Rohingya people are not even treated as human

Take us back to 2009 when you both began following this story. What is it about the Rohingya? Why do they lurch from one crisis to another?

Am: Before 2009, we had been covering the traffickers’ situation and we went to the Islamic community in Mae Sot. At that time, we didn’t even know the name Rohingya. The local people told us they were from Bangladesh. So, we walked around the community and talked to the village chief. And they told us that the situation in the Islamic community was mixed up with the many traffickers and smugglers who came from Bangladesh and from Myanmar.

So, we tried to find stories that connected the human traffickers. We talked to many people who worked around the Ranong area, and we found a Muslim man from Chiang Rai who lives on one of the islands between the Thai and Myanmar border. We just came to cover the traffickers.

Steve: We didn’t know it was an ongoing problem then. The Rohingya Muslim population, basically in Western Myanmar, had been persecuted for decades, dating back to at least the 1970s, when there were massive expulsions of the minority group, and a lot of them would flee across the border into Bangladesh.

Their mistreatment caused a lot of people to seek escape to a third country, or in this case, Malaysia or Indonesia, which are predominantly Muslim countries. So, they would travel through Thai waters, and occasionally, they would be intercepted by security forces in Thailand. There was a policy by the Thai navy called the “help on or push back policy.” They would supply them with food, water, and rice and then guide them to their destination. Or, in some cases, they would take them out to sea and push them back to where they had come from.

In this instance, the Thai navy spotted a trafficking boat, and we went to the dock around midnight. It was in January 2009, and we documented the case. It was quite a horrid scene. There was a group of Asian men who were starving. It was very rough; they’d been out at sea for a long time on their journey to try to get to Thailand or Malaysia.

Thai medics were on the dock, helping and giving them medical care. Then, they took them and hauled them off to an immigration center and a hospital that night. So, we were able to document that case. The following day, they were hauled into the provincial courthouse. It was quite an amazing sight. A lot of them were bandaged up. They had barely slept three or four hours since the boat entered the docks. It was quite disturbing.

In Witness to Genocide, you go into graphic detail about the plight of those refugees and the torture that was inflicted upon some of them by the authorities, quite horrendous.

Steve: When we talked to some of the boat people, one of them was yelling out that he wanted to tell a story. When we came up to him, we saw this very nasty gash on the underside of his leg. It was a massive wound. We asked what happened. Half of his leg was gone from under the thigh. We were able to take photos of it. He said the Myanmar navy had held him down and taken a long stick with a gauze wrapped around the end, dipped it in diesel, lit it on fire, and then pressed it against his leg.

They were torturing him. He had a massive burn on the underside of his leg. We took photos of that and we contacted a forensic expert in Thailand. She came down two days later with a small group of delegates, examined the young man’s leg, and corroborated his story that the Myanmar navy had tortured him.

Am: We communicated with the boat people through someone who spoke Thai and Rohingya. We tried to interview the victims, with the young man who was very severely wounded. He told us about the Burmese man in uniform torturing him. When he tried to ask or cry for help, they kept beating him. Amazingly, they remembered the number on the boat, the Myanmar navy boat. So, they tell us that the Burmese navy boat number was four-two-five, four-two-three. They wrote it on their hand to remember everything that had happened to them along the journey.

It was just a start, and this episode would take you through 2017, the great exodus, and the alleged genocide. It must have been quite stunning to follow the plight of this group of people, who were not that well known in the outside world, yet they’re enduring such deep atrocities.

Steve: All of the ethnic groups within Myanmar are under attack in some form by the Burmese junta. However, the Rohingya have been classified by someone in the UN as the most persecuted minority on the planet. In 2017, there was a massive exodus after the Myanmar army started a clearance operation.

This clearance operation was based on reports that some police posts had been attacked by a rebel Rohingya group called ARSA (the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, a Rohingya insurgent group in northern Rakhine State). Verifying that by asking the Burmese army would have been difficult because they’ve repeatedly been proven to be liars. You can’t trust what they say. But in any event, the disproportionate response was atrocious.

The Burmese army began a clearance operation after these reported attacks on some police outposts. I think there were 30 of them. On Aug 24 [one day earlier], a Kofi Annan-led commission* presented a report talking about rehabilitation and reconciliation of the Rohingya people because in the year previously, there had been a smaller clearance operation, and there were many atrocities committed at that time as well.

This commission was outlining a process in which there could be some reconciliation and peace between the Rohingya Muslim minority and the Buddhist majority population. Unfortunately, a massive army clearance began the next day that led to more than 750,000 people fleeing for their lives across the border into Bangladesh.

The Burmese army disallowed any foreigners from going into the area to report. So, we were very frustrated. At that time, we were investigating the situation not in the area of conflict, a place called Sittwe. We went to IDP [Internally Displaced People] camps where the Buddhist population had been transferred from the conflict zone. They told us that they heard gunshots and noises early in the morning but never saw anybody. They never saw any of the so-called Rohingya terrorists coming into their area. The next day, the Burmese army came to their door and said, “You have to leave. It’s very dangerous in this neighborhood. We’re going to have to relocate you for some time.” That was very suspicious in trying to figure out what was going on.

