The plight of stateless Rohingya is Asia's latest humanitarian crisis. Allegedly beaten on Thai beaches and cast adrift in leaky boats with little or no food and water, more than 500 are thought to have died at sea. In a Thai court recently, 66 were convicted of illegal entry. In Indonesia, a further 200 were denied safe haven. Battered, bruised and with nowhere to go, the Rohingya bear witness to the dark side of regional politics. In particular, their tragic stories attest to the challenge posed by Myanmar's military junta. As Amnesty International put it in an open letter issued to regional governments in January, the 'root cause' of this crisis is Myanmar's 'systematic persecution' of its Rohingya minority. While also calling on neighbouring countries to meet their obligations to individuals in distress, Amnesty was right to emphasise this point. The world has long known about the Myanmar problem. Democracy is outlawed and opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi is held under apparently limitless house arrest. Political reform is touted by the ruling generals, but few expect elections scheduled for next year to be even remotely free and fair. In all probability, the predatory state built by military elites will continue in business as usual. Underlying everything else, however, is the ethnic strife to which stateless Rohingya testify. For sure, this Muslim minority suffers more than most in a Buddhist-majority state. Treated harshly after the army seized power in 1962, the Rohingya were denied citizenship by passage of a 1982 nationality law. Today, 800,000 Rohingya are stateless in Myanmar's Rakhine state, 230,000 live illegally or as refugees across the border in Bangladesh, and up to 2 million form a loose Asian diaspora. Yet Myanmar's ethnic problem goes far deeper than this. The country is and always will be a patchwork quilt of races numbering well over 100 by the junta's count. At no time in history have those races lived in perfect harmony, and the British colonial government undoubtedly did much to exacerbate ethnic tension through divide-and-rule tactics that top generals routinely castigate today. Unfortunately, policies adopted by those generals have made race relations worse rather than better. Following the seventh visit of UN special adviser Ibrahim Gambari to Myanmar, the world's media needs to start looking beyond democratic icon Ms Suu Kyi, locked up in her lakeside villa in Yangon. National reconciliation is at the heart of Dr Gambari's mandate, and only when advances are made here can Myanmar hope to make real political progress. In addressing this theme, Dr Gambari and the UN should certainly speak up for the Rohingya. At the same time, however, the larger significance of the Rohingya tragedy must not be overlooked. Ethnic strife runs very deep in Myanmar. It is to this issue that the UN and regional governments must pay urgent and sustained attention if they are to avert a humanitarian catastrophe in Southeast Asia. Professor Ian Holliday is dean of social sciences at The University of Hong Kong
