REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, YANGON/BANGKOK - The government will offer citizenship for those that accept the classification and have required documentation. That may encourage some to consent to identification as Bengali.
Citizenship would offer some legal protection and rights to those Rohingya who attain it. But an official from Rakhine State who is part of the committee overseeing citizenship verification said even that would not resolve the simmering tensions between Buddhists and Muslims in the state, or prevent a recurrence of the inter-community violence that plagued the country in 2012.
"Practically, even after being given citizenship and resettlement and all that, a Bengali with a citizenship card still won't be able to walk into a Rakhine village," said Tha Pwint, who also serves on the committee that oversees humanitarian affairs in the Rakhine.
The plan was drafted at the request of the national government, said Tha Pwint and three other sources contacted by Reuters about the plan. Myanmar government spokesman Ye Htut could not be reached for comment on the plan, despite repeated efforts by Reuters to contact him by telephone and email.
Stateless
Many Rohingya families have lived in Rakhine for generations and are part of a small minority in the predominately Buddhist Myanmar. They are stateless because the government does not recognize the existence of the Rohingya ethnicity, and has to date refused to grant the majority of them citizenship.
Accepting the term Bengali could leave the Rohingya vulnerable should authorities in future attempt to send them to Bangladesh as illegal immigrants, said Phil Robertson, deputy director for Asia at Human Rights Watch.
"One of human rights' core principles is the right to determine one's ethnic and social identity and this is precisely what the Myanmar government is doggedly denying the Rohingya," he said.
In May, US President Barack Obama, who is due to visit Myanmar in November, cited abuses in Rakhine State as one reason for maintaining some economic sanctions.
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