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Sedimentary logics and the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh
By Lindsay Bremner, School of Architecture and Cities, University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road, London, NW1 5LS, UK
This paper adopts a geosocial approach to sociopolitical research by thinking with sediment as a forceful mode of terraqueous mobility driven by interactions between dynamic earth systems inflected by social processes. It demonstrates that sediment is an active and vital state of matter, with the potential to erupt into and disrupt human politics. Unpacking sediment as a form of movement challenges assumptions of the earth as a stable platform on which socio-political processes play out. The paper develops its argument through analyses of the Rohingya refugee camps in southeast Bangladesh and a char (sediment) island in the Meghna Estuary to which Bangladesh proposes to relocate the refugees. In the first situation, the sedimentary logics of anticline geology, deforestation and monsoon rains push back against political agendas directed towards constraining refugee movement. In the second, fluvial and oceanic sedimentary dynamics and the post-Holocene volatility of the monsoon throw into doubt the engineering solution proposed by Bangladesh to the political problems the refugee presence poses. Through these examples, the paper adds to literature on how states of matter inflect, exceed, undercut or in other ways interfere with matters of state through their unique, dynamic environmental properties.
In their introduction to the special issue of Theory Culture and Society: Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene, Nigel Clark and Kathryn Yusoff (2017: 3) argued that for some time “most social thought has taken the earth to be the stable platform upon which dynamic social processes play out.” However, they argued, contemporary climate change and the Anthropocene thesis are prompting social thought to engage more closely with the dynamics of earth systems and to consider how social and political agency is constrained, made possible and emergent with earth forces. This proposition reiterated Elizabeth Grosz’s (2012) call to think through rather than about the earth and to afford political power to “the elemental forcefulness of the earth itself” (Clark, 2017b, p. 223).
The Rohingya — The Rohingya are Muslims of the Mayu Frontier of Myanmar’s Rakhine (formerly Arakan) State. Rhakine lies between the Bay of Bengal and the Arakan Mountains and borders Bangladesh across the Naf River. The history of the Muslim presence in Rhakine State is disputed. Rohingya historians claim indigenous status traceable back for more than 1000 years while others trace Rohingya history back only to the 1950s when Bengali Muslim intellectuals began to call themselves Rohingya. They were descendants of immigrants from the Chittagong District of East Bengal who had migrated to Arakan after it was ceded to the British at the end of the first Anglo-Burmese War (1824–26) (Chan, 2005). However, there were Muslim settlers in Arakan long before 1826. The earliest of such settlers were the Bengali retinues of King Min Saw Mon, the founder of the Mrauk-U Dynasty (1430–1784). They were allowed to settle in Mrauk-U after the King regained his throne with military assistance from the Sultan of Bengal (Chan, 2005). In the 17th Century, the Muslim population in Arakan grew when Bengali slaves were acquired by the Arakanese from the Portuguese and assigned to agriculture and other services. Arakan was conquered by the Burmese in 1784, who ruled it until 1824. During this period, many Arakanese fled to British Bengal. As a result, when the British annexed Burma in 1826, Arakan was scarcely populated. Favouring Bengalis over Burmese, the British encouraged Bengali Muslims to migrate as agriculturalists into the fertile valleys of Arakan to reinstate former high yield paddy fields. At the time, there was no international boundary between Bengal and Arakan and no restrictions were imposed on movement between the two territories. In the 1830s, thousands of Muslims migrated from Chittagong to Arakan as seasonal labourers. Their labour provided the impetus for the economic development of Arakan. Arable land expanded 4.5 times between 1830 and 1852, regular shipping lines opened between Akyab (now Sittwe) and Chittagong and Akyab became one of the major rice exporting cities in the world.
During this period the British introduced policies favourable to Bengalis in Arakan. These policies included the Zamindary System that allocated land on 99 year leases to Bengalis while denying leases to the Arakanese. Arakanese peasants who had fled Burmese rule and returned after British annexation were thus deprived of the land they had previously owned through inheritance. Bengali Zamindaries did not want Arakanese as tenants, instead importing Bengali peasants to cultivate their lands. As a result, many Chittagonians made Arakan their home and after a century of colonial rule they became the numerically dominant social group in the Mayu Frontier (Chan, 2005). Peaceful co-existence between Muslims and Buddhists in Arakan was maintained until beginning of World War Two despite political, ethnic and religious cleavages that had been simmering for a century (Chan, 2005). After the withdrawal of the British from Burma in 1942, ethnic violence between Arakan Buddhists and Muslim Chittagonians broke out. Yegar (1972) suggests that underlying cause for the violence was the Zamindary System, aggravated by Buddhists and Muslims siding with the Japanese and the British respectively during the Second World War. This conflict transformed the Mayu Frontier into a no-go-zone, with many atrocities committed on both sides. In 1946 Arakan Muslims formed the Muslim Liberation Organisation (MLO) and sent a delegation to Karachi to discuss a proposal with the leaders of the Muslim League to incorporate some of Arakan State’s northern townships into East Pakistan. This proposal was ignored.
