Every year Lake Superior State University in Michigan releases its annual list of words and phrases that it says should be banished in the new year. America's TIME magazine conducts an annual word banishment poll, asking readers to suggest words for cast off.
To the regret of Buddhist monks in Myanmar, neither Lake Superior State University nor the TIME readers think the term Rohingya should be included in the list. Worse still, the US Embassy does not find anything wrong with the word. Last week they issued a statement expressing condolences for an estimated 21 people, who media said were Rohingya, who drowned off the coast of Rakhine state. This infuriated the people of Myanmar who think and want others to think that that the Rohingya are interlopers in Myanmar and don't deserve citizenship rights. So hundreds of them including Buddhist monks, staged a protest outside of the US Embassy in Yangon on Thursday.
Their demand was simple: The US as well as Western countries and the European Union stop using the term “Rohingya." Instead they be referred to as Bengali, an ethnic group native to the region of West Bengal in India and to Bangladesh. The use of that term would support the belief, held by many in Myanmar, that the Rohingya should not be recognized as an official ethnic group under Myanmar's 1982 citizenship law.
"Normally, we would call them what they ask to be called," said US Ambassador Scott Marciel in comments to VOA's Myanmar's service. "It is not political decision, just normal practice." Unfortunately, the Rohingya in Myanmar are the victims of some abnormal practices. More than one million Rohingya are said to live in Myanmar, the majority of them in Rakhine state, along the western border with Bangladesh and India. The government does not consider them Myanmar citizens, despite their number and long-standing presence in this Buddhist country.
Over recent years, vast numbers of Rohingya have been displaced after successive rounds of mob violence. They now live in squalid refugee camps. Many have attempted to flee Myanmar in dangerous, sometimes deadly, boat journeys. In 2014, United Nations special rapporteur Thomas Ojea Quintana suggested that Myanmar's policy of "discrimination and persecution" of the Rohingya community could amount to crimes against humanity. Last year, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum said we may be seeing "early warning signs of genocide" against the Rohingya in Rakhine. President Barack Obama, during his trip to Myanmar in 2014, made a special reference to the plight of Rohingya.
But their plight is getting more and more miserable as days pass by. They are unable to travel freely in Myanmar and cannot marry or have children without official permission. Rohingya are also largely barred from higher education and face the constant threat of violence from Buddhist extremists. Even liberal forces within the country fear using the term "Rohingya"; Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi avoided speaking out for this persecuted minority during last year's elections, lest she should alienate the majority Buddhists. Her party, National League for Democracy, did not field any Rohingya as candidate with the result that the present Parliament, the first democratically elected house, does not have a single Rohingya member.
This will remain a blot on Myanmar's reputation. The challenge for Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi is not merely to bring about the constitutional and legal reforms to ensure Myanmar’s return to democracy but to end the injustice against the Rohingya. The United Nations special rapporteur on Myanmar, Yanghee Lee, has urged the new government to take a series of reforms within its first 100 days, including amending or repealing a 1982 law that denies citizenship to Rohingya and some others. This is the only way to avoid an anomalous situation where “a beloved Nobel Peace Prize winner presides over 21st-century concentration camps,” as Nicholas Kristoff’ put it in a New York Times article on Rohingya.
