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Myanmar's junta stepped into the deepening Rohingya crisis on Friday, denying any of the Muslim boat people washing up in Thailand, India and Indonesia were from its soil, but promising to take unspecified "measures".
Following are some facts about the Rohingya people, 550 of whom are feared to have drowned in the last two months after being towed out to sea by the Thai military and set adrift in rickety wooden boats:
-- The Rohingya are a Muslim minority in predominantly Buddhist Myanmar, formerly Burma. The military government does not recognise them as one of the country's around 130 ethnic minorities.
-- Most Rohingya come from Rakhine State, also known as Arakan State, in northwest Myanmar, abutting the border with Bangladesh.
In a 2004 report, Amnesty International said there were between 700,000 and 1.5 million Muslims in Rakine, most of them Rohingya.
-- Their roots are disputed and unclear, although Rohingya groups in exile trace their ancestry back as far as 9th century Arab merchants and settlers.
Such groups deny a prevailing Burmese version of history which suggests they descend from Bengali-speaking Muslim labourers brought in by Britain after it annexed the region as a province of British India in the 1820s.
-- When Burma won independence in 1948, the Bengali-speaking Muslim population near the border exceeded that of the Buddhists, leading to secessionist and political tensions.
This translated into harassment following the 1962 coup that has led to nearly five decades of military rule by the ethnic Burman majority. Thousands fled to Bangladesh to escape a 1978 military census of the Rohingya called "Operation Dragon".
-- In 1991, another wave of Rohingya fled to Bangladesh, where the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) says more than 200,000 now live a perilous, stateless existence.
The Bangladeshi government runs two camps funded by the UNHCR, but only 28,000 people are officially recognised.
-- Rohingya in northwest Myanmar are restricted from travelling inside the country, and those in Bangladesh have little prospect of ever returning home.
As a result, thousands have fled to try to start new lives, chancing their luck at sea in wooden boats.
Many are aiming for Malaysia, home to 14,300 officially registered Rohingya. Saudi Arabia also has a sizeable Rohingya population.
-- The Rohingya have seldom hit the headlines. One exception was in April 2004, when a group armed with axes and knives burst into the Myanmar embassy in Kuala Lumpur, attacked embassy officials and set fire to the building.
(Sources: Reuters News, Arakan Rohingya National Organisation, Amnesty International, UNHCR)
(Additional reporting by Aung Hla Tun in Yangon; Writing by Ed Cropley; Editing by Darren Schuettler)
KYOTO: For Japan, the crowning of Hiromu Nonaka as its top leader could have been as significant as America's election of its first black president.
Despite being the descendant of a feudal class of outcasts who are known as buraku and still face social discrimination, Nonaka had dexterously occupied top posts in the governing party and acted as the government's No. 2. The next logical step, by 2001, was to become prime minister. Allies urged him on.
But not everyone inside the party was ready for a leader of buraku origin. At least one, Taro Aso, the current prime minister, made his views clear to his closest associates in a closed-door meeting. "Are we really going to let those people take over the leadership of Japan?" Aso said, according to Hisaoki Kamei, a politician who attended the meeting.
Kamei said he remembered thinking at the time that "it was inappropriate to say such a thing." But he and the others in the room let the matter drop, he said, adding, "We never imagined that the remark would leak outside."
But it did, spreading rapidly among the nation's political and buraku circles. And more recently, as Aso became prime minister just weeks before Barack Obama's victory, the comment has become a touchstone for many buraku.
How far have they come since Japan began carrying out affirmative action policies for the buraku four decades ago in a mirror of the American civil rights movement? If the United States, the yardstick for Japan, could elect a black president, could there be a buraku prime minister here?
But the questions were not raised in the society at large. The topic of the buraku remains Japan's biggest taboo, rarely raised in private conversations and virtually ignored by the media.
The buraku, who are ethnically indistinguishable from other Japanese, are descendants of Japanese who, according to Buddhist beliefs, performed tasks considered unclean. As slaughterers, undertakers, executioners and town guards, they were called "eta," meaning "defiled mass," or "hinin," meaning "nonhuman." Required to wear telltale clothing, they were segregated into their own neighborhoods.
