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| Pic: Proghyananda Vikkhu, associate director of the Sima Bihar monastery in Ramu; Jared Ferrie/IRIN |
Proghyananda Vikkhu stood in his purple monk’s robe in front
of gleaming gold statues of the Buddha, recalling the night that a mob of
nationalist Muslims attacked his monastery in eastern Bangladesh.
“This monastery is 300 years old and it was totally demolished
on that night in 2012,” he said. “Within one year, the Bangladesh government
totally rebuilt it with help from the army.”
The mob also sacked a village next door, motivated in part
by twisted retribution for attacks by ethnic Rakhine Buddhists on ethnic
Rohingya Muslims on the other side of the border, in Myanmar.
The government and military responses to violence against
Bangladesh’s Buddhist minority and Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim minority couldn’t
be more different.
Hundreds of people were killed in Myanmar’s Rakhine State in
2012 and 140,000 were forced into displacement camps. Almost all the victims
were Rohingya, burnt out of their homes by mobs of ethnic Rakhine Buddhists,
and about 100,000 remain in camps today.
The 157-year-old mosque in the state capital, Sittwe, is
still damaged. It’s now off-limits to worshippers, and instead serves as a
police post.
Unlike Buddhists who enjoy the rights of full citizens in
Muslim-majority Bangladesh, Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims saw their citizenship
stripped away during decades of military rule.
Today, overwhelmingly-Buddhist Myanmar is led by a nominally
civilian government headed by Nobel Laureate Aung San Su Kyi, but this shift
away from direct military rule has not helped the Rohingya. They live under an
apartheid system, with their movements severely restricted, along with their
access to healthcare, education, and employment.
Decades of oppression have fuelled anger in the Rohingya
community, which has recently given rise to an insurgency that threatens
stability in Myanmar as well as Bangladesh. Analysts warn that the insurgency
could attract support from international Islamist militant groups, including
the so-called Islamic State.
“We cannot take this lightly, either as Bangladesh or
members of the international community,” said A.N.M. Muniruzzaman, a retired
major-general who now heads the Bangladesh Institute for Peace and Security
Studies.
He said Bangladesh should sponsor a UN Security Council
resolution that would aim to resolve the humanitarian crisis in Rakhine State
and stop Myanmar from forcing Rohingya over the border.
On 30 December, 11 Nobel Peace Prize Winners also urged
the UN Security Council to take action, and they accused Myanmar of “ethnic
cleansing and crimes against humanity”. Aung San Suu Kyi, who won a Nobel Peace
Prize for her decades-long struggle against Myanmar’s former junta, was not
among the signatories.
Rising insurgency
It was in direct response to the 2012 violence that some
Rohingya began organising the nascent insurgency, according to a recent report
by the International Crisis Group. A committee of Rohingya in Mecca oversees
the group, which is called Harakah al-Yakin [“Faith Movement” in Arabic], and
20 Rohingya with international experience in guerrilla warfare are leading
operations on the ground, ICG said.
Harakah al-Yakin struck first on 9 October, with hundreds of
insurgents carrying out coordinated attacks on Myanmar police border posts that
killed nine officers in Maungdaw, a frontier township. Four soldiers were
killed in clashes on 11 October, while another soldier died and several more
were wounded on 12 November before the insurgents retreated to a village,
pursued by troops.
“Several hundred villagers, armed with whatever they had to
hand [knives and farming implements], supported the attackers, seemingly
spontaneously,” ICG said.
The military called in air support after a
lieutenant-colonel was shot dead, and two helicopter gunships “allegedly fired
indiscriminately" at villagers trying to flee, according to the report.
After the 12 November battles, “the military considerably stepped up its
operations” in Maungdaw, said ICG.
Since then, there have been reports of widespread military
abuses against Rohingya civilians, including rapes, killings, and
disappearances. Rohingya have been fleeing by the tens of thousands into
Bangladesh.
“Violence and abuses are likely to boost support for the
armed group,” ICG warned. “People pushed to desperation and anger, with no hope
for the future, are more likely to embrace extremist responses, however
counterproductive.”
Uncooperative
Allegations of abuse have been met by flat denials from the
government, which refuses to allow journalists and investigators into Maungdaw.
Myanmar’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Aye Aye Soe told IRIN she did not
believe the International Organization for Migration when it said at least
34,000 Rohingya had crossed into Bangladesh since military operations began.
SEE: Myanmar says Rohingya rape
and abuse allegations “made up”, despite mounting evidence
The new arrivals join as many as half a million Rohingya who
have fled to Bangladesh during attacks on their communities over the past few
decades. Impoverished and overpopulated, Bangladesh struggles to host the
refugees, and it now faces the potential that the overcrowded camps could
become recruiting grounds for Harakah al-Yakin. Already, hundreds of Rohingya refugees
have crossed back into Myanmar to join the insurgency, according to ICG.
Still, Myanmar continues to insist the situation in Rakhine
State is “not an international issue”, as a 19 December article posted to the Ministry
of Information website put it.
