GEMUNU AMARASINGHE
/ AP A Rohingya man pushes a rickshaw leaving a camp for displaced Rohingya
people in Sittwe, northwestern Rakhine State, Myanmar, Thursday, May 16, 2013.
Some members of the Rohingya minority started to evacuate for safer shelters
ahead of Cyclone Mahasen, while others refused to leave, mistrusting the
government.
In western Burma,
140,000 people have been forced from their homes by communal violence. Their
camps are now at risk of being inundated by monsoons.
RAKHINE STATE,
BURMA—As a mob of Arakanese Buddhists descended on their village, Ma Nu, 52,
and her family pushed off in their fishing boat.
“The day before, we
were given leaflets, telling us to leave,” says Ma Nu, a Rohingya Muslim. “We
lived together for decades. We never thought anything like this could happen.”
From the water,
they watched the violence unfold. Stragglers were attacked and houses were
looted with the assistance of local police. Then, a hail of Molotov cocktails
set Shwe Pya village ablaze. More than 800 houses were destroyed. At least
three villagers had their throats slit, according to Ma Nu.
She lists the names
of people she recognized in the mob. Most of the Buddhists, however, were
strangers. As far as Ma Nu knows, no one has been arrested.
“We lost everything
— our fishing equipment, our clothes, our identification cards . . . and
afterward, they said we set fire to our own homes!”
Ma Nu has been
living in the crowded Bawduba internally displaced persons (IDP) camp since
July. She shares a two-by-two-metre room with her family of seven in a rickety,
government-built longhouse. Nearby, stand canvas tents and makeshift shacks
that front precarious mud flats, and beyond, the Bay of Bengal.
“I don’t know how
long we’ll have to stay here. This is not a suitable place to live.”
Built atop dry rice
paddies, the camp, like many others in the region, is at serious risk of being
flooded with the arrival this month of the monsoon season. It will last until
October. If inhabitants survive the deluge, they’ll face outbreaks of malaria
and water-borne diseases as they wade through the effluvia oozing from their
already taxed septic systems. The state already has one of the highest malaria
mortality rates in Asia.
To make matters
worse, a cyclone passed this week near the Bangladesh-Burma border — precisely
where the camps are located. Until now, Muslim IDPs have been barred from
leaving their camps, and government attempts to move them in advance of the
cyclone were met with widespread distrust.
In desperation, Ma
Nu’s son-in-law and son set out to sea in separate boats earlier in the year,
hoping for a better life in Malaysia, trusting more, it seems, to the wind,
tides and human smugglers than Burmese authorities.
“I don’t want to
live with the Arakanese,” Ma Nu says. “If they try to attack us again, this
time, even I will fight back.”
In June and October
of 2012, communal violence erupted in western Burma’s Rakhine state between
Rohingya Muslims and Arakanese Buddhists.
The Arakanese (also
known as the Rakhine) are the three-million-strong progeny of a Buddhist
kingdom that thrived in the area from the dawn of the Common Era until 1785,
when it was annexed by the Burmese. The stateless Rohingya, who number about
one million, claim they have been part of the region’s ethnic tapestry for
centuries. The Arakanese (as well as Burmese authorities) consider the Rohingya
to be illegal Bangladeshi immigrants.
Burma’s 1982
citizenship law denies the Rohingya official ethnic status, and thus
citizenship rights. To be part of a legally recognized ethnic group, one’s
people must have resided in the country prior to 1893. While Muslims have lived
in the region since at least the 15th century, their numbers grew dramatically
under British rule (1824-1948) when agricultural labourers were encouraged to
migrate to Rakhine from neighbouring Bangladesh.
Under current
legislation, third-generation Rohingya may become citizens, but it’s rarely
awarded — proof of ancestry is often difficult to verify and the law is full of
arbitrary loopholes (one clause, for example, states applicants must “be of
good character” and “sound mind”).
Despite this
identity dispute, the Arakanese and Rohingya for a time enjoyed a certain
degree of economic and social integration.
