The Truth About Myanmar’s Rohingya Issue

articles in the series can be found here.

After over 50 years of military rule, Myanmar is finally making the long-awaited transition to elected government. Its second liberation is brought about by Aung San Suu Kyi, the head of the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) and the daughter of Aung San, the man who is known for engineering Myanmar’s first liberation from the British. Yet, as foreign media converges on the nation, coverage in recent months has been focused on one issue: the Rohingya.

Nicholas Kristoff’s recent article in The New York Times begins: “Soon the world will witness a remarkable sight: a beloved Nobel Peace Prize winner presiding over 21st-century concentration camps.” Tens of thousands of Rohingya have been forcibly confined in deplorable conditions in Sittwe, whilst there is evidence that the ethnic cleansing perpetrated under the military government amounts to genocide. In May 2015, stranded Rohingya off the coast of Thailand elicited humanitarian outrage from the international community. Ever since, foreign commentators have called for an end to what appears to be government inaction or lack of accountability for extreme human rights abuses in Rakhine state.

But international attention directed at the issue – meant to hold the government accountable –may have in fact inadvertently played a role in exacerbating tensions between the Rohingya and the Rakhine Burmese. Increasing resentment is bred within the Rakhine Buddhist community, who believe the situation has been mischaracterized.

In most cases the situation has been mischaracterized. Rakhine history expert Jacques P. Leider may have put it best in his analysis Rohingya: The Name, The Movement, The Quest for Identity. “By narrowing the debate on the Rohingyas to the legal and humanitarian aspects, editorialists around the world have taken an easy approach towards a complicated issue… where issues like ethnicity, history, and cultural identity are key ingredients of legitimacy,” Leider states.

In even a cursory survey of Rohingya history, it is clear that the Rohingya are not an ethnic, but rather a political construction. There is evidence that Muslims have been living in Rakhine state (at the time under the Arakan kingdom) since the 9th century, but a significant number of Muslims from across the bay of Bengal (at the time a part of India, now Bangladesh) immigrated to British Burma with the colonialists in the 20th century. They are, as defined by Benedict Rogers (himself a prominent critic of the military regime’s persecution), “Muslims of Bengali ethnic origin.” The group referred to as “Rohingya” by contemporary Rohingya scholars (and most of the international community) today actually display huge diversity of ethnic origins and social backgrounds, and, as Leider argues, the existence of a “single identity” is difficult to pinpoint.