Sunday 29 August 2021

Seeking Refuge: 218 Rohingyas died or went missing at sea

Source TheDailyStar, 20 Aug


Photo: Reuters/Navesh Chitrakar/File Photo

At least 218 Rohingyas died or went missing at sea in 2020 as they desperately sought refuge in the Southeast Asian countries either from Myanmar's Rakhine State or Bangladesh's Rohingya camps, a new UN report says.

They are part of 2,413 Rohingyas who are known to have travelled last year, making it the deadliest year on record for refugee journeys in the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea since the region's "boat crisis" in 2015, according to the report of the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, released yesterday.


"This means that journeys were eight times deadlier in 2020 than those in 2019," according to the report titled "Left Adrift at Sea: Dangerous Journeys of Refugees Across the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea".

It also highlights that some two-third of those attempting these perilous voyages are women and children in contrast to earlier periods where most of those travelling were men.

UNHCR says these deadly journeys of the Rohingyas are not a new phenomenon. Over the past decade, thousands of Rohingya refugees have left by sea from Rakhine State in Myanmar and from the refugee camps in Cox's Bazar.

"The roots of these dangerous journeys are found in Myanmar, where the Rohingya were stripped of their citizenship and denied basic rights."

Bangladesh hosts nearly a million Rohingyas, mostly those who fled a brutal military campaign in 2017. Back in Rakhine State, there are some 600,000 Rohingyas.

For the Rohingya who found refuge in neighbouring countries, restrictions on movement, livelihoods and education are compelling factors to seek a future elsewhere in the region. Motivations are various, often overlapping, and also include aspirations of reuniting with family members, UN Refugee Agency said.

They are at even greater risks of abuse by smugglers when making such journeys. Their ordeal was made worse because safe harbours to end their dangerous journey were nowhere to be found.

Since 2020, many refugees have been marooned for months on unseaworthy boats, falling prey to abuses by smugglers, becoming gravely ill through insufficient food and water, and enduring the harsh conditions at sea, it said.

These risks have been prolonged on the occasions where the regional states have "pushed back" boats to prevent disembarkation, UNHCR said.

UNHCR has called on all states in the region to search for and rescue refugees in distress at sea, and disembark them to a place of safety, work towards a regional mechanism for predictable and equitable disembarkation and provide access to asylum procedures for those who disembark.

It also called on the states to work with UNHCR and support fellow countries in the region to implement dignified reception arrangements and provide protection and assistance to refugees who disembark, and address the root causes of refugee maritime movements.

UNHCR's Regional Director for Asia and the Pacific Indrika Ratwatte said, "For as long as states bordering the Andaman Sea and Bay of Bengal are reluctant to rescue and land those in distress at sea, that collective failure to act will have tragic and fatal consequences. We can and must do better."

Friday 20 August 2021

Rohingya Genocide Survivors Will Get Historic Day In Court

Source BROUK, 15 Aug

For Immediate release: 16th August 2021

Rohingya genocide survivors will this week for the first time be able to share their stories in a court of law anywhere in the world, the Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK (BROUK) said ahead of a historic hearing in Argentina.

Rohingya victims of the Myanmar military's brutality, including five survivors of sexual violence, will testify during a court hearing at the Federal Criminal Appeal Court in Buenos Aires on Tuesday 17 August. The hearing comes as the Argentinian judiciary considers taking up a genocide case against the Myanmar military leadership under the international legal principle of universal jurisdiction.

"This week's hearing marks a historic moment for the Rohingya people. After decades of fighting for justice for atrocity crimes, survivors will finally get a chance to tell a court what they have been through. This gives us hope that one day there will be accountability for the Tatmadaw's – the Myanmar military's – genocide against our people," said Tun Khin, President of BROUK.

"This is also a reminder to the world that justice is the only way to break the cycle of violence in Myanmar. The same military that has tried to wipe out the Rohingya as a people are now in control of the country since the coup. The Tatmadaw must face the consequences of their murderous actions. This week's hearing is not just for the Rohingya, but for all our brothers and sisters in Myanmar who have suffered through military abuse."

On 13 November 2019, BROUK petitioned Argentinean courts to open an investigation into the role of Myanmar's civilian and military leaders in committing genocide and crimes against humanity against the Rohingya. Under the principle of universal jurisdiction, such crimes can be investigated anywhere in the world regardless of where they were committed.

Since 2019, developments at the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) have added momentum to international justice for the Rohingya genocide. At the same time, many experts – including the UN Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar – have urged states to pursue universal jurisdiction cases against the Tatmadaw and its allies.

