Genocide, we’ve heard the term before. A term we often associated with what happened to the Jews during World War II. So practically, most of us understand very well what genocide is. It’s a systematic killing of a people of a particular race or creed. But what most of us don’t understand is that even now, during the information age, genocides are happening. One such modern genocides is happening to a people called the Rohingya, a Muslim minority in what we know as Myanmar or Burma in South East Asis which is predominantly Buddhist. Rohingya is not something you’d often hear in our daily evening news or newspaper. You may even have only heard about it on Social Media through very graphic violent pictures and videos about their burning villages, torture and summary execution.
This is a brief account of what Rohingya and why you should care about it.
Rohingya is known as one of the Most persecuted minorities in the world. They are originally residents of the Arakan Teritory, West of Burma until they were invaded by Burma in 1784. Rohingya have their own language, religion, culture and traditions which are very different from their conquerors. Being followers of Islam, they did not assimilate easily into the Buddhist society that conquered them. Historically, the Arakan region in which the Rohingya live was an independent nation which has close historical and cultural ties to India and Bangladesh. Rohingya are sometimes referred to as Arakanese Indians due to this fact. Sometimes they are even dubbed by the Myanmar government as Stateless Bengali Muslims.
This minority status made them second class citizens which were made worse by the being denied citizenship in 1948 by the Burmese government after Burma gained independence from Great Britain.
Citizenship was again denied for the Rohingya in 1982 with the Burmese government claiming that they are illegal immigrants. The Burmese government claim that they are from Bangladesh, a neighboring Muslim country in the West of Burma. There is a bit of truth in this and in fact, it was the British empire that facilitated the migration of Muslims from India and Bengal region into the fertile Arakan region to work as farmers under the British East India Company which by then, India, Bangladesh, Arakan and Burma doesn’t have any political border because they are all under the British rule. However, most of the Rohingya have been residents of the Arakan for hundreds of years now during the British rule and were not modern illegal immigrants as claimed by Myanmar government.
This denial of citizenship meant that the Rohingya have been denied basic human rights in the Buddhist state which led to many forms of oppression against them which were lately being revealed as state sponsored. Basic rights have been denied to almost 2 million Rohingyas which most of them are refugees running away from militias and sometimes the Burmese army themselves who systematically hunt them down. The Rohingyas have been denied freedom of movement, state education, and civil service jobs.
Behind all these oppressive actions, the Burmese government justified its actions as proper punitive actions against some terrorist activities done by Rohingya resistance fighters which have been fighting for freedom even as early as colonial times when the state of Burma, Arakan, India, and Bangladesh are all under the British Empire.
In 2012 there has been an escalation of the violence against the Rohingya which was headed by an ultranationalist religious leaders named Ashin Wirathu. It led to a series of riots between the Rakhine Buddhists under Wirathu and Rohingya Muslims. These events have led to summary executions, enforced disappearances, arbitrary arrests and detentions, torture, and ill-treatment and forced labor of the Rohingya which finally made international news after they got viral on Social Media.
The Rohingya see themselves as an independent people the same way Myanmar sees them as illegal immigrants in Myanmar or citizens of Myanmar. For hundreds of years, the Rohingya remained stateless inside a territory that does not accept them.
Because of this, there has been freedom movements amongst the Rohingya seeking independence from Myanmar with Arakan as their state territory. Some even resorted to armed conflicts against the Myanmar government which resulted in the conflicts and military crackdowns in 1978, 1991–1992, 2012, 2015 and 2016-2017 against the Rohingya which did not only inflict damage to the Rohingya resistance fighters but also to the civilian populace which has been subjected to ethnic cleansing according to UN reports.
There was even a diplomatic attempt of the Rohingyas in the 1940s through what was called as the Pakistan Movement to talk to the then Pakistani President Muhammad Ali Jinnah for Rohingya to be annexed by Pakistan due to its religious affiliation and geographical proximity. This, however, did not materialize.
From 2015 to the present, there has been an escalation of violence against the Rohingya. In 2016 there have been some attacks by the Harakatul Yaqin, an armed freedom movement of the Rohingyas against some military outposts. These attacks were answered by the government of Myanmar and ultranationalist militias by attacks against the general populace including the civilians and have resulted in wide-scale human rights violations at the hands of security forces, including extrajudicial killings, gang rapes, arsons, and other brutalities. Even though it has been proven many times that the Myanmar government forces have been involved in the atrocities, the de facto government head, Aung San Suu Kyi was silent about all these events and even denied that there has been a mass murder going on against the Rohingya and have even blocked a UN probe into the crisis.
Worldwide outrage has been expressed. Even the Dalai Lama, the highest Buddhist religious leader in the world denounced the killings but with little to no effect to stop the genocide which is done in the name of Buddhism or the Buddhist state against the Rohingya. As of now, different Muslim and Non-Muslim state leaders have condemned the events but the Rohingya crisis has been ignored to the point of apathy by most people especially media agencies from whom you will never hear from them any news about the Rohingya.
In August 2017, clashes with the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) which is formerly known as Haraqatul Yaqin, have resulted in the death of 375 ARSA fighters according to the Myanmar government but Rohingya activists are quick to denounce that most of those killed are Rohingya civilians thus solidifying their accusation of mass murder and crimes against humanity.
This article is not about whether the Rohingya deserve independence or not. This article is not about denying the Myanmar government the rights to impose its sovereign right as a nation on its people. Rather, this is about our moral obligations as humans to know the situation of our fellow humans and to do something to stop oppression by expressing disapproval, creating awareness that will eventually lead to actions, and praying for world peace and unity.
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