THE ROHINGYA:

AN ETHNIC PEOPLE,
OUR HISTORY AND
PERSECUTION
 Factsheet on the Rohingya1
Group Identity, Citizenship, and Persecution

Who are the Rohingyas?

Rohingyas are a native, pre-colonial ethnic minority group of Rakhine State of Western Myanmar
(formerly Burma), which shares 170-miles long modern-day borders with Bangladesh (formerly East
Pakistan).
Rohingya people view Myanmar as the country to which they belong. They also share a linguistic and
cultural affinity with communities in Chittagong, Bangladesh – an affinity which is widely mis-
perceived as being outsiders from Bangladesh.
Their ethnic identity, “Rohingya” which is predominantly Muslim – as opposed to 16 other “Muslim
groups” with diverse ethnic backgrounds found in Burma or Myanmar – has been documented in
primary historical sources,i which date back to the 18th century, and decades before the British rule
begun in Rakhine (then known as Arakan or Aracan to the outside world) in 1824.
The British colonial censuses of the 19th century, which were based on the then prevailing pseudo-
scientific European conceptions of “race” and conducted for the sake of administrative convenience
and control of the subjugated populations, did not record Rohingyas under their ethnic identity but

1
Compiled and written by Maung Zarni, PhD (University of Wisconsin at Madison). The author is a
Burmese Buddhist from an extended family whose members have served in Myanmar Tatmadaw or
Armed Forces for 3 generations since its inception in 1942. Zarni himself was a military cadet-admit
to the Officers Training Corp (Teza-10 Intake), 1979. His late great-uncle, Zeya Kyaw Htin Lt.
Colonel Ant Kywe (Recipient of the Union of Burma’s National Chronicle Grade I Award), was Deputy
Commander of All Rakhine Command and Deputy Chief of the predominantly Rohingya Mayu District
Administration (1961-63).
1
instead used linguistic and religious markers such as “Bengali (speakers)” or “Mohamedan”, just as
they recorded many of today’s official “ethnic nationalities” under different categories and markers.
When Britain gave up Burma as a colonial possession and the latter became independent in 1948, both
the newly independent government of Prime Minister U Nu and the military’s Revolutionary Council
Government which ousted Nu’s elected government in 1962 and ruled as a military junta, officially
recognized Muslim Rohingyas of Rakhine as an ethnic minority of the Union of Burma. They were
granted full and equal citizenship rights.ii
Therefore, the typical portrayal of Rohingyas, in both international media and international policy
circles, as a people who have lived in Burma for generations but not recognized as natives of Western
Myanmar nor granted citizenship, is factually incorrect. They are as “indigenous” as any other ethnic
group that is officially recognised by the Burmese state as an “ethnic nationality”.

What is unique about Rakhine as a western state with 170-miles borders with Bangladesh, as
opposed to other Eastern and Northern states (provinces) that share over 1,000 miles each with
China and India?
First, Rakhine, in effect, is a colony of the majority Burmese Buddhists, not dissimilar to Scotland and
N. Ireland or Wales within the United Kingdom. Second, the majority of the residents of Rakhine are
Buddhists who consistently outnumber Rohingya Muslims by 3:1. Third, Rohingya Muslims have
more cultural, religious and ethnolinguistic similarities with the adjacent Chittagonian communities in
the adjacent Chittagong Province of the old East Bengal of present day Bangladesh while Rakhine
Buddhists are closer to the colonizing Burmese majority in ethno-linguistic, religious and cultural
terms. Fourth, unlike the rest of the Muslim populations in Myanmar only the Rohingyas have their
own distinct ancestral region– namely Northern Arakan or Rakhine – where they are concentrated as
the majority community. iii Fifth, importantly, unlike China’s southern most provinces and India’s
Northeast territories on Myanmar’s borders, Bangladesh is predominantly Islamic. Sixth, the Burmese
Armed Forces have, since independence, shared the colonial-era resentment and feariv of people with
Indo-Aryan features (people of Indian sub-continent ancestry) and more specifically, Muslims. Since
the military rule of 1962, Burma’s leaders institutionalized Muslim-free policies within the military.
And seventh and finally, the Muslim Rohingyas of Rakhine, with historical, cultural and demographic
ties to Chittagong, are first viewed by the Burmese military leaderships as a potential proxy for the
State of Bangladesh or Trojan horse with an intention to annex Northern Rakhine State.
Ironically, it was the Buddhist Burmese feudal kingdom that annexed Arakan or Rakhine in December
1784, through a brutal military conquest.v In 1826, the Burmese conquerors lost Rakhine to Britain as
the result of the military defeat in the First (of 3) Anglo-Burmese War. In 1948, the Burmese regained
its control over Rakhine annex. From the perspective of Rakhine Buddhist nationalists, Burma’s
independence was nothing more than the release of Rakhine as an annex from the clutches of British
colonial rule into the hands of the Burmese colonialists.

How do the Burmese public view the Rohingya?

Rohingyas are widely seen by the Burmese public, including other ethnic minorities and other Muslim
groups, as “Bengalis whose ancestors migrated to Western Myanmar only during the British colonial
rule as agricultural seasonal labourers”. This is the view Aung San Suu Kyi herself shares with the
Burmese military leaders who she is in partnership with.

2
But this is the direct outcome of government propaganda, not reflecting the factual backgrounds about
the group, but the effectiveness of decades of official acts of propaganda including erasing and/or
denying any official and historical references to Rohingya identity, presence and history in Burma.

Why do the Burmese public reject and hate the Rohingya people so much?
Until the two bouts of organized mass violence primarily against Rohingya communities across
Rakhine State, the public in Myanmar generally were not familiar with the name Rohingya, nor were
they cognizant of the fact that there was a people called Rohingya. Instead what the Burmese public
learned from the official history textbook about the post-independence national history of Myanmar is
that there were Muslims in Rakhine state that waged an armed separatist movement under the banner
of “Mujahidins”, whose aim was to join up with the then East Pakistan (and since 1971 Bangladesh).
Myanmar military that have had monopoly control over all state institutions with direct and indirect
influence over public opinion and sentiment, namely, schools, religious organizations, economic
organizations, universities, bureaucracy, and media, succeeded in erasing the word Rohingya from
public discourses. When in June and October 2012, violence in Rakhine state erupted in the form of
sectarian conflicts or communal conflicts between Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims (as well
as other Muslims) it became headlines news, in Myanmar and around the world.
Myanmar state media, government spokespersons and national leaders including ex-general and
President Thein Sein (2010-15), put into nationwide circulation the official tale of “Rohingyas” as
colonial-era Bengali migrants assuming the “fake ethnicity” as “Rohingya” with a history of the
separatist movement.vi
This official discourse about the Rohingya has been adopted by all non-Muslim segments of the
Burmese society, including majoritarian Buddhists and minorities of all denominations for the reason
that the colonial-era general anti-“Indian” and subsequently anti-Muslim racism continues to pervade
the social fabric of Myanmar.
It is the military and the set of governing institutions, including Burmese language state media, that
systematically disseminates the fear and loathing of Rohingyas as a “fake” ethnic group which is
viewed as attempting to take a slice of Rakhine region and join it up with Muslim Bangladesh. The
result is a pervasive and blinding anti-Rohingya racism, which in turn facilitates public rejection of
any official documentation and historical evidence of Rohingya being an ethnic group of Myanmar,
formerly endowed with equal and full citizenship rights, with an administrative region of their own.

What do the Rohingya people want and need?

All that the Rohingya people demand and need is to live in their own ancestral birthplace of Rakhine
State of Western Myanmar, peacefully alongside other non-Rohingya and non-Muslims including the
state’s majority Buddhist Rakhine. They want their equal rights and citizenship restored and their
ethnic identity respected and honoured as before.
Rohingya leaders, activists and organization do not call for secession, or the establishment of a new
and independent country, or making Northern Rakhine state an annex of Bangladesh.
Millions of displaced and deported Rohingyas in Bangladesh and in diaspora, unequivocally wish to
return to Rakhine and live as Myanmar citizens. They however, need guarantees of safety, restoration
of full and equal citizenship rights, and reintegration into the Burmese society at large, while being
allowed to retain their own ethnic identity and culture. After 40-years of periodically violent
persecution and systematic destruction and erasure their identity, group existence and history, vii

3
Rohingyas are rightly extremely distrustful of Myanmar’s verbal assurances and promises. They want
and need concrete international protection to return to their birthplace and rebuild their communities
and livelihoods from where more than half of their population have been deported across Myanmar’s
national boundaries and into Bangladesh.viii

i
Francis Buchanan. “A Comparative Vocabulary of Some of the Languages Spoken in
the Burma Empire.” Asiatic Researches 5 (1799): 219-240. Reprinted in SOAS Bulletin of Burma
Research, Vol. 1, No., 1, Spring 2003, ISSN 1479-8484 and accessible at
https://www.soas.ac.uk/sbbr/editions/file64276.pdf
ii
"Rohingyas are equal and full citizens and an ethnic minority integral to the Union of Burma":
Myanmar Military Leadership, July 1961 (See both unofficial English translation and the Burmese
original transcript here: https://maungzarni.net/en/news/rohingyas-are-equal-and-full-citizens-and-
ethnic-minority-integral-union-burma-myanmar-military ) Also see Gregory Poling, “Separating Fact
from Fiction about Myanmar’s Rohingya.” Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS),
Washington, DC, 13 Feb 2014 at https://www.csis.org/analysis/separating-fact-fiction-about-
myanmar%E2%80%99s-rohingya
iii
See Official Encyclopedia of Burma (Burmese), Literary House, Union of Burma Government Press,
V. 9, under “Mayu District” (of Rohingya), 1964.
iv
Maung Zarni & Natalie Brinham, Reworking the Colonial-Era Indian Peril: Myanmar’sState-
Directed Persecution of Rohingyas and Other Muslims, The Brown Journal of World Affairs, V. XXIV
Issue I, Fall/Winter, 2017, pp. 53-76. Accessible at
http://bjwa.brown.edu/24-1/reworking-the-colonial-era-indian-peril-myanmars-state-directed-
persecution-of-rohingyas-and-other-muslims1/
v
Michael W. Charney, “A State Myth of "National Race" and the Tatmadaw’s War on the Rohingya
and other Myanmar Ethnic Groups" (Presentation version with no footnotes), Berlin Conference on
Myanmar’s Genocide, Berlin, Germany, 26 Feb 2018, at
https://www.maungzarni.net/en/news/professor-michael-charney-soas-identities-and-histories-
rakhine-and-rohingya
vi
David Mepham, Dispatches Burma: "Excuse me, Mr. President...", Human Rights Watch UK,
London, 19 July 2013 at https://www.hrw.org/news/2013/07/19/dispatches-burma-excuse-me-mr-
president
vii
Maung Zarni & Natalie Brinham, “Waves of Genocidal Terror against Rohingyas by Myanmar and
the Resultant Exodus Since 1978.” The Middle East Institute, American University, Washington DC,
14 Nov 2017 at http://www.mei.edu/content/map/waves-genocidal-terror-against-rohingyas-
myanmar-and-resultant-exodus-1978 and see also “An Evolution of Rohingya Persecution in
Myanmar: From Strategic Embrace to Genocide.” The Middle East Institute, American University,
Washington DC, 20 Apr 2017 at http://www.mei.edu/content/evolution-rohingya-persecution-
myanmar-strategic-embrace-genocide For the most comprehensive historical analysis of Myanmar’s
persecution of Rohingyas, see Maung Zarni & Alice Cowley (aka National Brinham), “The Slow-
Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingya.” Pacific Rim Law & Policy Journal, volume 23 no.3, June
2014, pp.683-754. Accessible at http://digital.law.washington.edu/dspace-law/handle/1773.1/1377
viii
Honourable Irwin Cotler (P.C., O.C.) former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada.
“Protected Return to Protected Homeland”, Berlin Conference on Myanmar Genocide, Jewish
Museum of Berlin, Germany, 26 Feb 2018. View https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RCGPjyyjU4

4
 Francis Buchanan.
“A Comparative Vocabulary of Some of the Languages
Spoken in the Burma Empire”

Asiatic Researches 5 (1799): 219-240.

(Reprinted in SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research, Vol. 1, No., 1, Spring 2003, ISSN 1479-8484 and
accessible at https://www.soas.ac.uk/sbbr/editions/file64276.pdf)

SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research, Vol. 1, No., 1, Spring 2003, ISSN 1479-8484

Early Article Reprint 1

Francis Buchanan published his “A Comparative Vocabulary of Some of the Languages Spoken in the
Burma Empire” in 1799, in the fifth volume of Asiatic Researches. This piece provides one of the first
major Western surveys of the languages of Burma. But the article goes beyond this and provides
important data on the ethno-cultural identities and identifications of the various population groups in
the first half of Bò-daw-hpayà’s reign (1782-1819). For these reasons, the article is republished here.

The article is reproduced in its entirety, with slight modifications as follows. The letter “ſ” used for the
contemporary “s” in such word as “Chineſe” follows contemporary usage (thus, “Chinese”). At several
points in the article, the original publisher did not include all the necessary characters (and sometimes
lopped off the ends of sentences). In such cases, the lost letter or likely word has been included within
brackets. Split words, using a dash at the end of a sentence have been reunified (hence, “wo-man”, is
now “woman”). Finally, the article has been repaginated to fit within the overall scheme of this issue
of the SBBR. Beyond these points, no changes have been made and all footnotes are derived from the
original article.
The original citation for the article is as follows:
M. W. C.

5
To judge from external appearance, that is to say, from shape, size, and feature, there is one very
extensive nation that inhabits the east of Asia. It includes the Eastern and Western Tartars of the
Chinese authors, the Calmucs the Chinese, the Japponese, the Malays and other tribes inhabiting what
is called the Peninsula of India beyond the Ganges: and the islands to the south and east of this, as far
at least as New Guinea. This, however, is speaking in a very general sense, and many foreign races
being intermixed with the nation, and, perhaps, many tribes belonging to it, being featured beyond the
limits I have mentioned.

This nation may be distinguished by a short, squat, robust, fleshy stature, and by features highly
different from those of an European. The face is somewhat in shape of a lozenge, the forehead and
chin being sharpened, whilst at the cheek-bones it is very broad: unless this be what is meant by the
conical head of the Chinese, I confess myself at a loss to understand what that is. The eyebrows, or
supercillary ridges, in this nation, project very little; and the eyes are very narrow, and placed rather
obliquely in the head, the external angles being the highest. The nose is very small, but has not, like
that of the Negro, the appearance of having flattened, and the apertures of the nostrils, which in the
European are linear and parallel, in them are nearly circular and divergent; for the septum narium
being much thickest towards the face, places them entirely out of the parallel line. The mouths of this
nation are in general well shaped; their hair is harsh, lank, and black. Those of them that live in the
warmest climates, do not obtain the deep hue of the negro or Hindu; nor do such of them as live in the
coldest countries, acquire the clear bloom of the European.

In adventitious circumstances, such as laws, customs, government, political maxims, religion,

literature, there is also a strong resemblance among the different states composing this great nation; no
doubt arising from the frequent intercourse that has been among them.

But it is very surprising, that a wonderful difference of language should prevail. Language, of all
adventitious circumstances, is the surest guide in tracing the migrations and connections of nations ;
and how in a nation, which bears such strong marks of being one, radically the same, languages, totally
different should prevail, I cannot, at present, pretend to conjecture ; but, in order to assist, in accounting
for the circumstance, having, during my stay in the Burma Empire, been at some pains to collect a
comparative vocabulary of such of the languages spoken in it as opportunity offered, I have thought it
might be curious to publish it. I am sensible of its many imperfections: but it is a beginning, which I
hope hereafter to make more complete; and where I fail, others, without doubt, will be more successful.

In all attempts to trace the migrations and connections of tribes by means of language, it ought to be
carefully remembered, that a few coincidences, obtained by searching through the whole extent of two
dictionaries, it is by no means the least affinity; for our organs being only capable of pronouncing a
certain, and that very limited, number of sounds, it is to be expected, according to the common course
of chance, that two nations, in a few instances, will apply the same sound to express the same idea. It
ought also to be observed that, in tracing the radical affinities of languages, terms of art, men’s names,
religious and law phrases, are, of all words, the most improper; as they are liable constantly to be
communicated by adventitious circumstances from one race of men to another. What connection of
blood have we, Europeans, with the Jews, from whom a very great proportion of our names and
religious terms are derived? Or what connection have the natives of Bengal with the Arabs or English,
from whom they have derived most of their law and political terms? With the former they have not
even had political connection, as the phrases in question were derived to them through the medium of
the Persians an[d] Tartars. Two languages, therefore, ought only to be considered radically the same,
when, of a certain number of common chosen by accident, the greater number have a clear and distinct
resemblance: a circumstance, to which, if antiquarians had been attentive, they would have been saved
from the greater part of that etymological folly, which has so often exposed their pleasing science to
the just ridicule of mankind.
6
In the orthography I have had much difficulty. Two people seldom write in the same way, any word
or language with which they are unacquainted. I have attempted merely to convey to the English reader,
without any minute attention to accent, or small variations of vowels, a sound similar to that
pronounced; nor have I paid any attention to the orthography of the natives. This, in the Burma
language, I might have done; but as I am not acquainted with the writing of the other tribes, I thought
it the safest method to express the sound merely. The following scheme of vowels, in order to read my
vocabulary correctly, must be kept in mind.

A—pronounce as in the English words bad, bat, had, hat.

Aw—or broad Scotch a, as in bawd.

Ay—as the English a in babe, bake, bare; day, pay, hay.

Ee—in order to avoid confusion, I use for the English e, as they have exactly the same sound.

Æ—I use for the French and Scotch e open.

U—I always sound as in the word duck; using oo for its other sound, as in book.

Ou—I sound as in sound, bound.

Au—is nearly similar, but broader, a sound scarcely to be met with in the English language.

Ei—I use as the vowel in bind, find, &c.

Ai—nearly the same, but broader.

These two sounds, as far as I remember,
are not used by the English.
Oe—I use to express the French u.

It is to be observed, that the pronunciation, among all these tribes, to a stranger appears exceedingly
inarticulate. In particular, they hardly ever pronounce the letter R; and T, D, Th, S, and Z, are almost
used indiscriminately. The same may be said of P and B. Thus the word for water, which the Burmas
universally pronounce yoe, is written rae; and the Pali name for their capital city, Amarapoora, is
commonly pronounced Amaapooya. This indistinct pronunciation probably arises from the excessive
quantity of betel which they chew. No man of rank ever speaks without his mouth being as full as
possible of a mixture of betel and nut, tobacco, quicklime, and spices. In this state he is nearly derpived
of the use of his tongue in articulation, which, although not the only organ of speech, is yet of such use
in articulation, as to be commonly considered as such. Hence it is, that an indistinct articulation has
become fashionable, even when the tongue is at liberty.

I shall begin with the Burma language as being at present the most prevalent. There are four dialects
of it, that of Burma Proper, that of Arakan, that of the Yo, and that of Tenasserim.

The people called by us Burmas, Barmas, Vermas, Brimmas, &c. stile themselves Myammaw. By
people of Pegu, they are named Pummay; by Karaya, Yoo; by the people of Cussay, Awa, by the
Cussay Shau, Kammau; by the Chinese of Younan, Laumeen; and by the Aykobat, Anwa. They esteem
themselves to be descended from the people of Arakan, whom they often call Myanmmaw gyee ; that
is to say, great Burmas.
7
The proper natives of Arakan call themselves Yakain, which name is also commonly given to them by
the Burmas. By the people of Pegu, they are named Takain. By the Bengal Hindus, at least by such of
them as have been settled in Arakan, the country is called Rossaum, from whence, I suppose, Mr.
Rennell has been induced to make a country named Roshaum occupy part of his map, not conceiving
that it would be Arakan, or the kingdom of the Mugs, as we often call it. Whence this name of Mug,
given by the Europeans to the natives of Arakan, has been derived, I know not; but, as far as I could
learn, it is totally unknown to the natives and their neighbours, except such of them as, by their
intercourse with us, have learned its use. The Mahommedans settled at Arakan, call the country
Rovingaw; the Persians call it Rekan.

The third dialect of the Burma language is spoken by a small tribe called Yo. There are four
governments of this nation, situated on the east side of the Arakan mountains, governed by chiefs of
their own, but tributary to the Burmas.

The fourth dialect is that of what we call the coast of Tenasserim, from its city now in ruins, whose
proper name was Tanayntharee. These people, commonly called by the Burmas, Dawayza and Byeitza,
from the two governments of which their country consists, have most frequently been subjected to
Siam [and] Pegu; but at present they are subjects of the Burma [kingdom].

Although the dialects of these people, to one another, appear very distinct, yet the difference consists
chiefly in such minute variations of accent as not to be observable by a stranger. In the same manner
as an Englishman, at first, is seldom able to distinguish even the Aberdeen accent from that of the other
shires of Scotland, which to a Scotchman appears to be different; so, in most cases, I could perceive
no difference in the words of these four languages, although among the Burmas, any of the provincials,
speaking generally, produced laughter, and often appeared to be with difficulty understood. I shall,
therefore, only give a list of the Burma words; those of the other dialects are the same, where difference
is not mentioned.

I. English. Myammaw. Yakain. Tanayntharee. Yo.

1 Sun Nay --- --- ---
2 Moon La --- --- ---
3 Star Kyee Kyay --- Kay
4 Earth Myacgyee --- --- ---
5 Water Yæ Ree --- Rae
6 Fire Mee --- --- ---
7 Stone Kiouk --- --- Kionkay
8 Wind Læ Lee --- ---
9 Rain [missing] --- --- ---
10 Man Loo --- --- ---
11 Woman Meemma --- --- ---
12 Child Loogalay Looshee --- ---
13 Head Kaung --- --- ---
14 Mouth Parat --- --- ---
15 Arm Læmmaung --- --- ---
16 Hand Læk --- --- Laik
17 Leg Kæthaloum --- --- Saloong
18 Foot Kiæbamo --- --- ---
19 Beast Taraitram --- --- ---
20 Bird Hugæk --- --- Knap
8
21 Fish Ngaw --- --- ---
22 Good Kaung --- --- ---
23 Bad Makaung --- --- ---
24 Great Kyee --- --- ---
25 Little Ngay --- --- ---
26 Long Shay --- --- Shæ
27 Short Ato --- --- To
28 One Teet --- --- ---
29 Two Hueet --- --- ---
30 Three Thoum --- --- ---
31 Four Lay --- --- ---
32 Five Ngaw --- --- ---
33 Six Kiouk --- --- ---
34 Seven Kuhneet --- --- ---
35 Eight Sheet --- --- ---
36 Nine Ko --- --- ---
37 Ten Tazay --- --- ---
38 Eat Zaw --- --- ---
39 Drink Thouk --- --- ---
40 Sleep Eit --- --- ---
41 Walk Xleen Hlay --- Hlay
42 Sit Tein --- --- ---
43 Stand Ta Mateinay --- Mateenahay
44 Kill That Sot --- Asatu
45 Yes Houkkay --- --- ---
46 No Mahouppoo --- --- ---
47 Here Deemaw --- --- Thaman
48 There Houmaw --- --- ---
49 Above Apomaw --- --- Apobau
50 Below Houkmaw --- --- Auk

The next most prevalent language in India beyond the Ganges, is what we call the Siamese, a word
probably corrupted from the Shan of the Burmas. The Siammese race occupies the whole frontier of
Yunan, extending on the east to Tonquin and Cochinchina, and to the south, down to the sea. It contains
many states or kingdoms, mostly subject or tributary to the Burmas. I have only procured vocables of
three of its dialects, which I here give complete, as they differ considerably.

The first dialect is that of the kingdom of Siam, the most polished people of eastern India. They called
themselves to me simply Tai; but Mr. Loubere says, that, in order to distinguish themselves from a
people to be afterwards mentioned, they add the word Nay, which signifies little. By the Burmas, from
the vulgar name of their former capital city, they are called Yoodaya: by the people of Pegu they are
named Seem: and by the Chinese of Yunan, Syianlo, or Kyænlo.

The second dialect of the Siammese language which I shall mention, is that of a people, who, to me,
also called themselves simply Tai. I believe, however, they are the Tai-yay, or great Tai, of Mr.
Loubere. They have been long subject to the Burmas, who call them Myelapshan: by the people of
Pegu they are named Sawn; Thay by the Karayn ; Looktai by the Katheeshan ; Kabo by the people of
Kathee, or Cussay ; Pawyee by the Chinese and to me they were named Lau by the Siammese proper.
Their country towards the north lies between the west side of Yunan and the Erawade, or great Burma
river, descending down its eastern bank a considerable way: it then extends along the south side of
Yunan, till it comes to the Loukiang river of Martaban, which forms its eastern boundary [,] on the
9
south it extends to no great distance from Martaban; and on the west it is separated from Burma Proper
by a chain of mountains, that passes about fifteen miles to the east of Ava.

The third dialect of the Siammese language is that of a people called, by the Burmas, Kathee Shawn;
to themselves they assume the name of Tai-loong, or Great Tai. They are called Moitay Kabo, by the
Kathee, people of Cussay. They inhabit the upper part of the Kiaynduayn river, and from that west to
the Erawade. They have, in general, been subject to the king of Munnypura; but, at present, are
tributary to the Burma monarch.

II. English. Myammaw. Yakain. Tanayntharee. Yo.

1 Sun Nay --- --- ---
2 Moon La --- --- ---
3 Star Kyee Kyay --- Kay
4 Earth Myacgyee --- --- ---
5 Water Yæ Ree --- Rae
6 Fire Mee --- --- ---
7 Stone Kiouk --- --- Kionkay
8 Wind Læ Lee --- ---
9 Rain [missing] --- --- ---
10 Man Loo --- --- ---
11 Woman Meemma --- --- ---
12 Child Loogalay Looshee --- ---
13 Head Kaung --- --- ---
14 Mouth Parat --- --- ---
15 Arm Læmmaung --- --- ---
16 Hand Læk --- --- Laik
17 Leg Kæthaloum --- --- Saloong
18 Foot Kiæbamo --- --- ---
19 Beast Taraitram --- --- ---
20 Bird Hugæk --- --- Knap
21 Fish Ngaw --- --- ---
22 Good Kaung --- --- ---
23 Bad Makaung --- --- ---
24 Great Kyee --- --- ---
25 Little Ngay --- --- ---
26 Long Shay --- --- Shæ
27 Short Ato --- --- To
28 One Teet --- --- ---
29 Two Hueet --- --- ---
30 Three Thoum --- --- ---
31 Four Lay --- --- ---
32 Five Ngaw --- --- ---
33 Six Kiouk --- --- ---
34 Seven Kuhneet --- --- ---
35 Eight Sheet --- --- ---
36 Nine Ko --- --- ---
37 Ten Tazay --- --- ---
38 Eat Zaw --- --- ---
39 Drink Thouk --- --- ---
40 Sleep Eit --- --- ---
41 Walk Xleen Hlay --- Hlay
10
42 Sit Tein --- --- ---
43 Stand Ta Mateinay --- Mateenahay
44 Kill That Sot --- Asatu
45 Yes Houkkay --- --- ---
46 No Mahouppoo --- --- ---
47 Here Deemaw --- --- Thaman
48 There Houmaw --- --- ---
49 Above Apomaw --- --- Apobau
50 Below Houkmaw --- --- Auk

The next most prevalent language in India beyond the Ganges, is what we call the Siamese, a word
probably corrupted from the Shan of the Burmas. The Siammese race occupies the whole frontier of
Yunan, extending on the east to Tonquin and Cochinchina, and to the south, down to the sea. It contains
many states or kingdoms, mostly subject or tributary to the Burmas. I have only procured vocables of
three of its dialects, which I here give complete, as they differ considerably.

The first dialect is that of the kingdom of Siam, the most polished people of eastern India. They called
themselves to me simply Tai; but Mr. Loubere says, that, in order to distinguish themselves from a
people to be afterwards mentioned, they add the word Nay, which signifies little. By the Burmas, from
the vulgar name of their former capital city, they are called Yoodaya: by the people of Pegu they are
named Seem: and by the Chinese of Yunan, Syianlo, or Kyænlo.

