The Rohingyas: No Longer Forgotten
Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh.
Within the already oppressive context of Burma's military dictatorship, the Rohingyas, a Muslim minority in western Burma, are systematically discriminated against and oppressed. They are deprived of their citizenship, their movements are severely restricted, and they are subject to forced labour, religious persecution and extortion. At the international level, the plight of the Rohingyas remains largely unknown and ignored. Chris Lewa is the coordinator of The Arakan Project, a human rights organization that has worked for the past seven years to bring their situation to light.
Chris Lewa shares with Inter Pares staff member Rebecca Wolsak part of her story as an activist in the movement for democracy and human rights in Burma.
Dear Rebecca,
I arrived in Thailand in early 1994 intending to backpack around South-East Asia. When I was in Mae Sot on Burma's border, I met an Australian volunteer teaching in a nearby refugee camp and she invited me to spend a week with her. This changed the course of my life.
I ended up volunteering with the Karen Human Rights Group for four years, monitoring human rights violations in Karen State. I soon realized nothing was known about the other borders of Burma. So I started a similar project in India documenting the situation in Chin State, helping to establish the Chin Human Rights Organization. In 1999, I moved to the Bangladesh-Burma border, and I was appalled by the conditions of the Rohingya refugees. The need to address this forgotten issue was so great that I have worked with Rohingyas ever since.
I set up a field team that includes refugees who now report regularly on the human rights situation in northern Arakan State and on the conditions of the refugees in Bangladesh. I engage in advocacy activities at the international level to address these issues.
In 2002, I was selected to attend the Refugee Summer Course at York University in Toronto. I took this opportunity to visit Chin and Karen refugees who had resettled in Ottawa. They introduced me to Inter Pares who then invited me to speak at a Burma conference. Since 2003, the Arakan Project has received annual financial support from Inter Pares. We are so grateful. The Rohingyas attract little interest from donors and, without this assistance, we would not be able to continue our research and advocacy work. Inter Pares also arranged my return to Canada in 2006 to present at two migration conferences in Toronto and to brief the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, staff at Citizenship and Immigration, and the Canada-based Burma Working Group.
We have achieved some successes in raising awareness of the situation of Rohingya refugees. For example, in Bangladesh we managed to stop the forced repatriation of thousands of refugees in 2003 and, recently, we successfully lobbied six UN Special Rapporteurs to release a joint statement denouncing the oppression and discrimination experienced by the Rohingyas in Burma.
Chris Lewa
Coordinator, The Arakan Project
Canada was the first and continues to be one of the few countries to resettle Rohingya refugees from the Bangladesh camps, which host 20,000. There are an estimated 100,000-200,000 more refugees outside the camps without access to assistance and protection. In the fall of 2006, The Arakan Project facilitated the creation of a documentary on the Rohingyas' situation by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, which can be viewed at 
www.abc.net.au/foreign/content/2007/s1838868.htm.
| Reviewed November 6, 2007 |  |
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