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History of Rakhine State and the Origin of the Rohingya Muslims
By Dr. Haradhan Kumar Mohajan — Assistant Professor, Premier University, Chittagong, Bangladesh.
The Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic minority group in Rakhine, are considered among the most persecuted, vulnerable, and oppressed minorities in the world. Recently, the persecution on the Rohingya Muslims has increased due to Buddhist nationalism in Myanmar. The Rohingya continue to suffer from several forms of restrictions and human rights violations in Myanmar due to them being denied Myanmar citizenship.
They are victims of various forms of oppression, such as arbitrary taxation, land confiscation, destruction of mosques, torture and ill-treatment, extrajudicial executions, restrictions on movements, forced eviction and house destruction, forced laborers on roads and at military camps, and financial restrictions on marriage. Since the 1970s, a number of crackdowns on the Rohingya in Rakhine have forced them to flee to neighboring countries. More than one million Rohingyas have migrated to refugee camps in the Bangladeshi district of Cox’s Bazar. This article deals with the origin of the Rohingya, the form of their citizenship, and recent oppression in the Rakhine State of Myanmar.
Myanmar is the least developed country in the Southeast Asia. In the 1947 Constitution, the name of the country was proclaimed Burma, and in 1989, the military junta changed the name to Myanmar (Ullah, 2011). Rakhine is a state located in the west coast of Myanmar, one of the poorest regions of the country. Its area is 14,200 square miles (Islam, 1999). In Rakhine, it is estimated that 59.7% of the 3.8 million people are Buddhist, 35.6% are Muslim Rohingya, and the remainder are from other religious groups. The Rohingya Muslims did not originate from just one single racial stock. They are the mixture of diverse ethnic groups, including Arabs, Moghuls, and Bengalis (Alam, 2013). In Myanmar there are 7 million Muslims, which are 15% of the total populations of the country, and half of them live in Rakhine (Jaha, 1994).
There have been many debates on the origins of the Rohingya and the Arakan State. The two conflicting theories are that i) Rohingyas are illegal immigrants from neighboring Bangladesh (Saw, 2011; Ahmed, 2012), and ii) Rohingyas are native to Arakan, and are descendents of the original Muslim converted on Ramree Island (Bahar, 2010a; Forster, 2011). Although there are two opposing debates about the origin of the Rohingya, it is true that a large number of Muslims have resided in the Arakan for hundreds of years (Azad & Jasmine, 2013; Leitich, 2014).
The sectarian conflict has been especially focused in the Muslim areas that lie in the northern part of Rakhine State: Maungdaw, Rathedaung, and Buthidaung Townships (Human Rights Watch [HRW], 2013). During the last few years the Rohingya ethnic violence in Rakhine became extensive, which has transformed into ethnic cleansing and genocide (Nawoyski, 2013). The UN has identified the Rohingya as one of the world’s most persecuted minorities, and one of the largest groups of stateless people (Kiragu et al., 2011). The discrimination and repression of the Rohingya Muslims in Arakan are due to the negligence of the Government of Myanmar (GoM).
The current displacement of the Rohingya began after the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) attacked 30 security outposts along the border with Bangladesh on August 25, 2017, killing over a dozen Burmese police officers, and at least one Tatmadaw soldier. In response, ARSA was officially declared a terrorist organization, the first time Myanmar used such a declaration for an insurgent group. The Tatmadaw also deployed more than 70 battalions (about 30,000-35,000 soldiers) into Rakhine State. More than 620,000 Rohingya refugees have fled to Bangladesh since 25 August 2017, and took shelter in established refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar (Martin, 2017). In 2017, at least 1,000 Rohingyas, including children and infants had died. Dozens of the Rohingya Muslims drowned when their ill-equipped, overloaded boat capsized in rough waters (Wright & Westcott, 2017).