The Argentinian judiciary is still considering whether to take up the case, and this week's hearing forms part of this process. Rohingya survivors will testify to their experiences, including five women who were victims of sexual violence in one of the villages devastated by security forces in Rakhine State before fleeing into Bangladesh in 2017. The names of the victims, who will speak remotely from refugee camps in Cox's Bazar, are being withheld for their own safety.

If the case is accepted by the Argentinian judiciary, it will be the first universal jurisdiction case related to the situation of the Rohingya anywhere in the world. The case in Argentina will cover the full range of crimes committed entirely in Myanmar against the Rohingya, including mass murder, enforced disappearances, widespread torture, sexual violence, and mass imprisonment. This is different to the ICC case, which is limited to only crimes which have at least partially been committed on Bangladeshi territory.

Among those named in the case are Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, the Tatmadaw Commander-in-Chief, currently self-appointed Prime Minister of Myanmar, and other high-ranking military officials.

"For decades, the Myanmar military has with impunity tried to wipe the Rohingya out as a people. With Myanmar both unwilling and unable to investigate itself – especially since the coup – the international community must step in and support all justice efforts," said Tun Khin.

"A universal jurisdiction case in Argentina would show that accountability is possible. We also urge other countries to immediately explore opening similar cases to show those responsible for the genocide that there are no safe havens anywhere."

About universal jurisdiction

Universal jurisdiction is based on the principle that some crimes are so horrific that they concern humanity as a whole, and can be tried anywhere regardless of where they have been committed. All states are permitted to exercise universal jurisdiction over certain crimes under international law, such as war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide.

This allows for the ability to investigate and prosecute individuals suspected of responsibility for crimes including torture, murder, and enforced disappearances, regardless of where the crime was committed or the nationality of the suspect or victim.

The principle is also enshrined in the Argentinean national legal framework, including in article 118 of the Constitution, which has led to other cases being processed in the country under universal jurisdiction. Argentina has in addition received global recognition for its own outstanding transitional justice process to address crimes committed during the military regime in the 1970s.

BROUK is legally represented in the case by the Argentinian Tomás Ojea Quintana, who visited Rakhine State many times during his tenure (2008-2014) as UN Special rapporteur on Myanmar. BROUK is further supported in the case by the Argentinean human rights NGOs Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Asociación Civil Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo) and Foundation for Peace and Justice (Servicio Paz y Justicia), founded by the Nobel Peace Prize Winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel.

The universal jurisdiction case by BROUK has received widespread international support, including from the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar, the Office of the Prosecutor of the ICC, Amnesty International Argentina, TRIAL International, Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights and Victims Advocate International, Baltazar Garzon Foundation.

For more information, please contact Tun Khin +44 7888714866.

Background

"Universal Jurisdiction, the International Criminal Court, and the Rohingya Genocide", BROUK opinion article, 23 October 2020

"Argentinean Judiciary Moves Closer To Opening Case Against Myanmar Over Rohingya Genocide", BROUK press release, 1 June 2020.

"Argentinean Courts Urged To Prosecute Senior Myanmar Military And Government Officials For The Rohingya Genocide", BROUK press release, 13 November 2019.

Thursday 19 August 2021

AA trying to get Muslims involved in the administration

Source RFA, 16 Aug
unlike Suu Kyi, AA upholds people based- 'rule of law' despite ULA and most Rakhine politicians have different views on Rohingya. (that is why AA trying to get Muslims involved in the administration)
မွတ်စလင်တွေ အုပ်ချုပ်ရေးကဏ္ဍမှာ ပါဝင်လာဖို့  အေအေ ကြိုးပမ်းနေရက္ခိုင့်တပ်တော် (AA/ULA) ရဲ့ စစ်ဦးစီးချုပ် ဗိုလ်ချုပ် ထွန်းမြတ်နိုင်ကို ၂၀၁၉ ဧပြီ ၁၄ ရက်နေ့က ဝပြည် နှစ် ၃ဝ ပြည့် အခမ်းအနားမှာ တွေ့ရစဉ်
 Photo: RFA

ရခိုင်ပြည်နယ်မှာ ဒုတိယလူဦးရေအများဆုံးဖြစ်တဲ့ မွတ်စလင်အသိုင်းအဝိုင်းကို ရက္ခိုင့်တပ်တော် (AA/ULA) ရဲ့ အုပ်ချုပ်ရေးကဏ္ဍမှာ ပါဝင်လာဖို့ကြိုးပမ်းနေကြောင်း အေအေ စစ်ဦးစီးချုပ် ဗိုလ်ချုပ် ထွန်းမြတ်နိုင်က သြဂုတ်လ ၁၅ ရက် မနေ့က ပြောလိုက်ပါတယ်။

