#SuuKyi, #Clinton Discuss Refugees

The Burmese opposition leader begins her US visit with a meeting with the top American diplomat.

RFA

Aung San Suu Kyi (l) speaks with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (r) at the State Department in Washington, Sept. 18, 2012.

Burma's opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi opened her visit to the United States with talks Tuesday with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the welfare of Burmese refugees in America.

The 67-year-old Nobel laureate, who arrived on Monday for a nearly three-week visit, met with Clinton at her office in the State Department.

The top U.S. diplomat briefly spoke to Aung San Suu Kyi on the resettlement of Burmese refugees in the United States and the visitor's trip next week to Fort Wayne in Indiana state, home to a large number of Burmese.

There is "so much excitement and enthusiasm about the fact that you can actually come," Clinton told Aung San Suu Kyi, according to journalists and photographers who were allowed a couple of minutes to witness their meeting before they went into closed talks.

Aung San Suu Kyi said she had heard about Fort Wayne while tracking Burmese news when she was under house arrest for nearly two decades during the rule of the previous military junta.

Since 2006, about 55,000 Burmese refugees, most whom were living in Thailand, have been resettled in the United States. Many of them had fled nearly five decades of harsh military rule and fighting between government military troops and armed ethnic groups. 

Aung San Suu Kyi will take part later Tuesday in a Washington forum organized by the Asia Society on the ongoing transition in Burma and the challenges facing the country. Clinton will make introductory remarks at the event.

Landmark trip

Clinton made a landmark trip to Burma nine months ago in the first visit by a U.S. secretary of state in more than 50 years to begin reconciliation with the nominally civilian government of President Thein Sein who took over in March last year.

The two countries then named ambassadors to each other's capitals, formalizing diplomatic relations for the first time since Washington withdrew its ambassador in 1990.

The United States also eased investment and financial restrictions to reciprocate nascent reforms in Burma but said it will maintain an import ban amid continuing human rights and ethnic conflict concerns.

The Obama administration is believed to be considering easing a ban on imports from Burma into the U.S., one of the main remaining sanctions imposed on the country. The U.S. Congress last month renewed the ban for another year.
Aung San Suu Kyi may also meet President Barack Obama during her trip, which is her first to the U.S. in 40 years.

The White House has yet to announce whether she will meet Obama but sources say he could hold talks with her despite his hectic re-election campaign.

Just before Aung san Suu Kyi landed at the Dulles airport in Washington Monday, Thein Sein ordered the release of another 514 prisoners, including dozens of political detainees, in an apparent bid to pave the way for the U.S. to further ease sanctions ahead of his trip to attend the U.N. meeting.

Aung San Suu Kyi is also scheduled to attend a high-level meeting organized by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, a day before Thein Sein addresses the General Assembly, reports have said.

Reported by RFA's Burmese service. Written in English by Chris Billing and Parameswaran Ponnudurai.

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Bangladesh should open borders to Rohingyas: #HRW

Source :  Mizzima News
The government of Bangladesh should immediately remove its restrictions on international organizations providing life saving humanitarian aid to the more than 200,000 Rohingya Muslims in Bangladesh, Human Rights Watch said on Thursday. In addition, it should open its borders to Rohingyas seeking to flee Rakhine State, it said.

Bangladeshi Border Guard personnel keep watch at a wharf in Taknaf on June 12, 2012. Border guards turned back boats transporting Rohingya Muslims fleeing violence in Burma, officials said, as the UN refugee agency called for the border to be opened. Photo: AFP

In late July 2012, the Bangladesh government ordered three prominent international aid organizations – Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), Action Contre la Faim (Action Against Hunger), and Muslim Aid – to cease providing assistance to Rohingya living in Cox’s Bazaar and surrounding areas.

The government contends that the presence of aid groups in Cox’s Bazaar encourages Rohingya to come to Bangladesh, and that it cannot afford to host them. The government accused the three aid groups of encouraging the Rohingyas’ flight by providing medical and other assistance. It also raised concerns about criticisms of Bangladesh in the international media. 

However, as a party to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Bangladesh is prohibited from denying those within its borders, including refugees and asylum seekers, access to food and healthcare, among other protections, said HRW.

In a July 28 media interview, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh disavowed any responsibility for the Rohingya, claiming the responsibility was with the Burmese government.

“Bangladesh is already an overpopulated country,” Hasina said. “We cannot bear this burden.” She denied that Rohingya were being forced back to Burma, saying, “It isn’t true, [the border guard force] didn’t force them. They persuaded them that they should go back to their own country, and they went back.” In the same interview, she added the Burma authorities are “creating a congenial atmosphere” and “providing all the [needed] assistance and everything” to the Rohingya.

In June, the Bangladesh foreign minister, Dipu Moni, told a news conference in Dhaka that, “It is not in our interest that new refugees come from Myanmar [Burma].”

