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The Rohingya Crisis : Suu Kyi’s False Flag and Ethnic Cleansing in Arakan
Dr. Md. Mahmudul Hasan –International Islamic University Malaysia, Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty Member
The mountainous strip of Arakan or Rakhine State bordering with Bangladesh in the northwest is a western province of what is now the Union of Myanmar. It is geographically separated from the rest of the country by the long, near-impassable mountain range of Arakan Yoma. There have been ‘longstanding social tensions’ between its two major ethnic-religious groups, Rohingya Muslims and Rakhine Buddhists (also known as Maghs). During the 1942 massacre on Muslims, they were pushed to the north and the Buddhist Maghs occupied the southern half of Arakan ‘where they now form majority.’ Hence the largest concentration of Muslims is in the northern areas such as Maungdaw and Buthidaung. The dominant ethnic group Bamar (also known as Burmese or Burman) comprises about 60% of Myanmar’s population and has long been controlling the country’s politics and economy since independence in 1948. Needless to say, the former name of the country, Burma, is an inflection of Bamar or Burman. In post-independence Burma, the Burmese ruling elite expelled the non-Burmese from military and government posts and pursued a strategy of repression to contain opposition.
From 1962 to 1988 when General Ne Win (1911 – 2002) dominated the government, repression on non-Burmese people
exacerbated. After the fall of Ne Win, subsequent rulers adopted new strategies to perpetuate Burmese dominance. They started identifying the population in terms of religion not ethnicity. The religion card gave the rulers a big dividend, as Buddhism is the main religion among all ethnic groups except the Rohingya. Now the rulers present themselves – especially to rebellious ethnic groups such as Rakhaings, Kachins and Shans – as belonging to 89.8% Buddhist majority as opposed to 60% Burmese majority, whereas Christians make ‘6.3 percent, and Muslims 2.3 percent.’ Like other ethnic minorities in Myanmar, the Buddhist Rakhaings are politically disaffected and their ‘struggle for recognition within the new Myanmar is marked by anxiety about ethnic identity and national belonging … when political reforms at the center of the state produce ambiguities about their own position.’
However, both the centre and the Rakhaings regard the ‘presence of a majority Muslim population in Arakan … as a real problem’ and seemed to have reached ‘a secret agreement’ that the former would give more rights to the latter only when ‘the Muslim problem is fully tackled.’6 Hence, both the ruling elite at the centre and local Rakhaings have joined together to purge Rohingya Muslims from Arakan. Moreover, if the Rakhaings can be kept busy ‘tacking’ Rohingyas in ‘a proxy war,’ they wouldnot have time to complain about their economic deprivations, Arakan being the poorest among all provinces in Myanmar.
Hence, the state has stoked the Rakhaing Buddhists to re-start anti-Muslim acts of vengeance and ethnic cleansing even though, previously, except for some turbulent times, Arakanese Buddhists and Muslims had co-existed peacefully especially during Mrauk-U (1430-1785) and British (1826-1948) periods. As part of this state-sponsored hatred for Rohingya Muslims, in 1989, as the official name of the country was changed from Burma to the Union of Myanmar, the name of the state of Arakan was changed to Rakhine and its capital city Akyab, to Sittwe. Since etymologically the terms ‘Arakan’ and ‘Akyab’ have Arabic-Islamic associations, this name-change is considered part of cultural oppression on Rohingyas and is slanted in favour of the Buddhist Rakhaings. With the formation of the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) in June 2010, the military junta kept stirring up religious hatred and intensifying its agenda of presenting the Muslims as the common enemy in the run-up to the largescale genocide that was launched in October 2016 onwards. Through using various propaganda machines, the establishment made the anti-Muslim agenda as the only way to do politics in Myanmar. It helped establish Ashin Wirathu’s racist Committee for the Protection of Nationality and Religion (Ma Ba Tha) that contributed to ethnic cleansing both by mobilizing populist sentiment and participating in mass killings and mayhem. Aung San Suu Kyi toed the line and became complicit with the anti-Muslim agenda and her National League for Democracy (NLD) did not choose a single Muslim candidate to stand for her party in the 2015, not even in the Muslim-majority Arakan region. Thus, as Myanmar’s de facto leader and part of the political elite, the Nobel laureate and once dubbed as symbol of democracy, Suu Kyi has condoned and virtually presided over the recent genocide in Arakan.
