Syed Badrul Ahsan. Asian Affairs. Volume 49, Issue 4. November 2018.
On 25 August 2017, the Myanmar army, together with extremist Buddhists, launched operations against Rohingya villages in the country’s Rakhine state as a measure toward what was given out as anti-terrorist action. The “terrorists”, of course, were members of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), a previously unknown outfit which had suddenly attacked some security outposts and killed twelve Myanmar soldiers.
It does not take much to comprehend the reasons behind this quick, and so far ephemeral, appearance of ARSA. The violence it let loose at the outposts was precipitated by a continuing campaign of atrocities by the Myanmar authorities against the Rohingyas, an ethnic group largely of Muslims whom the government in Naypyitaw does not acknowledge as citizens of the country. That attitude flies in the face of historical reality, which is one of the Rohingyas being people who have lived in Rakhine state for generations but who have seen their rights consistently chipped away over the years, to reach a point where it has become rather conventional for the Buddhist majoritarian group of Myanmarese—and included here are the military, the administration putatively led by Aung San Suu Kyi, the political opposition and the Buddhist clergy—to argue that the Rohingyas are foreigners whose roots are in neighbouring Bangladesh. A particular reason behind this argument is the fact that the Rohingyas speak a form of Bengali which, however, is not to be spotted in Bangladesh proper.
The attacks by ARSA on the security outposts in August 2017 were, as events unfolding since that moment have so clearly demonstrated, a convenient pretext for the Myanmar military to unleash its brutal operations against the Rohingyas. Indeed, there are all the suspicions to lead one to the conclusion that the soldiers, in line with the general attitude of Myanmar’s authorities, were engaged at the time in exploring the possibilities of a fresh new push against the Rohingyas, one that would compel them to leave the country and move to—where else?—Bangladesh. The soldiers succeeded brilliantly. Beginning their onslaught on the Rohingyas the same night, on the spurious grounds of clearing operations against ARSA, they razed Rohingya homes and villages, killed men, women and children in indiscriminate manner and raped scores of Rohingya women. The Tatmadaw, the Myanmar term for the army, was swift and surgical in its work, compelling hundreds and then thousands and eventually tens of thousands of Rohingyas to cross the frontier into Bangladesh in search of shelter. At this present time, as many as 750,000 Rohingyas happen to be housed in poor accommodation in south-east Bangladesh, with little sign of any deal being reached anytime soon on the modalities, if at all, of their return home to Myanmar.
The Rohingya issue is, in light of the circumstances in which it exercises minds across global diplomatic fora, a crisis of a dimension to which no solution is in sight. The exasperating consistency with which the Myanmar authorities have remained committed to removing the Rohingyas from Rakhine while at the same time holding out “promises” to work out a solution to their plight does not convince the international community that a way out of the crisis can be negotiated in the near future. Such depressing reflections are certainly provoked by the absolute wall of intransigence which the authorities in Myanmar, on the watch of Aung San Suu Kyi, have put up in response to all overtures and proposals for a solution to the problem.
One must begin at the beginning, which essentially is the report submitted on the Rohingya issue to the Myanmar government by what was officially known as The Advisory Commission on Rakhine State and informally referred to as the Annan Commission. A year prior to the military onslaught on the Rohingyas, on 23 August 2016 to be precise, State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi authorized Kofi Annan, the former secretary general of the United Nations, to undertake studies of the situation and submit a report to her government. The report by the Annan Commission was released on 24 August 2017. It recommended, among other measures, the need for the authorities to undertake a review of the 1982 citizenship law, which had turned the Rohingyas into a stateless people, and in accordance with established global convention, take measures towards lifting all restrictions on the exercise of human rights by the Rohingyas.
One will note that that Kofi Annan and his commission released the report only a day before the ARSA attacks on the Myanmar security outposts and the launch of the concerted army crackdown on Rohingya villages in Rakhine state. Clearly, the sudden attacks by ARSA served as a good pretext for the Myanmar authorities to hold themselves back on an implementation of the steps suggested by the Annan Commission. The reluctance of the Suu Kyi-led administration to work on the recommendations and instead eagerness about creating hype about the ARSA attacks in order to justify the systematic and protracted army operations against the Rohingya community were the earliest indication of more trouble ahead not only for the persecuted community, not only for Bangladesh (which was forced to house the fleeing Rohingyas), but also for the international community.
