A Long History of Injustice Ignored: Rohingya – The Forgotten People of Our Time

An often-practiced devious way to grab someone‟s land is to deny his right to that property. Nothing could be more horrific when a government itself gets into such a criminal practice. The most glaring example of such a crime can be seen in the practices of the regimes that have ruled Burma (now Myanmar) since its independence from Britain in 1948 (esp. since 1962 when Gen. Ne Win came to power). In our times, one can hardly find a regime that has been so atrocious, so inhuman and so barbarous in its denial of basic human rights to a people that trace their origin to the land for nearly a millennium. [1] The victims are the Rohingya Muslims living in the Arakan (now Rakhine) state. They have become the forgotten people of our time. The Burma Citizenship Law of 1982 has reduced them to the status of Stateless.

The ruling junta in Myanmar do not want to know and let others know that the Rohingyas have a long history, a language, a heritage, a culture and a tradition of their own that they had built up in the Arakan through their long history of existence there. Through their criminal propaganda – to garner support among the Buddhist majority – they have been feeding so much misinformation against the Rohingya that even Joseph Goebbles must be amazed in his grave! The level of disinformation has reached such an alarming level that if you were to talk with a Burmese Buddhist, he/she would say that the Rohingyas are foreigners in Arakan; they don‟t belong to Burma; they belong to Bangladesh.[2] Such allegations are unfounded. Distinguished scholar Abdul Karim writes, “In fact the forefathers of Rohingyas had entered into Arakan from time immemorial.