Thread: Million Muslims self deport to avoid forced deportation by Myanmar

Muslim Minority Flees as Myanmar Plans Deportations


As Myanmar Advances Resettlement Plan, Rohingya Flee

By JANE PERLEZ NOV. 6, 2014

SLIDE SHOW|13 Photos

Bleak Existence for Myanmar’s Rohingya Minority

SITTWE, Myanmar — The Myanmar government has given the estimated one million Rohingya people in this coastal region of the country a dispiriting choice: Prove your family has lived here for more than 60 years and qualify for second-class citizenship, or be placed in camps and face deportation.

The policy, accompanied by a wave of decrees and legislation, has made life for the Rohingya, a long-persecuted Muslim minority, ever more desperate, spurring the biggest flow of Rohingya refugees since a major exodus two years ago.

In the last three weeks alone, 14,500 Rohingya have sailed from the beaches of Rakhine State to Thailand, with the ultimate goal of reaching Malaysia, according to the Arakan Project, a group that monitors Rohingya refugees.

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The crisis has become an embarrassment to the White House ahead of a scheduled visit by President Obama to Myanmar next week. The administration considers Myanmar a foreign-policy success story in Asia but is worried that renewed conflict between Buddhist extremists, who are given a free hand by the government, and the Rohingya could derail the already rocky transition from military rule to democratic reform.



A Rohingya girl in a hut in a displaced persons camp on the outskirts of Sittwe, in Rakhine State. CreditTomas Munita for The New York Times

Mr. Obama called President Thein Sein of Myanmar last week, urging him to address the “tensions and humanitarian situation in Rakhine State,” the White House said.

In his most public appeal to the government yet, Mr. Obama asked the Myanmar leader to revise the anti-Rohingya policies, specifically the resettlement plan. Myanmar must “support the civil and political rights of the Rohingya population,” he said.

The Rohingya have faced discrimination for decades. They have been denied citizenship, evicted from their homes, had their land confiscated and been attacked by the military. After one such attack in 1978, some 200,000 fled to Bangladesh.

The latest flare-up began with an outbreak of sectarian rioting in 2012, in which hundreds of Rohingya were killed and dozens of their villages burned to the ground by radical Buddhists. Since then, close to 100,000 have fled the country, and more than 100,000 have been confined to squalid camps, forbidden to leave.

As conditions in the camps have deteriorated, international pressure has mounted on the government to find a humane solution. Instead, the government appears to be accelerating a strategy that human rights groups have described as ethnic cleansing.

For many Rohingya, the new policy, called the Rakhine Action Plan, represents a kind of final humiliation, said Mohamed Saeed, a community organizer in a camp on the edge of Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine State.

“People really fear this plan,” he said. “Our community is getting less and less. This is where they want us — out.”

Many Rohingya came to Myanmar in the 19th century when the British ruled all of what is now India, Bangladesh and Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. But the government’s demand for proof of residence since 1948 is too onerous for many, who either do not have the paperwork or fall short of the six-decade requirement, human rights advocates say.

Those who can prove their residence qualify only for naturalized citizenship, which carries fewer rights than full citizenship and can be revoked. Moreover, they would be classified as “Bengali,” rather than Rohingya, suggesting that they are immigrants from Bangladesh and leaving open the possibility of deportation.

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Under the plan, those Rohingya who cannot meet the standards for naturalized citizenship or refuse to accept the Bengali designation would be placed in camps before being deported.

Human Rights Watch described the plan as “nothing less than a blueprint for permanent segregation and statelessness.”

The government asked the United Nations refugee agency to participate in the resettlement, but the agency refused, a spokesman said.

The Rakhine Action Plan is but one element of a host of policies and tactics aimed at marginalizing the Rohingya. This year, in line with the government’s position that they are foreigners, the Rohingya were prevented from participating in the national census.

Legislation introduced in Parliament two months ago, and expected to pass, would bar Rohingya from voting in next year’s election.

