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The Rohingya Crisis: Impact and Consequences for South Asia
Didier Chaudet — Consultant on Eurasia and South Asia and also Editing Director, Center for the Analysis on Foreign Policy, France.
Inevitably, the Rohingya crisis will have an impact on the South-East Asian environment. But it would be simplistic to see this important Burmese internal issue as limited to South-East Asia. Geographically and historically, Myanmar has also been connected to another area: South Asia. Hence, what is happening to the Rohingya Muslim minority is also a political issue of particular importance for the subcontinent. This paper will analyse its impact on India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Since the end of August 2017, a long-term policy of ethnic cleansing in Myanmar has again turned violent against a minority in this country – the Rohingya people. Using the pretext of „terrorist attacks‟ against the security forces by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) – Rohingya rebels,1 the Burmese Army has targeted Rohingya civilians, burning villages, killing men, raping women, forcing a whole population to flee because of their identity, not their actions. Indeed, at the root of what is called the „Rohingya Crisis‟ is a refusal to accept this population as a minority indigenous to Myanmar. They were stripped off their citizenship by law in 1982.
For local nationalists, to be a citizen of Burma was strongly influenced by an ethnic (Bamar, the majority in the country) and religious (Buddhist) approach. Rohingyas, from their point of view, are South Asians, Bengalis, brought to the country by the British coloniser. This simplistic approach, that the history of the Rakhine/Arakan territory and of its Muslim population are disconnected, has made Rohingyas non-state actors (NSAs) considered a danger to the nation, as a “foreign‟, alien element. At the time this paper is written, one can already say that Burma has partly succeeded in its policy of violence and persecution; there are now an estimated 650,000 Rohingya Muslims in Bangladesh of the 1.1 million in Myanmar, with countless still fleeing.
This is a crisis of tremendous importance for South-East Asia. But the anti-Bengali undertone of the Rohingya crisis, and the impact of this population’s latest escape, mainly to Bangladesh, is proof that this issue will also impact South Asia. After all, India and Bangladesh share borders with Myanmar. For humanitarian, political and geopolitical reasons, it is clear that Dhaka, New Delhi, and even Islamabad, will be affected by the crisis.
