Let's help the Rohingya
Editorial
The Nation, Thailand
With the one-year anniversary nearing of the Kofi Annan report recommending solutions to the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar, the international community needs to send Naypyitaw a clear and strong message that it's had enough of investigative commissions.
Diplomatic niceties have been emanating from this catastrophe for far too long. Asean foreign ministers at their annual meetings have formally "welcomed" in turn the establishment of each new panel to probe the crisis.
Hands are wrung but nothing gets done. It should be abundantly clear by now that the committees set up to resolve matters achieve next to nothing.
The Myanmar government has inked vague agreements with the United Nations Development Programme and its human rights agency, but what's on paper does not adequately address realities.
One reality is that the Muslim-minority Rohingya driven from their homes in western Rakhine state have nothing left to return to there.
The authorities have basically paved over the area, bulldozing away all evidence of atrocities committed by security forces and hateful, xenophobic Buddhist zealots. With no assurance they will be able to resume life unmolested, the Rohingya are unwilling to leave even the meagre comforts of the refugee camps along the Bangladesh border.
A temporary camp waiting for them in Rakhine, paid for by China and India, remains empty.
The latest committee to be established, just weeks ago, is scrutinising the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (Arsa), a little-known militant group blamed for the August 2017 attacks against 30 military and police posts hours after Mr Kofi Annan unveiled his recommendations.
The committee is tasked with assessing Arsa atrocities - not those of government soldiers, police and rabid civilians.
Naypyitaw cannot be allowed to continue buying time and hiding behind investigative commissions and advisory boards.
Apart from humanitarian prerogatives, there are serious political and security repercussions for South-east Asia the longer the problems are left to fester.
A second crisis for Bangladesh?
Shahedul Anam Khan
The Daily Star, Bangladesh
The signals from India regarding the National Register of Citizens (NRC) sound ominous.
From the threat in Kolkata on Aug 11, it seems the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is all but sure that the four million or so Muslims delisted from the controversial Assam citizen's list are indeed Bangladeshis alleged to have infiltrated into India.
And the fallout for Bangladesh, as an outcome of the NRC delisting of four million Muslims, is grave.
Quite an outlandish figure for illegal Bangladeshi migrants in India - 20 million - has been flaunted from time to time to convey the "magnitude" of the problem. And imagination was allowed to run wild when, in 1981, it was estimated that the so-called Bangladeshi immigrants constituted 45 per cent of Assam's 1.6 crore (16 million) population.
Assam's politics has been largely pinned on the issues of census and migration. And many scholars term the migration issue a myth. They assert, citing census reports, that the "increase in Assam's Muslim population is nowhere extraordinary".
Political elites in Assam, who want to make political hay out of this issue, put forward the argument that the only measure that can save Assamese culture from being subsumed within Bangla culture is to see that these Muslims are sent back to Bangladesh, or ghettoised. (It's inevitable if they are sequestered in separate areas pending "repatriation". Sequestration of the four million of them is an alternative that some stalwarts within the BJP are suggesting, pending deportation to their supposed place of origin, that is, Bangladesh).
Surprisingly, there has been little reaction from our side regarding the NRC since our government believes - mistakenly, one feels - that the issue is India's internal matter. India as usual has tried to assuage any concern, saying that Bangladesh has no reason to be alarmed by the matter.
But the utterances of various BJP members, including its president, are worrisome. What is happening in Assam, despite assurances from India, should force us to emerge from the state of self-delusion that we are immersed in .
The children among refugees
Julia Suryakusuma
The Jakarta Post, Indonesia
Do you remember Alan Kurdi? Tragically, his claim to global fame was having his lifeless three-year-old body washed up on a beach in Turkey after he drowned in the Mediterranean Sea on Sept 2, 2015.
Alan was the child of Syrian refugees of Kurdish descent who, trying to escape the civil war, had settled in Turkey but hoped to join family members in Canada. On that fatal day, he and his family boarded a small plastic dinghy filled to twice its capacity, and with no life vest to boot. Doomed from the start, the boat capsized five minutes after it left the shores of Bodrum, a city on Turkey's south-west coast.
Given the heartbreaking starkness of the image of Alan's corpse, you'd have thought it would move anyone and everyone to actually do something. Yet a year later, in 2016, 200 children have drowned in the Mediterranean.There are about 14,000 refugees from 49 countries in Indonesia, over one-fourth of them children.
Because Indonesia has not yet signed the 1951 United Nations convention relating to the status of refugees, those in Indonesia don't have any rights, including the children among them.
They often suffer from trauma, have difficulty going to school due to language and financial barriers, or no access to healthcare when sick, which are basic human rights.
Eglantyne Jebb, founder of Save the Children, said "humanity owes the child the best it has to give". Easy to say.
• The View From Asia is a compilation of articles from The Straits Times' media partner, Asia News Network, a grouping of 23 news media organisations.
