Myanmar widely denies cleansing of Rohingyas
Society unites in hatred of Muslims sent to Bangladesh.
The SITTWE, MYANMAR — Buddhist abbot tucked his legs under his robes and began to explain.
Rohingya Muslims do not belong in Myanmar, and they never have, he said. Their fertility allowed them to overwhelm the local Buddhist population. But now, somehow, many Rohingya seemed to be gone.
“We thank the Lord Buddha for this,” said Thu Min Gala, the 57-year-old abbot of the Damarama Monastery in Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine state in western Myanmar. “They stole our land, our food and our water. We will never accept them back.”
An overwhelming body of published accounts has detailed the Myanmar army’s campaign of killing, rape and arson in Rakhine that has driven more than 600,000 Rohingya out of the country since late August, in what the United Nations says is the fastest displacement of a people since the Rwanda genocide.
But in Myanmar, and even in Rakhine itself, there is stark denial that any ethnic cleansing is taking place.
The divergence between how Myanmar and much of the outside world see the Rohingya is not limited to one segment of local society. Nor can hatred in Myanmar of the largely stateless Muslim group be dismissed as a fringe attitude.
Government officials, opposition politicians, religious leaders and even local human-rights activists have become unified behind this narrative: The Rohingya are not rightful citizens of Buddhist-majority Myanmar, and now, through the power of a globally resurgent Islam, the minority is falsely trying to hijack the world’s sympathy.
Social media postings have amplified the message, claiming that international aid workers are openly siding with the Rohingya. Accordingly, the Myanmar government has blocked aid agencies’ access to Rohingya still trapped in Myanmar — about 120,000 confined to camps in central Rakhine and tens of thousands more in desperate conditions in the north.
The official answer to U.N. accounts of the military’s mass burning of villages and targeting of civilians has been to insist that the Rohingya have been doing it to themselves.
“There is no case of the military killing Muslim civilians,” said Dr. Win Myat Aye, the country’s social welfare minister. “Muslim people killed their own Muslim people.”
The Rohingya, who speak a Bengali dialect and tend to look distinct from most of Myanmar’s other ethnic groups, have had roots in Rakhine for generations. Communal tensions between the Rohingya and ethnic Rakhine Buddhists exploded in World War II, when the Rakhine aligned themselves with the Japanese, while the Rohingya chose the British.
Although many Rohingya were considered citizens when Burma became independent in 1948, the military junta that wrested power in 1962 began stripping them of their rights. After a restrictive citizenship law was introduced in 1982, most Rohingya became stateless.
Public sentiment against Muslims — who are about 4 percent of Myanmar’s population, encompassing several ethnic groups, including the Rohingya — has spread beyond Rakhine.
Social media messaging has driven much of the rage in Myanmar. Though widespread access to cellphones only started a few years ago, mobile penetration is now about 90 percent. For many people, Facebook is their only source of news, and they have little experience in sifting fake news from credible reporting.