By Katharina Nachbar

The Hague Institute for Global Justice

September 26, 2014

On 30 August 2014, Myanmar’s government released the preliminary results of the country’s first national census since 1983, but it has been overshadowed by controversy: despite pressure from rights organizations, individuals were not allowed to identify as members of Myanmar’s Muslim ‘Rohingya’ community. The Burmese government had taken the decision at the last minute due to fears that an inclusion of the Rohingya could spark inter-communal violence.

Ethnicity is highly politicized in the former Burma. The Rohingya in particular have long suffered from persecution and a denial of recognition. However, the census was held at a time of heightened tension: deeply rooted animosities between the Buddhist Burmese majority and the Rohingya minority erupted into violence in late 2012 and left entire villages razed and thousands displaced.

One immediate fall-out of the conflict has been the politicization of humanitarian aid. Aid organizations have been able to reach only a fraction of those in need, and their operations have been hampered by bureaucratic impediments and hostile propaganda. The result has been a rapid deterioration of the humanitarian situation. Apart from the moral impetus to grant unrestricted access to those in need, the crisis, if unaddressed, will likely have long-term security implications for Myanmar and the wider region. A fast improvement of humanitarian access is critical for preventing a renewed escalation of violence and securing the country’s fragile transition.

A Protracted Conflict

Myanmar is a majority Buddhist country with many ethnic minorities. The Rohingya are mostly concentrated in the northwestern state of Rakhine and claim long ancestral roots in the area. Many Buddhists and the central government regard them as recent immigrants from Bangladesh.

Following Burma’s independence in 1948, discrimination against religious minorities was progressively institutionalized. Suspicion towards Muslims and the Rohingya in particular culminated in the 1982 Citizenship Law, which blocked any path to citizenship for unrecognized minorities. Ever since, the Roginya have been stateless.

In mid-2012, decades of state-driven Buddhist nationalism and anti-Muslim sentiments erupted into violent inter-communal clashes driven by hate speech and the growing influence of extremist-nationalist Buddhist movements. These have embarked on a campaign to ‘protect’ Myanmar’s Buddhist heritage from what many Burmese perceive to be a cultural encroachment of Islam.

Politicized Humanitarian Access

To date, almost 140,000 people, overwhelmingly Rohingya Muslims, remain internally displaced in Rakhine alone, according to UNHCR. Hundreds of thousands more live outside official camps or as refugees in neighboring countries. The acute lack of access to food, water, and basic medical care has driven a growing number of Rohingya to take the dangerous journey by boat in search for safety and recognition in Thailand, India, Malaysia or Indonesia.

Much of the disastrous conditions in and outside the camps can be attributed to afraught operating environment for humanitarian agencies. A climate of extreme ethno-religious polarization has given rise to intimidation and harassment of aid agencies servicing Rohingya.

In April 2014, international aid workers had to be evacuated from Rakhine after Buddhist mobs attacked the offices of several organizations in retaliation for an alleged ‘Rohingya bias’. This narrative has been deliberately fuelled by extremist-nationalist groups and tolerated by state authorities. The consequences of theexpulsion of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) have been particularly severe. MSF had been the primary provider of basic health care in Rakhine. The government’s sporadic efforts to fill the vacuum have proven woefully inadequate, and disease and severe malnutrition have spiked.

After heightened international pressure, including from the United States, the Burmese government announced in August that MSF was free to resume its operations. While a positive signal, conditions have gravely deteriorated, and the political situation has not changed.

Risks of Destabilization

The humanitarian crisis in Rakhine has already had destabilizing effects, in Myanmar and the wider region. Relations with Bangladesh and Thailand are strained because of the influx of Rohingya refugees. The refugee crisis has fuelled organized crime such as human trafficking of undocumented Rohingya or their use as smugglers by drug cartels. In Malaysia and Indonesia, both Muslim-majority states, the crisis has sparked outrage and even anti-Myanmar protests.

Islamist extremist groups in both countries have threatened retaliation on behalf of their fellow Muslims in Myanmar. Organized Rohingya resistance has so far proven elusive, but it may become more likely with external support from regional terrorist networks. Al-Qaeda’s recent “launch” of an India branch indicates a broader strategy to capitalize on the mobilizing potential of marginalized Muslim groups throughout the region.

The Rohingya crisis, if unresolved, will severely disrupt Myanmar’s transition to stable democracy, which depends on the peaceful co-existence of its many ethnicities and good relations with neighboring countries. More resolute efforts to improve the humanitarian situation are crucial for preventing a new cycle of violence and longer-term destabilization. There are two immediate steps the government should take.

Restricted access for aid agencies has been the result of a climate of fear and radicalization fuelled by nationalist-extremist propaganda. Extremist Buddhist monks have been preaching violence against Muslims and aid workers with almost complete impunity. Enforcing a policy of “zero tolerance” for hate rhetoric and strengthening moderate Buddhist voices could open up possible pathways for de-escalation. To reinforce this approach, toxic rumours about aid agencies’ role and “bias” should be countered by a carefully planned outreach campaign aimed at communicating humanitarians’ intentions and activities to Rakhine’s Buddhist communities. Their fears are real and cannot be ignored. Some organizations have begun taking such steps; however, these cannot be effective without political support by government and local authorities.

Both measures will go a long way not only in securing better humanitarian access to a displaced population that is in urgent need of relief efforts, they might also prove to be vital trust building measures towards de-escalation.

By Saw Yan Naing

The Irrawaddy

September 26, 2014

CHIANG MAI, Thailand — Thai Prime Minister Prayut Chan-ocha will pay a three-day official visit to Burma starting on Oct 1 and is scheduled to visit the capital Naypyidaw to meet President Thein Sein and Union Parliament Speaker Shwe Mann, The Irrawaddy has learned.

Gen. Prayut, who leads the military regime that seized power from a democratically elected government in May, plans to fly to Naypyidaw on Oct 1, where he will meet Thein Sein, and the two are expected to sign a memorandum of understand to boost trade relations.

On the same day, he is due to meet Shwe Mann, who chairs the ruling Union Development and Solidarity Party (USDP), The Irrawaddy understands. Prayut will also pay a visit to Buddhist religious sites constructed in Naypyidaw.

On Oct 2, he will fly to Burma’s largest city and commercial capital Rangoon to meet with the Thai business community and to visit the Shwedagon Pagoda, before leaving the next day.

Thailand’s newspaper The Bangkok Post reported on Friday that Prayut is tentatively scheduled to visit in early October and it quoted the Thai Ambassador to Burma Pisanu Suvanajata as saying that economic cooperation, particularly on the Thailand-backed Dawei Special Economic Zone in southern Burma, would be discussed during the visit.

The Thai ambassador told the Post that Prayut would also seek cooperation from Naypyidaw in stemming the flow of Rohingya Muslim migrants, who have been fleeing en masse by boat to Thailand and onward to Muslim-majority Malaysia, in order to escape persecution in western Burma’s Arakan State.

Previously, the Thai junta has indicated that it wants to repatriate the roughly 130,000 Burmese refugees living in camps in western Thailand in the coming years because of Burma’s ongoing peace process.

The multi-billion dollar Dawei SEZ and deep sea port in Tenasserim Division, close to the border with Thailand, has been planned by the Burmese and Thai governments for years. The mega-project is controversial as it would displace some 30,000 local residents. It has suffered financial and project planning setbacks and came to a complete halt after Thailand plunged into a political crisis late last year.

Prayuth’s visit to neighboring Burma will be the Thai junta leader’s first official trip abroad.

The Thai regime has come in for strong criticism from the US and other Western government, with which Thailand has good relations, and the Bangkok regime appears to be seeking support in the region.

