Tibetans to Sri Lankans, India welcomed all. Why not Rohingya Muslims?

Both China and India may be soft-pedalling Myanmar’s genocide out of geopolitical interests. But that doesn’t explain Delhi’s selective rejection of the region’s most vulnerable refugees

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A Rohingya refugee boy on the way to Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. Photo: Reuters

Debasish Roy Chowdhury

Published: 11:45am, 3 Dec 2017Updated: 11:53am, 3 Dec 2017

The blank stare of Mohammad Hussain speaks of a thousand persecutions.

One afternoon in late September, when the 51-year-old Rohingya imam was visiting an adjoining village in his native Maungdaw district of Myanmar’s Rakhine state, he heard soldiers were heading to his village. He knew right away it was futile to go back to save his family. It was all up to Allah now. Ever since a militant Rohingya group attacked border security posts the previous month, the Myanmese military had hit back with a ruthless “clearance operation”, laying to waste hundreds of Rohingya villages.

So, like more than 600,000 Rohingya before and after him, Hussain fled north to Bangladesh, trekking through the forests for two days to reach Cox’s Bazar district, just across the border. After a couple of months at a refugee camp there, a friend helped him reach New Delhi, the Indian capital, where he now teaches Arabic at a small Rohingya settlement in the city’s outskirts.

Hussain later learnt that two of his seven sons survived the carnage that night. There’s no news of his other sons, his two daughters, or his wife and sister. In what the United Nations is calling a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing” by Myanmar troops, human rights investigators are reporting massacres on a scale not seen since the Rwandan and Bosnian genocides of the 1990s.

Amnesty International has detailed accounts of how soldiers have killed men and boys, raped women, torched Rohingya homes and villages, and burned people to death. Human Rights Watch says most Rohingya women and girls it met at refugee camps had been gang-raped. And those lucky enough to escape the military’s wrath faced landmines, human traffickers, organ harvesters and forced prostitution as they fled.

Kill all, burn all: the Japanese war tactic used on the Rohingya by Myanmar’s military

“Anything might have happened to them,” says Hussain, staring vacantly into space. His voice is strangely calm, only the resigned stillness in his eyes betraying a pain dulled by the endless imaginings of what might have happened. I’m relieved he is not making eye contact, as I struggle to block out the mental images of the possible fates his family met that night. Or after, if they made it out alive.