If there was ever a time for the member-countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to abandon their all-too-comfortable policy of letting one another handle domestic problems unhampered by neighborly criticism, it is now. In a crisis worsening by the day and being watched around the world, tens of thousands of Myanmar residents are being driven from their homes at risk of death. People are being killed in the interest of forced expulsion.
The benighted Rohingya people are right now facing the worst spate of persecution to date in a long history of undeserved maltreatment because they are Muslims in a nation of bigoted “Buddhists” and are of Bengali ancestry and thus “foreigners”. When some among them foolishly took up arms to fight back against the injustice and allegedly killed several state officials, it lit the fuse for the current violence.
The Rohingya of northwestern Rakhine state have never been recognized as citizens of Burma or Myanmar and can travel only under severe restrictions. The country’s military -- the monolithic Tatmadaw -- has harassed them mercilessly. Now, in what a high-ranking United Nations official has termed “ethnic cleansing”, an estimated 30,000 Rohingya have fled from homes occupied by their people for a century, to the Bangladesh border. Bangladesh doesn’t see them as Bengali at all, of course, and is thus an unwilling recipient of refugees.
Aerial photos of a Rohingya town shorn of its citizens and dwellings -- and the fact that the government under Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi has done nothing to rein in the Tatmadaw -- have sparked mass demonstrations around the world in sympathy for the Rohingya cause. The best that can be said about Suu Kyi’s administration is that it doesn’t appear to know how to handle the situation, an appalling indictment nevertheless of a regime elevated to power a year ago on a wave of optimism and high democratic expectations.
The government has a responsibility to ensure the safety of everyone living in the country, regardless of their ancestral background and how the majority of the electorate views them. By the same token, ASEAN -- which counts Myanmar among its 10 members -- is obliged to take care of all citizens of the region. It is touted as a “people-centered” organization, a shield for fundamental rights, and yet it has done nothing so far, said nothing, about the crisis in Rakhine. At the very least we should have by now heard objections from the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights. Instead there is ominous silence. Not even Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation and home to the ASEAN secretariat, has complained. On the contrary, its ambassador to ASEAN, Rahmat Pramono, has objected to the term “ethnic cleansing”, saying it ignores the hurdles the Myanmar government faces in dealing with the Rohingya situation.
Thus it was most welcome to see Malaysia, another predominantly Muslim country, take a stance last Friday. While cautiously referring to “the alleged ethnic cleansing”, it condemned the violence in Rakhine and was taking the matter up with Myanmar’s ambassador to Kuala Lumpur.
To no one’s surprise, immediate neighbor Thailand has adopted the same wait-and-see approach as the rest of ASEAN. Our military-led government can hardly be expected to do more when its own record on individual rights is in question. Nor can it be said to be the norm in Southeast Asia to treat ordinary citizens well, let alone foreigners and those irrationally deemed as such.
For its part, Laos -- current chair of ASEAN -- can be counted on to pretend that people in the region aren’t being persecuted en masse. Will the Philippines prompt a shift in stance when it assumes the chair in January? Given President Rodrigo Duterte’s cavalier attitude towards life and liberty, it’s unlikely.