The second dialect of the Siammese language which I shall mention, is that of a people, who, to me,
also called themselves simply Tai. I believe, however, they are the Tai-yay, or great Tai, of Mr.
Loubere. They have been long subject to the Burmas, who call them Myelapshan: by the people of
Pegu they are named Sawn; Thay by the Karayn; Looktai by the Katheeshan; Kabo by the people of
Kathee, or Cussay; Pawyee by the Chinese and to me they were named Lau by the Siammese proper.
Their country towards the north lies between the west side of Yunan and the Erawade, or great Burma
river, descending down its eastern bank a considerable way: it then extends along the south side of
Yunan, till it comes to the Loukiang river of Martaban, which forms its eastern boundary [,] on the
south it extends to no great distance from Martaban; and on the west it is separated from Burma Proper
by a chain of mountains, that passes about fifteen miles to the east of Ava.

The third dialect of the Siammese language is that of a people called, by the Burmas, Kathee Shawn;
to themselves they assume the name of Tai-loong, or Great Tai. They are called Moitay Kabo, by the
Kathee, people of Cussay. They inhabit the upper part of the Kiaynduayn river, and from that west to
the Erawade. They have, in general, been subject to the king of Munnypura; but, at present, are
tributary to the Burma monarch.

II. English. Tai-nay. Tai-yay. Tai-loong.

1 Sun Roen Kawan Kangoon
2 Moon Sun Loen Noon
3 Stars Dau Lau Nau
4 Earth Deen --- Neen
5 Water Nam Nawhor Naum Nam
6 Fire Fai Fai Pui
7 Stone Hin --- Heen
8 Wind Lam Loum Loom
9 Rain Fon Foon Poon
10 Man Kon Kon Koon
11 Woman Pooen Paeyen Pawneen
11
12 Child Daeknooe Lawen Lookwoon
13 Head Seeza Ho Hoo
14 Mouth Pawk Tsop Pawk
15 Arm Kayn Komooee Moo
16 Hand Moo Mooee Pawmoo
17 Leg Naung Koteen Hooko
18 Foot Langteen Swateen Lungdin
19 Beast Sawt [missing] Nook
20 Bird Noup Naut Nook
21 Fish Plaw Paw Paw
22 Good Dee Lee Wanoo
23 Bad Maidee Malee Mowan
24 Great To Loung Loong
25 Little Layt Laik Unleek
26 Long Yan Yan Anyou
27 Short San Lot Unlot
28 One Noong Noo Aning
29 Two So Sang Sowng
30 Three Sam Sam Sam
31 Four See Shee Shee
32 Five Haw Haw Haw
33 Six Hok Houk Hook
34 Seven Kyæt Sayt Seet
35 Eight Payt Payt Pæt
36 Nine Kawo Kaw Kau
37 Ten Seet Sheet Ship
38 Eat Kyeen Kau Kyeen Kau Kyeen Kau
39 Drink Kyeen Nam Kyeen Nawm Kyeen Nam
40 Sleep Non Non Non
41 Walk Teeo Hoe Pei
42 Sit Nanon Nawn Nung
43 Stand Yoon Lootfook Peignung
44 Kill Kaw Po Potai
45 Yes O Sai Munna
46 No Maishai Mosai Motsau
47 Here Teenee Teenai Teenay
48 There Teenon Teepoon Ponaw
49 Above Bonon Teenaipoon Nooa
50 Below Kang lang Teetai ---

The next language of which I shall give a specimen, is that of the people who call themselves Moitay.
Their country is situated between Sylhet, in Benga[l] and that of the Tailoong above-mentioned: to the
north of it is Assam; on the south Arakan, and the rude tribes bordering on that kingdom. Their capital
city they name Munnypura. By the people of Bengal, they are called Muggaloos, an appellation with
which those we saw at Amarapura were totally unacquainted. This name, however, Europeans have
applied to the country, turning it at the same time into Meckley. Kathee is the name given to this people
by the Burmas, which we also have taken for the name of the country, and corrupted into Cussay. Mr.
RENNEL having from Bengal obtained information of Meckley, and from Ava having heard of Cussay,
never conceived that they were the same, and, accordingly, in his map of Hindustan, has laid down
two kingdoms, Cussay and Meckley; for which, indeed, he had sufficient room, as by Captain Baker’s
account he had been induced to place Ava much too far to the east.
12
III. English. Moitay. English. Moitay.
1 Sun Noomeet 26 Long Asamba
2 Moon Taw 27 Short Ataymba
3 Stars Towang Meezat 28 One Amaw
4 Earth Leipauk 29 Two Anee
5 Water Eesheen 30 Three Ahoom
6 Fire Mee 31 Four Maree
7 Stone Noong Loong 32 Five Mangaw
8 Wind Noosheet 33 Six Torok
9 Rain No 34 Seven Tarayt
10 Man Mee 35 Eight Neepaw
11 Woman Noopee 36 Nine Mapil
12 Child Peeka 37 Ten Tarraw
13 Head Kop Kok 38 Eat Sat
14 Mouth Seembaw 39 Drink Tawee
15 Arm Pambom 40 Sleep Keepee
16 Hand Khoit 41 Walk K[a]wnee
17 Leg --- 42 Si[t] Pummee
18 Foot with ankle Kho 43 Stand Lapee
19 Beast --- 44 Kill Hallo
20 Bird Oosaik 45 Yes Manee
21 Fish Ngaw 46 No Nattay
22 Good Pawee or Pai 47 Here Mashee
23 Bad Pattay 48 there Ada
24 Great Sauwee 49 Above Mataka
25 Little Apeekauk 50 Below Maka

In the intermediate space between Bengal, Arakan, the proper Burma, and the kingdom of
Munnaypura, is a large mountainous and woody tract. It is occupied by many rude tribes. Among
these, the most distinguished is that by the Burmas called Kiayn, from whom is derived the name of
the great western branch of the Erawade; for the Kiaynduayn signifies the fountain of the Kiayn. This
people calls itself Koloun, and it seems to be a numerous race, universally spoken of, by its neighbours,
as remarkable for simple honesty, industry, and an inoffensive disposition.

IV. English. Koloun. English. Kolun.

1 Sun Konee 26 Long Asaw
2 Moon Klow 27 Short Sooæ hay
3 Stars Assay 28 One Moo
4 Earth Day 29 Two Palmee
5 Water Tooee 30 Three Patoon
6 Fire May 31 Four Poonhee
7 Stone Aloong 32 Five Poonho
8 Wind Klee 33 Six Poosouk
9 Rain Yoo 34 Seven Pooæ sæ
10 Man Kloun 35 Eight Pooæ say
11 Woman Patoo 36 Nine Poongo
12 Child Saemee 37 Ten Poohaw
13 Head Mulloo 38 Eat Kayawæ
14 Mouth Mawkoo 39 Drink Koyawee
15 Arm Maboam 40 Sleep Eitsha
13
16 Hand Mukoo 41 Walk Hlayæ shoe
17 Leg Manwam 42 Sit Own
18 Foot Kopaung 43 Stand Undoon
19 Beast Pakyoo 44 Kill Say, oe
20 Bird Pakyoo 45 Yes Ashæ ba
21 Fish Ngoo 46 No Seehay
22 Good Poæ lahoe 47 Here Næ a
23 Bad Sæ lahoe 48 There Tsooa
24 Great Ahlayn 49 Above Akloengung
25 Little Amee 50 Below Akoa

Another rude nation, which shelters itself in the recesses of hills and woods, from the violence of its
insolent neighbours, is named, by the Burmas, Karayn; and Kadoon by the people of Pegu. They are
most numerous in the Pegu kingdom, and, like the Kiayn, are distinguished for their innocence and
industry. By the Burmas they are said to be of two kinds; Burma and Talain Karayn. Some of them,
with whom I conversed, seemed to understand this distinction, calling the former Passooko, and the
latter Maploo. This, however, probably arose from these individuals being better acquainted with the
Burma ideas than the generality of their countrymen; for the greater part of those with whom I
conversed, said, that all Karayn were the same, and called them Play. I am, however, not certain if I
understood them rightly; nor do I know that I have obtained the proper name of this tribe. I have given
a vocabulary of each of these, who seemed to understand the distinction of Burma and Talain Karayn,
and two different villages who did not understand the difference; for in this nation I found the villages
differing very much in dialect; even where not distant, probably owing to their having little
communication one with another. It must be observed, that, in using an interpreter, one is very liable
to mistakes, and those I had were often very ignorant.

V. English. Passooko. Maploo. Play, No. 1 Play, No. 2

1 Sun Moomay Moo Mooi Moomay
2 Moon Law Law Law Poolaw
3 Stars Tsaw Sheeaw Shaw Shaw
4 Earth Katchaykoo Kolangkoo Kako Laukoo
5 Water Tee Tee Tee Tee
6 Fire Mee Meeung Meea Mee
7 Stone Loe Loong, Noong Lung --- Loung
8 Wind Kallee Lee Lee Lee
9 Rain Tachoo Tchatchang Moko Moko
10 Man Paganyo Pashaw Pasha Paploom,
Or Pasha
11 Woman Pomoo Pomoo Pummee Pammoe
12 Child Pozaho Possaw Napootha Apoza
13 Head Kozohui Kohui Kohui Pokoohui
14 Mouth Patako Pano Ganoo Pano
15 Arm Tchoobawlee Tchoobawlee Atsyoodoo Tchoobawlee
16 Hand Patchoo Poitchoo Kutshoo Tchooasee
17 Leg Kadoe Pokaw Kandoo Kandoo
18 Foot Konyawko Kanyakoo Kanyako Kanyasaw
19 Beast T’hoo Too --- ---
20 Bird T’hoo Too Kalo To
21 Fish Nyaw Zyaw Ya Ya
22 Good Ngeetchawmaw Ngee Gyee Gyee
23 Bad Taw ngee baw Nguay Gyeeay Gyeeay
14
24 Great Pawdoo Hhoo Uddo Doo
25 Little Tchecka Tchei Atsei Atsee
26 Long To atcho maw T’ho Loeya Ato
27 Short P’hecko P’hoe Apoe Apoe
28 One Taydoe Nadoe Laydoe Laydoe
29 Two Kee-doe Nee-doe Nee-doe Nee-doe
30 Three So-doe Song-doe Soung-doe Soung-doe
31 Four Looee-doe Lee-du Lee-doe Lee-doe
32 Five Yay-doe Yay-doe Yay-doe Ya-doe
33 Six Hoo-doe Hoo doe Koo-doe Koo-doe
34 Seven Nooee-doe Noay-doe Noæ -doe Noæ o-do
35 Eight Ho-doe Ho-doe Ko-doe Ko-doe
36 Nine Kooee-doe Kooee-doe Kooee-doe Kooee-doe
37 Ten Tatchee Leitchee Tassee Laytsee
38 Eat Po,c Aw Ang Ang
39 Drink Oo O O O
40 Sleep Prammee Mee Mee Mee
41 Walk Latcholia Leetalay Rakuæ Lakuæ
42 Sit Tcheenaw Tseingaw Tysana Tsayna
43 Stand Tchocto Tchonto Tsaynagay la-Gnaythoe
44 Kill Klo P’hee Pæ tegul Paythee
45 Yes Maylee Moayyoo Moiyoo Moithay
46 No Tamaybaw Moæ Moi Moi
47 Here Loee Layee Leyoo Layee
48 There Lubanee Loo Læ yo Læ yo
49 Above Mokoo Mokoo Læ panko Læ panko
50 Below Hokoo Lankoo Læ paula Læ paula

To this kingdom, the natives of which call themselves Moan, we have given the name of Pegu, a
corruption of the vulgar appellation of its capital city, Bagoo; the polite name of the city among its
natives having been Dam Hanga, as among the Burmas, Hanzawade. This people are named Talain
by the Burmas and Chinese of Yunan; Lawoo by theKarayn; and Tarain by the Tai-loong: their
kingdom extends along the mouths of the two great rivers Erawade and Thauluayn, or of Ava and
Martaban, from the frontiers of Arakan to those of Siam.

VI. English. Moan. English. Moan.

1 Sun Knooay Tangooay 26 Long Kloein
2 Moon Katoo 27 Short Klee
3 Stars Shawnaw 28 One Mooi
4 Earth Toe 29 Two Bau
5 Water Nawt 30 Three Pooi
6 Fire Komot 31 Four Pou
7 Stone --- 32 Five Soon
8 Wind Kyeaw 33 Six Teraw
9 Rain Proay 34 Seven Kapo
10 Man Puee 35 Eight Tatsam
11 Woman Preau 36 Nine Kaffee
12 Child Koon 37 Ten Tlo
13 Head Kadap 38 Eat Tsapoung. Poung,
I believe, is rice.
15
14 Mouth Paun 39 Drink Saung nawt. Nawt
is water.
15 Arm Toay 40 Sleep Steik
16 Hand Kanna Toay 41 Walk Au
17 Leg Kadot-prawt 42 Sit Katcho
18 Foot Kanat zein 43 Stand Katau
19 Beast --- 44 Kill Taw
20 Bird Seen ngat 45 Yes Taukua
21 Fish Kaw 46 No Auto
22 Good Kah 47 Here Noomano
23 Bad Hookah 48 There Taoko
24 Great Mor 49 Above Tattoo commooee
25 Little Bok 50 Below Tauamo

These six are all the languages of this great eastern nation, of which, during my stay in the Burma
Empire, I was able to procure vocables sufficient for my purpose. Although they appear very different
at first sight, and the language of one race is totally unintelligible to the others, yet I can perceive in
them all some coincidences; and a knowledge of the languages, with their obsolete words, their
phrases, their inflections of words, and elisions, cuphoniæ causa, would, perhaps, shew many more.
Those that have the greatest affinity are in Tab. I. IV. And V. Mr. GILCHRIST, whose knowledge of
the common dialects in use on the banks of the Ganges is, I believe, exceeded by that of no European,
was so obliging as to look over these vocabularies; but he could not trace the smallest relation between
the languages.

I shall now add three dialects, spoken in the Burma Empire, but evidently derived from the language
of the Hindu nation.

The first is that spoken by the Mohammedans, who have long settled in Arakan, and who call
themselves Rooinga, or natives of Arakan.

The second dialect is that spoken by the Hindus of Arakan.I procured it from a Brahmen and his
attendants, who had been brought to Amarapura by the king’s edlest son, on his return from the
conquest of Arakan. They call themselves Rossawn, and, for what reason I do not know, wanted to
persuade me that theirs was the common language of Arakan. Both these tribes, by the real natives of
Arakan, are called Kulaw Yakain, or stranger Arakan.

The last dialect of the Hindustanee which I shall mention, is that of a people called, by the Burmas,
Aykobat, many of them are slaves at Amarapura. By one of them I was informed, that they had called
themselves Banga; that formerly they had kings of their own; but that, in his father’s time, their
kingdom had been overturned by the king of Munnypura, who carried away a great part of the
inhabitants to his residence.

When that was taken last by the Burmas, which was about fifteen years ago, this man was one of the
many captives who were brought to Ava. He said also, that Banga was seven days’ journey south-west
from Munnypura: it must, therefore, be on the frontiers of Bengal, and may, perhaps, be the country
called in our maps Cashar.

Mr. GILCHRIST has been so good as to examine particularly these two dialects, and to mark thus (*)
those words which come nearest the Hindustanee spoken on the Ganges; and thus (†) those not so
evidently in connection with the same, but which shew resemblance by analogy.

16
English. Rooinga. Rossawn. Banga.
1 Sun Bel *Sooja Bayllee
2 Moon Sawn Sundsa Satkan
3 Stars Tara *Nokyoto *Tara
4 Earth Kool Murtika *Matee
5 Water Pannæ *Dsol *Pannæ
6 Fire Auin *Aaganee Zee
7 Stone Sheel *Sheel *Heel
8 Wind Bau *Pawun *Bo
9 Rain Jorail †Bistee *Booun
10 Man Manush †Moanusa *Manoo
11 Woman Meealaw Stree Zaylan
12 Child Gourapa *Balouk Sogwo
13 Head Mata Mustok Teekgo
14 Mouth Gall Bodon Totohan
15 Arm Bahara *Baho Paepoung
16 Hand Hat Osto Hatkan
17 Leg Ban †Podo Torooa
18 Foot Pau Pata Zankan
19 Beast --- Zoomtroo Sasee sangee
20 Bird Paik †Pookyee †Pakya
21 Fish Maws Mootsæ †Mas
22 Good Goom Gam Hoba
23 Bad Goom nay Gumnay Hoba nay
24 Great Boddau Dangor Domorgo
25 Little Thuddee *Tsooto Hooroogo
26 Long Botdean Deengol Deengul
27 Short Banick *Batee *Batee
28 One Awg *Aik *Ak
29 Two Doo *Doo De
30 Three Teen *Teen †Teen
31 Four Tchair *Tsar *Saree
32 Five Pansoee *Paus *Pas
33 Six Saw *Tso *Tsæ
34 Seven Sat *Sat *Hat
35 Eight Awtoa †Asto *Awt
36 Nine Nonaw * No *No
37 Ten Dussoa *Dos *Dos
38 Eat Kau *Kawai †Kæ k
39 Drink Karin Kawo †Peek
40 Sleep Layrow †Needsara Hooleek
41 Walk Pawkay Bayra †O-teea-ootea
42 Sir Boihow †Boesho †Bo
43 Stand Tcheilayto *Karao †Oot
44 Kill Marim *Maro *Mar
45 Yes Hoi Oir Oo
46 No Etibar *Noay *Naway
47 Here Hayray Etay Erang
48 There Horay Horay Orung
49 Above Ouchalo *Ooper Goa
50 Below Ayray Hayray †Tol
17
 Official Transcript of the Address
delivered by Brigadier General Aung Gyi
Vice Chief of Staff (Army), The Union of Burma Armed Forces
Mujahid Insurgents’ Surrender Ceremony
Maungdaw Town, Rakhine, Burma

4 July 1961
(un-official translation by Dr. Maung Zarni)

See the Burmese language original text here:

https://maungzarni.net/en/news/rohingyas-are-equal-and-full-citizens-and-ethnic-minority-integral-
union-burma-myanmar-military

The Burmese language Editorial Summary:

“In the morning of 4 July 1961, the Mujahideens led by Robi Ulla surrendered with their weapons in
the presence of Vice Chief of Staff (Army) Brigadier General Aung Gyi, having thus returned to the
legal fold. In the following speech, Brigadier Aung Gyi made an impassioned urging to the public in
the region on various subjects including the need to adopt the Multi-ethnic Union spirit (of belonging
to Burma), the need for the region’s administrators to combat poverty which arose from the
unfavourable land-population ratio by livestock breeding
18 and orchard growing and by focusing on the
economic development for the people of the region, in light of the fact that a sufficient degree of
security has been established in this Mayu District Frontier Region.

[Begin texts]

On this surrender occasion, I wish to say a few words to those of you, soldiers, who had taken up arms
against the central government (of Burma) under the banner of revolution in Maung Daw region from
the time of our country’s independence (in 1948) right up to this moment.

First and foremost, I wish to talk about some facts that are most directly relevant to all those who reside
in this region. On its west, our Mayu District borders with East Pakistan. Because of the
interconnected nature of borders, we have ethnic groups of Islamic faith that line the two countries’
(modern) borders. The ethnic group that reside on the west of Mayu District boundaries are Pakistani.
And the people who reside on the east side of this border are called Rohingya.

Continuing on with this point, I want to state that it is not like one single racial or ethnic group saddles
the two countries’ boundaries. Our country’s regions that border with China also have ethnic groups
that interface with one another. To give an example, in (Burma’s) Kachin State, we have Lisu as an
ethnic group. In Burmese region, we also have Lisu. On the Chinese side of the borders, they have
Lisu. Likewise, we have Ei-kaw (ethnic group), on the other side of the Burmese-Chinese borders,
they also have Ei-kaw. On our Burmese side, we have La-Wa ethnic group. On the Chinese side,
they also have La-Wa ethnic group. Similarly, we have Shan ethnic people in Burma. On the Chinese
side they are called Tai. They all share one language. They adhere to one religion. Again if you look
at the Thai-Burmese border areas, they have “tai” ethnic people. We also have the same ethnic people.
The same is true of Mon ethnic people: Thailand has the Mons and so does Burma. There are also
Karen ethnic people in Thailand and Karen ethnic people in Burma. Likewise, on the (East) Pakistani
side, there are Muslims who share the same faith with Rohingyas ethnic people who are on the Burmese
side.

Therefore, I want to tell you all here openly and publicly that the people of this border region (of Mayu)
have relatives and families on both sides (of Pakistani and Burmese borders). However, those of you
who are on the Burmese side of the borders must be the people of the Union (of Burma). This is the
Union spirit of belonging to Burma, which you as the border ethnic people must adopt unequivocally
and irreversibly. For instance, if you look at the situation of Kachin people, they have relatives and
families on each side of the Burmese-Chinese borders. But those Kachin who are on the Chinese side
they are Chinese. And those who are on the Burmese side are Burmese. Some (Kachins) are in-laws
like mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. And some are nephews or son-in-law. Despite these ties and
belonging to the same ethnicity, their countries are different. That, we all must know clearly and
categorically. When it comes to allegiance (among Kachins) to countries, the allegiance to countries
must also be decisive.

By the same token, it is only natural that the ethnic Rohingyas living on the side of the Burmese-
Pakistani borders pledge allegiance to Burma as a country and those on the Pakistani side of the
borders, pledge their allegiance to Pakistan.

I want to tell you, the civic leaders, socialites and the (surrendered) soldiers (of Mujahideens), this
emphatically: although you might have family ties, in-laws, and even children in West Pakistan, your
family ties must not interfere or lessen your allegiance to the Union of Burma. For as you are all
members of the Union of Burma your allegiance and loyalty must, with no equivocation, lie with our
Union. Likewise, your relatives and families who may reside in West Pakistan or East Pakistan, their
allegiance must also be to Pakistan as a country. Here I want to make a sincere request to you all
19
present at this ceremony: please inform friends and families of the need for respective allegiances they
must adopt.

Here I wish to share with you a historical tale. Previously, as you all know the Burmese public from
the central Burma assume all the Rohingya people as Muslims and Mujahideens who want to join up
with Pakistan. On their part, some of the Rohingya in this region feel that because they are Muslims
they need to join with East Pakistan. Based on that view, they struggled to make this region to become
part of Pakistan – like what happened with Sudestan in Germany. That’s not natural and that is not
possible. In the case of Germany, it was because of the WWII. But after the end of the WWII the
problem was no more. The position and view of Pakistan (regarding annexation of Muslim areas on
the Burmese side bordering with East-Pakistan) was truly correct. For instance, Pakistan did NOT
even demand the return of Kyee (Crow) Island. Considering that Pakistan did not even ask the Island
to be returned to Pakistan, it is inconceivable that Pakistan would even consider annexing or
incorporating Mayu District Frontier Region into East Pakistan. Pakistan dares not, and is not,
entertaining that idea at all.

Similarly, those Kachin ethnic people who are on the Chinese side of the Sino-Burmese borders cannot
demand that Kachin State (of Burma) be incorporated or annexed into Yunnan Province on the grounds
that the Kachins of Burma and China are of the same ethnicity.

In this day and age, this kind of thinking is no more. Yes, this kind of view prevailed in the past. In
central Burma, there are people who hold the view that (Rohingya) people in this region are not Tai-
yin-tha or ethnic group native to the Union of Burma. There are also (Rohingya) people who make
moves to separate from Burma and join with Pakistan. These are false views and deeds, held by some
people in central Burma and held by some Rohingyas in this region. From today on – and from here –
I want to openly and publicly tell you this: we consider (the Rohingya people) of Mayu District an
ethnic minority integral to the Union of Burma. Let me be very precise about this. Those of you here
(in this Mayu Region) ought to view yourselves as an ethnic minority of Burma. Only then will peace
prevail in this region and in this country of ours.

I urge you to wipe your memory clean about the wrong-doings committed by us. To give a specific
example, in previous military operations in this region, there may have been incidents where the
government troops burned down entire villages. Some burning may have been necessary, militarily
speaking. Other incidents of deliberate burning of villages may have been committed out of vengeance
and vendetta. If our troops committed these acts, I urge you to wipe your collective memory clean.
Let’s start with a clean slate. From now on those of you in the Mayu Frontier Region must see
yourselves as the Burmese, as members of the Union, as an ethnic minority integral to the Union. You
must adopt allegiance and loyalty to the Union of Burma. Only then will Mayu Frontier region have
the prospects to become a peaceful region in the future. I hereby request to you – religious
organizations, Malvi teachers, former members of the armed revolts, the surrendered Mujahideen, and
other Rohingyas, village chiefs, and so on – to try to inform, educate and shape those who have not
adopted these views and attitude (as Burma’s ethnic minority group, the Union spirit and the loyalty
to the Union of Burma). In the years to come, you as an ethnic minority of the Union of Burma work
for peace, prosperity and economic development of this region, for the advancement of the wellbeing
and health of the people here. We will work together for those objectives. This is the first main point
I wished to tell you.

Now onto my second point, namely the general assumption and assessment of the region by our
Ministry of Defence. As you all know, there is a total population of nearly 500,000 people in Mayu
Frontier Region. Your livelihoods here depend mainly on creeks and streams, and agriculture.
Because of the region’s unfavourable land-population ratio the region will likely remain impoverished.
20
Every year, the people here cannot afford to buy more than two or three longyis (male skirt). In short,
you are generally poor. That’s our (military’s) general economic assessment. We (in the military)
are empathetic to you for the pervasive poverty, because you are our ethnic minority and your region
is an integral component of our Union of Burma. We now have plans and schemes for economic
development of your region. The Administration of the Mayu District Frontier Region will shoulder
the responsibility. In this connection I urge you to lend your full cooperation with the Administrators.
Treat them as your blood relations, family members, your own ethnic people and leaders, your own
government. On our part we will treat you like you are our own members of the family, or clan.

Your people and our administrators may be of two different religions. Our cultures and customs may
be different. In a big country, differences in terms of cultures, languages, dialects, and so on are of no
significance at all. In the United States there is diversity along these lines. The same goes for England.
The same can be said of Russia and China. The countries you know well India and Pakistan have
similar diversities. Despite differences in mother tongues and faiths, cooperation is crucial. So, on
your part, you need not blow some minor differences (in culture and language) out of proportions and
behave as one family and one clan with us. On our part, we as the administration are prepared to strive
for the development and welfare of your communities. Here I wish to call your attention to one
important fact regarding economic development.

That is, security of this region. Without the security of the region, no matter how hard we work
prosperity and development will not become realities. Therefore, security of this region is our utmost
priority. The second most priority is tranquillity and safety of neighbourhoods, wards and quarters.
Towards the goal of establishing the region’s security, I urge Rohingya religious leaders, Rohingya
men, Rohingya leaders, Rohingya politicians to keep the military and administration in the Mayu
District region informed (about the remaining insurgencies). If possible, please join our efforts to repel
insurgents. If possible I urge you to join hands with the Burmese Armed Forces and fight the
insurgents.

If you begin to engage in self-defence of your own wars, villages, and neighbourhoods the insurgencies
will get weakened and peace will follow. Then only will be able to focus on economic development of
the region. As peace and tranquillity returns we will strive for all-round development of the region.
These words I uttered in front of you are ORDERS, insofar as Colonel Saw Myint and Colonel Ye
Gaung, respectively in charge of Border Affairs Administration, (Ministry of Defence, Yangon) and
of All Rakhine Troops Command, (Sittwe, Rakhine). In the military, these instructions (by a superior
officer) are words of COMMAND. Giving a political on a stage before a civilian audience and the
soldiers’ talk are different. In our military, these words are commands that need to be executed by all
ranks and files of the armed forces. That is why, I want to let you know that today – or even today –
when I uttered these words, the military has embarked on certain initiatives for the region. Following
my address, the Mayu District administration and the administrators will strive as hard as they can in
executing the initiatives designed to develop the region economically, socially and communally.

With respect to your culture and religious practices in this region, we will support the respective faiths
of our ethnic minorities. If there are suspicions about our policies towards religions, I want you to
have complete confidence in the pledge that we will support, encourage, protect and defence all faiths
practised by both the majority ethnic communities and ethnic minorities of this region.

