THE Rohingya have often been called the world’s most persecuted minority, and with good reason. They form the largest single group of “stateless” people in the world, about 1.5m out of a total of 10m, and thus have no legal rights in the country that 1.1m or so of them live in, namely Myanmar. With no protection, the Rohingya have been subject to decades of discrimination and violence in the western Myanmar state of Rakhine. This culminated in the wholesale ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya from the state capital of Sittwe in 2012, after which about 140,000 of them were forced into squalid refugee camps. Some have begun to call this a new “genocide”. Since then, out of desperation, thousands have tried to flee by boat to start new lives in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. In the first quarter of this year alone 25,000 people paid traffickers to flee by boat from western Myanmar and Bangladesh. They were mostly Rohingya, from both countries, as well as Bangladeshis. About 300 died doing so. An international conference on their plight was held in Thailand on May 29th, but nothing concrete was decided. But just who are the Rohingya?
