Escape Bid Highlights Rohingya Desperation

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June/July 2022, pp. 42-43

Special Report

By John Gee

528 ROHINGYA REFUGEES broke out of a detention center in north-western Malaysia on April 20, 2022. Most of the escapees were quickly rounded up, but as of April 28, 61 had still not been recaptured. Six, including two children, died after being hit by vehicles while crossing a busy road. 

The mass breakout drew attention to the conditions in which Rohingya refugees are detained in Malaysia. They are kept in isolation from the local population and not allowed to work to earn money. There is resentment among some Malaysians of what it costs to support them, but human rights organizations in the country have pointed out that there is a ready remedy to that complaint, if only Malaysia would allow the refugees to seek work. Instead, the country recruits workers from abroad to plug gaps in its labor market. 

The basic problem is that Malaysia does not want the Rohingya to settle and become citizens, so it keeps them in limbo. It is not alone in that. The fact is that no state wants them. 

The Rohingya are Muslim people who were concentrated in Rakhine state, an area of Myanmar adjacent to Bangladesh. Successive Myanmar regimes treated them as illegal foreign residents and refused them citizenship. They faced discrimination and bouts of violence that resulted in a quarter of a million fleeing to Bangladesh in the early 1990s and a mass expulsion in 2016-2018, leaving a minority of around 600,000 still inside Myanmar. 

Bangladesh was the first refuge for the great majority of the refugees and 1,300,000 still live there, mainly detained in camps close to the Myanmar border. But Bangladesh is a poor country itself, which sees more than 400,000 of its own citizens seeking work abroad every year. It is a major supplier of clothes to wealthier countries, due to its low labor costs. Its aversion to anything that smacks of permanent settlement by the Rohingya in Bangladesh was underlined by a government drive since December 2021 to close down community schools established by Rohingya refugees, even though it would not offer alternative educational facilities or allow refugee children to enroll in local schools. The official reasons for shutting these schools down is that they are unauthorized and the government does not know what is being taught in them. There are schools provided by UNICEF and aid groups for young children, but next to nothing for older ones without the community schools.

Bangladesh is seeking the return of the Rohingya refugees to Myanmar, but this is not happening, despite a series of announcements since 2018 on their repatriation. The Myanmar authorities have been slow in approving individuals’ return, and Rohingya refugees in general don’t wish to return without guarantees for their safety and for respect of their most basic rights.

Many refugees have transited through Bangladesh and sought work and settlement elsewhere; a few managed to leave Myanmar by other routes. More than 500,000 live in Pakistan, 190,000 in Saudi Arabia and 50,000 in the United Arab Emirates, while 150,000 live in Malaysia. Many had hoped to reach wealthier developed countries, but the barriers to their migration have been insuperable for all but a few: 12,000 live in the USA and 3,000 in Australia. 

SOLIDARITY WITH PALESTINIANS “DISAPPEARED”

After Archbishop Desmond Tutu died on Dec. 26, 2021, the British liberal newspaper, The Guardian, published an obituary that generally did justice to the memory of an outspoken and lifelong opponent of racism and apartheid in South Africa. However, there was a significant omission: despite his repeated criticisms of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and his strong support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement as a non-violent means of promoting Palestinian rights, the obituary passed over his stand on Palestine. When a number of readers commented on this on the online version of the obituary, their words were deleted as they were said to “violate The Guardian’s community standards.”

Responding to a request from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, 36 prominent figures wrote to the newspaper in protest. Their letter was not published, but the deleted comments were restored and an article by Chris McGreal, The Guardian’s former correspondent in Jerusalem and Johannesburg, on Tutu’s support for the Palestinians (as well as the consequent attacks on him by the likes of Alan Dershowitz) appeared in the paper on Dec. 31.

Such treatment of a well-respected figure’s expression of support for Palestinian rights, in their obituaries and later retrospectives, is far from unusual. Nelson Mandela’s solidarity with Palestine went largely unrecorded in most of the media when he died. Stephen Hawking’s support for the academic boycott of Israel was generally not seen as worthy of inclusion in his obituaries.

Selective recollection can also work the other way around. The most obvious case is that of Anwar Sadat, president of Egypt from 1970 until his assassination in 1981. When Sadat was in the news during his early years in Egypt’s highest office, pro-Israel writers and spokespeople in the West frequently alluded to his arrest by the British during World War II for his attempting to obtain Axis support. In 1977, Sadat flew to Israel and opened negotiations with Israeli premier Menachem Begin that led to the Camp David Accords, resulting in Egypt recovering the Sinai from Israel, but also implicitly abandoning the Palestinians and enabling Israel to concentrate its military forces against the PLO in Lebanon in 1982. His portrayal as a Nazi sympathizer then seemed to have become a mere footnote of history, if recalled at all.

John Gee is a free-lance journalist based in Singapore and the author of Unequal Conflict: The Palestinians and Israel.