{"id":102967,"date":"2017-12-04T12:00:02","date_gmt":"2017-12-04T12:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=102967"},"modified":"2017-12-03T12:33:45","modified_gmt":"2017-12-03T12:33:45","slug":"no-such-thing-as-rohingya-myanmar-erases-a-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/12\/no-such-thing-as-rohingya-myanmar-erases-a-history\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018No Such Thing as Rohingya\u2019: Myanmar Erases a History"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

A Rohingya woman and her child returning to the Basara camp in Sittwe, Myanmar. Across central Rakhine, about 120,000 Rohingya have been interned in camps. Many more have fled the country.
Credit Adam Dean for The New York Times<\/p><\/div>\n

2 Dec 2017 <\/em>\u2014 He was a member of the Rohingya student union in college, taught at a public high school and even won a parliamentary seat in Myanmar\u2019s thwarted elections in 1990.<\/p>\n

But according to the government of Myanmar, U Kyaw Min\u2019s fellow Rohingya do not exist.<\/p>\n

A long-persecuted Muslim minority concentrated in Myanmar\u2019s western state of Rakhine, the Rohingya have been deemed dangerous interlopers<\/a> from neighboring Bangladesh. Today, they are mostly stateless, their very identity denied by the Buddhist-majority Myanmar state.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no such thing as Rohingya,\u201d said U Kyaw San Hla, an officer in Rakhine\u2019s state security ministry. \u201cIt is fake news.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such denials bewilder Mr. Kyaw Min. He has lived in Myanmar all of his 72 years, and the history of the Rohingya as a distinct ethnic group in Myanmar stretches back for generations before.<\/p>\n

Now, human rights watchdogs warn that much of the evidence of the Rohingya\u2019s history in Myanmar is in danger of being eradicated by a military campaign the United States has declared to be ethnic cleansing<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Since late August, more than 620,000 Rohingya Muslims, about two-thirds of the population that lived in Myanmar in 2016, have fled to Bangladesh, driven out by the military\u2019s systematic campaign of massacre, rape and arson<\/a> in Rakhine.<\/p>\n

In a report<\/a> released in October, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said that Myanmar\u2019s security forces had worked to \u201ceffectively erase all signs of memorable landmarks in the geography of the Rohingya landscape and memory in such a way that a return to their lands would yield nothing but a desolate and unrecognizable terrain.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

\u201cThe Rohingya are finished in our country,\u201d said U Kyaw Min, a former schoolteacher and the president of the Democracy and Human Rights Party. \u201cSoon we will all be dead or gone.\u201d
Credit Adam Dean for The New York Times<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cThe Rohingya are finished in our country,\u201d said Mr. Kyaw Min, who lives in Yangon, the commercial capital of Myanmar. \u201cSoon we will all be dead or gone.\u201d<\/p>\n

The United Nations report also said that the crackdown in Rakhine had \u201ctargeted teachers, the cultural and religious leadership, and other people of influence in the Rohingya community in an effort to diminish Rohingya history, culture and knowledge.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are people with our own history and traditions,\u201d said U Kyaw Hla Aung, a Rohingya lawyer and former political prisoner, whose father served as a court clerk in Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow can they pretend we are nothing?\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n

Speaking over the phone, Mr. Kyaw Hla Aung, who has been jailed repeatedly for his activism and is now interned in a Sittwe camp, said his family did not have enough food because officials have prevented full distribution of international aid.<\/p>\n

Myanmar\u2019s sudden amnesia about the Rohingya is as bold as it is systematic. Five years ago, Sittwe, nestled in an estuary in the Bay of Bengal, was a mixed city, divided between an ethnic Rakhine Buddhist majority and the Rohingya Muslim minority.<\/p>\n

Walking Sittwe\u2019s crowded bazaar in 2009, I saw Rohingya fishermen selling seafood to Rakhine women. Rohingya professionals practiced law and medicine. The main street in town was dominated by the Jama mosque, an Arabesque confection built in the mid-19th century. The imam spoke proudly of Sittwe\u2019s multicultural heritage.<\/p>\n

But since sectarian riots in 2012, which resulted in a disproportionate number of Rohingya casualties, the city has been mostly cleared of Muslims. Across central Rakhine, about 120,000 Rohingya, even those who had citizenship, have been interned in camps, stripped of their livelihoods and prevented from accessing proper schools or health care.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

A house burned by Myanmar\u2019s military in a Rohingya village in Rakhine State in September.
Credit Nyein Chan Naing\/European Pressphoto Agency<\/p><\/div>\n

They cannot leave the ghettos without official authorization. In July, a Rohingya man who was allowed out for a court appearance in Sittwe was lynched by an ethnic Rakhine mob.<\/p>\n

The Jama mosque now stands disused and moldering, behind barbed wire. Its 89-year-old imam is interned.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have no rights as human beings,\u201d he said, asking not to use his name because of safety concerns. \u201cThis is state-run ethnic cleansing and nothing else.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sittwe\u2019s psyche has adapted to the new circumstances. In the bazaar recently, every Rakhine resident I talked to claimed, falsely, that no Muslims had ever owned shops there.<\/p>\n