The Thein Sein government, largely filled with members of Burma’s former military regime, has refrained from criticizing its neighbor. In recent months, the countries have organized a number of meetings to bolster ties, largely in the field of military cooperation.

The Thai junta’s chief already met with his Burmese counterpart, Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, chief of Burma’s armed force, when he visited Bangkok in July.

By Mary Fitzgerald

The Irish Times

September 25, 2014

Abdulkareem and his wife Robeza have not given their tiny week-old baby boy a name, because they fear he will not live for much longer. Born with a rectal abnormality, he needs emergency medical treatment but there is no way of getting help.

The family are members of Burma’s long-persecuted Rohingya Muslim minority. They are among tens of thousands of Rohingya confined to a miserable archipelago of camps, ringed by armed guards, strung along Burma’s southwest coast. When international aid agency Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) was evicted by local authorities early this year, life for the Rohingya became even more precarious.

“We can’t leave the camp and we have never seen a doctor here,” says Abdulkareem as his wife wraps their shivering, shrunken son in white cloth. “Our situation is impossible.”

The story of Abdulkareem and Robeza is just one of countless tales of desperate interrupted lives at this camp near Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine state. More than two years ago they lived alongside Buddhists in a stable – if strained – coexistence. Neighbours often referred to them pejoratively as Bengalis, a frequently heard insult that attempts to convey the impression the Rohingya do not really belong in Buddhist- majority Burma, though most have lived there for generations. Documents dating back to the late 18th century refer to the Rohingya population, yet they remain stateless and unwanted.

In June 2012, tensions that had long simmered erupted into deadly violence when Buddhist mobs went on the rampage after rumours spread that a Buddhist woman had been raped by a Muslim man. More than 200 were killed, some of them hacked with machetes, and 140,000 driven from their homes. Most of the victims were Rohingya.

Anti-Muslim sentiment

The episode has become a cause célèbre for hardline Buddhist monks at the forefront of an extremist nationalism movement that has grown in tandem with Burma’s much-trumpeted tentative embrace of democracy. Leading figures in this movement have visited Sittwe to stoke anti-Muslim sentiment.

The Rohingya are an easy – and vulnerable – target. Burma’s government refuses to recognise its 1.3 million Rohingya as citizens and has subjected them to restrictions on marriage, employment, healthcare and education. The curtailment of Rohingya rights amounts to what Fortify Rights, a Bangkok-based human rights organisation, calls deliberate state-designed “policies of persecution”.

The outgoing United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in Burma was also highly critical, saying the pattern of “widespread and systematic human rights violations” against Rohingya communities in Rakhine state may constitute crimes against humanity. The plight of the Rohingya has become a blot on the image Burma seeks to present to the world as it transforms itself from a decades-old military dictatorship to fledgling democracy.

The MSF story says much about how high emotions run in Rakhine. After decades of providing healthcare in the region, the agency was ordered to suspend operations in February after it was targeted by Buddhists who accused it of bias towards the Rohingya. Vigilantes ransacked MSF’s local offices. On the streets of Sittwe today, people wear T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “MSF out!” in Burmese and English. Earlier this month the Burmese authorities invited MSF to resume work in Rakhine, a move welcomed by foreign diplomats, but local activists have warned they will resist any such attempt.

Tarpaulin homes

The lack of medical services is having a devastating effect, explains Zayed Hussein, an imam in one camp. Sitting outside a makeshift mosque, he says conditions have been particularly bad during monsoon season, when heavy rains fill the camp’s rutted tracks and sometimes sweep away flimsily constructed homes made of tarpaulin.

“It affects children and the elderly the most. Our children are dying of malaria and diarrhoea and there is nothing we can do to help them,” he says. “The government is keeping us here like chickens under a net. It is like living in a prison.”

Hussein says life before they were driven to the camps was also difficult. “It was clear the Buddhists didn’t want us here. They beat us, insulted us on the streets and made life very difficult for us. It seems they hate Muslims.”

One group that is trying to step into the gap left by the enforced dearth of humanitarian aid is the Tableeghi Jamaat, a transnational Islamic missionary movement that calls on Muslims to be more observant. It adheres to a particularly conservative interpretation of Islam and has been accused in some countries of fostering more radical groups.

“They are becoming more popular because when people face difficulties they turn to their faith more,” says one Rohingya man who admits he is uneasy with their growing presence in the camps. He gets into an argument with one Tableeghi leader, also a Rohingya, over his advice to women to don the full-face veil or niqab – a rare sight in Burma but a handful in the camp have started wearing it.

Some in the camp say they are worried about their young men. The Rohingya’s plight has been taken up by hundreds of Muslim campaign groups worldwide but it has also become a rallying call for extremists. Islamic State, the group that has swept across Syria and northern Iraq, has cited the crisis in some of its communiques.

“Our youth are stuck, they cannot leave the camps and they cannot continue their studies or work,” says another imam, Hafez Idris. “They are fed up and frustrated, and that is not a good mix.”

Such desperation has led scores of Rohingya to risk a perilous escape by sea on boats bound for Thailand and Malaysia. Many have not made it, falling victim to traffickers running overcrowded vessels that have often sunk on the way. Rights groups fear the situation will get much worse: Rakhine leaders are considering a plan that would force all undocumented Rohingya to live in detention camps, essentially making the current segregation official and permanent.

The squalid camps near Sittwe have already taken on a grim semblance of permanency. Small markets have popped up, where Rohingya trade aid rations from the UN for basic medicines sold by local traders who see an opportunity in their misery. Some new schools and mosques have been built with sturdier materials, as if there for the long haul.

Surveying the patchwork of squalor, one older Rohingya who often acts as an interlocutor with the local authorities sighs. “For years I had heard of the Palestinians and how they had to live,” he says. “I think we are the new Palestinians.”

By Carlos Sardiña Galache

New Mandala

September 25, 2014

The most controversial aspect of the census recently held in Burma has been the denial of the large Muslim population in Arakan to identify themselves as Rohingya, the term of their choice. The government ban means as many as one million people remain uncounted in Arakan. That is scarcely surprising, as the Burmese government, Rakhine ultra-nationalists and seemingly a majority of the Burmese population have denied for years the existence of the Rohingya identity. According to them, the Rohingya ethnicity is an invention devised by immigrants from Bangladesh to take over the land in Arakan.

Few people have made more effort to deny the claims of ethnicity by the Rohingya than Derek Tonkin, former British ambassador to Thailand and editor of the website Network Myanmar. Mr. Tonkin has reached his conclusions after digging deeply in colonial British archives, where he has not found a single use of the term Rohingya. His command of the British colonial records is nothing less than impressive, but by relying almost solely on these sources he only offers a partial picture, from which I think he draws incorrect conclusions.

The debate on whether the Rohingya ethnicity should be regarded as one of the “national races” or not, assumes – implicitly or explicitly – as its framework of reference the definition to be found in the controversial Citizenship Law passed in 1982. According to this definition, only those ethnic groups which were already in Burma in 1823 qualify as “national races.”

Rather than attempting to defend Rohingya claims, I argue that the notion of “national races” itself, and thus the set of assumptions hitherto determining the terms of the debate, are fundamentally false and do not facilitate any understanding of the history and present social realities of Burma.

This notion has reduced the debate on Rohingya identity to a confrontation between three different historical narratives: what we might call “Rakhine history” and “Burmese History” on the one side (on this point both are basically indistinguishable, albeit there are important divergences in other aspects), as opposed to the “Rohingya history” on the other. As in many other nationalist histories all around the world, these narratives are loaded with myths and distortions. They are also mutually contradictory, making it impossible to find any common ground for all sides involved.

