HISTORY of rohingya people , MIGRATED PEOPLE AND and original history of rohingya state of miyanmer ( from wikapedia )
Rohingya people
| Ruáingga ရိုဟင်ဂျာ | |
|---|---|
_(cropped).jpg) | |
| Total population | |
| 1,547,778[1]–2,000,000+[2] | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
| Myanmar (Rakhine State), Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nepal, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Thailand | |
 Myanmar | 1.0[3]–1.3 million[4][5][6] |
 Saudi Arabia | 400,000[7] |
 Bangladesh | 300,000–500,000[8][9][10] |
 Pakistan | 200,000[11][12][13] |
 Thailand | 100,000[14] |
 Malaysia | 40,070[15] |
 India | 40,000[16][17] |
 Indonesia | 11,941[18] |
 Nepal | 200[19] |
| Languages | |
| Rohingya | |
| Religion | |
| Islam | |
| Islam by country |
|---|
 |
 Islam portal |
The Rohingya people (/ˈroʊɪndʒə/, /ˈroʊhɪndʒə/, /ˈroʊɪŋjə/, or /ˈroʊhɪŋjə/)[20] are Muslim Indo-Aryan peoples from the Rakhine State, Myanmar.[1][21][22]
According to the Rohingyas and some scholars, they are indigenous to Rakhine State, while other historians claim that the group represents a mixture of precolonial and colonial immigrations. The official stance of the Myanmar government, however, has been that the Rohingyas are mainly illegal immigrants who migrated into Arakan following Burmese independence in 1948 or after the Bangladesh liberation war in 1971.[23][24][25][26][27][28][5][29]
Muslims have settled in Rakhine State (also known as Arakan) since the 15th century, although the number of Muslim settlers before British rule is unclear.[30] Despite debates concerning its origins,[24] the term "Rohingya," in the form of Rooinga, first appeared in 1799 in an article about a language spoken by Muslims claiming to be natives of Arakan. In 1826, after the First Anglo-Burmese War, the British annexed Arakan and encouraged migrations from Bengal to work as farm laborers. The Muslim population may have constituted 5% of Arakan's population by 1869, although estimates for earlier years give higher numbers. Successive British censuses of 1872 and 1911 recorded an increase in Muslim population from 58,255 to 178,647 in Akyab District. During World War II, the Arakan massacres in 1942 involved communal violence between British-armed V Force Rohingya recruits and Buddhist Rakhine people and the region became increasingly ethnically polarized.[31] After Burmese independence in 1948, the mujahideen rebellion began as a separatist movement to merge the region into the East Pakistan and continued into the 1960s, along with the Arkanese Independence Movement by Rakhine Buddhists. The rebellion left enduring mistrust and hostilities in both Muslim and Buddhist communities. In 1982, General Ne Win's government enacted the Burmese nationality law, which denied Rohingya citizenship, rendering a majority of Rohingya population stateless.[1] Since the 1990s, the term "Rohingya" has increased in usage among Rohingya communities.[24][29]
Prior to the 2015 Rohingya refugee crisis and the military crackdown in 2016 and 2017, the Rohingya population in Myanmar was around 1.1 to 1.3 million[4][5][6][1][4] They reside mainly in the northern Rakhine townships, where they form 80–98% of the population.[29] Many Rohingyas have fled to neighbouring Bangladesh,[32] to areas along the border with Thailand, and to the Pakistani city of Karachi.[33] More than 100,000 Rohingyas in Myanmar live in camps for internally displaced persons, not allowed by authorities to leave.[34][35] Probes by the UN have found evidence of increasing incitement of hatred and religious intolerance by "ultra-nationalist Buddhists" against Rohingyas while the Burmese security forces have been conducting "summary executions, enforced disappearances, arbitrary arrests and detention, torture and ill-treatment and forced labour" against the community.[36] International media and human rights organizations have often described Rohingyas as one of the most persecuted minorities in the world.[37][38][39]According to the United Nations, the human rights violations against Rohingyas could be termed as "crimes against humanity".[36][40] Rohingyas have received international attention in the wake of the 2012 Rakhine State riots, the 2015 Rohingya refugee crisis, and the 2016–17 military crackdown.
