So what do Rohingya contribute?
It’s fine to cry about how nobody wants you, but what do you have to give? That’s the question unhappy individuals and groups should ask themselves.
If you hate your job, what skills do you have to offer to another employer? If you hate your girlfriend, what do you have that someone classier would want to take you on?
The Washington Post’s Wonkblog addresses the plight of the Rohingya but doesn’t spend a word on what these people can give to a society. I’ve yet to see anyone make the case that Rohingya would be valuable additions to a country.
Last week, the United Nations’ top human rights official called Burma’s ongoing military campaign against the Rohingya Muslim minority group in that country’s Rakhine state “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”
This is what he meant: Using a pretext of rooting out Islamist insurgents, Burma’s military, together with Buddhist villagers, is terrorizing the Rohingya, emptying and razing their villages, and attempting to hound them out of the country.
Of a total of 1.1 million Rohingya that remained in Burma despite repeated waves of violence since the late 1970s, more than 400,000 have fled to neighboring Bangladesh in just the past month. New arrivals are building makeshift settlements near established camps where hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees from previous exoduses already live. Most are women, children and the elderly.
Conditions are dire. Food is scarce. Aid agencies are worn thin. The monsoon rain is torrential.
The human catastrophe has captured the world’s attention. But it has also caused a lot of confusion. Didn’t Burma just undergo a democratic transition? Isn’t it led by Nobel Peace Prize-winner Aung San Suu Kyi? Why are Buddhists perpetrating an ethnic cleansing against Muslims?
