Suu Kyi must stop the ethnic cleansing in Arakan
Myanmar’s government said that the
October 9 raids were conducted by the Aqamul Mujahidin organization, which it
described as being affiliated with an extremist group. On the other hand, a
previously unknown group - Faith Movement - has released a press statement on
October 15 in which it claimed itself as the sons of Arakan soil who were
compelled by the dire situation that they faced to make their own destiny
through uprising, self-determination in self-defense. “We stand as an
independent body which is free from all elements of terror in any nature,” the
press release stated “that seeks fundamental but legitimate rights and justice
for all ARAKANESE including our innocent Rohingyas and OTHER civilians dying
from the continuous military assaults.”
An outcome like this was only waiting to happen given that
history has repeatedly shown that such prolonged encampment in IDP concentration
camps create a sense of ultimate abandonment by the state, pushing even the
most moderates to take violent means to redress their plight. The
initial attacks, in which three border police outposts were overrun by hundreds
of people, most only lightly armed, showed a degree of sophistication not seen
before in violence involving the Rohingya, but did not suggest the group was
especially well-funded or armed, diplomats said.
Myanmar’s military (Tatmadaw) has since been deployed in the
Rohingya populated northern part of Arakan (Rakhine) state. And what we are
witnessing there is simply shocking. War crimes are perpetrated. Under the
pretext of finding the Rohingya perpetrators, the Tatmadaw has been doing what
it has always done – using its criminal scorched-earth tactics. As a result, since the Oct. 9 attacks, at least 133 unarmed Rohingyas
(mostly children and women) have been killed, or have died in custody. Over a
hundred Rohingyas have been detained, several villages and more than a thousand
homes and several mosques have been burned by the security forces forcing an
internal displacement of at least 15,000 people, who are even denied
humanitarian aid. Many of the local elders and Imams have also been killed
extra-judicially after they were asked to report the local military camp.
Chris Lewa of the Arakan Project, a monitoring group, said the
army was using "typical counter-insurgency measures against
civilians", including "shooting civilians on sight, burning
homes, looting property and arbitrary arrests".
Foreign
reporters have not been allowed into the area the military has declared an
"operation zone", but Reuters was able to contact some residents and
community leaders by telephone. The people, who did not want to be identified,
contradicted several of the reports in state media, saying that the death toll
in the area was higher than reported and that a number of those killed were
unarmed. In one of the disputed accounts, the state-run Myanma Alinn newspaper
said 30 Muslims attacked government forces on Oct. 11 near Kyetyoepyin village,
and that 10 Rohingyas were killed in the subsequent fighting. After the clash,
the insurgents fled, setting fire to homes, the report said. But several
Rohingya residents from the area said they believed at least 19 people,
including eight women, were killed by security forces that day. They also say
it was the soldiers who set a large part of the village on fire.
The United Nations has said the violence is preventing aid
agencies from delivering food and medicines to the region.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) warned in
a statement Friday that as troops poured into the region and authorities
blocked off the delivery of humanitarian aid to Maungdaw, aid agencies have not
been able to conduct a needs assessment. The statement quoted a World Food
Program (WFP) partnerships officer as saying they had requested access “from
township level to Union level”. WFP told HRW that 50,000 people remain without
food aid in Maungdaw.
Brad Adams, the group’s Asia
director, said the recent violence “has led the army to deny access to aid
agencies that provide essential health care and food to people at grave risk”. “The
Rohingya and others have been especially vulnerable since the ethnic cleansing
campaign in 2012, and many rely on humanitarian aid to survive,” he added.
Rohingya advocacy groups have
expressed concerns over what they claim is a continued crackdown in the area,
with global groups releasing a statement Sunday claiming security forces have
been indiscriminately killing Rohingya and torching and plundering their homes
and villages, under the pretext of looking for the attackers.
This latest ethnic
cleansing drives against the Rohingya are simply sickening in a country that is
led by someone like Suu Kyi who was honored with a Nobel Prize for peace. What
a joke this award is becoming! Apparently, she has failed to learn lessons from
history, esp. why her wise father Aung San had organized the Panglong
Conference in the pre-independence days.
Suu Kyi should have
known better than most Burmese that such military excesses only weaken the very
foundation of an artificial geographic entity like Burma (and today’s Myanmar) that
comprises peoples of many nationalities, races, ethnicities and religions. Since
the time of Pagan King Anawrahta (11th century, CE), her country has
been kept together by strong arms tactics of feudal kings, the British Raj and
the military governments that ruled. ‘Divide and rule’ and fear-mongering
against a perceived foe became prudent methods to administer this diverse
country. But such tactics failed to create nationhood. There was never a sense
of belonging except for the dominant group.
