A big problem of the modern world is the growing number of stateless people. Driven out or rejected by the countries of their birth or adoption, these unfortunate people have nowhere to go. There is no country they can call their own and no country is prepared to take them as its citizens.

They live in camps in the neighboring countries in inhuman conditions facing an uncertain future. Some of them like the Palestinians and the Kashmiris have been waiting endlessly for the last 62 years for resolution of the crises which forced them out of their hearths and homes. Some more unfortunate ones do not have even such hopes.

Sadly, the majority of these stateless people are Muslims. Their homelands, like Palestine and Kashmir, have been occupied by foreign powers that refuse to vacate their aggression. The Palestinians were driven out of their land by Zionist Jews who descended upon Palestine from all over the world with the support of imperialist powers. The aggressors established the illegitimate state of Israel on the Palestinian land, and extended its borders after repeated wars with the neighboring Arab states. The uprooted Palestinians have been living in neighboring countries and are denied the right to return to their homeland. Those still living in Palestinian lands occupied by Israel are refused full citizenship.

The case of Kashmir Muslims is not too dissimilar to that of the Palestinians. The Muslim majority Kashmir was occupied by India just after the independence of the sub continent. Since then hundreds of thousands of Kashmiris have been living as refugees in Pakistan and elsewhere waiting for the vacation of their land by India. Those living in the occupied Kashmir are denied their right to self determination and face suppression by the six hundred thousand Indian troops who are stationed in the occupied area.

The worst case, however, is that of the Rohingya Muslims of Burma, now called Myanmar. They had been living in Burma for generations as full citizens, but after independence from Britain, the Burmese drove them out of the country in what can only be described as a case of blatant religious discrimination by the Military Dictatorship. The Rohingyas had been living in Arakan region of Burma. But the Burmese took the plea that they are outsiders and mercilessly drove them out of the country. The Rohingyas are now a stateless people living on the fringes of the Burma-Bangladesh border in most miserable conditions. Some of them have taken refuge, temporary though, in other countries of south and Southeast Asia like Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. A few came to Pakistan.

The Rohingyas, a community of several thousand families, have nowhere to go; they have been living in limbo with no status and no future to look forward to. The worst affected are their children; they are denied any schooling; they have no facilities of any kind like food and medicine. They are stateless citizens; the only certainty in their lives is death. They must be helped, either to get back to their homeland as full citizens or to be rehabilitated somewhere else.

The Rohingyas' case is a challenge to the entire civilized world, more particularly to the Muslim Ummah because the only fault for which they have been condemned by the Burmese is that they are Muslims in an overwhelmingly Buddhist land.

30th August marks the 50th anniversary of the signing of the UN convention on stateless people. The Muslim world must take up the case of the Rohingya Muslims. They must get justice, the Muslim world should persuade, nay force, the Myanmar military authorities to take back the Rohingyas and restore their rights as full citizens.

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