Eyewitness Rohingya

I am an eyewitness to the humanitarian catastrophe of the Rohingya people.  They are fleeing for their lives from what they call the “Buddhist Terror”.  I was part of an interfaith delegation that visited them in the refugee camps on the border of Myanmar and Bangladesh. The first short film on this page  is my on-the-spot footage.

I was invited to give an eyewitness report to the Hillary Clinton Center For Women’s Empowerment at Morocco’s Al Ahkawayn University. The university’s mission is to promote  “the values of human solidarity and tolerance”.  You’ll find highlights from the event as well as the full talk, with questions and answers, further down the page.

 

On-the-spot footage

 

Eyewitness to the Rohingya: highlights


  • Nothing could be further from the Buddha’s teachings



  • What the children carry



  • Women are speaking out



  • What we can do



  • Did you tell them you were a Buddhist?



  • Your values as a human being



  • Have you lost faith in humanity?


 

The full Eyewitness report

      Part One: The “Buddhist Terror”

      Part Two:  The Women, Trauma and

                            Controversy

      Part Three: What we can do right now

      Part Four: Questions,  Answers and our

                            Common Humanity

The UN refugee agency at work

I wanted to meet and thank the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) for the work they are doing. Luckily, I spotted something in the distance while I was in the camp with my camera. It was such an amazing sight.

Voices of Courage

I sent this hand-written message to children in the Rohingya refugee camps on the Myanmar/Bangladesh border where the UN Refugee Agency is hard at work building makeshift schools out of local bamboo. More than half of the 742,000 people who fled there for their lives from what they call “Buddhist Terror” are of school age and in urgent need of education and support.

It is a grim irony that it was precisely for being a little Buddhist myself, that I faced taunts and harassment in the primary school I attended.

Many fear that this unresolved crisis is a “time-bomb” for devastating future conflict. The young people in the camps, many of them severely traumatised, have witnessed unspeakable horrors.  The possibility of future revenge was very much in my mind when I wrote to them about the need to respect and protect our human family.

There are  Voices of Courage speaking out against the brutal suppression of the Rohingya people in Myanmar — and asking us to help the hundreds of thousands of victims of this humanitarian catastrophe, now under international investigation for genocide.

When I was in the border camps with the survivors of these “killing fields”, the desperate people I met there called this nightmare the “Buddhist Terror.”

I tried to put what I witnessed into words:  Meditating on the Buddha in the Midst of Buddhist Terror .  It has since been published by Lion’s Roar, one of the Buddhist world’s most widely read online journals.

These people’s villages were set on fire. They were shot as they fled. The soldiers threw their babies into the flames. The medical workers in the refugee camps are treating hundreds of women who have been raped and horrifically scarred by sexual cruelty.

Hearing their testimony was so unbearable to me as a Buddhist, my hands were trembling as I tried to hold my camera.

These people want the world to hear their story.

This time there is something we can do

We Buddhists have a special responsibility. We need to raise our voices against these atrocities, and make clear this violence is not being done in our name.  We need to do whatever we can to help the victims.

So often when we see devastating news reports, we have no idea how to help. Our sense of helpless makes the compassionate pain we feel all the more intense. This time, however, there is something we can do.

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Buddhist activists appeal to Myanmar leaders, bring aid to fleeing victims

World Buddhist leaders are appealing for peace in Myanmar and Buddhist charities are bringing aid to victims fleeing the violence.

A Rohingya refugee family on the side of the road without shelter in Bangladesh Photo ©: UNCHR/Adam Dean.

Buddhist Global Relief, founded by one of the western world’s leading translators of the Buddha’s teachings, and the Tzu Chi (literally “Compassionate Relief”) Foundation, launched by a renowned Taiwanese Buddhist nun, are both dedicating relief resources to what UN Secretary General Antonio Guiterres has called “a humanitarian and human rights nightmare.”

The United Nations and major aid agencies now report that more than half a million people – mainly women, children and the elderly – have fled over the border between Myanmar (also known as Burma) and Bangladesh since late August. Thousands more continue to flood in every day. 

The exodus is the fastest exodus of human beings from a single country since the outbreak of the Rwandan genocide. The vast majority are members of Myanmar’s Muslim Rohingya, caught up in a violent conflagration that, according to the country’s security forces, includes official “cleansing operations”. The military said 176 out of 471 villages had been emptied of people, and an additional 34 villages “partially abandoned.”

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