On economic development, we will begin our scheme to introduce livestock breeding. We will
encourage and support raising chickens, building fish ponds, breeding cows. On this Colonel Ya
Gaung and other administrators (of Mayu District Frontier Region) will explain in details our planning
as needed. The main rationale behind our animal breeding scheme is the following: because
agricultural land is scarce compared to the population in this region, we need to combine livestock
21
raising with agriculture. For instance, a farmer will likely to be better off if he also incorporates
livestock breeding into his livelihood scheme. Because we are of the view that every farmer will need
(to supplement their income) by adding livestock raising to his economic activities we are stressing
the need for it and we will support it accordingly. On this I wish to make a second point: at the
moment farmers do only one-crop per year. We need to double that. And we will encourage and
support 2-crops per annum. We will introduce beans, peanuts, and pulses. So we are going to
encourage and support strongly the double-crop agriculture and livestock breeding. In the hilly areas
of Mayu District, we will emphatically support growing orchards – orange, tea, etc. These are just
general ideas and schemes the frontier area administrators will be ordered to engage in. I sincerely
request that you inform and educate the public of this region about the rationales behind the
establishment of the Mayu District Frontier Region, namely to foster regional development, to
facilitate neighbourhood peace and tranquillity, and to seek educational, religious and cultural
development for the region’s people.

The 3rd point I wish to tell is about the surrender issue. Today at this surrender ceremony, you all bear
witness to the acts of surrender by those from the Southern side of the Buthidaung and Maung Daw
towns, who had been engaged in the armed revolution against the central government. I would like
to think that their acts of surrender are meant as an act of gratitude, on their part, to those farmers and
agriculturalists in this region. By their deeds, this region will become more peaceful. And that will in
turn facilitate the growth of agriculture, livestock breeding, commerce and trade. I would like to invite
you to think of the surrender as an act of gratitude by the surrendering revolutionaries towards local
communities from whom they had extorted money and supplies. On behalf of those ex-revolutionaries
who surrendered today I would like to plead forgiveness from you for their shortcomings (and
wrongful behaviours) in the past. The express reasons that propelled them to take up arms against the
central governments are to a certain degree true and valid, previously. They said the Mujahideen
rebellion broke out because of religious persecution. They said there was economic persecution. They
said there was racial persecution. Yes, they are correct as these rationales and explanations were true
to a certain degree, before.

Various acts of armed revolt against the central state or government were justified, if only minimally
in the bygone days. The public too supported these rebellions because the public in Mayu region felt
these issues concerned the collective affairs of the Muslims as a whole in the region. But that was the
past. We no longer have religious or economic persecution or subjugation in the Mayu Region. On
the contrary, we are finding ways to support the region’s development. There is no more racial
persecution. For we have emphatically and categorically recognized Rohingyas as an ethnic minority
(of the Union of Burma), making efforts for the progress and development of the Rohingya ethnic
minority. Therefore, emphatically speaking there is no longer religious persecution in this region, nor
is there racial or ethnic persecution. In light of this new development, there is no longer a valid rational
for uprisings or revolt against the central government. Yes, in 1948 - (at the time of independence) –
the rationales for rebellion may have been valid and solid. But today in 1961, those rationales are no
more valid. In terms of faith, we will be supporting Islam, the faith of the majority in this region. We
will build mosques. We will make donations (for your religious activities). Buddhists here in this
region are a minority. They too will receive support from the central government. We will support
Buddhist monasteries. Therefore, there is no religious persecution in this region. Not only do we not
persecute the region commercially and economically we are more than ready to assist your region for
economic development. There is no long racial or ethnic persecution. Given that, there is absolutely
no reason for anyone to take up arms against the central government. Those who continue with their
armed rebellion against the state, whatever their slogans, they are now engaged in extortion, kidnap of
young women, or kidnap community leaders and socialites. Their deeds have nothing whatsoever to
do with the original rationales behind the armed revolt in this region. On the whole what they are
doing is nothing more than the acts of robbery by a huge gang.
22
Therefore, these armed gangs of robber will meet the fate of robbers: death. They have now morphed
into big robbers – because they have not had a change of heart and a change of perspective, they will
remain 100% robbers. Nowhere in the world or no period in history no armed robbers can expect to
be prosperous and grow big. Make no mistake. These armed gangs will only reap death, sooner rather
than later. Let me make one offer and one prediction. They should come and give up their deeds.
They should adopt the patriotism and enlightened political spirit, like the surrendering revolutionaries
before us today. After their surrender they should work with all of us in the Armed Forces of Burma
for the development and progress of their communities. This is our heart-felt, genuine appeal to them
all. However, if they continue with their robberies we will have no choice but to plan and executive
systematic military operations against them. Up until today, our Armed Forces (Ministry of Defence)
has not placed any priority to this region where Mujahideen roamed. From now on, we are ready to
pay serious attention to this region. We have adequate troop strength. We can send new deployment
as needed. We can bring in reinforcements. If these remaining insurgents do not choose to surrender
in the next several months, we will have massive troop deployments to this region and before year’s
end, we will wipe the insurgency out. This is my clearest message.

I now wish to make an appeal to religious/spiritual leaders, community leaders, political leaders. Those
insurgents who have continued on with their insurgency, we do NOT view them as enemies. Please
try to persuade them to lay down arms – like today’s politically enlightened rebels (Mujahideen) in
front of us. We view them all as members of the Union of Burma, we don’t want us to launch attacks
as fellow Union members. We desire no bloodshed and violence. Therefore, please persuade them
through demonstrating Metta (loving kindness) or via the method of Metta. If you all the leaders here
fail at this task we the military will have to crush them decisively. We are in a position to defeat them.
Before we launch our attacks we want to avoid bloodshed and violence. We would rather resolve the
remaining rebellion peacefully. Please, I repeat my appeal to you all – spiritual leaders, political
leaders, community leaders – to bring them back to the legal fold.

In conclusion, I would like to thank emphatically all of you who listened with great patience what I
have to say – including the Mayu region’s political leaders, religious leaders, community leaders, as
well as the leaders of the surrendering Mujahideen and their rank and file members.

[end text]

23
 Rakhine holds key to future of Myanmar
Harn Yawnghwe
Myanmar Times
21 May 2018

https://www.mmtimes.com/news/rakhine-holds-key-future-myanmar.html

Why is there such a divide between what Myanmar and foreign writers report about Rakhine? I believe
it is important to bridge the gap because the future of Myanmar as a nation may depend on it.

In 1988, I gave up my international business career to work for democracy in Myanmar. I wanted what
was best for the country. However, the Tatmadaw (military) saw me as an enemy intent on
undermining them.

This belief was suspended only when the late U Nay Win Maung of the non-profit organisation
Myanmar Egress persuaded Minister Aung Min that the long-held views of the Tatmadaw might not
be accurate. So after nearly 50 years in exile, I was allowed back into the country by then-President
Thein Sein to help facilitate the peace process.

But why did I agree to come back to work with the regime that had caused the deaths of my father and
brother and exiled me from my homeland? Was it a desire to cash in on the transition and make lots of
money or political ambition?

No. I have not gained politically or financially from the peace process. One of the key reasons for
coming back was President Thein Sein’s inaugural speech on in March 2011. He talked about “the hell
of untold miseries” suffered by the people because of the decades of armed conflicts caused by
“dogmatism, sectarian strife and racism,” and the need for national reconciliation.

This was what I had been trying to do since 1999 when I contacted Ambassador U Kyaw Win in
Canada to persuade Senior-General Than Shwe to talk with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. I wanted to
convey the message that using force and violence to advance one’s political agenda does not work,
that dialogue can solve problems, and that democracy would benefit Myanmar.

Today, some Myanmar claim that the Muslims in Rakhine State are foreigners who are trying to take
over Myanmar through illegal immigration and a population explosion.

24
The truth about Muslims

Is this true? Inscriptions from the 1st century show that Arakan is an ancient civilisation that pre-dates
the Myanmar Kingdom. Sculptures from the 4th century also show that the Kingdom of Vesali was
Buddhist. Islam arrived in Arakan with Arab traders in the 8th century and its influence grew in the
15th century during the Mrauk-U period. The kingdom at that time was comprised of Buddhists and
Muslims.

Mrauk-U was conquered by Myanmar in the 18th century, and later, after World War II, national
boundaries were re-drawn. In Myanmar’s Arakan State, Buddhists became the dominant population.
In India’s Tripura State and Bangladesh’s Chittagong and Barisal divisions, and the Chittagong Hill
Tracts, Buddhist Rakhines became minorities in their respective nations but were recognised as
citizens.

Similarly, the 1947 Constitution recognised the Muslim population in Arakan as citizens. They had
national registration cards (NRCs) identifying their religion and ethnicity. They voted and could run
for office. Government textbooks described them as an ethnic minority in Myanmar and the
government’s Burmese Broadcasting Service had a programme in their ethnic language.

But some wanted northern Arakan to be annexed to East Pakistan. When the mujahideen were subdued
in 1961, the Myanmar Government set up the Mayu Frontier District, which was governed directly
from the capital to provide adequate protection and representation of the Muslim minority. Brigadier-
General Aung Gyi, Army vice-chief of staff, speaking at the mujahideen surrender ceremony in
Maungdaw in July 1961, said, “The ethnic group that resides on the west of Mayu District boundaries
are Pakistani. And the people who reside on the east side of this border are (Myanmar)... In central
Burma, there are people who hold the view that people in this region are not Tai-yin-tha, or an ethnic
group native to the Union of Burma. There are also people who make moves to separate from Burma
and join with Pakistan. These are false views… From today on, I openly and publicly tell you this: We
consider the people of Mayu District an ethnic minority integral to the Union of Burma.”

All of this changed after General Ne Win seized power in March 1962 and embarked on a
Burmanisation programme. All foreigners, including westerners, were expelled and their businesses
nationalised. Over 100,000 Chinese and 300,000 Indians who had been in Myanmar for generations
but were not citizens were also pushed out overnight.

In 1978, the Burma Army conducted Operation Naga Min, ostensibly to stop illegal migration. NRCs
identifying ethnic Muslims as citizens were confiscated and temporary 3-fold white identity papers
were issued. They were supposedly to be replaced at a later date. But these IDs were replaced only 36
years later in 2014 with certificates having no legal standing. However, the fact that the ID holders
could vote showed that they were citizens.

No documents before 1885

The citizenship of ethnic Muslims in Arakan State was officially changed in 1982 by Ne Win, who
demanded they prove they had been in Burma for three generations. This was impossible, since most
people, including Burmans, were not documented until the British came in 1885. Even in 2013-14, the
Thein Sein government had to issue new NRCs to people living in the Karen and Shan ceasefire areas
because they had no documents. If the law were applied today to Burmans with NRCs, many might
not qualify as citizens either.

25
Some say that the list of Myanmar’s 135 races does not include ethnic Muslims in Arakan, so they
cannot be citizens. The list, introduced by the regime in 1991, is a political document with no
ethnological basis. The Union Solidarity and Development Party said as much in Parliament in 2013,
stating that the list was drawn up by the Burma Socialist Programme Party.

From the early 1990s onward, ethnic Muslims in Arakan State were restricted: they could not travel
from village to village, they were not allowed to marry without permission from township officials,
nor could they attend universities, just to name a few. Most of Myanmar forgot about them until 2012.

That is probably why today, 20 years later, people in Myanmar say, “We have never heard of them
before. It is a made-up identity. They are foreigners.” By the same token, most of the world had never
heard of Myanmar before 1991, so is Myanmar a made-up country? Of course not. So this is not a
valid argument.

We all have deep-seated prejudices whose basis we may never have tried to verify. In the past, we may
not have been able to do so easily, but today, in a democracy where information is more accessible, it
is our responsibility to do so.

In promoting democracy, I always emphasise that for it to work, basic human rights must be respected.
Democracy is not just about majority rule. It needs to be inclusive, non-discriminatory, just, and protect
minorities.

I hope democracy will truly take root in Myanmar and that our diversity can be our strength, so that
we can proudly take our place in the world without shame. Otherwise, the crisis in Rakhine could be
the beginning of the end.

[end text]
_______________________

Harn Yawnghwe is the founder and executive director of the Euro-Burma Office established in 1997.
He holds a mining engineering degree and an MBA in international business and finance and is the
youngest son of Sao Shwe Thaike, the first president of the Union of Burma from 1948 to 1952.

26
 Statement by Ms. Razia Sultana
at UN Security Council Open Debate on Sexual Violence in Conflict
United Nations, New York, NY

16 April 2018

http://www.womenpeacesecurity.org/resource/statement-unsc-sexual-violence-open-debate-april-
2018/

This statement was made by Ms. Razia Sultana, Senior Researcher with Kalandan Press, a coordinator
of the Free Rohingya Coalition, Director of Arakan Rohingya National Organization’s women section
and the founder of Rohingya Women Welfare, on behalf of the NGO Working Group on Women,
Peace and Security, at the United Nations Security Council Open Debate on Sexual Violence in
Conflict. In her statement Razia Sultana outlines her research documenting the widespread and
systematic use of sexual violence by the Myanmar army against Rohingya women and girls and other
ethnic minorities, emphasizing that the Security Council should have prevented this latest crisis that
has forced over 670,000 Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh since August 2017. She calls for an urgent
increase in aid to address the humanitarian situation for those who have fled to Bangladesh and for
rule and law, accountability and human rights to drive the international response.

Mr. President, Excellencies, Ladies, and Gentlemen,

Good Morning,

I am a Rohingya lawyer, researcher, and educator specializing in trauma, mass rape, and trafficking of
Rohingya girls and women. I have been working directly with Rohingya women and girls in the refugee
camps in Bangladesh since 2014. As a senior researcher, I have worked with Kalandan Press on a few

27
reports. I am coordinator of the Free Rohingya Coalition, Director of Arakan Rohingya National
Organization’s (ARNO) women section, and the founder of Rohingya Women Welfare (ROWW).

I speak today on behalf of my people, who have been driven from our motherland. Where I come from,
women and girls, have been gang-raped, tortured and killed by the Myanmar Army, for no other reason
than for being Rohingya. I also speak today on behalf of the NGO Working Group on Women, Peace,
and Security.

Since August last year, over 670,000 Rohingya have fled Myanmar. This is the fastest refugee
movement since the Rwanda genocide. I am extremely grateful to Bangladesh for opening its borders.
However, the international community, especially the Security Council, has failed us. This latest crisis
should have been prevented if the warning signs since 2012 had not been ignored. Since then state
security forces have committed human rights abuses against the Rohingya. Officials have since placed
severe restrictions on our freedom of movement which limited access to livelihoods, healthcare, food,
and education. Discrimination against Rohingya people dates as far back as 1982 when we were
stripped of our citizenship rights.

Many of Myanmar’s other ethnic minorities including the Karen, Kachin, Chin, Mung, and Shan have
also faced decades of entrenched discrimination, rape, and other human rights violations by the military
operating with impunity. Other ethnic women’s groups in Myanmar have been documenting these
patterns for decades. In 2002, Shan groups released a report with the same patterns of gang-rape,
killing, and mutilation. In 2014, the Women’s League of Burma released a report documenting rape of
over 100 ethnic women by the Myanmar Army. This showed how even after elections in 2010, the
Myanmar Army was still raping ethnic women with impunity. What is happening now is only on a
much larger scale.

My own research and interviews provide evidence that Government troops raped well over 300 women
and girls in 17 villages in Rakhine State. With over 350 villages attacked and burned since August
2017, this number is likely only a fraction of the actual total number of women raped. Girls as young
as six were gang-raped. Women and girls were caught and gang-raped in their homes, as they were
running away or trying to cross the Bangladesh border. Some were horribly mutilated and burned alive.
Sexual violence involved hundreds of soldiers and occurred across a vast part of Rakhine State. Such
scale and breadth provide strong evidence that rape was systematically planned and used as a weapon
against my people. The pattern of mutilation of women’s private parts after rape, suggests a specific
directive to instill terror among Rohingya people but also to destroy their very means of reproduction.
With hundreds of thousands of troops deployed across Myanmar, this has horrifying implications for
the safety of women and girls across the country.

There are similar situations around the world, such as in Syria and Yemen. In Yemen, more than 3
million women and girls are at risk of sexual and gender-based violence. In Syria, the Commission of
Inquiry has found that sexual violence carried out by Government forces and militias, formed part of
widespread and systematic attacks directed against the civilian population.

Rohingya continue to flee today, and humanitarian organizations estimate that 60% of displaced
Rohingya currently in Cox Bazar in Bangladesh, are women and girls. Had Bangladesh closed its
borders, the situation would have been considerably worse. However, the international community and
humanitarian agencies need to urgently scale-up health and protection services to support Rohingya
refugees. This must include unhindered access to lifesaving healthcare services, mental and
psychosocial care, and improved conditions of sanitation, water, and hygiene. Despite the acute need,
post-rape care, including access to safe abortions and emergency contraception, is critically low in
camps. Women and girls with disabilities and the elderly, face greater risks and needs which are not
28
being addressed. There must be a faster registration process for NGOs with specialized humanitarian
sexual reproductive health experience and in women’s empowerment and protection programming.

Of greatest concern to me are the increased incidents of young women being trafficked, some as young
as12 years old. Young women and girls are either being kidnapped, or promised jobs or marriage offers
and then disappear. Many see no future and are desperate to escape to a better life. They are easily
trapped by false promises and then never seen again. There have also been cases of young teenage
boys being taken. I am working on an awareness campaign for parents and community leaders to
provide their girls with a protected environment.

Young Rohingya women have a vital role to play in this awareness raising and in coordinating
humanitarian assistance in the camps. They should be encouraged to volunteer as they will be trusted
by their community to relay vital information and at the same time will learn important leadership
skills. Many young Rohingya women in the refugee camps want to help their people and be actively
involved in the future of their community. They need to be supported and provided the necessary
training to do so. It is time to empower our Rohingya women and girls with vision, respect and support
whatever way we can.

Later this month, the Security Council will be visiting the refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar and then
going to Myanmar. During this visit, you must meet with women and girl survivors. I could facilitate
safe meetings. You must work with the Bangladesh authorities to stop the trafficking, pressure the
Myanmar Government and senior officials to cooperate with the UN Fact Finding mission, and insist
on unrestricted humanitarian access across Rakhine State.

Rule of law must drive the response to the Rohingya crisis. International pressure is urgently needed
to end impunity in Myanmar and support political and legal reform, that ends the oppression of all
ethnic peoples in Myanmar. Any return of refugees to Myanmar must be in accordance with
international standards, and be safe, dignified and voluntary. As the Advisory Commission on Rakhine
State recommended, and many members of this Council agreed, the Government of Myanmar must
address the central questions of Rohingya citizenship, rights, freedom of movement, and equality
before the law. My people must be guaranteed their safety upon return to Myanmar.

The Myanmar military is listed for the first time in this year’s Secretary General Report on Sexual
Violence in Conflict. In light of this and the ongoing impunity of the army, the Security Council must
refer the situation in Myanmar to the International Criminal Court without delay, for its horrific crimes
against Rohingya, as well as for violations against other ethnic groups in the country, including in
Shan, Karin, Kachin and other states.

It is hypocritical to condemn the human rights violations and express horror at the new violence, while
then also selling arms to Myanmar and seek explorative licenses to mine its natural resources. Member
States committed to conflict prevention and sustaining peace cannot turn a blind eye to state-sanctioned
ethnic minority persecution, discrimination or other human rights violations including sexual violence,
for trade. This applies to Myanmar and all crises elsewhere.

My statement today is not only for Rohingya women but for my other ethnic sisters who are also facing
atrocities. Women community leaders from different ethnicities across Myanmar are working together
to build inter-ethnic peace and community relations. We believe in a peaceful and united Myanmar for
all ethnicities.

29
 Confronting genocide in Myanmar
The urgent need to prevent and protect
Katherine Southwick

Asia and the Pacific Policy Society Policy Forum

2 December 2016

Interethnic divisions in a young democracy cannot be downplayed or wished away, and it is time
Myanmar’s government and the international community acknowledge strong evidence that
genocide is being perpetrated against the Rohingya and act to end it, Katherine Southwick
writes.

Violence in Myanmar’s western Rakhine State escalated after a 9 October attack on border guard posts,
leaving nine officers dead. Humanitarian assistance and media access to the area have been cut off for
weeks while the Myanmar authorities conduct a counterinsurgency operation against allegedly
Rohingya assailants. Responsibility for the initial attack remains unclear, however. More than a
hundred people are thought to have died already, with 30,000 internally displaced adding to the
160,000 people who have been subsisting in squalid displacement camps since previous outbreaks of
violence in 2012 and 2013. Human Rights Watch has released satellite imagery showing that over
1,200 buildings in Rohingya villages have been razed in the past month. Government soldiers have
reportedly gang-raped Rohingya women and girls.

Bangladesh, which for 30 years has permitted more than 230,000 registered and unregistered Rohingya
refugees to shelter in its territory, has been turning people back who seek refuge across the
border. Thousands have already crossed and continue to gather at the Bangladesh-Myanmar border.

These events mark a dramatic deterioration in what has long been a desperate situation for a minority
that many have identified as among the most persecuted in the world. Most of them are stateless, with
the government designating them as “Bengalis” or “illegal immigrants,” despite many having had
citizenship in the past and having lived in the region for generations. They have been subjected to
forced labour and confined to displacement camps where they do not receive adequate food and
medical care, leaving pregnant women and children particularly at risk of agonising illness and death.

30
Rohingya are subject to harsh restrictions on marriage, family size and movement. Their religious
buildings have been destroyed, and those who flee on rickety boats to other countries such
as Malaysia or Thailand have, in the past, been turned back to the open seas to die or suffer at the hands
of traffickers or languish in indefinite detention.

A question that haunts Myanmar’s government, and the international community, is whether what is
happening to the Rohingya constitutes genocide. By now a credible claim can be raised that the
internationally recognised crime of genocide is taking place in Myanmar. Accordingly, based on
international legal obligations, the Myanmar government and other nation states should be taking all
necessary actions to stop and avert the gravest kind of humanitarian catastrophe.

Under Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention, which Myanmar has ratified, “genocide” is defined
as “…any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national,
ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily
or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life
calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended
to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

The Yugoslav tribunal has elaborated further on Article II (c) that deliberately inflicting conditions
calculated to bring about a group’s destruction can include “subjecting the group to a subsistence diet,
systematic expulsion from homes and denial of the right to medical services. Also included is the
creation of circumstances that would lead to a slow death, such as lack of proper housing, clothing,
and hygiene or excessive work or physical exertion.”

There is little doubt that for years the Rohingya population has suffered the acts listed in Article II (a)
– (d) of the Genocide Convention.

On the intent requirement of the crime – that the acts are committed with the intent to destroy, in whole
or in part, an ethnic or religious group – courts have taken a highly contextualised, case-by-case
approach, to determining whether intent can be inferred from factual circumstances. Such an inference
must be “the only reasonable one available on the evidence.” Additionally, as the Rwandan
tribunal has stated: “The offender is culpable because he knew or should have known that the act
committed would destroy, in whole or in part, a group.”

This case-by-case approach to intent, along with the high burden of proof requiring the evidence to be
“fully conclusive,” renders genocide determinations unavoidably contestable. Other analyses could
suggest that the overall intent of perpetrators in Myanmar is better understood as “ethnic cleansing,”
which reflects the idea that the actual intent is to forcibly transfer or expel the Rohingya rather than
physically destroy them.

In the 2015 case of Croatia v. Serbia, which also included evidence of killings, sexual violence,
forced labour, and displacement, the International Court of Justice did not find genocidal intent on the
part of the Serbs against the Croats in the context of the Yugoslav war. Key considerations were that
the conflict was seen as territorial and the Serbs had organised transportation for Croats to evacuate
the territories that Serb forces had occupied.

The difference in the Rohingya case is that there is no clear escape from the abject misery and high
risk of death or extreme abuse at the hands of traffickers or by other countries’ immigration
authorities. There are no systematic measures to officially deport the population, either through
providing transportation or agreeing to formal arrangements with receiving countries. Moreover,
Rohingya are deterred from departing through restrictions on movement and punishments for leaving,
31
such as by the removal from household lists, the extortion of family members left behind and
imprisonment for “illegal” re-entry.

Hundreds, possibly thousands of babies born in squalid camps have suffered preventable deaths due
to lack of food and medical care. The overall conditions are such that those persons imposing them
over a prolonged period either know or ought to know, that the eventual outcome will be the physical
destruction of the group, in whole or in part.

The complexity of proving genocide is ill-matched to the urgency of preventing and responding to
genocidal situations when they arise. We could be waiting years for an international tribunal or a panel
of experts to conclude authoritatively that genocide is or is not taking place. This scenario would come
as too little too late for the many victims and their families, not to mention the domestic political fallout
and economic disaster which would ensue after the fact. At the same time, the moral and political costs
– the enduring stigma and potential criminal liability – of not acting to stop genocide are severe.

International law and institutions extricate us from this quandary through their emphasis on genocide
prevention as an obligation that is at least as equally strong as protection. The 1948 Convention
obligates states to prevent and punish genocide. The widely affirmed Responsibility to
Protect doctrine requires states to prevent and protect victims from war crimes, crimes against
humanity and genocide in the absence of a meaningful government response.

We can now draw on ample scholarship and case law to identify situations that look very much like
genocide and compel robust responses to live up to these obligations to prevent and protect. In 2015,
the London-based International State Crime Initiative released a report based on a social scientific
study and concluded that, “genocide is taking place in Myanmar” and warning of “the serious and
present danger of the annihilation of the country’s Rohingya population.” Others have made a legal
case for genocide, or the high risk of genocide, such as scholars Zarni and Cowley, Yale Law School’s
human rights clinic, and former deputy prosecutor of the Yugoslav Tribunal, Sir Geoffrey Nice, among
others.

Some might argue that the label for a crime should not matter, and in a sense they are right. These
crimes too often occur along a spectrum that, without corrective action, can lead to the same calamitous
result; massive loss of life and destruction.

We might think the responses would be the same, regardless of the words we choose to define the
crime. However, too many international conferences and diplomatic meetings over the years have
lamented the long list of persecutions and suffering this group has endured over decades, resulting in
responses that are disproportionately inadequate to the gravity of the Rohingya’s plight. Tepid policies
toward Myanmar and the Rohingya betray a deep-seated reluctance to label these crimes as genocide
for fear of subverting the narrative so many in the world have waited for; an enlightened democratic
transition. The notion of genocide in Myanmar risks turning the country back into an international
pariah rather than an international darling.

But the current violence painfully illustrates that interethnic divisions in a young democracy cannot be
downplayed or wished away. It is time for Myanmar, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the
United Nations and others to face facts, to confront the prospect of genocide being perpetrated against
the Rohingya. They must be open to judgment for their inaction, or more hopefully, take action and
commit the resources needed to save lives throughout the region and preserve Myanmar’s future.

_________________________

32
Katherine Southwick is a Visiting Scholar at George Mason University’s School for Conflict Analysis
and Resolution. She is a Doctoral Candidate at the National University of Singapore’s Faculty of Law,
where she was also a Research Associate at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies.

She previously helped to manage and implement legal reform programs throughout Asia on behalf of
the American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative (ABA ROLI) based in Washington D.C. and
Manila, Philippines. While at ABA ROLI, she co-authored two publications on the ASEAN human
rights system.
She has worked on statelessness issues at Refugees International, served at the U.S. State
Department’s Office of the Legal Adviser, and clerked in the Office of the Prosecutor of the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). She has also worked for human
rights organisations in India and Uganda. She has a J.D. from Yale Law School.

