The Rohingya people are stateless Indo-Aryan people from the Rakhine state of Myanmar. However, the Government of Myanmar does not recognize them as citizens. They are rather accorded the status of illegal immigrants from neighbouring Bangladesh albeit they have been living in Myanmar for centuries. As reported in the Independent, ‘At least 10,000 members of the Muslim Ethnic community have been driven across the Bangladeshi border by the threat of violence in the recent weeks. The Rohingya people have fallen victim to communal atrocities and the horrors of genocide in the land they have been staying for so long. They have no rights in the State and have to endure severe restrictions on movement, marriage, religious freedom, and education. To add to these, the Bangladesh Government has denied recognition to these people.
There is no end to the number of questions that have to date arisen in regards to the Rohingyas: Why these atrocities on a single community out of 8 principal communities in Burma? Why the Rohingya people are rendered stateless? Why they are so viciously abused? What measures are being taken to bring these communal atrocities to a halt? Are those measures effective?
To get an answer to these questions, one needs to go back a few decades or few centuries in time and look into the matter from a different perspective.
Arakan, today is known as Rakhine, is a state in Myanmar (Burma) situated on the western coast of the country. The state is bordered by Chin state to the north, Chittagong to the north-west, and the Bay of Bengal to the west. The Arakan Mountains that run from Manipur in India in the north to Cape Negrais in the south essentially isolate the Arakan region from Burma Proper.
According to Arakan researcher San Shwe Bu, the rule of the Chandras, a Hindu dynasty that later converted itself to Mahayana Buddhists, dates back to 788 AD. During the reign of Chandra King Mahat Sing Daya’s time, it was recorded in a royal chronicle that several Arab ships wrecked on Ramree Island. The survivors went to Arakan proper and settled in villages. Similar Arab settlements were also recorded in the southern parts of Chittagong. Inter-mixture with the local population led to the first Chandra-Rohingyas of Arakan. That was the time when the influence of Sanskrit, Pali, Arabic, Portuguese and Persian combined together eventually formed the Chandra-Rohingya dialect which is similar to the Chittagonian dialect with slight variations of its own. When the Chandras invaded Chittagong in the 9th century AD, they believed that the Muslims have changed the original Sanskrit name of Chittagong from ‘Chatta Gram’ to ‘Chaitigaon’. However, the Arakan historians claim that an Arakan king erected a pillar at Chittagong in the 9th century AD with a remark “to make war is improper”. Apparently, a Chandra king (not a Mogh king) ruled Arakan at that time. Shoe Ratan was the king of Arakan at that time and his language was not Burmese-Moghi but Sanskrit. “To make war is improper” translates to “Tsit-ta-gunging” in Burmese-Moghi. It seems unlikely for a fighter king to make a slogan like that. It seems more like a declaration of victory by an Arakan king as a peace treaty between the two parties. If it was such, then under the circumstances of a non-existent Burmese language in Arakan, the Chandras should have used the Sanskrit language “Shoukeet Thakom” which means “We live in Peace”. This shows that the latter expression “Tsit-ta-gunging” holds more consistency. This misinterpretation may be the result of the fact that after the 1784 Burmese invasion of Arakan, the king took the Arakan chronicles to Burma proper and rewrote the actual Arakani Sanskrit chronicles in Burmese, along with which a tendentious interpretation of events entered into Arakan history.
The 957 AD Mongolian invasion marked the fall of the Chandras and their exodus from Arakan proper to Northern Arakan and eventually eastern India (Chittagong). This created the two divisions: The Rakhine consisting of the Mongolian Buddhists and the Rohingyas consisting of the Chandras and Muslims that joined them. According to Martin Smith, in The Muslim Rohingya of Burma, “… hidden by undergrowth in the forests of Arakan, local Rakhines also found a great golden Buddha image, known as the Mahamuni statue, which belongs to the Mahayana Buddhist tradition and must have predated the Rakhine arrival by some centuries.” According to him, this unusual history of Buddhism in Arakan, which some believe, helps explain the particular importance of the religious issue in Arakan and the apparent chauvinism by some, of course not all, of the later Rakhine nationalist movements and communal disputes.
The rise of the Burmese Pagan king Anwardhta during 1044-77 AD in Burma proper, reduced the northern Arakan region into a province of Burma and began the settlement of Mongoloid Burmese (now known as Moghs) in the Arakan region.
