Documents 'show Myanmar Rohingya discrimination is policy'

Over the last hundred years countries have enacted laws which specifically targeted minority groups in an effort to limit their rights.

Turkey which has a large Kurdish population has over the last 50 years used various legal means to limit their rights.   One of the most continuous is the Turkish government's banning of   Kurdish language through publication or education believing that it would harm Turkey and its identity.

1. Forced assimilation program, which involved, among other things, a ban of the Kurdish language, and the forced relocation of Kurds to non-Kurdish areas of Turkey.
2. The banning of any organizations opposed to category one.
3. The violent repression of any Kurdish resistance.

In 1956 Sri Lanka enacted the Sinhala Only Act which removed English as the country's official language replacing it with Sinhala which is spoken by 70% of the population, but excluded the Tamil language which is spoken by 29% of the population.  

Enactment[edit]

In the 1956 parliamentary elections, the SLFP campaigned on largely nationalist policies, and made the one of their key election promises. The result was electoral victory for the SLFP, and The Ceylon (Constitution) Order in Council or Sinhala Only Bill was quickly enacted after the election. The bill was passed with the SLFP and the UNP supporting it, with the leftist LSSP and Communist Party as well as the Tamil nationalist parties (Illankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi and All Ceylon Tamil Congress) opposing it

Now a human rights group has released documents which show that the government of Myanmar has systematically discriminated against its Muslim Rohingya minority which lives in the west of that country in the state of Rakhine.   Though the Rohingya have lived in Burma for more than a century the government of Myanmar doesn't consider them to be citizens but illegal immigrants and has does Bangladesh which shares a border with Rakhine state.  Because of these policies the Rohingya are considered a  stateless people by the United Nations.

'Marriage restrictions'

In a report, Fortify Rights said it had analysed 12 government documents from 1993 to 2013, and found that government policies imposed "extensive restrictions on the basic freedoms of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar's Rakhine state".

The policies restricted Rohingya's "movement, marriage, childbirth, home repairs and construction of houses of worship", it said.

  Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine state were also prohibited from travelling between townships, or out of Rakhine, without permission, the report said.

The report said a government order stipulated that married Rohingya couples in parts of Rakhine state could not have more than two children, while another document said Rohingya had to apply for permission to marry, in what the report described as a "humiliating and financially prohibitive" process.

One document published in the report said officials should force a woman to breastfeed her child if there were doubts over whether she was the birth mother.

The restrictions have been known about for some time, but what is new is that campaigners say they have the official orders issued by the Buddhist-dominated local government in Rakhine state, the BBC's Jonah Fisher in Rangoon reports.

It is an oft-stated fear of Myanmar's Buddhists that the larger families of Muslims mean they will one day be in the majority, our correspondent adds.