Posts Tagged ‘refugees’
How’s Burma/Myanmar doing?
Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh
As an impoverished elder I only get to travel though reading, and it’s also safer. Currently I’ve been re-reading Thant Myint-U’s The hidden history of Burma: race, capitalism and the crisis of democracy in the 21st century, which I first read in 2021, and now I’m reading it again for the first time, if you know what I mean. I vaguely recall the place being something of a hot mess, with the very distinguished author ending on a hopeful ‘things can only get better’ note. It was all about generals ruling things – never a good sign – and a worry about China – always a bad sign. Still, the author was optimistic, because… why not?
I must say my renewed interest in the situation there is likely to do with the book Escape from Manus by the Burmese Rohingyan refugee Jaivet Ealom. I’m interested in finding out how thing are going, genocidally, for these Moslem people in the south-west coastal region of that predominantly Buddhist country. I’m not hopeful.
So, before we get to the Rohingyas, and the Arakanese (it’s quite confusing, and Arakan is now called Rakhine, bordered by the Arakan mountains to the east), Burma in general still seems a mess, and as far as I’m aware it’s quite an artificial country – but aren’t they all? Who created the borders of the sub-Saharan African countries? Of Afghanistan, with its Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks and such? Or the Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen of Iraq?
But getting back to the topic – Burma or Myanmar? They’re both quite ancient terms, used more or less interchangeably, perhaps within different contexts, but Myanmar recently has been associated with the stink of the military dictatorship, which has continually suppressed democratic movements, and even governments, so I prefer to follow Thant Myint-U’s lead in calling it Burma. Whatever, with a population around twice that of Australia, it continues to be the least developed country in the region. It was a British colony from the early-mid 19th century, and attained independence in 1948. I would say that, before British colonisation, it wasn’t so much a country, in our modern sense, as a region, containing many ethnic, language and religious cultures, as was Australia and the Americas before the arrival of the palefaces.
Anyway, since 1948, there has been very little in the way of peace and tranquility in the region/country, and the military under a series of blokes has been notoriously dominant in its politics. This no doubt has much to do with the near-impossibility of moulding together such a congeries of peoples without a firm, manly and generally oppressive hand – or so the military think. Which brings me to the ups and downs of its most well-known citizen, the now 80-year-old Aung San Suu Kyi, currently serving an interminable sentence, apparently under house arrest for the time being, but things can always change at the whim of the military. Her global reputation has been tarnished in recent decades due to her attitude towards the Rohingya people, whom she refuses to recognise as Rohingya, or as a real Burmese ethnicity. It all seems to be about Buddhist-Islamic tensions. Sadly, her oddly inhumane response to this issue has lost her quite a few supporters in the west, but her treatment at the hands of the military, which continues to undermine democratic movements – the latest coup occurring in 2021 – has been unremittingly harsh. From Wikipedia:
According to reports published on Democratic Voice of Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi was moved to an undisclosed location from house arrest around October 2025. In December 2025, Aung San Suu Kyi’s son, Kim Aris, stated that nobody had heard from Aung directly since 2023, only being given second-hand information from the junta. As a result, he stated that he feared that she was dead.
On 17 April 2026, Aung San Suu Kyi’s sentence was reduced to 22.5 years as part of a general wave of amnesties and commutations by Min Aung Hlaing’s Union Government of Myanmar during Thingyan [Burmese New Year]. On 30 April, the military government reduced her sentence by one-sixth and commuted it to house arrest; she will continue to serve the remaining 18 years and 9 months of her sentence at a designated residence. A photo of her was also broadcast by state media for the first time in years.
Not that a photo proves anything. However, a tiny commutation of such a ridiculous sentence for an 80-year-old winner of the Nobel Peace Prize proves a great deal about Burma’s current regime.
Burma is a country of serious and widespread poverty, and income inequality due to successive corrupt military governments, and going back to the days of the British Empire. You could, of course, say that it’s more a region than a country, largely created by the British, but then all countries are human inventions, something we forget, what with all the palaver about passports and ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ immigrants, and sovereignty and the like.
Today, Burma is fake-democratic, as an election held earlier this year was won by the Union Solidarity and Development Party, a front for the all powerful and all corrupt military (heavily backed by China), which had seized power four years before, sending 3-4 million people packing, both within and outside its borders. It’s a terrible mess, in which scum has risen to the top and poverty and despair abounds.
And what about the Rohingyas? A huge proportion of them are now in Bangladeshi refugee camps, in flimsy makeshift dwellings subjected to powerful monsoon storms, though some half a million remain in Burma, where they have no status whatsoever. Many try to escape by sea, to parts unknown, to escape the violence visited upon them by the Buddhist majority. And in general the region – I mean the whole of Burma/Myanmar – has become so benighted and dangerous that many international aid organisations have given up on it.
