No strong response
Business ties complicate Muslim states’ aid to Rohingya
When Rohingya Muslims fled persecution and slaughter in Myanmar in past decades, tens of thousands found refuge in Saudi Arabia, home to Islam’s holiest sites. This time around, Muslim leaders from the Persian Gulf to Pakistan have offered little more than condemnation and urgently needed humanitarian aid.
The lack of a stronger response by Muslim-majority countries partly comes down to their lucrative business interests in Southeast Asia, experts say.
Much of the Middle East is also buckling under its own refugee crisis sparked by years of upheaval in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Afghanistan.
More than 500,000 people — roughly half the Rohingya Muslim population in Myanmar — have fled to neighbouring Bangladesh over the past year, mostly in the last month. The United Nations human rights chief has described Myanmar’s military crackdown and allied Buddhist mob attacks as “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”
Saudi Arabia is already home to around a quarter-million Burmese people who took refuge in the kingdom under the late King Faisal in the 1960s. The kingdom pledged US$15 million in aid to the Rohingya this week.
As the world’s biggest oil exporter, Saudi Arabia competes with Russia to be China’s top crude supplier.
Expanding its footprint there requires Myanmar’s help.
A recently opened pipeline running through Myanmar , also known as Burma, carries oil from Arab countries and the Caucuses to China’s landlocked Yunnan
Province. The 771-kilometre pipeline starts at the Bay of Bengal in western Myanmar’s Rakhine state, from where most of the Rohingya have been forced out.
In 2011, a subsidiary of state oil giant Saudi Aramco and Petro-China, an arm of China’s stateowned CNPC, signed a deal to supply China’s southwestern Yunnan Province with up to 200,000 barrels per day of crude oil, just under half of the pipeline’s capacity.
Saudi Aramco did not immediately respond to a request for comment on shipments through the pipeline.
“One could argue that Saudi Arabia is less likely to be outspoken on this (Rohingya) issue because it actually relies on the Burmese government to protect the physical security of the pipeline,” said Bo Kong, a senior associate at the Center for Strategic
and International Studies who has written about China’s global petroleum policy.
The pipeline became operational in April following years of delays. It allows tankers to bypass the Strait of Malacca, cutting typical voyages by about seven days. A natural gas pipeline from Myanmar’s Shwe gas field runs alongside it.
Daniel Wagner, founder of consulting firm Country Risk Solutions, said Saudi Arabia is moving ahead with its economic and political agenda in Mynamar and Southeast Asia, yet can still “claim to have stood the moral highground” by previously taking in refugees and providing financial aid.
“The important point is that natural gas and oil flows through Rakhine state,” he said.
Muslim-majority countries have been increasingly promising
aid as the number of refugees swells in Bangladesh.
Azerbaijan, which also appears to be exporting crude to China through the pipeline, has ordered 100 tons of humanitarian aid to be dispatched.
Turkey, which like Iran jostles with Saudi Arabia to be the Islamic world’s centre of influence, has mobilized millions of meals for refugees in Bangladesh and vowed to maintain a refugee camp there. It has also provided clothing, part of more than 150 tons of humanitarian aid supplied overall.
Iran, Saudi Arabia’s regional rival, has sent at least 40 tons of aid. Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei recently took a swipe at other Muslim countries with business interests in Myanmar, urging them to ramp up pressure on the government there.