Thousands of Rohingyas are thought to be stranded on boats without adequate food, water or sanitation. Photo: AFP
Over the past week, the world has finally awakened to the humanitarian crisis that is the plight of the Rohingya, an ethnic Muslim population in Myanmar.
With estimates of 6000 to 8000 of them currently adrift at sea, having fled decades of persecution in the vain hope of seeking asylum elsewhere, we have watched in horror as Malaysia, then Thailand turned back the boats.
"We have to send the message that they are not welcome here," said Malaysian Deputy Home Minister, Wan Junaidi Jafar. "No one wants them," added Thai Prime Minister General Prayuth Chan-oca.
Rohingya swimming to collect food supplies dropped by a Thai army helicopter. Photo: AFP
And so they continue to drift aimlessly, as they have done for several months, slowly starving to death (as I write this there are reports that the Philippines and Gambia have offered to resettle some of them).
How has it come to this?
Listed by the UN as among the most persecuted minorities in the world, the Rohingya make up just five percent of the Myanmar population. Although they have been in Myanmar for centuries, the government refuses to grant them citizenship unless they renounce their Rohingya identity and refer to themselves as Bengali.
Rohingya Muslims who arrived in Indonesia by boat rest inside a shelter. Photo: Reuters
With most of them refusing, they have been living stateless and unrecognised. As of last November, more than 87,000 had attempted the boat journey to Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia, with than one hundred thousand trapped in refugee camps sealed off from the outside world by right-wing Buddhists.
The Rohingya are subject to a quota of two children per couple, a limit that does not apply to the Buddhist majority, and they have been subjected to such horrific levels of violence that Human Rights Watch has accused the Burmese government of a campaign of ethnic cleansing.
It may surprise many to learn that much of this violence has been incited and enacted by Buddhist monks. In 2012, the Council on Foreign relations reported that:
Buddhist Rakhines launched a massive campaign of intimidation, violence and outright ethnic cleansing against their Rohingya neighbours…Meanwhile, a group of monks active in Arakan State told the 'Democratic Voice of Burma', a radio station, that people should target Rohingya Muslims and anyone sympathetic to them as "national traitors". The monks' organisation also helped distribute photos of Rohingya and people helping them in every town in Arakan State.
That's right. A Muslim minority has been relentlessly terrorised by Buddhists, that religion of supposed peaceniks. Talk about turning our entire understanding of terrorism upside down.
Most of us would be familiar with the mantra, "Not all Muslims are terrorists but all/most terrorists are Muslims," which casts Muslims as the primary instigators of global violence and identifies Islam as the cause of this violence. Take away the religion, this line of thinking goes, and all the terrorism would simply disappear.
Even in conflicts such as Iraq and Syria, where the majority of victims are Muslim, the violence is still regarded as an expression of Islam. Sympathy for the victims is eclipsed by anger towards the perpetrators, with the result that all Muslims become associated with the terrorists. Just witness the spike in anti-Muslim sentiment in Australia following terrorist activity overseas.
Buddhism, meanwhile, is regarded as the epitome of pacifism. A Buddhist monk inciting violence by telling his 250k YouTube followers that once they have won the battle in Myanmar, "we will move on to other Muslim targets" does not gel with we see as the rightful place of Buddhism in our world.
It was far too easy for the world to ignore the Rohingya for so long because the possibility of Muslim innocence and Buddhist guilt is too great of a disruption of our understanding of conflict and terrorism.
As it stands, that understanding has it, as Sam Harris would say, there is something about Islam itself that inspires violence and terrorism. That it is unlike other religions, and, although there are many more peaceful than violent Muslims in the world, their peacefulness is not because of Islam but in spite of it.
A Muslim terrorist is a terrorist because he is Muslim. But individuals or groups belonging to other religions commit who commit similar acts are seen, not as representatives but as aberrations. No one seriously blamed the actions of Anders Breivik -who identified as a Christian- on Christian ideology.
Nor does the violence being inflicted on Muslims in the Central African Republic by Christian militias earn the moniker "Christian terrorism." Not even after one such militia boasted:
"There are still nine Muslims here. We will capture them. We will kill them. When we finish here, we will go to the next village and kill the Muslims there, too."
The truth is, violence against Muslims rarely makes headlines in the West unless it is committed by other Muslims. Christian terrorism in Africa and Buddhist terrorism in Myanmar does not fit the script and so it is largely ignored and assumed not to occur at all (a Fox news anchor recently seriously claimed that the number of people killed in the name of contemporary Christianity is "zero").
It is far too easy to explain terrorism and violence purely in terms of religious ideology, especially one as racialised and otherised as Islam. What we ignore when we associate only Islam with terrorism is that those who seek to wage violence on other people will naturally invoke their own cultural framework to justify their actions. A Christian will claim to be acting on behalf of Christianity, a Muslim in the name of Allah, and so on.
But when even those who claim to follow the tenets of a faith based on the principle of ahimsa – nonviolence- also engage in unspeakable acts of terror, surely the time has come to admit the problem has to do, not just with religion, but with human nature itself. Our failure to do so will only enable injustices like that inflicted on the Rohingya to continue.