This was followed by series of battles and wars following which the control of Arakan changed hands. These wars and battles also involved conquerors like Nadir Shah. Language changed along with the rulers until the arrival of Shah Suja, the Mughal prince, in August 1660. Sandathudamma, the then ruler of Arakan welcomed him into his land with great warmth but later murdered him and his family along with his followers, thereafter looted their property. To avenge the death of the prince and to stop Mogh-Portuguese piracy in the Bay, Shaista Khan launched a conquest of Chittagong. The Moghs moved away from Arakan leaving their Bengali wives behind. In 1666 however, the defeated Moghs returned to Arakan and that led to the beginning of anti-Bengali, anti-Rohingya sentiment in Arakan. Many Rohingyas left Arakan to save their lives. Another mass migration of both Rohingyas and Moghs happened after the Burmese king Bodapawpaya conquered Arakan. This time, both Buddhists and Muslims have been tortured alike. Later, some of the Arakanese Muslims returned to their homes in Arakan after the first Anglo-Burmese war in 1824, but in the British records, they were termed as Chittagonians.
The 1930 Rangoon riots, which were actually a riot of the Indian dockworkers against the Burman employers, Utomo, a fungi leader who was also a monk from Arakan, led an anti-Indian riot in Rangoon and Arakan. Ultra-nationalist movements spread in Arakan and the Moghs, previously known as Arakanese, changed their name to Rakhines.
During WWII, the Japanese forced Burma. British forces retreated and communal violence between Pro-Japanese Buddhists and Pro-British Muslims erupted. Arakan eventually became the front in the conflicts and habitual lawlessness grew among the people. This resulted in the defeat of the Rohingyas and Japanese forces committed the most brutal atrocities on the Rohingya Muslim community. The Rohingyas had to endure countless acts of rape, murder, and torture before fleeing Arakan.
1942 was the year when the Rohingyas started an armed resistance movement and were branded separatists by the government. The Naf River, which separates Burma from Bangladesh, served as a way for the Rohingya Muslims to join the Mujahid revolts in Arakan. When Burma became independent in January 1948, the new Government had other troubles to handle and neither had time nor manpower to enforce orders for curbing trouble in such a remote lying region of Arakan. It was stated in the press releases in 1948 that smugglings were carried on freely across the Naf and foreigners entered the land unchecked that were setting up parallel governments. The Mujahids had an aim to form a Muslim state and although it was not certain with whom, Burma or Pakistan, that state was going to be associated, it was obvious that the latter would have scored the state. However, not all Muslims supported the rebellion may be owing to a general disgust with the chaotic situation. Many of the Rohingyas remained loyal to the Burmese government.
An Arakanese Muslim Peace Mission was formed in 1949 hoping that the rebels would lay down their arms. But the problem regarding ownership of land remained. A land Distribution Committee was formed that was highly composed of Buddhist people.
Moving forward to the present situation of the Rohingya Muslims, the present crackdown of the Myanmar Army and Police on the Rohingyas is a result of the attack of the Rohingya insurgents on a Myanmar Border Outpost in October 2016. According to Reuters, nine border guards were killed by Rohingya militants in that attack and as a response, the Myanmar army raped Rohingya women, shot villagers and burnt down their homes. According to United Nations, Myanmar’s security forces have committed mass killings and gang rape of Rohingya Muslims and burned down villages since October in a campaign that is likely to amount to crimes against humanity and possibly ethnic cleansing. Myanmar however, rejected all allegations made by the UN and accused the UN of making exaggerated claims in its report.
According to a report in Independent, Vijay Nambiar, the special adviser of the United Nations Secretary-General on Myanmar, has called upon Aung San Suu Kyi and asked her to speak directly to the people of Myanmar. Aung San Suu Kyi, the feted pro-democracy activist, who was elected as Myanmar’s State Counsellor in 2015, failed to visit the Rakhine state after the outbreak of the violence that started as a response to the killing of nine guards, later pointing to a complete ‘ethnic cleansing’. She continually defended the purges and demanded to project Myanmar a “Nation without human rights issues”. The activist known as “The Lady” is a Nobel Laureate and the prize was awarded to her for ‘striving to attain democracy, human rights and ethnic conciliation by peaceful means. Despite this, she seems to have shown little or no interest in the area where human rights are murdered along with people, where people are living in ghettos patrolled by Army, and where murdered corpses lie in mass graves.
These atrocities against a community that is being targeted for ‘ethnic cleansing’ would not come to a halt until governments come to an understanding and reach a solution to provide shelter and rehabilitation to those who have suffered. Some term it genocide. But whatever the terms are, 600,000 Rohingyas have fled the Rakhine state since August to the overburdened refugee camps in Bangladesh. It is not just the people who are filling those camps – stories of gang rape, indiscriminate killing and mass arson come along with these people. These clashes are not a result of a single militant attack but a dispute that has been going on for centuries. Rulers, governments changed but these disputes continued. No person or institution can be sure that any measure will stop these clashes once and for all but with its recent fragile transition to democracy, the future of Myanmar is at peril.
Article was originally written in October, 2017
