Friday, August 5 2005 15:51 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

What 'Bangladeshis' are to India, the Rohingyas are to Bangladesh.

Muslim immigrants and refuge seekers who are unwanted and actively discriminated against.

The Rohingyas are Burmese Muslims, from the Arakan province bordering Bangladesh and India. From the eight-century onwards, Muslims and Buddhists had co-existed peacefully in Arakan and in the rest of Burma. Britain colonized Burma in 1886 and the importation of the colonial divide and rule policies led to the anti-Muslim riots in 1938 which resulted in the massacre of nearly 30,000 Muslims and the burning of over a hundred mosques. In Arakan, many Muslims were forced out of Burma to Bengal after the slaughter of over 100,000 Muslims. After independence in 1948, hostile actions by U Nu's Government led to the deaths of 80,000 more Muslims.

In 1961, U Nu declared Buddhism as the State religion, forcing Buddhist teaching and culture on everyone, including the Muslims. In 1978, General Ne Win's Government launched an anti-Rohingya military campaign to check illegal immigration. By June 1978, more than 200,000 Rohingyas had sought refuge across the border in southern Bangladesh. In 1982, Ne Win redefined citizenship so that the Rohingya, Muslims who had inhabited northern Burma as early as 788, were now legally considered illegal aliens. The Rohingyas were now people without a country.

The conditions imposed on the Rohingyas were draconian. The law passed by Ne Win permitted arbitrary confiscation of Rohingya land without compensation. These lands have been increasingly taken over by military garrisons and Buddhist settlers from South Burma. There were severe restrictions on Rohingyas travelling or even leaving their villages. They were also subject to forced labour, illegal taxation, arbitrary arrest, denial of employment opportunities, shrinking food rations for children. The Burmese junta ensured that there was no future for the Rohingya in Burma.

As if things weren't bad enough, the SLORC, the State Law and Order Restoration Council, the military junta that consolidated power after the democratic upheavals of the early nineties, led military actions against the Rohingyas, coupled with rioting and looting by the local populace. About 250,000 Rohingyas fled to Bangladesh.

Prospects haven't been much better. The Rohingyas were placed mostly in refugee camps, where conditions weren't far better than back in Burma. Despite being a Muslim country, Bangladeshi authorities did not want the Rohingyas and made that amply clear. Reductions in rations, worsening medical care, denial of educational opportunities, beatings and imprisonment, all of these served as incentives for voluntary repatriation, overseen by the UNHCR in 1994 and 95.

Today, only about twenty thousand Rohingya refugees are sheltering in two camps, Kutupalong and Nayapara, located between Cox's Bazar and Teknaf in southern Bangladesh. The 21,500 refugees in the Nayapara and Kutupalong camps under UNHCR protection are the visible side of the crisis. Since 1996, thousands of Rohingyas, both repatriated refugees as well as new arrivals have continued to trickle back from Burma into Bangladesh. They have been denied access to the refugee camps and have joined the more than 100,000 undocumented Rohingya living outside the camps, often surviving in extreme poverty in villages or slums around Cox's Bazar and Teknaf. Local sources estimate that, in 2002, more than 10,000 Rohingya crossed the border illegally to seek sanctuary in Bangladesh. They have become invisible refugees, being labelled as 'economic migrants' by the Bangladesh authorities.

There are around 100,000 of these 'economic migrants' living outside the camps in south Bangladesh, eking out a miserable and precarious living. They have no country to call their own and no legal standing whatsoever. They are vulnerable to everybody who wishes to exploit them. With Bangladeshi Government and society giving the refugees a less than grudging welcome, the only organisations they have to turn to are the various splinter factions of the Rohingya Solidarity Organisation.

Many of these splinter groups have connections to various Islamic groups with extremist ideologies and established links to political violence and terrorism, including Pakistan's Jamaat-e-Islami and the Bangladeshi Harkat ul Jihad Islami (HuJI). And for many Rohingyas, denied access to education, the fundamentalist foreign financed madarsas might be the only option they have.

With the sort of treatment meted out to Rohingya refuges by the Bangladeshi Government, the conditions are tailor made for Islamist groups to recruit disaffected Rohingya youth for terrorist actions under the label of jihad. After all, denied the protection that comes with recognised refugee status and denied admission into Bangladeshi civil society with its plural, tolerant Islamic traditions, the Rohingyas have no stakes to defend and nothing to lose.