Nomenclature
The Rohingya refer to themselves as Ruáingga /ɾuájŋɡa/. In the dominant languages of the region, they are known as rui hang gya (following the MLCTS) in Burmese: ရိုဟင်ဂျာ /ɹòhɪ̀ɴd͡ʑà/ and Rohingga in Bengali: রোহিঙ্গা /ɹohiŋɡa/. The term "Rohingya" comes from Rakhanga or Roshanga, the words for the state of Arakan.[41][42]
Jacques P. Leider states that in precolonial sources, the term Rohingya, in the form of Rooinga appears in a text written by Francis Buchanan-Hamilton.[43][44] In his 1799 article "A Comparative Vocabulary of Some of the Languages Spoken in the Burma Empire", Hamilton stated: "I shall now add three dialects, spoken in the Burma Empire, but evidently derived from the language of the Hindu nation. The first is that spoken by the Mohammedans, who have long settled in Arakan, and who call themselves Rooinga, or natives of Arakan."[43] The word Rohingya means "inhabitant of Rohang", which was the early Muslim name for Arakan.[45] Historian Aye Chan from Kanda University of International Studies states that though Mulims have lived long in Arakan, the term Rohingya was created by descendants of Bengalis in the 1950s who had migrated into Arakan during colonial times. He also says the term cannot be found in any historical source in any language before the 1950s.[46]
After riots in 2012, academic authors used the term Rohingya to refer to the Muslim community in northern Rakhine. Professor Andrew Selth of Griffith University for example, uses "Rohingya" but states "These are Bengali Muslims who live in Arakan State...most Rohingyas arrived with the British colonialists in the 19th and 20th centuries."[23][25] Among the overseas Rohingya community, the term has been gaining popularity since the 1990s, though a considerable portion of Muslims in northern Rakhine are unfamiliar with the term and prefer to use alternatives.[24][44]
History
Although Muslim settlements have existed for a long time in Arakan, the number of original settlers before the British rule are generally assumed to be low.[47] After four decades of British rule in 1869, Muslim settlers reached 5% of Arakan's population. The number steadily increased until World War II.[29]
Kingdom of Mrauk U
Early evidence of Bengali Muslim settlements in Arakan date back to the time of Min Saw Mon (1430–34) of the Kingdom of Mrauk U. After 24 years of exile in Bengal, he regained control of the Arakanese throne in 1430 with military assistance from the Bengal Sultanate. The Bengalis who came with him formed their own settlements in the region.[48][49]
Min Saw Mon ceded some territory to the Sultan of Bengal and recognised his sovereignty over the areas. In recognition of his kingdom's vassal status, the kings of Arakan received Islamic titles and used the Bengali gold dinar within the kingdom. Min Saw Mon minted his own coins with the Burmese alphabet on one side and the Persian alphabet on the other.[49]
Arakan's vassalage to Bengal was brief. After Sultan Jalaluddin Muhammad Shah's death in 1433, Narameikhla's successors invaded Bengal and occupied Ramu in 1437 and Chittagong in 1459. Arakan would hold Chittagong until 1666.[50][51]
Even after gaining independence from the Sultans of Bengal, the Arakanese kings continued the custom of maintaining Muslim titles.[52] The Buddhist kings compared themselves to Sultans and fashioned themselves after Mughal rulers. They also continued to employ Muslims in prestigious positions within the royal administration.[53] The Bengali Muslim population increased in the 17th century, as they were employed in a variety of workforces in Arakan. Some of them worked as Bengali, Persian and Arabic scribes in the Arakanese courts, which, despite remaining Buddhist, adopted Islamic fashions from the neighbouring Bengal Sultanate.[53] The Kamein, who are regarded as one of the official ethnic groups of Myanmar, are descended from these Muslims.[54] Also during the 17th century, tens of thousands of Bengali Muslims were captured by Arakanese raiders—with some serving in the king's army, others sold as slaves and others forced to settle in Arakan.[45]
Burmese conquest
Following the Konbaung Dynasty's conquest of Arakan in 1785, as many as 35,000 Rakhine people fled to the neighbouring Chittagong region of British Bengal in 1799 to escape persecution by the Bamar and to seek protection under the British Raj.[55] The Bamar executed thousands of Rakhine men and deported a considerable portion of the Rakhine population to central Burma, leaving Arakan as a scarcely populated area by the time the British occupied it.[56]
According to an article on the "Burma Empire" published by the British Francis Buchanan-Hamilton in 1799, "the Mohammedans, who have long settled in Arakan", "call themselves Rooinga, or natives of Arakan."[43] However, according to Derek Tokin, Hamilton no longer used the term to refer to the Muslims in Arakan in his later publications.[24] Sir Henry Yule saw many Muslims serving as eunuchs in Konbaung while on a diplomatic mission to the Burmese capital, Ava.[57][58]
British colonial rule
British policy encouraged Bengali inhabitants from adjacent regions to migrate into the then lightly populated and fertile valleys of Arakan as farm laborers. The East India Company extended the Bengal Presidency to Arakan. There was no international boundary between Bengal and Arakan and no restrictions on migration between the regions. In the early 19th century, thousands of Bengalis from the Chittagong region settled in Arakan seeking work.[59]
The British census of 1872 reported 58,255 Muslims in Akyab District. By 1911, the Muslim population had increased to 178,647.[60] The waves of migration were primarily due to the requirement of cheap labour from British India to work in the paddy fields. Immigrants from Bengal, mainly from the Chittagong region, "moved en masse into western townships of Arakan". To be sure, Indian immigration to Burma was a nationwide phenomenon, not just restricted to Arakan.[61]
Historian Thant Myint-U writes: "At the beginning of the 20th century, Indians were arriving in Burma at the rate of no less than a quarter million per year. The numbers rose steadily until the peak year of 1927, immigration reached 480,000 people, with Rangoon exceeding New York City as the greatest immigration port in the world. This was out of a total population of only 13 million; it was equivalent to the United Kingdom today taking 2 million people a year." By then, in most of the largest cities in Burma, Yangon, Sittwe, Pathein and Mawlamyine, the Indian immigrants formed a majority of the population. The Burmese under the British rule felt helpless, and reacted with a "racism that combined feelings of superiority and fear."[61]
The impact of immigration was particularly acute in Arakan, one of less populated regions. The Rakine saw themselves as made a minority in their own land by Indian immigration with complaints being made all of the jobs and land were going to the Rohingyas.[62] In 1939, the British authorities, alert to the long-term animosity between the Rakhine Buddhists and the Muslims, formed a special Investigation Commission led by James Ester and Tin Tut to study the issue of Muslim immigration into the Arakan. The commission recommended securing the border; however, with the onset of World War II, the British retreated from Arakan.[63]
World War II Japanese occupation and inter-communal violence
During World War II, the Imperial Japanese Army invaded British-controlled Burma. The British forces retreated and in the power vacuum left behind, considerable inter communal violence erupted between Arakanese and Muslim villagers. The British armed Muslims in northern Arakan in order to create a buffer zone that would protect the region from a Japanese invasion when they retreated[64] and to counteract the largely pro-Japanese ethnic Rakhines.[45] The period also witnessed violence between groups loyal to the British and the Burmese nationalists.[64]
Aye Chan, a historian at the Kanda University, has written that as a consequence of acquiring arms from the British during World War II, Rohingyas[note 1] tried to destroy the Arakanese villages instead of resisting the Japanese. In March 1942, Rohingyas from northern Arakan killed around 20,000 Arakanese. In return, around 5,000 Muslims in the Minbya and Mrauk-U Townships were killed by Rakhines and Red Karens.[63]
As in the rest of Burma, the Japanese committed acts of rape, murder and torture against Muslims in Arakan.[65] During this period, some 22,000 Muslims in Arakan were believed to have crossed the border into Bengal, then part of British India, to escape the violence.[66][67][68] The exodus was not restricted to Muslims in Arakan. Thousands of Burmese Indians, Anglo-Burmese and British who settled during colonial period emigrated en masse to India.