Major Waves of Genocides: The first time Rohingya Muslims had found themselves second-class citizens in their own land was in 1785 when the Burmese invaded and annexed Arakan. The conquerors committed massacres and used thousands of prisoners as slaves: [A]s many as 6,000 Arakanese youth were sent to renovate the Meiktila Lake and none of them returned. In addition, Arakanese forced labour was extracted to build the 500 feet tall pagoda in Mingun in Burma. In 1791, an unsuccessful attempt against the Burman rule in Arakan was followed by massive reprisal … [and] 200,000 Arakanesewere murdered. Another attempt in 1796 ended in failure and resulted in massive influx of Arakan refugees into the Cox’s Bazar area [in Bangladesh].
During those difficult years of mass execution and mass slavery, many Arakanese Muslims took shelter in the neighbouring areas of what is now Bangladesh. When, after the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824-26), British India annexed Arakan and much of Burma in 1826, many expatriate Rohingyas as well as Bengalis were brought to Arakan mainly to serve British interests. Muslims had a relatively peaceful time in Arakan until WWII when they found themselves in the line of fire between the British and Japanese forces. The Arakanese were thought to be on the side of the British who eventually abandoned them to themercy of the Japanese and the Burmese mob during the Japanese occupation period (1942-45), which facilitated the 1942 massacre of the Rohingya Muslims that cost more than 100,000 lives.
After Burma became independent in 1948, elements among the Arakanese sought autonomy. In 1962, General Ne Win (1911-2002) seized power in a military coup and began widespread persecution of Rohingyas and declared them foreigners (Bengalis) arguably for the first time in history. Then again in February 1978, Ne Win ‘launched a large-scale program named ‘Operation Dragon King’ (Naga-Min)’ that caused death of nearly ‘tens of thousands of Rohingyas’ and mass exodus to Bangladesh of more than 200,000 of them. The next big blow on the Rohingyas came four years later in the form of the 1982 Citizenship Law. The recent violence and mass killings of 2012, 2014 and 2016-17 cost thousands of lives, a higher incidence of gang rape, burning down of hundreds of villages and mass migration of nearly a million genocide survivors.
Although Rohingya Muslims have been living in Arakan since the eighth century, with military rule in 1982 they suddenly became stateless through a process of ‘arbitrary deprivation of citizenship.’ The government adopted Citizenship Law which approved of a list of135 recognized ethnic groups in the country; it derecognized and delisted the Rohingya. Muslims are recorded to have participated in the administration of Arakan as early as the fifteenth century beginning with the historic Mrauk-U dynasty (1430-1785), the golden era in terms of Muslim-Buddhist coexistence. In pre- 1962 Burma, ‘there had been several Rohingya members of parliament and ministersin the cabinet.’ More specifically, in 1951 and 1956 elections, ‘at least eleven Rohingyas, including women, returned to Burmese Parliament as MPs.’ However, during the military regime from 1962 to 1995, not a single Muslim was given any ministerial post. Then in pre-2015 parliament, Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party had a number Muslim MPs.
The current wave of genocide started in October 2016 on the pretext of avenging alleged 9 October 2016 pre-dawn attacks on military outposts by Rohingya insurgents. This is the final phase and is designed to exterminate Rohingya people completely. In two weeks from 9 October 2016, hundreds were killed, innumerable women were raped and thousands of houses were razed to the ground and 723,000 ( UNHCR Report) Rohingyas fled to Bangladesh, and that was in addition to hundreds of thousands of them who had migrated there over time to escape earlier ethnic cleaning. Then the genocide that started on 25 August 2017 has literally spared nothing, as the current commander-in-chief of the Myanmar Armed Forces, Sr. Gen. Min Aung Hlaing regards this as the ‘unfinished business’ of ‘clearing the Rohingya.’ Jeffrey Gettleman’s account of one Rajuma’s predicament may give a hint what has been happening during this recent genocide: She told me (and everything she said was consistent with dozens of other witness accounts) that Myanmar government soldiers stormed into her village in August and burned down each house. They separated the men from the women and summarily executed the men. Then they raped the women. But before raping her, Rajuma said, the soldiers snatched her baby boy from her arms and threw him into a fire. The baby was screaming for her as he burned to death.
