Vigil aims to remember Rohingya
Ontario community fears refugees face death upon Burma return Ahmed Ullah, centre, and other volunteers prepare meals for Rohingya orphans last year.
A year after government-sanctioned violence triggered the exodus of Rohingya minorities from Burma, Canada’s closely knit Rohingya community is holding a vigil on Saturday to remember the victims and draw attention to the plight of those who survived the trauma and face repatriation.
“We must not forget the survivors of the genocide. These are not refugees. They are survivors,” said Saifullah Muhammad of the Canadian Rohingya Development Initiative, which represents about 450 Rohingya across Canada and organized the event at Queen’s Park.
“Little has changed in the past year. Our concern is these displaced people in refugee camps are going to be forced to repatriate to Myanmar (also known as Burma). Sending them back is like sending them to death.”
Since Aug. 25, 2017, more than 700,000 Rohingya — a stateless minority group, most of them Muslims — have fled Rakhine State to escape what Human Rights Watch calls the military’s “campaign of ethnic cleansing” after the Burmese government launched a security crackdown against Rohingya militants it claimed attacked police posts and killed security force members.
Médecins Sans Frontières estimates more than 6,700 Rohingya Muslims were killed in the first month of the crackdown, and rights groups have accused authorities in Myanmar of mass killings, sexual violence and burning down Rohingya villages — accusations Burma has repeatedly denied.
Tensions between the Rohingya minority and Burmese majority go back decades, but they intensified after a new law in 1982 effectively stripped the Rohingya of their citizenship in the country, making them one of the largest stateless populations in the world. Muhammad and his parents fled to Bangladesh in 1992, when Burma’s military junta began persecuting political opponents and targeting Muslims who supported the pro-democracy movement, then led by Aung San Suu Kyi. Muhammad, now 30 and a resident of Kitchener, Ont., said there were only two Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh then, but the number has since ballooned to 33.
“There was a repatriation agreement between Burma and the United Nations, and we have seen many Rohingya forced to return. There was nothing for them to return to. Now the same happens again,” said Muhammad, who came to Canada under the federal refugee sponsorship program in 2016. His parents and two younger siblings are still in Bangladesh.
“People live in horrible conditions at these camps. As a Rohingya, my concern is there is limited education (opportunity) for the children who grow up in the camps and they can be easily exploited.” In June, Burma and the UN reached a repatriation agreement for the “safe voluntary” return of the 700,000 Rohingya refugees to their homeland.
Canada has dedicated $300 million in international aid over the next three years to support a co-ordinated response to the Rohingya crisis, pushing for a lasting political solution for the refugees’ safe return.
Ahmed Ullah, who led a group of Rohingya Canadian youth in producing a play that chronicles the journey of 14 refugee youth, said there has been a growing awareness in Canada about the crisis through public education, media reports and the community’s networking with other advocacy groups.
Last October, he spent two weeks in camps in Bangladesh to visit refugees and listen to their harrowing stories of escaping from Burma.
“It’s very sad to see. There’s no word to describe what I saw and heard. It felt like a horrifying nightmare,” said the 25-yearold, who came to Canada from Bangladesh in 2009, along with his widowed mother and two siblings.
“It’s difficult to campaign for something that people don’t know anything about.”