ROHINGYA OF BURMA (MYANMAR)

ROHINGYA  OF BURMA (MYANMAR)

The Rohingya,  an estimated 750,000, live in Myanmar’s mountainous northern state of Rakhine, which borders Bangladesh. Rohingya are descendants of Arab traders from the 7th century. For generations, more since Burma was cut out of the geographical map in 1935, along with the island of Aden, the ethnic Muslim Rohingyas have endured persecution by the ruling junta of Myanmar, now a predominantly Buddhist country. Their status in Myanmar is “illegal”, but despite this being known to everyone in all Muslim countries, hardly any of them have legal status anywhere in the world. They have no rights, and are not allowed to travel from village to village. It’s almost impossible, even, to get married or go to school.

Unlike the Kurds or the Palestinians, most countries, from Saudi Arabia to Malaysia, see them as little more than a source of cheap labour for the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs.

Twice since the 1970s, waves of attacks by the military and Buddhist villagers forced hundreds of thousands of Rohingya to flee over the border to Bangladesh, a Muslim country whose people speak a similar language. Many have since been repatriated, but 200,000 still work there as illegal migrants and another 28,000 live in squalid refugee camps.

For years, the Rohingya travelled to the Middle East for work, with nearly a half million ending up in Saudi Arabia.  But in recent years - partly because of bureaucratic hurdles faced by Muslims following 9/11 - many now try to go instead by boat to Thailand and then overland to Malaysia, another Islamic nation. But even those who make it to Malaysia then struggle find good jobs and quickly discover that, there too, intolerance is growing against them in the minds of their own Muslim brethren.

Not being good looking in comparison to women from Bangladesh, Thailand & Malaysia, their woman are not preferred in the flesh trade in these countries and where women from these countries are hired for this purpose.

There is a lot of money that the Muslim world has which could feed  millions of their fellow Muslims who are  daily meeting death in abject penury and lack of anything edible in Sudan, Chad and other Central African countries, which the world knows about. Instead of funding suicide bomber producing Madarsaas, the Muslim world should shift its attention towards dying and desperate like the Rohingya.