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Uprooted people get the worst from both sides: those evicting them, and those whom they have no option but to turn to for safety. That predicament increasingly bears down upon Muslims today, much like it was for their spiritual cousin, the Jews, historically. Evicted by the Romans in 70AD, Jews lived diasporic lifestyles, facing hardships every step of the way in almost every part of the world, for almost nineteen centuries, until the most extreme viciousness, Adolf Hitler's Holocaust, indirectly created Israel in 1948. Since creating Israel evicted yet other peoples, the Palestinians, persecution looked like a passing baton.
Kurds, Rohingyas, and Palestinians constitute three of the most visibly persecuted peoples today. Given the media at our disposal - though their blow-by-blow recorded experiences may last longer than they did for the Jews - increasingly we will notice the persecution curse shifting from its instinctual bastion into institutionalised formats.
Almost all cases and media will dramatically show the ongoing ethnic cleansing in Myanmar and Palestine like they could be the one in Auschwitz. Based on common narratives connecting causes with consequences, they should alert us of the Kurds, who stand on the precipice of a doomsday only the rest of the world can prevent, if it so desires.
From the Rohingya case, we will notice ethnic cleansing characterised by the most rapid displacement of so staggering a proportion of a persecuted group: over half a million Rohingyas, or almost half the Rakhine population at the time, poured across the River Naf or through the Bay of Bengal, into Cox's Bazaar, Bangladesh, over a month or two. Palestinians have faced a far slower (and, therefore, longer) evaporation, dating back to 1948, with brief but misleadingly hopeful interludes. Examining some common denominators may help prevent a Kurdish déjà vu.
First, just as the Holocaust followed two legitimate and democratic elections in 1932, in which Hitler's Nazi Party received the highest tally (37 per cent and 33 per cent, respectively), followed by the farcical 1933 election with Hitler pulling strings, so too did the Rohingya ethnic cleansing follow the most democratic election Myanmar has had in living memory, producing a Nobel Peace laureate as winner no less. Strings were pulled here too: Rohingyas, who had up to a dozen elected representatives in the country's parliament during the 1950s, were stripped of their voting rights, indeed citizenship in 1982, on the pretext of being Bangladeshi or Bangalee migrants. This claim was in spite of the Rohingya term stemming from Rakangha/Roshanga, Rahkine's capital and once the name of Myanmar's province, Arakan (itself a kingdom until conquered by the Bamars, first in the 14th Century, then comprehensively by 1784). Given the huge 2017 Kurd independence referendum mandate and the 2017 rapprochement between Al-Fatah and Hamas Palestinians, both reflecting rational voter choices, we need to carefully monitor Iran and Iraq directly, and Turkey indirectly, against systematically squashing the Kurds; and Israel subtly strangulating Palestinians under sporadic xenophobic outbursts. Even more carefully we need to monitor if and how election results produce institutional reforms in transitional countries.
A second disturbing factor is the stalemated, sterile international context within which the Holocaust and Rohingya genocide took place: the rest of the world remained helpless, particularly the 'great powers' that mattered. During the Holocaust, in spite of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, Great Britain did nothing in the 1930s and 1940s to prevent Jewish genocide: in the infamous September 1938 Munich meeting with Hitler, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain saw 'peace in our times' in German-UK relations (even though world war would break out within a year), but not one word about 'peace' for persecuted Jews, nor against the pogroms unleashed at them. With the Rohingyas, after Bangladesh explicitly requested China to exert its influence, China dismissed the crisis as being bilateral, but at least drove Bangladesh and Myanmar to a negotiating table that India's Narendra Modi, who received a similar Bangladeshi request, ignored. Instead, he embraced Aung Sang Suu Kyi's exodus interpretation, that too, amid the refugee-flow peak wit India closing its door to them. Other than lip service, a token humanitarian gesture, or a firm caution, the rest of the world has stayed aloof. Social voices spoke louder than any state's policy, exposing the faltering state legitimacy. One only wonders: the more the state fails, the likelier more genocidal circumstances will erupt.
We have noticed how the ho-hum treatment of Palestinians has been aggravated by Palestinian divisions and resort to terrorism in the 1970s. Interestingly the leader of one of those terrorist groups, Yasser Arafat, eventually received a Nobel Peace Prize (with Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin), which puts him in the company of Israel's terrorist prime minister, Menachem Begin, who also received the same prize, with Anwar Sadat, in 1978. These were a posteriori awards (after their terrorist phase was corrected by huge peace efforts), and can be pardoned; Suu Kyi's ethnic cleansing authorship came after the award was conferred upon her, flagrantly violating norms. Increasingly, the Nobel-terrorism relationship looks flaky.
Third, with terrorism becoming a slippery instrument, the increasing global perceptual fixation upon one perpetrator group is surprising. The Palestinians resurrected terrorism in the late-1960s and early 1970s from its once-famous usage in the streets of Paris just after the French Revolution. Myanmar's flimsy argument, of the Rohingya exodus resulting from its military intervention to oust Muslim extremism, was bought hook, line, and sinker by a Muslim-baiting Modi. Just as the terrorism proved a useful (and successful) fallback for Myanmar and India, so too may it be for Iran and Iraq against the Kurds. Though they formed one of the most coherent and staunchest forces against Islamic State terrorists, they might ironically be dubbed as such as a pretext to any invasion to pre-empt Kurd independence. While German Jews were not seen as terrorists, though Europeans then fleeing to the Holy Land, like Begin, resorted to terrorism (through Irgun), the terrorist label has fixated upon Muslims anywhere now.
Finally, none of those persecuted migrants have found a home outside their 'home'. The Jews knew that for almost 1,900 years, prompting Theodore Herzl's 1896 Der Judenstaat pamphlet. Palestinians remain pests in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and wherever else they have resettled. Kurds pose security problem to Turkey, and remain outcasts in Syria, not to mention governments in Baghdad and Tehran. Rohingyas, too, live cordoned lives in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand (a huge chunk in Saudi Arabia too).
No matter how Muslims, professing Islam, portray themselves to be, when it comes to salvaging these rootless Muslims, their actions betray their religious convictions. It therefore tempts non-Muslims to treat Muslims just like they treat themselves: with contempt. If that is a sobering thought for mainstream Muslims, imagine how that falls upon rootless Muslims.
Surely if we do better to our own kind, others may find fewer incentives to exploit our vulnerabilities: tempering the ruthless instinct could give rootless peoples more breathing-space, and to the rest of us, more time to eke out a workable solution.
Dr. Imtiaz A. Hussain is Professor & Head of the newly-built Department of Global Studies & Governance at Independent University, Bangladesh.