Word: burma
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...Sorry,' I was told, 'but there are no Rohingya here.' I was mystified. From everything that I had heard about this persecuted Muslim minority, the Rohingya come from western Burma's isolated Arakan State. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya, who speak a dialect similar to that of Bengalis from neighboring Bangladesh, have fled the brutality of Burma's military regime by escaping their Buddhist-majority homeland for lives as illegal immigrants. The ruling junta has denied the Rohingya some of the most basic human rights - no citizenship, no freedom of movement, no marriage without permission. In January, their plight made...
...long trip to Arakan, there was a strange lack of information on the Rohingya. Many locals denied their very existence. (The Burmese government, in a curious feat of logic, denies having mistreated the Rohingya, since there is, according to Foreign Minister Nyan Win, no such a minority group in Burma.) Then, a break: a Buddhist Arakan local confided that there were some ethnic Bengalis who lived in a nearby village. He guessed that they'd come from Bangladesh to Burma 10 or 20 years ago and were living in Arakan illegally. Would I like to meet them? Yes, I would...
...villagers of Nazi spoke of a regime that conscripted them as forced labor and made them pay prohibitive taxes or buy expensive business licenses that robbed them of any chance at economic mobility. Because they are not considered citizens of Burma, they cannot work in the public sector as teachers or soldiers or doctors. Nor can they attend university in Arakan's capital, Sittwe, where communal violence between Buddhists and Muslims flared eight years ago. The villagers' tone when describing their plight was matter-of-fact, as if they were complaining of a rainstorm or a bad case of influenza...
...realized they were afraid to be identified as Rohingya because the very word carried with it the likelihood of so much discrimination. The man's name was Muhammad - he gave me his Bengali name, not the Burmese one that Rohingya are also required to have - and he left Burma two years ago on a crowded wooden boat filled with wannabe migrants. Eventually, the vessel drifted to India's Andaman Islands, from which he and others were repatriated. Would he try his luck abroad again, I asked? The news of the recent boatpeople's experiences in Thailand had reached Arakan...
...pictures of Burma after Cyclone Nargis...