MYANMAR ‘TARGETS’ ROHINGYA WHO SPEAK OUT
Educated members of the persecuted minority say they have long been subject to widespread abuse
Mohammed Hashim hid in the hills and watched as his brother begged for his life, his arms bound behind his back as soldiers marched the 35-year-old teacher away. It was the last time he saw him alive.
It was Aug 26, the day after Rohingya Muslim separatist attacks on military outposts in the Rohingya homeland in western Myanmar. In their wake, Myanmar’s military and local Buddhists would respond with a campaign of rape, massacre and arson that has driven about 700,000 Rohingya into Bangladesh.
But more than a dozen Rohingya teachers, elders and religious leaders told The Associated Press that educated Rohingya — already subject to systematic and widespread harassment, arrests and torture — were singled out, part of Myanmar’s operation to drive the Muslim Rohingya from majority Buddhist Myanmar.
Soldiers targeted the educated, they said, so there would be no community leaders left willing to speak up against the pervasive abuse. It’s an old tactic, according to those who study genocide — and often a precursor to killing.
“My brother apologised and pleaded with the military not to kill him; he showed them his ID card and said, ‘I’m a teacher, I’m a teacher.’ But the government had planned to kill our educated people, including my brother,’’ Hashim said.
He was interviewed at one of the teeming Bangladesh refugee camps that have sprung up along the hilly border with Myanmar since the Rohingya began fleeing in August. Hashim, who is also a teacher, ran for the hills and hid after the military surrounded his hamlet in northern Rakhine state, where most of the Rohingya lived. Others told similar accounts.
After the Aug 25 attacks, soldiers in Maung Nu village, the site of a massacre, asked villagers: “Where are the teachers?’’
Rahim, a 26-year-old high school science and math teacher who was known to many soldiers because he taught their children at the local battalion school, saw the military coming and fled. “I knew I was dead if I got caught. They were hunting me,’’ said Rahim, who, like some Rohingya, uses only one name. “They knew that I would always speak out for the people. They wanted to destroy us because they knew that without us they could do whatever they wanted to the rest of the Rohingya.’’
Researchers see comparisons between what is happening in Myanmar and other genocides, including the Holocaust.
“Listening to these stories, it sounds so similar. First you take out the religious or the political leaders, and then you start going down to the civilian population and you start tightening things more and more,’’ said Karen Jungblut, research director at the USC Shoah Foundation, who has conducted interviews in the Bangladesh camps. “This was not just some random spurt of regional violence here and there because Myanmar felt it was being attacked by a ‘terrorist group’ ... It felt way too organised.’’
A military official who refused to give his name and rank bristled when asked about the Rohingya statements, saying he “couldn’t accept the term Rohingya, which does not exist in Myanmar.’’ He said Myanmar had not targeted educated members of the ethnic group in “clearing operations,’’ which is how the government has described the crackdown.
Thomas MacManus, a specialist in international state crimes at Queen Mary University of London who has researched the Rohingya since 2012, said: “The objective appears to be to destroy the Rohingya, and one way to do that is to destroy their culture and remove their history. It’s part of the genocide tactic.’’
Interviews with about 65 refugees in a September report by the UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner indicate that “the Myanmar security forces targeted teachers, the cultural and religious leadership, and other people of influence in the Rohingya community in an effort to diminish Rohingya history, culture and knowledge.’’
This targeting was “well-organised, coordinated, and systematic ... thereby challenging the assertion that it was merely collateral damage of the military’’ operations after the August insurgent attacks.
The Buddhist majority has long reviled the Rohingya as “Bengali interlopers’’ in northern Rakhine state and suppressed their ability to maintain their culture and go to school.
“Literacy is not high with the Rohingya; it is difficult to get an education in the first place, so targeting the teachers is a similar path that you’ve seen and heard in other places that ended up in genocide,’’ said Ms Jungblut.
An Amnesty International report from November documented a system of institutionalised discrimination and segregation of the Rohingya that was meant to erase their identity.
Since an outbreak of Buddhist-Muslim violence in 2012, Rohingya children have been prevented from attending Buddhist schools, and government teachers often refuse to come to Rohingya villages because of purported safety worries, the report said.
That leaves the bulk of their education left to “local community schools staffed by untrained volunteer teachers.’’
Teachers interviewed said they were paid only by community donations, were banned from teaching the Rohingya language, history and culture, and could only speak Burmese; many said they were prohibited from using the word “Rohingya.’’
“Teachers in school are their windows to the world,’’ said Arif Hossein, 31, a former elementary school teacher from Khular Bil in Maungdaw Township.
“They teach them the meaning of the word Rohingya. Who tells them about our history and about how long we have lived there as a community? Teachers do.’’
In the months before Aug. 25, informers made it too dangerous to teach Rohingya language or culture, even in secret, according to a longtime headmaster at a middle school.
“Informers would follow me every day, every time I left the house. The government police would come at night and accuse me of giving the insurgents food, which was false, and my house was searched.’’
After the 2012 violence, he said soldiers put him and 18 other elders and teachers face down on the ground, with their hands bound, laid a tarp over them and began stomping and beating them.
He spent four years in prison, for allegedly burning homes, a charge he denies, and was released in 2016.