THE ALARMING ROHINGYA CRISIS
What lends urgency to the Rohingya crisis – justifying this second exploration in two weeks – is the emergence of the militant Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army with suggestions of Pakistani, Saudi Arabian, Malaysian and Afghan links and funds from Australia. Pitted against the Myanmarese Buddhist 969 movement, it could plunge the region into the horrors of a Syrian-style civil war.
The challenge is in no way lessened by citing worse suffering elsewhere or proving that the Rohingyas themselves are guilty of similar crimes against Chakmas in the Chittagong Hill Tracts or Arakanese Communists. What European Jews underwent in the Holocaust does not mitigate what they have inflicted – and are inflicting – on the Palestinians. The answer does not lie in India or Bangladesh evacuating the entire beleaguered community, which isn’t possible in any case. New Delhi and Dhaka can, of course, afford to be more compassionate, but their responsibility for regional stability can be discharged most effectively by pressuring Myanmar to take back its own people and treating them humanely.
The Tatmadaw, as the Myanmar military calls itself, may be beyond redemption, but the leaders of India and Bangladesh can use their growing security and economic linkages with Myanmar to persuade Aung San Suu Kyi to understand that inaction makes mockery of the Nobel Peace Prize she received to international acclaim. Ms Suu Kyi may be afraid of losing Myanmar. The greater danger she runs is of losing the world.
A United Nations spokesman said recently that 87,000 mostly Rohingya refugees had arrived in Bangladesh since 25 August. About 20,000 more were massed on the border waiting to enter, while overcrowded Bangladesh has announced it is running out of land for refugee camps. It’s for friendly neighbours to ensure that Myanmar does not continue to deny citizenship rights to Rohingyas because of ethnic and religious differences. Such treatment inevitably raises the question of how long it takes people to be regarded as sons of the soil.
The ARSA insurgency was simmering all through 2016 and the first half of 2017. It began as the Harakah al-Yaqin movement led by Attullah Abu Ammar Jununi, who was born in Pakistan and raised in Saudi Arabia before he returned home to lead the struggle against Buddhist vigilantes and official repression. Initially low-level attacks became bolder in 2016 as a response to the violence in Rakhine state perpetrated by government-backed Buddhist vigilantes – the 969 movement – which the state security forces did little to control or curtail.
It turned into a vicious cycle with ARSA launching public attacks and inviting brutal retaliation. In 2016, ARSA, armed with machetes and other primitive weapons, attacked police posts. The government (or its Buddhist vigilantes) responded with pogroms, including persecuting civilians and setting fire to Rohingya villages. Such violence in October and November 2016 led to a huge addition to the 400,000 Rohingya refugees who had already crossed into south-eastern Bangladesh.
Last month, two days after the UN special representative, Kofi Annan, issued his report on the Myanmar government’s mishandling of the problem, about 150 ARSA militants attacked between 24 and 30 police outposts in Rakhine state. ARSA claims the attacks were pre-emptive and done in self-defence. Those attacks were a tactical failure: about 77 militants were killed, compared to only a dozen police, in the fighting. But the attacks were not meant to be tactical successes. They were meant to be a strategic victory.
ARSA knew all too well that the Tatmadaw could respond only with an extremely heavyhanded “clearance operation” and total disregard for human rights. By August 28, the death toll was in the hundreds. In the days that followed, thousands of refugees crossed into Bangladesh, with an additional 20,000 stuck along the border. Earlier, about 6,000 refugees, mainly women and children came under Tatmadaw fire as they tried to cross the frontier.
A dissection of the nature of Buddhism is not especially relevant at this juncture. Yes, “Buddhism is supposed to be a religion of love, not hatred; of sympathy for the distressed, not their suppression,” as a reader, Barun Dasgupta, has pointed out. But no religion admits to being a faith of fire and fury. The 969 movement also portrays itself as a peaceful, grassroots group dedicated to “promoting and protecting religion.” Muslims who are questioned about Islamist terrorism inevitably reel off Quranic suras about love and kindness. Roman Catholic priests presented the dreaded Inquisition as surrendering to the compassion of Christ. We have seen warlike Buddhist clergy not only in Myanmar and Sri Lanka but also in erstwhile South Vietnam.
However, anyone who doubts the vigour with which Hinduism stamped out Buddhism need only remember Rabindranath’s moving poem, Pujarini. Harking back to that triumph of militant faith, the British cynically encouraged Hindu Nepalese settlers in Buddhist Bhutiya-Lepcha Sikkim to prise the small Himalayan kingdom out of Tibet’s cultural and religious grasp. “In Sikhim, as in India, Hinduism will assuredly cast out Buddhism, and the praying-wheel of the lama will give place to the sacrificial implements of the Brahman” wrote H.H. Risley, a 19th century colonial administrator.
Vice and virtue mingle in all faiths, and all practitioners are free to use religion for their secular purposes. As journalist Sankar Ray points out, “the Khaleda Zia government pitted them (Rohingyas) against the Chakmas of Chittagong Hill tracts by forceful settlement of the former” and Bangladesh’s present prime minister, Sheikh Hasina “silently endorsed” her predecessor’s strategy. No wonder Rohingyas provoke anger among Bangladeshis. Perhaps similar – seemingly legitimate – reasons inspire host populations in areas of India like Jammu where Rohingyas feel unwanted.
Ray also refers to Abul Barkat’s “well-researched book” Political Economy of Unpeopling of Indigenous Peoples: The Case of Bangladesh, which apparently no newspaper bothered to review. Barkat, an economics professor at Dhaka University, was inundated with threatening messages from Islamic terrorists for his thesis that more than 80 per cent of the indigenous poor of Bangladesh became homeless during the last 40 years. He might also point to the systematic deprivation and dispossession of Bangladesh’s Hindu minority. But to repeat the old truism, two wrongs don’t make a right. The Rohingya case must be treated on its own.
“Every time I see the news, my heart breaks at the suffering of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar,” says Malala Yousafzai, who survived being shot in the head by the Taliban. She is waiting for her fellow Nobel laureate Ms Suu Kyi to condemn the atrocities. Britain’s foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, says the treatment of the Rohingyas is “besmirching” Myanmar’s reputation. But neither enjoys the leverage with Naypyidaw that Narendra Modi and Sheikh Hasina would if they exerted themselves.
Bangladesh needs a secure neighbourhood even to pursue its economic interests with Myanmar. India cannot claim a global position and still see persecuted peoples only through the lens of religion. Moreover, Sittwe, India’s major investment in Myanmar, is in Rakhine state.
The writer is the author of several books and a regular media columnist