Parliament is also considering a bill that would ban interfaith marriage, a measure human rights advocates say is designed to stoke anti-Muslim sentiment.

The policies come on top of an increasingly dire situation in Rohingya camps and villages. In the camps around Sittwe, where about 140,000 Rohingya live, health services are virtually nonexistent.

The main medical provider, Doctors Without Borders, the international nonprofit, was chased out six months ago and has not been able to return.

In the villages around Maungdaw, a Rohingya-dominated town near the border of Bangladesh, there has been a sudden increase in the arrests of young Rohingya men and boys, United Nations officials and human rights advocates said.

The Border Guard Police arrested more than 100 Rohingya on charges of holding illegal gatherings and over refusals to participate in the action plan. Chris Lewa, the director of the Arakan Project, said the arrests were part of a campaign to force the men to leave the country.

For many, the high-risk boat trips to Thailand en route to Malaysia, a Muslim country that quietly tolerates the refugees, begin at a gray sandy beach at Ohn Taw Shi, a fishing village fringed by coconut trees on the outskirts of a camp for the displaced.

On a recent day, a froth of waves lapped the shore, a few open wooden boats lay untended, waiting for use at night. The police slept in the afternoon heat in a wooden shack about 500 yards away.



A Rohingya woman at a camp in Sittwe called her brother in Malaysia to ask for money after the burial of their mother.CreditTomas Munita for The New York Times

A smuggler, Chan Thet Maung, a cellphone hooked to his pants and earplugs dangling from his neck, said that when the wooden boats were filled with Rohingya, they sailed north for about five hours to connect with larger vessels. There, in waters off the Myanmar-Bangladesh border, multideck boats sometimes idle for days or weeks, manned by armed and often brutal crews, waiting for a full complement of passengers bound for Thailand, the United Nations refugee agency said in an internal report.

The annual smuggling season, which begins in early October when the monsoon season ends, got off to a fast start, the smuggler said.

The police wanted $2,000 — $100 for each of the 20 passengers — for a recent boatload, but the smugglers had offered slightly less, he said.

The trip was aborted, but another attempt would be made soon, he said.

Local officials abet the smuggling trips, according to Matthew Smith, the director of Fortify Rights, an organization that studies ethnic groups in Myanmar.

“The regional trafficking and smuggling begins with the complicity of Myanmar authorities,” he said. “We’ve documented Myanmar police and armed forces taking payments as high as 7 million kyat in return for a boat’s passage to sea.” Seven million kyat is approximately $7,000.

In some cases, the Myanmar Navy escorted boats filled with fleeing Rohingya and operated by criminal gangs out to international waters, Mr. Smith said.

Most Rohingya who want to leave the camps or the villages in northern Rakhine pay brokers $200 just to board a boat. Once in Thailand, the refugees must pay smugglers an additional $2,000 for the second leg to Malaysia.

Some, like Nor Rankis, 25, who said she wanted to join her estranged husband and brother in Malaysia, do not pay anything, an almost certain sign she will be sold into servitude by traffickers in Thailand.

“I don’t want to live here; I cannot survive,” she said one evening as she waited for a smuggler to take her away. She had packed a few things in a pink plastic basket: a bottle of perfume, a new sarong and a box of vitamins — though nothing to protect her against the equatorial sun that would beat down on her across the Bay of Bengal.

For better-off Rohingya in Sittwe, brokers can arrange documents for a ticket on the daily 90-minute flight to Yangon for $4,000. Regular passengers pay $88.

A 20-year-old Rohingya student, whose family pooled savings for the $4,000, said his broker gave more than 75 percent of the cost to immigration officials. Like all Rohingya students, he was expelled in 2012.

The student, who declined to be identified for fear of retaliation, said the broker escorted him with officials of the Department of Immigration and Population in a government car from the camp to the Sittwe airport.

“I was shaking with nerves,” he said. “But the broker gave me heart, and I was waved through the departure gate.”

