Business ties complicate responses by Muslim states to Rohingya crisis
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — 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 Muslimmajority 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 neighboring 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 quartermillion Burmese who took refuge in the kingdom under the late King Faisal in the 1960s. The kingdom pledged $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 479-mile 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 PetroChina, an arm of China’s state-owned CNPC, signed a deal to supply China’s southwestern Yunnan Province with up to 200,000 barrels per day of oil, just under half of the pipeline’s capacity.
Saudi Aramco did not immediately respond to a request for comment on shipments via the pipeline.
“One could argue that Saudi Arabia is less likely to be outspoken on this 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. A natural gas pipeline from Myanmar’s Shwe gas field runs alongside it.