The Annan Commission’s reference to the 1982 law, which it suggested be reviewed in the interest of a solution to the crisis, calls for a brief survey of the historical factors which have pushed the Rohingyas to their present plight.
Extremists among Myanmar’s Buddhist community have endlessly come forth with the argument that no Rohingyas were in Myanmar before 1824, a point in time—and that was the period of British colonial rule—when in their perception the “Bengalis” began to settle Rakhine state. The argument does not hold much water, considering that it does not explain the gigantic leap in the Rohingya population in Rakhine state immediately after 1824. Even if the argument that Rohingyas were essentially people who moved from Bengal, as it used to be prior to the partition of India in 1947, to Myanmar—and indeed there are good reasons to believe that during the period of British rule in India and Burma some degree of migration of Rohingya Muslims to Rakhine state did take place—is acknowledged, the scale of the migration has never matched the numbers related to the presence of Muslims who were already part of the landscape in Rakhine before 1824.
It is interesting that on the eve of independence being granted to Burma by the British colonial power in 1948, a group of Rohingya political leaders appealed to the colonial authorities to initiate measures which would have the northern region of Arakan state incorporated in what was then East Pakistan (today’s Bangladesh). The appeal was clearly given short shrift and the Rohingyas found themselves, unlike some other ethnic groups in Burma, between a rock and a hard place. There was little chance for them to be part of the neighbouring Muslim state of Pakistan. And, at the same time, they discovered, to their deep disappointment, that independence for Burma did not translate into independence, insofar as citizenship rights were concerned, for them. A ray of hope was, of course, provided by Prime Minister U Nu (who was to be deposed in the military coup of 1962). In his opinion, the absence of citizenship rights for Rohingyas was a temporary circumstance, though he did not address the question of when this temporary status might draw to an end. His view that “the Rohingya has the equal status of nationality with Kachin, Kaya, Karen, Mon, Rakhine and Shan” was not followed up by concrete action to bring the Rohingyas at par with other citizens of Myanmar, or Burma as it was then known. Even so, the Rohingya community was sustained by its belief that in the democratic condition which then defined national politics, they could afford to remain optimistic about their future within the constitutional parameters of the country.
The optimism was belied, first, by the failure of the U Nu government to take any purposeful measures toward bringing the Rohingyas into the national mainstream in all the years it was in office, and second, by the commandeering of the state by the Myanmar army under General Ne Win in 1962. The coup d’etat was to turn out to be the earliest sign of the difficult path which lay ahead for the Rohingyas. It did not help that some Rohingya politicians, who happened to be members of the country’s parliament, were supportive of the Ne Win regime and subscribed to the political programmes enunciated in what was beginning to be touted as the Burmese Road to Socialism.
The blow to Rohingya aspirations for citizenship was not long in coming. The new constitution adopted for the country in 1974 did away with any question of drawing the Rohingyas into the mainstream and instead left them in no uncertainty that they were henceforth to be regarded as foreigners residing in Myanmar. The Rohingyas were advised to accept identity cards that would specifically refer to them as foreigners. An immediate consequence of the move was for the Rohingyas to come under organized attacks by the Buddhist majority, the result being the exodus of a good number of these hapless people into Bangladesh, which in its early years of independence was going through a very rough patch in terms of political instability and a famine that would test the patience and ability of the government of Prime Minister Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bangladesh’s founding father. The 1974 constitution cobbled into shape by the Ne Win regime can properly be regarded as the beginning of a crisis which in subsequent times was to assume critical proportions. The dilemma which Bangladesh and by extension the global community is confronted with in these present times is a direct offshoot of the Myanmar decision in 1974 to push the Rohingyas further into a grey region of political uncertainty and indeed raise questions afresh about their place in the historical scheme of things in Myanmar.
But the 1974 constitution, depressing though it was, was not the end to the problems faced by the Rohingyas. More draconian steps were to come. The Burmese Citizenship Law adopted in 1982—and the Ne Win junta yet ran the show—recreated the old argument, indeed sophistry, of Rohingyas entering the country after 1824 and therefore not people who were or could be considered eligible for citizenship. Indeed, this constant refrain about people and ethnic groups inhabiting the country since before 1824 being legitimate components of the country’s demographics—and therefore of Myanmar society—has been a yardstick on the basis of which the Myanmar state has continued to define itself. This argument is one which has not only been a weapon for the military to wield at every opportunity but has now also been embraced by Aung San Suu Kyi, whose refusal to refer to the Rohingyas in the historical term that defines them as a people has been grating for the international community.
