Attacks on Myanmar's Rohingya May Lead to Wider Conflict

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

 

In Myanmar (Burma), Buddhist animosity towards an ethno-religious Bengali Muslim minority, the Rohingya, has led to massive violence.

The Rohingya, who number some 1.3 million people, less than five per cent of the country’s population, live mainly in Myanmar’s far western Rakhine State, adjacent to neighbouring Muslim Bangladesh. 

Most were stripped of their citizenship under a 1982 law enacted by the military junta that used to rule Myanmar, and they have suffered decades of repression under the country’s Buddhist majority.

Indeed, the term “Rohingya” is itself highly contested, because it is perceived as a claim of indigenous ethnic status by a community most Buddhists regard as immigrants from Bangladesh, and who link their arrival to the first British incursion into Burma in 1824. They therefore prefer to refer to the Rohingya as “Bengali.”

“Location and lack of integration have helped to fuel views of Rohingya as illegal immigrants and made them more susceptible to false portrayals as a rapidly growing existential threat to Buddhist Burmese culture,” stated Dan Sullivan, a senior advocate at the humanitarian organization Refugees International.

In Southeast Asia, both Western and internal colonialism have been instrumental in the legal and political construction of indigeneity and its application to specific populations, according to Oona Paredes, a cultural anthropoogist at the National University of Singapore. 

Indigenous concepts of indigeneity typically diverge widely from state definitions, especially where territorial sovereignty is at stake, she contends.

The Rohingya population has seen its rights progressively eroded, and its gradual marginalisation from social and political life. This has become particularly acute since 2012 anti-Muslim violence in Rakhine State. 

Disenfranchisement prior to the 2015 elections severed the last link with politics and means of influence, and an increasing sense of despair has driven more people to consider a violent response.

On Aug 25, militants from the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) attacked police posts and an army base, killing more than a dozen. 

In response, the Myanmar military began destroying entire villages, aided by Buddhist vigilantes supportive of the extremist 969 Movement. 

The stream of refugees has crossed into Bangladesh, which is itself poor and overcrowded. Around 400,000 Rohingya fleeing violence already lived there before the exodus. This new influx could soon add at least another 400,000 refugees.

The ARSA was formed from remnants of earlier movements, including the Arakan Rohingya Islamic Front (ARIF) and the Rohingya Solidarity Organization (RSO). Arakan is the former name of Rakhine State.

The insurgents are led by a committee of Rohingya émigrés in Saudi Arabia and commanded on the ground by Rohingya with international training and experience in modern guerrilla war tactics. They enjoy considerable sympathy and backing from Muslims in northern Rakhine State.

Muslim states are taking notice. Protesters in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country, demanded that their government put pressure on Myanmar.

Foreign Minister Retno Marsud visited Myanmar and urged Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the civilian leader of the country, to end the ongoing violence. 

But, though the country’s nominal leader, she has little control over the military. The armed forces are run by Commander-in-Chief Min Aung Hlaing.

In the Russian republic of Chechnya, tens of thousands protested against what its leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, called Myanmar’s “genocide” against the persecuted Rohingya minority.

A senior leader of al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch, Khaled Batarfi, called on Muslims to support their Rohingya Muslim brethren against the “enemies of Allah.”

Suu Kyi has come under fire for failing to speak out against the mass killings and displacement of Rohingya, particularly given her previous image as a champion of human rights.

Now she has gone further. In a telephone call with Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan, she claimed that Myanmar is the victim of “misinformation” that was being distributed to benefit “terrorists.” She added that her government was fighting to ensure “terrorism” didn't spread.

Aung San Suu Kyi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for her decades-long campaign against Myanmar’s military junta, but now many critics have called for it to be revoked.

But liberal globalists conflate two different things. Perhaps her apparently inconsistent behaviour can better be understood, not through the prism of human rights, but that of ethnic conflict – a very different, and uglier, matter.

In her battle against the military that ruled the country, she was fighting what was in effect an internal struggle within the Buddhist Burman majority, which considers itself the “owners” of the country, their “homeland.” 

But the Rohingya are to her a “foreign” community, especially “dangerous “as their kith and kin live in neighbouring Bangladesh. She probably to some extent agrees with the narrative propounded by the nationalists. Therein lies the problem.