By Hannah Beech (The New York Times)
Dec 2, 2017
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| A Rohingya woman and her child returning to the Basara camp in Sittwe, Myanmar. Across central Rakhine, about 120,000 Rohingya have been interned in camps. Many more have fled the country.Adam Dean for The New York Times |
SITTWE, Myanmar — He was a member of the Rohingya student
union in college, taught at a public high school and even won a parliamentary
seat in Myanmar’s thwarted elections in 1990.
But according to the government of Myanmar, U Kyaw Min’s
fellow Rohingya do not exist.
A long-persecuted Muslim minority concentrated in
Myanmar’s western state of Rakhine, the Rohingya have been deemed dangerous interlopers from neighboring Bangladesh.
Today, they are mostly stateless, their very identity denied by the
Buddhist-majority Myanmar state. https://nyti.ms/2h46NZ5
“There is no such thing as Rohingya,” said U Kyaw San
Hla, an officer in Rakhine’s state security ministry. “It is fake news.”
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| Rohingya in Myanmar Govt record |
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| Mosque built in 1433, demolished by Ex_Gen Khin Nyunt in 1995 |
Since late August, more than 620,000 Rohingya Muslims,
about two-thirds of the population that lived in Myanmar in 2016, have fled to
Bangladesh, driven out by the military’s systematic
campaign of massacre, rape and arson in Rakhine. https://nyti.ms/2yZha6L
In a report released in October, the Office of the United
Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said that Myanmar’s security forces
had worked 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.”
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| “The Rohingya are finished in our country,” said U Kyaw Min, a former schoolteacher and the president of the Democracy and Human Rights Party. “Soon we will all be dead or gone.” Adam Dean for The New York Times |
“The Rohingya are finished in our country,” said Mr. Kyaw
Min, who lives in Yangon, the commercial capital of Myanmar. “Soon we will all
be dead or gone.”
The United Nations report also said that the crackdown in
Rakhine had “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.”
“We are people with our own history and traditions,” said
U Kyaw Hla Aung, a Rohingya lawyer and former political prisoner, whose father
served as a court clerk in Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine.
“How can they pretend we are nothing?” he asked.
Speaking over the phone, Mr. Kyaw Hla Aung, who has been
jailed repeatedly for his activism and is now interned in a Sittwe camp, said
his family did not have enough food because officials have prevented full
distribution of international aid.
Myanmar’s sudden amnesia about the Rohingya is as bold as
it is systematic. Five years ago, Sittwe, nestled in an estuary in the Bay of
Bengal, was a mixed city, divided between an ethnic Rakhine Buddhist majority
and the Rohingya Muslim minority.
Walking Sittwe’s crowded bazaar in 2009, I saw Rohingya
fishermen selling seafood to Rakhine women. Rohingya professionals practiced
law and medicine. The main street in town was dominated by the Jama mosque, an
Arabesque confection built in the mid-19th century. The imam spoke proudly of
Sittwe’s multicultural heritage.
But since sectarian riots in 2012, which resulted in a
disproportionate number of Rohingya casualties, the city has been mostly
cleared of Muslims. Across central Rakhine, about 120,000 Rohingya, even those
who had citizenship, have been interned in camps, stripped of their livelihoods
and prevented from accessing proper schools or health care.
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| A house burned by Myanmar’s military in a Rohingya village in Rakhine State in September.Nyein Chan Naing/European Pressphoto Agency |
They cannot leave the ghettos without official
authorization. In July, a Rohingya man who was allowed out for a court
appearance in Sittwe was lynched by an ethnic Rakhine mob.
The Jama mosque now stands disused and moldering, behind
barbed wire. Its 89-year-old imam is interned.
“We have no rights as human beings,” he said, asking not
to use his name because of safety concerns. “This is state-run ethnic cleansing
and nothing else.”
Sittwe’s psyche has adapted to the new circumstances. In
the bazaar recently, every Rakhine resident I talked to claimed, falsely, that
no Muslims had ever owned shops there.
Sittwe University, which used to enroll hundreds of
Muslim students, now only teaches around 30 Rohingya, all of whom are in a
distance-learning program.
“We don’t have restrictions on any religion,” said U Shwe
Khaing Kyaw, the university’s registrar, “but they just don’t come.”
Mr. Kyaw Min used to teach in Sittwe, where most of his
students were Rakhine Buddhists. Now, he said, even Buddhist acquaintances in
Yangon are embarrassed to talk with him.
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| Rohingya refugees arriving in Bangladesh across the Naf River, in September. Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times |
“They want the conversation to end quickly because they
don’t want to think about who I am or where I came from,” he said.
In 1990, Mr. Kyaw Min won a seat in Parliament as part of
a Rohingya party aligned with the National League for Democracy, Myanmar’s
current governing party. But the country’s military junta ignored the electoral
results nationwide. Mr. Kyaw Min ended up in prison.
Rohingya Muslims have lived in Rakhine for generations,
their Bengali dialect and South Asian features often distinguishing them from
Rakhine Buddhists.
During the colonial era, the British encouraged South
Asian rice farmers, merchants and civil servants to migrate to what was then
known as Burma.
Some of these new arrivals mixed with the Rohingya, then
known more commonly as Arakanese Indians or Arakanese Muslims. Others spread
out across Burma. By the 1930s, South Asians, both Muslim and Hindu, comprised
the largest population in Yangon.
The demographic shift left some Buddhists feeling
besieged. During the xenophobic leadership of Gen. Ne Win, who ushered in
nearly half a century of military rule, hundreds of thousands of South Asians
fled Burma for India.
Rakhine, on Burma’s western fringe, was where Islam and
Buddhism collided most violently, especially after World War II, during which
the Rakhine supported the Axis and Rohingya the Allies.
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| Rohingya crossing a makeshift bridge in the Kutupalong refugee camp, outside Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times |
Later attempts by a Rohingya insurgent group to exit
Burma and attach northern Rakhine to East Pakistan, as Bangladesh was then
known, further strained relations.
By the 1980s, the military junta had stripped most
Rohingya of citizenship. Brutal security offensives drove waves of Rohingya to
flee the country.
Today, far more Rohingya live outside of Myanmar — mostly
in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia — than remain in what they
consider their homeland.
Yet in the early decades of Burma’s independence, a
Rohingya elite thrived. Rangoon University, the country’s top institution, had
enough Rohingya students to form their own union. One of the cabinets of U Nu,
the country’s first post-independence leader, included a health minister who
identified himself as Arakanese Muslim.
Even under Ne Win, the general, Burmese national radio
aired broadcasts in the Rohingya language. Rohingya, women among them, were
represented in Parliament.
U Shwe Maung, a Rohingya from Buthidaung Township in
northern Rakhine, served in Parliament between 2011 and 2015, as a member of
the military’s proxy Union Solidarity and Development Party. In the 2015
elections, however, he was barred from running.
Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya were disenfranchised in
those polls.
Mr. Shwe Maung’s electoral district, which had been 90
percent Rohingya, is now represented by a Rakhine Buddhist.
In September, a local police officer filed a
counterterrorism suit accusing Mr. Shwe Maung of instigating violence through
Facebook posts that called for an end to the security offensive in Rakhine.
(The military operation began after Rohingya militants besieged government
security posts in late August.)
Mr. Shwe Maung, the son of a police officer himself, is
in exile in the United States and denies the charges.
“They want every Rohingya to be considered a terrorist or
an illegal immigrant,” he said. “We are much more than that.”