အာရက္ခမီဒီယာနဲ့ သီးသန့်ဆက်သွယ်မေးမြန်းခန်းမှာ ရက္ခိုင့်တပ်တော် (AA/ULA) ရဲ့ စစ်ဦးစီးချုပ် ဗိုလ်ချုပ် ထွန်းမြတ်နိုင် က အခုလို ပြောဆိုခဲ့တာပါ။

"သူတို့ကို ကျွန်တော်တို့ရဲ့အုပ်ချုပ်ရေးကဏ္ဍနဲ့ ရဲလုပ်ငန်းကဏ္ဍတွေမှာ ပါဝင်လာဖို့ မှန်းထားပါတယ်။ ပြီးတော့ အုပ်ချုပ်ရေးဆိုင်ရာ ရုံးလုပ်ငန်းတွေ၊ စီမံအုပ်ချုပ်ရေး နည်းလမ်းတွေ၊ ပြီးတော့ ဥပဒေဆိုင်ရာ သင်တန်းတွေ ခေါ်ပြီးပေးဖို့ ကျွန်တော်တို့ စီစဉ်နေကြပါတယ်။ ဒီဟာတွေကတော့ တဆင့်ပြီးတဆင့် လုပ်သွားရမှာပါ။ သင်တန်းတွေမှာလည်း သူတို့ကိုခေါ်ပြီးပေးဖို့ ကြိုးစားနေကြပါတယ်။ ဒီနှစ်ပိုင်းတွေမှာ ကိုဗစ်ရောဂါတွေနဲ့ ကျွန်တော်တို့မှာလည်း အခက်အခဲတွေရှိနေတဲ့အတွက် ကြန့်ကြာမှုတွေ ရှိနေတာပါ"

ရခိုင်နဲ့ မွတ်စလင် အသိုင်းအဝိုင်းကြား အခြေအနေတွေနဲ့ပတ်သက်လို့ ပြည်ပမှာနေထိုင်တဲ့ လူ့အခွင့်အရေး လှုပ်ရှားသူတွေက ဒေသမှာရှိနေတဲ့ အခြေအနေမှန်ကို မစူးစမ်းဘဲ ခံစားချက်တွေအပေါ် မူတည်ပြီး လှုံ့ဆော် နေတာတွေဟာ နှစ်ဖက်ယုံကြည်မှုနဲ့ သင့်မြတ်ရေးကို အတားအဆီးတွေဖြစ်စေတယ်လို့လည်း ဗိုလ်ချုပ် ထွန်းမြတ်နိုင်က ပြောပါတယ်။

ရက္ခိုင့်တပ်တော် (AA) ရဲ့တော်လှန်ရေးကဏ္ဍဟာ အခုအချိန်မှာ ၇၅ ရာခိုင်နှုန်းအထိ ခရီးရောက်နေပြီလို့လည်း ဆိုပါတယ်။

ရခိုင်ဒေသမှာ လွန်ခဲ့တဲ့ အချိန်ခြောက်လလောက်ကနေစလို့ ဥပဒေအတိုင်ပင်ခံတွေနဲ့ တရားစီရင်ရေးကဏ္ဍကို ဆောင်ရွက်နေသလို အဂတိတရားကင်းစင်ဖို့အတွက် တရားသူကြီးတွေကို မကြာခင်လစာပေးဖို့ ဆောင်ရွက် နေတယ်လို့လည်း ပြောပါတယ်။

တရားစီရင်ရေးအပိုင်းမှာ ရပ်ကျေးအဆင့်တရားရုံး၊ စစ်ဒေသအဆင့် တရားရုံးနဲ့ ဗဟိုတရားရုံးဆိုပြီး အဆင့်တွေ ခွဲထားပြီးတော့ ရပ်ကျေးအဆင့်အတွက် အုပ်ချုပ်ရေးမှူးတွေကိုလည်း ဥပဒေသင်တန်းတွေ ပေးထားပြီးဖြစ် တယ်လို့လည်း ဆိုပါတယ်။

တရားစီရင်ရေးအတွက် ဗြိတိသျှဘုံဥပဒေကိုအခြေခံပြီး ဆောင်ရွက်တာလို့လည်း ပြောပါတယ်။

ရက္ခိုင့်တပ်တော် (AA) အနေနဲ့ ရည်မှန်းချက်ကို အကောင်အထည်ဖော်ရာမှာ အလျှော့အတင်းလုပ်တာ မရှိသလို နောင်လည်းရှိမှာ မဟုတ်ကြောင်း၊ အခု စစ်ကောင်စီနဲ့ ယာယီအပစ်အခတ် ရပ်စဲထားတာကလွဲလို့ တစ်စုံတစ်ရာ နိုင်ငံရေးအရ အပေးအယူ၊ ကတိကဝတ် စာချုပ်စာတမ်းတွေ ဒီနေ့အထိ မရှိသေးကြောင်း ဗိုလ်ချုပ် ထွန်းမြတ်နိုင်က ပြောပါတယ်။