To facilitate their reentry into Burma, British formed Volunteer Forces with Rohingya. Over the three years during which the Allies and Japanese fought over the Mayu peninsula, the Rohingya recruits of the V-Force, engaged in a campaign against Arakanese communities, using weapons provided by V-Force.[31] According to the secretary of British governor, the V Force, instead of fighting the Japanese, destroyed Buddhist monasteries, pagodas, and houses, and committed atrocities in northern Arakan.[69][70]
Pakistan Movement and Post-war insurgency
.jpg)
In 1948, when Burma became independent of Great Britain, the Burmese government refused to recognize the Rohingyas as Burmese citizens.[62] The Rakhine for their part felt discriminated against by the governments in Rangoon dominated by the ethnic Burmese with one Rakhine politician saying “we are therefore the victims of Muslimisation and Burmese chauvinism”.[62] The Economist wrote in 2015 that from the 1940s on and right to this day, the Burmens have seen and see themselves as victims of the British Empire while the Rakhine see themselves as victims of the British and the Burmens; both groups were and are so intent upon seeing themselves as victims that neither has much sympathy for the Rohingyas.[62]
During the Pakistan Movement in the 1940s, Rohingya Muslims in western Burma organized a separatist movement to merge the region into East Pakistan.[58] Before the independence of Burma in January 1948, Muslim leaders from Arakan addressed themselves to Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, and asked his assistance in incorporating the Mayu region to Pakistan considering their religious affinity and geographical proximity with East Pakistan.[58]Two months later, the north Arakan Muslim League was founded in Akyab (modern Sittwe). It demanded annexation to Pakistan.[58] The proposal was never materialized since it was reportedly turned down by Jinnah saying that he was not in a position to interfere into Burmese matters.[58]
After Jinnah's refusal, Rohingya elders who supported a jihad movement, founded the Mujahid party in northern Arakan in 1947.[71] The aim of the Mujahid party was to create an autonomous Muslim state in Arakan. By the 1950s, they began to use the term "Rohingya" which may be a continuation of the term Rooinga to establish a distinct identity and identify themselves as indigenous. They were much more active before the 1962 Burmese coup d'état by General Ne Win, a Burmese general who began his military career fighting for the Japanese in World War II. Ne Win carried out military operations against them over a period of two decades. The prominent one was Operation King Dragon, which took place in 1978; as a result, many Muslims in the region fled to neighboring Bangladesh as refugees. In addition to Bangladesh, a large number of Rohingyas also migrated to Karachi, Pakistan.[13]Rohingya mujahideen are still active within the remote areas of Arakan.[72]
Post-independence immigration and Bangladesh Liberation War
The numbers and the extent of post-independence immigration from Bangladesh are subject to controversy and debate. In a 1955 study published by Stanford University, the authors Virginia Thompson and Richard Adloff write, "The post-war (World War II) illegal immigration of Chittagonians into that area was on a vast scale, and in the Maungdaw and Buthidaung areas they replaced the Arakanese."[27] The authors further argue that the term Rohingya, in the form of Rwangya, first appeared to distinguish settled population from newcomers: "The newcomers were called Mujahids (crusaders), in contrast to the Rwangya or settled Chittagonian population."[27] According to ICG, The International Crisis Group, these immigrants were actually the Rohingyas who were displaced by the World War II and began to return to Arakan after the independence of Burma but were rendered as illegal immigrants, while many were not allowed to return.[37]ICG adds that there were "some 17,000" refugees from the Bangladesh liberation war who "subsequently returned home".[37]
From 1971 to 1978, a number of Rakhine monks and Buddhists staged hunger strikes in Sittwe to force the government to tackle immigration issues which they believed to be causing a demographic shift in the region.[73] Ne Win's government requested UN to repatriate the war refugees and launched military operations which drove off around 200,000 people to Bangladesh. In 1978, the Bangladesh government protested against the Burmese government concerning "the expulsion by force of thousands of Burmese Muslim citizens to Bangladesh." The Burmese government responded that those expelled were Bangladesh citizens who had resided illegally in Burma. In July 1978, after intensive negotiations mediated by UN, Ne Win's government agreed to take back 200,000 refugees who settled in Arakan.[74] In the same year as well as in 1992, a joint statement by governments of Myanmar and Bangladesh "acknowledged that the Rohingya were lawful Burmese residents".[75] In 1982, the Burmese government enacted the citizenship law and declared the "Bengalis" are foreigners.[76]
There are widespread beliefs among Rakhine people that significant number of immigrants arrived even after the 1980s when the border was relatively unguarded. However, there is no documentation proof for these claims as the last census was conducted in 1983.[5] Successive Burmese governments have fortified the border and built up border guard forces.
