MANY World Refugee Days have come and gone — one just did on June 20 — and yet their plight remains one long disturbing story. Marking World Refugee Day without doing more is like acknowledging the problem but doing nothing about it. Call it a work in regress. Much of the blame must be placed on the home countries of the refugees.
Take Myanmar, a country known for its treatment of minorities. Malaysia knows because it is on the receiving end of the refugee crisis. More on this later.
Not that Myanmar lacks natural resources to be shared among all. Nature has blessed Myanmar with numerous resources, but extremists dispense more curses than blessings on the minorities. Politics of race and religion is the cause of much violence there. Take the Rohingya. They have been in Myanmar for generations, yet they are treated as aliens. There the word Rohingya doesn't exist. In 1982, the junta passed a citizenship law listing 135 national races.
The Rohingya were not on the list. For decades, they have been the target of violence, not just by the soldiers but by extremists. The worst outbreak was in 2017, when close to a million had to flee to Bangladesh, India, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia when their homes were bombed and burnt.
Asean, the Southeast Asian bloc of which Myanmar is a member, has been trying to humanise Myanmar but it chooses not to.
Can there be hope away from home? Yes, but mountains need to be climbed. Up to May, there were 189,340 refugees and asylum seekers in Malaysia, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Elsewhere in the world, there are millio
ns more escaping violence in their home country. They are not looking for a better life. They are running away from death and destruction. Again, up to May, the UNHCR said there were 120 million refugees around the world.
This staggering increase in the number of forcibly displaced people is a sign of the failure of the international community. Developed nations with their vast wealth could have stepped in to host the refugees. But some of them have put up "walls" to keep the refugees out.
Others like Britain have decided to farm them out. Who would have thought that the fate of refugees can be bought out like this in the 21st century? Rich nations must do better.
The failure of the international community to resolve the root cause of the refugee crisis has left developing nations like Malaysia — just because they are nearest to the killing fields of Myanmar — picking up the tab. One way to alleviate the situation is for Malaysia to integrate them into the labour force.
Malaysian job seekers shouldn't worry. The refugees come with different skill-sets and compete in different job sectors. A 2019 Khazanah Research Institute (KRI) report, though not targeted at refugees, gives credence to this view.
To put it in KRI language, Malaysian and foreign workers "occupy different employment spaces". Absorbing refugees into our labour market would be a productive move, not only for the refugees but also for Malaysia.