[Tlc] T-Rohingya

[justinm at ucr.edu]

Forwarded from a reader.
Best regards,
justin

In the context of the recent refugee crisis in Thailand and Aceh, now unfortunately well-established but erroneous generalizations are once more circulated regarding the identity of the so called "Rohingya".

The "Rohingya" are Muslims living in the State of Arakan of the Union of Myanmar (formerly Burma). There is scarce evidence for the use of the term "Rohingya" over the last two centuries as referring to the Muslim community in Arakan. But the term itself existed definitely at the end of the 18th century when it referred to Muslim AND Hindu from Bengal living in Arakan.

Not all the Muslims of Arakan today refer to themselves as "Rohingya". The contemporary use of the term is heavily determined by the political fight of a part of the Muslims in Arakan to establish a claim that they are an ethnic minority of Myanmar/Burma. Who were they originally? No doubt there existed in Arakan as in other continental Southeast Asian kingdoms a Muslim minority that grew during the early modern period. But the majority of the Muslims today are descendants of Chittagonian Bengalis who were the key labour force imported by the British to exploit Arakan's fertile soils (mainly since the middle of the 19th century). They were extremely numerous and fully absorbed the pre-colonial Muslim community.

Some political leaders of the Muslims of Bengali origin in Arakan made a fatal political error when they wanted northern Arakan to become a part of Jinnah's Pakistan at the moment of Indian Independence and partition. This did not look as if they considered themselves as an ethnic group of Burma in 1948. The later choice or say reinvention of the term "Rohingya" was built on shaky grounds but allowed them a radical change in their ambitions in the fifties as they suddenly claimed an ethnic identity of their own based on a strange amalgam of facts and unsustainable historical interpretations of Arakanese history. The Rohingya language is the Chittagonian dialect of Bengali very recently written by them in Latin script so as to mark a difference with the standard Bengali written in Bengali script. This makes the Rohingya appear like, say the mostly Christian Chin who also use the Latin alphabet introduced by missionaries to write their language.

Even people who support Rohingya political claims do not deny that like NE India, Arakan also became a zone of illegal Bengali immigration in the fifties and sixties and later on.
The growth of this Muslim community has been resented by the majority Buddhist Arakanese for cultural reasons. One may recall that the British stopped Indian immigration in Lower Burma in the 1930s but this restrictive policy did not apply to Arakan where the unequal growth of the religious communities largely bred discontent. While the "Rohingya" enjoy a quasi unilateral support of Western media that pay little or no attention to the particular situation of the Arakanese Buddhists, neither the political opposition in exile, nor any other ethnic groups in Burma/Myanmar or say even other Muslim communities in the country itself (!) have been or are supportive of the "Rohingya" political cause. From a humanitarian point of view, it has been an unending tragedy. Given the persecutions they went through in the last three decades, it must have been particularly bitter for them to see that Muslim countries have been consistently unhelpful to their cause. Consider their outcast situa!
!
tion in Bangladesh and Pakistan. Look at Malaysia's policy towards Rohingya refugees some years ago (already forgotten?) and you see that the acclaimed Thai army policy confirms the rule, not the exception. Why get into trouble with the military government when you deal with a group that has no allies nowhere besides briefly making every few years the headlines in the international media. Their political leadership abroad, generally boasting division rather than unity, also suffered as "Rohingya" were spotted among fundamentalist groups in Bangladesh, others in Afghanistan finding themselves on the "wrong side".
 

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Dr. Justin McDaniel
Dept. of Religious Studies
3046 INTN
University of California, Riverside
Riverside, CA 92521
951-827-4530
justinm at ucr.edu