A glimmer of hope

This week marks exactly three years since the Myanmar military poured into Rakhine State and launched a vicious operation against the Rohingya people. Over the course of a few weeks, thousands of women, men and children were killed, mutilated and raped, whole villages were burned to the ground, and hundreds of thousands fled into neighbouring Bangladesh.

Even for us Rohingya, who have been oppressed and rendered stateless in our home country for decades, the savagery of the violence in 2017 was unprecedented. Today, our plight has mostly disappeared from the headlines in international media, but our people are still suffering. We need the world’s help more than ever to end the genocide against us in Myanmar.

Close to a million Rohingya continue to live as refugees in Bangladesh, mainly in the southeastern district of Cox’s Bazar. Bangladesh has generously welcomed and hosted people who fled for their lives, but an overcrowded refugee camp is no place for a life of dignity. A whole generation of Rohingya children is growing up in deplorable conditions, with little access to education, or hope for the future.

What the refugees want the most is to return home to Myanmar, but that is simply not possible today. The 600,000 Rohingya who remain in Rakhine State live in an open-air prison. Every aspect of their lives is controlled by the state: To leave one’s village to attend school, to make a living or to go to a hospital usually requires special permission or a well-placed bribe.

At the moment, Myanmar is gearing up to hold a general election on November 8. It is the first vote since the historic election in 2015, when Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) won in a landslide, ending decades of direct military rule. Many Rohingya supported the NLD at that time, but have since grown bitterly disillusioned with the party’s policies. Aung San Suu Kyi and her civilian government have proven complicit in the genocide against us by continuing to support the army’s actions and denying on international platforms what is happening on the ground.

Although in the past, many Rohingya in Myanmar were able to vote and run in elections, today they are being barred from both. In 2015, Myanmar abruptly withdrew temporary citizenship cards from ethnic Rohingya, which had given them the right to vote.

This year, the authorities have also rejected members of the Rohingya community who have tried to register to run in the elections, claiming their parents were not citizens and that they, therefore, did not meet the criteria. This is despite the fact that some of these candidates have been allowed to run in previous elections.

There still is a glimmer of hope for the Rohingya, however: the momentum behind the international justice process.

Excerpted from: ‘The world cannot forget the Rohingya’

Aljazeera.com