'Rohingya' movement (1990–present)
"Rohingyas have been in Rakhine from the creation of the world. Arakan was ours; it was an Indian land for 1,000 years."
— Kyaw Min, Yangon-based Rohingya politician[77]
Since the 1990s, a new 'Rohingya' movement which is distinct from the 1950s armed rebellion has emerged. The new movement is characterized by lobbying internationally by overseas diaspora, establishing indigenous claims by Rohingya scholars, publicizing the term "Rohingya" and denying Bengali origins by Rohingya politicians.[29]
Rohingya scholars have claimed that Rakhine was previously a Muslim state for a millennium, or that Muslims were king-makers of Rakhine kings for 350 years. They often traced the origin of Rohingyas to Arab seafarers. These claims have been rejected as "newly invented myths" in academic circles.[42] Some Rohingya politicians have labelled Burmese and international historians as "Rakhine sympathizers" for rejecting the purported historical origins.[78] Nonetheless, the term spreads with great success after the riots in 2012.
The movement has garnered sharp criticisms from ethnic Rakhines and Kamans, the latter of whom are a recognized Muslim ethnic group in Rakhine. Kaman leaders support citizenship for Muslims in northern Rakhine but believe that the new movement is aimed at achieving a self-administered area or Rohang State as a separate Muslim state carved out of Rakhine and condemn the movement.[79]
Rakhines' views are more critical. Citing Bangladesh's overpopulation and density, Rakhines perceive the Rohingyas as "the vanguard of an unstoppable wave of people that will inevitably engulf Rakhine."[80] However, for moderate Rohingyas, the aim may have been no more than to gain citizenship status. Moderate Rohingya politicians agree to compromise on the term Rohingya if citizenship is provided under an alternative identity that is neither "Bengali" nor "Rohingya". Various alternatives including "Rakhine Muslims", "Myanmar Muslims" or simply "Myanmar" have been proposed.[24][81]
Burmese juntas (1990–2011)
The military junta that ruled Myanmar for half a century relied heavily on mixing Burmese nationalism and Theravada Buddhism to bolster its rule, and, in the view of the US government, heavily discriminated against minorities like the Rohingyas and the Chinese people in Myanmar such as the Kokangs and Panthays. Some pro-democracy dissidents from Myanmar's ethnic Bamar majority do not consider the Rohingyas compatriots.[82][83][84][85]
Successive Burmese governments have been accused of provoking riots led by Buddhist monks against ethnic minorities like the Rohingyas and Chinese.[86] In 2009, a senior Burmese envoy to Hong Kong branded the Rohingyas "ugly as ogres" and a people that are alien to Myanmar.[87][88]
Rakhine State riots and refugee crisis (2012–present)
The 2012 Rakhine State riots were a series of conflicts between Rohingya Muslims who are majority in the northern Rakhine and ethnic Rakhines who are majority in the south. Before the riots, there were widespread and strongly held fears circulating among Buddhist Rakhines that they would soon become a minority in their ancestral state.[80] The riots finally came after weeks of sectarian disputes including a gang rape and murder of a Rakhine woman by Rohingyas and killing of ten Burmese Muslims by Rakhines.[89][90] There is evidence that the pogroms in 2012 were organized with Rakhine men who participated in the riots telling International State Crime Initiative (ISCI) that they were told by the government to defend their “race and religion”, were given knives and free food and were bused in from Sittwe to attack the Rohingyas.[62] The Burmese government denies having organized the pogroms, but to date has never prosecuted anyone for the attacks against the Rohingyas.[62] The Economist argued that since the transition to democracy began in Burma in 2011, the military has been seeking to keep its privileged position, and wanted to encourage riots in 2012 so that the military can pose to the public as the defender of Buddhism against the Muslim Rohingya.[62]
From both sides, whole villages were "decimated".[90][91] According to the Burmese authorities, the violence, between ethnic Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims, left 78 people dead, 87 injured, and up to 140,000 people have been displaced.[92][93] The government has responded by imposing curfews and by deploying troops in the region. On 10 June 2012, a state of emergency was declared in Rakhine, allowing the military to participate in the administration of the region.[94][95] Rohingya NGOs overseas have accused the Burmese army and police of targeting Rohingya Muslims through arrests and participating in violence.[92][96]
However, a field observation conducted by the International Crisis Group states that both communities were grateful for the protection provided by the military.[97] A number of monks' organisations have taken measures to boycott NGOs which they believe helped only Rohingyas in the past decades even though Rakhines are equally poor.[98] In July 2012, the Burmese Government did not include the Rohingya minority group in the census—classified as stateless Bengali Muslims from Bangladesh since 1982.[99] About 140,000 Rohingya in Myanmar remain confined in IDP camps.[35]