33
 Naming Genocide:
The Least That Can Be Done
Dr Louise Wise

University of Sussex, UK

Global Dynamics Series

University of California at Santa Barbara, USA

"... a pervasive Holocaust-centrism in subsequent decades has led to

restrictive interpretations of the meaning and scope of genocide, with
the labeling of situations as ‘genocide’ being reserved for a few big
or ‘spectacular’ cases of (usually one-sided) mass killing, which are
largely ‘successful’ and resemble or fit the Holocaust model. As
scholars such as Martin Shaw describe, the codification of genocide as
a crime under international law, and the neglect of Lemkin’s original
historical and sociological work, has similarly engendered a narrow
focus on mass killing as the sharp empirically identifiable end of
destruction. In fact, it is little known that Lemkin developed many of
the ideas he would later subsume under the term genocide before the
Nazi Holocaust."

http://www.21global.ucsb.edu/global-e/february-2018/naming-genocide-least-can-be-done

There is a troubling tendency among some academics and commentators to dismiss too easily the use
of the word genocide in the case of the Rohingya in Myanmar. To apply the term to this complex
conflict, they suggest, is too simplistic, an exaggerated activist shock tactic designed to get publicity
rather than a serious tool of description or analysis. The general concern is surely an important one:
that the invocation of genocide—and the inevitable politics of doing so—can overshadow a layered
and multifaceted historical and contemporary complexity that cannot be grasped or contained by
simplistic categorizations. Yet the concept of genocide is more complex, nuanced, and indeed broader
than many tend to recognize. Seen in this context, the disavowal of its relevance reveals an
unnecessarily rigid doctrinal mind-set (with quite significant
34 implications). Moreover, some argue that
the word should be reserved for a few cases which display a ‘special evil’, used sparingly because the
phenomenon itself is an exceptionally rare occurrence. But this is assumption rather than argument—
there is simply no logical a priori reason why genocide should apply to only a few situations. 1

Engagement with the concept’s history makes it clear that such dismissals are only intellectually
sustainable on the basis of a highly selective understanding, problematic blind spots, and
unacknowledged biases. The term genocide was coined by the Polish international lawyer Raphael
Lemkin in 1943, although his scholarship was for decades strangely absent from the academic field of
genocide studies. However, both popular and official understandings of the concept today, which
usually rely on the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide, have departed in significant ways from
Lemkin’s original formulation. In contrast to conventional understandings of genocide as systematic,
planned, and ideologically-driven mass killing, Lemkin saw it as a complex, multifaceted process
which incorporated broad-based cultural and social destruction as an integral aspect, and did not
necessarily involve mass killings.

For him, the element of cultural destruction was absolutely central to the overall concept of genocide.
Genocidal techniques for Lemkin aimed to ‘cripple’ groups by targeted all aspects underpinning
collective life, including political institutions, economic existence, language, religion, health and even
the ‘dignity’ of groups.2 Indeed, the politicized removal of an entire section on ‘cultural genocide’
from the UN Convention during the drafting process (a process with which Lemkin was intimately
involved) was strongly resisted by him, and as he wrote in his autobiography, ultimately a cause of
much personal distress. He was also deeply interested in many cases of colonial genocides, and saw
genocide in general as a process that was underpinned by an inherently colonial logic—a neglected
insight with quite profound implications for our interpretation of the meaning of genocide historically
and in the contemporary world. For example, in Axis Rule, he wrote:

Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed; the other, the
imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn, may be made upon the
oppressed population which is allowed to remain or upon the territory alone, after removal of the
population and the colonization by the oppressor’s own nationals. 3

But Lemkin was politically pragmatic, with a deep liberal faith in the law, and accepted the definitional
compromise. As a number of scholars have pointed out, the consequence has been a legacy of
misunderstanding.4

Compounding this lost intellectual lineage, a pervasive Holocaust-centrism in subsequent decades has
led to restrictive interpretations of the meaning and scope of genocide, with the labeling of situations
as ‘genocide’ being reserved for a few big or ‘spectacular’ cases of (usually one-sided) mass killing,
which are largely ‘successful’ and resemble or fit the Holocaust model. As scholars such as Martin
Shaw describe, the codification of genocide as a crime under international law, and the neglect of
Lemkin’s original historical and sociological work, has similarly engendered a narrow focus on mass
killing as the sharp empirically identifiable end of destruction. In fact, it is little known that Lemkin
developed many of the ideas he would later subsume under the term genocide before the Nazi
Holocaust.

Symptomatic of this in the case of Myanmar is the tendency to focus on body counts and the occurrence
and intensity of mass killings to the neglect of other, perhaps more attritional or socio-cultural forms
of group destruction such as forced displacement, destruction of livelihoods, mass rape, and enforced
starvation. Additionally, due to the wide influence of the (highly problematic) legal framework of the
UN Genocide Convention, the unambiguous identification of perpetrators’ calculated intent is often
35
cast as the pivotal factor in determining the character of violence against the Rohingya. But we might
ask why the subjectivity and moral quality of the perpetrator group is more important than the
experiences of the victims? Furthermore, while many assume that a simplistic and decontextualized
idea of intent must be clearly demonstrable in cases of genocide, recent scholarship has suggested that
Lemkin himself had a much more nuanced perspective on this than has been hitherto recognized; Latin
words in the preface to Axis Rule read, ‘He in whose interest it was, did it’ (Tony Barta, 2013).

a pervasive Holocaust-centrism in subsequent decades has led to restrictive interpretations of the

meaning and scope of genocide...

However, these more nuanced sociological interpretations do not translate easily into the political
realm, and are certainly not amenable to media sound bites. Mention of genocide at this level inevitably
becomes contorted into a simplistic narrative of conflict and violence. But it is one thing to correctly
identify the vast and horrifying destruction of the Rohingya as an unfolding genocide within the
context of this broader framework; it is another to believe that therein lies a solution to the inaction of
political leaders, or a clear guide to action. Words are important. Correctly naming the distinctive form
of destruction that has been faced is especially significant for the victims, for whom denial can
be retraumatising. But sadly, this does not alter the fact that the political promise of naming is far
from certain, as the case of Darfur in particular demonstrates. For all the international attention Darfur
received starting in 2003—high-level recognition of genocide, the multiple UN peacekeeping forces
and international diplomacy, not to mention the ICC’s indictment of President al-Bashir for genocide—
the situation across the country, and now also in the new state of South Sudan, remains one
of unfolding tragedy.

Indeed, with its reliance on a now standard script that pushes for bolder pronouncements from the
‘international community’, military intervention, and the activation of international juridical
mechanisms, most discussions around the prevention of genocide become superficially decoupled
from the complex contexts out of which genocide, and the incipient conditions for genocide, have
emerged. Of course, these discussions must be seen in the contexts of urgency in which they take place.
Yet the possibility of a real ground for meaningful anti-genocide action or politics arguably depends
upon confrontation with, and a more systematic tracing of, the complex entanglements of genocidal
processes and structures within these broader societal conflicts and trends. Importantly, these must be
situated in a global political and economic context. The ‘event’ of genocide in Myanmar—and the way
we talk about it—cannot be bounded as a temporally punctuated internal or domestic issue, or
separated from long-term processes are that rarely sufficiently interrogated in relation to the recent
violence. In particular, the complex interactions between colonial legacies, globalization, and
neoliberal economics (the latter driving an unprecedented wave of land grabs), are deeply implicated
in the genocide’s historical genesis, and should be part of the conversation about possible ways
forward.

The ‘event’ of genocide in Myanmar—and the way we talk about it—cannot be bounded as a
temporally punctuated internal or domestic issue, or separated from long-term processes are that rarely
sufficiently interrogated in relation to the recent violence.

It is these connections—rather than a focus on how our elites apply labels or the depoliticizing
preoccupation with ‘evil’ individual leaders—that could be productively drawn into the vocabulary
and repertoire of genocide prevention discourse and activism. But such issues are usually seen (by both
genocide activists and scholars) as falling beyond the scope of any form of anti-genocide action.
Likewise, the focus on pushing those with the power to deploy official labels to name ‘genocide’, and
the implicit model of political change it embodies, obscures other potential avenues of action. The
36
situation in Rakhine is incontrovertibly genocide. But whilst naming the atrocity accurately is deeply
important—for the victims especially, and for helping us grasp the true extent and character of human
destruction that is unfolding—it is not a panacea; it brings its own dangers and is, unfortunately, the
least that can be done.

__________________
NOTES
1. As the anthropologist Alexander Hinton has pointed out, ‘Critical Genocide Studies’, Genocide
Studies and Prevention, (2012), vol. 7, no. 1.
Available at: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/gsp/vol7/iss1/3/
2. See Chapter IX of Lemkin, R. (1944). Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation,
Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress, (Washington D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace).
Available at: http://www.preventgenocide.org/lemkin/AxisRule1944-1.htm
3. Ibid.
4. Notably Martin Shaw. See Shaw, M. (2007). What is Genocide? (Cambridge: Polity).

REFERENCES
Barta, T. (2013). ‘”He in whose interest it was, did it”: Lemkin’s Lost Law of Genocide’, Global
Dialogue, Vol. 15, No. 1.

Lemkin, R. (1944). Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of

Government, Proposals for Redress, (Washington D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace).

Moses, D. (2010). ‘Raphael Lemkin, Culture, and the Concept of Genocide,’ in Bloxham, D. and
Moses, D. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies (Oxford: OUP).
Available at: http://www.dirkmoses.com/uploads/7/3/8/2/7382125/moses_lemkin_culture.pdf

Moses, D. and Stone, D. (eds) (2006). Colonialism and Genocide, (London: Routledge).

Shaw, M. (2007). What is Genocide? (Cambridge: Polity).

Louise Wise is Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Sussex, England.

37
 An Evolution of Rohingya Persecution in Myanmar:
From Strategic Embrace to Genocide
Alice Cowley and Maung Zarni

20 April 2017

Middle East Institute, American University, Washington, DC

http://www.mei.edu/content/evolution-rohingya-persecution-myanmar-strategic-embrace-genocide

“Send us as many birth control pills as you can. They (Myanmar troops) are gang-raping our women.
They are arresting and killing all our men. There is nothing else you can do. Just pray to Allah and to
wish us speedy deaths! This is just simply unbearable,” said a Rohingya woman talking from her
mobile phone from Myanmar’s predominantly Rohingya region of Northern Rakhine State bordering
Bangladesh.[1] [See Figure below right.] She was talking to her brother, an unregistered refugee living
and working in a poor and rough neighborhood called Salayang on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur,
Malaysia.

Among the handful of Burmese eager for updates, listening to the phone conversation on speaker phone
was U Maung Maung, a respected Muslim leader and activist from Mandalay, also making a living in
Malaysia. Maung immediately posted this on his Facebook timeline on November 20, 2016,[2] hoping
to alert people to the shocking events unfolding. Western experts on the region note there is an
“information blackhole,”[3] owing to the Myanmar government’s lockdown of Northern Rakhine State
for its ‘security clearance operations.’ As such, Myanmar authorities have barred access to
humanitarian aid groups and local and international media. This latest lockdown was a result of the

38
killing of nine Myanmar police officers which was believed to have been instigated by Rohingya
hoping to form a resistance group.

However, Maung’s attempt to alert the world via Facebook came to naught. The post was in Burmese
language. But more importantly, his alert — like many others conveyed by ‘locals’ — had not been
vetted by any Western organizations or international human rights ‘experts,’ who have become the
standard bearers of facts or “truth-conveyors” relating to other peoples’ experiences of atrocities.
Victims and their accounts need first to be vetted by these mediating agencies — a system understood
only too well by the Burmese government with its blanket denials of the allegations coming out of the
information black hole it created. Aung San Suu Kyi Government’s Information Committee referred
to the atrocities on many occasions, “fake rape” [4] and “exaggerations” or “fabrications.”[5]

Following hundreds of similar allegations and coordinated documentation by Rohingya groups of mass
killings, mass rape, and destruction of whole villages, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for
39
Human Rights (OHCR) sent a team to interview Rohingya refugees who had recently fled to
Bangladesh — 70,000[6] of whom had arrived in four months. Based on over 200 interviews, OHCR
issued a damning Flash Report (Feb 3) complete with harrowing tales of burning elderly Rohingya
men alive and slitting children’s throats.[7] The U.N. estimates that Myanmar may have killed as many
as 1,000 Rohingya men in recent violence alone. [8] This information, presented at the 34th session of
the Human Rights Council,[9] did not result in the much-hoped-and-lobbied-for U.N. Commission of
Inquiry with a view towards the International Criminal Court. The result was a compromise — a ‘Fact
Finding Mission’[10] — which both the military[11] and the National League for Democracy (NLD)-led
government[12] are determined not to accept or cooperate with.

We have previously argued that far from being a new phenomenon, waves of state-directed violence
and communal destruction such as these have been occurring since 1978 and are part of a process of
‘slow-burning genocide.’[13] Two other independent studies published a year later reinforce our
findings.[14] Over these decades, Rohingya experiences and sufferings have been tossed across multiple
discourses that deny the central role of the military such as “communal violence” [15] or since the
October 9 raids, “Muslim insurgency” pregnant with potential for escalations involving “international
terrorism.”[16] In recent years, these have run concurrently with human rights bodies and organizations
framing the situation as “ethnic cleansing” [17] and “crimes against humanity”— U.N. Special
Rapporteurs and the OHCHR included.

Despite these shifting narratives, the fundamental nature of the problem has remained constant. The
military-controlled state has attempted to “cleanse” the nation of the largest Muslim minority in
Myanmar, unique with legitimate claims to Northern Rakhine as their ancestral home. Firstly, this has
been attempted through legal, bureaucratic, and administrative means — such as removing their rights
to citizenship, destroying and revoking documents in Rohingya possession, refusing to register
thousands of Rohingya infants, household checks, as well as subjecting them to a web of criss-crossing
security grids by which the freedom of movement of the Rohingya population is severely restricted
and monitored.[18] Secondly, it has been attempted through denial of their history/identity and
propaganda campaigns that serve to de-nationalize them.[19] Where these two attempts have not been
achieved, communities have also been subjected to physical destruction through methods such as
burning property, evictions, and killings.

However, this has not always been the case. In 1961, the Burmese co-author’s late great uncle, Zeya
Kyaw Htin Major Ant Kywe, a decorated nationalist solider, was the Deputy Commander of the
administrative district of Mayu in 1961, which was effectively established as a homeland for Rohingya
in Rakhine State in order to maintain law and order[20] in the region where the central government was
confronted with rebellions from two different fronts: Muslim Rohingya separatists and Buddhist
Rakhine nationalists clamouring for statehood.

Waves of state-directed violence and communal destruction ... have been occurring since 1978 and
are part of a process of ‘slow-burning genocide.’

40
On Myanmar’s Independence Day (January 4, 1948), even as the Union Jack was lowered at the
colonial Secretariat in Rangoon, the Burma Army was engaged in ferocious battles against armed
Rakhine (Buddhist) rebels[21] who wanted to reclaim the sovereignty they had lost to the militarily
dominant Burmese Buddhist group in 1784.

In the years following Myanmar independence in 1948, the central government, specifically the
Ministry of Defense, strategically sought to embrace Rohingyas as a bona fide ethnic minority of the
new Union of Burma,[22] with equal and full citizenship rights, along with multiple other minorities
with armed revolts against the ethnically Burmese central government. It is essential to see the root of
the Rohingya persecution not simply in the sectarian ethnic conflict between the two main co-habitant
communities in Rakhine state of Western Burma, namely Rakhine Buddhist majority and Rohingya
Muslim minorities, but in the ethnic triangle involving also the majority Burmese in ultimate control
of the state (both the military under General Ne Win and the civilian political coalition headed by PM
U Nu).[23]

Although the Burma Army was fighting battles on two fronts in West Myanmar, it was the Rakhine
rebellions that presented a more serious threat to the central government than the simultaneous
Muslim/Rohingya armed movements, some of which sought, with no success, to join with the
predominantly Muslim nation of Pakistan (East Pakistan). During the Rohingya surrender ceremony
of 290 Muslim rebels, held on 4 July 1961 in Northern Rakhine town of Buthidaung, the Commander
of the Border Area Administration and Territorial Forces Colonel Saw Myint promised “absolutely no
religious or ethnic discrimination” against Rohingyas — vis-à-vis Rakhine Buddhists —and
guaranteed “equal protection under Law for all those who abide by the law and live in peace.” [24] Saw
Myint’s superior and the second in command, after General Ne Win of the Burma Army Brigadier
Aung Gyi, presided over the ceremony and explained the need for Rohingyas as an ethnic minority
group to recognize and accept the primacy of political allegiance to the Union of Burma over their
kinship, cultural, and religious ties in exchange for the full citizenship rights and ethnic equality which
they were offered.[25]

In addition, as early as May 1960, the Ministry of Defense agreed to the Rohingyas’ request to carve
out the predominantly Rohingya geographic pocket in Northern Rakhine State and establish a new
district named after the local river Mayu. The co-founder of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for
Democracy, the then-young Lt-Colonel Tin Oo, was tasked with establishing the Mayu District, which
was to be administered centrally from the Burmese-controlled Rakhine Military
Command.[26] Rohingyas’ request was precipitated by the moves made by Prime Minister U Nu’s re-
elected civilian government in order to fulfil its election pledge of granting Rakhine Buddhists a
separate statehood, within the Union of Burma.[27]

Within eight months of the establishment of the May-U District, General Ne Win and his deputies
staged a coup against U Nu’s government on the pretext that Nu’s opportunistic electioneering and
weak leadership were emboldening ethnic minorities’ demands for devolution of power away from the
Burmese centre. While the coup leaders continued to honour the arrangements with Rohingyas, the
policy orientation of the military leadership shifted
41 towards racist, isolationist, xenophobic, and
socialistically doctrinaire. The more liberal and less radical military leaders such as the Deputy
Commander in Chief of Army Brigadier General Aung Gyi and Colonel Chit Myaing were sacked in
1963 and 1964.[28] The remaining military leaders under Ne Win’s commandership began to
marginalize and eventually cleanse the Armed Forces of Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu officers
unless they agreed to convert to Buddhism. Having remade this once-multi-ethnic, multi-faith national
institution of unrivalled power and control over society, the military leadership turned its sights to
society at large.[29] Most important, the army leadership initiated, promoted, and sustained the process
of radically reimagining ethnic and political histories, national identity, and the society at large along
the army’s new “purist” Buddhist vision.[30]

In 1978, Ne Win launched a centrally organized, violent operation against Rohingyas of both Southern
and Northern Rakhine, under the pretext of surprise immigration checks. Known as Operation King
Dragon, the events of 1978 are carved into the consciousness and the inter-generational memories of
Rohingya communities. It was conducted as an interagency campaign of terror involving Immigration,
Religious Affairs, Police, Courts, Army, Navy, and police intelligence, as well as local administrations
made up of anti-Rohingya Rakhine.[32] Myanmar’s former chief of military intelligence until 2004, Ex-
General Khin Nyunt, who was operationally involved on the ground as a young major from Special
Operations Bureau, Ministry of Defense, serving as the Commander of Infantry Regiment No. 20 based
in Rakhine, wrote that a total of 277,938 fled, between February 12 and June 3, from Western Burma
into the neighboring Bangladesh.[33] Shut off from the outside world by an isolationist military regime,
the Burmese public — the Burmese co-author included — was misinformed of this operation as an act
of national defense, under the slogan “the (Buddhist) race could be swallowed up by other (alien)
race”[34] — an understanding that still resounds today. This was the first of the chronic waves of state-
sponsored and state-condoned violence against Rohingyas which have resulted each time in hundreds
of thousands of Rohingya fleeing “unbearable life on land.”

Following Ne Win’s coup in 1962, the nation’s vision fundamentally changed ...

Following Ne Win’s coup in 1962, the nation’s vision fundamentally changed — from one that sought
to establish peace through a unified multiethnic nation based on equality, to one which harnessed and
mobilized the Buddhist public’s anti-colonial sentiments, and along with this their anti-Indian
(subcontinent) and anti-Muslim racisms, which emerged out of the colonial-era political economy in
which locals were subordinated to Indians.[31] It was a vision which sought to ‘cleanse’ the nation
through systematic attempts to subjugate some ethnic minorities whilst removing others (such as
Rohingyas) from the national fold.

The now internationally infamous 1982 Citizenship Act was one part of a long process of stripping the
Rohingya of their citizenship and the rights of future generations of Rohingya to obtain Myanmar
citizenship. It was accompanied by eviction, land confiscation, and disenfranchisement of the
Rohingya. Although this controversial law does not mention Rohingyas by name, viewed within the
historical context of large scale forced repatriations from Bangladesh, and based on accounts of those
involved in drafting the Act, it can be concluded that the primary aim in drafting the Act was to exclude
Rohingyas from citizenship.[35] The law — and its42application regarding 135 fixed ethnic nationalities
excluding Rohingya, on the basis of their absence in the dubious colonial censuses, who in fact
existed in Myanmar prior to the first British Annexation of Western Burma in 1826 — has not simply
left Rohingya vulnerable to multiple discriminatory policies aimed at non-nationals, it has also fed
popular anti-colonial racisms in society that have led to pervasive social ostracism of Rohingya and
violence in which Rakhine Buddhists and state security forces have worked hand in glove.

Decades of facts relating to the instrumental role of the central Myanmar State in the abuses of
Rohingya are buried alongside very real human corpses.

Despite annual U.N. human rights monitoring in Myanmar since 1992[36] and the UNHCR having a
presence on the ground in northern Rakhine State since the early 1990s, violent persecution of the
Rohingya has continued unabated and indeed increased. This persecution was largely perceived as a
part of the authoritarian regime’s general pattern of rights violations, for the Myanmar military was
notoriously repressive towards ethnically Burmese opposition movement under Aung San Suu Kyi’s
leadership across the country, as well as other non-Bama ethnic groups in the country’s North and
North East regions.

Myanmar’s rights abuses in Rohingya regions of Western Myanmar weren’t seen as something that
demanded special attention. Today, while the anti-historical and institutionally amnesiac discourses
such as “humanitarian concern,” “communal conflict,” “security and terrorism,” “lack of
development,” and “livelihood creation” float through the ether world of foreign embassies,
development, and U.N. agencies, the decades of facts relating to the instrumental role of the central
Myanmar State in the abuses of Rohingya are buried alongside very real human corpses — again —
waiting to be verified and validated by the right kind of foreign experts and the right kind of U.N.
process. People and processes that never come. As Rohingyas in Northern Rakhine wait and their
diasporic relatives post desperate calls for U.N. peacekeepers and intervention on Facebook, “Never
again!”— the foundational myth of the United Nations — must sound bitterly hollow.

Fifty-five years ago, the Myanmar Ministry of Defense and its military leaders officially embraced
Rohingya as an ethnic minority, granted them equal rights, and full citizenship while enabling them to
make contributions to the country’s politics, society, and economy. Today, the military’s radical
reversal of Rohingya policy created the space in society where Rohingyas are commonly seen as
“leaches,” their identity and history “a hoax,” and their presence a demographic and jihadist threat to
the Buddhist nation. Meanwhile, over the same period, under the same national visions, other ethnic
communities along the country’s strategic, resource-rich borderlands including Kachins, Shan,
Karenni, etc., were offered promises, pledges, and agreements by generations of military and civilian
leaders, only to have them reneged when powerful stakeholders changed their strategic calculations.
Under the military regime, those that refused to be co-opted into the military’s national vision complete
with its Burmese dominance, were and still are subject to persecution, oppression, and war. They are
victims of the same ideologies that cleanse the nation of Rohingyas and all those that oppose or live in
contradiction to the state’s centralized control and organization of Burma’s ethnic minorities.

43
With NLD elected to government and with Aung San Suu Kyi as de facto leader, one would hope for
at least a dilution of the military leadership’s post-1962 purist ideologies, or at best for a radical re-
imagination of the Burmese national community incorporating her late father’s (Aung San) vision of
post-colonial Burma as a secular, progressive, multi-culturalist, multi-ethnic nation. Tragically, it is
not only the armed forces that have implemented internal cleansing of their institutions. NLD is now
also without a single Muslim representative from the population. Every time the government calls rape
‘fake’ on the military’s behalf or refuses to cooperate with U.N. bodies' attempts to unearth and validate
atrocities, Aung San’s multi-ethnic vision of Burma is trampled further into the ground.

[1] Amartya Sen, the foremost scholar on famines, explains why Burma’s intentional measures to
deny, severely limit, or block Rohingyas’ access to livelihoods, nutritional opportunities, and essential
medical services is an act of “institutionalized killing,” a slow genocide, not like Khmer Rouge’s
genocide, Rwanda or the Holocaust. Conference on the Plight of the Rohingya, Harvard University,
November 4, 2014, accessed April 5, 2017, http://tribunalonmyanmar.org/2014/11/15/the-slow-
genocide-of-the-rohingya-by-nobel-laureate-amartya-sen/.

[2] Ibid.

[3] International State Crime Initiative (ISCI), Queen Mary University of London, “Genocide of
Rohingya in Myanmar may be entering a new and deadly phase, October 17, 2016, April 3,
2017, http://www.qmul.ac.uk/media/news/items/hss/187983.html.

[4] Myanmar State Counsellor Information Committee, “Information Committee Refutes Rumours of
Rape,” December 26, 2016, accessed April 3, 2017, http://www.statecounsellor.gov.mm/en/node/551.
See also “Aung San Suu Kyi is making war time rape easier to commit,” MSN.com, December 26,
2016, accessed April 3, 2017, http://www.msn.com/en-sg/news/other/aung-san-suu-kyi-is-making-
wartime-rape-easier-to-commit/ar-BBxzZR6.

[5] “Aung San Suu Kyi laughs out loud at Rohingya genocide allegations while in Singapore,” The
Independent, January 5, 2017, April 3, 2017, http://www.theindependent.sg/aung-san-suu-kyi-
laughs-out-loud-at-rohingya-genocide-allegations-while-in-singapore/; and Jonah Fisher,
“Myanmar’s Rohingya: Truth, lies and Aung San Suu Kyi,” BBC, accessed April 3,
2017, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-38756601 Accessed 3 April 2017.

[6] “Rohingya flee into Bangladesh as Crisis Deepen,” Getty Images, January 18, 2017, accessed April
3, 2017, http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/album/rohingya-flee-into-bangladesh-as-crisis-deepens-
around-70000-rohingya-muslims--fVZ0izTy4ESIzTtE_KtsOQ#people-are-seen-in-kutapalong-
unregistered-camp-on-january-18-2017-in-picture-id631975540.

[7] “Devastating cruelty against Rohingya children, women and men detailed in UN human rights
report,” Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), February 3, 2017, accessed
44
April 3,
2017, http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=21142&L...http://w
ww.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=21142&LangID=E#sthash.ktblvI
Cd.dpuf Accessed 3 April 2017. See the full report
at http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Countries/MM/FlashReport3Feb2017.pdfAccessed 3 April
2017.

[8] “Exclusive: More than 1,000 feared killed in Myanmar army crackdown on Rohingya - U.N.
officials,” Reuters, February 8, 2017, accessed April 3, 2017, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-
myanmar-rohingya-idUSKBN15N1TJ.

[9] U.N. OHCR, “Statement by Ms. Yanghee LEE, Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human
Rights in Myanmar at the 34th session of the Human Rights Council,” March 2017, accessed April 3,
2017, http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=21355&LangID=E
#sthash.au9jPlEw.dpuf.

[10] “Rohingya issue: UN to send fact-finding mission to Myanmar,” ANI News, March 24, 2017,
accessed April 3, 2017, http://www.aninews.in/newsdetail-MzY/MzA1NzIz/rohingya-issue-un-to-
send-fact-finding-mission-to-myanmar.htmlAccessed 3 April 2017.

[11] “Myanmar Military Chief Defends Crackdown Against Rohingya in Rakhine State,” Radio Free
Asia, March 27, 2017, accessed April 3, 2017, http://www.rfa.org/english/news/myanmar/myanmar-
military-chief-defends-crackdown-against-rohingya-in-rakhine-state-03272017154143.html.

[12] “Myanmar rejects UN call for rights probe,” Bangkok Post, March 25, 2017, accessed April 3,
2017, http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/general/1221134/myanmar-rebuffs-un-rights-probe.

[13]Maung Zarni and Alice Cowley, “The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingya,” Pacific
Rim Law & Policy Journal 23, 3 (2014): 683-754, accessed April 3,
2017, http://digital.law.washington.edu/dspace-law/handle/1773.1/1377. (Hereafter “The Slow-
Burning Genocide”).

[14] See Penny Green, Thomas MacManus & Alicia de la Cour Venning, “Countdown to Annihilation:
Genocide in Myanmar,” International State Crime Initiative Report, Queen Mary University of
London, 2015, accessed April 3, 2017, http://statecrime.org/state-crime-research/isci-report-
countdown-to-annihilation-genocide-in-myanmar/; and “Is Genocide Occuring in Myanmar’s Rakhine
State?: A Legal Analysis,” Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic, Yale Law School,
October 2015, accessed April 3,
2017, http://www.fortifyrights.org/downloads/Yale_Persecution_of_the_Rohingya_October_2015.pd
f.

