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“The Government Could Have Stopped This”
Sectarian Violence and Ensuing Abuses in Burma’s Arakan State
By Human Rights Watch, U.S.A. 2012
Arakan State is located in western Burma, bordering the Bay of Bengal to the west, Bangladesh to the northwest, Burma’s Chin State to the north, and Magwe, Bago, and Irrawaddy Divisions to the east. The fertile plains and coastal wetlands of the state are separated from the rest of Burma by the dense jungles of the Arakan-Yoma mountain range, which for centuries enabled Arakan kingdoms to maintain political independence from lowland Burmese kingdoms.
The population of Arakan State is largely agrarian and remains one of Burma’s poorest, with over 43.5 percent living below the poverty line, second only to Chin State, according to a 2011 study by UNDP. Yet tens of billions of dollars’ worth of verified natural gas deposits have been found in the Bay of Bengal off the coast of Arakan State. Chinese, South Korean, and Indian companies are mining the gas in partnership with the state-owned Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise, among others, under undisclosed contracts negotiated under the former military government. Oil and gas transport pipelines are currently being constructed from Arakan State to Yunnan Province in China. Interpretations of early and modern Arakan history are contested. The historical question of who among the inhabitants of the state have a valid claim of indigenousness, besides the predominantly Buddhist ethnic Arakan, is deeply controversial. The government of Burma and Burmese society at large roundly reject claims that the Muslim populations of Arakan State, many of whom identify as Rohingya, are entitled to Burmese citizenship, let alone recognition as a distinct ethnic group in Burma. Most citizens of Burma, of all ethnicities, do not acknowledge the term Rohingya and commonly refer to the Muslim population in Arakan State as “Bengali,” “so-called Rohingya,” or the pejorative “Kalar,” claiming that they are all illegal migrants from what is now Bangladesh.
Nevertheless, there have been Muslim inhabitants in western Burma for centuries. Use of the term “Rohingya” in English dates back at least to research published in 1799 on the languages of Burma, by Francis Buchanan, M.D., who wrote of a dialect in western Burma “spoken by the [Muslims], who have long settled in Arakan, and who call themselves Rooinga, or natives of Arakan.” Arakan was in ancient times regarded as an extension of northern India. Some sources suggest the territory of Arakan State was largely inhabited by Indians until the area was invaded in the 10th century by one of the earliest Tibeto-Burman tribes to enter what is today Burma, at which point the “newcomers mixed with the original inhabitants and formed the Kingdom of Arakan.” In 1404, when the Kingdom of Ava from northern Burma invaded the Arakan Kingdom, the Arakan king Naramithla fled to Bengal, where he lived in exile until 1430 before returning to Arakan to establish the Arakan capital of Mrauk-U. While in exile, the king was exposed to Islam in the Bengali city of Guar and its influence was reflected upon his return to Arakan, when he established what has been called “a remarkably hybrid Buddhist-Islamic court, fusing traditions from Persia and India as well as the Buddhist worlds to the east.”8 Thereafter, in the 15th century, Arakan kings copied and used coins with Islamic inscriptions and coins from Bengal; Persian language was used in diplomatic exchanges in the 17th and 18th centuries; and Mughal-Arakan wars in eastern Bengal gave rise to an active, and lamentable, trade in Bengal slaves.
The British colonial period led to a shift in ethnic and religious relations in the state. The first Anglo-Burmese war, from 1824 to 1826, left Arakan territory under British colonial rule until Burma’s independence in 1948. During the colonial period, the British moved the capital from Mrauk-U to what is known today as Sittwe, and there was no political border between Arakan and Bengal, giving rise to new population flows between Chittagong, or east Bengal, and Arakan.9 The Muslim population of Arakan State grew significantly during this period, from approximately 58,000 in 1871 to 179,000 in 1911, according to British colonial records. This information has been used by some to argue the Rohingya as an ethnic minority per se does not exist; that the Rohingya exist merely as a modern construct; and that all “so-called Rohingya” are direct descendants of migrants from Bengal during the British colonial period. The latter claim is widely accepted in Burma, and it is operative, because current Burmese law denies citizenship to those who cannot verify their ancestry in Burma prior to British colonial rule. While the Rohingya and Bengalis from Bangladesh are in many ways physically indistinguishable from each other, the Rohingya in Burma speak a unique dialect of Bengali, distinct from the Bengali spoken across the border, and many Rohingya in Burma also speak Burmese.
After Burma’s independence in 1948, the country underwent a post-colonial political reformation marked by political instabilities and armed ethnic conflict until a coup by the army in 1962 introduced military rule that would last for over 60 years. Throughout the period of military rule, up to the present—which is still marked by a military-dominated parliament—the Burmese army has committed numerous human rights violations against both the Arakan and Rohingya populations of Arakan State, including killings, widespread forced labor, rape, torture, land confiscation, and other abuses. The Arakan people have played an important role in defending human rights and promoting democracy in Burma, despite enduring great repression. For instance, ethnic Arakan were key in building momentum for the 2007 nationwide demonstrations led by Buddhist monks against government-imposed fuel price hikes. In the early stages of the protests, on August 28, 2007, as state security forces arrested protesters in Rangoon, approximately 200 Buddhist monks took to the streets in Sittwe, significantly altering the course of the protests—the biggest in Burma in two decades. Soon, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in protest throughout the country. Dubbed the “saffron revolution,” for the color of the monks’ traditional robes, the Burmese military government brutally cracked down on protestors to the shock of the international community. Among those forcibly disappeared in the government crackdown were several monks and activists in Arakan State.
