Rohingya Crisis: Int’l community should do more

A number of international experts yesterday said there were not enough protests across the world and by the Rohingyas themselves to mount pressure on the Myanmar government to resolve the Rohingya crisis.

Blaming the Myanmar army for committing atrocities, they called upon the international community to document each serious crime for ensuring justice in future.

The experts were addressing a discussion titled “Rohingyas: Landless Future” at the Dhaka Literary Festival at the Bangla Academy.

Escaping a military crackdown in Myanmar's Rakhine State, more than 618,000 Rohingyas have fled to Bangladesh since late August.

Recalling a huge international outrage over the Darfur crisis in 2004, Ameerah Haq, under-secretary general at the UN Department of Field Support, said such a protest from renowned global personalities, including Hollywood celebrities, was needed to show support to the Rohingya community.

There could be a regional solution to the crisis, but the South-East Asian nations seemed stuck on the issue at the moment, she said, adding that a UN Security Council resolution could be a decisive factor to resolve the crisis.

Terming the atrocities by Myanmar army genocide, Azeem Ibrahim, research professor of Strategic Studies Institute at US Army War College, said the army carried out an orchestrated and preplanned campaign to eliminate an entire ethnic group while a political appetite was seemingly absent to end the crisis.

“What we are all hoping for is that this ethnic cleansing will be completed as quickly as possible so that we can move from the domain of criminality on to the domain of humanitarian assistance.”

He said Rohingyas living in different countries have to raise their voice against the atrocities committed against their community.

BBC South Asia Correspondent Justin Rowlatt, who has been covering the incident, said the movement of a huge number of Rohingyas with faces of fear was hard to imagine.

Despite a very welcoming response from the Bangladesh government, the Rohingyas had to fight for basic humanitarian needs from the very beginning, he told the programme.

Michael Vatikiotis, Asia regional director of Geneva-based Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, said the “conflict between two religions” in Rakhine caused a rift across South East Asia.

“This is a major rift between two great religions in this part of the world,” said Vatikiotis, also a former editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review.

Jeff Kingston, director of Asian Studies and professor of History at Temple University in Japan, said regional organisation ASEAN can play a more pro-active role to address the issue, but so far it has failed to make an impact due to seemingly disagreements among the member states.

Zafar Sobhan, editor of English daily Dhaka Tribune, moderated the discussion.