The communal
violence followed the May 28, 2012, rape and murder of an Arakanese woman by
three Muslim men. On June 3, a gang of Arakanese killed 10 Muslims in
retaliation, sparking a Rohingya reprisal on June 8 that descended the state
into five hellish days of arson, attacks and murder as Arakanese mobs swarmed
Rohingya neighbourhoods with swords, spears and torches — and vice-versa.
A second wave of
violence occurred between Oct. 21 and 24. This time, Arakanese mobs staged
co-ordinated attacks in nine townships. In one Rohingya village, 70 people
(including 28 children) were slaughtered. As with the June riots, security
forces were accused of either watching idly or participating.
Officially, 211
people have been killed in Rakhine state since June. Rohingya activists put the
number closer to 1,000. More than 8,000 homes have also been razed, and at
least 140,000 people have been displaced, the vast majority of whom — some 94
per cent — are Muslim.
Rohingya villages
and quarters that were not evacuated or destroyed have been surrounded and
contained by security forces, ostensibly to protect their inhabitants from
further attacks, but essentially creating ethnic ghettos that lack access to
food, water and medical supplies. This forced segregation is particularly
pronounced in the state capital — Muslims once made up nearly half of Sittwe’s
population of 180,000, but its once-bustling streets are now entirely
Muslim-free.
Heading out of
Sittwe, we pass shops, houses, tree-shaded boulevards and a glittering gold
pagoda that was constructed in 1997 by the country’s last dictator, Gen. Than
Shwe. Large bats, like shifting black fruit, dangle from nearly every tree.
Most buildings fly the red, white and blue Rakhine state flag.
In town, a new
deepwater port is being built with Indian money. Further south, an oil pipeline
to China is under construction. After decades of isolation, Burma (also known
as Myanmar) is now open for business. Many Arakanese, however, complain their
homeland is being exploited by the central government. Despite its resource
wealth, Rakhine state remains the second poorest in the country.
On the outskirts of
Sittwe, the recent violence becomes more palpable. We pass entire
neighbourhoods — both Buddhist and Muslim — that have been reduced to rubble.
The few surviving mosques are guarded by police.
The world begins to
take on a character of abandonment: the shell of a school, overgrown fields.
Few people are seen. Reams of barbed wire stretch into the distance and line
the road.
We come upon a
checkpoint and my tuk tuk slows to a stop. A clutch of soldiers sit on plastic
chairs, cradling new assault rifles and what look like Second World War
carbines. They glance at me and I anticipate difficulty. My driver begins
speaking to them in Arakanese.
The day before,
while visiting the office of a humanitarian agency for a briefing, I was
surprised when a foreign aid worker (who was not authorized to speak with the
media) asked me to describe camp conditions.
“We can’t go where
we want,” she said. “They see our white license plates and stop us at the
checkpoints.” Vehicles registered to international agencies all sport these
white plates. Camp visits, she said, need to be preapproved and are then
curated by the authorities.
Another aid worker
complained that their staff are routinely harassed and threatened. Their
capacity to deliver humanitarian aid is limited, she said, because the
government is constantly trying to placate the Arakanese.
Turkey’s
development agency, for example, was blocked from building 5,000 permanent
homes for the Rohingya after demonstrations in March. Since June, at least 14
Muslim humanitarian workers have been arrested in the state. Human Rights Watch
says five of them remain in custody.
The soldiers just
wave us through and we enter a dust-cloaked world, one of destitution and
despair, where men sport beards or topi caps and women cover their hair with
scarves.
I pay my Arakanese
driver and he beats a retreat out of the ghetto that was once Bu May village.
It’s not long before my Rohingya fixer, 57-year-old Aung Win, finds me standing
near the barricaded crossroads. A retired consular interpreter turned poultry
farmer, he says an Arakanese mob mutilated his livestock in the riots. He now
styles himself a fixer/activist. He was imprisoned briefly in February, he
says, for trying to contact a visiting United Nations rapporteur.