References
Thant Myint-U, The hidden history of Burma: race, capitalism and the crisis of democracy in the 21st century, 2019
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myanmar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aung_San_Suu_Kyi
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-31/myanmar-election-won-by-military-backed-usdp-party/106290376
https://www.unrefugees.org/news/rohingya-refugee-crisis-explained/
sovereign borders and all that
I’m reading Jaivet Elom’s book Escape from Manus with great interest as well as a kind of horror and shame, as a ‘naturalised’ Australian who knew about the treatment of asylum seekers or ‘boat people’ as they were often called, and their treatment at the hands of various Australian governments, beginning with that of Johnny Howard, and his more or less triumphant, ‘we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come’. I compare this to a wounded or crippled individual who lies collapsed on my front lawn, and me going out and shushing her away, with ‘I will decide who enters my property and the state of health in which they do so.’
Nobody wants to be a refugee, obviously, but Palestinians, Kurds, Congolese, Hazaras, Uyghurs and Rohingyas, to name a few, often find themselves without other options. Jaivet Elom is a Rohingya, a Moslem ethnic group that has now moved, or been moved, more or less holus-bolus from north-western Burma to Bangladesh after decades of being treated like absolute shit by the predominantly Buddhist Burmese people and government, for reasons unknown to me. I first learned about their plight some years ago on reading Thant Myint-U’s The Hidden History of Burma (the author rejected the name ‘Myanmar’, because of its association with the brutal military takeover of that multi-ethnic state), and Elom’s account only reinforces my sense of shock and outrage at their treatment.
So now I’ve read the whole of Elom’s unputdownable book, my book of the year so far, and I can hardly imagine any work that will inspire me more. It tells me that with enough intelligence, perseverance, support and luck, an occasional individual can survive and escape even the worst conditions a hostile state can impose on them. If only I could keep Johnny Howard, Tony Abbott, Kevin Rudd, Scott ‘Skummo’ Morrison, Peter Dutton and other gate-keepers and their minions under lock and key until they have read, aloud, every word of this book.
So has Australia improved or softened its policies towards refugees in any way over the past few years? Have its decision-makers felt any embarrassment or shame about Elom’s revelations? Of course there are those who argue that the harsh policies of successive Australian governments have been effective in stopping the boats. Yes, this is true, treating people like lumps of shit that need to be flushed down the toilet will tend to make other people who hear about it want to avoid you. It’s hardly a great insight. But at least Elom’s book shows that he and many of his fellow Manus and Christmas Island prisoners have been decent people who deserved far better than the contemptuous treatment they received from my fellow Australians.
Anyway, the Australian government continues its pretentiously-titled ‘Operation Sovereign Borders’ program, though the boat arrivals, or attempted arrivals, seem to have dropped to around the level of zero, but was such a draconian and essentially inhumane approach necessary? Yes, it seems to have been popular with Australians – I looked at a program discussing Ealom’s book from four years ago, and one brief comment pointed out that the policy of successive governments had been effective in stopping the boats. It garnered many more likes than posts about the cruelty and callousness of it all. But it surely doesn’t take much thought to realise that if every country treated escapees from genocide or ethnic cleansing this way, then…. what? How could they justify their humanity?
So with the continuation of this program (there have, according to AI, been successful ‘interventions’ this year, with ‘unauthorised maritime arrivals’ being sent to ‘regional processing centres’ in Nauru and elsewhere, and the Indonesian government has often voiced its displeasure. New Zealand has accepted hundreds of these refugees, and hundreds more are in Australia as ‘transitory persons’ on temporary arrangements – a kind of grudging acceptance, it seems).
It would be great if we could have some binding international laws to protect people escaping from nightmare scenarios from being subjected to further nightmare scenarios in another country, but, looking at the current international scene, we’re about as far from that kind of maturity as we’ve ever been.
References
Jaivet Ealom, Escape from Manus: the untold true story, 2021
Thant Myint-U, The hidden history of Burma: race, capitalism and the crisis of democracy in the 21st century, 2019
the help
too much imagined in a smile, or not
that is the question.
youth, age, weave with guilt and fading hope
smiles and glances, wondering at wondering.
language will fix it, and it will
fix it.
Her need is clear, surely, and I can help.
No matter that I can help others, many others.
My choice is selfish, not immoral.
Think of the harm principle.
And fuck you.
It will probably not come to that anyway,
and life will go drearily on.