Bangladesh must help prevent Rakhine bloodbath 

It restates that the Aung San Suu Kyi government refuses to accept the indigenous Muslim minority for what they are. The Rohingya are as Bengali as Americans are English. This attitude of rejecting one of its own has underpinned Myanmar’s policy on the Rohingya.
The Rohingya have been living in Rakhine for centuries. Regrettably, with one stroke of pen this minority group, an integral part of the Burmese culture and society, was made stateless by the Burmese strongman General Ne Win.
That was his reaction to his abortive attempt to force the Rohingya out of the western province into Bangladesh permanently. He managed to push out nearly one third (300,000) of the total Rohingya with a military operation code-named “Operation King Dragon”, ostensibly for the purpose of checking illegal immigrants, in 1978. But strong international reaction against the ethnic purge forced him to take back most of those from Bangladesh. That policy of expulsion having failed, he resorted to a legal expedient – the Citizenship Law of 1982.
History provides the crucial missing perspective on the issue. The current spate of violence that began last October is a part of a longstanding strategy Myanmar has used to use to clear its territory of one of its ethnic minorities, made stateless by government fiat. The Rohingya have been described as the most persecuted stateless people in the world.
Their movement has been controlled since 1964 by law.
The latest extremist attack of August 25, which merits the strongest contempt, is also a cause for concern for Bangladesh. It was the killing of several Myanmar security personnel by militants that triggered the violence wreaked on the Rohingya in the name of fighting insurgency in October last year.
That action came in for criticism from the local head of the UN refugee agency, who went so far as to characterise the military’s action as ethnic cleansing. Bangladesh now faces a Catch 22 situation.
On the one hand it cannot officially open its doors to the persecuted Rohingya, but either can it forcefully turn them back into the teeth of violence and uncertainty.
Strategic compulsions preclude the former option, since it would encourage the Myanmar government to continue to create conditions to lever all the Rohingya permanently out of their homeland, and fulfil its longstanding aim. But hosting a large number of refugees will impose – and it already has – adverse security and socio-economic consequences on Bangladesh.
Although Bangladesh is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention, it has acted according to customary international law and the principle of non-refoulement in not rejecting asylum seekers at its border when they are escaping persecution in their homeland.
It is Bangladesh’s position that, since the situation is of Myanmar’s own making, it is for Nay Pyi Taw to resolve it. That Bangladesh cannot remain an impassive neighbour because it has been directly affected by the developments in Rakhine has been demonstrated by the government’s declared position on the issue.
Amid all the killings in one part of her country, the silence of Suu Kyi has been deafening. Her response to atrocities committed by her security forces was that they were working as per “the law”. A redeeming feature in the entire situation was the setting up of the (Kofi) Annan Commission in August last year to “find a sustainable solution on the complicated issues in Rakhine State”.
If this was not merely a ruse by Suu Kyi to placate international opinion, then her government should recognise the merit of the Commission’s recommendations, which were delivered on August 24, and act on them. It is time that Myanmar realised the error of its Rohingya policy. If anything, it has fostered extremism among the younger members of the Rohingya community. This cannot be allowed to happen. Bangladesh must make it abundantly clear that its stake in the region is not only humanitarian. If this conflict is allowed to simmer, Bangladesh would suffer the fallout in equal measure.