Displaced Rohingya people in Rakhine State, 2012. Wikicommons/ FCO. some right reserved.2015 will be remembered as the year of mass migration. This year, the
world has endured an unprecedented flood of haunting images. The one image we
have all seen over and over again is of overcrowded boats packed with desperate
people in dire need of supplies. Sometimes they are Syrians, sometimes Iraqis, sometimes
Africans. Among the distraught faces are also a number of people who are stateless.
In May this year, the world’s short-lived attention
turned towards the thousands of migrants stranded in boats across the Bay of
Bengal and Andaman Sea, off the coasts of Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. The
boats were carrying Rohingyas, a Muslim ethnic minority, fleeing from the
Burmese state of Rakhine and Bangladesh. Denied citizenship and basic rights in
Myanmar, the Rohingyas have been subjected to persecution in their own homeland.
According to UN
estimates, 94,000 people departed by sea from Bangladesh or Myanmar since 2014,
including 31.000 people in the first half of 2015. Over 1,100 migrants have
died on sea since 2014.
The boats that managed to find their way to shore were
turned away and forced to return to sea. Faced with substantial international
pressure, the governments of Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia subsequently reconsidered
their actions and promised aid, announcing that temporary shelter would be provided
on the condition that the refugees were resettled by the international
community within a year.
Around the same time, mass graves were discovered near
human trafficking camps in Thailand and Malaysia. Thai police confirmed that
the dead were Rohingyas who had died of starvation or disease while being held
by traffickers awaiting ransoms before smuggling them to Malaysia. Moreover, in
a recent report Amnesty
International documents that at sea too the refugees suffer terrible abuses.
The plight of the Rohingya minority in Myanmar is
rapidly deteriorating. Just ahead of the country’s parliamentary elections on 8
November 2015, President Thein Sein signed off on a series of laws that
restrict religious conversion and interfaith marriage. The bills are a part of
the ‘Race and Religion Protection Laws’. This could be seen as the last nail in
the coffin for the Rohingyas, who have suffered discrimination for decades.
Rohingya candidates have also been barred from running
in the upcoming elections and thousands have been struck off the electoral
rolls and stripped of their right to vote. It
remains to be seen if the National League of Democracy (NLP) party around Nobel
Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu
Kyi, which won the recent elections by a landslide, will
improve policies towards the Rohingya.
ASEAN
governments don’t do enough to solve crisis
The large-scale displacement of Rohingyas has become a
regional crisis for five directly affected countries – Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia,
Myanmar, and Thailand. Along with 12 other countries, they participated in a meeting
in May this year in Bangkok to discuss “irregular” migration in the Indian
Ocean.
The recommendations
put forward by the meeting included mobilizing resources to support emergency
responses, preventing human trafficking, enhancing legal and safe channels of
migration among the countries in question, and addressing the root causes of
migration in the areas of origin. However, the UNHCR reports that the implementation of these
proposals has yet to begin, including the establishment of a joint task force and
other urgently needed mechanisms. Five months after the meeting, there has been little news about concrete
measures taken.
Experts have also criticized the Association of
Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) for failing to establish an effective legal
framework for refugees. ASEAN aims to foster economic growth and social
progress among its members as well as to protect regional peace and stability. But
as Dr. Amy Nethery from Deakin University in Melbourne pointed out in
an article in The Diplomat recently, the Rohingya refugee crisis highlights the
devastating human effects of the absence of an effective asylum policy.
India and China, the wealthiest nations in the region,
have remained passive bystanders, eschewing any involvement with Myanmar at a
political level despite their substantial economic investments in the country.
For a long time, Thailand turned a blind eye to the slave labor that was the
backbone of the country’s fishing industry. Human
trafficking networks have also been reported to operate with the support and
protection of corrupt Thai officials.
Moreover,
following the 2014 coup, Thailand’s military junta began reviewing many
policies of the deposed government of Yingluck Shinawatra and tightened
measures against Burmese refugees and other migrants. As the
Bertelsmann Transformation Index BTI shows, discrimination and harassment of minorities is frequent in Thailand:
“Thailand has not ratified U.N.
conventions on refugees, and has forcibly repatriated Burmese and Lao refugees
and Rohingya refugees. Migrant workers (estimated to number in the millions),
especially women, suffer salary discrimination and on-the-job harassment.
Female migrant workers are perhaps the most underprivileged and maltreated
social group in Thailand, and are generally ignored by Thai law.”
However, in Thailand international pressure and threat
of sanctions seems to have done some good. Over the last few months, the
country’s administration has cracked down on traffickers and corrupt officials.
But Thailand needs international support to combat trafficking.
The region urgently needs a firm anti-trafficking policy, and it must
coordinate its efforts in order to address the problem in the long term. ASEAN should
also intervene by putting pressure on Myanmar because unless the root cause of
the problem is addressed, there can be no sustainable solution for the Rohingya
refugee crisis. Myanmar must put an end to its discriminatory policies.
With the Monsoon season ending, a new wave of refugees
is expected to cross the Southeast Asian seas. Amnesty
International already warns that a new “sailing
season” crisis looms in the Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea. It’s time to act now.