Since independence there have been relatively small and sometimes short-lived Arakan and Rohingya armed insurgencies in the state, both pitted against the central government toward different ends, but none of the insurgencies have proved to be of much political significance. The Arakan Liberation Party—the political wing of an Arakan armed group—in April 2012 signed a ceasefire agreement with the Burmese government, and still enjoys broad moral support in Arakan State. This contrasts with various Rohingya armed insurgencies, which had little support among local Muslim populations and reportedly received some assistance, though nominal, from international extremist organizations.
While both populations suffered terribly under military rule, the oppression of the Rohingya was uniquely compounded by their denial of Burmese citizenship. For example, in the mid-1970s, Burma required all citizens to possess National Registration Certificates under the Emergency Immigration Act, but Rohingya were only given Foreign Registration Cards, which many schools and employers would not accept. In 1977, the government initiated a program called Naga Min (Dragon King) to “scrutinize each individual living in the State, designating citizens and foreigners in accordance with the law and taking actions against foreigners who have filtered into the country illegally.” While the program was nationwide, in Arakan it degenerated into massive human rights abuses against the Rohingya by the army and the local Arakan residents and authorities. There were killings, mass arrests, torture, and other abuses, driving more than 200,000 Rohingya to Bangladesh.19 At the time, the government of Burma claimed, “19,457 Bengalis fled to escape examination because they did not have proper registration papers,” referring to the Rohingya as Bengalis and grossly underestimating the number of refugees. In Bangladesh, the authorities withheld food aid to the refugees in an attempt to force them back to Burma; more than 12,000 starved to death.21 The survivors were forcibly repatriated to Burma, settling primarily in northern Arakan State.
In 1983, in what appeared to be a response to Bangladesh’s mass repatriation of Rohingya to Burma, the Burmese government completed a nationwide census in which the Rohingya were not counted, rendering them stateless through exclusion. The 1982 Citizenship Act had legalized this exclusion. In 1991, the Burmese army repeated its expulsion of Rohingya, driving more than a quarter million out of Arakan State into Teknaf and Cox’s Bazaar in Bangladesh. The Burmese army slashed and burned its way through villages, killing hundreds and forcing a new outflow of refugees. Bangladesh was again hostile to the refugees and forced them into squalid refugee settlements. Human Rights Watch documented Bangladesh’s forced repatriation to Burma of some 50,000 Rohingya between September 1992 and the end of 1993. At the time, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was not present in Burma and had no agreement with the Burmese government to provide assistance to returnees. There were serious abuses in the camps in Bangladesh, including beatings and the denial of food rations by camp authorities, which were directed at forcing the refugees back to Burma, similar to the behavior of Bangladesh in 1978. Nevertheless, the vast majority of the 50,000 refugees who returned to Burma did so involuntarily, and UNHCR was unable totrace them upon their return.
In 1994, UNHCR established a small field presence in Arakan State, at which point additional Rohingya were forcibly repatriated to Burma by Bangladesh authorities. At the time, UNHCR promoted mass repatriation on the grounds that the situation in Arakan State was conducive to return, although Human Rights Watch later documented that the refugeesdid not return voluntarily. The effort was marked by the use of excessive force, including killings, by Bangladeshi security forces and Burmese troops receiving the Rohingya. In 1995, some of the returnees were granted Temporary Registration Cards (TRC), which provided only limited rights to movement and employment in northern Arakan State. Since then, thousands of dispossessed and stateless Rohingya in Arakan State have subsisted on humanitarian aid from international agencies and the UN World Food Program, surviving brutal repression by Nasaka, a Burmese border guard force comprising an amalgam of the army, police, immigration, and customs officials. Nasaka has law enforcement, military, and administrative authority in the predominantly Muslim townships of northern Arakan State, making it an entity unique to all of Burma. Nasaka routinely conscripts Rohingya for forced labor, and last year alone Nasaka arbitrarily detained between 2,000 and 2,500 Rohingya for “offenses” such as repairing homes without permission. Those in custody are often beaten and mistreated, and they secure their release through payments to Nasaka commanders, usually through brokers or middlemen.
Every year, thousands of stateless Rohingya—fleeing repression and abuse in northern Arakan State and unable to travel overland in Burma—take to the seas in dangerous journeys to Bangladesh, Thailand, and Malaysia. These travels frequently result in violence and exploitation by human traffickers, push-backs to sea, and prolonged, indefinite detention in foreign lands. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya work illegally in Malaysia, Thailand, and the Middle East, or have sought asylum in other countries. Thousands of Arakan have also fled abuses and poverty in Burma and live abroad as undocumented workers or as asylum seekers in India, Malaysia, Thailand, and other countries. Due to their ability to travel freely in Burma, Arakan rarely join the perilous sea journeys taken by Rohingya
