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COMMENT Doublespeak on Myanmar's Rohingya By Ramzy Baroud

''Transparency is the most important word,'' Myanmar Ministry of Energy official Aung Kyaw Htoo pledged on March 4 during a press conference in the former capital of Yangon. His assurance was aimed at wooing foreign companies to bid on 25 off-shore oil blocs.

Oil, gas and other resources in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, promise to reap huge profits for Western companies and

A governance whitewash has been underway for some time now in Myanmar. Perceptions of the former ruling military junta as an oppressive regime with a disconcerting human rights record have shifted favorably on its closely aligned quasi-civilian regime, which has been widely credited with managing a budding democracy. Reality, however, is much removed from the new regime's official newspeak.

While the regime speaks of recognizing ''international standards'' in its energy sector, international human rights standards have been completely ignored in its handling of the suffering and humiliation of the Rohingya people. According to the United Nations, the Rohingya are ''virtually friendless'' in the face of a relentless ethnic cleansing campaign that threatens their very existence in Myanmar. The UN has referred to the Rohingya as the world's ''most persecuted'' people.

On February 26, fishermen discovered a rickety wooden boat floating nearly 25 kilometers off the coast of Indonesia's northern province of Aceh. The Associated Press reported there were 121 people on board including children who were extremely weak, dehydrated and nearly starved. They were Rohingya refugees who preferred to take their chances at sea rather than stay in Myanmar.

Their plight is hardly an isolated event. Such deadly journeys, each with their own traumatic twist, have been reported with growing frequency in the regional media. Another large rescue took place off the coast of India's eastern Andaman archipelago, where 108 Rohingyas in dismal condition were rescued on February 28, the Andaman Sheekha website reported.

A week earlier, another group of Rohingya refugees were not so lucky. New York-based Human Rights Watch on Wednesday called on the Thai government to investigate an incident in which two people were reportedly killed after a group of refugees were forced onto a boat and sent back to sea from Phang Nga province in southwest Thailand, the Bangkok Post reported. "Our government has a policy to take care of the Rohingya on humanitarian grounds, so they won't be pushed back," Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatara told journalists on Monday. "We will investigate this," she said of the alleged deaths in Phang Nga, according to the report.

Driven by systematic persecution of the Rohingya inside Myanmar, the mounting incidents have so far been a mere irritant to the country's still highly touted democratic opening, a transformation that has been widely hailed as a success story by Western media, companies and political elites. Western governments have heaped rewards on the new regime, including a suspension of previous punitive economic and financial sanctions imposed over the junta's abysmal rights record, for its supposed newfound respect for rights and democracy.

Most Rohingya Muslims are native to the previous state of Rohang (originally a kingdom of its own), now officially known as Rakhine, in Myanmar's coastal southwest. Over the years, especially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the original inhabitants of Rakhine were joined by migrant or forced labor from Bengal and India, many of whom permanently settled there. For decades thereafter, tensions brewed between Buddhist Rakhines and Muslim Rohingyas in the region.

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Doublespeak on Myanmar's Rohingya