Erstellt am: 28. 2. 2014 - 18:02 Uhr

The Rohingya People of Myanmar

According to the UN, one of the most persecuted minorities in the world.

The Rohingya people are an ethnic group who practice Islam and speak Rohingya. They are indigenous to the state of Rakhine in Burma/Myanmar. About 800,000 Rohingya live in the country (that’s approximately 1% of the population). But according to the United Nations, they are one of the most persecuted minorities in the world.

Medicins sans frontierers, MSF has worked in Rakhine state for almost 20 years treating hundreds of thousands of people from all ethnic groups through programmes including maternal health and treatment for HIV and tuberculosis. But the Myanmar government has now accused MSF of being biased in favour of the Rohingya minority in the state. It has also accused MSF of falsely claiming it treated victims of a massacre against Rohingya allegedly committed by security forces and ethnic Rakhine Buddhist civilians. The government has denied any massacre took place.

There have been individual stories of Rohingya being persecuted for decades. Now, Fortify Rights, a human rights group based in Thailand says it has evidence of the Myanmar government's discrimination against Rohingya, restricting their movements and family size. Fortify Rights says that the government's orders, shown in leaked documents, amounted to "state policies of persecution" in Rakhine state.

Reality Check’s Steve Crilley spoke with Mark Farmaner from the Burma Campaign UK .

What's your reaction to these leaked documents here?

They confirm in part what we already knew. We knew from Rohingya people on the ground that these laws were been applied to them. But there was no formal evidence. The laws themselves had not been made public. They are only within the government. The government was in fact denying the existence of these laws. Now we have the orders that actually come from the government, they can’t claim that it’s just a local authority. These are official state laws targeting the Rohingya people in every aspect of their lives, from who they can marry, how many children they can have, whether they can even walk to a nearby village and play a game of football and carry out repairs on their homes. It’s incredibly detailed discriminatory laws, just to try and make life as unpleasant as possible for the Rohingya people.

One report says that officials should force a woman to breastfeed her child if there were doubts over whether she was the birth mother.

We’ve also got reports of at least 450 Rohingya people who are in jail for getting married without permission. People who are in love and they can’t even get permission from the government without paying massive bribes. And now they are in jail for the simple act of getting married. And these laws are still on the books. We are hearing that Myanmar is reforming. But in practice, President Thein Sein has left these laws on the books. The President has not taken any steps to make sure these laws are repealed. And we are also hearing that he is supporting a new discriminatory law; this one targeting all moslems in the country, not just the Rohingya people which will restrict the ability of women to marry moslem men. These laws are not just historical as we are seeing such new laws being proposed even today.

Why do you think that Rohingya people are so persecuted in Myanmar because the country is easing up somewhat?

I think we are seeing specific prejudices against the Rohingya people in Rakhine state. But there is also a very widespread sentiment against moslems across the country. You hear ordinary everyday comments about moslems and they are negative. When the political space started to open up at the end of 2010, some Buddhist nationalists starting to use that space not to promote democracy and freedoms but to agitate against the Rohingya and they were even encouraged to do so by some elements within the government. I don’t think the government sees it as a problem if moslems are discriminated against or if their homes or villages are being destroyed. Apart from the damage it does to the country's international reputation, they generally share these prejudicial feelings against moslems. It is a kind of nationalism that is at the root of all the problems meaning there has never been peace in the country since it gained its independence. The reason the dictatorship was there in the first place in 1962 all relates to the central government having this vision of Burma as a Buddhist country and not accepting it as a country which has many different ethnicities and religions.

What about the attitude of the opposition pro-democracy movement towards the Rohingya?

One of the big surprises and disappointments of the past two years has been the failure of the The National League for Democracy and other pro-democracy human rights organizations to actually come out and support human rights for the Rohingya. In fact we’ve even seen senior members of the National League for Democracy who have themselves expressed comments that are discriminatory against the Rohingya and question their right to live in the country. So we’re not seeing from the government or the democracy movement any kind of leadership challenging prejudice, challenging attitudes toward the Rohingya. And last year we saw anti-moslem propaganda being targeted against all moslems in the country not just against the Rohingya moslems. And there were violent attacks against moslem communities up and down the country.

For FM4, reporter David Kriegleder went to Myanmar and returned with interviews with human rights activists, commentators and journalists. He also considered the repression of the Rohingya. Hear his reports in the Reality Check Special, broadcast on Saturday 1st March at 12 midday.