This much-needed task
for forging national unity was taken up by visionaries like Aung San (who
represented the Interim Burmese government), Sao Shwe Thaik (Shan leader)
and others (including U Razak of AFPFL, a Muslim) in the late 1940s. That was the
background for the Panglong Conference, which was held in Southern Shan state
on February 1947. However, the spirit of Panglong Agreement that was reached between Aung
San and other ethnic and community leaders in an attempt to unite
everyone - irrespective of race, ethnicity and religion, Buddhists and
non-Buddhists - for a common goal of independence was dead following Aung San's assassination (along with U Razak who was Education and National Planning Minister in Aung San's cabinet, and
six other cabinet ministers) on July 19, 1947, less than six months before Union
of Burma was to emerge as an independent state in the global arena. It should
be noted that the Agreement, amongst other provisions, accepted full autonomy
in internal administration for the “Frontier Areas" (bordering British
India, Thailand, Laos, China) in principle and envisioned the creation of a Kachin State by the Constituent Assembly.
The founding fathers of Burma were very serious to foster unity in their
future state. Thus, in 1946 General Aung San assured full rights and
privileges to Rohingya/Arakanese Muslims as an indigenous people, saying: “I give (offer) you a blank cheque. We will
live together and die together. Demand what you want. I will do my best to
fulfill them. If native people are divided, it will be difficult to achieve
independence for Burma.”
The
First President, Sao Shwe Thaik, who was the last Saopha of Yawnghwe, famously said, “If the
Rohingyas are not indigenous, nor am I.”
After Myanmar gained independence on January 4, 1948, communists and ethnic/national/religious
minorities in the country began a series of insurgencies displaying their grave
discontent towards the newly formed post-independence government as they believed that the Panglong Agreement was not honored and that they
were being unfairly excluded from governing the country. Their overwhelming
perception was that the new government was a state for, by and of the majority
Bamar and Buddhists only, and not for other minorities.
Sao
Shwe Thaik who had led and organized the Panglong conference became the first president of the Union of Burma. His public speech on 4 January 1949
at a mass rally held outside City Hall to mark the first anniversary of
Independence Day captures the troubled mood of the state: “Cooperation and
understanding cannot come about so long as the element of violence or threat of
violence exists, for violence has no counterpart in freedom, and liberty ends
where violence begins.”
There were also widespread practice of discrimination against anyone who
was not a Buddhist. For example, it was noted that many Christian Karen and
Muslim and Sikh military officials, who were originally appointed by the
British, were replaced with Buddhist Bamars by the new parliament. The situation was much worse for
Muslims everywhere - from Arakan to Rangoon. As a result of serious
discrimination, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs lost their jobs in every government
sector – civilian, police and military. Many lost their businesses, too, and were
looked down upon as either British-era migrants or their children thereof. Loss
for them was craved as a net gain for the majority Buddhist. Steadily,
intolerance of the minority became the law of the land.
The occupation of Burma by Japan during the early years of the World War II,
when Rakhine Buddhists had allied themselves with the occupying fascist
Japanese forces while the Arakanese Muslims collaborated with the British Raj
to defeat Japan, had already poisoned the relationship between these two
dominant groups in Arakan. After Burma earned its independence, many Rakhine Buddhists
took advantage of the emerging situation to ethnically cleanse Muslims from
many parts of Arakan, esp. the southern part of the state. This led to the
ghettoization of Muslims in towns and villages bordering today’s Bangladesh
(erstwhile East Pakistan).
It is not difficult to understand why almost every racial/religious entity,
including the Mujahedeen (made up of Arakanese/Rohingya Muslims), outside the
majority Bamar/Buddhist race/religion rebelled in the early years. Being betrayed by the British Raj, in spite of their valuable services rendered during
and after the WWII, it was no brainer that some Arakanese Muslims had felt that
they had to protect themselves against marauding Buddhist incursions into their
northern Mayu Frontier Territories. Muslim rebellion against the central
government ultimately stopped when promises for their wider acceptance were
made by government officials. Even then the persecution of the Rohingya and
other Muslims continued.
