In the context of such clichés, it has been jarring, many say, to see very different images coming out of Myanmar. Many monks, barefoot and clothed in the traditional robes of Burmese Buddhist monasteries, have been at the forefront of the violent repression of the Rohingya Muslim minority, which the United Nations has characterized as ethnic cleansing.Over the past month, more than 400,000 Rohingya have fled their homes in what United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi on Sunday called “the most urgent refugee emergency in the world” right now. Often spurred on by Buddhist monks, local mobs and government forces have reportedly burned hundreds of Rohingya villages to the ground in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, slaughtering many of their Muslim inhabitants as hundreds of thousands have fled to neighboring Bangladesh.
Please note that this is from a September article from the Christian Science Monitor. However, every single link high on the DuckDuckGo search was from a leftist media outlet, which leads me to believe that it has become a cause célèbre for leftists, including the UN and Oxford.
When Burma became independent in 1948, successive governments denied full status to the Rohingya, denying their historical claims and refusing to even consider them as one of the country’s 135 official ethnic groups – each a branch of one of the “8 Major National Ethnic Races,” Myanmar officials say.
In 1982, the Rohingya were officially denied citizenship. During the 2014 census, too, most were forced to be identified as “Bengali” – in essence, unofficial resident aliens denied status, effectively stateless. The UN has called the Muslim minority population in Myanmar as “the most persecuted minority in the world.”
What is the Rohinga crisis The essence of the conflict:
While Muslims are a small minority in Myanmar as a whole, they constitute 42% of the population of the coastal state of Rakhine.
As tends to happen when the number of Muslims approach parity with non-Muslims, conflicts were happening in the area. The apparency was that the Muslims were starting their own ethnic cleansing of non-Muslims in Rakhine, so that they could then declare independence from Burma and align with Bangladesh.
Whoever controls the coastal state gets to control the rights to the offshore oil and gas discoveries in the Bay of Bengal. The Myanmar government decided that was NOT going to happen.