Dorsum – The Ethnopolitcal Blog Worldwide Ethnopolitical Analyses
Recently, more and more positive news has emerged from Myanmar (Burma) as the country transitions from military dictatorship to civil society. Burma has its own heroine in the struggle for freedom in the form of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi.
However, it seems that not everyone is destined for freedom. In the far west of the country, in Rakhine State (formerly Arakan), a tragedy is unfolding that is barely noticed.
The Muslim Rohingya people are treated as foreign by the Buddhist majority in Burma, who are oriented towards the nation. This even extends to the Rohingya being deprived of their Burmese citizenship in 1982 by a controversial law. Consequently, the Rohingya became foreigners in their own country, despite having lived there since time immemorial. This has led to recurrent pogroms against the Rohingya people. Their villages are destroyed, people are killed, and hundreds of thousands have to flee their homes. It is estimated that there are 8 million Muslims in Burma, representing around 15% of the total population. However, the government conceals these facts and claims that Muslims only make up 4% of the population, labelling them a foreign element in Buddhist Burma. However, the Rohingya are an ancient people who have lived in the same region for centuries and are geographically separated from the rest of Myanmar.
Situation of the State of Rakhine (Arakan)
The estimated population of the state of Rakhine (Arakan) is around 3.8 million. Since gaining independence, around 1.5 million Rohingya people have been displaced and now live in various countries around the world. This has led to the situation whereby the Rohingya people now account for no more than half of the population in Arakan. The other half of the population, the Buddhist Rakhine people, is growing and gaining more and more political influence over the increasingly marginalised Rohingya minority. This results in further Rohingya expulsions, a trend that will probably continue, causing the Rohingya to lose more and more influence.
Exclusion and distortion of history
The Rohingya people are related to the population of India. Geographically, the region in which they live is considered part of South Asia and is separated from the rest of Myanmar, and therefore Burma, by the same mountain range in the east. However, according to the Burmese authorities, the Rohingya are immigrants from Bangladesh and must be returned there. The following picture of protesters in front of the BBC building in Rangoon gives an impression of the situation:
The demonstrators point out that the Rohingya are not part of the Burmese ethnic group. They are implicitly suggesting that the Rohingya have no rights in Myanmar either. The comparison with the exclusion of German Jews in the Third Reich is obvious: the Germans also did not consider the Jews to be German, but rather as foreign elements who had no right to reside in the country. In both cases, this is a clear distortion of history.
Historical documents clearly show that the Muslim Rohingya have a long-standing historical connection to Arakan. According to a British map from 1909, the Rohingya population accounted for between 50 and 70 per cent of the population in their ancestral homeland of Arakan.
Myanmar is making great progress on the road to freedom and democracy, not least thanks to Aung San Suu Kyi. Unfortunately, this does not seem to apply equally to all the country’s peoples, quite the contrary. The more power the democratic majority gains, the worse off the Rohingya minority becomes. For them, escape is often the only option.
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