Nobody's people in a no-man's land

In November 2007, Rohingya refugee Ali Ashraf paid dubious agents in
Bangladesh's Cox's Bazar town for a place in a big boat that was to
take him to Malaysia via Thailand for a "good job" and a "secure
future".
Three weeks later, after a perilous journey across the choppy waters
of the Bay of Bengal, Ashraf's boat was intercepted by the Thai navy.
The tough Rohingya was dragged outto a beach at night, beaten up and
questioned by uniformed men and then dumped back into the boat two
days later with other Rohingya.
The Thais had removed the boat'sengine before it was towed to the high
sea by a big naval ship and then left to drift. "There was no food or
water left in the ship, we were left to die on the sea," Ashraf said
two weeks later after he was rescued by Indian coast guards when his
boat drifted towards India's Andaman islands.
By then, Ashraf was on the verge of death, totally dehydrated and
emaciated. But after a month in an Indian hospital at Andaman's Port
Blair town, he had recoveredand was lucky to survive, unlike most of
his friends on that perilous boat journey.
"Some jumped off the boat in desperation when they saw the coastline.
Either they were drowned or eaten up by sharks. Others drank sea water
to quench thirst and died of disease.I survived by keeping my lips
moist with sea water but did not drink it. Allaah was merciful,"
Ashraf recounted his ordeal at Port Blair.
In the summer of 2008, he was taken back by Bangladesh after India
submitted a list of Rohingyarescued off the Andamans, and Dhaka agreed
to take only those of them who had Bangladeshi citizenship or a UNHCR
refugee certificate. Thankfully, Ashraf's details matched the records
at one of the Rohingya refugee camp run by the UNHCR near Cox's Bazar.
A month later, Ashrafwas reunited with his wife and children.
But efforts to trace down Ashraf during a visit to Bangladesh last
year were unsuccessful. People inCox's Bazar said Ashraf and his whole
family were among the thousands of Rohingya who had been repatriated
to Myanmar by the Bangladesh government, after the UNHCR cut down on
support to run the refugee camps that were first set up when tens of
thousands of Rohingya fled into Bangladesh in the late 1970s. More and
more camps were added to shelter the continuous flood of Rohingya
refugees fleeing Myanmar (then Burma), but they are now being steadily
closed down.
Bangladesh's Awami League-led coalition government wants to send back
all the Rohingya refugees to Myanmar. "They are Myanmar citizens and
we have sheltered them long enough. Now they must go back and settle
down in Myanmar," Bangladesh Foreign Minister Dipu Moni said recently,
after a round of talks with a Myanmar delegation.
Unwanted in Bangladesh
The Awami League is a secular party wedded to Bengali linguistic
nationalism, and their leaders see the Rohingya as religious bigots
who support their rivals in Bangladesh's Islamic party, the
Jamait-e-Islami.Bangladesh intelligence officials say "the
Jamait-e-Islami support the Rohingya insurgent groups that have fought
Myanmar forces and routed funds from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to them
through a network of Islamic NGOs". The Rohingya groups denythe charge
but admit they have sympathizers across the Islamic world.
Unwanted now in an over-populated Bangladesh, the Rohingya are also
not wanted in their own country, Myanmar. Even President Thein Sein
has saidon record that the Rohingyas are migrants from the Chittagong
region of neighboring Bangladesh and not indigenous to Myanmar, so
they should be taken away to some other place.
In late July, dozens of Burmese in Yangon chanted slogans in front of
a UN office in Yangon: "Go backRohingya, get out of Myanmar, we
support our president".
It is entirely possible that the likes of Ashraf, after spending two
decades in refugee camps in Bangladesh, would have been displaced
again back home after returning.
The Buddhist Rakhines and the Muslim Rohingya have a long tradition of
intense hostility that goes back to the steady flow of Muslim
immigrants from Bengal'sChittagong region into Arakan province,
migration that was encouraged by the British. Thousands of Rakhines
and Rohingya died in riots in Arakan in 1942 during the Second World
War. The Japanese also massacred large number of Rohingya because they
supportedthe British.
In 1947, some Rohingya leaders formed the Mujahid Party and raised the
demand for a separate Muslim Autonomous Region in northern Arakan.
That upset the Rakhines and the Burmese military junta alike, and
General Ne Win unleashed "Operation King Dragon" in the
Rohingya-dominated areas of Arakan in 1978. The mass torture and
extra-judicial killings, gang rapes and demolition of mosques forced
nearly one-third of the Rohingya population to flee to Bangladesh.From
there, many of them movedinto India enroute to Pakistan and elsewhere
in the Middle east.
Indian alert
Now, India has also send out an alert to the states in the country's
northeast to step up vigil against "illegal" Rohingya migration, after
more than 1,400 Rohingyas have been nabbed in the last two years on
the borderstrying to get into Indian territory.
Chris Lewa, who has researched the Rohingya extensively, says
thousands of them have been migrating to Pakistan through India from
the refugee camps in Bangladesh. During the course of her research,
she found a lot of Rohingya women in the red light districts of
Karachi and many Rohingya men in the port city's thriving fishing
industry.
After the prospects of migrating to Pakistan and the Middle East began
to dry up, Rohingya turnedtowards Malaysia, travelling therethrough
Thailand. Many could slipin and settle down in Malaysia. Some even
reached Australia. But as the Thais became more vigilant and tried to
deter the Rohingya with harsh punishmentlike dragging their boats back
to high seas without engines, the hapless minority, now numbering
between 800,000 to a million in Myanmar, has been rendered short of
options to find a safe future.
PHOTO CAPTION
An ethnic Myanmar Rohingya Muslim living in Malaysia cries during a
protest over the persecution of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, outside
the Myanmarembassy in Kuala Lumpur on August 3, 2012.