Competing historical narratives

Burmese and Rakhine nationalists often accuse the Rohingya of falsifying their history in order to advance their claims for ethnicity. It is true that Rohingya historians tend to minimize or ignore altogether the importance of the migration of laborers to Arakan from Bengal during colonial times; moreover, some have made claims that are historically incorrect: for instance, Rohingya historians often claim that some Muslim kings ruled Arakan in the 15th century.

Meanwhile, mirroring the distortions of “Rohingya history,” Rakhine historians tend to minimize, or to ignore altogether, the large numbers of Muslims living in Arakan before colonial times and to emphasize only the influx of Bengali laborers during colonial times. Now some Rakhine go so far as to claim that “illegal immigrants from Bangladesh” have arrived as recently as a few years ago and have continued arriving up to the first wave of sectarian violence in 2012, a highly dubious assertion for which there is no evidence.

On the Burmese side, we find assertions of a history of unity and continuity stretching back for hundreds of years and which was only broken by the traumatic colonial experience. Thus, in 2002, the military ruler, Senior General Than Shwe claimed that “thanks to the unity and farsightedness of our forefathers, our country has existed as a united and firm Union and not as separate small nations for over 2,000 years.”

This extraordinary kind of assertion only makes sense in the context of the state-building project to unify all the ethnic groups under the guardianship of the (Bamar-controlled) Tatmadaw(Burmese military). This has been the ultimate goal for the Burmese state since Ne Win staged his coup d’état in 1962. It is in this context that, at least during the last two decades, the generals have been increasingly trying to present themselves as the heirs of the Burmese kings and their mission as that of restoring some sort of “natural Burmese order” which the British interrupted.

There is no doubt that the British colonization of Burma dealt a highly traumatic blow to every dimension of social order in Burma, from which it has yet to recover. The British dismantled completely all the political institutions and cultural structures that had more or less glued together the society of central Burma and replaced them with others that the Burmese often did not understand or refused because they had been imposed by force by foreign invaders.

But pre-colonial Burma was by no means an era of uniform political order and stability. In fact, the centuries between the first Burmese kingdom which managed to unify this territory, the Pagan dynasty (1057-1287), and the colonial times was a period in which central authority was only gradually asserted, at every point confronting many difficulties and including long periods of anarchy when petty states competed for power.

In any case, before the first Anglo-Burmese war, the domains of the Burmese kingdom were never coterminous with those of the present Burmese state: in large areas, particularly in the hills to the North and East, the grip of the Burmese kings was at best extremely weak. And the Arakanese kingdom was only invaded in 1784, just forty years before it was taken by the British.

It is an anachronism to talk about borders, as we understand them now, in Southeast Asia before the arrival of the colonial powers. As the anthropologist Edmund R. Leachput it more than fifty years ago in his paper, “The Frontiers of ‘Burma’:” pre-colonial Burma was a “wide imprecisely defined frontier region lying between India and China” where “the indigenous political systems which existed prior to the phase of European political expansion were not separated from one another by frontiers in the modern sense and they were not sovereign Nation-States.”

Therefore, it makes little historical sense to classify any ethnic group as a “national race” on the basis that it already inhabited before the colonial period a territory demarcated after the beginning of the period.

Colonial conceptions of ethnicity

What the Burmese, Rakhine and Rohingya historical narratives have in common is an essentialist and racialist conception of ethnic identities as something primordial and fixed in time. Arguably, this is one of the most enduring and deleterious legacies of the British rule in Burma and lies at the heart of the now hegemonic and highly dangerous notion of “national races.”

When the British arrived in Burma, they found a land with a bewildering and confusing (for the external observer) variety of human groups, and where ethnic affiliations were enormously fluid. To make sense of that complex human landscape, they imposed a rigid grid of ethnic classification in which they conflated the mother tongue of the speakers with the category of “tribe” or “race.”

But, as the scholar Victor Lieberman has shown in his paper, “Ethnic Politics in Eighteenth-Century Burma,” ethnicity had virtually no bearing at all as a marker of political loyalty to the different kingdoms which ruled Central Burma during the 17th and 18th centuries. Ethnic distinctions were even more blurred in the “hill areas,” as Edmund R. Leach showed in his classic book Political Systems of Highland Burma. The distinction between Kachin and Shan categories was rather vague, and it was not uncommon for “Kachins” to turn Into “Shan” or vice versa depending on the social systems in which they decided to live, a phenomenon which, according to Leach, “cannot readily be fitted into any ethnographic scheme which, on linguistic grounds, places Kachins and Shans into different ‘racial’ categories.”

But that is exactly what the British did. And the colonial officials held a set of views of ethnicity and race strongly influenced by the social Darwinist prejudices of the time, and they attributed to the different groups personal and innate characteristics: the Karen or Kachin were stereotyped as simple and honest people, included within the “martial races;” the Burmans were devious and childish, not to be trusted, and so on.

On the basis of these spurious classifications, they recruited people to their armies using ethnicity as criteria, and favored some groups over others. They also tended to employ Indians as civil servants, rather than Burmese, because they had more experience with the colonial bureaucratic system and thus were better trained. These policies reinforced, and in some cases generated, ethnic classifications which are still widely accepted in Burma, and animosities that survive to this day.

The anthropologist F. K. Lehman identified the problem more than fifty years ago in his study “Ethnic Categories in Burma and the Theory of Social Systems.” According to him, before the colonial period, “the Burmans had a reasonably correct tacit understanding of the nature of their relations with bordering peoples, tribal and non-tribal,” an understanding which was lost due “to the importation of very explicit European ideas about nations, societies and cultures.”

Lehman suggested that when people identify themselves as members of an ethnic group, they were merely “taking positions in culturally defined systems of intergroup relations,” and that those ethnic categories were “only very indirectly descriptive of the empirical characteristics of substantive groups of people.” Therefore, local or regional groups were “inherently likely to have recourse to more than one ethnic role system and more than one ‘identity’.”

As a consequence of the fluidity of these roles, Lehman Asserted that “we cannot reconstruct any demonstrable discrete ancestral group for some ‘ethnic category’ –no matter whether we define such a possible ancestral group as a discrete dialect group, or as a group with relatively sharp discontinuities from its neighbors.” But this kind of “discrete ancestral groups” is precisely what the notion of “national races” assumes as certain.

Arakan: “The Palestine of the Farther East”

In 1891, the Swiss Pali scholar and archeologist Emil Forchhammer wrote a small book about Arakan in which he described it as the “Palestine of the Farther East,” because, as he put it, Arakanese Buddhism was the inspiration of the Buddhism practiced in the rest of Burma. More than two hundred years later, the comparison has a different resonance: as in Palestine, Arakan is the land of a conflict with some religious undertones between two communities. As in Palestine, the conflict involves a clash of historical narratives. And, as in Palestine, one of the two communities has been stripped of its political rights.

Arakan is separated by a range of mountains from the rest of Burma, making it relatively isolated from the Irrawaddy delta and central Burma. For most of its history, Arakan’s relations with the kingdom of Bengal in the west were just as rich and close as with the Burmese kingdoms in the north, if not more so, thus creating a culture distinct from that of Burma.

As in the rest of Southeast Asia, there were not clear borders between Arakan and Bengal in pre-modern times, the areas of influence of both kingdoms overlapped and were constantly fluctuating. The historian G. E. Harvey wrote in his classic History of Burma that, throughout the Middle Ages, “when Bengal was in the ascendant, some kings sent tribute to Bengal and when the Arakanese were in the ascendant they received tribute from the Ganges delta, ‘The Twelve Towns of Bengal’.” At that time, the Bengali court provided a political model for the Arakanese kingdom, and from the 15th to the 17th century, it was common for the kings to use Muslim/Bengali designations and to issue coins with the kalima, the Muslim profession of faith.

