Burma's Forgotten Muslims In Rohingya
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By Mike Thompson
March 17, 2006

They have been called one of the world's most persecuted people. Some argue that they are also one of the most forgotten. Thousands of Rohingya fled Burma for Bangladesh in 1992.

The Rohingya people of Western Burma's Arakan State are forbidden from marrying or travelling without permission and have no legal right to own land or property.

Not only that but even though groups of them have been living in Burma for hundreds of years, they are also denied citizenship by the country's military government.

For decades this Muslim group of ethnic-Indo origins have be considered the lowest of the low in this mainly Buddhist country.

In addition to their almost total lack of legal rights many have been regularly beaten by police, forced to do slave labour and Jailed for little or no reason.

In 1992, 250,000 Rohingyas, which is a third of their population, fled over Burma's border into Bangladesh to escape the persecution.

Fourteen years later more than 20,000 of them are still in the same refugee camps and around 100,000 more are living illegally in the surrounding areas.

Finding out what is happening to Rohingya people now in Burma is particularly difficult.

Troops on both sides of the Burmese border are on high alert and I was told that it would be almost impossible for me to slip into Arakan State unnoticed.

To get around this I arranged for two Rohingya men to come out of the country and meet me in Bangladesh, neither of whom were prepared to be identified.

"We have nothing in Burma. We are disabled people, like slaves. We cannot work because our hands and feet are cut off. If we don't get permission to travel we are sent to Jail. We are like slaves there," he said.

But why I asked his younger friend, does the Burmese government persecute your people like this?

He replied: "The main reason is to finish us. They can't kill us or the International Community would see it. So this is the way to banish us from the land."

So why were these two men, who had now escaped Burma to come and talk to me, so determined to go back to a nation that made their lives hell?

"If I stay in Bangladesh, what will I do?" The younger man asked. "Even if I build a house here people will treat me as Burmese...This is a hated word."

"I have a ray of hope in my heart that one day there will be peace in Burma and my people will get back all their lives."

The world can only hope that he is right.

To learn more about Islam in Burma and the Burmese Muslims, go to:
http://www.islamawareness.net/Asia/Burma/