The Rohingya community and refugee rights activists rallied Rohingya Genocide Remembrance Day in Lakemba, New South Wales on August 28.
The day marks the genocidal attack by Myanmar military and Buddhist-chauvinist militias on the Rohingya people in Rakhine state in Western Myanmar, which became one of the worst cases of ethnic cleansing in recent times.
Nine years later, more than a million Rohingya refugees struggle to survive in neighbouring countries — notably in the Cox's Bazar refugee camp in Bangladesh. Thousands more survive precariously in India and Malaysia.
The Rohingya are the world's largest group of stateless people because the Myanmar state has effectively denied them citizenship since 1982.
Speakers at the rally included Sajeda Bahadurmia, from Australian Rohingya Women's Development Organisation; a Rohingya woman who had just arrived from Cox’s Bazar under Australia humanitarian and refugee intake program; Mark Goudkamp and Ian Rintoul from the Refugee Action Coalition; Peter Boyle from Socialist Alliance; Abrar Ahmed, the Greens candidate for Bankstown; and immigration lawyer Daniel Taylor.
The speakers called on the Australian government to increase the humanitarian and refugee intake rather than cut it, as the immigration minister Tony Burke had threatened to do just the previous week.
Prayers were led by the local Rohingya religious leader Maulana Abu Alom.