Meanwhile, as Harvey points out, though the geographical isolation of Arakan from Burma “rendered her immune to attack on the east, the resultant peace did not give her unity, because her territory is a long thin strip of coast intersected by hill torrents.”

This fragmentation made the Arakanese kings more tolerant than the Burmese kings to the religious beliefs of the different communities under their rule. In his doctoral dissertation, Where Jambudipa and Islamdom Converged: Religious Change and the Emergence of Buddhist Communalism in Early Modem Arakan (Fifteenth to Nineteenth Centuries), Professor Michael Charney wrote: “In Arakan the royal center was not simply indifferent to promoting one particular religious identity over another, but rather was one of the chief barriers restricting the emergence of a Theravada Buddhist orthodoxy in the Arakan littoral.”

Arakanese kings did not try to establish a “Buddhism kingdom” or centralize the Sangha, as their Burmese counterparts did, but worked through local patron-client networks and tried to present themselves as the patrons of whatever religion was practiced at a local level, be it Buddhism, Islam or even Catholicism in some Portuguese communities in the coast. Charney argues that this prevented for centuries the creation of communal identities based on religious beliefs, Buddhist or Muslim; and that these did not emerge until the late 18th century, and even then only under external influences.

There were Muslims in Arakan as early as the Ninth century but it is likely that their presence was not very strong. It was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the Arakanese and Portuguese communities settled in Southern Bengal (then under the authority of the Arakanese court) started to raid Bengal for slaves and transferring thousands of them to Arakan. The Arakanese kings settled most of these slaves in Northern Arakan, but took the well-educated in Mrauk-U to serve in the court as functionaries.

Before its conquest by the Burmese in 1784, there was already a substantial rural Muslim population in Arakan. “Perhaps up to three-quarters of Danra-waddy’s [northern Arakan, including Sittwe and Mrauk-U] population by the 1770s may have been Muslim,” asserts Charney. Meanwhile, “some Bengali Muslims in Mrauk-U participated in the development of an elite Muslim culture in the royal city, perhaps reflecting their privileged backgrounds in Banga [Southern Bengal].”

It is worth mentioning that the border along the Naf River between the British-controlled Bengal and Arakan did not have the same meaning for the British and the Burmese. If, as Leach pointed out, pre-colonial Burma was a “wide imprecisely defined frontier region lying between India and China,” Arakan was a “frontier region” between Burma and Bengal.

Whatever border there was between Arakan and Bengal, it disappeared completely after the first Anglo-Burmese war (1824-1826), when Arakan passed to British hands. At that time, Charles Paton, the sub-Commissioner of Arakan, estimated that, from a total population of 100,000 people, 60 percent were ‘Mughs’ (Rakhine), 30 percent were ‘Mussalman’ (Muslims) and 10 percent ‘Burmese’. It is clear that those were highly tentative figures, but at the same time it’s impossible to deny that there was a substantial Muslim population in Arakan before the arrival of the British.

It is also undeniable that there was migration of Muslims from Chittagong during colonial times, and that not all of the newcomers were seasonal laborers. This immigration was encouraged by the British, something that was resented by the Buddhist Rakhine population and contributed to reinforce the communal divisions between Muslims and Buddhists in the region. There is no need to repeat here the arguments demonstrating this, the reader can review the article published by Mr. Tonkin to find extensive evidence for that.

The point is that there was a migratory wave of Muslims from Bengal in colonial times that joined an already sizeable Muslim population made up of the descendants of the slaves taken by the Portuguese and the Arakanese during the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Present-day Rohingya are the descendants of both waves of migration, which intermingled to such a degree that now it would be impossible to distinguish who descends from one or the other.

In any case, as Lehman pointed out, it would be impossible “to reconstruct any demonstrable discrete ancestral group” for the people who now have chosen to call themselves Rohingya, as it would be impossible for any other Burmese ethnic group. But that does not imply that the Rohingya ethnicity is not real now. In any case, the Rohingya identity was not “invented” recently out of the blue, as some claim; it had been “gestating,” so to speak, for at least three hundred years, and the term itself was not new.

The “R-word”

The first known record of a very similar word to Rohingya used to refer to the Muslim inhabitants of Arakan is to be found in an article about the languages spoken in the “Burma empire” published by the Scottish physician Francis Buchanan in 1799. He wrote: “I shall now add three dialects, spoken in the Burma Empire, but evidently derived from the language of the Hindu nation. The first is that spoken by the Mohammedans, who have long settled in Arakan, and who call themselves Rooinga, or natives of Arakan.”

It has been argued that Rooinga (or Rohingya) derives from Rohang, the word used in Bengal to refer to Arakan, and thus was just another way to say Arakanese. Michael Charney suggests tentatively that “Rohingya may be a term that had been used by both Hindu and Muslim Bengalis living in Rakhaing [Arakan] since the sixteenth century, either as resident traders in the capital or as war captives resettled in the Kaladan River Valley.” But he is careful to point out that in the past “Rohingya and Rakhaing [Rakhine] were not mutually exclusive ethnonyms. Rakhaing’s topography may have led to Rohingya and Rakhaing emerging as separate versions of the same term in different geographical contexts that came, in the eighteenth century to be associated closely with the predominant religious makeup of the local area concerned.”

The evidence available shows that the term Rohingya was not widely used to describe a distinct ethnic group until the twentieth century. I would argue that the explanation for this is as simple as that there was no reason for the Rohingya to distinguish themselves in such a manner until the rise in Burma of the Bamar and other ethno-nationalisms against British colonialism.

The beginnings of the Burmese nationalist movement were strongly Buddhist in character, and some of the first nationalist leaders were monks. Thus, Burmese nationalism acquired a religious hue from the beginning. On the other hand, the Burmese have always viewed Indians with suspicion, and particularly Muslims. At that time, the general public did not distinguish much between Burmese Muslims and Indian Muslims, so Burmese Muslims felt they needed to distance themselves from Indian Muslims throughout the country.

The tensions between Buddhists and Muslims in Arakan, which had been mounting during colonial times, came to a head in the Second World War. When the British retreated to India and the Japanese advanced in Arakan, the Rakhine Buddhists sided mostly with the Japanese and the Burmese Independence Army of Aung San, while the Muslims were armed by the British; but the conflict soon turned into a civil war between Muslims and Buddhists. When the war ended, the north was mainly Muslim, the south was mainly Buddhist, and the communal divisions reached a point of no return.

Anti-Rohingya discourses often recall the Mujahid insurgency that took place in Arakan during the fifties. As the goal of some of the insurgents was the annexation of northern Arakan by East Pakistan, Rohingya are accused of disloyalty to the Burmese State. But there was scarcely any popular support for the rebellion, and many of its victims were Rohingya. In fact, some Rohingya leaders demanded U Nu to provide them with weapons in several occasions, a demand which was never met.

Meanwhile in Rangoon, Rakhine nationalists were pushing for a separate Arakan State, while Rohingya politicians, wary of their Rakhine neighbors after the Second World War sectarian violence, demanded a separate region in the north for them ruled directly by Rangoon. And during the Parliamentary period (1948-1962) and the first years of Ne Win’s dictatorship, there were not only many Rohingya organizations, both in Arakan and Rangoon, but the government recognized Rohingya as a Burmese ethnic group, as documents compiled by Dr. Zarni show.

It was the government of Ne Win and its military successors who denied Rohingya their rights and began to persecute them, from the mid-seventies until now. And it can be argued that, paradoxically, nothing has done more to reinforce the Rohingya identity than the attempts to suppress it.