According to the Pakistan Times (August 26, 1959), some 10,000 refugees
had by then taken shelter in East Pakistan. In 1959, Burma agreed with East
Pakistan governor Zakir Hossain to take back Rohingya refugees who had taken
shelter in Chittagong in 1958. When questioned ‘why refugees were pouring into
Pakistan from Burma, the governor replied that the government of Burma had
nothing to do with it. Actually the Moghs [ie, Buddhist Rakhines] of Arakan
were creating the trouble.’ (Pakistan Times, August 27, 1959) Governor Zakir
Hossain’s reply once again underscored the deep hostility of the racist
Rakhines against the minority Rohingyas. On October 27, 1960, the Daily
Guardian, Rangoon, reported that Burmese ‘Supreme Court quashes expulsion
orders against Arakanese Muslims,’ which once again shows that the Arakanese
[Rohingya] Muslims faced much problems in their reintegration.
Armed resistance by various ethnic and religious minorities and communists became
the new norms and not the exceptions, which continued for more than a decade
until the military was able to crush such through its savage scorched-earth
tactics. Even then armed struggle is a
reality in many parts of Myanmar to this very day.
The two largest insurgent factions in Myanmar were the communists, led by
the Communist Party of Burma (CPB), and ethnic Karen insurgents, led by the Karen National Union (KNU). The KNU favored an independent state, forged out of Karen State (Kayin State) and Karenni State (Kayah State), in Outer Myanmar (Lower
Burma), administered solely by the Karen people.
Even the Rakhine Buddhist separatists were not behind in such insurgency
movements, nor were the Chins. Rakhine insurgent groups, such as the Arakan Army (AA) and Arakan Liberation Army (ALA) continue to have hostilities towards the government, though major
violence has been rare since political reforms and peace talks. The AA, founded
in 2009, is currently the largest insurgent group in Rakhine State, with an
estimated 1,500–2,500 fighters active in the region. Its goal is an independent
Rakhine state.
In the early 1960s, the Burmese government refused to adopt a federal
system, to the dismay of insurgent groups such as the CPB, who proposed
adopting the system during peace talks. By the early 1980s, politically
motivated armed insurgencies (like the communist) had largely disappeared,
while ethnic-based insurgencies continued.
The Panglong Agreement of 1947 offered the Shan the option to split from
Myanmar a decade after independence if they were unsatisfied with the central
government. This was, however, not honored following Aung San's assassination.
Instead, what they got are – severe mistreatment, torture, robbery, rape,
unlawful arrest, and massacre. As a result, an armed resistance movement, led
by Sao Noi and Saw Yanna, was launched in May of 1958 in the Shan State. One of
the largest Shan insurgent groups in Myanmar is the Shan State Army - South (SSA-S), which has some 6,000 to 8,000 soldiers, with its bases along the
Myanmar-Thailand border.
In October 2012, the ongoing conflicts in Myanmar included the Kachin conflict, between the Christian Kachin Independence Army (KIA) and the government; a series of genocidal pogroms directed against the
Rohingya Muslims that were
participated by Rakhine Buddhists, and aided by the government and
non-government groups in Rakhine State, including the Buddhist clergy; and a
conflict between the Shan, Lahu, and Karen minority groups, and the government in the eastern half
of the country. Armed conflict between ethnic
Chinese rebels and the Myanmar
Armed Forces have resulted in the Kokang offensive in
February 2015. The conflict had forced 40,000 to 50,000 civilians to flee their
homes and seek shelter on the Chinese side of the border.
In 2012 alone, fighting between the KIA and the government resulted in
around 2,500 casualties (both civilian and military); 211 of whom were
government soldiers. The violence resulted in the displacement of nearly
100,000 civilians, and the complete or partial abandonment of 364 villages.
Several insurgent groups have negotiated ceasefires and peace agreements
with successive governments, which until political reforms that begun in 2011 and ended in 2015, had largely fallen apart. That
reality marshaled in the Second Panglong-type conference held in Naypyidaw this
August to end the decades-long insurgencies in many of the ethnic areas.
As can
be seen from the brief review above, civil/genocidal wars
have been a constant feature of Myanmar's socio-political landscape since her
independence as Union of Burma in 1948. These wars are predominantly struggles
for ethnic and sub-national autonomy, with the areas surrounding the ethnically
Bamar central districts of the country serving as the primary
geographical setting of conflict.
The Rohingya and other Muslims inside Myanmar had been in the receiving end
of annihilation. They have faced dozens of extermination campaigns since 1942. Denied
each of the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
truly, the Rohingyas of Myanmar remain the most persecuted people in our
planet. And yet, until this latest episode of attacks by some disgruntled
Rohingya youths for daily dehumanization that their family members face, they
have been the most unarmed, passive and peaceful of all the communities that
make up the fractured mosaic of Myanmar. This, in spite of the fact, more than
1 in 2 Rohingyas now live a life of a refugee outside Myanmar.