In 2015, the Simon-Skjodt Centre of America’s Holocaust Memorial Museum stated in a press statement the Rohingyas are "at grave risk of additional mass atrocities and even genocide".[62] In 2015, to escape violence and persecution, thousands of Rohingyas migrated from Myanmar and Bangladesh, collectively dubbed as 'boat people' by international media,[100] to Southeast Asian countries including Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand by rickety boats via the waters of the Strait of Malacca and the Andaman Sea.[100][101][102][103] The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates about 25,000 people have been taken to boats from January to March in 2015.[104][105] There are claims that around 100 people died in Indonesia,[106] 200 in Malaysia,[107] and 10 in Thailand[108] during the journey. An estimated 3,000 refugees from Myanmar and Bangladesh have been rescued or swum to shore and several thousand more are believed to remain trapped on boats at sea with little food or water. A Malaysian newspaper claimed crisis has been sparked by smugglers.[109] However, the Economist in an article in June 2015 wrote the only reason why the Rohingyas were willing to pay to be taken out of Burma in squalid, overcrowded, fetid boats as "...it is the terrible conditions at home in Rakhine that force the Rohingyas out to sea in the first place.".[62]
In late 2016, the Myanmar military forces and extremist Buddhists started a major crackdown on the Rohingya Muslims in the country's western region of Rakhine State. The crackdown was in response to attacks on border police camps by unidentified insurgents,[110] and has resulted in wide-scale human rights violations at the hands of security forces, including extrajudicial killings, gang rapes, arsons, and other brutalities.[111][112][113] The military crackdown on Rohingya people drew criticism from various quarters including the United Nations, human rights group Amnesty International, the US Department of State, and the government of Malaysia.[114][115][116][117][118] The de facto head of government Aung San Suu Kyi has particularly been criticized for her inaction and silence over the issue and for not doing much to prevent military abuses.[111][112][3]
In January 2016, the government of Bangladesh initiated a plan to relocate tens of thousands of Rohingya refugees, who had fled to the country following persecution in Myanmar.[119][120] The refugees are to be relocated to the island of Thengar Char.[119][120] The move has received substantial opposition. Human rights groups have seen the plan as a forced relocation.[119][120] Additionally, concerns have been raised about living conditions on the island, which is low-lying and prone to flooding.[119][120] The island has been described as "only accessible during winter and a haven for pirates".[119][120] It is nine hours away from the camps in which the Rohingya currently live.[119][120] 65,000 refugees have been estimated to have entered Bangladesh since October 2016: more than 200,000 are estimated to have been there already.[119][120]
Historical demographics
The following table shows the statistics of Muslim population in Arakan. Note that except for 2014 census, the data is for all Muslims in Rakhine. The data for Burmese 1802 census is taken from a book by J. S. Furnivall. The British censuses classified immigrants from Chittagong as Bengalis. There were a small number of immigrants from other parts of India. The 1941 census was lost during the war. The 1983 census conducted under the Ne Win's government omitted people in volatile regions. It is unclear how many were missed. British era censuses can be found at Digital Library of India.
| Year | Muslims
in Arakan
| Muslims in
Akyub
District
| Akyub's
population
| Percentage
of Muslims
in Akyub
| Indians in Arakan
(Including most
Muslims)
| Indians born
outside Myanmar
| Arakan's total
population
| Percentage of Muslims
in Arakan
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1802 census
(Burmese)
| Lost? | 248,604 | ~1-2% (estimate) | |||||
| 1869 | 24,637 | 10% | 447,957 | 5% | ||||
| 1872 census | 64,315 | 58,255 | 276,671 | 21% | 484,963 | 13% | ||
| 1881 census | 359,706 | 113,557 | 71,104 | 588,690 | ||||
| 1891 census | 416,305 | 137,922 | 62,844 | 673,274 | ||||
| 1901 census | 162,754 | 154,887 | 481,666 | 32% | 173,884 | 76,445 | 762,102 | 21% |
| 1911 census | 178,647 | 529,943 | 30% | 197,990 | 46,591 | 839,896 | ||
| 1921 census | 576,430 | 206,990 | 51,825 | 909,246 | ||||
| 1931 census | 255,469 | 242,381 | 637,580 | 38% | 217,801 | 50,565 | 1,008,535 | 25.3% |
| 1983 census | 584,518 | 2,045,559 | 29% | |||||
| 2014 census
estimate
| 1.3 million[4]
(+1 million overseas)
| 3,188,963 | 40% (~60% if overseas population is included.) |
Demographics
Those who identify as Rohingyas typically reside in the northernmost townships of Arakan bordering Bangladesh where they form 80–98% of the population. A typical Rohingya family has four or five surviving children but the numbers up to twenty eight have been recorded in rare cases.[5][121] Rohingyas have 46 % more children than Myanmar's national average.[5] As of 2014, about 1.3 million Rohingyas live in Myanmar and an estimated 1 million overseas. They form 40% of Rakhine State's population or 60% if overseas population is included. As of December 2016, 1 in 7 stateless persons worldwide are Rohingya per United Nationsfigures.[1]
Language
The Rohingya language is part of the Indo-Aryan sub-branch of the greater Indo-European language family and is related to the Chittagonian language spoken in the southernmost part of Bangladesh bordering Myanmar.[21] While both Rohingya and Chittagonian are related to Bengali, they are not mutually intelligible with the latter. Rohingyas do not speak Burmese, the lingua franca of Myanmar, and face problems in integration. Rohingya scholars have successfully written the Rohingya language in various scripts including the Arabic, Hanifi, Urdu, Roman, and Burmese alphabets, where Hanifi is a newly developed alphabet derived from Arabic with the addition of four characters from Latin and Burmese.
