Thank you very much for inviting me to give a presentation. I'd like to provide you with information on the current situation of the Rohingya ethnic minority in the Arakan state in Burma. This Rohingya ethnic minority is a vulnerable population minority in western Burma. They have been facing ethnic cleansing for half a century. This situation has worsened, so I'd like to draw your attention to what is happening inside Burma and in our state.
Before I go into that, I would like to introduce our organization, which is known as the Arakan Rohingya Union. I represent this union. This is an umbrella organization composed of 21 individual Rohingya organizations from around the world. That includes our own organization called BRANA, the Burmese Rohingya Association of North America, which includes Canada and the United States. We are a signatory to that Arakan Rohingya Union, made up of some 25 organizations.
The first mission of this organization is engagement with Burmese entities—governments and other entities—to address the Rohingya issue peacefully through diplomatic means. Our second mission is to improve the living conditions of the Rohingya ethnic minority and others inside Arakan, Burma. The third mission of ARU is the further enhancement of dialogue and the relationship between the Rohingya ethnic minority and other communities, including various ethnic minorities and other communities in Burma.
We have a secretariat for the ARU, headed by me as the director general. We have five departments: international relations, refugees, education, fundraising, and culture and media. We have an 11-member coordinating council and a seven-member advisory board. That's the basic structure of our organization.
Using a couple of slides I wish to present a very brief background of who the Rohingya are. They're an ethnic minority of mixed race in western Burma who have been living in that western part of Burma for many centuries. You can trace this mixed race of Rohingya back to the Middle East, the Caucasus, and South Asia. This Rohingya population is a mixture of various demographic populations that, for various reasons, came to Burma many centuries ago during the Persian and Mughal empires. They were Arab traders and others. This population is in western Burma, and I am one of the descendants of the Rohingya.
The different colours on the map of Burma represent each state. Arakan state is in blue in the red circle, a strip of land along the coastal region. The Rohingya populations are mainly in the northern part of the blue circle, the northern half of Arakan state, but there are also some in the south.
The Rohingya ethnic mixed minority in western Burma is mainly Sunni Muslim who have cultural ties to South Asia. They make up approximately 40% of Arakan state's population. That's a total of about three million, but only about 1.5 million are there now. About 1.5 million are scattered throughout the world, mainly in Asian countries.
Illiteracy is very high because there have been no opportunities for the Rohingya for many years. If you look at the census and at the situation on the ground, you'll see that less than 1% of the Rohingya population has graduated from high school. Most of them have not seen schooling of any kind.
The ethnic cleansing is a serious issue faced by the Rohingya ethnic minority in Burma. It is widespread. It is systematic, as devised by the Burmese military junta, and has been for the last 50 years. It's also systemic and a step-by-step process. It is ongoing. It never stops. It's increasing. It's long-standing. All of these ethnic cleansing operations are well coordinated and are well documented by the international community.
This ethnic cleansing was mainly initiated in 1962 by military dictator General U Ne Win. He took power when he overthrew the civilian government. During that time—in 1962 and prior to it—the Rohingya population had citizenship as an ethnic minority in Burma. After General Ne Win overthrew the civilian government, their citizenship was revoked by General Ne Win's revolutionary council.
Since then, anybody who is born is not given a birth certificate; they are denied birth certificates. Rohingya couples have not been and are still not given permits to marry. The Rohingya ethnic minority is the only ethnic minority in the country required by the government to obtain a permit if a couple wants to get married—the only ethnic minority in the country out of 147 ethnic minorities. Only one ethnic minority is required to obtain a permit from the government if a couple wants to get married, yet the denials are widespread. If there is a sporadic issue, it takes enormous amounts of bribes to the authorities to resolve it.
There are severe travel restrictions imposed on the Rohingya. The Rohingya people cannot travel within the state, between villages, across the country, or globally. Their movement is restricted. The authorities will take money—bribes—to give limited permits for local movement, or travel from town to town or village to village.
They are denied education. I was one of the fortunate ones who received education in Burma. I was born in Burma. I received education in Burma because initially when I was growing up, the military had just started ethnic cleansing. That was in 1962. I was seven years old. It increasingly became a problem for us to go to school, but during my time, we were given limited access to college, so I was one of the fortunate ones in Burma. I was able to go to college during that time, although we had to carry a permit, a licence, to travel to college campuses. Still, we were able to go. Now we are banned from all of that: no Rohingya student can go to college or even to high school. They can barely go to school.
There is confiscation of lands. The Rohingya society is an agrarian one of mainly farmers and fishermen. They have owned land for many, many centuries. Their lands have now been confiscated by the Burmese government and have been given to translocated families of another ethnicity, who are brought in from central Burma. They are brought into Rohingya land. Lands are confiscated and given to them, and they build settlements. The Rohingya have been replaced by them. It is going on as I speak.
Forced labour is widespread. An international conference took place on that recently. I can provide the report later on. There's child labour. Children aged five, six, or seven years have been taken for labour. Family members, from fathers to youngsters, are taken as forced labour.
There are arbitrary arrests. Police officers can arrest Rohingya without any charge. There's imprisonment without due process. They can be in prison for unlimited time periods without due process.
Arbitrary taxation is imposed on Rohingya people, as well as widespread extortion.