In 1948, after subsequent demands for recognition made to the newly independent government of Burma were also ignored, the MLO, renamed the Mujahid Party, destroyed Arakan villages in the north of Maungdaw. In a historical reversal of the Zamindary system, one of the major reasons for this rebellion was that Muslims who had fled Japanese occupation were not allowed to resettle in their villages (Yegar, 1972). In 1951 the Mujahid Party demanded that Northern Arakan become a Muslim State as an equal constituent of the Union of Burma. This demand was not acceded to. Subsequent uprisings in the guise of Jihad encouraged by Muslim clerics gave way to banditry, arson and rape and the frontier was thrown into turmoil for a decade. In 1962 a military coup resulted in Burma becoming a one-party military state and the Mujahid movement was driven underground. In 1982, the military government passed the Citizenship Act that recognized only ethnic groups who had lived in Burma since before 1824 when the First Anglo-Burmese War began. This legislation was designed to deny citizenship rights to Rohingya Muslims, most of whom had arrived in Myanmar after 1824. In this way the Rohingya became officially stateless. They were subsequently denied citizenship documents, education, employment, freedom of movement or the right to marry freely and were vulnerable to arbitrary detention, forced labor, discriminatory taxation and confiscation of property (Abdelkader, 2013).
In 1978 the Myanmar military had launched a nationwide initiative known as Naga Min (Dragon King) to register the population prior to a national census. This initiative provoked the flight of 200,000 Rohingya into Bangladesh, where they were not welcome and denied food aid to force them back to Myanmar. It should be noted that Bangladesh is not a signatory to the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees nor its 1967 Protocol. The UNCHR only operates in Bangladesh via a Memorandum of Understanding signed in 1993. There is also no specific provision for refugees in Bangladesh’s legislative apparatus. The law governing their presence is the 1946 Foreigners Act, which grants the government the powers and discretion to decide on the scope of the Act’s application (UNCHR, 2012). In 1978, more than 12,000 Rohingya refugees starved to death and others were forcibly repatriated. According to one scholar, this hostility was owing to the siding of the Rohingya with Pakistan during the Bangladesh War of independence (Yegar, 1972).
Again in 1988 and 1992, Rohingya Muslims fled to Bangladesh after counter insurgency campaigns against them. After the 1992 incident, 250,000 remained in Bangladesh. 28,000 were registered as refugees and lived in two official United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNCHR) refugee camps, Kutupalong and Nayapara, and up to 220,000 lived in surrounding villages as undocumented migrants (Sidhu & Parnini, 2011). In 1993, the UNCHR and the Bangladesh authorities signed a memorandum of understanding guaranteeing protection of the Rohingya in the refugee camps and setting out a process of voluntary repatriation. At the same time, the UNCHR and Myanmar agreed the issuing of identity cards and limited rights to movement and employment for those who returned to Myanmar. Between 1993 and 1997, 230,000 Rohingya returned to Rakhine State, though many subsequently went back to Bangladesh (Danish Immigration Service, 2011). In March 2016 Aun San Suu Kyi’s democratically elected government took office in Myanmar and hopes were high that Rohingya citizenship would be restored. In October 2016 however, attacks were launched on police posts in northern Rhakine State allegedly by Rohingya militants. The subsequent security operations saw 87,000 Rohingya flee into Bangladesh. In August 2017 further attacks on police posts resulted in hundreds of Rohingya villages being burned to the ground. A mass exodus of 600,000 Rohingya followed in 2017. They joined the estimated 200,000 Rohingya already living in Bangladesh concentrated in its two southernmost upazilas (districts), Ukhia and Teknaf. The refugees were accommodated in refugee camps, makeshift settlements and local villages or stranded in the border regions of Bandarban and Cox’s Bazaar (United Nations & Partners, 2017). Here a geological borderland of sub-ducting, folding tectonic plates is substrate to a frontier culture, where traditionalism meets Islam meets Buddhism and weak institutions of democracy are subject to political, ethnic and religious violence and cleavage (Guhathakurta, 2018).
The Rohingya refugee camps are concentrated on the Teknaf Peninsula, a narrow finger of land sixty km long and five to ten km wide between the Bay of Bengal and the Naf River, which is the boundary between Bangladesh and Myanmar (Fig. 1). To the north of the peninsula is an area of approximately 40 sq. km (4000 ha) that is recognized as protected forest by the Bangladesh Forest Department. In September 2017, 800 ha of this forest were allocated for the extension of the UNCHR’s Kutupalong camp set up by the 1993 Memorandum of Understanding between the UNCHR and Bangladesh. Prior to the 2017 influx, Kutupalong was home to 13,900 refugees. 100,000 undocumented Rohingya lived in makeshift settlements around it (Danish Immigration Service, 2011). To its south, separated by a swathe of forest, was Bulukhali, another makeshift settlement. By 8 November 2017, these settlements had become contiguous, forming the Kutupalong-Balukhali expansion site. It was the largest refugee settlement in the world, housing over 600,000 refugees. Just to its south the Jamtoli, Hakimpara and Potibonia settlements housed another 100,000 refugees. Further south, Nayapara and Leda had joined to form a third sprawling concentration of more than 88,000 refugees, spreading into surrounding villages (Strategic Executive Group, 2018) and an estimated 56,000 refugees were absorbed into host communities (Tani & Rahman 2018).
In this paper, I have taken up two related challenges posed by Clark and Yusoff (2017) in the light of climate change and the Anthropocene: to engage more closely with the dynamics of earth systems, and to consider how social and political agency is constrained, made possible and emergent with earth forces. The objectives of the paper were framed by my encounters with sediment and its extraordinary volume and force in a developing monsoonal research methodology in south and southeast Asia.