ရက္ခိုင့်တပ်တော် (AA) နဲ့ တပ်မတော်တို့အကြား ဖမ်းဆီးထိန်းသိမ်းထားသူတွေကို အပြန်အလှန် လွှတ်ပေး တာက အွန်လိုင်းစနစ်နဲ့ အလွတ်သဘော အပြန်အလှန်ဆွေးနွေးရာမှာ ဥပဒေကြောင်းအရ မခိုင်လုံဘဲ ထောင် ထဲမှာ ဖမ်းဆီးထိန်းသိမ်းထားသူတွေကို လွှတ်ပေးမယ်ဆိုရင် အခုယုံကြည်မှုတည်ဆောက်ဆဲကာလမှာ အလားအလာတွေ ပိုကောင်းနိုင်ကြောင်းပြောလို့ နားလည်မှုနဲ့ လွှတ်ပေးခြင်းသာဖြစ်တယ်လို့လည်း ဆိုပါတယ်။

ရက္ခိုင့်တပ်တော် (AA) အနေနဲ့ ပြဿနာတွေကို နိုင်ငံရေးနည်းလမ်းနဲ့ ဖြေရှင်းနိုင်ဖို့လိုလားပေမယ့် တခြား တစ်ဘက်ကတော့ စစ်ရေးအရ ရန်လိုမှုတွေကို ပြတာတွေရှိသလို အုပ်ချုပ်ရေးနဲ့ တရားစီရင်ရေးပိုင်း တွေကိုလည်း လက်မခံဘဲ ကန့်ကွက်တာတွေကို အခါခါကြုံနေရတယ်လို့ ပြောပါတယ်။

အခုလိုမျိုး ကပ်ဘေးကာလ၊ မိုးတွင်းပြည်သူတွေ စားဝတ်နေရေး အခက်အခဲတွေများတဲ့ ကာလမှာတော့ စစ်ရေးအရ ပြသနာတွေ မတက်လာအောင် ရှောင်ရှားဖို့ တပ်မှူးတွေကိုတော့ ညွှန်ကြားထားပေမယ့် သည်းခံ နိုင်တဲ့အတိုင်းအတာက အကန့်အသတ်ရှိကြောင်း၊ တတ်နိုင်သမျှ ရှောင်ရှားမှာဖြစ်ပေမယ့် စစ်ရေးအရ လိုအပ်ရင်လိုအပ်သလို စဉ်းစားသွားမယ်လို့လည်း ရက္ခိုင့်တပ်တော် (AA) ရဲ့ စစ်ဦးစီးချုပ် ဗိုလ်ချုပ် ထွန်းမြတ်နိုင်က ပြောပါတယ်။

‘If it’s a genocide, declare it a genocide’: Inside the Biden administration’s vexing Myanmar debate

Source Politico, 9 Aug

China, the case of the Uyghurs and politics loom as the administration mulls whether to call the Rohingya massacres an international crime.

Rohingya refugees walk at the Balukhali refugee camp in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, Tuesday, Feb.2, 2021.

Almost exactly a year ago, as aides to former President Donald Trump debated whether to label the Chinese government's abuse of Uyghur Muslims a "genocide," Joe Biden's presidential campaign beat them to the punch.

In a statement given for a POLITICO story, a spokesperson for the campaign said Biden believed the Uyghurs were genocide victims and that Trump needed to "take action" to stop the group's suffering. "The unspeakable oppression that Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities have suffered at the hands of China's authoritarian government is genocide and Joe Biden stands against it in the strongest terms," the spokesperson, Andrew Bates, said in the statement.

Biden's stance was hailed by human rights advocates deeply worried about the fate of millions of Uyghurs subject to forced sterilizations, long-term detention and various types of exploitation. According to a person familiar with the campaign, Biden reached the position weeks earlier after briefings from advisers, and he'd shared his view at a fundraiser before POLITICO's inquiry. The stance made Biden look moral and tough on China following allegations, denied by Trump, that the incumbent president had encouraged China's leader to persecute the Uyghurs.

But it raised a question: If Biden thought the Uyghurs were genocide victims, did he believe the same thing about Myanmar's Rohingya Muslims, who'd been facing mass slaughtermass detention and mass displacement? Many of the human rights activists, U.S. lawmakers and foreign government officials worried about the Uyghurs had already concluded that the Rohingya were genocide victims. At the time, the Trump administration was still officially reviewing the Rohingya case.

