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Myanmar’s Rohingya Crisis: An Analysis of Security Threats for South Asia
Md Intekhab Alam Khan — Ph.D. Research Scholar, Nelson Mandela Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution, Jamia Millia Islamia Jamia Nagar, New Delhi, India.
This paper analyses the security threats emanating from the cross-border movement of displaced Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar’s Rakhine State. The paper presents a brief background of the ethnic conflict involving Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims to explicate its historical context. The objective of the analysis is to understand the consequences of escalation of latest crisis in Myanmar. For analysing the threats, reports of leading international organizations such as International Crisis Group, Human Rights Watch, United Nations’ Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and first-hand accounts of leading international media houses have been consulted.
Myanmar’s restive Rakhine State is a theatre of invisible genocide. The world community is watching in awful silence as Myanmar government has unleashed a reign of terror on hapless, haggard, impoverished and the stateless Rohingyas – the world’s most persecuted ethnic group according to the United Nations (UN). The decades’ long cruelty against the community transited into a new phase of systemic persecution after a group of 400 armed Rohingyas attacked three Burma Guard Police (BGP) bases on 9 October 2016. Consequent to this attack the government launched a massive crackdown against the community on the pretext of anti-terrorist search operation, which is described by the President’s office as “clearance operations.” The crackdown led to widespread displacement of population from northern Rakhine to neighbouring Bangladesh as well as India.
Large-scale population migration often accompanies security threats to a region. In a recent report by UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), more than 66,000 Rohingyas have arrived in Bangladesh since October 2016.1 The latest flight of Rohingyas is in continuation with the earlier massive displacement triggered by 2012 communal riots in northern Rakhine. Most of the 140,000 displaced people of 2012 are settled in refugee camps at Cox’s Bazar district of Bangladesh. A large number of these uprooted Rohingyas have also sneaked into India through the porous borders with Bangladesh. As per a report in The Quint, nearly 36,000 Rohingyas are living in different locations in India. Although Myanmar is part of the Southeast Asian regional block but Rakhine State is closer to South Asia sharing borders with the southernmost tip of Bangladesh. Escalating crisis in Rakhine raises serious concerns of security in the immediate neighbourhood. There is also the fear of a renewed Muslim insurgency in Rakhine. This paper analyses the nature of security threats emanating from the extremely volatile situation in Rakhine in the larger South Asian context.
Latest crisis in Myanmar is a manifestation of deep-rooted historical grievances between Rohingya Muslims and Arakanese Buddhists (also called Bamar). Ethnic hostility goes back to the emergence of British colonial period in Burma (Myanmar). The First Anglo-Burmese war (1824-1826) led to the annexation of Arakan (now Rakhine State) to British India. Post the Burma conquest, Indian labourers from regions part of today’s Bangladesh were brought to the province for labour works. The demographic change owing to British-engineered immigration in the sparsely populated Arakan caused socio-economic distress that engendered conflict of interest between the Rohingyas and Buddhists. In the conclusion of the study, the author concludes that why is it imperative to prevent further escalation of the ethnic conflict and how.
