There is a lot of talk about refugees in Southeast Asia. Military Burma hunts Rohingya minorities ... Real refugee alert or convenient charges?
Myanmar, for friends Burma. When the military changed the name to represent everyone and not just the Burma, it was just political strategy. Everyone kept calling her the old fashioned way.
At the bottom of Burma everything changes, but everything remains the same. The first rangoon today is called Yangon. There are still the embassies but officially the capital is Naypyidaw, 400 km to the north.
Under its mint green roofs, Burma seems to remain eternal. His cars with the steering wheel and the direction of travel to the right; mosquitoes that carry dengue; rickshaws that bring people; the men who wear longyis, the traditional burma skirt ... everything is still. Yet something moves. It has always moved in reality.
The country, under military control of the pseudo-communist regime, is a rib of China. The Tatmadaw (the armed forces) is everywhere, not only in power. Just take an extra-urban bus to start counting check points. In the hot areas of the guerrillas in the Shan State they are continuous, but even in quiet areas the vigilance is very strong. Feeling stalked in Burma is not a paranoia. The Services and the Army are omnipresent. Discrete but omnipresent.
The area to the southwest towards Thailand instead makes history to itself and is inaccessible to foreigners. The open war between the regular army and the Karen National Liberation Army is only silenced by the media, but it has reaped thousands of victims for years. That of the Karen is only the most conspicuous among the ethnic wrongs of Burma, torn by rivalries of peoples subjugated to the Burma majority since independence.
The refugee problem is a constant throughout the country's history. It is part of national culture. Like the belet, the reddish dough is the main cause of cancer and boxes; like the thanaka, the yellow cream used as a refreshing drink by women. The refugees are part of this corner of the world and for half a century nobody has talked about it.
Silence on the Karen and silence on the Shan people because they considered issues within the nation. Silence also on the Rohingya, an Islamic minority of the Rakhine State.
The sublime bad luck of Rohingya is to be a minority by definition. Minority in contrast to the Burmese Buddhists but also mistreated minority in the Islamic Bangladesh from which they originally came, as evidence of the fact that religion is often only the screen of politics. Forced to flee they end up between Herod and Pilate, tossed about in the Indian Ocean between Malaysia and Indonesia.
By magic, suddenly, the problem reappears. Just in conjunction with the exodus alarm in the Mediterranean, Myanmar, Indonesia and Malaysia end up in the eye of the storm for a new refugee issue.
The Nobel Peace Prize dance begins. The Dalai Lama accuses Aung San Suu Kyi of not doing enough to defend human dignity and respect for minorities.
Does the Buddhist Dalai Lama, a world reference in Tibetan independence, speak against the burma Buddhists to defend Muslims? One would think that it is not teetotal ...
Reading over the lines we understand the anticinese logic. China is the first sponsor (in addition to North Korea) of the military in power in Burma. His words come to blackberry so that the mother-in-law intends.
Vice versa Aung San Suu Kyi is silent. The Hillary Clinton of the tropics, a woman image of the pink style in Dem style, avoids criticizing the Yangon government in the general embarrassment. Precisely her, imprisoned as Mandela and symbol of the democratic revenge on all the military juntas of the world?
Politics works wonders, nothing to say.
Collective hypocrisy becomes a joke. The Rohingya refugees who are not interested in anyone end up being an instrument of political goals. Everyone uses them for something:
The Dalai Lama to attack the Burmese and therefore their lante sue China. The democratic West to raise the volume on humanitarian alarms, always comfortable in an ideological key Aung San Suu Kyi, in silence, to avoid irritating the once-military servicemen, now accomplices in an obviously obvious international spotlight.
All this behind ordinary people, not just refugees. Behind those slow rhythms of a people that does not know jeans and lives chewing belet, under the mint-colored roofs of British colonial heritage.
All this while in Yangon, as every evening, the mosquitoes come to squadrons with the music of Apocalypse Now.
It is one of the constants of Myanmar, the DDR of Southeast Asia that is dozing but continues to live. With its slow rhythms, shocked from time to time by Chinese pressure and some dead too.
(PHOTO: author / Tatmadaw)
