Abdul Jabbar, 30, stood in front of Exit B at Terminal 5 in O’Hare International Airport waiting.“For them, it’s really hard,” he said, of the family coming through the door in a few minutes.
He knows. He is also a Rohingya, an oppressed Muslim minority in Myanmar, the former Burma. How oppressed? Last year, the government refused to let anyone register as “Rohingya” on the national census.
“Rohingya doesn’t exist,” said a member of the parliament, news to the refugees who live in camps, have fled the country because they cannot hold jobs or go to government schools, and are being attacked by Buddhist mobs, beaten or burned to death.
When he was 12, Jabbar would be seized on his way to school and forced to work, unpaid, pressed by local military officers into being a porter. When his uncles decided to flee, his mother urged Jabbar to join them.
“My mother said, ‘Follow your uncles; save your life,’” he recalled, the start of a 15-year odyssey through Bangladesh, Thailand, Malaysia, dealing with treacherous human traffickers and police whose only interest was to send him back.
“Nine times I was arrested in Malaysia,” he said. “Each time I was deported to Thailand. … We are most persecuted minority in the world,”
But not the only persecuted minority. The United Nations High Command on Refugees estimates that 40,000 people a day leave their homes fleeing armed conflict; it administers to some 15 million refugees. For decades, the main source of refugees was Afghanistan, but in 2014 that became Syria. (Courtesy of Rohingya Vision TV )
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