We should all share the blame for the Rohingya tragedy
My local shop in Yangon was owned by a retired army officer and his wife and guarded by their handsome coal-black dog. When I asked the name of the hound the man smiled and said ‘Kalar’. Kalar is a racial slur, employed originally by the Burmese to describe the darkerskinned immigrants from India brought to Burma by the British as cheap labour in the colonial era.
More recently, the word has come to be used as a derogatory reference to Burma’s Muslims, and the reviled Rohingya minority. The use of the insult has become so pervasive that Facebook, by far the most favoured means of communication in Burma, now automatically censors any post that includes the word.
Being called a kalar was a daily de-humanising experience for the Rohingya activist and writer Habiburahman when he was growing up in Rakhine State in the 1980s. He was also known as ‘10 per cent’ to his Buddhist classmates, because the Rohingya were considered to be only parthuman. But Habiburahman thought himself lucky to be attending school. Even 30 years ago, the Rohingya were being denied access to education, as well as healthcare.
No one referred to Habiburahman as a Rohingya because his people had lost the right to use that name in 1982. That was the year Burma’s citizenship law was changed by the then ruling junta to exclude the 1.4 million Rohingya from the list of Burma’s 135 officially recognised ethnic groups. The Rohingya have been effectively stateless since then. One reason why the Burmese state has been so successful in erasing the Rohingya is the fact that the Rohingya have very little written history of their own. Their grim story is told mainly through death tolls and the head counts in refugee camps. Habiburahman’s book is a rare firsthand account of what the Rohingya have had to endure over the past few decades, and especially valuable because the events it describes took place long before most of the world
had heard of them. Told in short, punchy chapters, written in an urgent present tense, Habiburahman details the experiences of his family to reveal how the Burmese army has been brutalising his people since the 1960s.
Perhaps the most remarkable part of the book comes when the author as a teenager flees Rakhine state, acquires a fake identity card and enrols in a provincial college to study for the degree he so desperately wants. Some people still call him kalar, but he is no longer officially a Rohingya. Brave, but also foolhardy, Habiburahman became involved with a cell of pro-democracy activists. Betrayed to the authorities, he escaped to Thailand and then Malaysia in 2000. His way out was to embark on an unseaworthy boat bound for Australia, where he now lives.
If Burma’s generals are the principal villains of this deeply depressing story, Habiburahman also wants Aung San Suu Kyi to take her share of the blame. Her failure to speak out against the army’s actions in Rakhine state is damning and disgraceful. While she was in Oslo in June 2012, making her much delayed acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize she was awarded in 1991, Rohingya villages were being attacked by soldiers and civilian mobs.
The West also played its part, averting its gaze from the violence while placing a blind faith in Suu Kyi. As Habiburahman puts it: “My people disappeared in the euphoria of a new age of democracy.”