Muniruzzaman said Bangladesh has unsuccessfully tried to
“woo” Myanmar into working together to resolve issues in Rakhine State. He
noted that Aung San Suu Kyi has visited virtually every other country in the
region aside from Bangladesh.
Bangladesh’s Foreign Ministry summoned Myanmar’s ambassador
in both November and December to offer its cooperation on resolving issues in
Rakhine State so that the Rohingya can go home.
On 23 November, the ministry urged Myanmar to consider
allowing an “independent investigation” into allegations of military abuses.
The ministry also requested that Myanmar “take urgent appropriate measures so
that Muslim minorities in the Rakhine State are not forced to seek shelter
across the border”, according to a statement.
Myanmar has thus far failed to do either.
Complicated history
Many of the problems facing the approximately one million
Rohingya in Myanmar are rooted in one overarching issue – statelessness.
Unfortunately, full citizenship is largely based on membership in one of the
135 “national races”, which do not include the Rohingya.
SEE: Bribes and bureaucracy –
Myanmar’s chaotic citizenship system
“It goes way, way past in history, whether they are citizens
or not,” said Aye Aye Soe. “And then it depends on a lot of issues. You have to
consider both communities in Rakhine State.”
The other community – ethnic Rakhines who comprise about two
thirds of the state’s population – largely consider the Rohingya illegal
immigrants from Bangladesh. It is a sentiment widely shared throughout Myanmar,
but it’s based on a false history that nationalists have propagated over
decades: that the Rohingya, whom they call “Bengalis”, arrived during the
British colonial period or afterwards.
Myanmar’s Ministry of Religious Affairs and Culture even
announced in mid-December that it would publish a treatise showing that the
Rohingya are not from Myanmar.
The ancient ancestry of the Rakhine and Rohingya people is
the subject of much debate, but historians say that both identities emerged
from the kingdom of Arakan, which encompassed much of today’s Rakhine State, as
well as areas that are now in Bangladesh. The identity of each is based to
great extent on religion, and there is ample evidence of both a Buddhist and
Muslim presence in the kingdom.
Archeologists have unearthed coins from the 15th century that
show Arakanese rulers using Islamic titles. But Michael Charney, a historian at
the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies, argues that
there were relatively few Muslims residing in Arakan until slave raids in the
17th century greatly boosted the population.
“Although there is very little evidence of a rural Muslim
community in Arakan prior to the 1570s, they clearly made up a substantial
proportion of the population in the 1770s, prior to Burman rule,” he writes.
The Burmans, who comprise modern Myanmar’s most populous and
politically-powerful ethnic group, conquered Arakan in 1784. But Burma ruled
for only 40 years before the British took it over, after which there was
further migration into the region from what is now Bangladesh.
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| Pic: A group of Rohingya who fled Myanmar have taken refuge in the village of Hazi Para |
Citizenship
Myanmar insists that, in order to receive citizenship,
Rohingya Muslims must provide evidence that their families were living in
Rakhine State before the British conquest in 1824.
From an international perspective, it is anomalous to
disenfranchise the descendants of people who arrived 193 years ago or even
later. If other countries were to impose similar restrictions, many people who
fled Myanmar during half a century of military dictatorship would suddenly find
themselves stateless too.
It’s also difficult for many Rohingya to prove their
lineage, even if it does pre-date British rule. Identification documents have
been lost throughout the years, including some that burnt along with their
houses.
The differences between citizenship policies in Myanmar and
Bangladesh are striking. Minority Buddhists who find themselves living in a
predominantly Muslim country – on one side of a border arbitrarily drawn by the
British – do not have to prove their right to be citizens. They are born
Bangladeshi.
Buddhist teachings
Even so, anti-Rohingya prejudice is also common in the
Rakhine Buddhist minority community in Bangladesh, according to Kya Thein Aung,
who is Rakhine and head of Cox’s Bazar City College.
“Our parents told us Rohingya means a floating culture:
people who don’t have a place,” he said. In contrast: “We are the original
people of this land.”
Kya Thein Aung said he doubted that most reports of abuses
against Rohingya were true. “If Myanmar denied giving them citizenship, then
you can take them to another country,” he added.
Proghyananda Vikkhu, the Buddhist monk who is associate
director of the Sima Bihar monastery in Ramu, had a more enlightened view.
“The Myanmar military is responsible for torturing Rohingya
people,” said Vikkhu, who is a member of the Barua ethnic minority.
He said Buddhism teaches that all people have the right to
be happy and live peacefully, and he condemned Buddhists who participated in
attacks against Rohingya communities.
“The people who take part in this kind of violence don’t
follow the rules of Buddhism,” he said. “They are not real Buddhists.”
(TOP PHOTO: The Bimukti
Bidarshan Bhabona Kendra Buddhist temple in Ramu was one of 16 temples damaged
or destroyed by mobs of nationalist Muslims in 2012. The government and the
military rebuilt them. CREDIT: Jared Ferrie/IRIN)