Burma and its national identities

There is no historical precedent for an independent political entity for Burma as it exists now, and the different groups that make up the complex ethnic tapestry of Burma were never under the authority of a single government before the arrival of the British. Like many other post-Colonial countries, Burma emerged from British rule as a country deeply divided along ethnic and sectarian lines.

The Bamar was in some ways an underprivileged group during the colonial era but, after turning the tables in the Second World War, since independence it has become the privileged group. As a result of these competing nationalisms and the repeated attempts of the Bamar majority to impose its centralized vision of a Nation-State, the Burmese state has failed to generate a supra-national identity powerful enough to include and transcend the several ethno-nationalisms that awoke during colonial times.

The Rohingya identity is not more “artificial” or “invented” than any other, but the story of its ethnogenesis does not fit easily in the all too narrow concept of “national races” as is currently understood in Burma: ethnic groups which were already fully formed as we know them now in pre-colonial times. Others would also fail the test, because the test itself stems from a misunderstanding of ethnicity and group formation, but it is the political context that has determined that the Rohingya, and the Rohingya alone, should fail it. Their mere existence as a people is a serious challenge to the weak mainstream historical narrative imposed by the military regime.

This, and the Rohingya’s cultural, religious and linguistic differences, has made them expedient scapegoats in the context of a failed process of nation-building. Nothing glues together a divided community more than a common threat, real or imagined, and nothing has united the Rakhine and the Bamar more than identifying the Rohingya as their common enemy. The consequence is a campaign of ethnic cleansing that has been going on for decades. In this situation, it would be very naïve to believe that they are suffering such persecution because they have choose to call themselves Rohingya, a claim for ethnicity that they have as much right to make as any other community in Burma, instead of accepting the designation “Bengalis” enforced by the Burmese regime.

If, as Mr. Derek Tonkin claims, the word Rohingya “is offensive to many Burmese,” that tells us more about those Burmese than about the Rohingya themselves. Burmese define themselves and what it means to be Burmese in the very act of exclusion. What is at stake in the way that the Burmese nation treats and identifies the Rohingya and other Muslim communities is not only the future of those communities, but also the kind of Burma that the Burmese want to build for themselves.

Carlos Sardiña Galache is a freelance journalist based in Bangkok. A longer version of this essay is available here. You can visit his website here.

RB News

September 25, 2014

Burmese Rohingya Organisation (BROUK) President, Tun Khin, joined the first Global Stateless Forum at the Hague, Holland from 15-17 September 2014. The Global Stateless Forum was co-hosted by UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the agency mandated by the General Assembly to help states to address statelessness, and the Statelessness Programm of Tilburg University. 

Mr. Tun Khin presented research and documentation on the 1982 citizenship law which deprived basic fundamental rights of Rohingya and which made Rohingyas stateless in their own state. 

BROUK President Tun Khin participated in two panels during the event. The first Panel was about Experiences of Statelessness and displacement. The speakers include Dr. Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh from Oxford University and Dr. Nell Gabiam who is visiting Researcher at The Centre for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University Washington DC, USA. 

The second Panel was on Myanmar and Mr. Tun Khin joined along with Amal De Chickera (Senior Consultant on Statelessness, the Equal Trust) who talked with the title “Human Rights of Stateless Rohingya”, Ms. Katherine G. Southwick (Research Associate, Centre for Asian Legal Studies, National University of Singapore) with the title Statelessness and Genocide in a Transitional State. 

Mr. Tun Khin particularly highlighted that 1982 Citizenship Law needs to be understood not in legal isolation, but as part of a broader process of ethnic cleansing and destruction of the Rohingya as an ethnic group in Myanmar, which holds in place and sanctions multiple anti-Rohingya policies and practices. This process has important regional consequences as populations and conflicts spill over into the region. The international community should not consider the 1982 Citizenship Law as simply a sensitive domestic issue to be dealt with internally by the Government of Myanmar. Both Myanmar and the international community have the responsibility to protect Myanmar’s population, including the Rohingya, especially where there is evidence of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. 

Mr. Tun Khin raised the issue with UNHCR about resettlement of Rohingya refugees from Bangladesh, India, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.

Aman Ullah

RB Article

September 24, 2014

The draft of the 1982 Myanmar Citizenship law was approved and passed by the third session of the Third Pyithu Hluttaw and promulgated by the Chairman of the Council of State, on 15 October 1982, “after long six years deliberation within the top echelons of party and state as well as extensive consultations with officials and party leaders of all levels.” It contains 8 Chapters and 76 sections recognizes three categories of citizens, namely citizen, associate citizen and naturalized citizen, Under that law, citizenships is decided based on prescriptions of laws, not on racial and religions.

Reportedly, since the draft law was published in April 1982, at least six members of the 475 strong People’s Assembly—selected in 1982—have resigned because of their foreign ancestry they perhaps feared state appraisal if their origin was exposed later. Under the Section 18 of this Law the penalty for falsifying racial identity is up to ten years of imprisonment and fine of kyats fifty thousand.

It was said that, this law is ingeniously designed to preserve the purity of the Burmese nationality although General Ne Win himself and many of his deputies were Chinese or Chinese origin.

Under the section 3 of this law it is mentioned that, “Nationals such as the Kachin, Kayah, Karen, Chin, Burman, Mon, Rakhine or Shan and ethnic groups as have settled in any of the territories included within the State as their permanent home from a period anterior to 1185 B.E., 1823 A.D. are Burma citizens”. 

And under the section 4, “Every national and every person born of parents, both of whom are nationals are citizens by birth.”

In the section 6, “A person who is already a citizen on the date this Law cones into force is a citizen. Action, however shall be taken under section 18 for infringement of the provision of that section.”

As par section 18 any citizen who has acquired citizenship by making a false representation or by concealment shall have his citizenship revoked, and shall also be liable to imprisonment for a term of ton years and to a fine of kyats fifty thousand.

According to the speech in Parliament of U Khin Yi, Union Minister for Immigration and Population, on 18 June 2013, “There are two kinds of citizens—citizens by birth and citizens by law. According to section 3, nationals such as the Kachin, Kayah, Kayin, Chin, Burma, Mon, Rakhine and Shan and ethnic groups as have settled in any of the territories within the State as their permanent home from a period anterior to 1185 M.E., 1823 A.D. are Myanmar citizens by birth.

According to section-5, every national and every person born of parents, both of whom are indigenous nationals are citizens by birth. 

Section 6 of the 1982 Citizenship Law states that according to The Union Citizenship (Election) Act, 1948 and The Union Citizenship Act, 1948, a person who is already a citizen on the date this Law comes into force is a citizen by law”. 

The citizenship issue was a settled issue and the Muslims of Arakan who identify themselves Rohingya are citizens by birth. As they, their parents and their grandparents were born and bred in Burma and most of them were indigenous, under the sub clauses (i), (ii) and (iii) of Article Before the colonization of Burma by the British 11, of 1947 Constitution of Union of Burma.

Indigenous peoples were the descendants of those peoples that inhabited a territory prior to colonization or formation of the present state. In the report of the Mr. Panton, the Muslim population of Arakan was about 30,000 on the eve of the colonization of Burma by British. Thus, the descendants of those 30,000 must be included in the indigenous races of the Union of Burma. There are also many Muslim of Arakan who can claim to be citizens under section 4 (2) of the Union Citizenship Act of 1948 on the ground of their descent from ancestors who for two generations have made Burma their permanent home, and whose parents and himself were born in Burma. 

Being bona fide citizens of Burma, the Rohingyas were enfranchised in all the national and local elections of Burma including under the Gen. Ne Win also. After the enactment of 1982 Citizenship Law, the immediate election was held in 1986.

