In an unusual turn of events that is almost surreal, Myanmar’s military is now trying to mend bridges with the very ethnic group it viciously pressed during one of the most severe ethnic cleansing campaigns in the world – the Rohingya Muslims.
But just a few years back, the world came to consciousness wrt to what the Rakhine State had gone through at the Tatmadaw (Myanmar’s armed forces) hands, which had committed the genocide on the Rohingya people as a campaign of ruthless violence. Whole villages have been burned down, women were raped, and more than a hundred thousand were slaughtered or forced to run away with their families, looking for shelter in the relief camps across the border near Bangladesh.
The United Nations would later characterize the horrors as an “open textbook of ethnic cleansing” with “element(s) of genocide” in essence. Meanwhile, the same government which unleashed this tragedy has employed a form of political engineering by calling on the Rohingya abroad to come back home in an attempt to salvage the weakened economy.
HCIGiNlats Ina, the junta’s deputy head, Rohingya expatriates to “go back home and improve the region”, was recently appealed. This appeal was made when Myanmar’s economy was on the verge of collapse; the country had the troubled for years due to many wrong decisions, corruption, and the sanctions imposed by the international community in response to the military crackdown of
The bravery of this appeal does not go unnoticed by the Rohingya community that has been suffering from long practices of discrimination and denying them the citizenship they deserve since the time they have been living in their homeland. Often, people have lost signing and families, dwellings, and the whole way of their being by the very forces which they are subjugating.
The Rohingya community is still suffering the pain, and the traumas are very fresh to them. They have deep scars on their body and their minds for all time. The concept of coming back to an area where first they have been failed by an existence that has been programmed to hurt and discriminate against them, but after that, it continues to try to eliminate every trace of their existence, can be very difficult for a person to digest.
