THE NEW WORLD DISORDER
The Roma and Rohingya of the world face persecution amid a heartless international community
THE world is getting cruel by the day. No, it is not just the cause of one man’s animus for everybody south of the border. The animus is spreading everywhere.There is something rotten in the state of the world.
In one sense, we are well wired and connected. In a deeper, despondent sense, we have lost the loving feeeling. Misanthropy is on the rise.
Consider the case of the Roma and Rohingya, two members of the human race who have been driven out of their homes and made stateless. They are even being given a cruel label: dispersed people. It is cruel because in one sense “disperse” means cause to thin out or disappear. Instead of competing to outdo each other in compassionate virtues, countries of the world are competing to outdo each other in vicious brutality.
We may locate this callous indifference to suffering as a congenital western disorder. But that is only half the tale. The narrative is equally nasty in Asia. But let’s finish the European story first.
There are actually two Romas. One is loved; the other despised. Roma the football club is a rage of love with the Italians while our human Roma are the brunt of vicious attacks. Yes, we have come to this: we show compassion to inanimate things at the expense of our own human race. We will find all manner of things that differentiate to discriminate. It can be the colour of the skin. It could be race. Or religion. Or even the shape of one’s nose. Any difference counts. Perhaps these are signs of the End Times. The journey to dystopia has begun.
More and more people are on a mission to exclude. Getting rid of a people is in vogue in the fashion nation of Italy. The latest to pour out his venom, copiously it must be added, is the newly minted interior minister Matteo Salvini. He was already a venomous fella long before that. During his campaign trail, he called immigrants a “social bomb”, with all its implications. He has gone on record as having asked for the interior ministry’s job so that he can clean up Italy of “unwanted” people. Now that he has got the job, Salvini is driving the Roma out of Italy from north to south of the country.
The Roma are Europe’s largest minority but no one wants them. No one speaks for them. They are like the Rohingya, the world’s most persecuted people. No official census exists but one estimate says there are 12 million worldwide. And 11 million of them are in Europe. They are said to be from northwestern India from where they migrated to all over the world 1,500 years ago. India is paradoxically claiming them as Indian diaspora while “othering” some who are already within its borders.
The Dutch have their Salvini, too. Geert Wilders, the leader of the extremist right Party for Freedom or PVV, is part of a European nativism movement that is taking the troubled continent on a path to ruin.
If the Europeans push the idea of nativism to its extreme, one doesn’t need Brexit to disintegrate the European Union.
But the more frightening prospect is the extension of nativism to religion, race, class and perhaps gender. It is a deeply disturbing notion. Hitler’s Nazism began with nativism, albeit Aryan racial nativism. If the trend continues, we will have yet another Holocaust, only this time without Hitler being around.
The disturbing news is that there is not just one Salvini or Wilders. There is a coming together of a huge wave of animus across continents and subcontinents. They coalesce, converge into mega misanthropy. The number of misanthropes who live in this confluence is increasing.
In America, they erect walls to keep people out. And if the immigrants somehow make their way into the United States, they are caged like animals. It seems being Latin isn’t American enough. The cage is your Latin quarters.
We Asians, too, have shame at our doorstep where Southeast Asia’s third world Myanmar is fanning nativism in Geertesque ways. Rohingya aren’t its only problem. Myanmar has been at war with itself since time immemorial.
The Karen conflict is the world’s longest running civil war in the world. Syrian and Yemen conflicts pale into insignificance when compared to this raging rivalry that has been going on since 1949. Maybe in terms of the maimed and murdered, Syria and Yemen are worse off, but in terms of dispersed and indeterminate lives, Myanmar takes the honour. Or shall we say dishonour. There are close to two million internally displaced people in Myanmar. Millions more displaced and dispersed outside its border.
Myanmar is home to 135 ethnic groups, and, it seems multiplicity and Myanmar can’t go together. The Burmans who make up about 60 per cent of the population want it all. No nation in the world which has ruled and reigned by exclusion has survived. The most recent example of a nation which tried to do that — the Sudan — ended in being divided into two countries: Sudan and South Sudan. South Sudan is repeating the mistake of North Sudan. There is a lesson for us all in this.
Malaysia may not have 135 ethnic groups but Myanmar may want to take a leaf out of Malaysia’s book. There is of course the sad episode of May 13, 1969, but which country hasn’t. Malaysia doesn’t have a Roma or Rohingya problem. It must not have. The Earth is big enough for everybody. What is needed is a big heart.
The Dutch have their Salvini, too. Geert Wilders, the leader of the extremist right Party for Freedom or PVV, is part of a European nativism movement that is taking the troubled continent on a path of ruin.
Abdul Rahim Mydin is NST’s leader writer.