45
[15] See, for instance, Jim Della-Giacoma, “A Dangerous Resurgence of Communal Violence in
Myanmar,” International Crisis Group, March 28. 2013, accessed April 3,
2017, https://www.crisisgroup.org/asia/south-east-asia/myanmar/dangerous-resurgence-communal-
violence-myanmar. See also “Why is there communal violence in Myanmar?” BBC, July 3, 2014,
accessed April 3, 2017, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-18395788.

[16] “Myanmar: A New Muslim Insurgency in Rakhine State,” International Crisis Group Report No.
283/Asia, December 15, 2016, accessed April 3, 2017, https://www.crisisgroup.org/asia/south-east-
asia/myanmar/283-myanmar-new-muslim-insurgency-rakhine-state; Tim Johnston and Anagha
Neelakantan, “The World's Newest Muslim Insurgency Is Being Waged in Burma,” TIME, December
13, 2016, accessed April 3, 2017, http://time.com/4601203/burma-myanmar-muslim-insurgency-
rohingya/.

[17] Human Rights Watch, “Burma: End Ethnic Cleansing of Rohingya Muslims,” April 22, 2013,
accessed April 3, 2017, https://www.hrw.org/news/2013/04/22/burma-end-ethnic-cleansing-
rohingya-muslims. See also Jocelyne Sambira, “Myanmar minorities suffer 'systemic' discrimination,
abuse: UN,” United Nations Radio, June 20, 2016, accessed April 3,
2017, http://www.unmultimedia.org/radio/english/2016/06/myanmar-minorities-suffer-systemic-
discrimination-abuse-un/#.WOKL1_nyu5s.

[18] See “The Slow-Burning Genocide.” See also Widney Brown, “Where there is police There is
persecution, Physicians for Human Rights,” Physicians for Human Rights, October 2016, accessed
April 3, 2017, http://physiciansforhumanrights.org/library/reports/myanmar-rakhine-
state.html?referrer=https://uk.search.yahoo.com/.

[19] In addition to the state-controlled mass media and official speeches by the generals and ex-
generals, Myanmar Military Intelligence Services spread deliberately false historical information
through teachers’ refresher courses at the Civil Servant Training School at Hpaung Gyi, which
thousands of Burmese state school teachers are required to attend, according to Daw Khin Hla, former
Rohingya Middle School Teacher, from Myanmar, who spoke at the conference on Rohingya
Persecution, November 4, 2014, accessed April 3,
2017, http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic662843.files/HGEI-Burma_Semin...

[20] “Finally, peace has prevailed in Mayu Borderlands District,” Editorial, Special Issue on Mayu,
Current Affairs (or Khit Yay), Ministry of Defense, the Union of Burma, 12, 6 (July 18, 1961): 5.
(Burmese Language publication).

[21] Tape-recorded Interview in Virginia, U.S. (July 1994) with retired Colonel Chit Myaing, former
member of General Ne Win’s Revolutionary Council (1962). As the Deputy Commander of the Burma
Rifle Brigade 5, Chit Myaing led the government’s military campaign against the armed Rakhine
rebellion in January 1948.

46
[22] The full text of the official Burmese language transcript of the speech delivered by Brigadier
General Aung Gyi, Vice Chief of Staff (Army), at the Surrender Ceremony of Mujahideen Rohingya
troops, Maung Daw Town, Northern Rakhine State, 4 July 1961. See “Special Issue on Mayu”, Current
Affairs (or Khit Yay), Ministry of Defense, the Union of Burma, 12, 6 (July 18, 1961): 8-10 & 23-24.
(Hereafter Brigadier General Aung Gyi’s speech).

[23] For the detailed records of this triangular politics amongst Rakhine-Burmese-Rohingya see the
book-length Burmese language publication, Kyaw Win, Mya Han and Thein Hlaing, “Myanmar Naing
Ngan Yay” (Burma’s Politics), Volume 3 (years 1958-1962), (Rangoon: Universities Press, 1991), in
particular Chapter 12, pp. 167-250. (Hereafter “Burma’s Politics,” 1991).

[24] The full text of the official Burmese language transcript of the speech by Colonel Saw Myint,
Chief of the Border Areas Administration and Commander of the Territorial Forces, “Special Issue on
Mayu,” Current Affairs (or Khit Yay), Ministry of Defense, the Union of Burma, 12, 6 (July 18, 1961):
15.

[25] Brigadier General Aung Gyi’s Speech, 1961.

[26] Transcript of the Current Affairs magazine discussions with Prime Minister’s Private Secretary-
2 U Khin Nyunt, “Special Issue on Mayu,” Current Affairs (or Khit Yay), Ministry of Defense, the
Union of Burma, 12, 6 (July 18, 1961): 16-20.

[27] “Burma’s Politics” (1991), 230.

[28] Interview with retired Colonel Chit Myaing, 1994, op cit.

[29] Within Myanmar Armed Forces – and in the society at large – it is widely known that non-
Buddhist military officers no longer get promoted beyond the ranks of Major.

[30] Wa Lone, “Snr Gen Min Aung Hlaing pledges to help safeguard Buddhism,” Myanmar Times,
June 24, 2016, accessed April 3, 2017, http://www.mmtimes.com/index.php/national-news/21035-snr-
gen-min-aung-hlaing-pledges-to-help-safeguard-buddhism.html.

[31] Maung Zarni, “Buddhist Nationalism in Burma

Institutionalized racism against the Rohingya Muslims led Burma to genocide”, Feature, Tricycle,
Spring 2013, https://tricycle.org/magazine/buddhist-nationalism-burma/Accessed 3 April 2017.

[32] Personal Testimony delivered by U Ba Sein, a former Rohingya civil servant – now a refugee in
London, UK - who lived through this King Dragon Operation in N. Rakhine, Permanent People’s
Tribunal on Myanmar, Queen Mary University of London. March 6-7, 2017, accessed April 3,

47
2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9Q11ZhC8qI (Ba Sein’s testimony begins at 7:55
minutes).

[33] Ex-General Khin Nyunt, Naing Ngan Ei Ah Nauk Hpet Ta Gar Pauk Ka Pya Tha Na (or
The Crisis from the Western Gate of Burma), (Rangoon: Pan Myo Ta Yar Press, 2016), particularly
Chapter 3, pp. 21-43.

[34] Although race/ethnicity and faith are two different “things,” the majority Buddhist Burmese
public collapse the two. The Burmese popular saying sums it up: “to be Burmese is to be Buddhist.”

[35] The Burmese co-author and a key drafter, the late Rakhine historian Dr Aye Kyaw, were friends
and fellow exiles for years in the United States. A few years before the two bouts of violence against
Rohingyas in 2012 Aye Kyaw gave a Burmese language interview to the influential Irrawaddy News
Group wherein he explained in details the internal discussions among the Drafting Committee
members, that focused on the best ways to de-nationalize Rohingya through the citizenship
act. Irrawaddy has since removed Aye Kyaw’s Burmese language interview.

[36] See the mountains of Human Rights Situation Reports on Myanmar for the last 25 years beginning
March 3, 1992, United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, accessed April 3,
2017, http://ap.ohchr.org/documents/dpage_e.aspx?m=89.

48
 Waves of Genocidal Terror against Rohingyas by Myanmar
and the Resultant Exodus Since 1978

Maung Zarni and Natalie Brinham

14 November 2017

Middle East Institute, American University, Washington, DC, USA

http://www.mei.edu/content/map/waves-genocidal-terror-against-rohingyas-myanmar-and-resultant-
exodus-1978

Introduction: Burma’s Ethnic Cleansing in the Social Media

In the age of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, netizens around the world view on their mobile phones
and tablets the deeply disturbing images of Rohingyas, children, elderly men and women, filing out of
Western Burma (or Myanmar) as the result of Burma military’s “clearance operations” [1] at the rate of
100,000 per week[2] for 6 weeks. The power of such imagery has so moved national politicians and
senior officials from such world bodies as UN and EU that they have publicly used such evocative, if
non-legal term as “ethnic cleansing”.[3]
49
Gregory Stanton, the renowned American genocide scholar and former U.S. State Department official,
who heads the Genocide Watch, has gone so far as to say Myanmar is committing the crime of all
crimes, namely a genocide. Stanton states that he is avoiding purposefully the journalistic “ethnic
cleansing.” For he views rightly the now popular terminology as Milosevic’s “euphemism,” which is
not considered punishable crime in international law. [4]

Ethnic cleansing is a deplorable act committed by a U.N. Member State and its collaborating non-state
actors in society, involving violent expulsion of a target population with their distinct ethnic and racial
identity from a particular geographic region within the nation’s national boundaries. [5] Burma’s latest
round (each marked by its distinctive methods of expulsion and justificatory ideologies) in what has
become a decades-old pattern or cycle of targeted violence and destruction against Rohingyas, is
typically accompanied by their displacement and flight from the country.

This essay aims to highlight the scope and rhythmic nature of Burma’s persecution of Rohingyas the
devastating impact on the Rohingya population. First, it sets out to describe and help readers
understand the evolving pretexts given by the successive Burmese governments and the methods of
group destruction and resultant waves — five in total — of the outflow of Rohingyas in large number.
Then it attempts to offer an interpretive framework within which this cycle of violence-exodus-lull is
best understood.

Burma’s Cycles of Terror-Expulsion-Destruction-Exodus-and-Lull

The diagram above captures both the periodic and cyclical pattern of cross-border forced migration of
Rohingyas and the biblical volumes of fleeing refugees across Bangladesh-Burmese borders over the
last almost four decades.

This pattern of slaughter, structures of severe repression, intervals of lull becomes cyclical since the
military-controlled state developed the threat perception regarding the Rohingya population as
demographic force of Islamic faith that pose a twofold threat to the country’s predominantly Buddhist
character and as a proxy for terrorist groups such as ISIS.[6]

Two striking features of the diagram are the fixed and instrumental role of the Burmese military as the
most powerful perpetrator and the shifting nature of the pretexts on which the operations of violent
expulsion (which force large numbers of Rohingyas to flee their homes on the Burmese soil) have been
based.

In the first large-scale “terror,” as the then Hong Kong-based Fast Eastern Economic Review (July 14,
1978) put it,[7] the campaign that was centrally organized and carried out by the military government
of ex-General Ne Win resulted in the exodus of over 280,000 Rohingyas into Bangladesh.[8] Then as
now, such large volumes of terror-fleeing Rohingyas forced their way into the neighbouring Muslim
country within a short period of about eight weeks. The ostensible pretext of this campaign named
“King Dragon Operation” was the “illegal immigration check” of Chittagongnians, that is, Muslim
50
residents of Bangladesh’s Chittagong region that had illegally crossed the 170-miles-long, porous
Burmese-Bangladeshi borders and settled in Western Burmese state of Rakhine. [9]

Amid the strong protests and the veiled threat of arming Rohingya refugees by the then military
government of Brigadier Zia Rahman in Dhaka, the exodus ended [10] and the Myanmar side agreed to
the U.N.H.C.R.-facilitated repatriation. Rangoon took back 180,000-190,000 of the total estimated
number of refugees in the same year[11] while many other Rohingya refugees found their way to
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.[12]

The Lull and the Emergence of the Structures of Apartheid

This first exodus was followed by 12-year lull.

More ominously for the Rohingyas, within four years after the violent crackdown on “Illegal
immigration” on their ancestral land of Northern Rakhine, they were de-nationalized, that is,
Myanmar’s military rulers, under the civilian façade of the Burma Socialist Programme Party,
effectively declared them non-nationals who did not belong to Myanmar.

Where violence failed to expel them en masse, Burma’s generals and ex-generals found the blunt
instrument in law reminiscent of Nazi-era Nuremberg race laws ...

Specifically, in a clever stroke of law enacted in effect as the decree, but rubber-stamped by the
People’s Parliament, a paper-tiger, Rohingyas found themselves Myanmar’s Jews. Where violence
failed to expel them en masse, Burma’s generals and ex-generals found the blunt instrument in law
reminiscent of Nazi-era Nuremberg race laws which disenfranchised and reclassified German Jews as
“non-nationals” of the Third Reich. While the Citizenship Act of 1982 never spelled out Rohingyas as
their main target one of the two Rakhine members of the drafting committee, [13] the late nationalist
historian Dr. Aye Kyaw, made it unequivocally clear, the law was primarily intended to exclude
Rohingyas from citizenship eligibility by requiring the non-existent documentation to prove their
residency before the first Anglo-Burmese War of 1824.[14] The first-ever printing press imported by
the Christian missionaries, arrived in British Burma only in 1870’s. During the pre-colonial (pre-1824),
the feudal Burmese society relied on dried palm-leaf as the medium of written language. The idea of
documenting one’s residency was un-heard of.

In addition to Burma’s use of this tailor-made citizenship law, it was during this decade of lull, the
military set up structures of repression[15] complete with severe restrictions on Rohingyas’ physical
movement, deprivation of property rights, establishment of the regimes of forced labour, extortion,
control of population growth via stringent marriage restrictions, summary execution and sexual
violence.[16]

1991-92 Wave: The Resumption of State-directed Violence after 1988 Nationwide Uprisings

51
In the six-year period following the passage of 1982 Citizenship Act, increasingly pauperized Burma
at large gradually plunged into a period of popular unrest, which culminated in a nationwide peaceful
revolt in August 1988, calling for the end of the one-party military dictatorship led by Ne Win and the
restoration of democracy and freedom for all.

Like the rest of the country's ethnic groups and social classes, Rohingyas organized mass protests in
Northern Rakhine, and rallied behind Aung San Suu Kyi and her newly-founded National League for
Democracy (NLD) party, which emerged as the flagship opposition. The fact that this unwanted
Rohingya population, which had been legally deprived of the right to belong in Myanmar, attempted
to join hands with the emerging opposition movement throughout the country became another impetus
for the next round of violent assault on them by the military.[17]

After the military restored “law and order” in the seat of the government in Rangoon and other major
urban centers throughout Burma, they turned their attention to the growing popular support among
Rohingyas for Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy.

Burmese (military) authorities began confiscating National Registration Cards (NRC) issued before
1982 Citizenship Act was decreed by the head of the military junta ex-General Ne Win: this was a key
document which proved Rohingyas to be full-citizens of Myanmar. Instead, the authorities replaced
the old NRC cards with “residency cards” (or White Cards, so-called) and began to identify them as
“Bengali.” This was designed to drive home the message that they were foreigners who did not belong
in Myanmar. While Rohingyas with prior citizenship instantly lost their citizenship status, those who
were under 12 years old — the age at which a national becomes eligible for applying for the official
national ID cards under Burmese citizenship and immigration law — and the new born are not issued
any proof of citizenship. As a matter of fact, Burma in effect render “illegal” thousands of Rohingya
babies who were conceived in the wombs of mothers who could not afford exorbitant fees to secure
marriage licenses and secretly wedded in the presence of Muslim spiritual leaders. [18]

Prior to her first house arrest in July 1989, Aung San Suu Kyi herself travelled to Northern Rakhine
and patronized local NLD chapters in the predominantly Rohingya areas.

Rohingyas saw new rays of hope in the burgeoning opposition movement with Suu Kyi as the most
popular, if untested leader.

On their part, Rohingyas saw new rays of hope in the burgeoning opposition movement with Suu Kyi
as the most popular, if untested leader.[19] In 1992, Myanmar military intelligence established an inter-
agency military unit named “Border Affairs Division” (or Na Sa Ka), which was then used as the main
instrument to crush the pro-democracy Rohingya communities. The angry sentiment — how dare “the
Bengali illegals” offered their solidarity to the Burmese generals’ nemesis — appears to have added a
new layer of sadism to the rationale behind the systematic persecution of Rohingyas. [20]

52
In no time, the Na Sa Ka in effect turned Northern Rakhine’s Rohingya villages, wards and towns into
a vast web of security grids dotted with armed check-points. The troops began to commit a laundry list
of major human rights violations including forced labour, severe restrictions on physical movements,
extortions, summary executions, sexual violence, marriage and child birth restriction, confiscation of
previously issued national identity cards. This new wave of repression by the central military triggered
the second exodus of Rohingyas in 1992. According to the U.N.’s count, “a total of 256,193 Rohingyas
fled of which 236,393 were repatriated while nearly 20,000 were too afraid to return to N. Rakhine
and stayed on.”[21]

As a matter of fact, the second wave of exodus and the growing repression against Rohingyas caught
the attention of the United Nations in New York and pro-Aung San Suu Kyi human rights campaigners.
It became one of the major factors — the other were civil war-related rights violations in Eastern
Burma in the regions of Karens, Shan, Karenni and the general repression against the NLD opposition,
with the freshly minted Nobel Peace Prize winner under her first house arrest — leading to the
appointment of the Special Rapporteur on human rights situation in Myanmar beginning in 1992. [22]

A pattern of exodus-repatriation-lull began to emerge.

It was during this period of lull that Rohingyas came to be subjected to the emerging genocidal
conditions of life ...

It was during this period of lull that Rohingyas came to be subjected to the emerging genocidal
conditions, which included severe restrictions of access to essential life-sustaining services such as
emergency medical care, preventative medicine, enough nutrition, unnatural control over birth via
severe restrictions on marriage licenses, and so on. While the national average for physican: patient
ratio is 1:691, in the combined two main Rohingya towns of Maung Daw and Buthidaung, Rohingyas:
doctor ratio is 158,000: 1, according to the Harvard Medical School research team which studied the
public health situation of Rohingyas.[23] The direct outcome of the policy-induced health and food
deprivation is felt most acutely among Rohingya children, as pointed out earlier.

As early 2006, these structures of repression and the resultant genocidal conditions, that is, conditions
that have in effect made life for the Rohingya population nearly impossible, were noted in the dispatch,
marked “Confidential” and dated February 20, 2006, sent by M. Kairuzzman. Bangladesh’s
ambassador in Rangoon, to the Foreign Secretary in Dhaka. After the site visit under the U.N.H.C.R.
auspices to Northern Rakhine with its 97 percent make-up of Rohingyas, Ambassador Kairuzzman
wrote:

according to the UNHCR statistics, the government (of Burma) has engaged a platoon of Na Sa
Ka/Army personnel (retired/serving) for 100 (Rohingya) people who enforce curfew at night
whenever they feel only for the Muslims … For 104 hamlets/villages in N. Rakhine state, there
are 58 check-posts to harass the Muslim population out of which 80% are illiterate, 65% of
children are suffering from malnutrition, and mortality rates are 4 times higher than other parts
53
 of Myanmar. Northern Rakhine state’s glittering pagodas in every nook and corner are only for
the 3% of the Buddhists. On the contrary, only a handful of mosques seen on the roadsides are
in such dilapidated conditions that itself bar Rohingyas from going to mosques. In most places,
Muslims are not allowed to pray inside the mosques. Northern Rakhine state are highly infested
with T/B, malaria and diarrhea …. These days the government provides them a document called
“Residence Document” for those who can fulfil these conditions: 1) speak in Myanmar
language; 2) marriage certification; and 3) birth certificate. [24]

Eleven years on, these man-made conditions have remained in place.

As recently as July 2017 the World Food Program found that up to 80,500 Rohingya children under
the age of five are suffering from “acute malnutrition,”[25] that is, euphemism for sub-Sahara like semi-
famine. WFP conducted Food assessment among the Rohingya population between December 2016
and March 2017, the WFP released its preliminary findings. It reports, “based on the household hunger
scale, about 38,000 households corresponding to 225,800 people are suffering from hunger and are in
need of humanitarian assistance.”[26] Further, the WFP report states, “high food insecurity, limited
access to essential services including health care, and poor ac-cess to safe water and sanitation may
have exacerbated an already serious malnutrition situation (based on DHS 2015-16 for Rakhine State,
the Global Acute Malnutrition (GAM) was at 13.9 percent while the Severe Acute malnutrition (SAM)
- 3.7 percent). None of the children from 6 to 23 months met the minimum adequate diet, only 2.5
percent reached minimum dietary diversity and 8.5 percent met the minimum meal frequency.” [27]

These inhuman conditions and structures of direct repression by Myanmar security troops have also
been a major factor behind wave-like streams of Rohingyas fleeing Myanmar.

After the ten-year lull since the second cycle which ended with the second repatriation of Rohingyas
in 1994-95, the communal riots broke out in several towns in Rakhine state in June and October of
2012.

The Communal or Sectarian Violence of June and October 2012

It is noteworthy that on the eve of the communal riots in June, there were two significant developments,
which caused, without a doubt, concerns among the military leaders.

First, Aung San Suu Kyi decided to play electoral politics, even within the structural constraints of
2008 Constitution drawn up by the military with the sole aim of ensuring its unchallengeable position
in national politics. In April 2012, her party contested for all the available seats in the by-elections,
and her NLD contestants defeated every single one of their military-backed opponents.[28]

Second, because of the media and political freedoms ushered in by the government of ex-General
President Thein Sein Rakhine nationalists were emboldened to make loud and public demands for
greater political and administrative autonomy for Rakhine people from the central government in
54
Naypyidaw and the equitable sharing of revenues originated from one of the country’s biggest income
earners — offshore natural gas sales, all of which hitherto went into the military’s coffers. [29]

No sooner had Aung San Suu Ky’s party swept the parliamentary by-elections in April 2012 than the
story of three “Bengali” Muslims gang-raping and murdering a 28-year-old Rakhine Buddhist woman
in a town called Taung Goke. While the murder indeed took place in May, the rape story was
completely false, according to Zargana, a well-known political comedian and former dissident, who
served as one of the members the Presidential Commission on Rakhine Violence formed in the wake
of the communal violence.[30] He interviewed the government’s coroner who performed the post
mortem on the victim, but who was forced to state otherwise in his medical report. And Myanmar’s
official media outlets — and Thein Sein’s presidential spokesperson — spread the false story of
“Muslim Bengali men” gang raping a Buddhist Rakhine. In retaliation, a well-organized mob in Taung
Goke town dragged ten Burmese Muslim leaders from their inter-state bus travelling back to Rangoon
from their pilgrimage in Rakhine sate and slaughtered them on the street in broad daylight, and in full
view of the local police and military.[31] That set off communal riots across half a dozen towns across
Rakhine. The violence broke out again in October the same year, this time with the participation of the
government military and police units, on the side of the Rakhine Buddhists. [32]

Unlike the first two waves of exodus which were triggered by the military-directed terror and
repression, the bouts of violence in 2012 took on the “communal” characteristic, with the “reformist”
government giving organized anti-Rohingya Rakhine mobs a blanket impunity as they killed
Rohingyas and destroyed Rohingya neighborhoods, places of worship, and businesses. In some cases
the security forces joined in the orgy of violence and destruction of Rohingyas. [33]

Myanmar’s official narrative about the violence and exodus has again shifted from one of “illegal
immigration” to “communal violence” between the two mutually hostile local Buddhist and Muslim
communities, with a long history of violent clashes dating back to the World War II era.

The international media and influential think tanks such as the Brussels-based International Crisis
Group (ICG)[34] began echoing this new official narrative in which the instrumental role of local
Myanmar security forces, that simply told the Rohingya victims who begged for protection from
organized mob attacks to simply “pray to your Allah,” [35]and the central government that provided the
impunity to anyone who inflicted death and destruction on Rohingyas. While portrayed as “sectarian
or communal violence,” Rohingya people bore the overwhelming destruction and death — 86 percent,
as estimated by the Kofi Annan-led Rakhine Commission Report, released in September 2017. [36]

Overlooking the previous waves of state-organized violence and repression of 1978 and 1991-92,
influential external players such as ICG, U.N. agencies, the E.U. and various foreign governments
began to promote a new “democratic transition” narrative that the “sectarian violence” in Rakhine was
an unfortunate but almost inevitable part of a transitional process during which multi-ethnic societies
undergo liberalization. But this narrative of the overwhelming violence against Rohingyas is
contradicted by the policy-induced cycle of violence-exodus-lull, which dates to the time during which
55
the country was completely closed off from the outside world and ruled tightly by the military junta
with no signs of political or economic liberalization.

The Fourth and Fifth Cycles of Violence and Exodus: “Muslim Terrorism”

In the last two waves of violence and exodus in 2016 and 2017, Myanmar government and Burmese
language private media outlets began peddling yet another pretext for the use of central’s government
troops, namely Myanmar’s national defence against the emerging ISIS-inspired “Bengali extremist
terrorists”.[37] The primitively armed Rohingya militant group named Arakan Rohingya Salvation
Army (ARSA) did launch two clusters of attacks against Myanmar’s armed security outposts, typically
with sticks, spears, swords and a “handful of home-made grenades and guns,” in October 2016 and
August 2017.[38]

In both attacks the militant reportedly killed a total of two dozen police. As a matter of fact, the attacks
by the primitively armed Rohingya young men only handed Myanmar government a “pretext” to
launch another large scale assault on the Rohingya people, as former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State
for Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) Eric Schwartz told PBS News Hour on October 13,
2017.[39]

In fact, following the two bouts of “communal violence” in Rakhine Myanmar government had been
trying to unsuccessfully to re-frame the issue of Rohingyas as a national security concern, namely that
of “Jihadist terrorism.” No one other than ex-Major Zaw Htay, the current spokesperson for Aung San
Suu Kyi government with the ranks of Director General in the President’s Office, was openly
promoting the verifiably false rumors that “fully armed Bengali terrorists had crossed the Burmese
borders to commit terrorist attacks on Burmese soil” if they were “army intelligence field reports. [40] At
the time Zaw Htay was one of two presidential spokespersons for the ex-General and President Thein
Sein. His fear-mongering about “Bengali terrorism” predated at least three years before the emergence
of Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army. Despite Myanmar’s sustained efforts to reframe persecution and
violent repression of the Rohingya people as “national defence against Islamic terrorism,”[41] not even
the United States Government, which has been at the forefront of “the global war on terror,” has bought
Myanmar’s new and unconvincing narrative.

However, this narrative has been very well-received by the public in Burma, as well as Aung San Suu
Kyi herself. Through this “Myanmar war on Muslim terror” narrative, the Burmese military has not
only burned down thousands of Rohingya homes in nearly 300 villages in the region of N. Rakhine
stretching over 100 kms. in length but it has destroyed the predominantly Buddhist society’s demands
for human rights for all, greater freedom and further democratization.

Conclusion

Today, there are more Rohingyas outside of their ancestral borderlands of Myanmar and Bangladesh
than inside. The exact death toll of Rohingyas, both men and women, children and elderly, will never
56
be known. For the loss of two dozen police, Myanmar has inflicted overwhelming and pre-planned
violence and terror against the virtually helpless and unarmed population. In the virtual world of
Burmese language Facebook individual Burmese soldiers have boasted that they have slaughtered a
large number of Rohingyas while Bangladeshi authorities estimate the death toll to be several
thousands.

On October 27, 2017, the three-member U.N. Fact Finding Mission issued a brief official statement
upon completion of their week-long visit to Bangaldesh where they interviewed scores of Rohingya
refugee out of a total of 600,000 new arrivals. In the words of the mission’s leader former Indonesian
Attorney General Marzuki Darusman, “We have heard many accounts from people from many
different villages across northern Rakhine state. They point to a consistent, methodical pattern of
actions resulting in gross human rights violations affecting hundreds of thousands of people.” Mazzuki
was also quoted as saying the number of Rohingya killed (in the most recent wave of Burmese state-
directed violence) may be “extremely high.”

