THE gruesome discovery of slave labour camps and mass graves on both sides of the Malaysia-Thai border must surely have jostled our collective conscience.
Modern human trafficking, like 19th century slavery, is a most heinous crime against humanity.
The human suffering that is reflected on the faces of half-starved boat people, lying listlessly on the lower decks, or shielding their sun-scorched faces and skeletal limbs on the open deck. Their expressions of hopelessness, after weeks of being abandoned by ruthless abductors, cause reverberations beyond just another shocking news item.
Asean (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) is a 10-member regional body, meant to bring about greater political cohesion and to speak out on behalf of over 500 million inhabitants of diverse political and economic backgrounds on regional and international issues affecting one of the most dynamic regions in the world.
Thus, Asean cannot remain mute on the exodus of the Rohingyas, whose persecution at home has caused them to become a stateless people, much like the Palestinians who suffered under nakba, the Arabic word for “catastrophe”, when 700,000 of them were evicted from their homes in the 1948 War.
Any form of persecution of minorities within the region that brings about a flood of refugees across land borders and treacherous seas is tantamount to a policy and institutional failure of Asean.
Asean is about more than free flow of goods and services to be achieved through a common market or monetary union; it is about the promotion of the solidarity of human and cultural interaction in a peaceful and sustainable manner.
It took Europe two devastating world wars before it formed the European Union (EU) in the late 1950s to end half a century of enmity between France and Germany. Between the end of World War 2 and the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 — that is, between the last Nazi camps in 1945 and Serbian death camps in 1995 — the EU finally brought about the free flow of people across member states. This has the immense economic spinoff of labour movement union-wide for education, employment and entrepreneurship.
Since the end of the Indo-China War in 1975, Asean has managed to avert being Balkanised into Cold War camps. The original founding members had had the foresight to extend to erstwhile communist rivals the invitation to become a member of a regional body that had gained international recognition for major global issues, from trade to anti-piracy. Singly, each of the 10 nation members would have been the lone voice in any international forum or conference table.
It is time Asean boldly moved to make the refugees within the geographical context a priority human rights issue instead of merely a periphery one.
Any form of ethnic cleansing or religious persecution, whether it is by militant Islamists or radical Buddhists, must be resolutely condemned. Otherwise, Asean can never realise its fullest socio-economic potential based on its immense untapped human resource.
The hallmark of Asean as a responsible regional organisation is not to be measured solely by intra-regional trade and investment statistics alone. Asean stands for the collective cultural, religious and moral values of some of the oldest religions of mankind, such as Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Christianity.
An Asean civilisation is judged and remembered by its humane treatment of its citizens, who must be freed from poverty, religious persecution, war and illiteracy.
Tai Hean Kiat, Sungai Buloh, Selangor