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The Rohingya and National Identities in Burma
By Carlos Sardiña Galache – Journalist covering Southeast Asia, Bangkok (Thailand)
Earlier this year, the Burmese government held its first census in three decades with the assistance of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). The census was a risky undertaking from the very beginning. Some international organizations warned that the thorny question of ethnicity in particular was liable to generate conflicts. The Burmese government assured the UNFPA that it would allow everyone to identify themselves freely by the ethnic name of their choice. But this promise was broken just before the census started, when it was announced that Muslims in Arakan state would not be allowed to identify themselves as Rohingya, and the national military-dominated government claimed it was under pressure from the Buddhist Rakhine community.
As a result, as many as a million people remain uncounted in Arakan. The government denied their right to self-identify with the term of their choosing and pushed them to identify as Bengalis. This is just the latest episode in the decades-long persecution of the Rohingya by the Burmese state and Rakhine nationalists, who have denied them citizenship since the mid-seventies. The justification for such persecution asserted by the Burmese government, and shared by many Burmese citizens, is that the Rohingya ethnicity is an invention devised by illegal immigrants from Bangladesh to take over the land of Arakan.
Few people have made more effort to deny the claims of ethnicity by the Rohingya than Derek Tonkin, former British ambassador to Thailand and editor of the website Network Myanmar. Mr. Tonkin has reached his conclusions after digging deeply in colonial British archives, where he has not found a single use of the term Rohingya. His articles are well researched, and his command of the British colonial records is nothing less than impressive, but by relying almost solely on them he only offers a partial picture, from which I think he draws incorrect conclusions.
The debate on whether the Rohingya ethnicity should be regarded as one of the “national races” or not, assumes – implicitly or explicitly – as its framework of reference, the definition to be found in the controversial Citizenship Law passed in 1982. According to this definition, only those ethnic groups which were already in Burma in 1823 qualify as “national races.” That was the year before the first Anglo-Burmese war, when the British annexed provinces of the Burmese kingdom (Arakan, Tenasserim, Assam and Manipur, areas that are now part of India).
This is the basic conceptual framework within which Mr. Tonkin operates, the same conceptual framework within which Rohingya, Burmese and Rakhine historians alike hold heated debates. Rather than attempting to defend Rohingya claims, I shall argue that the notion of “national races” itself, and thus the set of assumptions hitherto determining the terms of the debate, are fundamentally false and do not facilitate any understanding of the history and present social realities of Burma.
The debate over Rohingya identity has been reduced to a confrontation between three different historical narratives: what we might call “Rakhine history” and “Burmese History” on the one side (on this point both are basically indistinguishable, albeit there are important divergences in other aspects), as opposed to the “Rohingya history” on the other. These narratives are mutually contradictory, making it impossible to find any common ground for all sides involved.
This is not unusual in a global context. Virtually all ethnic and/or national communities construct histories about themselves in order to advance their nationalistic claims. These histories are often loaded with myths more or less disguised as fact, anachronisms, and mystifications about the origins of the groups involved and importantly, their neighbors. The past is interpreted, constructed, and sometimes simply invented, to fit present political agendas.
Burmese and Rakhine nationalists often accuse the Rohingya of falsifying their history in order to advance their claims for ethnicity. It is true that Rohingya historians tend to minimize or ignore altogether the importance of the migration of laborers to Arakan from Bengal during colonial times; moreover, some have made claims that are historically incorrect. Arakanese history from the Rohingya point of view is littered with statements such as follow: “in the 15th century, a number of Muslim kings ruled Arakan, which was a golden period in the history of Arakan,” or “the ancestors of the people now known as the Rohingyas, came to Arakan more than a thousand years ago.”
In all likelihood, the origins of the Rohingya presence in Arakan are much more recent than that –albeit not as recent as the Rakhine and Burmese historians claim. The idea of “Muslim kings” is at best a misunderstanding, or at worst a willful distortion: in the 14th and 15thcenturies, some Arakanese Buddhist kings adopted seemingly Muslim titles because they followed models of rule taken from Bengal in equal measure as from the kingdoms in central Burma, if not more. Meanwhile, mirroring the distortions of “Rohingya history,” Rakhine historians tend to minimize, or to ignore altogether, the large numbers of Muslims living in Arakan before colonial times and to emphasize only the influx of Bengali laborers during colonial times.6 Now Rakhine leaders go so far as to claim that “illegal immigrants from Bangladesh” have arrived as recently as a few years ago and have continued arriving up to the first wave of sectarian violence in 2012, a highly dubious assertion for which there is no evidence.
On the Burmese side, we find assertions of a history of unity and continuity stretching back for hundreds of years and which was only broken by the traumatic colonial experience. Thus, in 2002, the military ruler, Senior General Than Shwe claimed that “thanks to the unity and farsightedness of our forefathers, our country has existed as a united and firm Union and not as separate small nations for over 2,000 years.” Again, blatantly untrue.
