Page 1 of
2 Nowhere
to go for the Rohingya By Phil
Radford
You'd imagine that refugees
fleeing violence, with no material possessions,
would cling to two bare prospects. The first,
their homeland; and the hope of one day resuming
life in their own home and county. The other, a
refuge; and the hope of reaching, quickly, some
place of safety where they or aid agencies can
assemble shelter and supplies so life isn't an
hourly struggle against uncertainty.
Pity,
then, the uniquely awful plight of up to 100,000
Muslim Rohingya of Rakhine province, Myanmar
(Burma), fleeing renewed sectarian violence last
week: for them, neither prospect is in store.
Without official recognition as an ethnic people
of Myanmar, the Rohingya don't qualify for
citizenship, and under
current citizenship
legislation they never will. As far as the
government, the majority Tibeto-Burman population,
and fellow Rakhinese are concerned, the Rohingya
are just immigrants from Bangladesh - and recent
ones at that.
Nor as
they flee burned-out homes can the Rohingya turn for
help to their supposed country of origin. As a
grudging host for waves of Rohingya refugees since
1978, Bangladesh has had enough. Prime Minister
Sheikh Hasina insists, the Rohingya are "... not
the Bangladeshi People's responsibility ....they
are their [Myanmar] citizens. It's up to them. "
In June, the country effectively closed its
borders to refugees and security forces can now be
seen turning away boats trying to cross the broad
Naf river estuary that demarcates the southerly
Bangladesh-Myanmar border.
The Rohingya's
stateless quandary leapt to prominence in early
June when communal violence erupted between the
Muslim Rohingya and Buddhist Rakhine, in the
western, coastal state of Rakhine, formally
Arakan. A rape led to a lynching, that led to
riot, that led to mob warfare across the state. On
June 10, the government declared a state of
emergency, but the presence of troops did little
to stem Rohingya panic.
By the end of
July, the main international relief agency
present, the United Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees (UNHCR) estimated there were a total of
75,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) in
Rakhine , with many seeking shelter in camps
around the state capital Sittwe and at Kyauktaw,
up the Kaladan river towards Bangladesh.
After a lull, violence erupted again on
October 21. A UNHCR and an inter-agency mission
that toured affected areas on October 27-8
reported widespread destruction and displacement,
but also reported that many of the coastal and
mountainous areas affected by violence are
extremely hard to reach.
Speaking in
Bangkok on November 2, UNHCR spokesperson Vivian
Chan said, "Right now, we are facing a massive
emergency." The organisation said 3,000 Rohingya
were travelling in boats towards Sittwe, but the
city, formerly with a mixed population of 200,000,
is now empty of Muslims, and food prices around
refugee camps on the outskirts have doubled.
Meanwhile, 6,000 Rohingya are stranded on boats or
islets along the Myanmar coast, and unknown
numbers have fled to the hills. If the pattern of
previous crises is repeated, over 250,000 may now
seek refuge in Bangladesh.
Not Bengali;
not Burmese For the Rohingya, straddling
post-colonial borders, losing one nationality was
a predictable misfortune. Losing two was a matter
of calculated, official carelessness - in the most
literal sense.
The rocky road began back
in the 1960's, during General Ne Win's
"Burmanisation" campaign. Eager to clear up racial
business left over from Burma's British days, when
Indian and Chinese traders swanned across the
border, Ne Win's Revolutionary Council embarked on
a campaign of nationalization. Confiscating their
businesses ensured the ethnically-foreign
enterprising classes got the message.
Approximately 300,000 Indians and 100,000 Chinese
fled, hobbling vital rice and timber export
industries and ensuring vital goods like medicine
and petrol were in short supply. To ensure
these "foreigners" didn't return, and to give
Burmanisation official meaning, the government
passed an Emergency Immigration Act in 1974. This
required all citizens to carry identity cards
(registration cards), which neatly gave the
military government the practical means of saying
who was and was not entitled to Burmese
nationality. The Rohingya weren't, they got
"Foreign Registration Cards".
At this
stage, citizenship-stripping proved more ominous
than critical to Rohingya. They lived in a remote
part of a rebellious province, largely outside the
realm of official Burma. For two decades after
independence, Arakan/Rakhine separatists had
fought with the Rangoon government and armed
Rohingya Jihadi occasionally lent a hand. But
during the late 1970s and early 1980s, Ne Win, his
generals and their Burma Socialist Programme Party
extended central control over some of Burma's
recalcitrant provinces, including Arakan.