This Mission’s one-page statement came on the heel of a damning field report (September 13-24, 2017)
by the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (O.H.C.H.R.), which states:

Credible information indicates that the Myanmar security forces purposely destroyed the
property of the Rohingyas, scorched their dwellings and entire villages in northern Rakhine
State, not only to drive the population out in droves but also to prevent the fleeing Rohingya
victims from returning to their homes. The destruction by the Tatmadaw of houses, fields, food-
stocks, crops, livestock and even trees, render the possibility of the Rohingya returning to normal
lives and livelihoods in the future in northern Rakhine almost impossible. It also indicates an
effort to effectively erase all signs of memorable landmarks in the geography of the Rohingya
landscape and memory in such a way that a return to their lands would yield nothing but a
desolate and unrecognizable terrain. Information received also indicates 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.[42]

This report also highlights that prior to the incidents and crackdown of August 25, a strategy was
pursued to: 1) Arrest and arbitrarily detain male Rohingyas between the ages of 15-40 years; 2) Arrest
and arbitrarily detain Rohingya opinion-makers, leaders and cultural and religious personalities; 3)
Initiate acts to deprive Rohingya villagers of access to food, livelihoods and other means of conducting
daily activities and life; 4) Commit repeated acts of humiliation and violence prior to, during and after
August 25, to drive out Rohingya villagers en masse through incitement to hatred, violence and
killings, including by declaring the Rohingyas as Bengalis and illegal settlers in Myanmar; 5) Instil
deep and widespread fear and trauma — physical, emotional and psychological — in the Rohingya
victims via acts of brutality, namely killings, disappearances, torture, and rape and other forms of
sexual violence.[43]

57
Whatever one may choose to call name of Myanmar’s persecution of Rohingyas, “genocide, ”crimes
against humanity,” “ethnic cleansing, “one thing is beyond dispute: Burma’s military and local
Rakhine non-state collaborators have been engaged in the cycle of violence-expulsion-destruction-
exodus-lull of biblical volumes over the last 39 years since the first large-scale centrally-organized
campaign of terror against Rohingyas. Only Burma’s official pretexts and the methods of destruction
have evolved, but the devastating impact on both the lives of individual Rohingyas and the existence
of Rohingyas as a distinct ethnic community remains constant.

International lawyers, U.N. officials and world leaders may and do debate as to whether Myanmar’s
mass atrocities constitute the crime of all crimes, a genocide. But over one million Rohingya refugees,
displaced in Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Malaysia, India and other countries and the smaller
number that are being trapped inside Northern Rakhine State between the unwelcoming world and the
hateful Burmese society do not have the luxury of deciding what to call the crimes they have been
subjected to for nearly 40 years.

Alas, as the diagrammatic waves of terror-exodus show, the mythical international community has
once again made a mockery of the rally cry against genocides “Never again!

[1] “Myanmar Army Conducts Clearance Operations; Thousands Flee Clashes,” Voice of
America, August 28, 2017, accessed November 12, 2017, https://www.voanews.com/a/myanmar-army-
conducts-clearance-operations-in-rakhine-state/4003642.html. Also see Global Center for the
Responsibility to Protext, “Populations at Risk Current Crisis,” October 15, 2017, accessed November 12,
2017 http://www.globalr2p.org/regions/myanmar_burma.

[2] “Myanmar Refugee Exodus Tops 500,000 as More Rohingya Flee”, US News & World
Report, September 27, 2017, accessed November 11,
2017 https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2017-09-29/myanmar-refugee-exodus-tops-500-000-
as-more-rohingya-flee.

[3] “UN human rights chief points to ‘textbook example of ethnic cleansing’ in Myanmar,” UN News
Center, September 11, 2017, accessed November 12,
2017 http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=57490#.Wgg3AMZl-mY. See also “UN Chief
Assails 'Ethnic Cleansing’ of Myanmar's Rohingyas,” Voice of America, September 13, 2017, accessed
November 12, 2017 https://www.voanews.com/a/united-nations-antonio-guterres-myanmar-rohingya-
ehtnic-cleansing/4027395.html.

[4] “Expert Witness Dr. Gregory Stanton’s Statement,” Delivered at the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal on
Myanmar, Faculty of Law, University of Malaya Kuala Lumpur, September 18, 2017, accessed November
12, 2017, https://tribunalonmyanmar.org/2017/09/18/expert-witness-dr-gregory-stantons-statement/.

58
[5] For literary definition of ethnic cleansing see “ethnic cleansing,” Oxford English Living
Dictionaries, accessed November 12,
2017, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ethnic_cleansing.

[6] For the Burmese military’s institutionalized view of Rohingya Muslims as a threat see (ex-Colonel) Ye
Htut, “A Background to the Security Crisis in Northern Rakhine,” ISEAS Perspective 2017/79, accessed
November 12, 2017, https://www.iseas.edu.sg/images/pdf/ISEAS_Perspective_2017_79.pdf. (Hereafter
“A Background to the Security Crisis in Northern Rakhine”). In contrast, a British researcher Joseph
Allchin offers a different perspective. See Joseph Allchin, "Myanmar: The Invention of Rohingya
Extremists,” The New York Review of Books, October 2, 2017, accessed November 12,
2017 http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/10/02/myanmar-the-invention-of-rohingy....

[7] William Matten, “Burma’s Brand of Apartheid,” Far Eastern Economic Review, July 14, 1978.

[8] For the details of this state-directed first large scale anti-Rohingya campaign see ex-General Khin
Nyunt, The State’s Western Gate Problem (in Burmese, hereafter cited as “The State’s Western Gate
Problem”) (Yangon: One Hundred Flowers Press, 2016) 21-60.

[9] Ibid. pp. 21, 22, & 23.

[10] Interview with F. K. Jilani (deceased), a prominent Rohingya teacher and community leader, Kuala
Lumpur, Malaysia, May 2013.

[11] “The State’s Western Gate Problem”, p.p.29-31.

[12] Interviews conducted face-to-face in 2014 and 2015 with Rohingya activists in Germany and the U.K.
who initially went to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia after their temporary refuge in Bangladesh.

[13] For a legal analysis of the Citizenship Act, see Benjamin Zawacki, “Defining Myanmar’s “Rohingya
Problem””, American University Washington College of Law's Human Rights Brief 20, 3 (Spring
2013).

[14] The late Aye Kyaw was a Monash University-trained Rakhine historian, who served on the Citizenship
Drafting Committee established by ex-General Ne Win, the then despot. In his Burmese language interview
five years ago to Irrawaddy News Magazine, Aye Kyaw emphatically stated that the new Citizenship
Act was aimed specifically at de-nationalizing and disenfranchising Rohingyas, whom he considered the
British colonial-era agricultural “coolies” from Chittagong, East Bengal. The Irrawaddy News Group has
emerged as the leading cheerleader justifying persecution of Rohingyas, and has since removed Aye Kyaw-
incriminating Burmese language from its website.

[15] See “A Background to the Security Crisis in Northern Rakhine,” 4.

59
[16] UN Commission on Human Rights, Situation of human rights in Myanmar, March 3, 1992,
E/CN.4/RES/1992/58, accessed November 12, 2017, http://www.refworld.org/docid/3b00f02154.htm.
Also see Human Rights Watch, “Burmese Refugees in Bangladesh: Still No Durable Solution,“ May 1,
2000, accessed November 12, 2017, http://www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6a86f0.html.

[17] Interview with Ro Nay San Lwin, a well-respected Rohingya activist based in Germany, whose uncle
led the local efforts in N. Rakhine state to mobilize Rohingya community support for Aung San Suu Kyi
and her National League for Democracy, 2015.

[18] Interview with Rohingya Blogger U Ba Sein, London, U.K., 2016.

[19] See AFK Jilani, “Aung San Suu Kyi: The Lady of Destiny,” The Taj Library Press, Chittagong,
Bangladesh. The late Jilani was a Rohingya educator and writer who resettled in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

[20] Interview with Ro Nay San Lwin, 2015.

[21] Dispatch No. 102, marked “Confidential” and addressed to Bangladesh Foreign Secretary (February
20, 2006), from Bangladesh Ambassador to Yangon, Myanmar. (Hereafter “Dispatch 102”), accessed
November 12, 2017, http://www.maungzarni.net/2017/10/myanmars-ethnic-cleansing-of-rohingyas.html.

[22] “Situation in Myanmar,” U.N. General Assembly resolution A/RES/47/144, adopted on December 18,
1992, accessed November 12, 2017, http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/47/a47r144.htm.

[23] Syed S. Mahmood et al., “The Rohingya people of Myanmar: health, human rights and identity,” The
Lancet 288, December 1, 2016. See The Lancet Editorial on the review article here, accessed November
12, 2017, http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(16)32458-8/fulltext.

[24] “Dispatch 102”.

[25] “Food Security Assessment of the Northern Part of Rakhine State,” World Food Program (WFP),
July 2017. “Hunger rife among Rohingya children after Myanmar crackdown: WFP,” Reuters, July 5,
2017 (Hereafter “Food Security Assessment”), accessed November 12,
2017, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-malnutrition/hunger-rife-among-rohingya-
children-after-myanmar-crackdown-wfp-idUSKBN19Q1WC. Subsequently, the U.N. agency withdrew
this report after its official release as the direct result of the objection by Myanmar Government of Aung
San Suu Kyi. See Oliver Holmes, “UN report on Rohingya hunger is shelved at Myanmar's request,” The
Guardian, October 17, 2017, accessed November 12,
2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/17/un-report-on-rohingya-hunger-is-shelved-at-
myanmars-request.

[26] Ibid.

60
[27] Ibid.

[28] “Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi wins by-election: NLD party,” BBC, April 1, 2012, accessed November
12, 2017, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-17577620.

[29] Shwe Gas Movement’s statements and press releases – shown on its website up to 2012 – exemplify
this grassroots demand from Rakhine community for more equitable revenue sharing and opposition to the
Burmese military’s increased presence in Rakhine State, accessed November 12,
2017, http://www.shwe.org/press-releases/.

[30] Personal telephone and face-to-face communications with the Burmese author. 2012. Also see Maung
Zarni, “Did the gov’t incite the racial violence targeting the Rohingya?” Democratic Voice of Burma,
October 2, 2017, accessed November 12, 2017, http://www.dvb.no/analysis/did-the-govt-incite-the-racial-
violence-targeting-the-rohingya/24116.

[31] Ibid.

[32] Human Rights Watch, “All You Can Do is Pray.”

Crimes Against Humanity and Ethnic Cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in Burma’s Arakan State (Hereafter
“All you can do is pray”), April 22, 2013, accessed November 12,
2017, https://www.hrw.org/report/2013/04/22/all-you-can-do-pray/crimes-against-humanity-and-ethnic-
cleansing-rohingya-muslims.

[33] Ibid. Summary.

[34] Jim Della-Giacoma, “A Dangerous Resurgence of Communal Violence in Myanmar,” ICG, March
28, 2013, accessed November 12, 2017, https://www.crisisgroup.org/asia/south-east-
asia/myanmar/dangerous-resurgence-communal-violence-myanmar.

[35] “All You Can Do is Pray.”

[36] “Towards a Peaceful, Fair and Prosperous Future for the People of Rakhine,”

Final Report of the Advisory Commission on Rakhine State , August 23, 2017, accessed November
12, 2017. http://www.rakhinecommission.org/the-final-report/

[37] Maung Zarni, “Is Irrawaddy News Group leading Myanmar genocide propaganda?” August 6,
2017, accessed November 12, 2017, http://www.maungzarni.net/2017/08/is-irrawaddy-news-group-
leading.html. Also see “Rohingya: Hate speech, lies and media misinformation,” Al Jazeera English
Listening Post, September 16, 2017, accessed November 12,

61
2017, http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/listeningpost/2017/09/rohingya-hate-speech-lies-media-
misinformation-170916072755690.html.

[38] “Myanmar: Who are the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army?” BBC, September 6, 2017, accessed
November 12, 2017, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-41160679.

[39] “What can stop the extreme violence against Rohingya Muslims?” PBS NewsHour, October 13,
2017, accessed November 12, 2017, https://svit.vkadri.com/video/pbs-newshour-what-can-stop-the-
extreme-violence-against-rohingya-muslims.html.

[40] On file with the authors is the screenshot of a Facebook Timeline on the then President Thein Sein’s
spokesperson ex-Major Zaw Htay, June 2013. He is now Aung San Suu Kyi Government’s spokesperson.

[41] “A Background to the Security Crisis in Northern Rakhine.”

[42] See U.N. Office of the Commissioner for Human Rights, “Mission report of OHCHR rapid response
mission to Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh,” September 13-24, 2017, accessed November 12,
2017, http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Countries/MM/CXBMissionSummaryFindingsOct....

[43] U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, “Mission report of OHCHR rapid response
mission to Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, 13-24 September 2017,” October 11, 2017. Accessed November 12,
2017. https://reliefweb.int/report/myanmar/mission-report-ohchr-rapid-response-mission-cox-s-bazar-
bangladesh-13-24-september.

62
 Making Rohingya statelessness
Nay San Lwin, Guest Contributo

29 October 2012

http://www.newmandala.org/making-rohingya-statelessness/

Burmese government records of Rohingya

In his article, “A friend’s appeal to Burma”, published on 19 June 2012, Benedict Rogers noted that
the first President of Burma, Sao Shwe Thaike, a Shan, said that “Muslims of Arakan certainly belong
to the indigenous races of Burma. If they do not belong to the indigenous races, we also cannot be
taken as indigenous races”.

“The people living in Buthidaung and Maungdaw Townships are Rohingya, ethnic of Burma” said
Burma’s first prime minister U Nu in a pubic speech on 25 September 1954 at 8 pm. “The Rohingya
has the equal status of nationality with Kachin, Kayah, Karen, Mon, Rakhine and Shan” said the prime
minister and minister for defense U Ba Swe at public gatherings in Buthidaung and Maungdaw
Townships on 3 and 4 November 1959.

“The people living in Mayu Frontier is ethnic Rohingya” included in the announcement of Frontiers
Administration office under Prime Minister Office on 20 November 1961. Mayu Frontier is composed
of Buthidaung, Maungdaw and Rathedaung Townships.
63
Broadcasting from radio program in the Rohingya language was relayed three times a week from the
indigenous language programme of the official Burma Broadcasting Service in Rangoon, from 15 May
1961 to 30 October 1965. Myanma Encyclopedia Vol.9, page 89-90, published in 1964, concludes
that population of 500,000 living in Mayu Frontier of Northern Arakan State 75% is Rohingya. “The
majority people live in Buthidaung, Maungdaw and Rathedaung Townships are ethnic Rohingya and
the minorities are Rakhine, Daingnet, Mro and Khami” wrote in Tatmataw Khit Yay Journal Vol.12,
No.6 printed on 18 July 1961 and Vol. 12, No.9 printed on 8 August 1961.

In his speech on 8 July 1961, the Army Deputy Commander-in-Chief Brigadier General Aung Gyi
said, “The people living in Mayu Frontier are Rohingya. Pakistan (now Bangladesh) is located in west
of Mayu Frontier and Muslims are living there. The people living in west are called Pakistani and the
people living here are called Rohingya. This is not the only border that has same people on both sides,
border with China, India and Thailand also have the same phenomenon. For example: Lisu, Ei-Kaw,
La-Wa live in Kachin State and same people live in China. Also Shan people can be found in China as
Tai. The ethnics Mon, Karen and Malay are also living in Thailand. In India-Burma border Chin, Li-
Shaw and Naga are living. These people are living in Burma as ethnics and living in India as well”.

The Rangoon University Rohingya Students Association was one of the many ethnic student
associations that functioned from 1959 to 1961 under the registration numbers 113/99 December 1959
and 7/60 September 1960 respectively. In High School Geography textbook, printed in 1978, where
scattered living regions of national races of Burma is shown on page 86, Northern Arakan is marked
as ‘Rohingya region’.

Rohingya elites/MPs before and after independence of Burma

After the separation of Burma from India in 1935, the “Di-Archy” system was replaced by a ruling
system called “91 Taa-na” (Departments administration). In that system there were 132 seats in the
governing body and a total of 132 members were elected from various communal backgrounds. In this
election, Mr. Ghani Markan, a Rohingya MP from Buthidaung and Maungdaw constituency, was
elected. Point to be noted here that Mr. Ghani Markan was from the Community of “Burmese national”
category and they (Rohingya) represented the Burmese national and not the Indian or any other group.

The General Election for Constituent Assembly in 1947 was organized just before the independence,
mainly by the participation of General Aung San. This time, Buthidaung and Maungdaw had two
separate constituencies. U Abdul Ghaffar for Buthidaung and U Sultan Ahmed for Maungdaw were
elected.

U Abul Bashar for Buthidaung, U Sultan Ahmed and Daw Aye Nyunt for Maungdaw and U Abdul
Ghaffar for Upper house were elected in 1951 election. U Ezhar Miah and U Abul Bashar for
Buthidaung, U Sultan Ahmed and U Abul Khair for Maungdaw, U Sultan Mahmood for Buthidaung
North and U Abdul Ghaffar for Upper house were elected in 1956. U Sultan Mahmood and U Abul
Bashar for Buthidaung, U Rashid and U Abul Khair for Maungdaw and U Abdu Suban for Upper
house were elected in 1961. By then the Rohingya community were involved more actively in politics.
For the first time, one of the Rohingya elected member became a cabinet minister of Prime Minister
U Nu’s government. He was U Sultan Mahmood, and in charge for the ministry of Education and
Health. U Abdul Ghaffar and U Abul Bashar, elected members of Buthidaung became the
Parliamentary Secretaries.

64
Even in the era of U Ne Win, the Rohingya exercised voting and representing rights in the Pyithu
Hluttaw (National Assembly) Election and in the election of different levels of Pyithu (National)
Council. Likewise, many Rohingya dignitaries were endorsed in the Burma Socialist Programme Party
(BSPP) and some of them held higher positions as well. U Abul Hussein and Dr. Abdur Rahim were
elected in 1974 from Buthidaung and Maungdaw.
Rohingya have been subjected to the discriminatory measure initiated in 1978 by the then BSPP and
local authority of Rakhine community. They started to take the initiative to deprive the fundamental
rights of Rohingya community and since then the Rohingya were marginalized from the Pyithu
Hluttaw Election. U Tun Aung Kyaw aka Abdul Hai, was the only Rohingya representative elected in
1978 election from Maungdaw, but none from Buthidaung. The Rohingya were excluded from
participating in the Pyithu Hluttaw elections in 1982 and 1986. However, some Rohingya were seen
at lower levels of Pyithu Council of the BSPP.

In 1990 multi-party general election, Rohingya exercised the voting and representing rights again. U
Kyaw Min, U Tin Maung, U Chit Lwin and U Fazal Ahmed from National Democratic Party for
Human Rights (NDPH) were elected from Buthidaung and Maungdaw constituencies. Later U Kyaw
Min became a member of Committee Representing People’s Parliament (CRPP).

Making Rohingya stateless

Rohingya people used to have National Registration Cards (NRC) like everyone else in the country.
Upon introduction of discriminatory policies on Rohingya by Ne Win in 1970s, the NRCs were taken
away by various measures. Numerous check-points were set up to block Rohingya’s travel and to
confiscate their IDs. Nagamin (the Dragon) operation in 1977-78 was skilfully crafted to drive out all
Rohingya from Burma. It produced about 250,000 refugees that fled to neighboring Bangladesh.
However, most of the fleeing refugees were returned to their original dwelling places, so the plan was
not quite successful for the Burmese regime. Although systematic discriminatory policies were in place
and IDs and other government issued documents were seized by the government, Rohingya remained
as citizens of Burma until 1982. The Citizenship Act promulgated in 1982 is the official document that
striped off the citizenship of Rohingya.

Numerous forms of discriminations followed by the enactment of 1982 Citizenship Law and lives of
Rohingya had become incomprehensible. Again, another operation was carried out in 1991 by the
successive military regime and it produced about 300,000 refugees, but this time about 200,000
remained in Bangladesh, of which, 28,000 are recognized refugees by the UNHCR and the rest are
scattered around the country and are not recognized as refugees.

In the meantime, the regime uses different methods to eliminate (force out) the Rohingya population
for the region: confiscation of farmland, establishing Buddhist settlement on Rohingya’s land, force
labor, restriction on movement, restriction on marriage, harassment, desecration of religious places,
arbitrary taxation, extrajudicial killings, rapes, and the list goes on.

The new National Scrutiny Card was introduced in 1989 and Rohingya were not entitled to receive
them as they have become non-citizen under the 1982 Citizenship Act. However, the authorities issued
Temporary Scrutiny Card to all and promised twice in 2008 constitution referendum and 2010 election
that National Scrutiny Card will soon be issued to all the Rohingyas. But the promises made to
Rohingya were never honored.
65
In a recent parliament session, when some MPs raised the issue of Rohingya, the immigration minister
U Khin Yee said that “there is no Rohingya in Burma”. The same was echoed by the director general
of the population department at a later date. Although many Rohingya were members of National
League for Democracy (NLD) in Buthidaung and Maungdaw Townships during 1990 election, now
the vice chairman U Tin Oo and other high ranking officials of NLD are openly saying that there is no
race called ‘Rohingya’ in Burma, which is an utter disregard for historical facts, human rights and
democratic principle. NLD’s discriminatory policy on Rohingya is no less than that of the military
regime.

There is no justice for Rohingya in Burma as racism is deeply rooted in Burmese society. Rohingyas
are made scapegoats to justify their evil doings by both ultra-nationalist racists and the regime to divert
public attention. As history cannot be deleted or altered, the truth needs to be revealed and justice
needs to be established. It is the human rights defenders that need to work hard to establish justice and
defend the rights of the unjustly persecuted.

__________________

Nay San Lwin is an activist and Vice President of the Burmese Rohingya Association in
Deutschland. He can be reached via Twitter @nslwin

66
 Breaking the cycle of expulsion, forced repatriation,
and exploitation for Rohingya

Natalie Brinham

Open Democracy, United Kingdom

26 September 2017

https://www.opendemocracy.net/beyondslavery/natalie-brinham/breaking-cycle-of-expulsion-forced-
repatriation-and-exploitation-for-r

Even as Rohingya in Bangladesh watch their villages burn across the Naff river, even as trapped and
internally displaced Rohingya desperately seek safe passage around the road blocks and landmines to
Bangladesh, all talk it seems is focused on returning Rohingya to Myanmar.

As Bangladesh’s prime minister Sheik Hasina opens the door to 400,000 newly-arrived Rohingya
victims of “ethnic cleansing” with one hand, she shakes her fist with the other, calling on Myanmar to
stop referring to Rohingya as Bengali and accept their return from Bangladesh. In the same breath as
calling on the Myanmar authorities to suspend military action against Rohingya, UN Secretary-
General, Antonio Guterres, speaks of “the right of return” for those who have left the country.

Meanwhile, the government of India is securing the borders and fighting it out in the Supreme Court,
seeking permission to deport Rohingya who have fled previous waves of persecution. Thailand is
preparing to resume the Navy “push-backs” of Rohingya escaping by sea, and Australia continues to
offer Rohingya payments to return to Myanmar – as though the horrors of the last three weeks in
Myanmar are just another temporary blip. 67
Rakhine was our homeland. We have only memories now.

For their part, as Rohingya activists desperately await news of their family and friends’ safe arrival in
Bangladesh, they also proclaim that their hearts will never leave their ancestral lands in Rakhine state
and that they will never lose hope of return. Their bodies, however, are another matter. Approximately
50% of all Rohingya villages now stand empty. Half the population has been displaced in the space of
three weeks and unknown thousands – who will remain uncounted – have been killed.

For many Rohingya in diaspora, the latest exodus has displaced the very last of their family members
from their homeland – now only dead bodies, ashes and memories are left. As a Rohingya friend living
in London told me, “our home town was destroyed. We wept through each night waiting to receive
news from our family. Yesterday we heard my brother and sister had finally reached Bangladesh. We
are relieved, but they were the last of our relatives in Rakhine. Rakhine was our homeland. We have
only memories now”.

THE RIGHT TO (FORCED) REPATRIATION

There is a fine line to walk between securing the “right of return” for Rohingya and
enabling refoulement or forced repatriation. Talk of the “right of return” correctly reasserts
Rohingya’s rightful claim to belong to Myanmar. That citizenship is rightly theirs – even if they have
no papers to prove it.1 But there is a distinct danger that the focus on return – before fleeing Rohingya
families have even found shelter from the rain – could open the door for forced repatriation of
Rohingya to Myanmar.

Again.

And, in waiting for return, the failure to secure durable solutions for Rohingya outside Myanmar could
lead to high risk journeys and exploitation, as they seek refuge in a third or fourth countries.

Again.

Rohingyas know all about forced repatriation. It’s a staple of their collective memories and oral
histories. Each time Rohingya have fled, Myanmar has been outmanoeuvred and has been forced to
accept Rohingya back into the country. In 1978, 270,000 Rohingya were driven from Myanmar into
Bangladesh during Operation Nagamin – which targeted all Rohingya under the guise of an
immigration sweep. Within sixteen months the vast majority had been returned to Myanmar, under
duress with no change in conditions in Myanmar. Food rations were withheld in Bangladesh to ensure
return. An estimated 12,000 Rohingya perished. Shortly afterwards and partially in response to the
repatriations, the 1982 Citizenship Law was brought in leaving the vast majority of Rohingya
unrecognised as citizens.

In 1991-2, 250,000 Rohingya fleeing human rights abuses in Myanmar arrived in Bangladesh.

Again.

Between 1992 and 1994, most of these refugees were returned to Myanmar.

Again.

68
Protests against repatriation broke out in the camps in Bangladesh. Excessive force was used to return
them. UNHCR oversaw the repatriations and attempted to secure documentation for Rohingya.
Promises did not materialise. There were no changes in the conditions on the ground in Rakhine State.
Abuses in Myanmar continued unabated.

Again.

And this time around?

The de-facto leader of the Myanmar government, Suu Kyi, in her attempts to placate the growing
international condemnation, has claimed that Myanmar stands ready to take back those “verified as
refugees from this country (Myanmar)”. An announcement of a bilateral agreement between
Bangladesh and Myanmar on repatriations is expected in the next few days. But they will not verify
the vast majority of Rohingya as their own. Rohingyas in Bangladesh are defiantly waving their ration
cards printed with: “Country: Myanmar, Nationality: Rohingya”, but Myanmar persistently denies
their roots and their collective identity.

STATELESS BY DESIGN

Rohingya citizenship in its substantive sense was not singlehandedly revoked by the 1982 Citizenship
Act, as is often claimed.2 A 40-year process, beginning under military rule and continuing until today,
has slowly and torturously severed Rohingyas’ relationship with their homeland and the state. This has
laid the groundwork for the persecution of Rohingya through law and policy as well as collective
violence. The Myanmar military are not about to welcome them back. Much less in safety and dignity.

The production of Rohingya statelessness by the Myanmar military and government is best understood
not as the result of historical disputes, but as a deliberate attempt to purify or cleanse the nation of
racial and religious ‘others’ through bureaucratic means. 3 Citizenship law in Myanmar – with its 135
fixed, immutable and externally-ascribed categories of ‘national races’ or Tai Yin Tha 4– serves an
additional, less ‘bureaucratic’ purpose.

It is the single most powerful and immovable discourse there is regarding race and exclusion in
Myanmar. It cements revisionist historical narratives that exclude Rohingya and legitimises primordial
notions of race that feed hatred. As Hinton explains in his 2002 book Genocide and
Anthropology, genocidal regimes “manufacture difference by constructing essentialized categories
of identity and belonging … linked to emotionally resonant notions of purity and contamination”.
Killing is then motivated out of resultant “ideologies of hate” 5 a la the Nuremburg laws in Nazi
Germany.

Rohingya statelessness is not a documentation issue: it’s a tool of genocide that aims to destroy
the Rohingya as a group.

International efforts to address Rohingya statelessness over past decades have attempted to provide
pathways to “paper citizenship” for Rohingya in the hope that human rights will somehow follow. It’s
a vain hope echoed in the final report of the Myanmar government’s Advisory Commission on
Rakhine State, headed by Kofi Annan.

Yet Rohingya statelessness is not a documentation issue. It’s a tool of genocide that aims to destroy
the Rohingya as a group, not only by removing their rights, but also by destroying their identity from
the inside out. It is the statelessness that Hannah Arendt and Raphael Lemkin 6 wrote about in the 1940s
– the kind that foreshadowed and preceded the holocaust,
69 not the kind for which UNHCR usually
offers technical assistance to states to resolve. Indeed, as Rohingyas know only too well, the
government’s documentation processes cost them the right to self-identify as Rohingya. For this
reason, most Rohingya do not seek documentation, or paper citizenship, at any cost. They know the
state has been destroying their identity and their collective “belonging” to Myanmar over decades.

