If you love your people, you are going to want to push out your enemies. This rule is not complicated. It applies equally to Jews, whites, Christians, Muslims, Germans, Australians…
Why would a non-Muslim country want Muslims (or any foreign group) in their midst? To the extent it is in their best interest, they should, and if not, they should not.
Jon Emont writes for Tabletmag:
There are about 1.1 million Rohingya living in Myanmar, which makes them roughly 2 percent of the country’s population. Myanmar is ethnically heterogeneous but overwhelmingly Buddhist, and the Muslim Rohingya, descendants of traders who have lived in Rakhine state, on the border with Bangladesh, for centuries, are labeled as Bengalis by the state, regardless of how many generations their families have resided in Myanmar. State discrimination against the Rohingya was enshrined in the Burmese citizenship law of 1982, which did not recognize Rohingya as an indigenous race to Myanmar, rendering the majority of Rohingya stateless…
It was once accepted that Suu Kyi, Nobel Laureate and darling of the human rights community, was simply unwilling to speak out on behalf of the Rohingya because doing so would make it easier for her political opponents to attack her. But given the scale of her party’s victory, and her continued unwillingness to defend Rohingya, observers and critics are looking at previous statements she has made on violence in Rakhine state, and wondering whether she herself shares in conventional Buddhist-Bamar prejudices against Rohingya Muslims.
In a 2013 interview with the BBC, Suu Kyi categorically denied that ethnic cleansing was taking place in Rohingya and attempted to explain the fear that many Burmese Buddhists brought against Muslims. “There is a perception that Muslim power, that global Muslim power, is very great. And certainly that is the perception in many parts of the world and in our country too.”
…ANP politicians and voters I spoke with viewed the Rohingya as collaborators in the centuries-long attempt to erase their people’s proud history…
Activists believe that Suu Kyi’s best opportunity for improving the status of Rohingya will come in the next few months, when her party’s mandate is strongest and NLD lawmakers are still years away from having to worry about re-election. Yet as Phil Robertson of Human Rights Watch observes, “every indication has been that she is not that interested in this stuff and she has other fish to fry and she is going to fry those other fish first.” Andrea Gittleman, of the Simon-Skojt Center for the Prevention of Genocide at the National Holocaust Museum, was also not optimistic that Suu Kyi’s NLD was going to restore Rohingya civil and political rights. Indeed, in May Suu Kyi formally requested the U.S. government cease referring to Rohingya as Rohingya, but refer to them as Bengali—foreigners—instead. Whether the Rohingya begin fleeing and dying at sea again will be an early sign of what kind of democracy Myanman’s Nobel Laureate has in mind for her country.