“Buddhists are
supposed to be peace-loving people, so why are they attacking the Rohingya?” he
asks rhetorically. “The government was capable of suppressing pro-democracy
demonstrations in the past, so why not suppress the Arakanese now?”
We step into a
battered jeep and follow a narrow, hole-riddled dirt road. Aung Win points out
the new multi-storey Sittwe University. A Rohingya village once stood on the
site, he says. The university’s Arakanese students are now escorted to its
guarded entrance by armed police officers.
The first camp we
see is composed of tight rows of squalid huts constructed from bamboo, thatch
and frayed bits of tarpaulin. One hut’s door is made from a piece of a World
Food Program (WFP) sack: “50 kg chickpeas / gift of Canada.” The irony: As an
“unregistered” camp, this settlement receives neither international nor
government aid, only the occasional bit of food from Muslims in Yangon. Such
camps have sprung up around the tents and longhouses of “registered” IDP camps.
Registered IDPs either lost their homes or were forcefully moved by the Burmese
authorities. As such, they receive small rations of oil, rice, salt and
chickpeas. Unregistered IDPs are people who fled their communities after
October, fearing more violence.
Rabiya Khatu, 45,
has been living in the unregistered section since January. She claims that
police opened fire on their houses in June. Her brother was killed in the
riots.
“I had to sell my
daughter’s earrings to bring her here,” she says. “Bribing authorities is the
only way to leave Aung Mingalar.” She is referring to the last Muslim quarter
in Sittwe — a tightly guarded ghetto of 7,000 people that I was barred from
entering.
“Everything depends
on the government,” she says. “If they supported us and gave us security, we
could live together again with the Arakanese. . . . But I think the government
is against the Rohingya people.”
She shares her
small hut with her family of eight, sleeping on thin mats. Like thousands of
others, her hut sits atop a soon-to-be-flooded rice paddy.
“We are very
worried about the rainy season,” she says. “We have no idea what to do.”
The area we tour is
several kilometres square. Within it, camps have been placed in the fields of
existing Muslim villages. Nearly half of the state’s Rohingya IDPs live within
this sprawling, guarded prison.
Everywhere one
looks, one sees expansive fields peppered with neat clusters of blue, green or
white tents, rows of longhouses, the odd wooden house on stilts, stagnant
ponds, swaying palms, and haphazardly placed makeshift huts that, from a
distance, look like swollen bumps of earth. A few small markets line the area’s
earthen roads, selling rice, eggs, watermelons, tea. Supplies mostly come via
bribed soldiers or sympathetic (as well as enterprising) Arakanese. For them,
doing business with the Rohingya can be dangerous: there have been reports of
attacks against “traitorous” Arakanese.
I’m taken to the
house of U Kyaw Hla Aung, 73, an activist lawyer who has spent 10 of the past
27 years in prison. Until June, he worked as an administrator for Médecins Sans
Frontières (MSF). Kyaw Hla Aung was also one of the NGO workers arrested after
the riots. He spent 14 days in prison.
“They searched my
house, then accused me of having a letter from Al Qaeda!” he says indignantly.
“Yet township by township, the Arakanese are destroying mosques and Muslim
houses, and the government takes no action against these terrorists.”
Kyaw Hla Aung talks
at length about the NaSaKa: the state’s notorious frontier police. He describes
extortion, arrests, torture, rape, killings and mass graves. The situation in
Rakhine state, he says, is a “hidden genocide.”
He shows me videos
on a laptop. He says they are from June. In one, young women futilely try to
douse the flames engulfing a thatch house. In another, people with bundles on
their heads and shoulders are being marched out of Sittwe at gunpoint by what
looks to be the military.
“We can forgive,”
he says, “but future peace depends on the government and the Arakanese. But why
would they seek peace while they’re winning?”
We visit a tiny
clinic where waiting patients cower from the blazing sun under a cement awning
or a lone banyan tree, swatting flies if they are conscious, if they have the
energy. Tuberculosis, diarrhea and malaria are the most common ailments. The
clinic, Aung Win says, receives funding from Yangon Muslims.The clinic’s lone
doctor refuses to waste time speaking with me.
