\n\tIt is not uncommon for those of a particular faith majority to fall short in their duty to others. No one doubts that this applies in parts of the world
\n\tand at different times to both Christians and Muslims. Perhaps because of the horrors of the Holocaust, there has been a reluctance to speak of Jews in
\n\tthis way. Still, the U.S. State Department recently termed as terrorists those Jewish settlers who commit violent acts against Palestinians in the West
\n\tBank. However, the one religious group that has often been given a pass on this observation of insensitivity is the Buddhists.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tIt is not profitable to get into a game of weighing which body of believers is the most hypocritical. Nor would it discredit all Buddhists to point out a
\n\tcase of their lack of concern. Nevertheless, it is a reality that Buddhists share with other mortals the ability and propensity to do great evil at times.
\n\tThe behavior of wartime Japan was seen as immoral, but there was a tendency to ascribe the behavior to Shinto, since many Japanese are at the same time
\n\tBuddhists and followers of Shinto. However, there are other predominantly Buddhist countries that treat minorities unjustly and even cruelly. In fact,
\n\tthere is even a commonality in the excuses for the mistreatment\u2014\u201cthey\u201d do not really belong in this country.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tThus, the Bhutanese government charges that their Nepalese minority are recent arrivals that came to work on construction projects in the 1960s. This might
\n\tbe true for some of them; but even then it means that even the \u201cnewcomers\u201d have been in the country for a couple of generations. In Sri Lanka the
\n\tgovernment withdrew the citizenship of those Tamils descended from workers on the tea estates who came to the island beginning in the nineteenth century.
\n\tAnd as for Japan, there is still the matter of the treatment of ethnic Koreans in their midst.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tIn 1982 the military junta in Myanmar (formerly Burma) adopted a law depriving the Rohingya minority of their citizenship, claiming that they are all
\n\trecent illegal immigrants from the Indian subcontinent. While even Burmese historians accept their presence since the 1950s, others have found reference to
\n\tthem as far back as the 1700s. While the minorities in Bhutan and Sri Lanka are mainly Hindu, the Rohingya minority in Myanmar is Muslim. Buddhists believe
\n\tthat Buddha came to teach humanity how to end suffering; but governments in most Buddhist countries fall short on that score\u2014just as Christian legislators
\n\toften fall short of Jesus\u2019 example and Jewish ones of the demands of the prophets.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tSo when the Rohingyas are looked at as an example of a neglected or marginalized group, it becomes even more problematic to discover that there are some
\n\t800,000 of them in Myanmar. The fact that these people are denied citizenship makes them particularly vulnerable.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tNay Saan Oo is a Rohingya, now living in New York City. While the Rohingya minority is centered in the western province of Arakan (or Rakhine), he comes
\n\tfrom Rangoon. Yet even there he felt the pain of discrimination. People disparagingly called him \u201ckalar,\u201d a derogatory term referring to his skin color, as
\n\tRohingyas are darker than other Burmese. Because he, like other Rohingyas, was deprived of an identity card, Nay Saan Oo could not gain entrance to higher
\n\teducation or even to a hospital.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tMany Rohingyas had been forced into special camps, even before recent racial strife became known. Nur Hashim, who chairs the Canadian Burmese Rohingya
\n\tOrganization, described to me what happened to him when he was in school in 1991. \u201cA group of soldiers surrounded our village and took all the young males
\n\tto a camp. I said that I was a student, but they said that Rohingyas could not study. On the way to the camp I said that I had to urinate, so they let me
\n\tmove away a bit, but I ran. They shot at me but missed. I made my way to Bangladesh, where I stayed for 16 years.\u201d There are some 300,000 Rohingya refugees
\n\tin Bangladesh, but Bangladesh is trying to keep them out.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tAziz Nur, a student living in the Waterloo region of Ontario, described his family\u2019s experiences. Troops beat his father and conscripted him to do forced
\n\tlabor. They also seized the family\u2019s land. A sister was refused permission to marry. Such permission ordinarily takes more than a year\u2014plus a bribe. And
\n\tcouples are made to agree to have no more than two children. Family members are not able to go to visit another village without permission. Soldiers came
\n\tto the house to shake the family down for money. They have also stolen cattle.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tWakar Uddin heads up the Arakan Rohingya Union, an international umbrella organization. When he notes some of the problems facing his people in Arakan,
\n\tthey often mirror the experiences that have already been described by others from other areas. He is quick to identify the problems caused by their high
\n\tlevel of illiteracy\u2014a direct product of their mistreatment. \u201cLess than 1 percent of the Rohingya population has graduated from high school. Most of them
\n\thave not seen schooling of any kind,\u201d says Wakar.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tThe government, Wakar charges, confiscates land and gives it to other Burmese brought into the area. According to Uddin, troops conscript not just adults
\n\tbut also children as young as 5 for forced labor. Rohingyas are subject to arbitrary arrest and taxation and to extortion. Amnesty International largely
\n\tconfirms these complaints and also accuses troops of killings, rape, and destruction of mosques.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tThere is a history of interracial mob violence between Arakan\u2019s Buddhist majority and the Rohingyas. Such violence broke out again following the rape and
\n\tmurder of a Buddhist woman by three Rohingyas in May last year. Then a mob pulled 10 Muslim men from a bus and butchered them. Apparently they were
\n\tpilgrims and not even Rohingyas. Matters then escalated with tit-for-tat killing, burning of villages, looting, and such. The government declared a state
\n\tof emergency.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tDuring the violence, troops sided against the Rohingyas in many instances, and afterward about 100,000 were put into camps, off limits to foreign
\n\tobservers. Buddhist monks stationed themselves at the entrances to keep food and other supplies out. Human Rights Watch reported that the troops also
\n\tengaged in rape, torture, and killing.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tClearly the situation calls for intervention by Burmese democracy advocates. Well, they have spoken up\u2014in support of the repression! Tin Maung Htoo,
\n\tdirector of Canadian Friends of Burma, has branded Rohingyas as failed jihadists. His board later made him retract the charge. In Japan pro-democracy
\n\tmilitants demonstrated in front of the Tokyo U.N. office in support of Burmese president Thein Sein\u2019s desire to have the U.N. resettle the Rohingyas
\n\toutside Myanmar. (His alternative was for the U.N. to look after them in camps inside Myanmar.) The prejudice against these people runs deep, leaving them
\n\twith few supporters in Myanmar. Even Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi refuses to speak up for their rights.\n<\/p>\n
\n\tMeanwhile, refugees continue to try to sneak into Bangladesh. Others are in camps along the Thai border. Still others take to rickety boats, looking for a
\n\twelcoming harbor. Thai sailors have towed some of these boats out to sea, where those on board are likely to find a watery grave.\n<\/p>\n
\n\t It is not uncommon for those of a particular faith majority to fall short in their duty to others. No one doubts that this applies in parts of the world and at different times to both Christians and Muslims. Perhaps because of the horrors of the Holocaust, there has been a reluctance to speak of<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[294],"tags":[126],"class_list":["post-6226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-july-august-2013","tag-july-august-2013"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6226\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n\t\tCanada has recently established an Office of Religious Freedom and has named Andrew Bennett as its first ambassador for religious freedom. It may be
\n\t\tthat Canada, working on behalf of Rohingyas now in Canada, will be able to speak up for the minority in Myanmar.
\n\t<\/em>
\n\tEditor.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"