Wanted: A working system for the world’s Rohingyas
If the question is asked who Aung San Suu Kyi is, one is bound to find similar background information from Google through Wikipedia to justify a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Truth is there’s not much to Suu Kyi than there was to the likes of Robert Mugabe or Joseph Kabila. Her fame is no more earned than leadership acumen is genetically transmitted.
Call her a victim of being at the right place at the opportune time and you won’t be wrong. She happened to be there at a time when Myanmar had reached the global notoriety level at a time when the West had determined to withhold support from military adventurists and dictators anywhere. It followed that if you must rid Myanmar of its military henchmen, you had to prop someone up to take its place. Suu Kyi fit that bill having earned a Nobel Prize, and you could say just like Obama. If the Nobel were instituted in any other continent, it would have lost its shine on a lot of grounds -a story for another day.
Suu Kyi is like most opinion writers and opportunist prodemocracy activists - they are conscious enough to know that something is terribly wrong with the system but not necessarily knowledgeable enough or equipped enough to know how to fix it. This was the Suu Kyi who stepped forward to head a government without a how-to blueprint. The pseudo-democracy she inherited has not grown in a year and shows no signs of progression.
The military henchmen who forever control real power in Myanmar were crafty enough to grant her figurehead status and to watch the world applaud it. It was a survival gimmick. With her ‘clout’ Myanmar was spared being brought to its knees with sanctions. She was the needed magnet for the rapprochement required to stave off impending economic blockage of her country. The generals were and are not prepared to give up power or take orders from a ‘bloody civilian’ least of all a female one dancing to the tunes of her foreign puppeteers. That makes Suu Kyi the prisoner of her own fortune having the semblance of power but denied the exercise of it.
This Tartuffe process would have continued unabated but for the Rohingya crisis now exposing the farce to the world. Without its religious undertone, the Rohingya conundrum could have continued unabated in a nation dominated by Buddists. Wherever Sunni Islam is threatened anywhere in the globe, the echo reverberates. That is what the Saudi’s live for. If the Rohingya had been Shiites, their plight would have fizzled out of media or global attention much like the plight of the Yazidis under ISIS.
What is happening to the Rohingya in Myanmar is no different from the plight of the estimated 70 ethnic minorities in Muslim-dominated Indonesia who need a conversion to Islam as authentication of nationality and passport to vital amenities in their own country. How much of that story makes global headlines?
The Rohingya crisis is no different from the phenomenon in Nigeria where certain ethnic nationalities are precluded from buying land in the eastern parts of their country because they are not ‘indigenes’ of the area. It is no different from the discrimination against Christian organizations in some parts of northern Nigeria where they are herded into a secluded area of town with no prospects of expansion. It is no different from what is happening to Muslims in the Central African Republic, CAR before the eyes of UN peacekeepers or the plight of Amakwerekwere in Southern Africa.
It is no different from the plight of the Kurds sandwiched between Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Iran and Armenia. The Rohingya crisis is no different from the lot of Muslim minorities in most parts of India; Hindu and Christian minorities in Pakistan or Jews in Morocco, Egypt, Iran/Iraq. Faith may build hope for mankind, but religion is a death tag to some citizens of the globe. This is why the Rohingya crisis is no different from the lot of Palestinians in the hands of their Israeli neighbours in the occupied territories in spite of several UN resolutions.
It is no different from the plight of the people and their oppressorpolitical rulers in motherland Africa or the supremacy gangup against minority black and Latinos in present-day America. The Rohingya plight is not different from the predicament of the indigenous people of North American who are crushed by the horrors of forceful adoptions, the residential school system, targeted alcoholism and drug addiction while battling environments which their governments derogatorily describe as below Third World conditions.
Are we saying that the Rohingyas don’t matter? Not by any stretch. Their denouement is just another prove of the hypocrisy of the western world order to the welfare of threatened peoples especially minorities all over the world. It should be a wake-up call for the UN and its agencies to find a workable lasting solution; one that could apply to all who live under unjust systems across the globe.
Our world would never be truly free as long as any person or group is discriminated against based on their race, their creed or any other social, economic or demographic description. The various articles of the UN that guarantee freedom to all humans to live; thrive and pursue happiness anywhere without let or hindrance should apply in Myanmar, as it should in Nigeria, Indonesia or Kurdistan. It may sound utopian, but it ought to be the ideal to which those who pull the strings of the global power order should aspire.