In Yangon, the nation’s commercial capital, Rohingya say they have an easier existence. Long-established Rohingya families run businesses there, and documents are not scrutinized as carefully as in Rakhine, where segregation has become entrenched.

A spokesman for Rakhine State insisted the Rohingya did not belong in Myanmar and defended the Rakhine Action Plan as necessary because the higher Muslim birthrate threatened the Buddhist majority.

“There are no Rohingya under the law,” said the spokesman, Win Myaing, assistant director of the Ministry of Information. “They are illegal immigrants. If they need labor in the United Arab Emirates, why don’t they ask people to go there?”

Some government officials have described the Rakhine Action Plan as a draft proposal, rather than official policy. But the government has already begun to carry out the plan in at least one camp, Myebon, 60 miles south of Sittwe.

In a gesture in advance of Mr. Obama’s visit, the government released 15 political prisoners in early October, including three Rohingya. Among them was Kyaw Hla Aung, 75, a prominent lawyer, who was jailed after the violence in Sittwe in 2012.

One of the few Rohingya trained as a lawyer — Rohingya have since been barred from studying law or medicine — Mr. Kyaw Hla Aung said that it was illogical for the government to insist that Rohingya were not citizens.

“My father was head clerk of the courts in Sittwe for 40 years,” he said in his bamboo house in one of the camps. “I was a stenographer for 24 years in the courts, and then a lawyer. How can they say we are not full citizens?”

After a few nights of waiting for a smuggler, Nor Rankis waded into the inky Bay of Bengal to a small wooden boat, jammed with a score of others, headed, she hoped, for Malaysia.

“I’m depending on God,” she said. “That’s why I dare to go.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/07/wo...T.nav=top-news

AP Exclusive: Myanmar profits off Rohingya exodus

By TODD PITMAN and ESTHER HTUSAN, Associated Press | November 6, 2014 | Updated: November 6, 2014 6:56pm


Photo By Kaung Htet/AP

• In this Nov. 29, 2013 photo, a Rohingya boy wades through the water carrying a basket of fish at The' Chaung refugee camp, on the outskirts of Sittwe, Myanmar. The small wooden boats leave the shores of western Myanmar nearly every day, overloaded with desperate Rohingya Muslims who are part of one the largest boat exoduses in Asia since the Vietnam War. Helping them on their way: Myanmar’s own security forces, who are profiting off the mass departure of one of the world’s most persecuted minorities by extracting payments from those fleeing. A report to be released Friday, Nov. 7, 2014, by the Bangkok-based advocacy group Fortify Rights, and reporting by The Associated Press, indicate the practice is far more widespread and organized than previously thought, with Myanmar naval boats going so far as to escort asylum seekers out sea, where larger ships operated by transnational criminal networks wait to pick them up.
  

MYIN HLUT, Myanmar (AP) — The small wooden boats leave the shores of western Myanmar nearly every day, overloaded with desperate Rohingya Muslims who are part of one the largest boat exoduses in Asia since the Vietnam War.

Helping them on their way: Myanmar's own security forces, who are profiting off the mass departure of one of the world's most persecuted minorities by extracting payments from those fleeing. A report to be released Friday by the Bangkok-based advocacy group Fortify Rights, and reporting by The Associated Press, indicate the practice is far more widespread and organized than previously thought, with Myanmar naval boats going so far as to escort asylum seekers out to larger human trafficking ships waiting at sea that are operated by transnational criminal networks.

"Myanmar authorities are not only making life so intolerable for Rohingya that they have to flee, they're also complicit in the process — they're taking payments and profiting off their exodus," said Matthew Smith, director of Fortify Rights.

Rakhine state spokesman Win Myaing dismissed the allegations as "rumors," saying he has not "heard of anything happening like that." He said any naval boats approaching such vessels were likely aiming to help fishermen in need.

More than 100,000 Rohingya have fled Myanmar's western shores by boat since Buddhist-Muslim violence erupted in Rakhine state two years ago, according to estimates provided by experts tracking their movements.

