2. Rohingyas in History
The Rohingya people, a Muslim group of Bengali origin, have lived in Myanmar for generations. It is said that “Muslim seamen first reached Burma in the ninth century.”[5] These Muslim Indo-Aryan people are considered by some to be indigenous to Rakhine State and their history can be traced back as far as these earlier centuries. Muslims served the kingdom of Narameikhla (Min Saw Mun), a Buddhist king who ruled Arakan in 1430s and welcomed Muslim advisers, even using Muslim titles for their courts. “Rohingya” means “the inhabitant of Rohang” which is the early name of Arakan at the western border of Burma near the present Bangladesh.
[5] Moshe Yegar, Muslims of Burma: A Study of a Minority Group (Otto Harrassowitz: Wiesbaden, 1972), 2.
But some others think that these Muslims only migrated to Myanmar during the British occupation. Encouraged by the British labor policy, at the onset of the 20th century, immigrants from Bengal came in great numbers to Arakan, reaching its peak in 1927 to around 480,000 people “with Rangoon exceeding New York City as the greatest immigration port of the world.” With such a huge number, the Burmese responded “with racism, with combined feelings of superiority and fear.”[6]
[6] Thant Mint-U, The River of Lost Footsteps – Histories of Burma (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2006), 185-187.
Between 1971 and 1973, ten million Bengalis escaped to neighboring countries during the Bangladesh Liberation War, most of whom settled in Northern Rakhine. The Myanmar government drove off around 200,000 refugees back to Bangladesh through violent military operations.[7] After the intervention of the United Nations, it welcomed these refugees back to Arakan. On 15 October 1982, the Islamophobic military government passed the Citizenship Act which rejected the citizen status of the “indigenous Muslim Rohingyas.” Harsh repression again drove hundreds of thousands back into Bangladesh.[8] In 2012, there were 800,000 stateless Rohingyas in Northern Arakan/Rakhine State.
The post-independence military agenda included the “Burmanization of Myanmar’s Muslims.” The regime considers “Arakan Muslims/Rohingyas” as the “stateless and illegal Bengalis”. The Buddhist Arakanese call them “illegal immigrants,” although some Rohingya Muslims have been there for at least three hundred years. More than 100,000 Rohingyas lost their homes due to serious communal violence. Without citizenship rights, they are oppressed, abused, discriminated and harassed. Like the Dalits of India, they are the most persecuted Burmese minority.