THE SUNDAY TIMES
Modern Day Sinhala Chivalry: Monk mob threatening Rohingya women and children who sought Lanka’s alms of temporary refuge
‘Sinha-le’ mob surrounds Mount’s UNCHR safe house where 16 children, 7 women and 7 men fleeing Myanmar violence were kept till repatriated
Forget their race, forget their creed and forget that they were born as Muslims in the land of Buddhist Burma, now Myanmar. Just hold them in your hearts for awhile as human beings, as victims of circumstances beyond their control, as innocent sufferers of another’s wrong, a nation’s crime, who must now cry in pain and bleed with grief; and storm heaven and verily raise the question, ‘ why me, why us, what grievous wrong have we and our children done on this earth this birth to deserve this terrible fate?
On April 30th, the Sri Lanka Coast Guard craft patrolling the Indian Ocean waters off Trincomalee found 16 children, 7 women and 7 men huddled aboard a fishing boat. They belonged to a race known as the Rohingyas, a minority tribe successive Myanmar Governments had refused to recognize as an indigenous race, persecuted them without pause, and had now unleashed a systematic campaign of terror which the UN had condemned as ‘ethnic cleansing’.
They were the innocent civilian casualties caught up in a conflict not of their own making: forced to flee their burning villages in fear of their lives and their children’s lives, abandon their homes in fright to face a dark fearful future unknown. And carried with them naught but the only wealth they possessed: their lives and their children. They had endured the terror in their ghettoes of fear, where danger sprung from every government sewer and the swish of the machete slash could be heard cracking the silence of the night, followed by the death wail of a neighbour being hacked to death.
They had braved the perils of the sea, faced the tempests that brew in the Bay of Bengal and dared the gulfs to swallow them purely to flee the Myanmar Government’s military crackdown against their indigenous race; and seek refuge on some safe shore. Perhaps, they never even intended to come to Sri Lanka and had set their sails to some other shore; but, merciless fates, as they sometimes mockingly do to those in dire straits, may have directed some foul wind to blow their fishing boat to bob adrift off Trinco’s coast when the coast guard naval vessel arrived to their timely rescue.
The Sri Lankan Navy handed these unfortunates to the Mirihana detention camp. The Colombo office of the United Nation Commission for Human Rights (UNCHR) soon intervened and obtained a court order and secured their release. They were then taken and placed in a UNCHR safe house in Mount Lavinia pending repatriation to a third country.
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