When is genocide not really genocide? When the victims are small, impoverished brown people no one wants or cares about \u2013 Burma\u2019s Rohingya.<\/p>\n
Their plight has finally commanded some media attention because of the suffering of Rohingya boat people, 7,000 of whom continue to drift in the waters of the Andaman Sea without food, water or shelter from the intense sun. At least 2,500 lucky refugees are in camps in Indonesia.<\/p>\n
Mass graves of Rohingya are being discovered in Thailand and Burma (Myanmar).\u00a0 Large numbers of Rohingya are fleeing for their lives from their homeland, Burma, while the world does nothing.\u00a0 Burma is believed to have some 800,000 Rohingya citizens.<\/p>\n
This week, the Dalai Lama and other Nobel Peace Prize winners call on Burma and its much ballyhooed \u2018democratic leader,\u2019 Aung San Suu Kyi, to halt persecution of the Rohingya.\u00a0 They did nothing.<\/p>\n
The Rohyinga\u2019s persecution has been going\u00a0 on for over half a century, \u00a0totally unobserved by the rest of the world.\u00a0 Burma\u2019s government claims they are descendants of economic immigrants from neighboring Bengal who came as indentured laborers to the British colony of Burma in early the 19th<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n Interestingly, the British Empire created a similar ethnic problem by bringing large numbers of Tamils from southern India to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) to work the British tea plantations.<\/p>\n But Bengalis have been on Burma\u2019s Arakan Coast for centuries.\u00a0 What sets Rohyingas apart is their dark skin and Islamic faith.\u00a0\u00a0 Burma seems determined to expel its Muslims for good, treating them like human garbage.\u00a0 It\u2019s the kind of brutal ethnic cleansing, racism and genocide that we recently saw unleashed against Albanian and Bosnian Muslims and Catholics in Bosnia and Kosovo.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been watched the steady rise of a weird form of Asian racism among some militant Buddhists in Burma and Sri Lanka.\u00a0 The first sign was anti-Tamil riots in Sri Lanka a decade ago led by fiery Buddhist monks.<\/p>\n But wait\u00a0 a minute.\u00a0 I have always been very attracted to Buddhism as a gentle, sensible, human faith.\u00a0 My first book, \u201cWar at the Top of the World,\u201d was inspired by my conversations with His Holiness, the Dalai Lama.\u00a0 I like to meditate in Buddhist temples whenever I\u2019m in Asia.<\/p>\n So from where did all those screaming, hate-promoting Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka and Burma come from?\u00a0 Clearly, from deep smoldering fires that we knew nothing about.\u00a0 The bloody Sri Lankan civil war between the majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils was largely initiated by militant monks. One also remembers Vietnam\u2019s self-immolating monks.<\/p>\n The same phenomena erupted in Burma, a nation rent by violent regional and ethnic tensions that have raged since 1945.\u00a0 But who initiated a campaign of hate and pogroms against the Arakan Muslims who were quietly, \u00a0minding their own business and eking out a living? As soon as Burma\u2019s military stepped back from total rule, the anti-Muslim violence went critical.<\/p>\n The triple-sainted (at least in the Western media)Aung San Suu Kyi refuses to hear foreign pleas that she do something. Burma will\u00a0 hold elections in November and she wants to avoid antagonizing Buddhist voters \u2013 even when her nation in practicing genocide.<\/p>\n I stood in front of her in Rangoon years ago when she was still a prisoner of the military junta, listening to her platitudes about human rights and democracy.\u00a0 I thought then and now that like all politicians, her words were not to be given too much credit.\u00a0 Maybe those fools on the Nobel Peace Prize committee could revoke her Peace Prize and, while they\u2019re at it, Obama\u2019s.<\/p>\n Thailand wants no Rohyingas; Indonesia says only a few thousand on a temporary basis.\u00a0 Australia, which is not overly fond of non-whites, say no.\u00a0 Bangladesh can\u2019t even feed its own wretched people.\u00a0 So the poor Rohyingas are a persecuted people without a country, adrift on a sea of sorrows.<\/p>\n What of the Muslim world? What of that self-proclaimed \u201cDefender of the Faith. Saudi Arabia?\u201d\u00a0 The Saudis are just buying $109 billion worth of US arms which they can\u2019t use, but they don\u2019t have even a few pennies for their desperate co-religionists in the Andaman Sea.\u00a0 The Holy Koran enjoins Muslims to aid their brethren wherever they are persecuted \u2013 this is the true essence of jihadism.<\/p>\n But the Saudis are too busy plotting against Iran, bombing Yemen, and supporting rebels in Iraq and Syria, or getting ready for their summer vacations in Spain and France, to think about fellow Muslims dying of thirst.\u00a0\u00a0 Pakistan, which could help, has not, other than offering moral support.\u00a0 Neither has India, one of the world\u2019s leading Muslim nations.<\/p>\n In the end, it may be up to the United States to rescue the Rohyinga, just as it rescued Bosnia and Kosovo. That\u2019s fine with me. \u00a0I don\u2019t want the US to be the world\u2019s policeman; I want it to be the world\u2019s rescuer, its SOS force, its liberator.<\/p>\n We should tell Burma to halt its genocide today, or face isolation and sanctions from the outside world.<\/p>\n \u00a0_____________________________<\/strong><\/p>\n Eric S. Margolis is an award-winning, internationally syndicated columnist. His articles have appeared in <\/em>The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Times of London, The Gulf Times, The Khaleej Times, Nation \u2013 Pakistan, Hurriyet, \u2013 Turkey, Sun Times Malaysia and other news sites in Asia. He is a regular contributor to <\/em>The Huffington Post and<\/em> Lew Rockwell. He appears as an expert on foreign affairs <\/em>on CNN, BBC, France 2, France 24, Fox News, CTV and <\/em>CBC.<\/p>\n