Myanmar's Rohingya: 'protected' but not represented

Days of euphoria in Myanmar about a landslide election win for the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) have temporarily eclipsed the country’s continuing human rights problems.

Many NLD supporters see the election as a key step on a long and difficult journey to full-fledged democracy, but the Rohingya -- a deeply maligned Muslim minority -- have only been promised "protection" rather than a reinstatement of their rights as citizens.

As millions went to the polls on Sunday to cast their ballot in the country’s freest general election in decades, tens of thousands of Rohingya were confined to a swathe of land in coastal Rakhine state in displacement camps.

The vast majority were unable to vote because earlier this year they were stripped of the identity cards that gave them suffrage.

The move was a response to demands from ultranationalist Buddhists to exclude the minority from the election, and followed repeated bouts of mob violence targeting the Rohingya and other Muslims.

In 2012, when riots hit the historic township of Mrauk U in northwest Myanmar, Aung Ko Ko -- an interfaith campaigner who is a Muslim but not a Rohingya -- says he began getting begging calls from Rohingya hoping he might be able to do something to stop the Buddhist mobs.

Aung Ko Ko -- an interfaith campaigner who is a Muslim but not a Rohingya – says that when riots hit the historic northwestern township of Mrauk U in 2012, he began receiving pleas from Rohingya hoping he might be able to do something to stop the Buddhist mobs.

The religious fanatics had entered villages in the area armed with crude weapons and were threatening to burn people's homes, he said, just as they had in Sittwe to the south months earlier.

“I didn’t have any idea of how I could help,” he told Anadolu Agency late Thursday, as official results for the election continued trickling in, showing that the NLD -- the party of Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi -- had crushed its military-backed rivals.

The election commission announced Friday that the party had won a "supermajority" of parliamentary seats, securing more than the 329 seats that would allow it to elect a president without help from other parties.

Whether an NLD government will spell the end of riots that have claimed hundreds of lives in Mrauk U, Sittwe and elsewhere is far less certain than the party's resounding victory.

Suu Kyi said in a BBC interview Tuesday that she would “protect” Muslims and pledged to prosecute people who inflame hatred, but her years of silence on the plight of the Rohingya in the face of growing pressure to speak out has left many doubting she is willing or able to help.

An NLD government may be committed to ending ethnic conflict targeting Muslims generally, said Aung Ko Ko, but on the Rohingya specifically there is less grounds for hope.

“The NLD’s position on the Rohingya is not so different from the current government,” he said.

The present regime -- which will remain in power until the new government is formed next year -- officially regards the Rohingya as illegal interlopers from Bangladesh.

With their distinct language and often darker skin, the minority is almost totally friendless in Myanmar, and there is little public support for changing a 1982 law that stripped most of them of citizenship.

A recent report by lawyers from Yale Law School concluded that there was "strong evidence" that genocide is being committed against the group, who face restrictions on movement, healthcare, education and jobs and have been fleeing the country in their tens of thousands on dangerous sea voyages.

Aung Ko Ko, who now runs an organization promoting interfaith harmony, said a key test of whether the NLD can offer the Rohingya any hope depends on whether or not they try to revise the citizenship law.

"Can they do that? I don’t think so,” he said.