Sittwe University, which used to enroll hundreds of Muslim students, now only teaches around 30 Rohingya, all of whom are in a distance-learning program.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t have restrictions on any religion,\u201d said U Shwe Khaing Kyaw, the university\u2019s registrar, \u201cbut they just don\u2019t come.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Kyaw Min used to teach in Sittwe, where most of his students were Rakhine Buddhists. Now, he said, even Buddhist acquaintances in Yangon are embarrassed to talk with him.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Rohingya refugees arriving in Bangladesh across the Naf River, in September.
Credit Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cThey want the conversation to end quickly because they don\u2019t want to think about who I am or where I came from,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

In 1990, Mr. Kyaw Min won a seat in Parliament as part of a Rohingya party aligned with the National League for Democracy, Myanmar\u2019s current governing party. But the country\u2019s military junta ignored the electoral results nationwide. Mr. Kyaw Min ended up in prison.<\/p>\n

Rohingya Muslims have lived in Rakhine for generations, their Bengali dialect and South Asian features often distinguishing them from Rakhine Buddhists.<\/p>\n

During the colonial era, the British encouraged South Asian rice farmers, merchants and civil servants to migrate to what was then known as Burma.<\/p>\n

Some of these new arrivals mixed with the Rohingya, then known more commonly as Arakanese Indians or Arakanese Muslims. Others spread out across Burma. By the 1930s, South Asians, both Muslim and Hindu, comprised the largest population in Yangon.<\/p>\n

The demographic shift left some Buddhists feeling besieged. During the xenophobic leadership of Gen. Ne Win, who ushered in nearly half a century of military rule, hundreds of thousands of South Asians fled Burma for India.<\/p>\n

Rakhine, on Burma\u2019s western fringe, was where Islam and Buddhism collided most violently, especially after World War II, during which the Rakhine supported the Axis and Rohingya the Allies.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Rohingya crossing a makeshift bridge in the Kutupalong refugee camp, outside Cox\u2019s Bazar in Bangladesh.
Credit Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times<\/p><\/div>\n

Later attempts by a Rohingya insurgent group to exit Burma and attach northern Rakhine to East Pakistan, as Bangladesh was then known, further strained relations.<\/p>\n

By the 1980s, the military junta had stripped most Rohingya of citizenship. Brutal security offensives drove waves of Rohingya to flee the country.<\/p>\n

Today, far more Rohingya live outside of Myanmar \u2014 mostly in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia \u2014 than remain in what they consider their homeland.<\/p>\n

Yet in the early decades of Burma\u2019s independence, a Rohingya elite thrived. Rangoon University, the country\u2019s top institution, had enough Rohingya students to form their own union. One of the cabinets of U Nu, the country\u2019s first post-independence leader, included a health minister who identified himself as Arakanese Muslim.<\/p>\n

Even under Ne Win, the general, Burmese national radio aired broadcasts in the Rohingya language. Rohingya, women among them, were represented in Parliament.<\/p>\n

U Shwe Maung, a Rohingya from Buthidaung Township in northern Rakhine, served in Parliament between 2011 and 2015, as a member of the military\u2019s proxy Union Solidarity and Development Party. In the 2015 elections, however, he was barred from running.<\/p>\n

Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya were disenfranchised in those polls.<\/p>\n

Mr. Shwe Maung\u2019s electoral district, which had been 90 percent Rohingya, is now represented by a Rakhine Buddhist.<\/p>\n

In September, a local police officer filed a counterterrorism suit accusing Mr. Shwe Maung of instigating violence through Facebook posts that called for an end to the security offensive in Rakhine. (The military operation began after Rohingya militants besieged government security posts in late August.)<\/p>\n

Mr. Shwe Maung, the son of a police officer himself, is in exile in the United States and denies the charges.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey want every Rohingya to be considered a terrorist or an illegal immigrant,\u201d he said. \u201cWe are much more than that.\u201d<\/p>\n

_______________________________________________<\/p>\n

Hannah Beech has been the Southeast Asia bureau chief for<\/em> The Times since August 2017. She covers more than 10 countries in a region with some of the world\u2019s fastest growth rates and largest tracts of rainforest and spiciest cuisine, as well as a growing collection of strongmen governments. She lives in Bangkok, Thailand.<\/em><\/p>\n

A version of this article appears in print on December 3, 2017, on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Myanmar Threatens to Wipe Rohingya From Memory.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 nytimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

2 Dec 2017 \u2014 He was a member of the Rohingya student union in college, taught at a public high school and even won a parliamentary seat in Myanmar\u2019s thwarted elections in 1990. But according to the government of Myanmar, U Kyaw Min\u2019s fellow Rohingya do not exist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":102969,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-102967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-asia-pacific"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102967"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102967\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}