Yet again, the situation surrounding the ethnic Rohingya community of Burma has burgeoned from a national disgrace to a regional shame. Despite what had appeared to be a coincidence of timing and opportunity to finally allow for a concerted effort on this long-festering problem, it now appears as though the Burmese generals, backed by inertia in the capitals of Southeast Asia, will preclude any movement on the status of this beleaguered community.
International outrage regarding the Rohingya situation revived suddenly in December. At that time, reports arose that the Thai navy had for weeks been intercepting boats carrying some thousand Rohingya attempting to flee Burma, as well as a few dozen from Bangladesh, where they have been living as refugees. Unable to work in either country due to policy proscription, the desperate 'boatpeople' had set off on a dangerous journey in search of work in Malaysia and Thailand. The Thai military, upon finding the Rohingya, was accused of disabling their engines and leaving them helpless, to drift for upwards of three weeks in the Bay of Bengal. According to accounts by survivors, it is now estimated that some 300-400 perished in the experience.
Yet if the Bangkok government came in for well-deserved ignominy following the revelations, the international reverberations have done nothing to affect the Rangoon junta's stance on the issue. As they have maintained since 1982, when new citizenship legislation was passed in Burma, the generals remain firm in their contention that the Rohingya are not Burmese citizens, but rather illegal Bangladeshi migrants. In fact, the roughly 800,000-strong Rohingya community traces its roots to Arab merchants that settled down in the modern-day Burmese state of Rakhine (or Arakan) during the seventh century. Many observers point to nationalistic xenophobia as the cause of this longstanding bias, with the predominantly Muslim Rohingya appearing out of place in Buddhist-majority Burma.
While Dhaka and Rangoon have expressed their individual weaknesses, the regional grouping ASEAN, which represents 10 Southeast Asian countries, has not exactly covered itself with laurels. It seems to be buying into the Burmese argument that the Rohingya are actually Southasian 'Bengalis', Bangladeshi citizens illegally migrating into Burma. Dhaka even recently decided to take back 49 of the 67 recently rescued Rohingya found marooned in the Andaman islands after attempting escape from Cox's Bazar. Through its silence and inaction on the matter, ASEAN as a whole gets identified with the junta. This was certainly clear at the 14th annual ASEAN Summit, which finished in Cha Am, Thailand, on 1 March. This was the first full meeting to take place since the ASEAN Charter went into effect in mid-December, and the central rhetorical focus at the summit was, in the words of ASEAN Chairman and Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, to make the Association increasingly "people-centred". We suggest that ASEAN include the Rohingya within the definition of 'people', so that their rights to life, livelihood and ownership is preserved.