Plight of the Rohingya a shadow on Myanmar’s young democracy

LAST week the UN’s top human rights official called Myanmar’s military campaign against the Rohingya Muslim minority group in that country’s Rakhine state “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing”.

This is what he meant: using a pretext of rooting out Islamist insurgents, Myanmar’s military, together with Buddhist villagers, is terrorising the Rohingya, emptying and razing their villages, and attempting to hound them out of the country.

Of a total of 1.1 million Rohingya who remained in Myanmar despite repeated waves of violence since the late 1970s, more than 400 000 have fled to neighbouring Bangladesh in just the past month. New arrivals are building makeshift settlements near established camps where hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees from previous exoduses already live. Most are women, children and the elderly.

Conditions are dire. Food is scarce. Aid agencies are worn thin. The monsoon rain is torrential. The human catastrophe has captured the world’s attention, but it has also caused confusion. Didn’t Myanmar just undergo a democratic transition? Isn’t it led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi? Why are Buddhists perpetrating an ethnic cleansing against Muslims?

The mass exodus of the Rohingya from Myanmar has underpinnings in events that took place centuries ago, as well as in events that took place weeks ago. The coast of what is now Myanmar’s Rakhine state was the centre of what was once called the Kingdom of Arakan. The name Arakan has since been morphed into Rakhine and Rohingya over the years to describe both the indigenous and Muslim populations of the region.

Muslims lived in Arakan both as traders and as slaves captured by the king’s army from nearby Bengal. Over time they developed a unique language that is not mutually intelligible with Bengali. Rakhine Buddhist and Muslim populations had been interacting for centuries by the time the Bamar, a larger ethnic group from the inland, took control of the coast in 1785.

Within 40 years, the British had usurped the Bamar and ruled the Arakan coast as part of a vast colony stretching from there to the Hindu Kush. Muslims from Bengal began to move to the Arakan coast in even greater numbers during this period, in search of work in the colonial economy, in many cases supplanting Arakanese labour and stirring local resentment. The perception of the Rohingya as outsiders and illegal immigrants grew during this period and was only exacerbated when the British armed local Muslims during World War 2 to fight the Arakanese, who largely sided with the Japanese.

After past spasms of violence, many Rohingya would return and resettle. This time around, the Myanmar government has warned that only Rohingya with verifiable ties to Myanmar will be allowed back. The systematic disenfranchisement of the Rohingya makes it unlikely that most will meet that criteria.

The state’s official stance is that the Rohingya ethnic group doesn’t exist. Instead, they are referred to as “Bengali,” a rhetorical linkage to a foreign land that many have never stepped foot in. Myanmar doesn’t recognise the Rohingya as cit- izens, rendering them stateless and limiting their access to public services.

Last week, Myanmar military’s commander- in- chief Aung Hlaing wrote this in a Facebook post: “They have demanded recognition as Rohingya, which has never been an ethnic group in Myanmar. Bengali issue is a national cause and we need to be united in establishing the truth.”

Suu Kyi cancelled her trip to the UN General Assembly and is set to address Myanmar on Tuesday. But, ultimately, how much power does she have? When Myanmar’s military junta agreed to democratic concessions starting in 2011, the world lauded Suu Kyi for her dedication to the cause.

But Myanmar’s constitution remains written in a way that bars Suu Kyi from becoming president because she has a foreign-born spouse and children. In many ways, the military still controls the country. A quarter of seats in the parliament are reserved for the military, as are the ministries of home affairs, foreign affairs and defence. It holds a majority of seats on the National Defence and Security Council, which has the power to dissolve the government.

That means the military could step in and replace Suu Kyi if they felt she was interfering with their plans. Whether they would risk renewed sanctions to do that is unclear. But amid her silence, a long-held goal of the Myanmar military may be in sight – the full-scale expulsion of Rakhine state’s supposedly illegal immigrants. – Washington Post

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