citizenship Act of 1947 by the Burmese Citizenship Law and declaring the Rohingyas as 'stateless'.
No power protested, not even Bangladesh. It was one of the many major mistakes that Bangladesh had made in its lack of preparedness or understanding about what Myanmar was up to with the Rohingyas. Thus with the return of democratic rule in Bangladesh, another major influx had occurred in 1991. Though many of the Rohingyas that came in 1978 and 1991 went back, yet because of the continued ethnic cleansing, today there are 6,70,000 (officially unconfirmed) Rohingyas in Bangladesh. There are as many Rohingyas dispersed to Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, India and other neighbouring countries.
Myanmar has effectively legitimised its policy of genocide and ethnic cleansing in its Rakhine state. It is a matter of time when the remaining 1.2 million Rohingyas would also be forced to leave and many would no doubt land in Bangladesh. The prediction became more than obvious when the Indian Prime Minister visited Myanmar in the midst of the new surge of genocide against the Rohingyas to stand with the Myanmar government. He used the excuse to show sympathy to the Myanmarese military that the members of Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, a makeshift group of armed Rohingyas, had killed 4 (four) Myanmarese soldiers. He did not utter a word about the Rohingyas or their sufferings. It is totally unacceptable as it would have been if Indira Gandhi had visited Islamabad in 1971 and in denial of Pakistan's genocide in Bangladesh, expressed sympathy for the Pakistani military.
Narendra Modi's response to the Myanmarese genocide was the direct antithesis to Indira Gandhi's response to the Bangladesh genocide that should be a body blow to India's hitherto justified claim as a responsible regional and world power.
China that supported Pakistan in 1971 also has not taken a firm stand against the Rohingya genocide although unlike India, it did not express outright support for the perpetrators of an active genocide. Bangladesh in the middle has become the unwitting victim of a tussle between these two powers that could have easily saved the Rohingyas and stopped the genocide. But they have not done what is required of them as responsible regional powers and friends of Bangladesh because their interests would be served better by keeping the Myanmar military happy at any cost.
India needs the Myanmar military's support to deal with the insurgencies in the Seven Sisters states. China needs the Myanmar military to protect its strategic and economic/commercial interests in Myanmar at a time when its once exclusive leverage on them is on the decline.
For Bangladesh and the Rohingyas, the future outlook is bleak. It appears, General Ne Win's vision of a Muslim-free Myanmar is on the cusp of being fulfilled at the expense of Bangladesh as there is no regional pressure at all and very little international pressure to stop Myanmar from pushing out the remaining Rohingyas out of the country in due course.
The writer is a former Ambassador.
