We must find our moral outrage on Myanmar refugee crisis

I asked a Rohingya refugee I met in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, India, how I should pronounce the word Rohingya. His response was "call us Burmese not Rohingya."

That is the crux of the Rohingya problem. The Rohingyas have lived in Burma, now called Myanmar, for many generations. The Buddhist majority does not recognize this fact, calls them Bengalis and is busy kicking them out.

A 1982 citizenship law requires a person to establish Burmese (Myanmar) ancestry back to 1823 to be considered a citizen. This essentially takes away the citizenship rights of a majority of the Rohingyas and other ethnic minorities.

The former president of Myanmar, Thein Sein, made brazenly bigoted statements about the Rohingyas, stating that they are illegals and do not belong in the country. He has the popular support of a large proportion of Myanmar citizenry. He added that if a country would accept, he would be happy to deport them all. Who would accept a million refugees?

But more to the point why should these people leave what has been their homeland for decades?

The approximately one million Rohingya in Myanmar constitute 20 percent of

Myanmar's population. The Rohingyas are the ultimate "other." Unlike the Buddhist majority in Myanmar, they have a different ethnicity (dark skin and Indian features), different faith (Muslim) and different language (a dialect of the Bengali language.)

Persecution of Rohingyas is a chronic problem that has flared up from time to time with other instances of exodus in the past. The current flareup started in 2012 and has reached a crescendo recently.

Last month there were raids on Myanmar border posts by an insurgent group calling itself "Rohingya Solidarity Organization", resulting in the death of some Burmese policemen. The Burmese army is using this as a rationale for mounting a massive campaign that they call "clearing operations", a euphemism for "ethnic cleansing."

Just in the last two weeks, over a quarter of a million Rohingya have fled to neighboring Bangladesh, report Doctors Without Borders. Some refugees have travelled all the way down to the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, hundreds of miles away from the Myanmar border, for a safer haven. I am part of a group that is running a free medical clinic for the Rohingyas who have sought shelter in that city.

The atrocities against Rohingyas have gone on much before any insurgency. The leader of the anti-Muslim movement is a Buddhist monk, Wirathu, known for his virulent racist pronouncements. It is jarring to see other Buddhist monks, who are his followers, violently attacking defenseless Rohingyas. Buddhist monks are known for their nonviolence and love of peace.

Even more disconcerting are words and inaction of the Nobel prize winner and the best-known citizen of Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi. The poster child of suffering in dignity, non-violent protest and the ultimate selfie partner of world politicians, she has shown remarkable insensitivity to the plight of the Rohingyas. For a long time, she was silent on the issue that pundits opined was a sign of political expediency.

When she finally spoke, she blamed both the Muslims and the Buddhists equally. Recently she has denied atrocities against the Rohingya as "fake news."

These atrocities are not happening in the dark. There are satellite pictures of burned villages, video evidence of torture and murder, rickety wooden ships in the Bay of Bengal filled with fleeing women and children, first person accounts and hundreds of thousands of refugees in Bangladesh. It is hard to call this "fake news."

Naming and shaming does not appear to be working. Recently Nobel prize winners, Desmund Tutu and Malala Yusufzai, called out Aung San Suu Kyi to no avail. She is the de facto civilian ruler of Myanamar and would be highly influential in stopping the pogrom. The Dalai Lama has been the Buddhist voice of compassion for, as he phrased it, the "poor Muslims."

It is disturbing to witness a genocide occurring in broad daylight. But this is not the only instance. The 21st century has witnessed brutalities in Rwanda, Bosnia, East Timur, Darfur, Central African Republic, Gujarat, South Sudan and many others. Now it is Rohingyas or as the refugee I spoke with said, Muslim-Burmese. The slogan "never again" rings hollow.

Rohingyas are not our neighbors. They are of no strategic interest to us. Most of us will never meet a Rohingya refugee. Any act to help them will go unrecognized except by our own conscience. It is time to find our moral outrage and put pressure on our country and the United Nations to stop Myanmar from committing genocide against its own people.

Javeed Akhter is a physician and freelance writer from Oak Brook.