Rohingya that cannot be removed from Myanmar by bureaucratic means or through the production of
their statelessness, are removed through military operations and pogroms that have taken place over
decades and have recently escalated. What we are witnessing now is the Myanmar military attempting
to prevent a repeat of the past cycles of repatriation – an attempt to remove them from the territory and
sever their links to home. Forever. Shooting Rohingyas in the back as they flee, placing landmines in
their flight paths across the border, targeting babies and children, burning Rohingya village after
Rohingya village. By law, land, once burnt, reverts to ownership of the state. These tactics are all
designed to prevent return and complete the “unfinished business”.

A BLEAK FUTURE

Survival for Rohingya in their homeland, for the time being, has become untenable. This is devastating
not only for the most recent Rohingya victims, but also for the many Rohingya living in diaspora. It is
absolutely right that Myanmar is internationally condemned for its genocidal project. But to break the
decades-long cycle of displacement, repatriation, and exploitation of Rohingya, it is to also necessary
to ensure Rohingya are able to live in safety and dignity outside the country. Not contained in camps
for decades, not dependent on aid or kept in limbo with irregular status, not denied access to integration
and resettlement programmes. Instead, provided with opportunities for work and education,
opportunities for movement and family reunification across borders, opportunities for meaningful
contribution to the localities they’ve ended up in.

Again.

Each Rohingya exodus from Myanmar in recent years has been accompanied by a spike in the numbers
of Rohingya leaving Bangladesh, seeking safety and security elsewhere. As we witnessed in 2012, as
Rohingya become increasingly desperate the levels of extortion and exploitation they face on their
journeys rise as well. Those unable to pay the full cost of their passage frequently become trapped by
debt bondage into horrific labour conditions, such as in the factories and rubbish dumps in India. They
are imprisoned in jungle camps, where they are beaten and tortured to extort money from their relatives
in Malaysia and Thailand. Some die on route or are killed in the camps when they become a financial
liability to the smugglers.

As long as Rohingya have no options for safe migration and decent work to support their families, the
prosecutions of traffickers, even the high-profile cases recently in Thailand, will not bring about the
end of these forms of exploitation. There are around one and a half million Rohingya living outside
Myanmar. Of these, many are in situations of protracted displacement in Bangladesh, Malaysia,
Thailand, India and beyond.

Some have been there for decades. Some have tried two or three countries and have been repeatedly
displaced. Some have been stuck in indefinite detention for years. In these conditions they continue to
struggle for their survival. Unable to regularise their status, they eke out a living in dangerous and
insecure jobs in the informal economy, without security or protection from arrest, dependent on the
good will of local populations, and sometimes the subject of politically-instigated hate-campaigns.

Many Rohingya in the diaspora are traumatised by the atrocities they have already borne or witnessed,
and their daily lives are little more than hand-to-mouth survival. Already they are at breaking point,
70
and now they are anxiously wondering how to move relatives beyond the desperate and untenable
humanitarian crisis in Bangladesh. Their desperation and urgency has a direct effect on their bargaining
power. With their resources so low, and with so many risks involved, they are knowingly and
unknowingly entering into relationships of exploitation and extortion with the brokers.

Again.

Bangladesh cannot absorb 800,000 Rohingya into its ailing local economy on the borderlands near
Myanmar, or support them indefinitely. The responsibility needs to be one that is shared internationally
– with the acknowledgement that home might not be a safe option for a long time to come. A joined-
up effort to secure durable solutions for Rohingya outside Myanmar (the new-comers and the old) –
from both concerned Western and Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) countries is vital. Efforts
to provide Rohingya with safe passage to countries in which they can build their lives should
accompany the pledges of aid. This will avert the secondary humanitarian crisis as Rohingya once
again take to the seas and smuggling routes on which so many lives have already been lost.

One of the conditions for returning Rohingya to Myanmar will likely be access to (future) nationality
or citizenship. Sometimes documentation has been conflated with citizenship. The international
community has fallen, time and time again, for Myanmar’s false promises relating to documenting
Rohingya with a view towards citizenship. Long ago the documentation processes themselves became
sites of persecution for Rohingya. When Rohingya statelessness is understood within the context of
wider genocidal processes7, it is clear that Rohingya don’t just need documents to return to Myanmar,
they need their group identity to be recognised there as well. And for toxic, primordial notions of race
to be dismantled from the top down. History is on repeat and the cycle of persecution, displacement,
forced repatriation and exploitation needs to be broken before the Myanmar military ends the cycle
their way.

1. See Para’s 19 & 20 of UN Human Rights Committee (HRC), CCPR General Comment No. 27:
Article 12 (Freedom of Movement), 2 November 1999, CCPR/C/21/Rev.1/Add.9. ↩︎
2. See Nyi Nyi Kyaw (2017) ‘Unpacking the presumed statelessness of Rohingyas’, Journal of Immigrant
& Refugee Studies, 15(3), 269-286. ↩︎ Bottom of Form
3. Robert M. Hayden describes how nationality laws in the former-Yugoslavia, that were based on
primordial notions of race, were used as “bureaucratic ethnic cleansing” and were a precursor for mass
expulsions and mass killings. See Hayden (2002), ‘Imagined communities and real victims: self-
determination and ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia’, American Ethnologist, 23(4), 783-801. ↩︎
4. See Nick Cheesman (2017) ‘How in Myanmar “national races” came to surpass citizenship and exclude
Rohingya’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 47(3), 461-483. ↩︎
5. Alexander Laban Hinton, Alexander Laban (2002), ‘Genocide: An Anthropological Reader’,
p10. ↩︎
6. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “Genocide” and tirelessly campaigned for the inclusion of
genocide in international criminal law, used the term “denationalisation” to describe the production of
statelessness as part of the genocidal process. Lemkin understood genocide to involve “destruction of
the national pattern” or social engineering by the oppressors to destroy a group both culturally and
physically. ↩︎
7. For a historic account of these processes, see Zarni and Cowley (2014), ‘The slow-burning genocide of
Myanmar’s Rohingya’, Pacific Rim Law & Policy Journal, 23(3). ↩︎

________________

Natalie Brinham is (Economic and Social Research Council) PhD student at Queen Mary University
of London researching statelessness. She has worked for many years in NGOs in the UK and Southeast
Asia on forced migration, trafficking and statelessness in both frontline service provision roles and
research and advocacy roles. She holds an MA from71 UCL Institute of Education and a BA from SOAS.
 Who Gets to Write the Encyclopedia?
Rohingya "Expert" Denies Genocide
David Palumbo-Liu

Truthout | Op-Ed

15 March 2018

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/43843-who-gets-to-write-the-encyclopedia-rohingya-expert-
denies-genocide

The genocidal killings and suppression of the Rohingya people in Burma (also known as Myanmar)
has drawn the world's attention to what the Economist has called the "most persecuted people in the
world." Because deep knowledge about the Rohingya is often sparse, it is crucial that reputable sources
cover what is going on in Burma with accuracy and objectivity. Now a group of academics and human
rights workers has issued a strong letter to the Oxford University Press, arguing that its choice of an
author to write on the Rohingya is deeply flawed and could have wide-ranging consequences. The
Press has commissioned Jacques Leider, whom the letter identifies as the head of the Bangkok-based
École française d'Extrême-Orient and an adviser to the Burma military's Armed Forces Historical
Museum, to write the reference article on the Rohingya for its Oxford Research Encyclopedias.

This is not the first time Leider's appointment as an expert on the Rohingya has been a matter of debate.
In January 2015, the UN hired him as a senior consultant to the UN Resident and Humanitarian
Coordinator in Burma, Renata Lok-Dessallien. Rohingya leaders protested the nomination because at
that time Leider had described claims by Human 72 Rights Watch that the Rohingya were facing ethnic
cleansing as "extreme." Later, in October 2017, The Guardian reported that Lok-Dessallien's office
was accused of suppressing a UN report warning of an imminent crisis in Rakhine State and urging
immediate action to forestall a human rights crisis amongst the Rohingya population. It predicted that
state security forces would be "heavy-handed and indiscriminate" in dealing with the Rohingya.
According to The Guardian, "Lok-Dessallien faces fresh charges that she undermined attempts to
publicly promote the rights of the Rohingya, the stateless Muslim minority. Aid workers said the UN
prioritized good relations with the Burma government over humanitarian and human rights advocacy."

In response to this criticism, the UN has said that "the focus on terminology is inhibiting progress in
resolving broader issues in Rakhine." And this is precisely Leider's take on the situation. In a YouTube
video, he argues that international sympathy has been extended to only one of the two groups in the
conflict -- the Rohingya -- while the other group, the Rakhine Buddhists, are ignored. He claims the
Rohingya narrative now occupies the "moral high ground," arguing that it has become "politically
correct" to side with the Rohingya, and that this has created a dangerous situation for free speech. He
argues for a set of quite different terms from the ones used by most international human rights
organizations to describe the situation of the Rohingya. While he does not deny that the Rohingya are
suffering, Leider says the Rakhine Buddhists are suffering as well, and equally so. He claims both
groups are being "manipulated" by the government.

While it is true that in 2016 the government began cracking down on a Buddhist nationalist group, the
Ma Ba Tha, many see this as a temporary political maneuver to deflect international protest. In
actuality, Reuters notes: "The [Buddhist nationalist] 969 movement now enjoys support from senior
government officials, establishment monks and even some members of the opposition National League
for Democracy (NLD), the political party of Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi."

And whatever constraint the government is placing on the Buddhist nationalists, the magnitude and
nature of its suppression of and attacks on the Rohingya have no counterpart with regard to the Rakhine
Buddhists.

Leider's written work for the popular press contains the same kind of sentiments, downplaying the
immense disproportion of violence and suffering that has been set upon the Rohingya by a constellation
of actors, not the least of which is the Burma government. Leider dismisses the claim that the state
favors the Rakhine Buddhists, saying that's "easy to argue" (as if that fact makes the argument
incorrect). In fact, as we will see below, there is considerable evidence, gathered by neutral
international rights organizations, that the Burma military is aiding the Rakhine Buddhists in attacking
and killing Rohingya.

Among his other denials, Leider rejects the perception that the Rakhine Buddhists harbor "racist"
feelings toward the Rohingya -- he claims instead they have an "extremely strong ... emotional
reaction." Yet, a report entitled "How Myanmar's Buddhists Actually Feel About the Rohingya"
claims, "There appears to be little sympathy for the Muslim minority in a country where there has been
an upsurge in Buddhist nationalism.... Prejudice against the Rohingya, who are not seen as citizens of
Burma, is long held and people aren't shy to share their views."

Leider dismisses as well the notion that "Rohingya" is a meaningful ethnic name, saying that it's a
recent political appropriation of an old term. Yet, his denial of Rohingya identity is part of the
government's strategy of denying the Rohingya rights and citizenship. Quartz notes, "The Rohingya
are a largely Muslim ethnic minority in Burma at the center of a humanitarian catastrophe. But the
Burma government won't even use the word 'Rohingya,' let alone admit they're being persecuted.
Instead, the government calls them Bengalis, foreigners, or worse, terrorists."

73
Finally, and perhaps most devastatingly, Leider vehemently denies that anything like genocide is being
committed against the Rohingya, saying, "That is ... way beyond anything that matches reality."

Most international human rights organizations beg to differ. In surveys conducted by Doctors Without
Borders, in a one-month period this fall, at least 9,000 Rohingya died "when the Burma military, police
and local militias launched the latest 'clearance operations' in Rakhine in response to attacks by the
Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army [ARSA]." Since then, more than 647,000 Rohingya have fled the
country. To put this in perspective, a BBC report described an attack by ARSA in which its members
were armed mostly with "knives and home-made bombs," certainly nothing to compare with the
combined force of the army, security police and armed vigilantes. Contrary to Leider's claim that the
conflict is between two equal groups, the state being "neutral," Human Rights Watch reports that:

For months, local Arakanese political party officials and senior Buddhist monks publicly vilified the
Rohingya population and described them as a threat to Arakan State. On October 23, thousands of
Arakanese men armed with machetes, swords, homemade guns, Molotov cocktails, and other weapons
descended upon and attacked Muslim villages in nine townships throughout the state. State security
forces either failed to intervene or participated directly in the violence ...

In the deadliest incident, on October 23 at least 70 Rohingya were killed in a massacre in Yan Thei
village in Mrauk-U Township. Despite advance warning of the attack, only a small number of riot
police, local police, and army soldiers were on duty to provide security. Instead of preventing the attack
by the Arakanese mob or escorting the villagers to safety, they assisted the killings by disarming the
Rohingya of their sticks and other rudimentary weapons they carried to defend themselves.

Just a few days ago, on March 12, the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Burma,
Yanghee Lee, told the Human Rights Council she was "increasingly of the opinion that the events in
Rakhine State bear the hallmarks of genocide and called in the strongest terms for accountability."

That same day, experts of the UN Fact-Finding Mission on Burma issued a report that listed eight
major findings in relation to allegations in Rakhine State of so-called "clearance operations" of the
Burma security forces: "Credible accounts are rife of the State's various security forces having
committed gross human rights violations in the course of these operations.... People died from gunshot
wounds, often due to indiscriminate shooting at fleeing villagers. Some were burned alive in their
homes -- often the elderly, disabled and young children. Others were hacked to death."

Besides the UN, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal, the
Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale Law School, and the International
State Crime Initiative are among the organizations and groups that have found evidence of genocide
against the Rohingya.

Amnesty International has called the system the Rohingya lived under "apartheid": "This system
appears designed to make Rohingyas' lives as hopeless and humiliating as possible. The security forces'
brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing ... is just another manifestation of this appalling attitude,"
according to a report from the organization.

There is certainly enough evidence that a significant number of researchers and scholars -- armed with
masses of data -- have a very different view from that of Jacques Leider so as to make his selection as
the author of an encyclopedia entry on the Rohingya more than problematic.

Oxford University Press has assured those mounting the protest that it will vigorously vet what Leider
submits for publication, but the very fact he was invited in the first place, by one of the premier
74
academic publishing houses in the world, raises huge questions, for a narrative established in such an
august and authoritative publication may be applied in all sorts of ways

Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of the signatories of the letter to Oxford University Press,
told Truthout that Leider's appointment continues a colonial project with deep economic interests.
"European knowledge management authorities subsidize histories that establish a new colonial bias
supporting (sometimes unwittingly) Burma's entry into the global scene -- a new stock exchange with
immense investments by India, China, and general nation state investors," she said. "Jacques Leider's
colonial bias -- masquerading as 'objectivity' --- comes in useful here. This is how historical accounts
are put to use in the interests of an economic growth that has little to do with social inclusion."

Moreover, the dismissal and distortion of the actual realities surrounding the Rohingya feeds into a
broader anti-Muslim framework. Leider denies that the violence against the Rohingya is motivated by
Islamophobia -- but Islamophobic venues such as The Muslim Issue are quick to use his dismissal of
the Rohingya as a way to dismiss the issue of Palestine with claims such as these:

Dr Jacques Leider clarifies that the Rohingya was not even known as Rohingya until the 1990's (this
again is similar to the "Palestinians" who never called themselves so until 1972) and that they are
painting a victimhood narrative.... All of this originates from the Islamic nationalism to create yet one
more Islamic state out of [Burma]. All these conflicts originate from the "Palestinian" conflict which
encouraged muslims [sic] a lot to infiltrate through immigration to take possession of a nation.

It is precisely because the connection between the Rohingya and the Palestinians has been made so
prominent that denying the suffering of the Rohingya has implications beyond Burma. As the Christian
Science Monitor notes: "the state-driven violence in Myanmar (Burma), which reportedly has killed
more than 1,000 people and driven 370,000 Muslim Rohingya into neighboring Bangladesh, has
caught the attention of the Arab world, promoting a rare outpouring of support, solidarity, and
activism." And Foreign Policy declared, "The Rohingya are the New Palestinians," noting:

Both groups became disenfranchised in the aftermath of colonial rule and imperial collapse, and both
the Burma and Israeli governments have attempted to relocate them from their territory, portraying
them as foreigners with no claim to the land. In both Israel and Burma, there have been attempts to
rewrite the history of the two persecuted groups, claiming that neither constitute a "real" ethnic group
and are thus interlopers and invaders

It is precisely in this last sense -- of rewriting history -- that Jacques Leider's appointment is suspect.
Professor Richard Falk, former Special Rapporteur to the UN Human Rights Council on Occupied
Palestinian Territories and a signatory of the protest letter, told Truthout: "As someone who has long
experienced media and publishing efforts to obscure and minimize the severe crimes experienced by
the Palestinian people, I regard the Oxford University Press choice of Leider to assess the treatment of
the Rohingya people by the Burma government to be similarly indefensible."

In response to Truthout's request for comment, Leider stated, "I did the job that I was asked to do. Now
I am looking forward to seeing my essay published by OUP. As the publication is under their
responsibility and yet unfinished business, it's not the best moment to make personal statements."

In sum, the issue is not, contrary to what Leider says, a matter of free speech. As the letter-writers note:
"We do not deny that Dr. Leider, like anyone else, has a right to comment on the Rohingya or any
other topic, but when someone takes such a strong position against the historicity of one group's claims
regarding ethnicity/identity (and only one group's in a context of conflict between two or more groups),

75
it seems unfair that they should be commissioned for a project to write an article on the ethnic group
in question that seeks to present itself as a fair and unbiased reference source.

_________________

David Palumbo-Liu is the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor, and professor of comparative literature,
and, by courtesy, English, at Stanford University. He has written three scholarly books and edited
three academic volumes on issues relating to cultural studies, ethnic studies and literary theory. His
recent books are: The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age (Duke UP, 2012),
and a coedited volume, Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the World: System, Scale, Culture
(Duke UP, 2011). He is part of the Public Intellectual Project at Truthout, and blogs for Salon, The
Nation and The Huffington Post. Follow him on Twitter: @palumboliu.

76
 A State Myth of "National Race" and the Tatmadaw’s War
on the Rohingya and other Myanmar Ethnic Groups"
Michael W. Charney
(SOAS, the University of London)

Berlin Conference on Genocide

26 February 2018

Presentation version (no footnotes)

Introduction

The Rohingya Genocide is as confusing as it is complex.

There is a fog that obscures what is happening on the ground in historical perspective because just so
much is happening in real time.
Parties which seek to prevent another great human tragedy have little time to scamper around for the
data and the situation gets viewed almost knee-jerk from whichever side one is in, in debates
concerning human rights issues and national sovereignty issues, whether one is concerned with
development or political rights, or on the side religious freedom or religious hatred.

It is no surprise that Islamophobes in the West and Bamar ethno-nationalists have found common cause
with each other. And the Myanmar state, both the civil government and the Tatmadaw, have actively
taken advantage of this confusion to accomplish two things, and, as I speak here in Berlin in a museum
dedicated to the Holocaust.

I point out that the Nazis fought both a war on the Jews AND used the war on the Jews to fight a war
on German liberalism.

I would similarly argue that it is CRUCIAL to understand that as with the Holocaust, the Myanmar
state is fighting a war against the Rohingya as it is again beginning to do with other ethnic groups as
outsiders, on the one hand, but also a war on emerging Myanmar liberalism on the other.

What is happening right now is about the Rohingya, but not only about the Rohingya. The state and
the army have very adeptly blinded the Bamar population and many of the ethnic minorities to the
eradication of liberalism within the country with the willing support of ASSK and her NLD party.
77
There are many other scholars here better versed in genocide studies than I, what I intend to talk about
instead is how states in Myanmar have actively using scholars and history both in the past and today
to obscure the truth and support state programmes that have worked against the Rohingya.

I. A Buddhicized Past

In the fifteenth century, the Kingdoms of Ava and Pegu tried to establish cultural hegemony over the
Indo-Aryan kingdom of Rakhine, importing kings and queens, courtiers, Buddhist monks, and
Burmese-speaking settlers.

The Rakhine ruler who ousted these foreign invaders, established a religiously hybrid court, a
sultanate, but in addition to permitting Buddhist immigration and European migrants from abroad, also
raided Bengal and brought to Rakhine thousands of Bengali Muslim every year.

Many of these were planted in the Kaladan River areas close to the concentrations of Muslims in
Rakhine today where they grew rice and still grow rice until the recent crisis.

We do not find a lot of pre-18th century tensions between the Buddhist and Muslim populations. The
physical geography and climate favored approaches to living and ruling, interacting, and community
building, social mentalities that were flexible and inclusive, that favored the emergence of ethnically
and religiously diverse communities.

But this diversity was soon obscured by an Invasion from the Irrawaddy Valley.

When it conquered Rakhine in 1784, the Myanmar court tried to produce histories that made Rakhine
historically a part of greater Myanmar.

Myanmar Buddhism was introduced, court literature and local Buddha mages were brought back to
the Irrawaddy Valley and so too were tens of thousands of Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists.

Rakhine Buddhists and Muslims both fled to British Bengal, the Buddhists settling in the area that
became a big refugee camp, which became known as Cox’s Bazaar.

Absent court literature, Buddhist monks from Rakhine rewrote from memory and produced new
chronicles in opposition to Myanmar rule, but in doing so created a Rakhine history only from their
particular point of view, not purposely leaving the Rohingya voice out, but not including it either. This
might have been balanced out with Rohingya voices if not for another accident of history, the
replacement of Myanmar rule with British rule in 1824.

II. A British Colonial Past

The British believed that communities having one native language, one native race, and one native
religion.

Despite or rather because of its huge diversity, the British decided that they would split Rakhine in
two—the northern half which had a heavier concentration of Muslim and Bengali-speakers would be
administered by Bengal and eventually become part of Bangladesh after independence and the
southern part, closer to the An pass and the heavier concentration of Buddhists and Burmese speakers
would be (re)joined to Myanmar.

78
Phayre produced the first histories of Rakhine and Myanmar during the 1830s and 1840s and used
sources for the region’s history exclusively from Rakhine Buddhist informants and their summaries of
Rakhine Buddhist histories.

Phayre was thus innocently or purposefully blinded to the fact that Rakhine had been at least since the
15th century a Muslim and a Buddhist land, with a Muslim and a Buddhist court, and that historically,
Burmese-speaking Theravada Buddhists from the Irrawaddy Valley were migrating into Rakhine at
the same time as Muslim, Bengali-speakers.

In his writings, Rakhine became an essentially a Theravada Buddhist, Burmese-speaking land. Later,
in1862, when Rakhine became part of British Burma (and later the Union of Myanmar upon
independence), it declined into an impoverished neglected periphery of an Irrawaddy based state, its
population impoverished where it had once been wealthy, and Muslims and Buddhists began to
compete for pieces of an ever shrinking economic pie.

During this period, Rakhine and the Rohingya with it became absorbed into a new myth, created by
Bamar nationalists in response to colonial rule, but also informed by Phayre’s ethno-racial histories,
the Myth of 1824.

In general, the myth held that British altered the system against the Bamar Buddhists, who were the
indigenous population, located since time immemorial within the boundaries of the Myanmar kingdom
and the modern Myanmar state.

The myth of 1824 was that the British introduced colonial rule into Rakhine and removed the obstacles
to foreigners coming into the country and invited in thousands of Bengali Muslims who the British
believed were better workers than the indigenous Buddhists.

This created the first major Muslim populations in the region, led to Muslims overrunning northern
Rakhine, forcing the indigenous Buddhists out.

By extension, as each part of Myanmar was acquired by the British, Indian immigration continued
with legal controls.

The foreigner Indians, including the Muslim Bengalis, and the foreigner Chinese remained loyal to
their homelands, retained their foreign cultures and religions, and sent their money when they could
back home.

III. Rohingya and Independent Myanmar to 1962

The Myth of 1824 did not get voiced a great deal in the 1950s.

Under the semi-liberal rule by U Nu and the AFPFL, the emphasis was on national solidarity through
ethnic union, not Bamar ethnic chauvinism or racialism. Because the Rohingya had stood up against
separatist Muslims from Bengal, they were praised as a national group in the mid-1950s by a grateful
U Nu.

But this feeling shifted in 1962 with the takeover by a poorly-educated military group led by Ne Win.
This military introduced into state policy the idea of Taingyintha, the 135 national races (Cheeseman).
The Myanmar military ethos is geared around the idea that Myanmar is not just of the Bamars, but of
the Bamars and an assortment of ethnic minorities who pay tribute to the Myanmar ruler.

79
When that hierarchy is not maintained politically, it was the military that restored it, maintained it,
ensured it. Without this hierarchy there is no order and the Bamars are faced with annihilation. This
concept picked up speed in the post-independence period in particular from its prominence in
Revolutionary Council thinking from 1964 and was pushed into school texts and other government
publications from 1990.

The Taingyintha idea became the foundation for the 1982 Citizenship laws. According to the 1982
citizenship laws of three categories of citizenship, the first, regular citizenship, was only open to those
who from the military’s perspective was a member of an indigenous ethnic group (instead of ethnic
group, they term this race) or not and these identifications were made according to the traditional
hierarchical ethnic imaginary of the Myanmar kingdom.

Key to the Taingyintha idea was that any group that was not indigenous and was foreign was a threat
to national solidarity.

At a time when the country was facing armed insurgencies throughout half the country by “native race”
ethnic minorities, Indians and Chinese had to be suppressed and forced to indigenize or leave.

Conveniently, there was no authoritative list of what these 135 Taingyintha specifically were, it was
usually used as a legitimizing phrase to explain why one or another group, the Chinese or Indians,
were not included.

In combination, the Myth of 1824 and the Citizenship laws of 1982 have had a disproportionate impact
on the Rohingya.

The Myth of 1824 portrayed the Rohingyas as non-indigenous and as Indians.

And the 1982 Citizenship laws established three different categories of citizenship—if you were a
member of one of the national races you were a citizen even if you did not have papers, if you were
not, you had to have papers showing that you had been in Myanmar in 1948.

This made only the Rohingya and other officially non-nationals peculiarly vulnerable to registration
abuse.

In 1978, in the run-up to the enactment of the 1982 law military operations, the Nagamin operations,
were run at the border to sweep out undocumented aliens. This caused the first major exodus of the
Rohingya out of the country, a quarter of a million and many who had documentation saw these
replaced with a new card.

When the military replaced the BSPP government in 1988, it required a change of documentation
again, in which government officers denied registration to many Rohingya.

In any case, the junta at the time reified a line of thinking about Rakhine that could be traced back in
one way or another to Phayre’s work in the 1830s. Buddhist Rakhine were Rakhine, but Muslim
Rakhine, the Rohingya were not.

The idea that the Rohingya are not part of the 135 national races, like others, is very significant because
it makes the Rohingya part of the legacies of British colonialism and something that can and should
be dealt with as part of the last steps of achieving complete independence.

80
It is the reason Myanmar authorities would not permit Rohingya children to attend schools of any kind,
except for madrasas, so they could learn the Koran and nothing else.

It is why the Bangladeshi government has had to provide basic training in different skills to Rohingya
refugees because so many are functionally illiterate and lack skills of any kind to use to support
themselves economically.

But it is the act of trying to correct these poorly founded claims, claiming Rohingya to be a national
race, that makes Buddhist Rakhine and others upset.

The underlying tension then that has caused the explosion is a very old one, two hundred years in the
making because of colonial-era orientalist misunderstandings of the region's history.

British colonial administration and scholarship encouraged not just Rakhine Buddhist hostility to
Muslims during the colonial period. The Rohingya are just as much a Taingyintha as anyone else or
are not just as much as no one else is.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I wish to draw your attention to the fact that how we understand Rakhine, the Rohingya,
and Myanmar ethnicities today is the result of numerous phases of successive states and non-state
actors responding to policies of those states shaping the historical record for political purpose.

The Rohingya have been negatively and peculiarly impacted by these efforts because of historical
accidents that placed them on the wrong side of the border.

The Rohingya did not cross the border, the border crossed them.

With military rule the Myanmar state has increasingly tried to integrate Burmese-speaking Buddhists
in Rakhine with the national Bamar ethnic group.

In fact, one way to view the problems we see now in northern Rakhine is that these anti-Rohingya
pogroms are the last thrusts of full, lowland state integration—the Myanmar military is literally
pushing Bamar civilization up the hills (Scott).

The Myanmar state is now fully integrating its frontier, non-state spaces into the body politic and with
it the national language, the national faith, and the national culture. Pushing out the Rohingya who
they see as not belonging.