The three aid organizations provide water, healthcare, sanitation, and other basic assistance to Rohingya refugees and asylum seekers in Bangladesh. Approximately 30,000 Rohingya who are officially recognized refugees are living in two camps; 40,000 who are unregistered live in a makeshift refugee camp, and the remaining 130,000 live in surrounding areas. All of the settlements are squalid and overcrowded.

Seasoned aid workers have told Human Rights Watch that the conditions in the makeshift camps for Rohingya are among the worst they have seen anywhere in the world.

“Bangladesh authorities are placing the lives of Rohingya refugees at grave risk by forcing aid groups to stop their feeding and health programs,” HRW said. “It is unthinkable that the government would actively attempt to make the terrible conditions faced by Rohingya even worse by stopping aid from reaching them.”

The communal violence in Burma broke out in early June displacing over 100,000 people. United Nations agencies still lack full and unfettered access to all affected areas of Arakan State, said HRW. 

While Bangladesh is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol, customary international law establishes the obligation of governments to respect the principle of nonrefoulement, which holds that refugees should not be forcibly returned to a place where their lives or freedom would be threatened. Bangladesh also is a party to several treaties – including the Convention against Torture, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child – that provide that no one, including refugees and asylum seekers, should be returned to a place where they face a genuine risk of being subjected to torture.

Bangladesh’s lose – lose strategy on the Rohingya

Rohingya women stand in front of their makeshift home in an unregistered Rohingya refugee camp in Teknaf on 17 June 2012. (Reuters)

By MARK FARMANER

Source DVB news

If officials from Bangladesh’s NGO Affairs Bureau and Foreign Ministry were to have a meeting tomorrow about how to deal with the current crisis with the Rohingya, and set the criteria that they wanted to cause maximum damage to Bangladesh’s international reputation, cause maximum suffering for the Rohingya, break international law, cause Bangladeshi citizens to miss out on development opportunities, and be completely ineffective at developing a long term strategy dealing with the root cause of the problem, they wouldn’t have to change a single policy that Bangladesh is already following today.

What is surprising is that despite this policy failing for the past twenty years and beyond, rather than reassessing the policy and changing direction, Bangladesh’s response to the current crisis has been to adopt an even more extreme and hard-line version of its failed policies. Last week’s order to three international aid agencies, MSF, Action Against Hunger and Muslim Aid, to stop proving aid to Rohingya refugees, in the full knowledge of the suffering and possible deaths that such an order will cause, will not solve any of the problems Bangladesh faces with Rohingya refugees.

Rohingya people are not going to Bangladesh because they are drawn by the prospect of luxury refugee camps. Rohingya people flee to Bangladesh because for decades in Burma they have faced severe human rights abuses at the hands of one of the most brutal dictatorships in the world. And more people are fleeing now because the military-backed government, facing the prospect of having its political party wiped out by the National League for Democracy at the next elections, is playing the nationalist card in order to try to build support, and is targeting the Rohingya as an unpopular Muslim ethnic minority.

The root cause of Rohingya refugees arriving in Bangladesh is the persecution they face, and also the long-term refusal of the government to allow international agencies full and free access to assist the Rohingya. Preventing refugees in Bangladesh from receiving aid doesn’t address this problem. Devoting significant military police and security resources to trying to turn back refugees doesn’t solve this problem. What is needed is a political solution.

Bangladesh could win significant international plaudits and favours by allowing Rohingya refugees’ entry to Bangladesh, and negotiating a fully-fledged international aid operation, funded internationally, to assist those refugees. It could use the goodwill created by such a gesture to secure humanitarian and development funding for the whole border region, transforming the lives of local Bangladeshi citizens.  There would be no significant cost to the government of Bangladesh, and there would be significant benefits for Bangladeshi people and the reputation of Bangladesh.

At the same time Bangladesh should begin a diplomatic initiative to tackle the root causes of the problem, which is Burma’s treatment of the Rohingya. It could mobilise support from the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, which includes the governments of Indian and Sri-Lanka, both close to Burma’s military-backed government.  The current high profile of the Rohingya issue gives Bangladesh the opportunity to enlist the support of not just western countries, but a much broader alliance in international forums such as the Human Rights Council and United Nations General Assembly, which can be used to apply pressure on the government of Burma to stop persecution of the Rohingya and reform the laws which render them stateless.

There is no quick fix or easy solution to the refugee crisis or the political problems at its root cause, which makes it all the more important that Bangladesh change policy now to try to find a more moral and humanitarian, and more effective strategy, to address this crisis. Bangladesh has so far followed a lose-lose policy on the Rohingya. It loses, the Rohingya lose. It’s time for a win-win policy.

-Mark Farmaner is Director of Burma Campaign UK.