Where were these terrorists? All we could rely on were the accounts of the Burmese army. As I mentioned earlier, it wasn’t very accurate. But within a week we had left the area and were doing a short story on the coal pollution in Shan State. We got a call from our colleague who said that the government was now allowing press tours of the conflict zone. But there were a few stipulations. First, they only allowed one person per media group. Second, you could not bring a translator, that was a bit difficult. If you can’t talk to the witnesses, then it’s going to be a problem.

One would assume you would be relying on the military to provide the translations as well.

Steve: That’s spot on. Exactly. I managed to get up to Sittwe and I met up with a group of Burmese journalists, as well as some foreign journalists. We went upriver to where the conflict was and we were assisted by an army-sponsored translator. It was very difficult to communicate. On the first day of our two-day press tour, we went to an IDP center. It was a school where a group of Hindu villagers had been relocated after their villages had reportedly been burned down by ARSA terrorists. We had about 40 minutes at this IDP center.

The army presented us with witnesses…. One of the women said she had seen firsthand Rohingya terrorists come into the village and they said, “Tell the Hindu villagers to get out and they were going to burn the village.”

Within 24 to 48 hours, it was proven that she was actually in one of the photos that the police presented to us of ARSA terrorists burning the Hindu village. We were talking to a fake witness; she had not even changed her dress. There were pictures of her burning huts in this Hindu village. That was a bit of a shocker. The Burmese journalists were quick to pick up on that. Within two days, they had found out and traced the pictures. They made the connection.

The Rohingya also occupy land through which the Chinese oil and gas pipelines run. There are also a lot of disputes with the Arakan. The Arakan army has been blamed for atrocities alongside the military.

Steve: The Arakan Army now has a major oil and gas pipeline running from the coast in their state [Rakhine] up to Kunming in China, with China being the customer. So, the amount of money that is going to be made by a small group of Burmese army families who originally signed these contracts back in the early 2000s, that would get a lot of people upset in Rakhine state and it’s estimated to be somewhere in the area of US$50 billion over 30 years. That’s a lot of money.

That land is occupied by the Rohingya and there are pecuniary interests at stake. The people behind those interests would like to see the Rohingya move on and they can seize their land. 

Steve: That’s exactly right. In 2012, in Sittwe, there were areas where Muslim houses had been burned and Buddhist houses were not. Then they had been resettled in these remote IDP camps. The land that they were on, a year later, the Myanmar government created a disaster management law that states that it oversees reconstruction in areas damaged by disaster and conflict. The law basically enables the government to confiscate property, which in many cases was previously owned by the Rohingya residents — because it’s been damaged. It’s a perfect land grab.

Let’s just make this clear that it’s not just the Rohingya that have been stepped on by the Burmese army. It’s the Karen, the Shan, the Kachin, the Mon, the list goes on and on. But these land grabs are for future development and these foreign countries that are involved with these development projects need to be held to account or at least held partly responsible for what’s going on with these conflicts within these areas.

How do you think neighboring countries should act in that they’ve been persistently supporting the military since the coup?

Steve: China has negotiated with all sides where its interests are at stake, but primarily they’re all still backing Min Aung Hlaing and the military, despite the fact that they are seriously losing this conflict in the battlegrounds. It’s follow the money and it’s happening across Myanmar. And I don’t exactly know how the UN will move forward with this. There seems to be a lack of either focus or something that should be done to prevent this from occurring in the future.

I think Am would agree with me, I really can’t imagine Min Aung Hlaing remaining in power with his military. They’ve got a lot of blood on their hands. They need to be taken to account for the atrocities they’ve committed.

Am, what do you think?

Am: The UN or any international organization that’s seen the situation in Myanmar, especially in Rakhine state, they are aware of what they should do, to try to be the mediator between leaders and businessmen from first-world countries who want to invest in places like Rakhine state — and from China, South Korea, and many others including Thailand, to bring all the high-level businessmen who invested there already, to talk and discuss, to try to find a solution first, before they start any projects.

If they can find a solution to stop people from killing each other and share the benefits with all the people who live there, everyone can have a share and have money and they can continue their lives. This can be one of my conclusions.

But they don’t even recognize the Rohingya as legitimate citizens of Myanmar and yet they’re conscripting them into their military.

Steve: Yeah, that’s a great point. They have not even been classified as citizens of Myanmar since 1982, since the consensus said there were only 135 different ethnic groups within the country, not including the Rohingya. There is a lot of anti-Muslim sentiment, both within the Burmese army and the general public, that has been going on for some time. There’s a lot of toxic rhetoric that has been spewed out by the junta over the past five, or six decades. They have been affected quite a bit by this talk. They call them [the Rohingya] Bengali interlopers — they don’t belong in the country.

I met an anti-Muslim head monk in 2015 and he seemed like a nice guy. He was very calm and cool. But when we started talking about the Rohingya he likened them to “a savage tribe that was breeding all the time and taking over the country.” His rhetoric over recent years led to a lot of attacks on the Muslim population, particularly the Rohingya.

It’s very difficult to understand how this happens. But it’s years and decades of dehumanization that has come to this. The Rohingya people are not even being treated as human.

source : uca news