The oldest buraku neighborhoods are believed to be in Kyoto, the ancient capital, and date back a millennium. That those neighborhoods survive to this day and that the outcasts' descendants are still subject to prejudice speak both to Japan's obsession with its past and its inability to overcome it.
In Japan, every person has a family register that is kept in local town halls and that, with some extrapolation, reveals ancestral birthplaces. Families and companies widely checked birthplaces to ferret out buraku among potential hires or marriage partners until a generation ago, though the practice has declined greatly, especially among the young.
The buraku were officially liberated in 1871, just a few years after the 13th Amendment abolished slavery in the United States. But as the buraku's living standards and education levels stayed below national averages, the Japanese government, under pressure from buraku liberation groups, passed a special-measures law to improve the buraku's condition in 1969. By the time the law expired in 2002, Japan had reportedly spent about $175 billion on affirmative action programs.
Fumie Tanaka, now 39, was born just as the special-measures law for the buraku went into effect. She grew up in the Osaka ward of Nishinari, one of the 48 neighborhoods that were officially designated as buraku areas.
At her neighborhood school, the children began learning about discrimination against the buraku early on. The thinking in Osaka was to confront discrimination head on: The problem lay not with the buraku but with those who harbored prejudice.
Instead of hiding their roots, children were encouraged to "come out," sometimes by wearing "buraku" sashes, a practice that Osaka discontinued early this decade but that survives in the countryside.
Sheltered in this environment, Tanaka encountered discrimination only when she began going to high school in another ward. One time, while she was visiting a friend's house, the grandparents invited Tanaka to stay for lunch.
"The atmosphere was pleasant in the beginning, but then they asked me where I lived," Tanaka said. "When I told them, the grandfather put down his chopsticks right away and went upstairs."
A generation ago, most buraku married other buraku. But by the early 1990s, when Tanaka met her future husband, who is not a buraku, marriages to outsiders were becoming more common.
"The situation has improved over all," said Takeshi Kitano, chief of the human rights division at the Osaka prefectural government. "But there are problems left."
In Osaka's 48 buraku neighborhoods - ranging from 10 to 1,000 households each - welfare recipient rates remain higher than the Osaka average. Educational attainment still lags behind, though not by the wide margins of the past.
What's more, the fruits of the affirmative action policies have produced what is now considered the areas' most pressing problem: depopulation. The younger buraku, with better education, jobs and opportunities, are moving out. Outsiders, who do not want to be mistaken for buraku, are reluctant to move in.
By contrast, Tokyo decided against designating its buraku neighborhoods. It discreetly helped buraku households, no matter where they lived, and industries traditionally dominated by buraku groups. The emphasis was on assimilation.
Over time, the thinking went, it would become impossible to discriminate as people's memory of the buraku areas' borders became fuzzier. But the flip side is that the policy effectively pushed people with buraku roots into hiding.
In one of the oldest buraku neighborhoods, just north of central Tokyo, nothing differentiates the landscape from other middle-class areas in the city. Now newcomers outnumber the old-timers. The old-timers, who all know one another, live in fear that their roots will be discovered, said a 76-year-old woman who spoke on the condition that neither she nor her neighborhood be identified.
"Me, too, I belong to those who want to hide," she said. "I'm also running away."
One of the rare politicians who never hid his buraku roots was Nonaka, who in 2001 was considered a leading contender to become president of the Liberal Democratic Party and prime minister.
Now 83, he was born to a buraku family from a village near Kyoto. On his way home at the end of World War II, he considered disappearing so that he would be declared dead, he once wrote. With the evidence of his buraku roots expunged, he thought he could remake himself in another part of Japan.
But Nonaka eventually entered politics and, known for his intelligence, rose quickly. By 2001, he was in a position to aim for the post of prime minister but had made up his mind not to seek the job.
Although he had never hidden his roots, he feared that becoming No. 1 would draw a harsh spotlight on them. Already, the increasing attention had hurt his wife, who is not from a buraku family, and his daughter.
"After my wife's relatives first found out, the way we interacted changed as they became cooler," Nonaka said in an interview in his office in Kyoto. "The same thing happened with my son-in-law. So, in that sense, I made my family suffer considerably."
But rivals worried nonetheless. One of them was Aso, now 68, who was the epitome of Japan's ruling elite: the grandson of a former prime minister and the heir to a family conglomerate.
