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Understanding Violence, Strategising Protection – Perspectives from Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh
Meghna Guhathakurta – Research Initiatives Bangladesh (RIB)
Northern Rakhine State in Myanmar is inhabited by a majority Arakanese Muslim population and a minority Rakhine Buddhist population, in a state that is largely Buddhist and authoritarian. The recent history of exclusionary citizenship policies and consequent military operations against Arakanese Muslims, often called Rohingyas, have led them to flee Myanmar and take shelter in Bangladesh. In this study, I examine and review the stereotypes of each of these groups, implicated in the exclusionary nationalist policies of the Myanmar state, and the general hostility expressed towards the refugees by the host community in Bangladesh, with a view to understanding the multi-layered spaces of violence in which they live. The aim of this study is to elucidate protection mechanisms against such violence from the perspectives of refugees themselves. This is done through practices and observations noted by the author while engendering participatory processes among Rohingya refugees as part of a project being implemented by the organisation, Research Initiatives Bangladesh (rib).
Violence in and among nation-states occurs as a result of exclusionary processes that differentiate and discriminate segments of populations on the basis of religion, race, ethnicity and caste, and enshrine such exclusions in the policies, practices and, often, the constitution of such nation-states. These trends and forces result in displacement of the “excluded” segments of the population from the polity itself, and may lead to a situation in which refugees are created. Refugees, therefore, have implications for the nature of the democratic practice that many nation-states seek to uphold, and open up the likelihood of potential spaces of violence, especially in newly-created states, in societies in transition or in an otherwise unstable society. It is these spaces of violence that I shall be looking at in this study, from the perspective of “protection”, which is also considered to be a characteristic of the modern nation-state.
Nation-states need not be democratic per se, as the world realised with the rise of the fascist state in the 1920s, but a key characteristic of a democratic nation-state is the identification of a people with a national polity. One of the relationships this polity can be said to have with the controlling power of the state is embedded in the very notion of democracy—that it is literally ruled by the people. But as has been noted above, the practice of democracy does not always take place on a level playing field, benefitting all segments of the population equally; vast inequalities of power and resources may separate the haves and have-nots. Therefore, systems and practices of democracy also vary. The pluralist version of democracy—where power is a result of open competition, there are equal winners and losers, and the public arena is free and equal— exists mostly in theory.
The second form of democracy is the elitist version, what Marxists call “bourgeois democracy”, where power is maintained through systemic discrimination and privilege, people need influence, bargaining skills and resources to reap benefits, and power is conflictual. Then, there is the ideological version, or majoritarianism, where power is maintained through ideological values (mostly of the majority), institutional barriers to inclusiveness remain— in both the public and private arena — and hegemony, which incorporates both consensus and repression, prevents conflicts from arising (Gaventa, 1998).
“We Rohingyas are like orchids,” an 18-year-old Rohingya man called Shamsul once told me. “We are not able to grow any roots in the ground so we are left with only one way to stay alive and that is to cling on to others.”
The extreme south-eastern tip of modern Bangladesh, and the river and land border with Myanmar (modern day Burma), has shared a history of violent conquests and cultural exchanges since pre-colonial times, a feature that, in recent times, has made the region more a cultural frontier than a border between two states.
The northern Rakhine state in Myanmar is inhabited by a majority Arakanese Muslim population and a minority Rakhine Buddhist population, in a state that is largely Buddhist and authoritarian. The south-eastern tip of the Chittagong district of Bangladesh, on the other hand, houses the minority populations of ethnic Rakhine Buddhists, as well as the more“integrated” Barua (Bengalicised) Buddhist communities, in an area dominated by majority Bengali Muslims.
Since 1962, Burma was ruled by a military dictatorship for nearly half a century, and had one of the worst human-rights records in the world. In that suppressive society, where the Burmese army fought against a number of ethnic insurgencies, the Rohingya—Muslim settlers in the northern part of Rakhine State (formerly Arakan State), and who prefer to call themselves Arakanese Muslims—have been among the most persecuted. Following the 1982 Citizenship Law, passed under the rule of General Ne Win, Burmese Muslims were denied fundamental citizenship rights.
Such treatment by the Myanmar state has driven wave upon wave of Rohingyas into neighbouring countries like Bangladesh, where they have received only temporary shelter amidst hostility from local host communities. Support from the international community has also been fragile, limited to a coterie of humanitarian workers, journalists and academics. The Rohingya crisis has generated differing perspectives among international actors on the issues of citizenship and ethnicity. The situation has been well captured by Amal de Chickera in his article, “Stateless in Burma: Rohingya Word Wars” (de Chickera, 2012). His views, with some additions of my own, are elaborated on in the next section.