Government forces have created extremely harsh conditions in the Rohingya areas. The austerity means that it is becoming very difficult for people to live on a day-to-day basis. They have been directly or indirectly expelled to different parts of the country. You may have seen in the recent news that Rohingya boat people have been travelling to Malaysia and Thailand because they have nowhere to go. They get on these rickety boats to travel, and many have drowned, as we all know. It has been documented in the international media. This is all part of the expulsion process.
I want to bring to your kind attention the most urgent thing, which is the current violence and carnage taking place as we speak in Arakan state in Burma. This carnage and violence is coordinated. The organizing of this violence began in 2010, prior to the election. Basically the racially motivated violence was organized to purposefully transform religious violence in order to mobilize the vast majority of the population in the country, which is 89% Buddhist. Ethnic cleansing has been turned into religious violence. It's like any other religious extremist people around the world would do; they're following the same ideology of religious extremism.
There was a gruesome killing of ten Muslim pilgrims, who were not even Rohingya, who came to Arakan from central Burma for a pilgrimage. They were brought down last week from the bus. They had been slaughtered. Gruesome pictures have been released. It is humanly unthinkable to see those pictures of how they were murdered in this century, in this day and age.
That was a triggering point. Coordinated rioting since then has spread throughout the state. Many, many, many people were killed. We do not have the figures because when the government forces shot at unarmed Rohingya, the bodies were taken away in trucks right away and could not be recovered. The bodies were taken to an unknown destination. We know it is in the thousands, but we cannot give you a figure. We do not have the dead bodies. But we do have missing people. We suspect that most of these people who are missing have been killed. I'm afraid they have been taken.
Many villages have been burned. This morning I spoke with local residents in the provincial capital of Sittwe, formerly Akyab, who say that villages are still being burned despite the fact the government has imposed martial law, a curfew, a state of emergency. It's just not working on the ground, where the situation is very different.
Another unfortunate thing is that there have been false media campaigns taking place against the Rohingya in several international media. Unfortunately, the international media don't have any other source, to be truthful, than the Burmese information ministry. That ministry has been giving them accounts of this violence based on their Burmese officials on the ground. The information is highly distorted and false. Indeed, the international community and the media have not been able to get access to both sides of the story, the Rohingya side as well as the Rakhine side. This has been a problem for the last week or so, not knowing the real casualties, real deaths, and real carnage. The government says that 17 people have died, but I can assure you that each day it's hundreds, maybe thousands. The Burmese government is downplaying the loss of life and loss of property.
On behalf of the worldwide Rohingya community, I would like to appeal to the international community to pressure or convince, whichever way may be suitable, the Burmese government to immediately halt the ongoing violence through effective law enforcement on the ground. I ask because despite the state of emergency, lootings and killings are taking place. Not a single Rohingya is employed in the armed forces, the police force, or any other security force, and these forces are allied with their ethnic kind. So they are helping their own ethnic groups and fighting against the Rohingya. That's why these forces are Rakhine. Buddhist forces are not implementing and following their own law on the ground and we are not sure whether the president, who is staying in the capital city, is aware of this situation with an accurate account of what's going on on the ground.
We are asking the international community to intervene by pressuring or convincing the Burmese government to enforce the law effectively, rather than just announcing that there's a curfew. The curfew has to be respected by both sides. The Rakhine side is not respecting the curfew; police and other forces are allowing them to go out and loot and shoot people.
We ask the international community, including the governments in western countries such as Canada and others, to pressure the Burmese government and convince the government that it must agree to immediately appoint members of international peacekeeping forces in Arakan. This is of the utmost urgency. I do not have stronger words to express our concern about the immediate need for an international peacekeeping force on the ground to enforce the rule of law, return to peace, and stop the anarchy.
The Burmese government has been shown to be ineffective, as we have seen that that Burmese forces are unable able to stop this violence. We need the international community to intervene immediately. With the monsoon season under way, the aid groups and other international relief organizations need to be there. Right now, the refugees are internally displaced. They cannot cross over to Bangladesh. The Bangladesh government has sealed the border to refugees, to the people whose houses have been burned and destroyed. They are internally displaced. From the cities they have moved out to the forested areas, under the trees, under plastic sheets. We don't know exactly how they are living, but we know a monsoon rain, torrential rain, is very heavy. I don't know how long they can survive in the rural areas without a liveable structure.
This is why there is the urgent need for international aid groups. The Burmese government must give access to international aid groups to supply materials, food, water, and medicine. Waterborne diseases will be widespread. Even if the carnage stops now, we have another danger coming: these waterborne diseases. There is no sanitation there, so to speak. This is an urgent need.
We ask the international community to provide moral and material support. Basically we want long-term support for education and other infrastructure in that isolated region, which is one of the least developed areas in the world. Literacy, by which I mean high school graduation rates, is less than 1%.
It is critical that human rights be respected by the Burmese government, since the government has proclaimed that it is proceeding to democracy via democratic reform, in which human rights is a strong component.
I think there is a ray of hope, provided that the international community intervenes. Arakan state is very rich in resources, and we do have infrastructure. Once peace returns to our country through international development agencies, we can thrive very well economically, education-wise, and infrastructure-wise using our own resources if we can get some help initially from international communities.
To wrap up, I appeal to you with urgency. I'm begging the international community on behalf of the Rohingya community. We urgently need humanitarian help in Arakan so that people will not face starvation, disease, waterborne diseases, and lack of shelter.
With that, I want to thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to come here and appeal to you for support. Thank you very much.