Inside the Liberal Democratic Party, some politicians labeled some of Nonaka's closest allies as fellow buraku who were hiding their past.
"We all said those kinds of things," recalled Yozo Ishikawa, 83, a retired lawmaker who was allied with Aso.
"That guy's like this," Ishikawa said, lowering his voice and holding up four fingers of his right hand without the thumb, a derogatory gesture indicating a four-legged animal and referring to the buraku.
And so, at the closed-door meeting in 2001, Aso made the comment about "those people" in a "considerably loud voice," recalled Kamei, the politician who attended the meeting. Kamei, now 69, had known Aso since their elementary school days and was one of his biggest backers.
Aso's comment would have stayed inside the room had a political reporter not been eavesdropping at the door - a common practice in Japan. But because of the taboo surrounding the topic of the buraku, the comment was never widely reported.
Two years later, just before retiring, Nonaka confronted Aso in front of dozens of the party's top leaders, saying he would "never forgive" him for the comment. Aso remained silent, according to several people who were there.
It was only in 2005, when an opposition politician directly questioned Aso about the remark in Parliament, that Aso asserted, "I've absolutely never made such a comment."
The prime minister's office declined a request for an interview with Aso. A spokesman, Osamu Sakashita, referred instead to Aso's remarks in Parliament.
In the end, Nonaka's decision not to run in 2001 helped a dark horse named Junichiro Koizumi become prime minister. Asked whether a Japanese Obama was now possible, Nonaka said, "Well, I don't know."
That was also the question asked by many people of buraku origin recently as they wavered between pessimism and hope.
"Wow, a black president," said Yukari Asai, 45, one of the two sisters who owns the New Naniwa restaurant in the Osaka ward of Naniwa, Japan's biggest buraku neighborhood.
"If a person's brilliant, a person's brilliant," she said, reflecting on Obama's election. It doesn't matter whether it's a black person or white person."
After serving a bowl of udon noodles with pieces of fried beef intestine, a specialty of buraku restaurants, Asai sounded doubtful that a politician of buraku origin could become prime minister.
"Impossible," she said. "Probably impossible."
In Kyoto, some had not forgotten Aso's comment.
"That someone like that could rise all the way to becoming prime minister says a lot about the situation in Japan now," said Kenichi Kadooka, 49, a professor of English at Ryukoku University who is from a buraku family.
Still, Kadooka had not let his anger dim his hopes for a future buraku leader of Japan.
"It's definitely possible," he said. "If he's an excellent person, it's just ridiculous to say he can't become prime minister because he just happened to be born a buraku."
The Army says it has come a long way since minority recruits were weeded out, but has Prince Harry's 'Paki' remark uncovered a less palatable truth?
January 13
The Independent
Photo: Getty Images, The Independent
They were known as "D Factor personnel". For 20 years, the British Army restricted the number of ethnic minority recruits to its ranks by instructing its medical officers to use the secret designation to single out would-be soldiers with "Asiatic or negroid features".
It was a policy which might have belonged to the 19th century or the First World War, but in reality it only ended in 1977 when medical examiners were told to stop classifying recruits according to physical characteristics which included looking like "Chinamen, Maltese or even swarthy Frenchmen".
Racial prejudice blighted the achievements of Second Lieutenant Walter Tull, who volunteered for the British Army a week after the declaration of war in 1914 and was recommended for the Military Cross by his superiors for his "gallantry and coolness under fire". The son of a former slave in Barbados, 2nd Lt Tull never received his award because military law forbade "any negro or person of colour" being commissioned and the medal seemed a step too far.
Ministry of Defence (MoD) officials have been at pains to underline that the armed services have come a long way in stamping out racism and increasing recruitment of members of the ethnic minorities. But as the row over Prince Harry's use of racist language to describe a Pakistani comrade continued yesterday, new figures revealed the problems the armed forces are facing in retaining black and Asian soldiers.
Data obtained by The Independent shows that the Army is losing ethnic minority recruits nearly 50 per cent faster than the rest of the services. In 2007, the last year for which complete figures are available, the Army lost 6.3 per cent of its black and Asian soldiers, compared to an average of 4.5 per cent.
