The organisers were not at all pleased that State Secretary Morten Høglund did not use the word 'Rohingya' during his address.
It would also appear that Yanghee Lee did not, in the event, participate in the conference. I would imagine that the manipulation apparent in the preparations for the conference, such as billing the messages from Tutu, Soros, Mahatir and others as "Calls to end the slow genocide of Rohingya" almost certainly without their prior approval, might well have deterred her from appearing. It would in any case have had a negative impact on her mission, even if she is personally supportive.
The impact of the conference would be limited because it was overshadowed by more important meetings currently taking place elsewhere. The Security Council expects to be briefed today by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. The webcast was technically inadequate and for this reason it seemed that at most 30-40 international viewers attempted to login at any one time.
I have sent a message to Bishop Tutu to which I doubt I will get a response. The Bishop wrongly assumed, from his African experience, that the border between India and Burma had been artificially drawn by the British. This led him to suppose that the British had improperly split the Muslim community in the border regions into two parts:
"The Rohingya people were not consulted when the British drew the Burmese border on the map. With those strokes of a pen, they became a borderland people; people whose ancestral land traverses political boundaries."
This is not of course what the Rohingya activists wanted to hear – that they are historically a 'chosen people' tracing their descent directly to 8th Century Arab traders and having nothing to do with Chittagong culture.
Derek
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