situation or provide relief, we need to be escorted by the authorities, police or soldiers. Staff are concerned for their safety, quite rightly.”
Among certain factions of Rakhine Buddhists, hatred for the Rohingya runs so hot that almost any overture of sympathy towards the displaced Muslims causes hatred to spill over onto the sympathizer. In their eyes, the Rohingya are invaders run amok from neighboring Bangladesh. They are commonly described by their detractors as “black” or “cruel” or “devilish.”
Burma denies citizenship to the estimated 800,000 Rohingya living within its borders. The UN has scoffed at Burma President Thein Sein’s contention that they should be moved to UN camps in a “third country.”
Offering citizenship to the Rohingya who’ve lived in Burma for generations would be a politically unpopular decision by the government. Few expect such a move: Thein Sein affirmed via his website that it would be “impossible to accept the illegally entered Rohingya, who are not our ethnicity.”
Contrast this sentiment to that of the UN, which asserts that the Rohingya are among the world’s most persecuted minorities. Anti-Rohingya groups in two major Burma cities, Mandalay and Yangon, have marched in large, monk-led street rallies condemning UN intervention. There are also smaller protests against international interference, such as the one in the Rakhine State capital, Sittwe, against a new Doctors Without Borders clinic. That rally, staged several weeks ago, halted the opening of a health facility in a largely Buddhist neighborhood.
“We’d been in intense discussions with the local community and had a high degree of buy in,” Belliveau said. “Then, at the last minute, a small group demonstrated and threatened our staff … This event was very confusing. We didn’t realize [the extent] to which there are small groups determined to stop us from operating.”
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