The plight of the Rohingya
Since August, an estimated 370,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled to Bangladesh from Myanmar (formerly Burma)
Who are the Rohingya?
That’s a vexed question. They are a Muslim ethnic group over a million strong who live mostly in Myanmar’s western state of Rakhine, bordering Bangladesh. But their identity and their origins are fiercely contested. They claim to have lived in the region for centuries, while Myanmar, which is overwhelmingly Buddhist, regards them as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, and denies them citizenship. The state officially refers to them as “Bengalis”: the term Rohingya is forbidden. They are the world’s largest group of stateless people, and have often been described as one of the world’s most persecuted minorities.
Where did they come from?
There has been a Muslim community in Rakhine, also known as Arakan, since at least the 18th century, but it grew greatly during colonial times. Muslim workers from the Chittagong area of Bengal were brought in to work the rice fields when Burma was part of British India, mostly settling in the north of the state; between the 1880s and the 1930s, Rakhine’s Muslim population grew from 13% to 25% of the total. Today, the Rakhine or Arakanese ethnic group, who are Buddhist, make up around 60% of the state’s population; they greatly resent the Rohingya, the second largest group. There was serious violence between the two communities during the Second World War, when the British armed the Rohingya, and the Rakhines sided with the Japanese. Before independence, some of Rakhine’s Muslim leaders tried to join East Pakistan (Bangladesh), then fought for autonomy from Burma, created in 1948. They were unsuccessful.
How did they fare after independence?
In the 1950s, the Rohingya were acknowledged as one of Burma’s ethnic groups. But after the military coup in 1962, the ruling generals established themselves as guardians of a Buddhist socialist state, and ruthlessly suppressed minority insurgencies in the borderlands. From the 1970s, the Rohingya were denied full citizenship, and faced systematic persecution. In 1978, the military reacted to a low-level Rohingya insurgency with a brutal operation which led 200,000 people to flee into Bangladesh. This set the pattern for recent decades. In 1982, new citizenship laws entrenched the Rohingya's status as foreigners. From 1991-92, another 250,000 fled into Bangladesh, fleeing forced labour, rape and persecution at the hands of the army. (They were later repatriated under a UN agreement.)
Why is there a crisis now?
The current cycle of misery began in 2012, when rioting between Rakhines and Rohingya led to nearly 200 deaths, mostly of Rohingya. Muslims were largely driven out of the cities. Tens of thousands fled to Bangladesh; 130,000 were confined to squalid camps inside Rakhine state. In 2015, around 25,000 sought to travel by sea to Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, with hundreds dying en route. The spark for the immediate crisis was an attack on police outposts in Rakhine on 9 October last year, in which nine officers were killed. It was blamed on the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (Arsa), and the army launched a large-scale counter-insurgency operation.
What are conditions like today?
Conditions for Rohingya are atrocious at the best of times. Even those outside the camps are subject to laws restricting their movement, marriages and how many children they can have; they are barred from education, healthcare, voting and civil service jobs. But the latest UN report describes the abuses suffered in recent months at the hands of the security forces and state-backed Rakhine mobs. Summary executions are common: people are shot from helicopters or at close range; children and adults have their throats slit in front of their families. Women are routinely gang-raped. Homes and food supplies are burnt. Large numbers of men of fighting age have been taken away. “Now is the worst it has ever been,” said one interviewee. The report concluded that it was “very likely” crimes against humanity were being committed; Muslim world leaders have called it genocide.
What can be done to improve the situation?
An independent commission appointed by Myanmar’s elected leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, and chaired by Kofi Annan, recently reported. Its findings give some idea of the scale of the problem. It recommended, inter alia: giving Muslims in Rakhine citizenship rights and political representation; closing the state’s camps and allowing displaced people to return home; ending restrictions on movement; ensuring access to education, healthcare and government jobs; promoting “inter-communal dialogue”; opening up the state to the media and humanitarian groups; and ensuring that the security forces respect human rights, and enforce the rule of law. It also pointed out that Rakhine is one of Myanmar’s poorest states, and is in desperate need of development.
Why hasn’t Aung San Suu Kyi done more?
Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize-winner whose National League for Democracy in 2015 won the country’s first free elections for half a century, has been much criticised for failing to tackle welldocumented abuses. Last week, a post on her Facebook page blamed “terrorists” for the violence, and railed against a “huge iceberg of misinformation” on the issue. In her defence, it has been pointed out that she is part of a power-sharing government in which the army controls defence, and is effectively above the law. In addition, there are only votes to be lost on Rohingya rights amid a wave of Buddhist nationalist feeling in the country (see box); and she is facing a tough election in 2020, against the USDP, the army-backed opposition party. Nevertheless, her failure to denounce indiscriminate state violence – or the army’s current blocking of UN aid to Rakhine – scarcely befits her status as a symbol of resistance to tyranny.