In effect, the 1982 Citizenship Law formalized the status of Rohingyas in Myanmar as foreigners. No more was there any recapitulation of U Nu’s promise, however dubious, of the community being incorporated within the larger Myanmar social structure. That the steps taken by the Ne Win regime between 1974 and 1982 to establish a racially pure Myanmar society through treating the Rohingyas as Muslim/Bengali illegal immigrants served as a disturbing vision for the future was made evident. For one brief shining moment, however, the Rohingyas experienced flashes of new hope with the arrival of Suu Kyi on the scene in 1988 and the elections of 1990. It was quite logical for them to persuade themselves into believing that Suu Kyi, having turned into a global icon of human rights through her long struggle against the dictatorship of the army, would eventually find the means and the measures to accord them the rights they had been denied for ages.
In the event, the daughter of Aung San has deeply left the Rohingyas disappointed. The Rohingyas were ignored in the elections of 2015. It does not help that British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt has been sympathetic to Suu Kyi during his visit to Myanmar in September 2018. He made it clear that “Myanmar has a constitution that is only halfway to democracy and the military are not accountable to her.” For good measure, he adds that “one has to understand the difficulty of her position.”
Unfortunately, the record relating to Suu Kyi’s politics in recent times, with special reference to the Rohingya issue, does not justify such sympathy for an individual who has so far given little or no indication that she is hamstrung in the pursuit of policies she would like to inaugurate and implement in Myanmar. As a matter of fact, her dogged refusal to address the Rohingya issue, to the extent of not calling them Rohingyas, is a broad sign of not her helplessness but her likely complicity in perpetuating the problem. To be sure, Suu Kyi is not to be held to account for the issue as it has grown over the decades. However, what cannot be ignored is the studious silence she has kept on the plight of the Rohingyas. A hint of the psychology which appears to have been working in her can be discerned in her reaction to an interview she gave to the BBC’s well-known anchor Mishal Husain. To the dismay of many of her well-wishers who still believed her hands were tied over the Rohingya issue, she let it be known that she was not aware that she was going to be interviewed by a Muslim. She did not elaborate on the statement, but the comment was unexpected from an individual of her stature.
In recent months, particularly since Rohingyas in increasing numbers began heading for the border with Bangladesh and into the country in August last year, Suu Kyi has had occasion to be visited by a number of prominent figures, one of them the American politician Bill Richardson. It soon became evident, though, that Richardson was incensed by Suu Kyi’s cavalier attitude to the plight of the 750,000-plus Rohingyas in Bangladesh and made it a point to let the world know of his disappointment at Suu Kyi’s style of functioning. Suu Kyi’s meeting with Jeremy Hunt was, in a larger sense, a measure of the hope the world continues to see in the Myanmar leader about a resolution of the issue. And that is despite the steep decline in reputation she has undergone in her global standing as a votary of peace owing to her silence on the Rohingyas.
The Rohingya issue, it is clear, has hit a wall of silence in Naypyitaw. One ought not to be under any illusion that the leadership, meaning Suu Kyi and her NLD colleagues as well as the military, intends to heed the calls made by the international community for a resolution of the problem through making it possible for the refugees now in Bangladesh to return home in security and on the understanding that they will be assured of the political as also citizenship rights they are entitled to. An instance of the Myanmar authorities reneging on promises is their failure to follow through on the deal, however unsatisfactory, they reached with Bangladesh in November 2017. The agreement to allow the Rohingyas to return home, albeit on the basis of a verification of their antecedents by Myanmar, from Bangladesh was a deeply flawed one despite the optimism expressed at the time by Bangladesh’s Foreign Minister Abul Hasan Mahmood Ali. “This is a primary step … now we have to start working,” said a visibly happy Ali.
In reality, there was hardly anything to work on, for the Myanmar authorities continued to assert that the Rohingyas were not their citizens and that those who would be permitted to return would need to depend on the criteria Myanmar would employ in determining their status. Indeed, the Bangladesh-Myanmar agreement was a non-starter given that no guarantees were proffered by Naypyitaw on whether the refugees would be able to return to their homes in safety and resume life in its normal mode. The larger question related to where the refugees, assuming they were cleared by the Myanmar authorities, would actually return once they were back in their country. Their homes had been razed, their villages bulldozed and army camps set up in their place. The only possibility open to them was accommodation in special camps to be set up by the government, which in effect would mean repression in a new form.
