{"id":72778,"date":"2016-05-02T12:00:05","date_gmt":"2016-05-02T11:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=72778"},"modified":"2016-04-29T15:23:37","modified_gmt":"2016-04-29T14:23:37","slug":"the-battle-over-the-word-rohingya-in-burma-aka-myanmar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/05\/the-battle-over-the-word-rohingya-in-burma-aka-myanmar\/","title":{"rendered":"The Battle over the Word \u2018Rohingya\u2019 [in Burma aka Myanmar]"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"adam<\/a>29 Apr 2016 – <\/em>Hundreds of\u00a0people gathered outside the U.S. Embassy in Rangoon, Burma, on Thursday [28 Apr]\u00a0with a simple demand: The United States must\u00a0stop using the word “Rohingya.”<\/p>\n

“It is already clear that there is no such ethnicity as Rohingya in our country,”\u00a0a\u00a0protester named Win Zaw Zaw Latt told Anadolu Agency before<\/a> the demonstration. “We demand the U.S. as well as Western countries and the E.U. to stop using the term Rohingya.”<\/p>\n

To most of the world, the\u00a0Rohingya\u00a0are a\u00a0Bengali-speaking Muslim minority in Buddhist-majority Burma, also known as Myanmar. More than\u00a01 million Rohingya are thought to live\u00a0in Burma, the majority of\u00a0them\u00a0in Rakhine state, along the western border with Bangladesh and India. Despite the size and long-standing presence\u00a0of this community, the government does not consider\u00a0its members\u00a0Burmese citizens.<\/p>\n

This\u00a0position as stateless people makes the Rohingya vulnerable.\u00a0Over recent years, vast numbers of\u00a0Rohingyas have been displaced after successive rounds of ethnically motivated mob violence and now live in squalid camps. Many have attempted to flee Burma in\u00a0dangerous, sometimes deadly, boat journeys.<\/p>\n

The situation has earned critical attention from international groups. In 2014,\u00a0United Nations special rapporteur\u00a0Tom\u00e1s Ojea Quintana<\/a> suggested that Burma’s policy of “discrimination and persecution” of the Rohingya community could amount to crimes against humanity. Last year, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum said we\u00a0may be seeing\u00a0“early warning signs of genocide” against the Rohingya in Rakhine<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It’s a problem inflamed by a\u00a0growing Buddhist nationalism within Burma.\u00a0Foreigners note that even liberal forces within the country avoid using the term “Rohingya”;\u00a0Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, a long-standing pro-democracy voice, has been criticized for not speaking out\u00a0for the minority<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This is a case in which\u00a0the semantics are important. The term Rohingya implies a unique minority.\u00a0However, the\u00a0protesters outside the embassy on Thursday were\u00a0demanding that they be referred to as\u00a0Bengali, an ethnic group native to the region of West Bengal\u00a0in India and to\u00a0Bangladesh. The use of that term would support the belief, held by many in Burma, that the Rohingya are illegal immigrants\u00a0who fled Bangladesh during or after that country’s\u00a0war for independence in 1971\u00a0and\u00a0should not be recognized as an official ethnic group\u00a0under Burma’s 1982 citizenship law.<\/p>\n

This law, devised under the military government that formerly led Burma, lists 135 ethnic groups that\u00a0were permanently settled within the boundaries of the country\u00a0before 1823, the year before the First Anglo-Burmese War, which would result in parts of Burma being incorporated into the British Empire (the entire nation would later become part of British India and remain under British rule until 1948).\u00a0Though that military government has since fallen, Burma’s current civilian government continues to use the list devised in 1982.<\/p>\n

\"<\/a>

People protest against the United States outside the U.S. Embassy in Rangoon, Burma, for its use of the term “Rohingya” to describe the stateless Muslim community. (Soe Zeya Tun\/Reuters)<\/p><\/div>\n

Many scholars argue that this classification of ethnic groups is an oversimplification, however, pointing out not only that many\u00a0of the\u00a0Rohingya have been\u00a0living in Burma for generations but that there also are historical traces of this Muslim community in what is now Burma before 1823, too \u2014 a key date marking\u00a0the moment when the British Empire may have begun encouraging Muslim\u00a0immigration to the region. One widely cited study from 1799<\/a> described a group of people called the “Rooinga” who have “long settled” in what is now Rakhine state, suggesting a long history for the Rohingya people.<\/p>\n

It is certainly true that the term\u00a0Rohingya was used relatively rarely until the 1990s, when the community and its\u00a0international supporters fully adopted it. However, although\u00a0some critics suggest that the ethnicity is\u00a0only a recent invention, records\u00a0show that\u00a0Prime Minister U Nu<\/a>, who led Burma for several years when it was a\u00a0parliamentary democracy between 1948 and 1962, used the term “Rohingya” at a number of points.<\/p>\n

The troubled\u00a0history of the term is probably\u00a0a\u00a0reflection of the complicated history of ethnicity and identity in the region.\u00a0Some Rohingya have actually used\u00a0this to their advantage, with elaborate tales of an 8th-century shipwreck<\/a>\u00a0linking them to Arabs or Persians farther west.<\/p>\n

Yet the\u00a0lack of a clear identity has often been used by the government to try to force the Rohingya out of the country or even to deny that the minority exists.\u00a0In recent years, as tens of thousands of Rohingya took off on boats to escape Burma, officials have indicated that they won’t attend meetings on the refugee crisis<\/a> if the word “Rohingya” is invoked. The Rohingya who do end up in Bangladesh\u00a0are hardly given a warm welcome: Last year, the government proposed moving one refugee camp to a remote island<\/a> that was prone to flooding.<\/p>\n

But despite\u00a0the backlash within Burma to the term Rohingya, the international community has shown no willingness to reconsider its use of the word. The United Nations has called for full citizenship to be given to the Rohingyas, and President Obama\u00a0has repeatedly used that term, including during a trip to country in 2014.<\/p>\n

The word “Rohingya” seems to be here to stay.<\/p>\n

______________________________________<\/p>\n

More: <\/em><\/strong>Bangladesh might exile Rohingya refugees to a remote, flood-prone island<\/a><\/p>\n

Adam Taylor writes about foreign affairs for<\/em> The Washington Post. Originally from London, he studied at the University of Manchester and Columbia University.<\/em><\/p>\n

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

Hundreds of people gathered outside the U.S. Embassy in Rangoon, Burma, on Thursday [28 Apr] with a demand: The United States must stop using the word “Rohingya.” To most of the world, the Rohingya are a Bengali-speaking Muslim minority in Buddhist-majority Burma, also known as Myanmar. More than 1 million Rohingya are thought to live in Burma, the majority of them in Rakhine state. Despite the size and long-standing presence of this community, the government does not consider its members Burmese citizens.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asia-pacific"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72778","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=72778"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72778\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}