The Rohingya Crisis – At Anthropology Today

The Rohingya Crisis  –  At Anthropology  Today

Guest Editorial by Elliott Prasse-Freeman

 As this article went to press, Myanmar military clearance operations in northwest Arakan state had already displaced over 600,000 Rohingya,1 the country’s long-oppressed Muslim minority. Often aided by Buddhist Rakhine people who claim the land as their own, these attacks have resulted in the torching of hundreds of Rohingya villages and the slaughter of over 1,000 men, women and children.

The simple facts of the crisis require reiteration because of the prevarication emerging from both Myanmar’s military and Aung San Suu Kyi’s government. Each has suggested that the Rohingya are burning their own homes, conjuring fake accusa­tions of rape and are solely responsible for the recent conflagra­tion. This narrative is unsupported by evidence.

On 25 August 2017 a militant group calling itself the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) did launch attacks on secu­rity installations that killed perhaps 100 people. But ARSA, a collection of Saudi-trained Rohingya emigres (ICG 2016), appears less like an organic expression of Rohingya resist­ance and more like a group of interlopers machinating to insti­gate an uprising. Content to play its part in such escalation, the Myanmar military used ARSA ‘terrorism’ to justify the initiation of a campaign of collective punishment and ethnic cleansing that shows no sign of ending. Indeed, even though the active destruction of Rohingya homes has currently ceased, no political solution is in sight, leaving the possibility of further conflict perpetually open. This is not the first time Rohingya people have been the victims of collective punishment at the hands of the Myanmar state apparatus – Rohingya were also expunged in the 1940s, 1978, the early 1990s and 2012 – and Myanmar’s leaders have given no reason to believe that fur­ther cleansing will not be forthcoming. This history of abuse and marginalization displaces attention from the recent events onto the political conditions that have enabled them. What is noteworthy is not ARSA’s attack but that the Rohingya have eschewed armed response in the face of humiliation and despair for so long.