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North Arakan: an open prison for the Rohingya in Burma
by Chris Lewa – is coordinator of The Arakan Project, a local NGO primarily dedicated to the protection and promotion of human rights for the Rohingya minority of Burma
Many minorities, including the Rohingya of Burma, are persecuted by being rendered stateless.
Hundreds of thousands have fled to Bangladesh and further afield to escape oppression or in order to survive. There were mass exoduses to Bangladesh in 1978 and again in 1991-92. Each time, international pressure persuaded Burma to accept them back and repatriation followed, often under coercion. But the outflow continues.
The Rohingya are an ethnic, linguistic and religious minority group mainly concentrated in North Arakan (or‘Rakhine’) State in Burma, adjacent to Bangladesh, where their number is estimated at 725,000. Of South Asian descent, they are related to the Chittagonian Bengalis just across the border in Bangladesh, whose language is also related. They profess Sunni Islam and are distinct from the majority Burmese population who are of East Asian stock and mostly Buddhists. Since Burma’s independence in 1948, the Rohingya have gradually been excluded from the process of nation-building.
The 1982 Citizenship Law — In 1982, Burma’s military rulers brought in a new Citizenship Law which deprived most people of Indian and Chinese descent of citizenship. However, the timing of its promulgation, shortly after the refugee repatriation of 1979, strongly suggests that it was specifically designed to exclude the Rohingya. Unlike the preceding 1948 Citizenship Act, the 1982 Law is essentially based on the principle of jus sanguinis and identifies three categories of citizens: full, associate and naturalised.
Full citizens are those belonging to one of 135 ‘national races’ settled in Burma before 1823, the start of the British colonisation of Arakan. The Rohingyas do not appear in this list and the government does not recognise the term ‘Rohingya’. Associate citizenship was only granted to those whose application for citizenship under the 1948 Act was pending on the date the Act came into force. Naturalised citizenship could only be granted to those who could furnish “conclusive evidence” of entry and residence before Burma’s independence on 4 January 1948, who could speak one of the national languages well and whose children were born in Burma.
Very few Rohingyas could fulfil these requirements. Moreover, the wide powers assigned to a government-controlled ‘Central Body’ to decide on matters pertaining to citizenship mean that, in practice, the Rohingyas’ entitlement to citizenship will not be recognised. In 1989, colour-coded Citizens Scrutiny Cards (CRCs) were introduced: pink cards for full citizens, blue for associate citizens and green for naturalised citizens.
The Rohingya were not issued with any cards. In 1995, in response to UNHCR’s intensive advocacy efforts to document the Rohingyas, the Burmese authorities started issuing them with a Temporary Registration Card (TRC), a white card, pursuant to the 1949 Residents of Burma Registration Act. The TRC does not mention the bearer’s place of birth and cannot be used to claim citizenship. The family list, which every family residing in Burma possesses, only records family members and their date of birth. It does not indicate the place of birth and therefore provides no official evidence of birth in Burma – and so perpetuates their statelessness.
The Rohingya are recognised neither as citizens nor as foreigners. The Burmese government also objects to them being described as stateless persons but appears to have created a special category: ‘Myanmar residents’, which is not a legal status. However, on more than one occasion, government officials have described them as ‘illegal immigrants from Bangladesh’. In 1998, in a letter to UNHCR, Burma’s then Prime Minister General Khin Nyunt wrote: “These people are not originally from Myanmar but have illegally migrated to Myanmar because of population pressures in their own country.” And a February 2009 article in the government-owned New Light of Myanmar newspaper stated that “In Myanmar there is no national race by the name of Rohinja.”
