China and India - wrong choice to protect Rohingya rights

By CJ Werleman

Anti-Muslim animus within the ranks of India and China’s security forces remains extreme, so how can they be called upon to protect the Muslim minority exiled from Myanmar?

On 25 August, more than 200,000 Rohingya Muslims participated in a sombre rally in Kutapalong refugee camp, Bangladesh, to mark the two-year anniversary of their forced exile from Myanmar, and to express their frustration with another failed repatriation deal.

Five days before, the United Nations’ refugee agency and Government of Bangladesh launched a new repatriation bid, which began by holding consultations with more than 3,000 Rohingya refugees to determine whether or not they are willing to return home. Unsurprisingly, they are not.

Without guarantees of security, citizenship or basic human rights, the 750,000 Rohingya who fled mass killings, torture, rape and the destruction of their homes and businesses in Myanmar remain stranded in Bangladesh, as so-called efforts to alleviate their suffering and persecution become ever more absurd and threatening.

Last week, a panel of human rights experts and diplomats met in Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka for a meeting titled The Rohingya Refugee Crisis: Towards Sustainable Solutions, which included representatives from ActionAid Bangladesh, the Centre for Peace and Justice and the Centre for Genocide Studies.

The proposed solution put forward by the panel was to encourage Bangladesh to pressure Myanmar into making amendments to its existing laws and to pressure Japan, India and China into providing security personnel to ensure that returning Rohingya are kept safe from further attacks from the military and/or Buddhist extremist groups.

But who in their right mind would ever imagine that Rohingya Muslims – or any persecuted Muslim minority for that matter – ever agree to being “protected” from anti-Muslim militants by military personnel provided by India and China, given the former is carrying out what constitutes an effort to ethnically cleanse Muslims in both Kashmir and the state of Assam, while the latter is carrying out cultural genocide of 12 million Muslims in Xinjiang?

Beyond India’s brutal military lock down in Kashmir and its construction of detention centres to house more than two million undocumented Muslim immigrants along its eastern border – and notwithstanding China’s network of concentration camps that hold three million Muslim political prisoners – anti-Muslim animus within the ranks of both countries’ security forces remains extreme.

“The security personnel should be from all countries,” Ro Nay San Lwin, a Rohingya genocide survivor and activist with the Free Rohingya Coalition, told me. “Not just from Japan, India, and China, but also US, UK, EU, and ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] must also send their forces to protect the Rohingya.