The latest monthly figures show that the outflow of ethnic minority personnel across all services has risen to 5.2 per cent of all recruits.
One Whitehall defence source said: "Ethnic minority soldiers leaving the forces at a faster rate than others is not the direction we want to be heading in. There has been a big push in recruiting from our black and Asian communities and currently we have the lowest number of people leaving for four years. But it does not look good if we cannot persuade our minority recruits to stay."
Military chiefs can point with some justification to success in recruiting from the minorities. The proportion of non-white personnel in the Army, the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force has risen from 3.5 per cent in 2005 to 6.3 per cent last year. The Army now has 9 per cent of its intake from minorities – comfortably above its target of 5 per cent. The Navy and the Air Force lag behind with 2.7 per cent and 2.3 per cent respectively.
But critics, including the House of Commons Defence Committee, point out that about 60 per cent of minority recruits come from Commonwealth countries rather than Britain's own ethnic communities. The MoD said figures showing the number of British minority personnel are not produced.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission said yesterday that it has "concerns" about the accuracy of the ethnic monitoring data produced by the armed forces and would be raising the issue of Prince Harry's remarks with senior military staff.
Despite success in recruiting non-white personnel to the lower ranks, few make it into the upper echelons of the services. Just 2.5 per cent of officers above the rank of lieutenant colonel or equivalent are from ethnic minorities, falling to 1.5 per cent in the Navy. However, the highest ranking ethnic minority officer in the forces is in the Navy. Admiral Amjad Hussain, who arrived in Britain from northern Pakistan at the age of three, was promoted to become the first non-white admiral in 2006.
Senior officers admitted that the damage caused by Prince Harry referring to Lieutenant Ahmed Raza Khan as "our little Paki friend" in a video diary shot while training at Sandhurst in 2006 would have a negative impact on ethnic minority recruiting. Colonel Paul Farrar, the Army's deputy head of recruiting, described the use of the term as "unacceptable". He said: "None of this helps the Army and whatever we do to try to encourage people from diverse backgrounds to join. I haven't seen the full context of what [Prince Harry] said, but any sort of throwaway line of this nature is to be regretted."
The controversy showed no sign of abating yesterday. Gordon Brown said that the prince's "genuine" apology should be accepted, but Keith Vaz, one of Britain's few Asian MPs, said: "What is important is, does it reveal a wider culture in the Army where words of this kind are acceptable?"
For its part, the MoD said: "Bullying and racism are not endemic in the armed forces and there are robust procedures for dealing with all forms of unacceptable behaviour."
Blogs Views from both sides
From military blogs
*Service people often use nicknames and pet names without meaning offence, it's all part of the comradeship. There are far more important issues going on than bothering about remarks made ages ago. rod-gearing
"Paki" is used all the time by racist scum, with venom. What the press are manipulating is the context, knowing full well that the military are merciless in taking the piss out of each other by exploiting individual differences. The majority of free-thinking people will recognise it for what it is. Dallas
*Brit is fine. Taff is OK. Jock is acceptable. Paddy is used quite often. We use these when addressing these people to their faces, more often than not they are our friends. So just what is racist?? SRENNAPS
From Asian blogs
*For years the term "Paki" was hurled at me in the street. This was meant as a racist and hurtful term. So, all of you saying that it is harmless name calling, think again. M Hussain
*An apology through a third person is unacceptable, so if he really is sorry we wait to see if he is man enough to own up to it. If not, then we know him better. Raheel
*If this was any other day they would be saying we are being PC about it etc. But, as the genocide in Gaza takes place they want to divert our attention, it's not going to work!!! Raja
HVG
In countries that have experienced regime changes, an economic crisis could give birth to a third wave of nationalism. The middle classes could find themselves facing an existential threat. People who were winners until now will lose out. Modernisers, those who urge the country in the direction of Europe, people who work in high-tech professions and those who have taken out loans in Swiss franks - they could all lose their jobs, their savings and their networks of contacts.
In 1989, central and eastern
New histories were written: stories in which Hungarians, Romanians, Croats, Serbs, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles and Ukrainians had each suffered unique and terrible injustices. New states, symbols, anthems and uniforms were created. All this was drawn from a deep well of history, yet it was still new. Among the south Slavs, this new history was written in blood.