More recently, a Latin alphabet has been developed using all 26 English letters A to Z and two additional Latin letters Ç (for retroflex R) and Ñ (for nasal sound). To accurately represent Rohingya phonology, it also uses five accented vowels (áéíóú). It has been recognised by ISO with ISO 639-3 "rhg" code.[122]
Religion
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The Rohingya people practice Sunni Islam along with elements of Sufism. The government restricts educational opportunities for them, many pursue fundamental Islamic studies as their only educational option. Mosques and madrasasare present in most villages. Traditionally, men pray in congregations and women pray at home.
Health
The Rohingya face discrimination and barriers to health care.[1][123] According to a 2016 study published in the medical journal The Lancet, Rohingya children in Myanmar face low birth weight, malnutrition, diarrhea, and barriers to reproduction on reaching adulthood.[1] Rohingya have a child mortality rate of up to 224 deaths per 1000 live births, more than 4 times the rate for the rest of Myanmar (52 per 1000 live births), and 3 times rate of rest non-Rohingya areas of Rakhine state (77 per 1000 live births).[124] The paper also found that 40% of Rohingya children suffer from diarrhea in internally displaced persons camp within Myanmar at a rate five times that of diarrheal illness among children in the rest of Rakhine.[124]
Human rights and refugee status
The Rohingyas’ freedom of movement is severely restricted and the vast majority of them have effectively been denied Burmese citizenship. They are also subjected to various forms of extortion and arbitrary taxation; land confiscation; forced eviction and house destruction; and financial restrictions on marriage.
—Amnesty International in 2004[125]
The Rohingya people have been described as "amongst the world's least wanted and "one of the world's most persecuted minorities.""[126][127] The Rohingya are deprived of the right to free movement and of higher education.[128] They have been denied Burmese citizenship since the Burmese nationality law was enacted.[129] They are not allowed to travel without official permission and were previously required to sign a commitment not to have more than two children, though the law was not strictly enforced. They are subjected to routine forced labour, typically a Rohingya man will have to give up one day a week to work on military or government projects, and one night for sentry duty. The Rohingya have also lost a lot of arable land, which has been confiscated by the military to give to Buddhist settlers from elsewhere in Myanmar.[130][129]
According to Amnesty International, the Rohingya have suffered from human rights violations under the military dictatorship since 1978, and many have fled to neighbouring Bangladesh as a result.[125] In 2005, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees had assisted with the repatriation of Rohingyas from Bangladesh, but allegations of human rights abuses in the refugee camps threatened this effort.[131] In 2015, 140,000 Rohingyas remain in IDP camps after communal riots in 2012.[132] Despite earlier efforts by the UN, the vast majority of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh are unable to return because of the 2012 communal violence and fear of persecution. Bangladeshi government has reduced the amount of support for Rohingyas to prevent an outflow of refugees to Bangladesh.[133] In February 2009, many Rohingya refugees were rescued by Acehnesesailors in the Strait of Malacca, after 21 days at sea.[134]
The Rakhine community as a whole has tended to be cast internationally as violent extremists – ignoring the diversity of opinions that exist, the fact that the Rakhine themselves are a long-oppressed minority, and rarely attempting to understand their perspective and concerns. This is counterproductive: it promotes a siege mentality on the part of the Rakhine, and obscures complex realities that must be understood if a sustainable way forward is to be found.
—The International Crisis Group, The Politics of Rakhine State, 22 October 2014[37]_(cropped).jpg)
Thousands of Rohingyas have also fled to Thailand. There have been charges that Rohingyas were shipped and towed out to open sea from Thailand. In February 2009, evidence of the Thai army towing a boatload of 190 Rohingya refugees out to sea has surfaced. A group of refugees rescued by Indonesian authorities told that they were captured and beaten by the Thai military, and then abandoned at sea.[135]
Steps to repatriate Rohingya refugees began in 2005. In 2009, the government of Bangladesh announced that it will repatriate around 9,000 Rohingyas living in refugee camps inside the country back to Myanmar, after a meeting with Burmese diplomats.[136][137] On 16 October 2011, the new government of Myanmar agreed to take back registered Rohingya refugees. However, Rakhine State riots in 2012 hampered the repatriation efforts.[138][139]
On 29 March 2014, the Burmese government banned the word "Rohingya" and asked for registration of the minority as "Bengalis" in the 2014 Myanmar Census, the first in three decades.[140][141] On 7 May 2014, the United States House of Representatives passed the United States House resolution on persecution of the Rohingya people in Burma that called on the government of Myanmar to end the discrimination and persecution.[142][143] Researchers from the International State Crime Initiative at Queen Mary University of London suggest that the Myanmar government are in the final stages of an organised process of genocide against the Rohingya.[144][145] In November 2016, a senior UN official in Bangladesh accused Myanmar of ethnic cleansing of Rohingyas.[112] However, such viewpoints have been criticized for using loaded terms to gain megaphone attention. Mr Charles Petrie, a former top UN official in Myanmar, argues that "Today using the term, aside from being divisive and potentially incorrect, will only ensure that opportunities and options to try to resolve the issue to be addressed will not be available."[45][146]
