Burmese Muslim Refugees Seek Kingdom’s Help

Burmese Muslim Refugees Seek Kingdom’s Help

K.S. Ramkumar - Arab News

JEDDAH, 20 July 2007 — Muslim Refugees from Burma have sought Saudi Arabia’s support and assistance in facilitating the stay of hundreds of thousands of them across the Kingdom and also in finding a peaceful political solution to their long standing problem with the military rulers back home.

“Many of the Burmese refugees, most of them known as Rohingya Muslims, have been here for quite some time and we seek the help of Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah in providing them education and basic needs which are denied to them back home,” Nurul Islam, president of London-based Arakan Rohingya National Organization, Arakan, Burma, told Arab News in an interview.

An estimated 500,000 refugees are residing in the Kingdom — mostly in Makkah, Madinah and Jeddah, and along the Red Sea coast.

They are part of one million Burmese refugees residing overseas including Bangladesh, Pakistan, the UAE, Malaysia, Thailand, India and China.

Bangladesh plans to set up a camp for 9,500 Muslim refugees from Burma — the third such shelter since they started arriving in the country more than a decade ago.

Most of the refugees crossed into Bangladesh from Burma’s western state of Arakan over the past several years, suffering ethnic persecution in the Buddhist dominated country.

The refugees have been living in sub-human conditions without sanitation and health care.

The new camp will be in addition to two existing camps housing some 21,000 refugees for more than a decade.

They are the remnants of some 250,000 Rohingya refugees who fled Arakan in early 1992 to escape persecution by the military government.

Most were repatriated under the supervision of UNHCR, but the process stalled in July 2005 when the rest refused to return home.

Bangladesh has sought international assistance, including from the United States, to help find a new home for the refugees, saying it could not afford to keep them any longer.

Rohingyas, who form four percent of Burma’s population, are an indigenous people of Arakan, the western province of Burma bordering Bangladesh.

They are one of the many ethnic groups of Burma. An estimated three million Rohingyas are at home and abroad.

Due to continued persecution and ethnic cleansing, about 1.5 million Rohingyas have either been expelled or have had to leave their historical homeland to save their lives since 1948.

“The Burmese military regime has declared the Rohingya Muslims as non-nationals,” Islam said, adding that the Burma Citizenship Law of 1982, which violates several fundamental principles of customary international law standards, has reduced them to a position of ‘de facto’ statelessness.

“Moreover, a planned increase in new Buddhist settlements has caused serious demographic changes resulting in a systematic extermination of the Rohingya population,” he said.

According to him, large tracts of Muslims’ farmlands including Waqf properties have been confiscated.

“North Arakan has turned into a militarized zone with increased violations of human rights,” he said, adding that he had a meeting at the Organization of the Islamic Conference and hopes to meet with others including the World Muslim League.

Source:

Arab News