When a POLITICO reporter raised the Rohingya question to the Biden campaign following its Uyghur declaration, the furthest Bates would go was to say, "The systematic atrocities being committed against the Rohingya community in [Myanmar] are grotesque and bear all the marks of genocide." He would not flat-out call it a genocide.

Since he took over as president, Biden and his team have essentially stuck to the same position, calling the Uyghur atrocities a genocide while using terms that fall short of that official designation for the Rohingya.

The Biden administration's stance puzzles lawmakers, activists and others, who say it is intellectually inconsistent. Multiple investigations, including by United Nations officials, have determined the Rohingya were victims of genocide or that there was strong evidence of it. Dozens of countries, led by The Gambia, have pushed a lawsuit at the International Court of Justice accusing Myanmar of genocide.

"This administration is undermining the legitimacy of its human rights policy by failing to make this declaration," said Sen. Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon who has visited Myanmar and seen the Rohingya plight firsthand. He added that, by not designating the Rohingya's case a genocide, the Biden team "undermines the legitimacy of the U.S. declaring other situations a genocide, particularly the way the Uyghurs are treated."

Later this month, the world will mark the fourth anniversary of the Myanmar military's worst crackdown on the Rohingya, a campaign that killed thousands and forced hundreds of thousands of Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh. Rights activists hope Secretary of State Antony Blinken will use the occasion to declare that the Rohingya were genocide victims.

Such a designation by the U.S. government will bolster the Rohingya's international legal cases against Myanmar's rulers while sending a warning to other would-be genocidaires, advocates say. It would signal that Biden, Blinken and others aren't letting the politics of China determine if they will call a crime a crime. And it would offer evidence for Biden's claim that human rights are key to his foreign policy, advocates say.

"The administration has had ample time to think about this, and there's a moral imperative for them to issue a clear determination about what the Rohingya people have been enduring," said Matthew Smith, co-founder of Fortify Rights, a group that investigates human rights violations.

There's no sign, however, that the Biden team is willing to make the call.

While the Rohingya have supporters in Washington — the House of Representatives has overwhelmingly declared them genocide victims, and dozens of NGOs, including Rohingya groups, are currently preparing a letter due to be made public Tuesday that demands the Biden administration do the same — their cause does not animate U.S. officials, lobbyists and other power players in Washington the way ones more directly linked to China do.




Tuesday 3 August 2021

The Misuses of Histories and Historiography by the state in Myanmar: The Case of Rakhine and Rohingya

Source Forsea, 29 July

Some look to find solutions in holding Myanmar to account through international law regarding what the Myanmar military has done to Rohingya. That is what they can do. I am not a lawyer, but a historian. When I look at Myanmar, I am trying to unravel the ways in which religious haters in the country misuse history to legitimate what they do. As Daniel Taylor has indicated,1 this has a real impact because countries, not willing to accept the stories that constitute genocide are partly influenced by the claims made by Myanmar that the Rohingya are foreigners, that they are Bengali.

I will give here essentially two seemingly different sub-papers that actually must be viewed together before they can be synthesized into a single three-dimensional view. First, I am going to discuss what I think is important about the long-term historical background of the current crisis involving Rakhine and Rohingya, because so much is already going around about more recent decades, the Citizenship Law of 1982, the Tatmadaw, NLD etc, that I do not have to do that here. Second, I will explain why so much of this crisis has been built on historical misunderstanding of Rakhine and Rakhine misunderstanding of history and how people picture history and people in that history. I will then wrap all of this up in the end with some brief comments about some of the historical things western academics have been doing in accepting one historical narrative that works against the Rohingya and why I think they are wrong.


1. The Historical Background

We have thousands of years of the human past in Rakhine, a lot of archaeological remains, coins, inscriptions in non-Bamar languages that really give us little more than Sanskrit royal names and titles. There is nothing that could serve as a historical story you might relate to students or a lay audience until really the fifteenth century. You have historicised stories that are almost certainly apocryphal.

Then, in the early fifteenth century, the Kingdoms of Ava and Pegu tried to establish cultural hegemony over the Indo-Aryan kingdom of Rakhine, importing kings and queens, courtiers, Buddhist monks, and Bamar settlers. You have a local king supposedly flee to the Muslim world, gain protection from the Sultan of Delhi or Bengal (it changes in different traditions), he teaches the sultan's court various kinds of war tactics and the sultan sends him back to Rakhine with a Muslim army.