However, before that election, in 1985 the government published and distributed to the peoples of Burma a form called ‘Nain-2’, a 25 pages form including 5 appendix pages. This form has three Chapters; Chapter-1 for at the age of 10 year to 18 year, Chapter-2 for at the age of 18 year and Chapter-3 for at the age of 30 year and 45 year. The applicant needs to give all the particulars information including the history of his/her education and occupation and submit the form with his/her fingerprints of both hands and toe prints of both legs. He/she has to give the particular information of his/her siblings; his/her parents and their siblings, his/her grandparents of both fraternal and maternal sides and their siblings, the parents of all their grandparents and their siblings, the applicant’s children and their children. The particulars, including name, date of birth, place of birth, race & type of citizen, identity card No., and if death-- date and place of the death.

Each and every one of the Rohingya of Arakan timely submitted to the concerned authorities after completely filling the form with Rohingya as their identity. However, no action or reaction was made by the government. But the Rohingyas had enjoyed the right to vote and the right to be elected as people’s representatives to the Organ of State power at different levels in that election in the said election of 1986.

Under the 1974 Constitution and 1973 Election Law, ‘citizens born of parents both of whom are Union nationals and citizens born of parents both of whom are Union citizens, have the right to be elected people’s representatives to the People’s Assembly or People’s Council at different levels. Persons who are not citizens of the Union of Burma have no right to vote.’

According to the 1974 Constitution, ‘citizens are those who are born of the parents whom are nationals of the Socialist Republic of Union of the Burma and who are vested with citizenship according to existing laws on the date of this constitution comes into force.’ 

Former Minister for Mines Dr. Nyi Nyi and Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs Minister U Win Ko had to resign from the position of the members of cabinet and People’s Assembly, as they could not fulfill the requirement of the said law. No Rohingya who had either been elected or who had applied for the nomination had neither been challenged nor barred from participation or asked to resign after being elected.

Moreover, SLORC held multi-party general election in May 1990. Under the1989 Section 7 and 8 of 1989 Pyithu Hluttaw Election law, ‘all citizens, associate citizens and naturalized citizens are permitted to vote, but only the citizens are allowed to stand for election. No foreign residents were allowed to vote.’

The Rohingya were not only allowed to vote but also, in their exercise of franchise, elected four Rohingya members of Parliament. U Chit Lwin (a) Ebrahim, Mr. Fazal Ahmed, U Kyaw Min (a) Shomshul Anwarul Haque, and U Tin Maung (a) Nur Ahmed have been elected as members of the Parliament.

In fact the Rohingyas were not only permitted to vote but also to form their own political parties during the May 1990 election. Two parties were formed the Students and Youth League for Mayu Development and the National Democratic and Human Rights (NDPHR). The NDPHR won all four seats in Maung Daw and Buthidaung constituencies, and in each constituency votes for the two parties counted for 80 per cent of the total votes cast. Moreover, the turnout in both constituencies equaled the national average, at 70 per cent of eligible voters. The NDPHR also fielded candidates in four other constituencies; Kyuk Taw-1, Minbya-1, Mrauk U -2 and Sittwe -2, and they gained an average of 17 per cent of the votes while the Government- backed National Unity Party got only 13 per cent. 

Although the name of Rohingya was not permitted to use in the party title, the NDPHR was allowed to produce a booklet in Burmese called ‘Arakan and the Rohingya people: a short History’ on August 31, 1991. According to the NDPHR sources, the permission to print this booklet was rescinded two months later. 

Even in the 2010 Election, which was held under the SPDC, the Rohingya were not only allowed to vote but also to be elected, in their exercise of franchise. Under the laws of that election, all Hluttaw representatives must have been residing in Burma for a minimum of at least 10 continuous years prior to the election. Residency exemptions are provided for individuals residing overseas in an official capacity for the government. In addition, both of the candidate’s parents must have been Burmese citizens at the time of their birth. 

A total of 37 political parties contested in this election, which included two Rohingya political parties also contested - - National Democratic Party for Development (NDPD) and National Democratic and Peace Party (NDPP). Some independent Rohingya candidates also contested in the election.

Out 33 Rohingya contested in the polls, 21 contested with NDPD ticket, 6 with USDP ticket, 3 with NDPP ticket and 3 independent candidates. U Htay Win (a) Zahidur Rahman with USDP ticket was elected for the Nationalities Parliament. U Aung Zaw Win (a)Zakir Hussain and U Shwe Maung (a)Abdu Razak both with USDP tickets were elected for the People’s Parliament. U Aung Myo Myint (a) Jahan Gir with USDP ticket, U Aung Myint (a) Zahiddullah and U Bashir Ahmed both with UNDP tickets were elected for the State Parliament. The Rohingyas of Arakan were overwhelmingly gone to vote with average turnover of more than 90% of over six hundred thousand eligible Rohingya voters.

Thus, their eligibility to vote and to stand for all these national elections must be upheld as a measure of recognition for the Rohingyas as full citizens in accordance with the 1982 Citizenship Law. They are neither associate citizens nor naturalized citizens and they never need to apply for their citizenship.

Although the 1982 Citizenship Law was enacted in 1982, the authorities never show their serious concern to implement it during Ne Win times or SLORC and SPDC period. However, after coming to the power by the present government became very serious on this matter. 

They try to implement the Citizenship Law only on the Rohingya. Although, there are more than a half million of Bangladeshi Buddhist who have entered in Arakan, during post independent day, they government did nothing against them. There are more than 20 million Chinese legally and illegally entered into Burma since SLORC regime. They are super class citizens of the country. They can do and can’t do anything they want. The whole Burma is now their father-in-law’s home.

U Khin Yi, the Union Minister for Immigration and Population Affairs, in his speech in Parliament on 18 June 2013, he mentioned that, “Even though they are Kachin, Kayah, Kayin, Chin, Burma, Mon, Rakhine and Shan, they are not national races if they permanently live in other countries, not in Myanmar. Same national races who have settled in Myanmar after 1824 are not indigenous races. So they are not citizens by birth. The law also states that national races who acquire citizenship of other countries and persons born of parents, both of whom are those foreign citizens cannot become Myanmar citizens”. But he and his government do not make any concern to these Chinese and Bangladeshi Buddhists issue. Their only interest is to wipe out the identity and existence of Rohingya from the soil of Arakan.

RB News

September 24, 2014

New York -- U.S. State Department held the event “Displacement of Religious Minorities” at the 69th United Nations General Assembly on September 22, 2014, at the United Nations Plaza in New York. Dr. Wakar Uddin, Director General of Arakan Rohingya Union, attended the event at the invitation of U.S. State Department. The event was presided by Sarah Sewall, U.S Under Secretary of State for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights. There were over 60 invited participants from various government and non-governmental agencies and civic societies.

Tom Malinowski, US Assistant Secretary of State for Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, also attended the event. In the opening remarks, Secretary Malinowski described the growing challenges of displacement of religious minorities in various parts of the world from political, social, religious, and cultural contexts. He stressed how the Government of United States has dedicated its resources and making tremendous efforts through engagement with global communities, including various governments and non-governmental agencies to address the rapidly growing displacement issue. He also discussed the strategies to tackle the problems faced by the displaced religious minorities. 

Secretary Sewall provided in-depth analyses of the complexities in displacement issues. The Secretary has stated that in 2013, the world witnessed the largest displacement of religious minorities. In almost every corner of the globe, millions of people - Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Yezidis and others representing a range of faiths were forced from their homes on account of their religious beliefs. She added that displacement is continuing in 2014, and entire neighborhoods are emptying of residents out of fear or by force, and communities are threatened and often disappearing from their historic homelands and dispersing across the map. She further described how this mass displacement has become a pernicious norm, particularly in conflict zones.