©2005 AYE CHAN SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research, Vol. 3, No. 2, Autumn 2005, ISSN 1479- 8484 The Development of a Muslim Enclave in Arakan (Rakhine) State of Burma (Myanmar)1 Aye Chan Kanda University of International Studies Who are the Rohingyas? Burma gained independence from Great Britain in 1948 and this issue is a problem that Burma has had to grapple with since that time. The people who call themselves Rohingyas are the Muslims of Mayu Frontier area, present-day Buthidaung and Maungdaw Townships of Arakan (Rakhine) State, an isolated province in the western part of the country across Naaf River as boundary from Bangladesh. Arakan had been an independent kingdom before it was conquered by the Burmese in 1784. Rohingya historians have written many treatises in which they claim for themselves an indigenous status that is traceable within Arakan State for more than a thousand years. Although it is not accepted as a fact in academia, a few volumes purporting to be history but mainly composed of fictitious stories, myths and legends have been published formerly in Burma and later in the 1 The present paper was written for distribution and discussion at a seminar in Japan. During the seminar, there was a debate between the author and Professor Kei Nemoto concerning the existence of the Rohingya people in Rakhine (Arakan). Nemoto, in a paper written in Japanese, agreed with the Rohingya historians that the Rohingyas have lived in Rakhine since the eigth century A. D. The author contests the vailidity of these claims. The present paper was also read at the 70th Conference of Southeast Asian historians of Japan, held at the University of Kobe, on 4 to 5 February 2003. SOAS BULLETIN OF BURMA RESEARCH SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 397 United States, Japan and Bangladesh. These, in turn, have filtered into the international media through international organizations, including reports to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (Ba Tha 1960: 33-36; Razzaq and Haque 1995: 15).2 In light of this, it is important to reexamine the ethnicity of the ‘Rohingyas’ and to trace their history back to the earliest presence of their ancestors in Arakan. And history tells us that we do not have to go back very far. In the early 1950s that a few Bengali Muslim intellectuals of the northwestern part of Arakan began to use the term “Rohingya” to call themselves. They were indeed the direct descendants of immigrants from the Chittagong District of East Bengal (present-day Bangladesh), who had migrated into Arakan after the province was ceded to British India under the terms of the Treaty of Yandabo, an event that concluded the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824-1826). Most of these migrants settled down in the Mayu Frontier Area, near what is now Burma’s border with modern Bangladesh. Actually, they were called “Chittagonians” in the British colonial records. The Muslims in the Arakan State can be divided into four different groups, namely the Chittagonian Bengalis in the Mayu Frontier; the descendents of the Muslim Community of Arakan in the Mrauk-U period (1430-1784), presently living in the Mrauk-U and Kyauktaw townships; the decendents of Muslim mercenaries in Ramree Island known to the Arakanese as Kaman; and the Muslims from the Myedu area of Central Burma, left behind by the Burmese invaders in Sandoway District after the conquest of Arakan in 1784. Mass Migration in the Colonial Period (1826-1948) As stated above, the term “Rohingya” came into use in the 1950s by the educated Bengali residents from the Mayu Frontier Area and cannot be found in any historical source in any language before then. The creators of that term might have been from the second or third generations of the Bengali immigrants from the Chittagong District in modern Bangladesh; however, this does not mean that there was no Muslim community in Arakan before the state was absorbed into British India. 2 See http://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/burma/burm for the report to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. DEVELOPMENT OF A MUSLIM ENCLAVE SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 398 When King Min Saw Mon, the founder of Mrauk-U Dynasty (1430-1784) regained the throne with the military assistance of the Sultan of Bengal, after twenty-four years of exile in Bengal, his Bengali retinues were allowed to settle down in the outskirts of Mrauk-U, where they built the well-known Santikan mosque. These were the earliest Muslim settlers and their community in Arakan did not seem to be large in number. In the middle of the seventeenth century the Muslim community grew because of the assignment of Bengali slaves in variety of the workforces in the country. The Portuguese and Arakanese raids of Benga (Bengal) for captives and loot became a conventional practice of the kingdom since the early sixteenth century. The Moghal historian Shiahabuddin Talish noted that only the Portuguese pirates sold their captives and that the Arakanese employed all of their prisoners in agriculture and other kinds of services (Talish 1907: 422). Furthermore there seem to have been a small group of Muslim gentry at the court. Some of them might have served the king as Bengali, Persian and Arabic scribes. Because the Mrauk-U kings, though of being Buddhist, adopted some Islamic fashions such as the maintaing of silver coins that bore their Muslim titles in Persian and occasionally appearing in Muslim costumes in the style of the Sultan of Bengal. Accordingly there were Muslim servants at the court helping the king perform these Islamic conventions (Charney 1999: 146). Arthur Phayre, the first deputy commissioner of Arakan, after the British annexation, reported about the indigenous races of Akyab District and the Muslim descendents from the Arakanese days as: The inhabitants are, In the Plains – 1. Ro-khoing-tha (Arakanese)-2. Ko-la (Indian) – 3. Dôm(Low Caste Hindu). In theHills – 1. Khyoung-tha – 2.Kumé or Kwémwé – 3. Khyang – 4. Doing–nuk, Mroong, and other tribes… While the Arakanese held these possessions in Bengal, they appear to have sent numbers of the inhabitants into Arakan as slaves, whence arose the present Ko-la population of the country (Phayre 1836: 680 – 681). During the four decades of Burmese rule (1784-1824), because of ruthless oppression, many Arakanese fled to British Bengal. According to a record of British East India Company, there SOAS BULLETIN OF BURMA RESEARCH SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 399 were about thirty-five thousand Arakanese who had fled to Chittagong District in British India to seek protection in 1799 (Asiatic Annual Register 1799: 61; Charney 1999: 265). The following report by Francis Buchanan provides a vivid picture of the atrocities committed by the Burmese invaders in Arakan: Puran says that, in one day soon after the conquest