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China’s southwest a safe haven for Myanmar’s Muslims

By Benjamin Morgan

An amendment to the citizenship laws in 1982 deprived the Rohingyas of citizenship, suddenly making them illegal immigrants in their own home

MYANMAR democratic activist Sirajul Islam pulled out a pile of letters that describe his plight as an 18-year refugee of his country’s ruthless military regime.

“Nobody has been able to help me,” said Islam, now 51, as he sat under the shade of the small jewellery store that colleagues at the Ruili gemstone market in southwest China’s Yunnan province have given him to tend. He keeps copies of all the letters he has sent to political groups and aid agencies, including the latest, mailed to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees a month ago. Unanswered, like the others.

A member of Myanmar’s minority Muslims that number upwards of five percent of the nation’s more than 50 million people, Islam’s crime was to help organise anti-government democracy protests in 1988. Up to 3,000 people were believed killed in the movement that was brutally crushed by the military junta, forcing Islam to flee into the mountains of western Burma as the nation is also called.

“I don’t even know where my friends are buried,” Islam said, bursting into sobs. “My mistake was being educated,” said the zoologist. After five months of clandestine living he joined the exodus of hundreds of thousands fleeing the junta to neighbouring Bangladesh. “I had to leave, the military was going from home to home looking for me,” said Islam.

About 236,000 Myanmar Muslims, known as Rohingyas, have been forcibly repatriated to Myanmar since the 1990s, but another 20,000 still live in two United Nations refugee camps near the Bangladesh border with Myanmar. For 16 years Islam lived as one of the 100,000 undocumented immigrants from Myanmar in Bangladesh, joining a patriotic front that aimed to fight the junta back home.

But the group folded, as did his small textile business, prompting him to move to Ruili two years ago as unwelcoming Bangladeshi authorities closed in on undocumented Myanmar citizens living in their country. From his new home, he has been forced to watch the Myanmar regime’s harsh response after up to 100,000 people took to the streets in successive days in Yangon, Myanmar’s biggest city, to protest the junta’s rule.

“I’m not a businessman. I want to fight for my people, but there’s nothing I can do from here,” he said. Islam’s real name is Sue Kway but like all from Rakhine, a predominantly Islamic state in western Myanmar, he was forced to take a name that identifies him as a member of the Muslim faith.

The Muslim Rohingya is one of seven ethnic minority states which were formed under the Myanmar constitution of 1974, but human rights groups including Amnesty International have documented a catalogue of abuses by the junta. An amendment to the citizenship laws in 1982 deprived the Rohingyas of citizenship, suddenly making them illegal immigrants in their own home.

Amnesty said they were subjected “to various forms of extortion and arbitrary taxation; land confiscation; forced eviction and house destruction; and financial restrictions on marriage.” “Rohingyas continue to be used as forced labourers on roads and at military camps,” it added.

Nick Cheesman, a south Asia expert at the Asia Human Rights Commission in Hong Kong, said: “They have not been given the same rights as other minority citizens in Burma, and their situation is very bad.” In Ruili, a town that for years has boomed on the back of illicit trade in drugs, timber and drugs, Islam lives in relative peace with a growing community of about 10,000 Myanmar traders, most of them Muslims.

Myanmar traders have moved to this side of the border and China has tolerated their presence as trade has flourished, even though the flow of illicit goods, border guards said, was difficult to control. Sitting at the mosque in Ruili that was built in 1993 to accommodate the growing number of immigrants, one trader said living in China was much safer.

“Things are really bad in Myanmar,” he said. “You don’t know the half of it, the terrible things that were done in Myanmar,” added an ethnic Chinese woman from Myanmar. afp

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