Arakan News Agency
Ever since Burma’s military elite began a slow and piecemeal, but highly publicized, march back towards civilian rule in 2010, the former pariah state has received a fair amount of praise from around the world. Diplomats, world leaders, and intellectual luminaries have applauded what they see as efforts to correct old lies, build stronger state institutions, and even put the brakes on their most egregiously violent and enduring local ethnic conflicts.
One of the most recent ostensible triumphs was Burma’s 2014 census—the nation’s first since 1983 and the first truly comprehensive headcount since 1931, which revealed that the nation’s population tallied 51 million, instead of the 60 million the state had touted for years. Many observers saw this monumental undertaking and the honesty of its results (understandably marred by their inability to reach regions of ongoing ethnic conflict) as a sign of the government’s newfound capability, professionalism, and willingness to seek out the truth.
But the unfortunate reality is that, while the census was an orderly affair, it was also a subtly weaponized bureaucratic tool. Sure, the count set right a good many statistical wrongs, paving the way for better management and services in the future, but it also allowed the government to perpetuate their relentless campaign to cleanse the nation of an ethnic Muslim minority, the Rohingya, without publicly lifting a gun. All they had to do was write their identity out of the census, erasing their legitimate existence from state records and forcing them, legally, into a tenuous, liminal space.
As subtle as this move against the Rohingya may seem, it’s outright aggressive at its core, not to mention a sign that the government may not be as fully dedicated to reform as many would like to believe, and may even be explicitly backsliding. This fear has surfaced periodically over the past year, most recently when police cracked down this month on student protestors venting their discontent over the government’s choice to reduce the autonomy of universities. The backlash saw violence and arrests reminiscent of the pre-reform days of the military dictatorship. Yet in the case of these protests, supporters have still managed to cobble together a legal case against the government to openly test the limits of their changing country’s justice system. The Rohingya lack even that recourse.
Rohingya Muslims number around 1.33 million worldwide (their numbers in Burma are estimated to have dropped to 800,000 these days), most of whom are clustered near the towns of Buthidaung and Maungdaw in Burma’s Rakhine State, near the border with Bangladesh. And they have the dubious honor of being named one of the world’s most persecuted minorities by the United Nations.
Their persecution isn’t a simple result of their minority status. The majority ethnic Burmese compose only about two-thirds of the population, with the remaining third composed of 135 minorities. Some of these groups (especially the Chin, Karen, Karenni, Kachin, Mon, Rakhine, Shan, and Wa) have been in armed conflict with the state, but many ethnicities still fly under the radar.
The Rohingya, who don’t have much in the way of resources to fight a war, get short shrift largely because they’re Muslims of uncertain origin. In Burma, a violently Buddhist country, home to Ashin Wirathu, the self-professed Osama bin Laden of Buddhism, and his 969 Movement which promotes the removal of the nations 5 to 10 percent Muslim population (which he views as subhuman) to preserve national purity and morality, the Rohingya’s religion alone is tough. But although many claim their ancestors have been in the nation for centuries, the government maintains they were a parasitic extension of the British Empire, arriving in the mid-19th century with their colonial masters. And Burma has for years used killings, concentration camps, denial of services, and blind eyes and hands towards communal violence against the Rohingya in Rakhine to encourage these supposed colonial vestiges to clear out as fast as they can.
Source : Good Magazine/ Mark Hay