But what happened in the historiography of the Rohingyas was also reinforced by the impact of area
studies on the scholars who studied Myanmar.

With independence from 1948, Myanmar was a country not a colony and everyone domestically and
abroad who studied Rakhine and the religious problems there was trained to view Rakhine as an
eternally Theravada Buddhist land.

This is why you will find a number of scholars who adamantly deny the existence of the Rohingya in
the historical past—they have been trained to only read the country by a Bamar Buddhist register. But
this ahistorical legacy has caused them to introduce a new era of untruths, writing histories that try to
erase the Rohingya and their history as merely being incorrect data rather than as people with a
historical narrative that challenges their own.
81
This ahistorical legacy has also led colonial-era and Rakhine and Bamar archaeologists since to
reconstruct religious buildings in ways that obscured a Muslim presence, to rely upon only Rakhine
Buddhist texts as the only acceptable historical sources, and to consider references to Rakhine as a
Muslim society or some eclectic mixture of different religious groups as a misunderstanding by
European traders.

Rather than kicking out in a sense the Rakhine Buddhists from this region, I am merely inviting the
Rohingya back into their own history, which they shared in an intimate way with the Rakhine
Buddhists, before the divisions that were introduced by a series of states that were interested in how
best to control power rather than reflect in a fair way, the peoples who had historically been part of
Myanmar.

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 Free Rohingya Coalition Initiatives

1. Correcting the Factual Record

The Coalition sets the facts straight on the plight of the Rohingya people by delivering accurate,
detailed factual information including through the media, publications, and events. In doing so, we
respond not only to Myanmar’s campaign of misinformation about the Rohingya, but also the many
blatant misrepresentations that appear in the media and in international policy discourse.

2. Research and Policy Development

The Coalition assists Rohingya people to self-determine and articulate within the international research
and policy space their vision for potential solutions for ending the genocide and obtaining
accountability for crimes suffered. As with all of the Coalition’s activities, this initiative is grounded
in the principles that Rohingya should participate as active agents rather than passive victims and that
Rohingya-led solutions are more likely to be relevant and effective.

3. Women and Children, and Trafficking Prevention

The Coalition spotlights and gathers information about the special vulnerability and needs of Rohingya
women and children, who make up the bulk of Rohingya refugees and are frequently subject to
additional dangers including sexual violence and human trafficking. Since women and children are
also comparatively underrepresented in the narratives of the Rohingya experience, this initiative also
works to amplify their voices. It is spearheaded by Razia Sultana, a leading Rohingya lawyer and
women’s rights expert.

4. Rohingya Genocide Remembrance Day

The Coalition promotes the commemoration by local governments of 25 August as an annual Rohingya
Genocide Remembrance Day. Myanmar makes the claim, unverified by any independent organisation,
that on 25 August, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) attacked 30 police outposts and
killed a dozen policemen. This claim is widely considered by the UN, researchers and scholars as an
invented pretext Myanmar relies upon to justify its forced transfer of more than 700,000 Rohingya to
Bangladesh and commission of numerous mass atrocity crimes in the process.

5. Boycott Campaigns
83
The Coalition undertakes and promotes consumer boycotts of goods and services connected with the
State of Myanmar. These include, for instance, tourism, sporting, and cultural activities involving
associations backed by Myanmar. This campaign is inspired by the success of past anti-apartheid
movements and the current BDS (boycott, divestment, sanction) movement focused on Israel’s policy
of apartheid against Palestinians.

6. Legal Accountability

The Coalition assists the Rohingya in the quest to achieve legal accountability for the mass atrocity
crimes -- including genocide and crimes against humanity -- that Myanmar has perpetrated against
Rohingya every day. These efforts rely not only on international treaties and forums but also national
laws and institutions, for instance cases pursued in domestic courts based on States’ universal
jurisdiction laws.

7. Youth and Leadership Development

The Coalition conducts numerous youth and leadership training initiatives among Rohingya refugees
in Bangladesh part of our commitment to developing initiatives for and by Rohingya. These are
facilitated by coordinators living in or travelling to the refugee camps, and adopt both formal and
informal education programs and methodologies.

8. International Conferences and Events

The Coalition organises public events and conferences to draw and maintain public consciousness
around the plight of the Rohingya, drawing upon an International Speakers Bureau it maintains of
Rohingya leaders and expert allies. Through this initiative, we aim to contribute to discourse on the
situation of the Rohingya and build an international solidarity movement which can end the Rohingya
genocide.

9. Global Solidarity and Citizen Diplomacy

The Coalition gathers and provides an advocacy platform for some of the Rohingya’s most
distinguished supporters, including former political leaders and heads of state and renowned scholars
and Nobel Peace Prize laureates. As Citizen Ambassadors for the Coalition, these eminent individuals
-- for instance, Professor Gayatri Spivak, Amartya Sen, Dr Mahthir Mohammad, -- have an
unparalleled ability to raise the profile of the plight of the Rohingya on an international stage.

84
 Rohingya Genocide Remembrance Day (25 August)

DECLARATION TO BE ADOPTED
BY SOLIDARITY GROUPS WORLDWIDE

AS APPROVED BY THE FREE ROHINGYA COALITION

We the People of (xxxx) support the inalienable right of Myanmar’s Rohingya ethnic minority group
to self-identify as Rohingya.

We acknowledge the ethnic group’s verifiable, pre-British colonial presence, history, identity and
culture in Northern Araccan or Arakan[i] which is now called Rakhine State in western Myanmar;

Together with the world’s leading scholar on famines Professor Amartya Sen[ii] (Nobel Prize winner
in Economics at Harvard University) and the veteran anti-apartheid campaigner Desmond Tutu[iii]
(Nobel Peace Laureate), we the People of (xxxx) fully recognize Myanmar’s decades-long persecution
of Rohingya as genocide.

This is a common finding of 4-independent studies[iv] published by Permanent Peoples Tribunal on

Myanmar (September 2017), Yale Law School Human Rights Clinic (October 2015), Queen Mary
University Law School’s International State Crimes Initiative (October 2015) and Pacific Rim Law
and Policy Journal of the University of Washington School of Law (Spring 2014);

We the People of (XXXX) unequivocally support the calls for international accountability and justice
made by senior most UN human rights officials[v], UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in
Myanmar Professor Yanghee Lee[vi] (2014-present) and ICC Prosecutor[vii] and President[viii] of the
ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber I regarding Myanmar’s crimes against humanity in the form of systematic
and pre-planned and violent deportation of about 800,000 Rohingya women, men, children and elderly
people from their original homeland, since October 2016, across Myanmar’s western borders on to the
soil of neighbouring Bangladesh;

We the People of (XXXX) declare 25 August (2017) as the Rohingya Remembrance Day; on that
fateful day the combined Myanmar Armed Forces – Navy, Air Force and Army – launched large-scale
premeditated attacks against the substantial segment of the Rohingya population in Northern most part
85
of Rakhine State of Myanmar, having used the invented “pretext”[ix] – that the Arakan Rohingya
Salvation Army (ARSA)[x], a 1-year old group of largely illiterate barefooted young Rohingya village
men armed with farm tools such as machetes, spears and a few home-made grenade, had launched
(coordinated) “attacks on 30 police outposts” in N. Rakhine, Myanmar government’s official story
which has never been independently verified by any credible research, media or UN agency;

Finally, we the People of (XXXX) support the existential needs of several million Rohingyas violently
deported by Myanmar government in periodic waves of exodus since 1978 to secure protected return
to their birthplace and ancestral homeland in Northern Rakhine. This will require international
protection, with or without the Security Council consensus– until such a time as Myanmar is ready to
accept them as full and equal citizens, with basic human and minority rights, the official status[xi]
which Rohingya had enjoyed upon independence from Britain well-into the late 1970’s.

_____________________
[i] Gregory B. Poling (13 Feb. 2014) “Separating Fact from Fiction about Myanmar’s Rohingya”,
Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, DC,
https://www.csis.org/analysis/separating-fact-fiction-about-myanmar%E2%80%99s-rohingya &
Michael W. Charney (26 Feb. 2018) “A State Myth of ‘a National Race’ and the Tatmadaw’s (the
Burmese Armed Forces) War on the Rohingya and Other Myanmar Ethnic Groups,” The Berlin
Conference on Myanmar Genocide, The Jewish Museum of Berlin, Germany.
https://maungzarni.net/en/news/professor-michael-charney-soas-identities-and-histories-rakhine-and-
rohingya

[ii] Alvin Powell (7 Nov. 2014) “The threat to Burma’s minorities: Government targeting Rohingya,
Karen peoples, critics say”, The Harvard Gazette,
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/11/burma-genocide/

[iii] Desmond Tutu (29 May 2015) “THE SLOW GENOCIDE AGAINST THE ROHINGYA”,
Newsweek, http://www.newsweek.com/tutu-slow-genocide-against-rohingya-337104

[iv] Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide, US Holocaust Memorial Museum & Fortify
Rights (Nov. 2017), “They tried to kill us all.”: Atrocity Crimes against Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine
State, Bearing Witness Report, US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC,
https://www.ushmm.org/m/pdfs/201711-atrocity-crimes-rohingya-muslims.pdf ; “Judgment of the
Peoples’ Tribunal on Myanmar”, Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal on Myanmar, University of Malaya
Faculty of Law, Sept. 2017; International State Crime Initiative, (Oct. 2015), “COUNTDOWN TO
ANNIHILATION: GENOCIDE IN MYANMAR”, Queen Mary University of London Law School,
http://statecrime.org/state-crime-research/isci-report-countdown-to-annihilation-genocide-in-
myanmar/ ; Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic, Yale Law School (Oct. 2015)
“Clinic Study Finds Evidence of Genocide in Myanmar”, Yale University, https://law.yale.edu/yls-
today/news/clinic-study-finds-evidence-genocide-myanmar ; Maung Zarni & Alice Cowley (Jun.
2014) “The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingya”, The Pacific Rim Law and Policy
Journal, University of Washington School of Law, http://digital.law.washington.edu/dspace-
law/handle/1773.1/1377

[v] “Rohingya crisis: UN rights chief ‘cannot rule out genocide’,” BBC, 5 December 2017,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-42234469

[vi] “UN Special Envoy claims Aung San Suu Kyi could be guilty of crimes against humanity,”
Channel Four News, UK, 14 Feb. 2018, https://www.channel4.com/news/un-special-envoy-claims-
aung-san-suu-kyi-could-be-guilty-of-crimes-against-humanity
86
[vii] War crimes prosecutor seeks jurisdiction over Rohingya deportations, Reuters, 10 Apr. 2018,
https://maungzarni.net/en/news/war-crimes-prosecutor-seeks-jurisdiction-over-rohingya-deportations

[viii] President of the Pre-Trial Division (11 Apr 2018) “Decision assigning the “Prosecution’s Request
for a Ruling on Jurisdiction under Article 19(3) of the Statute to Pre-Trial Chamber I”, International
Criminal Court, The Hague, https://www.icc-cpi.int/CourtRecords/CR2018_02081.PDF

[ix] “What can stop the extreme violence against Rohingya Muslims?”, PBS, 12 Oct. 2017,
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/can-stop-extreme-violence-rohingya-muslims

[x] Faisal Edroos (13 Sept. 2017) “ARSA: Who are the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army?” Al Jazeera
English, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/09/myanmar-arakan-rohingya-salvation-army-
170912060700394.html

[xi] “Rohingyas are equal and full citizens and an ethnic minority integral to the Union of Burma”,
Unofficial English Translation of the Official Burmese Language Transcript of the keynote address
delivered by Deputy-Commander-in-Chief (Army), Brigadier General Aung Gyi, Ministry of Defence,
4 July 1961, Rangoon, Union of Burma. See the Burmese original and the text of the English
translation here: https://maungzarni.net/en/news/rohingyas-are-equal-and-full-citizens-and-ethnic-
minority-integral-union-burma-myanmar-military

87
 UN Security Council and The Rohingya
Yet another charade?

C R Abrar
4 May 2018

https://www.thedailystar.net/opinion/perspective/yet-another-charade-
1571170?ct=t(EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_5_11_2018
This week has experienced a flurry of diplomatic activities centring the Rohingya issue. Principal
among those was what has been dubbed a “historic and highly unusual” visit of an important delegation
of the UN Security Council (UNSC) to Bangladesh and Burma. Quite understandably, the visit drew
attention of various quarters—states, international agencies, refugee and rights organisations, and most
importantly, the hapless Rohingyas who have been “living in mud and shacks, with no hope and no
future, no nation and no identity, no past and no future.”

During its visit, the delegation should have experienced two contrasting scenarios. On the one hand,
in Kutupalong refugee camp and in the no-man's land, they heard heart-wrenching testimonies of
scores of survivors of the ongoing genocide—horrifying tales of mass murder, rape, torture, tossing of
children in raging fire, torching of homes and hearths and systematic expulsion of an ethnic community
whose identity and claims to citizenship have been meticulously dismantled over the last four decades
by a state that has little regard for human rights, which the world body so fervently champions (at least
in theory). The delegation also heard how a resource-poor and one of the most densely populated
countries of the world, has lived up to its commitment to uphold the UN Charter and the lofty principles
of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in sheltering more than a million of refugees in distress.
While UN diplomats heap massive praise on Bangladesh for its generosity and compassion, the
organisation has so far failed to do the heavy-lifting in mobilising resources and garnering political
will in addressing the root cause of Burma's genocide.

88
On the other hand, the delegation met representatives of a regime that not only perpetrated perhaps the
most gruesome crime against humanity this century has ever witnessed, in fulfilling its long-term
genocidal agenda to free Arakan of ethnic Rohingyas, but also blatantly flouted the UN Charter and
UDHR, and since the outbreak of current crisis in August 2017, repeatedly hoodwinked the security
council that called for bringing an end to the current humanitarian crisis.

By now the authorities in Naypyidaw have established themselves as masters of the art of deception.
Time and again they have promised the UNSC that effective action would be taken to create an
enabling environment for the return of Rohingyas who are languishing in refugee settlements in
Bangladesh. The delegation does not need reminding that till date not a single case of repatriation has
taken place, save the staged repatriation of five Rohingya individuals out of a million who have been
deported.

Befitting the adage “giving the devil its due”, the astute policy planners of Burma have been immensely
successful in manipulating the UNSC. As early as September 2017, Burma informed the UNSC that it
was prepared to start the repatriation at any time. The country's National Security Advisor U Thaung
Tun assured the UNSC that repatriation would take place by using the framework worked out jointly
by Bangladesh and Burma in 1992. However, despite such a pledge, seven months have passed with
no sign of repatriation. Under the memorandum of understanding with Bangladesh, Burma promised
to stem the flow of refugees. In less than two weeks after signing the document, more than 100,000
Rohingyas crossed the border into Bangladesh. Anticipating the security council's displeasure over its
inaction, Naypyidaw was smart enough to cook up yet another scheme—the Union Enterprise
Mechanism, with the purported aim to extend humanitarian assistance and resettlement of repatriated
Rohingyas. The UNSC fell into the trap and in a presidential statement it “welcomed” the signing of
the memorandum with Bangladesh and the formation of the Union Enterprise Mechanism.

Despite its explicit commitment to UNSC to cooperate with Bangladesh in expediting the repatriation
process, in contrast to 1992 accord, Burma further tightened the eligibility criteria for the Rohingyas'
return and the verification process, thwarting any substantive effort for repatriation. In essence, it
rebuffed the calls made by the UNSC in its two meetings held in September and November 2017.

The Burmese swindlers made best use of November 23 agreement with Bangladesh to stave off UNSC
criticism for not progressing with repatriation. In a December UNSC meeting, Burma's envoy to UN
informed the council that repatriation would begin within the next two months. While the gullible
world body appeared to have fallen for the hoax, true to its colour, a week before the commencement
of repatriation (on 22 January), Burma demanded family-wise list of Rohingyas—a demand that
Bangladesh subsequently complied with.

Even though the Burmese threw in a spanner in the latest effort of repatriation, its minister for
international cooperation, Kyaw Tin, claimed that his country was ready to welcome refugees and held
Bangladesh responsible for the delay. One hopes while assessing the sequence of stalled repatriation,
eminent members of the UNSC delegation would bear in mind the subterfuges that the Burmese
resorted to in undermining the repatriation effort.

In their meeting with the UNSC delegation, Rohingya refugees handed over a 13-point demand which
they had earlier passed on to the visiting Burmese minister for social welfare. Included in the list were
demands for restoration of their citizenship rights, bringing the perpetrators of heinous crimes to
justice, ensuring international presence in Arakan, return of ancestral land confiscated by the
authorities, payment of compensation for losses, presence of international media and human rights
groups in Arakan, release of all political prisoners and closure of internally displaced camps. In other
words, the refugee community demanded ensuring 89“protected return to protected homeland”—a plan
that was floated in the February 2018 Rohingya conference in Berlin that has gained near unanimous
acceptance of the global Rohingya community.

While briefing the press in Bangladesh, a member of the UNSC delegation noted “We don't have any
magic solution in the Security Council”. May he be reminded that maintaining “world peace and
security” forms the core function of the security council and the council is duty bound to deliver on
both counts? All states that are members of the council are meant to act on what is good for
international community and not be guided by their own selfish political, strategic and economic
interests. Any departure from this would tantamount to violation of the UN Charter. Rohingyas do not
want UNSC delegation to whisk around a magic wand in its search for solution. They want the UNSC
to adhere to the UN Charter, in word and spirit, to ensure their protected return to protected homeland
and bring the perpetrators to justice.

The influential UK permanent representative Karen Pierce observed “…it is not the Security Council's
fault that there is a crisis.” Well, not quite so. For decades, the Burmese state has pursued a policy of
annihilation of ethnic Rohingya considered as “the most persecuted minority in the world” by the
United Nations. As the community was gradually stripped of their citizenship and other associated
rights, being subjected to methodical discrimination and unleashing of spikes of violence periodically
triggering massive refugee flows, the international community opted to look the other way. Rohingyas
were also considered a dispensable lot as western countries raced to exploit the resources and engage
in trade with the genocidal regime under the rubric of supporting democratic transition. Every veto
wielder in the security council is guilty of complicity in the four decade long slow genocide. The
difference in complicity among them is in degree and not in kind.

This charade is exposed when UK representative in the delegation Pierce told BBC in Burma on May
1 that there is no difference between Burma's domestic investigation and international investigation as
long as Aung San Suu Kyi accepts and launches the investigation with the help of the security council.
What could be crueller for the victims of genocide than the security council openly lending its
collective assistance to the genocidal government to conduct such investigation into its own crimes?

Over the last four decades, the UN has failed to stop genocide and other atrocious crimes that led to
death and displacement of millions (Rwanda, Bosnia, Sudan and now Burma). The onus lies on the
permanent members of the security council to make the institution functional and relevant. The
Rohingya case provides an opportunity for the UN's redemption. Ensuring protected return to protected
homeland and bringing the perpetrators to justice is the first step in that direction.

While members of the UNSC delegation return to New York and deliberate on their whirlwind mission,
one hopes they bear in mind that for the first time in the history of the august body that is tasked to
maintain global peace and security, they had the rare opportunity of visiting the sites where genocide
was perpetrated by a murderous regime.

________________
C R Abrar teaches International Relations and directs the Refugee and Migratory Movements
Research Unit (RMMRU) at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. He has done research on Rohingya
refugees, Bihari stateless people, labour migration and recruitment industry issues. Abrar was
instrumental in the movement for citizenship rights of the camp dwelling Bihari people and civic
campaign for allowing admission to Rohingya refugees. He also successfully filed public interest
litigation for the release of several Rohingya asylum seekers who served out their sentence but were
still languishing in prisons. Dr. Abrar is President of leading rights organisation Odhikar (Rights) of
Bangladesh. He studied at the Universities of Dhaka and Sussex, and Griffith University, Australia.
He is a regular contributor on migration and rights90 issues to English dailies.
 Rohingya People need Protected Homeland
in Myanmar’s Northern Arakan
Maung Zarni

Prohom Alo, Bangladesh’s Leading bi-lingual National Newspaper

3 April 2018

http://en.prothomalo.com/opinion/news/173522/Rohingyas-need-protected-homeland-in-Northern

Only 2 generations ago the Rohingya people of Northern Arakan or Rakhine State of Myanmar had a
homeland.

The homeland of Rohingya people was officially referred to as the Mayu Frontier region, and was a
separate administrative district made up of the two predominantly Rohingya, but not segregated towns
of Maung Daw and Buthidaung, and parts of Rathedaung. Owing to the specific request of the
Rohingya community leaders and parliamentary representatives, who were worried about being placed
under the regional control of Akyab or Sittwe-based Rakhine nationalists, who clamoured for an
autonomous statehood for Rakhine, the Burmese Ministry of Defence in Rangoon established Mayu
District in the late 1950’s as a distinct administrative region, and placed it under the Ministry’s Border
Affairs Division. The first founding chief administrator of this homeland for Rohingyas is the then
young Lt-Colonel Tin Oo, now 95-years-old Vice Chair of the ruling National League for Democracy.

Because of the two ongoing separatist movements – Rakhine Buddhists’ independence struggle and
Rohingyas’ Mujahideen movements –the new Rohingya district was not fully operational under Tin
Oo’s military command until 1961.

By virtue of his deputy-commadership of the All Rakhine Command (now Western Command), my
own relative, Zeya Kyaw Htin Major Ant Kywe, was deputy administrator of Mayu District in 1961
while the Commander Lt-Colonel Ye Gaung, who later became Ne Win’s Minister of Foreign Affairs,
was Mayu Region’s Chief Administrator.
91
Even in the formative years of General Ne Win’s coup government that went by the name of the
Revolutionary Council, the military government kept intact the official recognition of Mayu District
as Rohingya’s ancestral and contemporaneous homeland. The official Myanmar Encyclopedia Volume
9 (1964) left nothing equivocal about this recognition: “the Mayu District is home to the Rohingya
people, who make up 70% to 75% of the district’s population. Largely adherents of Islam, Rohingyas
are native people of this region. Majority of them are farmers, labourers and fishermen.”

Today, the large swath of their homeland – stretching 100 Km – has become a UNESCO-worthy World
Heritage site of mass killings where 318 villages had been burned systematically by Myanmar
Tatmadaw and auxiliary troops which subsequently bulldozed both charred village remains and
unknown number of mass graves.

Since the 1990’s when the United Nations first set up the UN Special Rapporteur to monitor and
investigate pervasive human rights abuses in Burma, including those to which Rohingya population in
Northern Rakhine have been subjected to successive Myanmar or Burmese governments, both military
and civilian, have categorically denied the existence of Rohingya people as an ethnic community of
the country, let alone acknowledge truthfully that Rohingyas were accorded a specific region of their
own.

In fact, ex-General Tin Oo, the elderly Vice Chair of the ruling NLD and the oldest colleague of
Myanmar State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi knew these facts – about the state’s official embrace of
Rohingyas as an ethnic people of the Union of Burma and the Ministry of Defence’s patronage in the
establishment of Mayu Frontier Region for the Rohingya community. After the two bouts of organized
violence took place in Rakhine state involving both Rohingya Muslims and Rakhine Buddhists, Tin
Oo was heard on the Burmese language service of the Radio Free Asia denying that Rohingyas were
a distinct ethnic people, in spite of his own intimate knowledge of the fact to the contrary.

The Burmese public, known for their pervasive anti-Muslim and anti-Indian subcontinent racism, is of
course to believe one of their iconic anti-military veterans when Tin Oo repeated the Burmese
military’s institutionalised stance: the country has no ethnic group named Rohingya, and those who
identify as such are unwanted “Bengali” migrants which the neighbouring Bangladesh tacitly
encouraged to illegally migrate into the sparsely populated Rakhine or Arakan through the 170-miles-
longtah porous land and river boundaries.

When Aung San Suu Kyi infamously asked the US Ambassador Scott Marciel (UN officials and
international diplomats) not to use the name “Rohingya” because in her misguided view calling
Rohingya by their own group name was going to further inflame the Burmese nationalist passion
against the group she was in fact driving the last nail into the coffin of Rohingya identity and presence
as an ethnic community living in their own ancestral land of Mayu Frontier region.

In 3 consecutive years since the mass violence flared up against Rohingyas in Rakhine state, I had
attempted to provide a select network of Burmese opinion makers – including nationally acclaimed
writers, journalists, artists, as well as a few dozens spiritual leaders drawn from Buddhist clergy,
Christian churches, Hindu and Muslim communities – with Burmese language official documentation
which expose the intense and intentional denial of Rohingya identity, presence and history and,
conversely, support solidly the claims of Rohingyas’ claim of Northern Arakan as their ancestral
homeland and their pre-British presence on it.

The power of 40-years of sustained propaganda by the military is such that the otherwise intelligent
and compassionate Burmese remain unpersuaded by the facts about Rohingya people: my non-
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Rohingya Burmese friends stare at the official encyclopedia, official transcripts by Prime Minister U
Nu, high ranking military officials including the Deputy Commander in Chief of the Burmese armed
forces, as well as a wide array of documentation as if the old official facts were lies and the new official
lies were facts.

Alas, truths are fragile and lies die hard, in a deeply racist mental culture such as today’s Myanmar.

Tragically, Myanmar’s rejection of Rohingya people is complete and total: all key pillars of the State
and society – namely the powerful Armed Forces, the Sangha or Buddhist Order, the political class led
by Ms Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy – have stated their counter-factual view that
Rohingyas do not exist, never existed and will never exist as who they say they are as an ethnic group.
Worse still, the country’s Christian and other ethnic non-Burmese who also suffer from decades of
military oppression and cultural subjugation at the hands of the dominant Bama majority have
expressed no empathy or solidarity when it comes to Rohingya’s plight.

In light of this society-wide rejection of Rohingya people a mere bilateral repatriation scheme has
proven to be absolutely no panacea: in fact, repatriation has become a vicious cycle for Rohingyas
and Bangladesh. Such well-worn repatriation mantra expressed as “voluntary, safe and dignified”
return will simply not do.

The only viable way for the Rohingyas to regain normalcy of life and have a chance to rebuild their
communal life is more proactive and aggressive intervention by the external state and non-state actors.

Specifically, Rohingyas need to be provided with their own homeland under international protection.
The talk of the restoration of homeland to this world’s largest population with no piece of earth they
can call home, belong to or settle down must not be misconstrued as another attempt at ‘ethnic
separatism’ as the Burmese military and the public have done, in reaction to the call made by the Berlin
Conference on Myanmar Genocide. How the protected homeland will work, and which forces will
provide the protection, who will administer the protected homeland are questions that can be pursued
once the idea is accepted among key state and non-state actors with express concerns about the plight
of 1 million Rohingyas which Myanmar has “dumped” on the sovereign territory of the Bangladeshi
neighbour.

As a matter of fact, in her address to the UN General Assembly last fall Prime Minister Sheik Hasina
of Bangladesh officially proposed the creation of a ‘safe zone’ in N. Arakan state where Rohingyas
have been expelled. Hasina’s proposal needs to be looked afresh again with urgency and seriousness,
with the view towards forging an international alliance of friends that can in turn firmly push for
restoring Rohingyas their rightful homeland where they can belong, and where they can rebuild their
communities, under international protection.

Over the last 40 years, there have so far been 3 such agreements since the perpetrating state of then
Burma launched the very first centrally organized wave of violent mass expulsion of Rohingyas in
February 1978. None had worked. There are absolutely no indications that the current bilateral
agreement ceremoniously signed in the Burmese capital Nay Pyi Daw on 23 November will be any
different.

By all means maintain the current talks of economic sanctions, as well as international justice and
accountability regarding Myanmar perpetrators including Suu Kyi and her military partners in power.
But what Rohingyas need and want more than anything is a homeland where they can live in peace
and rebuild their scorch-earthed communities under international protection. The solution to Myanmar
genocide will not come from the perpetrators.
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It is high time that Bangladesh lead a serious international effort to help actualize the protected return
of Rohingyas to their protected homeland in their ancestral place of Northern Arakan or Rakhine. Such
an effort needs to be given a serious grassroots and state-level backing worldwide. For Rohingyas
deserve and need a piece of earth which they can call home, just like every human community that
walks this planet.

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