Location of Rakhine State in Myanmar. Wikipedia Commons

In 1430, we then have the Rakhine ruler, supposedly the same guy, who comes back and ousts the foreign, Bamar and Mon, invaders, establishes a religiously hybrid court, a sultanate from one perspective, a Buddhist court from another, but from inside the court, both at the same time. The physical geography and climate favoured approaches to living and ruling, interacting, and community building, social mentalities that were flexible and inclusive, that favoured the emergence of ethnically and religiously diverse communities, and states that by European standards would be seen as heterodox and a major source of confusion. Thus, we find lots of evidence that Buddhists and Muslims got along quite well. Certainly, this creation myth of sorts identifies Muslims and the Muslim world as the saviour and protector, not the enemy of Rakhine. That latter role is reserved for Myanmar and the Buddhist political world. The Irrawaddy world is something Rakhine needs saving from.

The new Mrauk-U court relied upon a Muslim army to protect it and its first religious building was mosque, the Santikhan mosque, its kings began using Muslim as well as Buddhist titles and issued coins with the Kalima. More importantly, in a population poor area, the court tried to build up its labour pool by raiding Bengal and bringing back to Rakhine thousands of Bengali Muslims and Bengali soon-to-be Muslims captive every year. Many of these people were planted in villages along the Kaladan River in areas close to the concentrations of Muslims in Rakhine we find today, or up until August 2019, where they grew rice and engaged in other kinds of primary agricultural produce cultivation. By the mid-18th century, observers claimed that 75% of the population of Rakhine south of the Naf, because the Mughals had taken the rest of the region in the 1660s, was of Bengali origin.

When Myanmar conquered Rakhine in 1784-85, it would again try to extend Irrawaddy civilization over it as part of their empire-building. The Myanmar court commissioned state histories that placed Rakhine historically within the orbit of greater Myanmar. Myanmar Buddhism was introduced, court literature and local Buddha mages were brought back to the Irrawaddy Valley and so too were tens of thousands of Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists. Rakhine Buddhists and Muslims unhappy with Myanmar rule both fled to British Bengal, the Buddhists settling in the area that became a big refugee camp, which became known as Cox's Bazaar (after Hiram Cox). Absent their own court literature, Buddhist monks from Rakhine rewrote from memory and produced new chronicles in opposition to Myanmar rule, but in doing created a Rakhine history only from their particular point of view, not purposely leaving the Rohingya voice out, but not including it either.

This is what we know from many different sources, but much of this is gradually erased by a new kind of source that emerges after this period, the Bamar-language chronicle of conquest and domination and the Rakhine-Bamar language chronicles of fear and insecurity. Histories are written for particular reasons—and when a great many are written with varying narratives it is a sign that something important is at stake. No one ever asks why the Rakhine were putting together so many histories in the late 18th century—why they were trying to legitimize their historical presence. The Rohingya were like many borderland peoples an oral and not text-based society and, they had little to complain about, because the main cultural and religious tension at the time was between Bamars and the Rakhine Buddhists—it was the intra-Buddhist take that was at stake not any threat from Islam. Muslims were not the chief concern of the Bamars in the late 18th century when they occupied Rakhine. There was no denying their presence—Rakhine of that time had mosques and coins with Muslim motifs. Again, most of the population was believed by the British of the time to have been 75% of Bengali origin. The foundational languages of the area were clearly Indo-Aryan. By contrast, the Buddhist past in Rakhine was in doubt, being under challenge by the Myanmar court. Not needing to compete, the Rohingya did not.

The relics of decades of Rakhine Buddhist insecurity—numerous chronicles that are mutually irreconcilable in which they admitted that their kingdom was founded by a refugee prince coming from India, protected by a Muslim army, were evidence that the Rakhine desperately wanted to create documentation that they had always been in the region, back to the time of Buddha. In later time, they would claim that with the presence of so many different chronicles that they did not "know" about an earlier Muslim presence, but they knew, they knew, generations of Rakhine Buddhists have always known. But, over generations, even the most basic truths of one's origins are forgotten (after all, how many of you know who your own great, great grandparents were?).

This is hugely important. It is impossible for us today—lay reader, professional historian, Rohingya or Rakhine– to provide a historical background to Rakhine without engaging vigorously with the politicised historical narratives that have been in production since the 1780s. Any background provided from whatever angle must be political because every source is a political artefact. So many gaps appear in the documentary record and so many contradictions exist in the "historical" narratives produced by local monks and courtiers from the 1780s that there has been plenty of space for compilers to act instead as composers and to fill these gaps with ideas and beliefs of their own time. In other words, when we read in chronicles descriptions of the history of Mrauk-U in the 15th century, we are not reading primary sources on that period. We are instead entering the imaginaries of Buddhist monks who lived geographically and temporally far away in Sandoway in the far south in a later time, the early 19th century. And their perspectives were built on a different society that had spent by their own time, forty years under Myanmar rule.