This first wave of nationalism died out in the mid-1990s. It was replaced by a kind of dual promise: on the one hand the promise of Europeanisation, of joining NATO and the European Union, and on the other, by the Left's promise that the security of the earlier Socialist period could be restored. Calm down, sit down and talk, leave the minorities alone, stop the Jew-baiting - otherwise you can't join the EU - this was the message of
In the new millennium, when it became clear to central Europeans that NATO and EU membership was a certainty, the promise lost its power, leading to anger about the efforts required to achieve the goal. A struggle began for the ownership and control of political and economic life and the media in these countries. Nationalists and liberals, modernisers and anti-modernisers, pro-Europeans and eurosceptics entered into a bloody conflict. All this coincided with the strong nationalist and Christian fundamentalist wave that hit
A new, ethnic nationalist wave was launched, which peaked in
But this trend seemed to correct itself.
But maybe not. At a recent meeting of Slovak and Hungarian intellectuals, Peter Tolgyessy and Laszlo Szigeti from
My concern is the nationalist "third wave." This wave will emerge from the economic crisis. Now, it is the middle class that emerged after the regime change which is endangered.
Disappointed forint nationalists, zloty nationalists, Czech crown nationalists who are eurosceptic but also claim to be western European are raising national flags in
| | |
| , Voice of America |
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| US President-elect Barack Obama |
And Europe's ethnic minorities, on the streets or in the corridors of power, began asking the question - could it happen here.
Baroness Patricia Scotland, Britain's attorney general, says the U.S. election was a great day for democracy and showed people of all ethnic backgrounds that even the highest aspirations are possible to achieve.
"He has demonstrated it is possible if you have got the talent, if you have got the energy, the courage, if you have got the determination, if you have the ability and the passion all things are possible and it does not really matter the color that you come in or the shape or the size or the religious or sexual orientation," she said. "That is really powerful."
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| Baroness Scotland |
"Absolutely. I have to be very conscious that I am the first woman attorney general in 700 years," she said. "If you were to ask someone - is it likely that the United Kingdom would have a woman as attorney general after having waited 700 years you might think some people would say - not that likely. It is likely that the first woman to be made attorney general is likely to be a black woman - well, I think even less likely. So, I think change is possible - absolutely."
Britain has a rich mix of ethnic communities, often from former British colonies. They come from the Caribbean, Africa, South Asia and that mix is celebrated every year at London's Notting Hill Carnival with music, dance and ethnic food.
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| Blacks in London are part of the rich mix of ethnic communities |
Their history may be different, but the process of fully integrating can remain a difficult one.
France has a large immigrant population - predominantly Arabs and Africans - estimated at between 10 to 15 percent of the overall population of more than 60 million. The Paris neighborhood of Barbes has a rich ethnic mix, and its people have mixed views about being able to replicate an Obama-style victory.
"I do not think we will have a black president elected here with all the racism in France; I do not think it could happen here," said one man.
"Given the conditions and the social situation here in France, I think that if it happened it would simply be a miracle," one woman said.
"You see the French have understood that why not? I am convinced that the French have understood that from now on they have to make room for black people," one man added.
France prides itself on its model of citizenship with an emphasis on being French without reference to race, religion or national origin.
But minorities often feel left out and complain about the lack of opportunities, says Louis-Georges Tin, spokesman for the Representative Council of Black Associations.
"France keeps on maintaining the philosophical principles of equality but, in practice, things are very different," he said. "We know, for example, that it is five times more difficult to have a job if you are black or of Arab origin."
Change has to go much further say minority rights activists. George Pau Langevin agrees. She is the only black member of mainland France in the National Assembly.
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| George Pau Langevin |
Back in London in the ethnically-mixed neighborhood of Brixton people also wonder if and when the kind of change that brought Barack Obama to power in America, might come here.
"Most definitely, most definitely," said one man. "If we have a black candidate that want to reach and can get there on merit, I support that, I endorse that."
"You will probably see after the whole Obama thing, you will see a few people get to higher positions who are of color, but whether it will be that high up? In this country, I think it would take another 15 years probably," a woman added.
"Yes, we can," chanted Barack Obama supporters in America - the question is - will Europe follow and when.