Out back, a
Rohingya nurse from Save the Children hands out nutritional supplements to a
group of pregnant women and young mothers. She is the only NGO worker I will
see within the camps.
“The UN and MSF are
afraid to work here,” Aung Win says. Both organizations have been targeted by
Arakanese activists.
At a crumbling
schoolhouse, I’m swarmed by smiling children. Two-thirds of the school’s 1,400
children are IDPs. Lacking outside funding, the community pools together money
to pay the school’s teachers paltry $40-per-month salaries.
“My people are poor
and illiterate,” Aung Win says. He tells me that Muslim extremism is borne of
poverty, discrimination and a lack of knowledge of the outside world. “If my
people do not receive education, they will become radicals in the future. We
cannot let this happen.”
We tour several
more camps. Nearly everyone complains about inadequate provisions, their
uncertain future, how the violence was unwarranted, unexpected and perpetuated
by both state security forces and the Arakanese. Conditions range from
rudimentary to deplorable. Unable to leave, few people can work. Nearly every
camp reeks of overflowing latrines.
The conditions in
remote ghettos and camps are supposedly much worse. My attempts to access such
areas were blocked by state authorities.
“This is not a
religious conflict between two communities,” U Shwe Mawng, 56, says. “This is
about one community trying to appropriate the others’ land.” A landowner
himself, his large wooden house sits amid a sea of camps. There have been
allegations of Arakanese appropriating Rohingya houses, farmland and livestock
following evictions.
“We never had this
kind of violence during the military dictatorship,” he says. “I don’t think
Myanmar is ready for democracy.”
Before arriving in
Sittwe, I was warned that the Arakanese can be incredibly hostile to
foreigners, who, in their eyes, are too sympathetic toward their enemy. My Arakanese
fixer, who had asked about my background when we met, suggested that his people
would be warm, hospitable and unabashedly candid if I made them aware of my
Jewish ancestry.
“Finally, a
foreigner who understands!” says Khin Maung Gree, a central committee member of
the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party (RNDP), when we meet. “But your
people have their own country. For us, that is still a dream.”
The
ultra-nationalist RNDP has been incredibly influential in Rakhine state since
winning 35 seats in the country’s 2010 election. Abetted by Burma’s government
and several monastic associations, it is believed the RNDP is driving Rakhine
state’s anti-Rohingya campaign.
“We could let them
stay here if they wanted to live in peace,” he says, “but they are trying to
invade our territory.” He claims the state’s Muslims are illegal Bangladeshi
immigrants masquerading under an artificial ethnicity, religious extremists
intent on conquering the Arakanese homeland through violence and their
“alarmingly high birth rate.”
There is a
historical precedent for this ethnic antipathy. Following fierce sectarian
clashes in 1942, a Mujahedeen movement developed in the region in 1947 with the
aim of creating an Islamic state along the Bangladeshi frontier. The Burmese
military has been combating such militants ever since, with particularly fierce
(and even genocidal) campaigns being waged against both Rohingya combatants and
civilians in the 1960s and ’70s.
While this Islamic
insurgency has waned in recent years, there is evidence that Bangladesh-based
Rohingya militants have been receiving at least some training from Al Qaeda
since 2000. The Arakanese, meanwhile, have been waging their own guerrilla war
against the Rohingya and the Burmese, starting with the 1968 formation of the
independence-seeking Arakan Liberation Party. Its armed wing still operates in
remote parts of the state, albeit nominally.
The RNDP’s solution
to the Rohingya question is simple: “We want the government to take them to a
third country,”
The few, like Aung
Win, who have citizenship papers can stay, Khin Maung Gree says, but “they need
to be given their own, separate places to live.”
Across town, U Sa
King Da, the severe 38-year-old leader of Sittwe’s 200-strong Young Monks’
Association, spends nearly half an hour detailing the moral degeneracy of the
“so-called” Rohingya.
“They’re polygamous
. . . and incestuous,” he says. He talks about Muslims setting fire to their
own houses, deliberately contracting tuberculosis, and starving their children
to garner international aid and sympathy.