We also have to keep in mind that the Rakhine area we refer to today is not what it was then, but Rakhine has historically been all of the eastern coast of the Bay of Bengal. So, one problem is that while the Rohingya are real, and they or their forebears were in Rakhine as long as the Buddhist Rakhine were, and are just as indigenous, the terminologies we are must rely upon to discuss them and their history have been subject to significant efforts to engineer them into foreigners.

This contemporary Buddhist monopoly on history might have been balanced out with Rohingya voices if not for another accident of history, the replacement of Myanmar rule with British rule in 1826. The British decided on the basis of orientalist scholarship by Sir Arthur Phayre that Rakhine should be categorised as having one native language, one native race, and one native religion, despite its huge diversity. Although from a Western point of view, you can only be one or the other, local indigenous families probably moved many times back and forth between different ethnic categories, from Rohingya to Rakhine and even to Bamar and back again, depending on the period, the context, and to whom they married. So, when Phayre read the Bamar-language chronicles, he accepted them as genuine and authoritative and rejected the coins and all the other evidence of Muslim culture and religion as anomalies. Phayre was thus blinded to the fact that Rakhine had been at least since the 15th century a Muslim and a Buddhist land, with a Muslim and a Buddhist court, and that historically, Bamars, Burmese-speakers, Theravada Buddhists from the Irrawaddy Valley were migrating into Rakhine at the same time as Muslim, Bengali-speakers. As Myanmar was gradually annexed by India, Muslims in Myanmar were treated officially as foreigners and not categorised by their local names. So the Rohingya not being recorded in the British colonial censuses from the 1860s as Rohingya or not was a political choice by a state, not by the Rohingya.

One of the greatest shifts in thinking though was introduced by Buddhist nationalism. Political monks who had accepted Irrawaddy based ordination in Mandalay-dominated sects and local laypeople eager to have greater political clout pulled a historical sleight of hand and turned tables. The Myanmar state, the greatest cultural and religious threat to Rakhine Buddhist regionalism, was made instead an ally. And the Muslims, those who were there before Buddhist immigration and those who indigenised later over time alongside new waves of Buddhist immigration, now became the Other—no longer wanted and now the enemy. And the Myanmar state started to eradicate the physical evidence of the Rohingya and tried to Irrawaddy-ize the region in their image, no longer in the image of southern Rakhine Buddhist culture, but now in the image of the Irrawaddy Valley.

Rohingya refugees entering Bangladesh after being driven out of Rakhine State, 2017. Wikipedia Commons


2. The Historians' craft and the State of the Field of Rakhine Studies

Historians and political scientists who seem to value access to a country more than historical questioning took Rakhine and Bamar Buddhist chronicles and their historical claims at face value and wrote materials that validated much of the Rakhine Buddhist fiction that resulted. And I do not mean to be insulting by calling it fiction, because I believe that at some level, all history is fiction, imagined, and constructed, because it has to be. We cannot talk about the subject until we have imagined it, until we have made a discursive construct that allows us to have something to have a history about. And this has been the nature of debate—some scholars pander to religious communalists claiming only things Muslim are fiction and anything Buddhist is fact, because Buddhists hold the power. And these scholars, without admitting what all historians know or should know, is that the Buddhist Rakhine historical record is a political invention, created to oppose the Bamars and then remobilised against the Muslims. If we are to really understand Rakhine, we need to consider everything that has been written, chronicles and secondary literature, as works of fiction that need to be heavily contextualised—we deal with the history of intellectual invention, not the history of DNA, a history of indigeneity. In my opinion, any historian who claims that Buddhist Rakhine are the indigenous population of Rakhine is performing professional malpractice and is either so profoundly stupid as to not understand the nature of the historian's craft or maliciously indifferent to the responsibilities that come with calling oneself a historian.

