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RLI Working Paper No. 13 — Access to citizenship in transitional Myanmar: Seeking Rohingya rights the wrong way?
Laura Parker, BA (Cantab), MA (London), University of London, UK.
The Rohingya have been de jure stateless since Myanmar’s 1974 Constitution and 1982 Citizenship Act excluded them as a ‘national race,’ denying them citizenship and its contingent rights. Racial and religious persecution has intensified, producing intractable displacement and ‘in-placement’ (containment) of the Rohingya population. I examine why, despite the democratic transition ostensibly underway in Myanmar, access to any measure of justice seems ever less conceivable for the Rohingya. A discussion of the interplay between statelessness, refugeehood and citizenship guides an enquiry into the challenges for leveraging the transitional moment in Myanmar for Rohingyas to exercise their rights. Terms such as ‘protection space’ and ‘humanitarian space’ are critiqued, so as to shift focus away from static notions of place and territoriality, and onto the dynamics of disenfranchisement and processes of exercising human rights. I conclude that barriers to accessing rights are exacerbated by the policies and institutional structures of international human rights actors, but that solutions are ultimately political and inter-personal, and hinge upon Myanmar’s navigation of its potential new role as an opening democracy, conditioned as it is by the exclusionary inclusion of the nation-state paradigm.
The oft-cited remark that ‘the Rohingya are one of the most persecuted minorities in the world,’ reifies this people as much as it invites examination of their multi-faceted persecution. I interrogate the dynamics contributing to the extreme difficulties faced when this group of around 1 million people living mostly in Myanmar’s Rakhine/Arakan state, and displaced into Bangladesh and beyond, seeks to exercise their human rights. The overarching concern framing my enquiry is the interaction between local and international concepts and actors, and how the latter, assumed arbiters of protection, may actually violate Rohingya rights. I examine practical and conceptual barriers to accessing rights, hoping that a combined approach will elucidate pathways for progress at this transitional moment in Myanmar.
The Rohingya – predominantly Muslims – have been severely persecuted since military rule began in 1962, and subjected to forced labour, arbitrary arrest, indefinite detention, torture, killings, sexual abuse, destruction of property and mosques, restricted freedom of movement, internal displacement, education bans, denial of medical treatment and family size limitations, amongst other atrocities. Discrimination and violence are perpetrated by officials, security forces and the Rakhine ethnic majority in Rakhine State, primarily Buddhists, with near total impunity. Although Rakhine are themselves another ethnic minority group, who claim independence from, and have waged armed insurgency against, the national majority Bamar (also Buddhist), Rakhine and Bamar are aligned over the Rohingya issue. Hate speech against Muslims, and the Rohingya in particular, is widely accepted, with monks and politicians leading boycotts against Muslim businesses, and inciting violence.
The military intermittently mobilised these divisions subsequently, to divert attention from economic and security issues: ethnically-diverse Myanmar became ‘not so much a melting pot as a pressure cooker.’ Discrimination was fostered legally: the 1982 Citizenship Act denationalised Rohingya, denying their status as one of Myanmar’s 135 recognised ‘national races.’ Only children of ‘national races’ were recognised as full citizens. Rohingyas’ resultant statelessness has exacerbated their poor access to protection domestically and abroad.
Rohingya fled to Bangladesh in three major waves, of approximately 250,000 in 1978 and 1991-92 each, and then in a more recent wave in 2012, though low-level displacement occurs regularly. Most Rohingya refugees are not recognised in Bangladesh, and are deemed illegal economic migrants and decried as Islamic terrorists. They have no local integration routes, live in an easily-exploited situation of precarious human security, and are detained or refouled occasionally. The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) supplies basic aid to 30,470 individuals registered in camps, and is blocked by the Government of Bangladesh (GoB) from assisting an estimated 400,000 unregistered refugees. Approximately 635,000 Rohingya live as refugees or (generally irregular) migrants in Thailand, India, Malaysia, and further afield, though refoulement has intensified regionally, with Thai authorities towing Rohingya boats out to sea and leaving hundreds to die, fearful of creating pull-factors to their territory. The 2012 violence, which left 140,000 displaced internally, now effectively imprisoned in segregated camps, focussed international attention on what many commentators deem to be Myanmar’s nascent quasi-civilian democracy: Human Rights Watch reports signal state complicity in – and instigation of – violence, eliciting allegations of ‘outsourcing genocide.’ Domestic impunity is mirrored by the international impunity the Government of Myanmar (GoM) enjoys, with other states and international institutions quick to praise reforms and compete as investors unencumbered by previous rights-centric, conditional approaches.
My analysis contemplates both those Rohingyas who remain stateless in Myanmar, and those who have fled as stateless refugees to Bangladesh and further. It is fuelled by unease with resignation towards this as a ‘protracted displacement’ deadlock, and humanitarian actors’ impotence in the face of sovereign power – particularly one party to few human rights instruments. Lack of citizenship is a lesser-understood phenomenon, and this case highlights the interconnectedness of statelessness, vulnerability, persecution and displacement. I am compelled by the idea that while Rohingyas pierce the fiction of historical unity in Myanmar, the plight of exiled Rohingya carries wider significance, for ‘by breaking up the identity between man and citizen, between nativity and nationality, the refugee throws into crisis the original fiction of sovereignty.’ Stateless refugees thus represent that most unknowable of ‘Others,’ simultaneously explaining their comprehensive rejection at all doors and, conversely, ‘clear[ing] the field for a no-longer-delayable renewal of categories’ – the spark for creative thinking and fresh advocacy is ushered in.
