International community must reverse cuts to Rohingya humanitarian aid, study says

The international community must reverse cuts to humanitarian aid for the Rohingya and work with Dhaka authorities to improve conditions in refugee camps, a new study says.

Both “impossible choices” for the Rohingya – a return to Myanmar where they are met with intense repression or remaining in refugee camps – amount to “social death”, the analysis says.

This means it has never been more urgent to act and address the Rohingya tragedy.

Other countries should facilitate dialogue between the Arakan Army and Rohingya refugees with the view of ensuring their human rights’ protection – including the right to return to their homes in Arakan / Rakhine.

The study, by Professor Klejda Mulaj, from the University of Exeter, says Rohingya dignity and survival cannot be assured by just charity. The international community should pressure the emerging rulers in Naypyitaw and Sittwe to put an end to extortion against the Rohingya population; acknowledge their suffering and provide redress; institute Rohingya’s citizenship rights and allow them a dignified return to their homeland. Excluding the Rohingya from Myanmar risks increased instability and violence in the region. Prolonged violence against the Rohingya has permutated to violence against designated Others in Myanmar.

ProfessorMulaj said: “The genocide against the Rohingya people of Myanmar is one of the greatest tragedies of our time. The marginalisation, maltreatment and expulsion of this persecuted minority has been ongoing for more than six decades.

“This human rights catastrophe is a result of state policy and ideology, based on nationalism which has informed the nation-state building process and has cast the Rohingya as a threatening “Other” that ought to be extirpated. Their insecurity and neglect is socially constructed via official policies that have been met with Buddhist-majority endorsement.

“Educating the world community on the Rohingya expulsion is a starting point for resisting their international neglect and drawing attention to the urgent need to stop the cascades of violence against them.”

The research says growing violence towards the Rohingya since the 1970s – culminating in genocide in the 2010s – has been caused by the “negative expression of sovereignty in a totalitarian setting” and an exclusivist nationalist ideology which has framed the Rohingya as outcast.

The study says they have been “othered” during efforts to build – exclusively – a nation-state and national identity centred on Buddhist religion and culture. Professor Mulaj said: “In the Buddhist-majority Myanmar, lacking Buddhism and cultural affinity with it, the Rohingya have become the fearsome other. Successive Burmese/Myanmar regimes have isolated, marginalised, deprived, maltreated and expelled the Rohingya since the 1970s via a wide range of targeted, chauvinistic state policies, which have been inscribed by the very writ of state laws.

“Sovereignty in Myanmar has been exercised in coercive ways, in the process using discriminatory legislation that has led to abrogation of rights and repudiation of citizenship, providing a framework for the comprehensive exclusion of the Rohingya. This process has been possible thanks to a direct relationship between law and violence and has led to discrimination, insecurity and coercive removal of the Rohingya people.

“Given the present tumultuous situation in Arakan/Rakhine and Myanmar, a feasible response to the Rohingya predicament cannot be their return to Rakhine without guarantees of their human rights – and first and foremost of their citizenship rights.”