National

Their Flight Without End

India’s Rohingya refugees live with a tortured past, and hope

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Their Flight Without End
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He struggles to roll up his jeans. It’s not until he reaches his right knee that one sees the scars. Mohammed Abdullah, a Rohingya refugee who has been in New Delhi for five months, shows others—one each on his right arm and back. And others still that we can’t see, which become apparent when he talks of how his parents, brother and sister were burnt in their house. In front of his eyes. “When I ran to save them, I was attacked too,” he says. His narrative is a glimpse into the violence many others like him have had to flee from in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, where Buddhi­sts, allegedly with support from the state machinery, have launched widespread attacks on the Muslim minority since 2012.

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Rohingya, a Burmese Muslim minority of close to a million, who have South Asian features and speak a language close to the Chittagong speech, are a persecuted lot. Den­ied citizenship by Burma and thought of as being Bangladeshis, they are also repel­led when they try to cross over into Bang­ladesh. Burmese president Thein Sein even suggested last year that the country could solve the crisis by expelling all of its Rohi­ngyas. Around 80,000 of them have been displaced by the conflict, many of the homeless segregated in camps, and many have lost their lives making perilous journeys on boats to Tha­iland, Bangladesh and Indonesia.

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There are 195 people crammed into three rows of tarpaulin and bamboo shanties near Jaitpur, New Delhi, getting by on a plot offered to the refugees temporarily by a city-based Muslim charity. They entered India over the last two years from Bangladesh and are now registered with UNHCR as either refugees or asylum seekers. They are waiting repatriation to a country that is willing to accept them, but there are none. Not even any of the Islamic ones.

The persecution of Rohingyas is no recent phenomenon. Former Indian ambassador to Myanmar Aloke Sen says, “There was oppression throughout, just that it was controlled by the junta. With the transition to democracy, it is something that has come out on the streets.” Stretched for space and resources in New Delhi, other Rohingya refugees are now directed to places like Jammu. Over 15,000 Rohi­ngyas are estimated to be living in India.

News of the bomb blasts in Bodh Gaya, apparently caused by their co-religionists, to further their cause, is being treated with caution. “We don’t want to be locked into any prolonged conflict with Buddhists. Our only hope is that peace returns to Rakhine so that we can return,” says Mohammed Samiuddin. For many in the community, it’s an idea that’s chimeric.

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