Rohingya flee persecution
Shamsul Alam Saan Yu doesn’t know if he’ll ever see his siblings again.
The Manurewa man says his sister and two brothers are living in an internally-displaced persons camp in Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine State in Myanmar.
Saan Yu, 36, and his siblings are Rohingya Muslims, an ethnic minority suffering persecution from the south-east Asian country’s military.
The United Nations says more than 500,000 Rohingya have fled violence in Myanmar to neighbouring Bangladesh.
Saan Yu lives with his wife and their three children. He says he talks to his siblings in Myanmar on the phone about once a month.
‘‘We have a very good life here, but they’re living in the camp ... they can’t go anywhere. I don’t know what’s going to happen to them.’’
He says he left Myanmar after he was accused of being involved in violence that broke out in Sittwe in 2001. He paid human traffickers to take him to Thailand by boat and then on to Malaysia.
‘‘I sat in the luggage compartment of a bus. It was very hot and very hard to breathe.’’
Saan Yu says Rohingya once served in various high-ranking official positions in Myanmar. They’ve been deprived of their human and political rights since the military took control in 1962, he says.
‘‘They got power and refused to recognise us. They said we were illegals and from Bangladesh. We said ‘no, we were born in that place [Myanmar] and we only want to live in our community’.’’
When he was attending university the government decreed Rohingya students couldn’t receive a qualification and members of their community lost their citizenship ‘‘overnight’’, Saan Yu says.
‘‘If we convert to Buddhism, we can be citizens. We are a very small group in that community [in Myanmar]. We are a very peaceful community.’’
Caretaker Foreign Minister Gerry Brownlee says the Government will contribute $1.5 million for humanitarian assistance in response to the crisis in Rakhine State.
The money will be used by the Red Cross to help affected people in Myanmar and over the border in Bangladesh, he says.
Go online to redcross.org.nz to contribute.