The deal that Bangladesh reached with Myanmar was therefore bound to collapse even before taking off, a prime reason being the severe criticism it ran into from governments and human rights activists seized with the Rohingya issue and its implications for the region. Moreover, there was the litany of inaction on Myanmar’s part, as can be observed in the aftermath of the recommendations made by the Annan Commission. The Myanmar government did make it known, in a half-hearted manner, that it accepted the recommendations and that it was putting in place a new body tasked with ensuring an implementation of the recommendations. The new body was officially designated as the Advisory Board for the Committee for Implementation of the Recommendations on Rakhine State. One of the members of the advisory board was Bill Richardson who, as has been pointed, resigned in anger.
The formation of the Advisory Board was followed by the setting up of yet another body, The Independent Commission of Enquiry. Not much of a difference was made, however. This commission went nowhere.
Complicating matters for the Rohingyas was the failure of the Annan Commission recommendations to get past the United Nations Security Council. The effort to gain the support of the UNSC and especially the five permanent members of the Security Council was blocked when Russia and China, nations friendly with Myanmar, vetoed the recommendations. Geopolitics together with national interests was at work, with neither Moscow nor Beijing willing to alienate Myanmar by the public reprimand which an approval of the recommendations would have meant for the Myanmar government. The move by the Russians and the Chinese ties in with their inclinations, along with India’s, not to go along with Bangladesh’s belief that pressure from them would compel the Myanmar authorities into taking concrete action on an issue which, if not checked, would spiral out of control. Bangladesh was of course unhappy with the attitudes demonstrated by Delhi, Moscow and Beijing but chose not to express its disappointment in public for fear of alienating the three nations with which it has scrupulously been trying to enhance economic, defence and other forms of cooperation.
In recent years, the Bangladesh government headed by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has been careful about maintaining a balance in its relations with India, closeness with which goes back to 1971 when Delhi assisted Dhaka massively with moral and material support in its struggle for freedom from Pakistan, and with China, a country with which it has had defence deals and would certainly like to keep it on its side in the power politics typified by geopolitics. With Russia, Bangladesh’s relations have been based on crucial issues, an instance being Moscow’s help in the development of the Rooppur nuclear plant. It follows, therefore, that a significant aspect of Bangladesh’s diplomacy at present is to do nothing that will have even the slightest negative impact on its relations with Russia, India and China. Its disappointment on the positions of the three countries on the Rohingya issue notwithstanding, Dhaka remains aware of the need for pragmatism in its diplomatic dealings with them. That does not detract from the fact that economic compulsions make it hard for Bangladesh to maintain the 750,000-plus refugees for a long period of time, on top of the 300,000 Rohingyas who entered the country in an earlier phase in the early 1990s.
In the last couple of months, international concerns over the Rohingya problem increased to an unprecedented level of intensity. At the end of August this year, a United Nations investigating team released a damning report on Myanmar’s treatment of the Rohingyas, holding senior military officers, including the chief of the army, responsible for the creation of a situation which stretches the patience of the world community. Myanmar’s obfuscations have patently exasperated the UN team, whose 444-page report not only excoriated the army but also stated in harsh terms the requirement for the military to step away from politics. The statement was directed at the country’s politicians, who have long suffered through the decades of military rule or, as in the present, military dominance of national politics. The army continues to play its selfappointed role of guarantor of the constitution, a document it framed in its own interest and which gives it a permanent twenty-five per cent representation in parliament.
The UN report has been blunt in its condemnation of the Myanmar government, making note of the military’s role in the creation of conditions of genocide targeted at the Rohingyas. Denied access into Myanmar, the investigators spoke to 875 Rohingyas fleeing Myanmar before emerging with its conclusions. Those conclusions have been supported by organizations which have remained engaged in highlighting the issue before the world.
The release of the UN report was swiftly followed by a statement from Fatou Bensouda, prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, on her plans of initiating preliminary inquiries into the atrocities committed by the Myanmar army against the Rohingyas in Rakhine state. It is doubtful, however, if the Myanmar government or Aung San Suu Kyi will be spurred into action other than condemning the move. Myanmar is not a signatory to the statute establishing the ICC. Bangladesh is.
