APRIL 30 — A perfect storm lies waiting for Malaysia.
The rage over Rohingya control or demands in Selayang is only the tip of the iceberg. The city’s wholesale market kerfuffle has inadvertently garnered a nation’s interest and raises questions, where and who next?
For the issue is set to amplify.
While enforcement agencies — police, immigration and Selayang Municipal — mop up the area, gaps remain about how many Rohingyas are there — legal, illegal or refugee — and where they are in Greater Kuala Lumpur and beyond.
How did this monster storm materialise?
The Malaysian Control Order (MCO) shifted realities for those inside the country in the past six weeks and probably continues with its adverse trajectory for another two weeks.
When it does end, people invariably must crawl till they learn to walk again.
For the migrants, job losses hit them hard. As casual workers with few legal protections and no social protection in most cases, they became immediate casualties of shuttered restaurants, hotels, bars, factories and malls. Pay disappeared overnight. Pain everywhere.
And migrants are not negligible in Malaysia, in terms of numbers.
The World Bank approximates up to four million foreign workers — legal and illegal — in Malaysia with most holding irregular jobs.
Presently, there’s desperation inside alien enclaves. They live cramped in with doubtful food supplies, sitting dazed, fraught with anxiety and fear of local reprisals. Synonymous with them are Enhanced MCOs (EMCOs), which are proper lockdowns with no frills, compounding their misery and uncertainty over the future.
Malaysians, still inside four walls while waiting for the final MCO to expire, where already many of them find themselves with salary cuts, half pays and job losses.
The punishment continues post-MCO. The full brunt of economic loss, and therefore job losses are to be known only in the second half of 2020.
Various research arms speculate beyond a million jobs gone. Maybe more.
The bad news is coupled with the fact the economy won’t necessarily fix itself in the short term and worry it worsens in the medium term.
Because firms may take this MCO lesson as a cue to automate and revolutionise their workspace, loosely translated, shed more jobs.
When there’s a huge employment hole, people seek scapegoats.
Foreigners fit the bill to a tee, the role of villains in this play. Apt they appear in their desperation.
Since there are many who chuck about the phrase “new normal” for everything from attending weddings to running marathons, I’d add “local antagonism towards foreigners and its worsening leading to violence” as one more.
Rohingyas prefer Selayang
I’ll limit my commentary about these refugees.
Two things emerge about the Vietnamese boat people, often compared with the Rohingya; one, they did not choose Malaysia as much as geography and sea made Malaysia a route; and two, Malaysia genuinely was a temporary stop as North America, Australia and Europe opened their doors for them in the years after their arrival.
And they’ve left. All of them. They are quite dissimilar to the Rohingyas.
A side-note, as Vietnam’s capitalism thrives, its global diaspora likely end up as business nodes for the home country.
Rohingyas chose Malaysia, padded up their numbers over the years and were intent on staying here — unless the unlikely exit to a First World nation opens up.
It’s 220 kilometres from Rakhine to Bangladesh’s Cox Bazar refugee centre. And 606 kilometres by sea to India’s Bengal capital Kolkata. Striking when compared to almost 1,700 kilometres to Langkawi.
They choose Malaysia. Their reasons can’t be discounted in the analysis on how to treat them.
Factor too, Myanmar’s politics, economy and ethnic relations are to remain problematic in the years to come, as they have been since it gained independence in 1947.
The military is strong, Aung San Suu Kyi the hope but currently condemned by a world indifferent to the complicity of Myanmar power and any number of tensions and battles at different corners against different groups of the republic. The economy uninspiring relative to other Asean countries.
Rohingyas here are not going anywhere for the next decade at least.
But my true concern is Malaysia’s own predicament in the matter.
The nation-state’s core attributes — Malaysia no different — are territorial integrity and the appreciation of citizenship. The political dimension always holds the two far above any other considerations, including treatment of refugees or asylum seekers.
Therefore, those bent on systemic and flagrant abuse of protection on a large scale — in this case, Rohingyas — can’t be surprised by local revulsion and governmental antipathy.
Even the retired Mahathir Mohamad asks the government only to pass supplies and fuel to the Rohingya boat people to head back to Rakhine or Bangladesh. Certainly not passage to his beloved Langkawi.
Help them he says as Muslims, but not receive them is the practical advice.
Apologetic liberals
Civil society groups back refugees but lack outreach to the masses, which is a recipe for backlash. They speak of principles, but the rakyat prefer distinctions, that it’s them before the migrants, of whatever status.
The MCO has compounded the people’s insecurities and expect testing months ahead. Any mention of aiding others right now, appears to compromise the welfare of Malaysians.
Even more when there are substantial jobs losses among Malaysians.
It is vital in this climate to couch assistance and programmes for refugees and migrants, Rohingyas not the least, subtly.
The threat present
I went down to volunteer at a football match between the local youths and Myanmar UN refugees in our township some years ago. The boys booted up and warmed up, but the match never transpired.
One of the local lads, only 15 years old, plays forward but instead of striking practice shots at goal struck a Myanmar boy in the face for no apparent reason. All the Myanmar boys fled the pitch, many of them running inside the drain — a short cut to their flats — and the match was called off.
It was a telling snapshot of migrants' life and the fear of repercussions they live with.
There’ll be more and more snapshots in the weeks to come. Chat groups and comment boxes are filled with anger and recriminations, and even personal threats naming Malaysians sympathetic to Rohingyas.
The seething aggression is unremorseful. It rejects outright any rights claimed by foreigners, and quick to associate Covid-19 spread to them.
The government listens, as evidenced by their actions to quieten foreigners.
When forced to choose, the government -- this government in particular -- will choose its people over migrants irrespective of the suspect morality of the choice.
Government will speak of kindness to refugees where possible, threaten to condemn Myanmar for its inhumanity and win liberals, and in the next breath quickly spout the canned rhetoric to maintain commitment to the Asean faith of non-interference.
It’s not the government I’m concerned about right now as much as my countrymen, as they confront the future struggles while sensing their lives affected by marauding foreigners in the midst. It’s a powder keg.
Our government is used to setting one group against another in order to win seats and stay in power.
The migrants are useful tools for the economy, but there’s little afterthought what to do with them when they are surplus to requirement in record speed thanks to the MCO. Local outrage towards foreigners is not a vote loser, but it can get out of hand.
I hope the government’s adequately aware about that possibility.
*This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