Dr. Wakar Uddin spoke about the displacement of the Rohingya ethnic minority in Arakan state, Burma, and in several countries around the world, particularly in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and the Middle East region. Dr. Uddin expressed serious concerns about the horrendous conditions at the Rohingya IDP camps in Sittwe and other Townships in Arakan. He stated that the displacement of Rohingya population has deeper implications as the victims are increasingly preyed upon by human smugglers and traffickers, and the victims ending up in hard labor camps and sex slave trade in Southern Thailand. He explained the major difficulties in initiation of dialogue among the communities in Arakan due to complexities involving the Union Government and State officials, and the lack of will power by the Government of Myanmar in Naypyitaw. 

Other distinguished speakers who spoke on displacements of religious minorities, include Dr. M. Din Syamsuddin, Chairman Center for Dialogue and Cooperation among Civilizations, Jakarta, Indonesia; Dr. William Vendley, Secretary General, Religions for Peace, United Nations Plaza, NY; Dr. Sayyid Syeed, National Director of ISNA, Washington, DC; Christen Broecker, Associate Director, Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights, New York, and others.

Press Release

Date: September 23, 2014

We, the leadership and members of the Rohingya American Society (RAS) strongly condemn the forced Bengalization attempt of President Thein Sein Government to helpless Rohingya native of the soil of Arakan (Rakhine-prey) through the immigration process enforcing the discriminatory 1982 Myanmar citizenship law which made the Rohingyas stateless in their own homeland.

In this context, we would like to reiterate that the 1982 Myanmar (Burma) citizenship law adopted in October 1982 by the previous Burmese Govt. led by the late General Ne Win is not related with the national status checking of the Rohingya Muslims of Arakan who are already citizens by birth and according to the 1947 Constitution, 1947 Burmese Residence and Registration Act, 1948 Burmese Citizenship law, and 1974 Burmese Constitution as well as per the 1948 Burma Independence Declaration according to the Nu-Atlee Agreement.

In fact this 1982 Myanmar (Burma) Citizenship law is concerned with the suspected foreigners and immigrants whose citizenship status needed to be scrutinized in Arakan such as those two hundred and fifty thousand RAKHINE (MOGS) Bangladeshi citizens who were born and brought up in neighboring Bangladesh and citizens of that country by birth, who entered into Arakan illegally and staying without the knowledge of Myanmar government and its central immigration organ functioning by the Rakhine ruling elite group.

The truth is that Rohingyas known as Mohammedan in accordance with British Census in 1826, 1872, 1911 and 1944 are already indigenous Myanmar citizens according to the Article No-3 and 6 of 1982 Myanmar citizenship law. So, enforcing and implementing the 1982 Myanmar citizenship law against the native Rohingya people forcing them to identify as Bengali is a matter of great concern to the world and UN.

This 1982 Myanmar citizenship law was intentionally created and approved by the Govt. of Myanmar (Burma) to exclude the Rohingya people from Myanmar citizenship rights.

The effect of the Myanmar Citizenship Law 1982 is to make it almost impossible for the Rohingya people to gain citizenship. This violates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child and international norms prohibiting discrimination of racial and religious minorities. The legal and practical constraints imposed by the Myanmar Citizenship Law 1982 render it “almost impossible” for the Rohingya people to be recognized as citizens of Myanmar. In fact that the Rohingyas are effectively excluded from citizenship is a clear violation of international human rights law. It is a fundamental principle that “everyone has the right to a nationality. This principle is especially important in relation to the children. 

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child provides in terms that every child “shall have from birth...the right to acquire a nationality”. As a party to that Convention, Burma is obliged to “ensure the implementation” of every child’s right to acquire a nationality. Since it is almost impossible for a Rohingya, and in particular a Rohingya child, to acquire Burmese citizenship, the 1982 Myanmar Citizenship Law violates the fundamental right to a nationality.

Moreover, since the Rohingya have no other nationality, the effect of the 1982 Myanmar Citizenship Law is to render them stateless. This is significant because Burma is specifically obliged to ensure a child’s right to acquire a nationality “where the child would otherwise be stateless”. 

Moreover, it runs contrary to many other international instruments which aim to limit statelessness. The 1982 Citizenship Law also violates international norms against discrimination. Ever since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 it has been recognized as a fundamental principle that “everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race and religion”. This principle has been repeated consistently in international Conventions. The rights of children, including the right to acquire nationality, must also be respected “without discrimination of any kind.

So, we sincerely urge and strongly demand the President Thein Sein Government to immediately stop undemocratic process of forced Bengalization of Rohingya’ immigration process in any forms using the policy of stick and carrot to helpless Rohingyas.

We earnestly recommend the GOM (Government of Myanmar) to restore the Rohingyas' citizenship rights disregarding 1982 Myanmar Citizenship Law and dismantle the IDP camps allowing all Rohingyas to return to their original own places with full compensation and reconstruction of their villages, houses, religious school and places of worship (mosques) burnt and destroyed by Rakhine mob with the help of Burmese security forces.

We also urge the world Governments including USA, EU, ASEAN, OIC and United Nations to put strong pressure to Myanmar current government to cease all forms of human rights violation against the ethnic Rohingya people and restore their fundamental and citizenship rights in Myanmar to make the country a better place for all people of Burma.

Note: Rohingya American Society (RAS) is a formerly known as “The Burmese Rohingya American Friendship Association (BRAFA).” 

RB News 

September 20, 2014

A. Soma Khatun, a 28 year old Rohingya woman, wife and mother, hadn't recovered well from the birth of her second child. Her son, Abdur Rahman, came to the world just a little over three months ago. Wife of Abdul Karim, A. Soma Khatun was blessed with their first child, Stamina Akter 3 years ago. They lived as a family in one of the thousands of sheds in Nayapara Refugee Camp in Teknaf, Bangladesh, which is near the Myanmar border, the motherland of the Rohingya. The country can clearly be seen just across Naf river, which separates the 2 countries beyond the border point shared by the two countries. The Rohingya's citizenship was revoked by the Myanmar government in 1982. Most of the refugees in this camp came to Bangladesh in the early 1990's and their generation after, have since been born there in the camps. 

A. Soma Khatun's family was fortunate in a sense of comparison, certainly in the eyes of many of the poorest local Bangladeshis and the Rohingyas living in the makeshift camps in Leda and Kutupalong. They were registered as refugees by the Bangladeshi government run UNHCR. They've MRC numbers, which qualifies them for food ration. The World Food Program handles the responsibilities of food distribution. They have recently started implementing a systematic change, from food coupons to a digital fingerprint scanning process. Some members of the family would get their fingerprints scanned and would get issued a barcoded food card, complete with photo ID. The selected members of the family would then have to queue and given the number of Refugees in the camp, these queues form long lines, zigzagged around the distribution building, which is along the well kept road between the main gate and the row of the camp officials offices. They would have to present their card and get their fingers scanned and receive their ration. Prior to WFP, the Red Crescent handled the food distribution. However the allocated amount was small and was not sufficient for the needs of the Refugees. They would have to go out of camp to purchase food. Now with the newly implemented changes, they have a choice of items which can be "purchased" using the balance from their food cards. The shop staff will even ask if there are any particular items that they wish to obtain. (In addition to this systematic change, some unregistered "makeshift" camps are now eligible to receive food ration. This is very good news for the unregistered refugees that are living near the registered camps. More than 200'000 live in these areas. Prior to now, some unregistered refugees were eligible only for non food items such as soaps etc.) One could be thankful for the ration but they have no rights within the country and no laws to protect them. They technically are not supposed to be carrying money or leave the camp for work. Many people do though. Generally in order to leave the camp, the Refugees would have to obtain a written permission to leave by an official such as the Camp-In-Charge, for good reason such as doctors visits, if they are fortunate enough to afford them. 