As I have stressed, history is a project of intellectual invention, a creative process that makes use of facts and constructions in a new way that is meant to explain why something has happened. I have no doubt that people often genuinely believe what they argue historically, unaware of the creative process of which they are a part. It is in our nature to invent when we tell and then believe it when we have told it. It is not that we have more facts that make us more confident that we know the past but the increasing flurry of images that accompanied the rise of modern history as a discipline since the end of the 19th century. Before, everyone imagined the past as a series of events coloured in by their own imagination. So, for a few thousand years, Julius Caesar could be a million different people, even during the centuries after Shakespeare brought a version of Caesar to life. The still camera and then the motion picture camera started to bring an end to all of that. We could not imagine an Abraham Lincoln to look any other way than he was depicted in well circulated photographs. And it was a constant introduction to the same episodes about Lincoln that made us all feel the same Lincoln. But it was the photograph that made him seem as real as a memory from our own childhoods. We then find it increasingly difficult to think of Lincoln any other way, a Lincoln has been locked into our brains. I can definitely say I knew the Lincoln of Steven Spielberg's biopic long before it was ever made. I knew the Hitler in Downfall long before that movie was made. I did not know the Django in the Quentin Tarantino movie. Media can be an ugly or an empowering, liberating tool in shaping our historical imaginaries.

How did most Bamars in their mindscape imagine the Rohingya? Most Bamars had never seen a Rohingya when they coloured them in. Instead, they used what had been depicted as Muslims. Terrorists. Rapists. Invaders. They had only the extremists now, particularly those in control of Myanmar state media, who gave them the images to fill in the colours. These fictions make the history they have been given in scrawls more real. When these Bamar colour in the Buddhist narrative of Rakhine they do not see the Rakhine as they are but as they are imagined to be in Mandalay. They are imagined to look and dress and speak and act like other Bamars. But some of us who know Rakhine personally know they do not. This is why memes are so powerful and so dangerous when maliciously distributed among people who do not have actual exposure to a people or evidence of their past. It is an easy thing to take the dates and chronologies and fill in the gaps to form a history of a continual threat to Myanmar Buddhism by the Muslims. All you need is a social media account.

But I would propose going further and argue that when Bamars look at the Rohingya they imagine them through the history of colonialism. For Bamars, the Muslim in Rakhine must be coterminous with the beginning and end of colonial rule. That history. British history. British Indian History. Something that exists between 1824 and 1948. And the Rohingya because they are not in this view part of the colonial Muslim group, must instead be something later. Whatever they are, the Rohingya must be post-1948 and neither Bamar nor colonial. The Rohingya suffer in these histories in two ways because as Muslims in Myanmar they are doomed in some conversations as being colonial and in other conversations they are doomed as Rohingya. And, again, as Rohingya they were not included in Bamar or Rakhine chronicles and are thus ahistorical.

Both elements of Bamar constructions of these people are in fact wrong. It is not the chronicle that is evidence. The chronicle is the fiction. The data in them we do not know directly. It is the documentary – written or oral — fragment that we can no longer read or hear directly that is the evidence. And we can never use chronicles as evidence but only as Buddhist Rakhine thinking about evidence. By the way, this is true of later colonial-era censuses as well—they are not really evidence of any thing, aside from an example of British thinking about evidence. I have to say that, astonishingly, as historians we have pretended our work is a science when it is not. We are after history as understandings of "the past" rather than "the past" itself. The closest we get at to what actually has happened is if we accept our findings to be a kind of archaeology of the past. As we must always fill in the gaps with the guesswork that is history, we must always accept that history never provides answers only questions, it is not revelatory but only creative in nature, and it never justifies the politics of the present however much it is claimed to do so. This is why I stress that history must never be surrendered to those who would use it to do so and it should be the primary objective of any historian to reject the contemporary political abuse of history, just as much today in Myanmar as it was in Europe of the 1930s and the former Yugoslavia of the 1990s.

Dr. Michael W. Charney (SOAS)

This is a modified version of a talk given by the author at The International Conference on Protection and Accountability in Burma on 9 February 2019 at Barnard College, Columbia University.

[1] Immigration & Refugee Solicitor and the Plaintiff in the Crimes Against Humanity Case against Aung San Suu Kyi, High Court of Australia, comments made on 8 February 2019 at The International Conference on Protection and Accountability in Burma.

 

  1. Immigration & Refugee Solicitor and the Plaintiff in the Crimes Against Humanity Case against Aung San Suu Kyi, High Court of Australia, comments made on 8 February 2019 at The International Conference on Protection and Accountability in Burma.

Posted by Michael Charney

A native of Flint, Michigan, Michael Charney is a full professor at SOAS, the University of London, in the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy (School of Interdisciplinary Studies) and the School of History, Religions, and Philosophies, where he teaches global security, strategic studies, and Asian military history. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1999 on the subject of the history of the emergence of religious communalism in Rakhine and has published a number of books on military history in Southeast Asia and the political and intellectual history of Myanmar. He was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies at the (National University of Singapore) where he researched religion and migration, was a project professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies of Asia at the University of Tokyo, and has spent most of the last two decades at SOAS, where he was elected to the Board of Trustees in 2016. He is a regular commentator in the media on events in Myanmar.