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How to protect the rights of the stateless Rohingya people in Myanmar?
By Silvia di Gaetano — Ms. Silvia di Gaetano is an independent human rights analyst with an expertise on the protection of stateless Rohingya people from Myanmar.
Few years ago, I was in London attending a human rights festival,where I watched a documentary about Myanmar. At that time I knew little about Myanmar, but that movie struck my attention and gave a different direction to my life. I decided to take action and understand what was behind the Junta’s curtain and the military violence against its own people. Therefore, few months later, I started a Master in Human Rights & Conflict Management at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa, Italy and then spent four months at the United Nations Regional Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Bangkok.
Western Myanmar is populated by Buddhist Rakhine and Muslim Rohingya people. On May 28 2012, a Buddhist Rakhine woman has been alleged raped and killed by three Muslim Rohingya men. Consequently, on June 3, a group of Rakhine villagers assaulted a bus and killed 10 Muslims on board. Since June 2012, deadly sectarian violence erupted in the Rakhine State between the two ethnic groups, with an escalation of violence in October, leaving 800,000 stateless Rohingya in the hands of the International Community.
The Government of Myanmar has long denied Rohingya the right to obtain citizenship, therefore limiting their right to get married and found a family, to register the birth of their children, to enjoy freedom of movement, access to education, employment, medical care and legal protection. Many human rights violations have marked the life of the Rohingya people, leaving them without a sense of identity and belonging.
Consequently, the main questions leading this research are: Who are the Rohingya? Why are they considered Stateless and how to protect their rights and address the causes of the Myanmar discriminatory nationality law? Understanding the reasons of Rohingya stateless status and developing an understanding of the legal, political and social context in which the violence is taking place will set the floor to advocate for the rights of the Rohingya people to be recognized as citizens of the Union of Myanmar, and subsequently fully enjoy human rights.
The work is structured in nine chapters. Chapter I starts with information about Myanmar. Chapter II explains who the Rohingya are, based on an historic overview of Rohingya people’s origins, crucial to understand the derogative term “illegal Bengali” used in Myanmar to describe them. Chapter III shows a snapshot of the inter-communal violence between the Buddhist Rakhine and the Muslim Rohingya people in the Rakhine State. It is followed by a presentation of the 1982 Myanmar Citizenship Law, the main discriminatory law against Rohingya people, cause of the racism against the Muslim minority. Chapter V provides the reader with possible International and Regional Legal Instruments to address the problem of Statelessness, together with the concluding observations of the Human Rights Treaty Bodies and the recommendations of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar in Chapter VII. The last chapters are dedicated to explain the future and imminent implications for not tackling the problem of Statelessness in Myanmar and the repercussion of that in other ASEAN countries, followed by conclusions and possible solutions to Statelessness.
The Muslim Rohingya represent the four per cent of the entire population in Myanmar but the 50% of the population in the Rakhine State, where they manly live.8 It is hard for an average Myanmar person to understand the legal status of the Rohingya, due to the lack of knowledge of their historical background. To an average Myanmar citizen, a Myanmar person is a Buddhist. All the others are considered foreigners, therefore non-citizens.
The Rakhine State, historically known as Arakan State, is located in western Myanmar. Its capital Sittwe, lays on the Bay of Bengal to the west, and the areas affected by the inter-communal violence border with Bangladesh to the northwest. The Rakhine territory shares its borders with the Chin State to the north and to the east with the Magway and the Bago Region. Western Myanmar is populated by Buddhist Rakhine and Muslim Rohingya people. The Rohingya are a stateless, ethnically, linguistically and religiously distinct minority viewed as illegal Bengali immigrants by the Government of Myanmar and as one of the most persecuted minorities in the world, according to the UN. Through the analysis of the historic roots of the Rohingya, this paper will show why the origins of the Rohingya proved to be so contested. According to some historians, the Rohingya do not belong to Myanmar, whereas others assure the Rohingya have lived there for hundreds of years. The polemic around the origins of Rohingya is a result of politics, wrong notion of national identity, intolerance and discrimination. The truth is that at large the Muslims Rohingya have lived in western Myanmar well before the British colonization of the province.
Nevertheless, before the 1784 Burmese12 invasion of the Rakhine State, or “Burmanization”, the area was an independent kingdom inhabited by Buddhists and Muslims. The first use of the term “Rohingya” dates back to the VIII century, according to a research published by Francis Buchanan. At that time, part of the Muslims settled in the then Arakan State was using a different dialect and were calling themselves Rooinga, or natives of the current Rakhine State.
After the Burmanization, the Rakhine region has been annexed to Myanmar as one of its new provinces, forcing 200,000 Rohingya to leave and settle in Chittagong, nowadays the second largest city of Bangladesh. After the 1824-1826 conflict, the British annexed the Rakhine State to India and encouraged migration from Chittagong. This flow assisted to the return of many Muslim Rohingya people to their native land. It is worth notice that under British colonial rule there was no political border between Arakan and Bengal. Ever since, the Myanmar military junta has depicted the Rohingya as “Indian Bengalis from Chittagong”, perceiving this return as the first Rohingya arrival on the Myanmar territory. Therefore, the authorities consider the Rohingya as illegal immigrants. In addition, the confusion about Rohingya’s origins can also be contested with their distinguished dialect. While Bengali and Rohingya physically look similar, the Rohingya speak a completely different dialect, and some of them also speak the Myanmar language. The military junta has discriminated the Rohingya simply because of their skin color, their language and their different religion, contrary to the Myanmar Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ assertion that cites: “The main religions of the country are Buddhism (89.2%), Christianity (5.0%), Islam (3.8%), Hinduism (0.5%), Spiritualism (1.2%) and others (0.2%). Religious intolerance or discrimination on grounds of religion is nonexistent in the Union of Myanmar throughout its long history.” The generals endorse the Buddhist faith and the Myanmar culture for their national citizens only; as a result, the Rohingya, who want to retain their own culture and the Muslim faith, fall outside of this ideal criterion. In 1974, the Government issued the Emergency Immigration Act, which stripped Myanmar nationality from the Rohingya. Under the Emergency Immigration Act, the authorities required all citizens to present the National Registration Certificates, but the Rohingya were only given Foreign Registration Cards, i.e. non-nationals cards.