Many of the refugees have grown up in a Bangladesh camp and are generally taught the Bangla language. Being able to speak the local language, the Refugees can get by well outside of the camp. It is those who only speak Rohingya and Burmese who would run into trouble, especially at police checkpoints positioned along the roadside, before and after the ship's dock for St. Martin Island, or near "Friendship Road" (where locals can make day trips to Myanmar to visit family), heading towards Cox's Bazar town which is the nearest hub, 85 km away from Nayapara. There are 4 checkpoints between this camp and Cox's Bazar. Even if refugees are given written permission (which is often just something crudely written on unofficial paper), they can face harassment and embarrassment at these checkpoints. It's not just the checkpoints to be worried about if you were amongst this group of people. The Communities are living near the Naf river and given it being so close to Myanmar, these are considered "sensitive" areas. Not much goes unnoticed. 

The sheds they are living in are in quite poor conditions. These bamboo huts quickly deteriorate, gets damaged by the insects and the elements. The fencing requires fairly constant mending. The main and obvious issue is the polythene (plastic) sheets on the roof, which is used to keep the rain from into seeping into the sheds. These polythene sheets are often torn and patched several times over. There is a buildup of leaves in sections of the roof, causing the weakened Polythene to droop and pool water. When it rains it fails under the strain and water pours into the small enclosure. Generally, a roof of this construction and in that area, the plastic will need replacing once a year- that is if you are fortunate. These roofs haven't seen new polythene this year and maybe not have been replaced in the last year either. Maintenance costs of the sheds thus far, have been donated by the international community. The responsibilities for the distribution of polythene amongst other maintenance products belongs to the UNHCR. Some sheds receive it and some get turned away because apparently there is no available budget for it. The quarters are cramped with full families, sometimes with up to 7 people in the small space of these 10'x 10' sheds. It's dark, hot and often damp in the sheds. No fresh flow of air to be found in these cramped spaces. There is however good hope in the camp with recent approval for new accommodations. Or so told by the local UNHCR to the refugees. 

Those are the, safe to say, deplorable conditions of the living quarters of the refugees in the camp. However, despite the struggle to feed their family, the lack of rights and very sub par living quarters, A. Soma Khatun had a family and they were fortunate to be living together. As mentioned, she never quite recovered from the birth of her 3 month old son. Finding yourself ill, doesn't usually turn out well in these camps. 

Perhaps the most complained about issues by refugees is the camp's health care situation. Specifically, the camps IPD (Indoor Patient Clinic.) There is only one of its kind in this camp with the burden to serve more than 13000 refugees. The MOH (The Bangladeshi Government Ministry of Health) has a clinic that must be first visited. Serious patients are to be referred to the IPD. (If the seriousness of the patients condition is too poor they should get referred to a Cox's Bazar hospital by IPD doctors.) 

This clinic is also being funded by the international community. The main sponsors listed are Canada, Australia and the USA. The responsibilities of the operation of the IPD and MOH clinic belong to the Bangladeshi Government. Refugees have often told RB News about the very poor state of the facility and the constant lack of supplies. "The IPD and MOH Hospital gets delivery of donated medicines on the third of each month. On the 13th date, there will be nothing offered. Only saline water."

In the IPD there are very few beds in working condition. 6 or 7 of the 30 that had been donated are useable. There are no water pipes or such water facility to the diarrhoea room. There is an electrical connection in the clinic but according to refugee patients, it's rarely turned on; not even to power the overhead fan to cool the sick patients within. Refugees know that if their condition is not critical and they speak with the MOH doctors, they will be scolded and sent away, or perhaps made to wait for very long periods of time to be told there is no medicine to treat their illness. In the case of A. Soma Khatun, there is no real surprise that her condition had reached such a critical point before she was brought to the MOH clinic to ask for a referral to IPD. After a long night of vomiting and diarrhea, was taken the the MOH clinic at 6 in the morning, only to find the doors have been locked tight. The other Refugees tried to contact the doctor, who then told her to wait for centre to open at 9am. By the time she was admitted to the clinic, Khatun was barely able to lift her head to take water. She wasn't administered saline despite the request of her family and their explanation of her dehydration.

The day was Monday, September 8, 2014. A. Soma Khatun was said to have taken her last breath at 10am. Sadly she never was referred to the IPD by the camp clinic. They kept her body at the clinic and was only handed over to her family at 1pm for burial. 

According to refugee witnesses, the police came to the MOH clinic for an investigation where the doctor gave a false statement about her death: "The police from Teknaf Police station came and investigated into the matter and the doctor explained to the police, whispering softly, that she was rushed to the Hospital after she had died at home, then the Police went away. Which is completely false statement to the Police by the Doctor." The local UNCHR has since been investigating the case. 

It's terribly sad and heartbreaking for the husband and the two children she had left behind. Her children will likely grow up and spend the rest of their days in Nayapara camp. This is not a reality that the Bangladeshi government would like to see. They wish to broker a deal with Myanmar return Rohingya refugees. A history of asylum for the persecuted, stateless people spotted with forced repatriation. The worst of which in 1997 where hundreds were sent back to Myanmar against their will and by force. 

On a fairly regular basis there will be rumours or outright statements made by local authorities that there have been a deal made with Myanmar government and that they would begin repatriating refugees. There will be write ups in local newspapers stating the same. 

Recently, there had been multiple international and local news articles with a similar statement that a deal had been brokered for repatriation of just under 2500 Rohingya refugees. Before it made the news the word was out in both of the camps. The government is planning to send these registered refugees back to Myanmar within two months. The refugees said that the ones who would be sent back would be those who signed an affidavit in 2005 after being brought to court in Cox's Bazar. (This, the same time that the next case of forced repatriation occurred.) The said affidavit, according to the refugees had been signed by force. It stated that they were Myanmar nationals and that they agree to return there. Almost two weeks after the articles circulated and tensions grew in the camps, the Myanmar government made a statement denying the claim of the repatriation agreement. There has been demonstrations in the camp in that time period. Those people and all Rohingya refugees that we have talked to have made it very clear that they will not return to Myanmar voluntarily until their requests have been met. The main request being the restoration of their citizenship and human rights. Many say that they would rather die than return without change. 

If the seemingly impossible but hypothetical scenario had occurred that saw a repatriation deal be made, the next issue for the refugees returning would be the lack of protection and dignity in the process of return. It would be carried out with the cooperation of the two countries and without the supervision of the international community.

For more than 20 years, Rohingya refugees have been taking asylum in neighbouring countries such as Bangladesh to escape violence and persecution in their motherland of Myanmar, particularly in Rakhine (Arakan state.) The government have been writing them out of their citizenship and rights; excluding their name from the census and refusing to acknowledge the existence of the the Rohingya ethnic group within the country. The government are claiming them as Bangladeshis who have come to Myanmar illegally. Their (Muslim) religion in former Burma is a very small percentage of the majority Buddhist population. Over the past few years, Myanmar Muslims (who are citizens, not Rohingya), have faced violence and discrimination. There are nationalist anti Muslim groups with a thin veil of Buddhism who are allowed to distribute propaganda and speak publicly to instill fear and discrimination and promoting violence against this religious group. So, hundreds of thousands of Muslims (mainly Rohingya) have become displaced within their own country.

While it is encouraging and possibly gives new hope with the recent new changes to the food rations for the Refugees and recent approvals for new housing, many still fear the discrimination and the prospect of forced repatriation by the Bangladeshi government. More important for current issues faced by the Refugees is the critical need to improve and maintain a respectable standard for the health care facilities in the camp so that cases like A. Soma Khatun should never happen again.