Al
Jazeera
December
9, 2012
This
is the story of a people fleeing the land where they were born - the
Muslim Rohingya of Myanmar.
Earlier
this year a Buddhist woman was raped and murdered in western Myanmar.
The authorities charged three Muslim men.
A
week later, 10 Muslims were murdered in a revenge attack. What
happened next was hidden from the outside world.
Bloodshed pitted Buddhists against minority Rohingya Muslims. Many Rohingya fled their homes, which were burned down in what they said was a deliberate attempt by the predominantly Buddhist government to drive them out of the country.
"They
were shooting and we were also fighting. The fields were filled with
bodies and soaked with blood," says Mohammed Islam, who fled
with his family to Bangladesh.
There
are 400,000 Rohingya languishing in Bangladesh. For more than three
decades, waves of refugees have fled Myanmar. But the government of
Bangladesh considers the Rohingya to be illegal immigrants, as does
the government of Myanmar. They have no legal rights and nowhere to
go.
This
is a story of a people fleeing the land where they were born, of a
people deprived of citizenship in their homeland. It is the story of
the Rohingya of western Myanmar, whose very existence as a people is
denied.
Professor
William Schabas, the former president of the International
Association of Genocide Scholars, says: "When you see measures
preventing births, trying to deny the identity of the people, hoping
to see that they really are eventually, that they no longer exist;
denying their history, denying the legitimacy of their right to live
where they live, these are all warning signs that mean it's not
frivolous to envisage the use of the term genocide."
Watch
here: THE HIDDEN GENOCIDE
Source: Al Jazeera
Comments