Like the RNDP, the
Young Monks’ Association disseminates its views in pamphlets. It also pays
regular visits to the offices of international humanitarian agencies in Sittwe.
To avoid further violence, Sa King Da says that NGOs should avoid “playing
favourites.” Aid, he says, must be distributed equally between the two
communities.
The state’s 7,300
Arakanese IDPs receive regular rations and were given one-time payments of $120
— half was provided by the United Nations, the other half was given by the
government. These people, whose houses were destroyed in the June riots, will
be moved from their government longhouses to new, permanent housing before the
monsoon season begins. In the meantime, they are able to come and go from their
camps as they please.
“In a way, we’re
fortunate that Muslims raped and murdered that girl last May,” says U Tun Sein,
37, the head of a small Arakanese IDP camp. “Now we know that they have been
conspiring to conquer Arakanese territory.”
While there are
moderate Arakanese, their voices have been lost in the nationalistic clamour
sweeping through the state.
U Tun Hla Aung, 74,
was Aung Win’s high-school English teacher.
“We can live
together in the future, but not now,” he says — tensions remain too high.
Still, he thinks that by asserting their false “Rohingya” identity, “Muslim
leaders are instigating this problem.”
If events of 2012
and 2013 are any indication, growing Islamophobia appears to be a caveat of
Burma’s courtship with democracy and freedom of speech. Non-Rohingya Muslims
are now being targeted as well, with pogroms occurring in March, April and May
of this year. Muslims make up approximately 5 per cent of Burma’s population of
55 million.
Perhaps with the
2015 election in mind, even Aung San Suu Kyi, traditionally the voice of
Burma’s disenfranchised, has been decidedly silent about the Rohingya. Other
members of the National League for Democracy, however, have been more
forthright. “Citizenship for them is possible, but being defined as a distinct
ethnic group is not,” political prisoner turned parliamentarian, Phyo Min
Thein, said when I sat down with him in April. Bengali immigrants, he says,
should be granted citizenship papers if they can prove that their families have
been in the country for at least three generations. “But they should understand
themselves . . . Historically, there is no such thing as ‘Rohingya.’”
International
pressure on Burma’s government for its alleged complicity in the anti-Rohingya
campaign has been minimal. To the contrary, the European Union lifted trade and
investment sanctions last month. In 2012, Australia, Canada and the United
States did much the same. With its first embassy to the country opening this
year, Canada, if it chooses, is better placed than ever to ensure that
attention is being paid to the impending humanitarian disaster in Rakhine state
— a disaster that threatens to become ethnic cleansing.
With her longhouse
raised 30 centimetres above the ground, Ma Nu may be able to avoid the rising
water — for now. Still, she is one of at least 69,000 Muslim IDPs that the
United Nations estimates to be living in flood-prone areas.
In advance of
Cyclone Mahasen, temporary weatherproof shelters are being constructed, but
this is a Band-Aid. According to one humanitarian worker, “Engineering is not
the solution. These people need to be moved to other sites.” But many Muslim
IDPs don’t trust the government to move them.
“I want to go to a
third country — if the government allows us,” Ma Nu says. “Any Muslim country
would do.”
Of the 13,000
Rohingyas to set sail from Rakhine state in 2012, the United Nations believes
as many as 500 have died at sea. If they manage to land on the region’s shores,
they are again placed in camps. Bangladeshi and Thai authorities have turned
boats back, and in February, the Thai navy even opened fire on one. Reports
differ: two or 15 were killed. Fleeing in advance of Cyclone Mahasen, moreover,
a boat carrying 100 Rohingya as part of a government evacuation plan capsized
late Monday night, killing at least 50.
Ma Nu’s son-in-law
is one of the fortunate ones to make it Malaysia. Her son’s boat drifted
off-course to India’s Andaman Islands. She’s received messages that they’re
alive. She can tell me nothing, however, about their conditions.
“Our future,” Ma Nu
says, “depends on Allah’s decisions.”
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