World Refugee Day was on June 20 when we were reminded that a person gets displaced every two seconds and at the moment there are some 79.5 million refugees in different places around the world.
The tragic refugee situations of places like Palestine, Syria, Afghanistan and, of course, Bangladesh have, it seems, been conveniently forgotten by the world.
Because of the war launched by Russia, the focus of the Western world or richer nations is on the Ukrainian refugees. It is clear to many that the outpouring is because the Ukrainian refugees are mostly white, “like us.”
For people like me who was involved with the Bangladesh refugees in 1971, it is easy to remember how the governments’ attitude towards that genocide was: “It is an internal matter of Pakistan.”
Later, the tune changed to some extent due to reporting of the horrors, and the public opinion and persuasive action of opposition parties in different parliaments, particularly the Labour Party in the UK and the Democratic Party in the US.
Statements such as those by renowned journalists such as John Pilger explained the situation very dramatically:
“The life, or death, of Bangla Desh is the single most important issue the world has had to face since the decision to use nuclear weaponry as a means of political blackmail. It is that, because never before have the world’s poor confronted the world’s rich with such a mighty mirror of Man’s inhumanity.
Usually we in the West, who are rich, can dismiss or rationalize famine, unexpected disaster and even mass extermination by simply noting that the poor, who are characterized by the people of Bangla Desh, are numerous and ought to be pruned. If only, we say, they could organize their own resources and subscribe to decent, Western politics. Surely they are expendable. We even allow ourselves a good snigger at places crying out against odds we cannot comprehend; places like the Congo and the ravaged republic of the Americas. None has followed the Western wisdom of democracy, and so they must suffer. A pity.
Bangla Desh has called our bluff. The people of what was East Pakistan, who represented the majority of the State of Pakistan, who represented the majority of the State of Pakistan, voted to be a democracy and to be led by moderate middle-class Western-styled politicians. Foolishly perhaps, they chose our way in their pursuit of freedom, in spite of problems we have never had to face.
And for this reason alone, they are being exterminated and enslaved in a manner reminiscent of Adolf Hitler, over whom the world went to war. But, of course, he was exterminating Europeans.
We in the West have no intention of going to war over Bangla Desh. Instead, through our elected government, we have contributed what amounts to one week’s survival pocket money to the refugees of Bangla Desh, now petrified in India. India must provide the rest.” (John Pilger in ‘The Testimony of Sixty on the crisis in Bengal’ - Oxfam, October, 1971)
It is unfortunate that many of the current observers of the Rohingya problem today do not understand the history of Muslims in Myanmar or Burma and some people are prepared to believe that the Muslims of Rakhine are actually Bangladeshis. There have, however, been Muslims in Rakhine off and on since the 13th century.
In the late 16th century, Rakhine or Arakan was controlled as part of a Mogul empire. In the 1780s the Burmese conquered Arakan and 30,000 to 40,000 Muslims fled to what is now Cox’s Bazar and were cared for by one “Captain Cox.”
However, it is very clear that since the Burmese gained their independence from the British in 1948, it has been their intent that the Muslims be thrown out of the country. Indeed an Oxfam colleague of mine who was based in Bangladesh from 1976 to 1980 wrote as follows:
“I visited northern Arakan in 1978 with the Burmese Red Cross -- a long journey by road and boat. The area was terribly run down and the local hospital virtually abandoned. An operating table was propped up on bricks. It was smeared with congealed blood. I met the army commander who expressed intense dislike of the Rohingya. ‘We tread on them as you would a snake,’ he said cheerfully.”
It is clear that Bangladesh needs to get more strongly involved with the negotiation for the return of the Rohingya to their homeland but this can only be achieved if the Myanmar government implements the recommendations of the Kofi Annan report and those countries friendly to both Myanmar and Bangladesh such as India and China do not continue to “sit on the fence” but forcefully put pressure on Myanmar.
Julian Francis has been associated with relief and development activities of Bangladesh since the War of Liberation. In 2012, the Government of Bangladesh awarded him the ‘Friends of Liberation War Honour’ in recognition of his work among the refugees in India in 1971 and in 2018 honoured him with full Bangladesh citizenship. Julian has also been honoured with the British award of the OBE for ‘services to development in Bangladesh.’