Chris Lewa, director of the advocacy group Arakan Project, said increasing desperation is behind a huge surge since Oct. 15, with an average of 900 people per day piling into cargo ships parked offshore. In Rakhine state, an aggressive campaign by authorities over the last few months to register family members and officially categorize them as "Bengalis" — implying they are illegal migrants from neighboring Bangladesh — has aggravated their situation.

The deepening crisis comes ahead of a visit by President Barack Obama to Myanmar next week for a regional summit, his second in two years. Obama, who has repeatedly pointed to democratic changes in Myanmar as a foreign policy bright spot, called President Thein Sein recently by telephone to express concerns about a reform process analysts say has been backsliding for months.

Myanmar, a predominantly Buddhist nation of 50 million that is still struggling to emerge from half a century of military rule, is home to an estimated 1.3 million Rohingya, and most are considered stateless. Though many of their families arrived from Bangladesh generations ago, almost all are denied citizenship by Myanmar as well as Bangladesh. In the last two and a half years, attacks by Buddhist mobs have left hundreds dead and 140,000 trapped in camps where they live without access to adequate health care, education or jobs.

Smith said authorities in Myanmar have been profiting off the Rohingya for decades, and extracting money from those departing was only one way. If Rohingya residents attempt to travel to neighboring villages without permission from local authorities, they risk being arrested and forced to pay bribes for their freedom, he said. The restrictions are so intense that even those who repair their own houses — which often crumble during the rainy season — can be fined if they do so without permission.

Many of those fleeing today have been forced to sell everything they have, including precious belongings — land, cattle, gold — to human trafficking brokers who typically charge $2,000 for passage to Malaysia, a Muslim country. Many end up in secret jungle camps in Thailand, where they face extortion and beatings until relatives come up with enough money to win their release.

Thai authorities have also been accused of colluding with traffickers, but have denied the allegations.

"It's draining them economically," Smith said. "This is one of the poorest communities in Asia, one of the most abused, and this whole process is taking the little resources that they have left in exchange for even more abuse."

According to Fortify Rights, the brokers may collect sums averaging $500 to $600 per small boatload of asylum seekers, usually numbering between 50 and 100 people, and hand those payments to officials from Myanmar's police, navy and army. Police also have collected payments directly from passengers, the group said, adding that the Myanmar navy once demanded $7,000 from a trafficking ship offshore to allow them to leave.

The small boats transport the Rohingya to larger ships further out at sea that can carry as many as 1,000 people. The Fortify Rights report said the vast majority of those fleeing are routinely deceived, finding themselves "in the custody of abusive human trafficking and smuggling gangs, who detain them in conditions of enslavement and exploitation .... nearly all endure or witness torture, deprivation of food and water, confinement in extremely close quarters and other abuses throughout their journeys."

The Associated Press has documented similar accounts in Rakhine state. The family member of one Rohingya broker — since arrested on drug trafficking and other charges — said his boat set off from a small creek inland and had to pass a police post on the way to the sea where an obligatory payment had to be made. The family member spoke in Myin Hlut town on condition of anonymity for fear of being arrested.

The family member also recounted navy ships escorting Rohingya asylum seekers out to sea, as well as chasing them to extract more bribes. In another instance documented by AP, a dozen Myanmar soldiers boarded a vessel filled with Rohingya in the Bay of Bengal, bound their hands and bludgeoned them with wooden planks and iron rods before finally extracting money and letting them go.

Smith said the reason Myanmar authorities were exploiting trafficking networks themselves was simple: they can make tremendous money doing it.

"Assuming that just half the 100,000 who have fled in the last two years have been forced to pay $2,000 each for passage to Malaysia, we're talking about a trade worth $100 million, he said. "That's why we see government complicity. There is a perverse and disturbing economic element to all of this."

http://www.chron.com/news/crime/article/AP-Exclusive-Myanmar-aiding-Rohingya-trafficking-5875037.php

For 200 years, the USA thrived.

Reason: We ENFORCED immigration laws.