The refusal of the Myanmar authorities to heed international opinion on its treatment of the Rohingyas, together with the manifest failure of the global community to exert pressure on Myanmar, enough for it to change course on the issue, raises the spectre of a situation far more serious than it is at present. Myanmar has not appeared to be moved by the opinions of UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, who on a visit to the Rohingya shelters in Bangladesh in early July 2018 was shaken by the experience. Accompanied by Jim Yong Kim, President of the World Bank, Guterres praised Bangladesh’s handling of the refugee influx but made it clear that conditions were not good for the refugees. He was pointing the finger at Myanmar. “It is unacceptable,” he said, “that these people who have suffered so much in Myanmar now have to live in difficult circumstances that these camps inevitably represent.”
Strong words from the UN chief. But they fell on deaf years in Myanmar.
The Rohingya issue, unless it is resolved to the satisfaction of the world community, will likely roll into a crisis of graver dimensions for the region and of course for the wider world. Unlike places such as Afghanistan, more than two million of whose citizens are in Pakistan because of a conflict dating back to the early 1980s, the Rohingyas are no victims of a military conflict between two nations. Their flaw is not just their physical features, which closely resemble those of people in Bangladesh and large parts of India, but also their religious beliefs. They are Muslims who the majoritarian sections of Myanmar citizens look upon as aliens and interlopers, people who do not belong. The attitude is widespread in a country where Buddhist extremism has complemented the regime’s efforts to drive the Rohingyas out, with the unstated intention of restoring what might be called, from their perspective, a purification of the land from a racial point of view.
These facts only compound the issue, from the Bangladesh perspective. In a country where politics remains in a state of ferment and democracy is yet a tenuous affair, the presence of such a large chunk of Rohingyas in a particular region invites fear. The fear has everything to do with the fact that the south-east of Bangladesh—that is where the Rohingya refugees are sheltered—has by and large been home to such fundamentalist political organizations as the Jamaat-e-Islami. The Jamaat, which has now been de-registered owing to its brutal role in helping the Pakistan army carry out atrocities against Bengalis supporting the guerrilla war for Bangladesh’s independence in 1971, has seen several of its leaders walk the gallows in recent years after their conviction for war crimes committed forty seven years ago. In public, the Jamaat is keeping a low profile, but that is hardly any reason to suppose it and some other Islamist groups will not mount surreptitious campaigns to recruit young Rohingyas in armed action against the Bangladesh state and government. It is a fear which keeps the Sheikh Hasina government on its toes.
While the threat of an Islamist radicalization of Rohingyas is a thought the government dreads, the spectre of social crime committed by the Rohingyas has already manifested itself. Rohingya youths have been caught committing theft and in some cases murder. At the other end, there are reports of young Rohingya women being sold to prostitution by Bangladeshi procurers. Quite a few of these young women have been abducted and pulled into the flesh trade.
The ramifications of the Rohingya crisis are thus to be imagined. There are legitimate fears that of the relatively small number of Rohingyas who remain in Myanmar, most—or even all—of them will eventually be pushed into Bangladesh, thereby cleansing the entirety of Myanmar of an ethnic community which has lived in Rakhine state for generations.
The world needs to act quickly, firmly and decisively in defence of the Rohingyas. A particular obstacle in the way of a resolution of the crisis is the unwillingness of Russia and China, as permanent members of the UN Security Council, to agree with other permanent members of the body on the imperative for Myanmar to take back its citizens from the refugee camps in Bangladesh, restore their homes and villages to them, compensate them for the damage done to them in physical and psychological terms and, above all, create the legal and constitutional mechanisms for them to be recognized and accepted as citizens of Myanmar.
Unless such strong measures are taken, there is every possibility that conditions will spin out of control for everyone. The Myanmar regime will be tempted to push more Rohingyas into Bangladesh. For its part, Bangladesh will be provoked into a pushback of the refugees to Myanmar. Border conditions, for both Bangladesh and Myanmar, have sometimes degenerated into ugliness. It is a prospect no one wishes to see turn into reality.
Ethnic cleansing does not just leave a people and a way of life destroyed. It ends up questioning the very moral basis of civilization itself. That is the hard lesson coming out of Myanmar.