Non-citizens found their rights to travel and
marry curtailed, and then citizenship started to
matter very much indeed.
In 1982,
parliament passed the Burma Citizenship Law, which
is still in effect. The 1982 Act removed long-term
residency (one grandparent, pre-1942) as the main
qualifying factor for citizenship, and replaced it
with race. Henceforth, "... only peoples and
ethnic groups settled ... within the state as
their permanent home for a period anterior to
[prior to] 1823 ..." qualified for full
citizenship. To prevent a quest for ancestry
bringing the country to a shuddering halt, the
government then listed all the ethnic groups thus
settled - there are 135 today - and left the
Rohingya off the list.
The act does make
provision for citizenship by descent, although it
has to be 100% parental/grandparental descent. If
one parent is not a citizen, then you have to
prove both of their parents were. But even if this
stipulation were relaxed, so that de jure
ancestral citizenship sufficed for an application,
the Rohingya would still remain beyond the pale.
According to Burma insurgency and ethnicity
specialist, Martin Smith, no accurate ethnic or
religious census was ever undertaken in the
region. So retrospective citizen recognition is
also a non-starter.
Meanwhile the Rohingya
can't hold out for Bangladesh citizenship either.
Under the jus sanguinis principle of
Bangladesh citizenship law, your parentage, rather
than your place of birth, is the critical criteria
for citizenship. A child born of parents who are
non-Bangladeshi, stateless or of unknown
nationality, cannot acquire Bangladesh
nationality, even if born inside Bangladesh. In
any case, Bangladesh hasn't the resources to
embark on the mammoth effort of working out where
or to whom Rohingya were born. And the country has
enough citizens, thanks.
So for the
hapless Rohingya, it's all far too late. In
February 2011, the UNHCR estimated there were
approximately 800,000 Rohingya with no
citizenship, out of a total population of perhaps
one million. The sheer scales of this
non-citizenry has encouraged the Myanmar
government to air some truly nasty solutions: "It
is impossible to accept the illegally entered
Rohingya, who are not our ethnicity," Myanmar
President Thein Sein told the UN High Commissioner
for Refugees, Antonio Guterres. On July 11, he
suggested the only solution to the sectarian
strife was for his country to expel all the
Rohingya, and then perhaps the UN could resettle
them to a third country. The UN declined.
History is not bunk... Of
course, President Thein Sein might be right. It is
possible that many Rohingya are of recent
Bangladeshi origin; that they have left a
peaceful, Muslim-majority homeland to settle in
violent, sectarian, northern Rakhine, passing
waves of obtuse refugees along the way, to enjoy a
life of civil discrimination, almost non-existent
health services (outside Sittwe), and travel and
marriage restrictions that are an open invitation
to bribery. History, as well as common sense,
suggests otherwise. While Bengali Muslim have
certainly migrated to Rakhine state, they have
also maintained a permanent, well-documented
presence there for centuries.
In 2002,
Israeli ex-foreign official Moshe Yegar included a
detailed, referenced account of Bengali settlement
in Arakan, in a comprehensive history of Muslim
communities in Southeast Asia. According to Moshe,
Arakan hosted thriving Muslim trading and
seafaring communities as far back as ninth century
(CE); they served in Burmese armies, and from
roughly 1400-1600, the kings of Arakan adorned
themselves with Muslim titles.
In 1799, a
well-travelled Scottish linguist and surveyor,
Francis Buchanan, published an analysis of Burmese
languages in Arakan in the official journal of the
Asiatic Society of Bengal. In it, he refers to two
communities of "Mohamedans" in the area, one of
which spoke a Hindu dialect, and which had "long
settled in Arakan". He says they called
themselves, "Rooinga" - which he translates as
"natives of Arakan". Incidentally, Buchanan also
observed communal division alive and well 200
years ago. He says the "real" natives of Arakan
called these Bengali Muslims, "Kuluaw Yakan",
which he translated as "Strange Arakan".
More recent observations on the historic
ethnic make-up of Arakan is provided by the notes
of one P Murray, of the British Foreign Office,
who claimed to have spent two years in the area
during World War II, and deposited his
observations with the UK Commonwealth Relations
Office in January 1949. He comments that in 1941,
nearly one-third of the inhabitants of Akyab (now
Sittwe) district were, "Chittagongian Muslims",
that they were mainly concentrated in the northern
part of the state, and that they spoke a "debased"
form of Bengali, mixed with Portuguese, Arabic and
Arakanese.
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