How would life be like if one were to remain stateless in perpetuity?
“Being said no to by the country where I live; being said no to by the country where I was born; being said no to by the country where my parents are from; I feel I am nobody and do not even know why I am living. Being stateless, you are always surrounded by a sense of worthlessness” — indeed, these very words uttered by a woman refugee and the recent heartrending incident of abandoned Rohingya migrants surviving on urine at Andaman Sea does hammer home the point that the international community can no longer delay recognizing the right to nationality as a stand-alone human right.
As Sarnata Reynolds, senior human rights adviser, emphasized in her testimony to the United States House of Representatives, “in that way, challenging a state’s denial of the right to nationality could be seen not as an exercise in piercing state sovereignty, but instead an exercise in human rights diplomacy.” Surely, one needs to understand that nationality is an essential part of human life without which an individual’s status in an organized society is completely meaningless.
Can anyone even imagine living in a vacuum where there is no state apparatus to take responsibility of citizenry’s need? Being stateless is akin to being left stranded in a no-man’s land without the privilege of enjoying the legal protection that a state offers. Worse still, statelessness results in extreme marginalization, as individuals are denied access to socio-economic benefits. Besides, there is no immunity against trafficking, harassment and violence. But most worryingly, statelessness also has a disproportionate impact on women and children.
When the parents are stateless, their children automatically become stateless from the moment they are born. This result in destitution and the curse of exclusion associated with statelessness befall yet another generation. Children without nationality are deprived of formal education and other basic services available to a normal child. But then, the bitter truth is they are born to die like an animal because their plight remains a low priority for the global political leadership.
As rightly pointed out by António Guterres, UN High Commissioner for Refugees, “living in a nightmarish legal limbo makes them some of the most excluded people in the world.” And this deliberate marginalization creates great stress in society and is sometimes a source of conflict too. To borrow Guterres’ words “it is shameful that millions of people are living without a nationality — a fundamental human right.”
No matter how talented the stateless people are, whatever their hopes and aspirations, however significant their achievements may be during the unending struggle to survive in a cruel world, these poor people are not accepted as “son or daughter of the soil” — the very soil where they live and die unless expelled forcefully. For the approximately 1.3 million Rohingyas, living in abject poverty and exclusion, this is the reality that life teaches them every second. Though, they descend from families, whose roots in Myanmar can be traced back to 12th century and beyond, these persecuted Muslim minorities were unethically denationalized in 1982. Since then, more than 10 percent of the population lives in internal displacement camps that have become segregated ghettos.
The rest stays in villages in western Myanmar’s Rakhine state, but like their fellow Rohingya brothers and sisters languishing in camps, they too are not permitted to leave their villages nor are they allowed any opportunity to earn a living by bread-labor. Moreover, the Myanmar government has often shown reluctance to supply the hapless Rohingya population with food or minimum health care facilities. Consequently, chronic malnutrition and death from diseases like tuberculosis is a common phenomenon in the Rohingya community. In fact, mortality during childbirth or in newborn population is alarmingly high because of extreme state-discrimination and apathy. True, the United Nations and international humanitarian organizations are occasionally allowed access to the Rohingya population for humanitarian assistance, but that too is dependent on the attitude of the local Arakanese Buddhists who goes to the extent of physically abusing aid staffs. Even medical professionals from “Doctors without Borders” were forced to leave after they were attacked by violent mob.
Indeed, the Rohingyas today are more helpless than ever before because there is no one who can wipe away their tears. As Rohingya families mourn the loss of their near and dear ones to boats in the sea, countries in the region have surprisingly failed to put their acts together. With more and more Rohingyas taking to the boat to flee violence and political persecution back home in Myanmar, the Southeast Asian nations are busy passing the buck despite ratifying an ASEAN declaration that provides for “the right to seek and receive asylum in another state in accordance with the laws of such state and applicable international agreements.”
Though the regional leadership is putting forth monetary and logistical issues as an excuse for denying the Rohingya refugees a landfall in respective countries, the fact of the matter is this avoiding attitude has laid bare the region’s ethnic and religious prejudices. With no international sanctions hovering over Myanmar due to cosmetic internal reforms, Naypyidaw is no longer willing to keep its commitment of granting the Rohingyas more rights. Hence, if humanity remains a silent spectator to such injustice, a significantly increasing number of Rohingyas may well end up in the lap of terrorism to get emancipated by the end of the day.