In the last few years alone, they have seen only death and destruction of
their folks; desperation has set in, and many have fled the country, while some
150,000 remain internally displaced with no shelters except concentration camps
within the Arakan state. Their ID cards were confiscated and they were denied
the right to vote; their political parties banned; and not a single Muslim candidate
was allowed to contest in the election. Suu Kyi has come to power and refuses
to identify them as ‘Rohingya’. She even did not invite them into the
peace/unity conference in Naypyidaw. In spite of mounting international pressure,
the Rohingya continue to be denied the basic rights and means of livelihood; their
women continue to be raped by Tatmadaw as weapons of war to bring collective shame
upon them and force them out of their ancestral homeland. [As I write, many
Rohingya women (ten of which alone are from Anauk Kwin hamlet of U Shin Gya village tract) continue
to be gang raped by the Tatmadaw in its latest ethnic cleansing drives.]
The new pogrom inside the
Rohingya populated territories of northern Arakan state once again underlines
the power the army retains in Myanmar, which is guilty of committing war crimes
against an unarmed civilian population. Such
brutality against the Rohingya Muslims also unmasks the Buddhist government’s
double-standards when dealing with non-Buddhists. Army generals
continue to run the home ministry, which inflicts the worst form of collective
punishment against the Muslims (but not against the Buddhist rebels). This is
quite evident when the Rakhine Buddhist extremists of the Arakan Army attacked
the military,
which it has done 15 times since 28 December, 2015, in which several soldiers got killed, interestingly no such scorched-earth
and combing operation to flush them out was undertaken by the military.
Suu Kyi
can start the process of reintegration of the Rohingya, by following the
footsteps of her wise father. She can immediately withdraw the military from
Rohingya towns and villages where they are committing war crimes. She can
restore the citizenship rights of the Rohingya on the basis of the First
Schedule to the Burma Independence Act 1947. That Act clearly stated that the
Rohingya and all other Muslims who were British subjects - who were born in
Burma or whose father or paternal grandfather was born in Burma - were
considered citizens of the Union of Burma. Under Annex A of the Aung
San-Attlee Agreement, 27 January, 1947, Rohingyas were citizens of the
Union of Burma: “A Burma National is defined for the purposes of eligibility to
vote and to stand as a candidate of the forthcoming elections as a British
subject or the subject of an Indian State who was born in Burma and resided
there for a total period of not less than eight years in the ten years
immediately preceding either 1st January, 1942 or 1st January, 1947.”
The
Nu-Attlee Agreement (1947), signed between Prime Minister U Nu (Burma) and
Prime Minister Clement Attlee (Great Britain) on Oct. 17, 1947 on transferring
power to Burma was very important as to the determination of the citizenship
status of the peoples and races in Burma. Article 3 of the Agreement states: “Any person who at the date of the coming
into force of the present Treaty is, by virtue of the Constitution of the Union
of Burma, a citizen thereof and who is, or by virtue of a subsequent election
is deemed to be, also a British subject, may make a declaration of alienage in
the manner prescribed by the law of the Union, and thereupon shall cease to be
a citizen of the Union.”
Human rights group, including the Faith Movement, have
called for: restoration of human rights including citizenship rights for their
Rohingya people; immediate relocation of the Rohingyas from the IDP camps back
to their places of origin (before the genocidal campaigns ensued in 2012),
return of their confiscated assets, repeal of the 1982 Citizenship Law so that
they can be treated as equals in Myanmar, compensation to IDP detainees towards
rebuilding their burnt/destroyed homes and places of worship, a cessation of
military offensives against all ethnic groups of Myanmar, and prevention of all
kinds of religious persecution including hate speeches by Buddhist extremists.
They have also demanded international investigation and intervention to stop
Rohingya Genocide, and have sought their protection.
So, if Suu Kyi’s government is serious about bringing peace
in Arakan, it should seriously fulfil such legitimate demands for the greater
good of all. After all, in all fairness, none of these demands is irrational
and within the capacity of the Myanmar government to implement. If she
continues to overlook such demands and
follows the dictates of her savage Tatmadaw that has been committing war crimes
in its conflicts against the ethnic minorities, I am afraid, it won’t be too
long that Myanmar would divide into many states, and that many of the top
generals and ministers could be charged with committing crimes against humanity
in the International Criminal Court. The international community may also find
it necessary to demand that the Mayu Frontier Territories
(in northern Arakan) be declared a ‘safe’ territory for the persecuted Rohingyas
of Myanmar so that they could live there with honor, dignity, safety and
security.
Let Suu Kyi do the math and figure out what is
better for her fractured and artificial country. The sooner the better!
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