In Myanmar, apartheid tactics against minority Muslims
By Jason Szep:
A 16-year-old Muslim boy lay dying on a thin metal table. Bitten by a rabid dog a month ago, he convulsed and drooled as his parents wedged a stick between his teeth to stop him from biting off his tongue.
Swift treatment might have saved Waadulae. But there are no doctors, painkillers or vaccines in this primitive hospital near Sittwe, capital of Rakhine State in western Myanmar. It is a lonely medical outpost that serves about 85,300 displaced people, almost all of them Muslims who lost their homes in fighting with Buddhist mobs last year.
"All we can give him is sedatives," said Maung Maung Hla, a former health ministry official who, despite lacking a medical degree, treats about 150 patients a day. The two doctors who once worked there haven't been seen in a month. Medical supplies stopped when they left, said Maung Maung Hla, a Muslim.
These trash-strewn camps represent the dark side of Myanmar's celebrated transition to democracy: apartheid-like policies segregating minority Muslims from the Buddhist majority. As communal violence spreads, nowhere are these practices more brutally enforced than around Sittwe.
In an echo of what happened in the Balkans after the fall of communist Yugoslavia, the loosening of authoritarian control in Myanmar is giving freer rein to ethnic hatred.
President Thein Sein, a former general, said in a May 6 televised speech his government was committed to creating "a peaceful and harmonious society in Rakhine State."
But the sand dunes and barren paddy fields outside Sittwe hold a different story. Here, emergency shelters set up for Rohingya Muslims last year have become permanent, prison-like ghettos. Muslims are stopped from leaving at gunpoint. Aid workers are threatened. Camps seethe with anger and disease.
In central Sittwe, ethnic Rakhine Buddhists and local officials exult in what they regard as a hard-won triumph: streets almost devoid of Muslims. Before last year's violence, the city's Muslims numbered about 73,000, nearly half its population. Today, there are fewer than 5,000 left.
Myanmar's transformation from global pariah to budding democracy once seemed remarkably smooth. After nearly half a century of military dictatorship, the quasi-civilian government that took power in March 2011 astonished the world by releasing dissidents, relaxing censorship and re-engaging with the West.
Then came the worst sectarian violence for decades. Clashes between Rakhine Buddhists and stateless Rohingya Muslims in June and October 2012 killed at least 192 people and displaced 140,000. Most of the dead and homeless were Muslims.
"Rakhine State is going through a profound crisis" that "has the potential to undermine the entire reform process," said Tomás Ojea Quintana, U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar.
Life here, he said, resembles junta-era Myanmar, with rampant human-rights abuses and a pervasive security apparatus. "What is happening in Rakhine State is following the pattern of what has happened in Myanmar during the military government," he said in an interview.
The crisis poses the biggest domestic challenge yet for the reformist leaders of one of Asia's most ethnically diverse countries. Muslims make up about 5 percent of its 60 million people. Minorities, such as the Kachin and the Shan, are watching closely after enduring persecution under the former junta.
As the first powerful storm of the monsoon season approached this week, the government and U.N. agencies began a chaotic evacuation from the camps, with a plan to move as many as 38,000 people to safer areas.
Many are resisting, fearing they would lose all they had left: their tarpaulin tents and makeshift huts. The U.N. relief agency said these would not withstand heavy rains or winds. More than 50 drowned in a botched government evacuation by sea, authorities said.
"THEY ALL TELL LIES"
Sittwe's last remaining Muslim-dominated quarter, Aung Mingalar, is locked down by police and soldiers who patrol all streets leading in and out. Muslims can't leave without written permission from Buddhist local authorities, which Muslims say is almost impossible to secure.
Metal barricades, topped with razor wire, are opened only for Buddhist Rakhines. Despite a ban against foreign journalists, Reuters was able to enter Aung Mingalar. Near-deserted streets were flanked by shuttered shops. Some Muslims peered from doors or windows.
On the other side of the barricades, Rakhine Buddhists revel in the segregation.
"I don't trust them. They are not honest," said Khin Mya, 63, who owns a general store on Sittwe's main street. "Muslims are hot-headed; they like to fight, either with us or among themselves."
Ei Mon Kyaw, 19, who sells betel nut and chewing tobacco, said Muslims are "really dirty. It is better we live apart."
State spokesman Win Myaing, a Buddhist, explained why Aung Mingalar's besieged Muslims were forbidden from speaking to the media. "It's because they all tell lies," he said. He also denied the government had engaged in ethnic cleansing, a charge leveled most recently by New York-based Human Rights Watch in an April 22 report.
"How can it be ethnic cleansing? They are not an ethnic group," he said from an office on Sittwe's main street, overlooking an empty mosque guarded by soldiers and police.
His comments reflect a historic dispute over the origins of the country's estimated 800,000 Rohingya Muslims, who claim a centuries-old lineage in Rakhine State.
The government says they are Muslim migrants from northern neighbor Bangladesh who arrived during British rule from 1824. After independence in 1948, Myanmar's new rulers tried to limit citizenship to those whose roots in the country predated British rule. A 1982 Citizenship Act excluded Rohingya from the country's 135 recognized ethnic groups, denying them citizenship and rendering them stateless. Bangladesh also disowns them and has refused to grant them refugee status since 1992.
The United Nations calls them "virtually friendless" and among the world's most persecuted people.
BOAT PEOPLE EXODUS
The state government has shelved any plan to return the Rohingya Muslims to their villages on a technicality: for defying a state requirement that they identify themselves as "Bengali," a term that suggests they are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.
All these factors are accelerating an exodus of Rohingya boat people emigrating in rickety fishing vessels to other Southeast Asian countries.
From October to March, between the monsoons, about 25,000 Rohingya left Myanmar on boats, according to new data from Arakan Project, a Rohingya advocacy group. That was double the previous year, turning a Rakhine problem into a region-wide one.
The cost of the one-way ticket is steep for an impoverished people - usually about 200,000 kyat, or $220, often paid for by remittances from family members who have already left.
Many who survive the perilous journeys wind up in majority-Muslim Malaysia. Some end up in U.N. camps, where they are denied permanent asylum. Others find illegal work on construction sites
Reuters
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