of Arakan the Burmans put 40,000 men to Death: that wherever they found a pretty Woman, they took her after killing the husband; and the young Girls they took without any consideration of their parents, and thus deprived these poor people of the property, by which in Eastern India the aged most commonly support their infirmities. Puran seems to be terribly afraid, that the Government of Bengal will be forced to give up to the Burmans all the refugees from Arakan (Buchanan 1992: 82).3 A considerable portion of Arakanese population was deported by Burmese conquerors to Central Burma. When the British occupied Arakan, the country was a scarcely populated area. Formerly high-yield paddy fields of the fertile Kaladan and Lemro River Valleys germinated nothing but wild plants for many years (Charney 1999: 279). Thus, the British policy was to encourage the Bengali inhabitants from the adjacent areas to migrate into fertile valleys in Arakan as agriculturalists. As the British East India Company extended the administration of Bengal to Arakan, there was no international boundary between the two countries and no restriction was imposed on the emigration. A superintendent, later an assistant commissioner, directly responsible to the Commissioner of Bengal, was sent in 1828 for the administration of Arakan Division, which was divided into three districts respectively: Akyab, Kyaukpyu, and Sandoway with an assistant commissioner in each district (Furnivall 1957:29). The migrations were mostly motivated by the search of professional opportunity. During the Burmese occupation there was a breakdown of the indigenous labor force both in size and structure. Arthur Phayre reported that in the 1830s the wages in 3 Puran Bisungri was an officer of the Police Station of Ramoo what is called Panwah by the Arakanese. He was a Hindu, born in Arakan and fled the country after Burmese invasion of 1784 (Buchanan 1992: 79). DEVELOPMENT OF A MUSLIM ENCLAVE SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 400 Arakan compared with those of Bengal were very high. Therefore many hundreds, indeed thousands of coolies came from the Chittagong District by land and by sea, to seek labor and high wages (Phayre 1836:696). R.B. Smart, the deputy assistant commissioner of Akyab, wrote about the ‘flood’ of immigrants from Chittagong District as follows: Since 1879, immigration has taken place on a much larger scale, and the descendants of the slaves are resident for the most part in the Kyauktaw and Myohaung (Mrauk-U) townships. Maungdaw Township has been overrun by Chittagonian immigrants. Buthidaung is not far behind and new arrivals will be found in almost every part of the district (Smart 1957: 89). At first most of them came to Arakan as seasonal agricultural laborers and went home after the harvest was done. R. B. Smart estimated the number at about twenty-five thousand during the crop-reaping season alone. He added that about the same number came to assist in plowing operations, to work at the mills and in the carrying trades. A total of fifty thousand immigrants coming annually were probably not far from the mark (Smart 1957: 99). Moreover, hunger for land was the prime motive for the migration of most of the Chittagonians. The British judicial records tell us of an increase in the first decade of the twentieth century in lawsuits of litigation for the possession of land. The Akyab District Magistrate reported in 1913 that in Buthidaung Subdivision, the Chittagonian immigrants stand to native Arakanese in the proportion of two to one, but six sevenths of the litigation for land in the court was initiated by the Chittagonians (Smart 1957: 163). Another colonial record delivers about a striking account of the settlements of the Bengali immigrants from Chittagong District as: “Though we are in Arakan, we passed many villages occupied by Muslim settlers or descendents of the settlers, and many of them Chittagonians” (Walker 1891(I): 15). The colonial administration of India regarded the Bengalis as amenable subjects while finding the indigenous Arakanese too defiant, rising in rebellion twice in 1830s. The British policy was also favorable for the settlement of Bengali agricultural communities in Arakan. A colonial record says: SOAS BULLETIN OF BURMA RESEARCH SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 401 Bengalis are a frugal race, who can pay without difficulty a tax that would press very heavily on the Arakanese….(They are) not addicted like the Arakanese to gambling, and opium smoking, and their competition is gradually ousting the Arakanese ( Report of the Settlement Operation in the Akyab District 1887-1888: 21). The flow of Chittagonian labor provided the main impetus to the economic development in Arakan within a few decades along with the opening of regular commercial shipping lines between Chittagong and Akyab. The arable land expanded to four and a half times between 1830 and 1852 and Akyab became one of the major rice exporting cities in the world. Indeed, during a century of colonial rule, the Chittagonian immigrants became the numerically dominant ethnic group in the Mayu Frontier. The following census assessment shows the increase of population of the various ethnic/religious groups inhabiting Akyab District according to the census reports of 1871, 1901 and 1911. There was an increase of 155 percent in the population in the district. According to the reports, even in an interior township Kyauktaw, the Chittagonian population increased from 13,987 in 1891 to 19, 360 in 1911, or about seventy-seven percent in twenty years. At the same time the increase of the Arakanese population including the absorption of the hill tribes and the returning refugees from Bengal was only 22.03 percent. The Assessment of the Census Reports for 1871, 1901, and 1911 Races 1871 1901 1911 Mahomedan 58,255 154,887 178,647 Burmese 4,632 35,751 92,185 Arakanese 171,612 230,649 209,432 Shan 334 80 59 Hill Tribes 38,577 35,489 34,020 Others 606 1,355 1,146 Total 276,671 481,666 529,943 DEVELOPMENT OF A MUSLIM ENCLAVE SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 402 It should be noted that all the Chittagonians and all the Muslims are categorized as Mohamedan in the census reports. There was an increase of 206.67 percent in Mahomedan population in the Akyab District and it was clear that only a few numbers of the transient agricultural laborers went home after the plowing and harvesting seasons and most of them remained in Arakan, making their homes (Smart 1957:83).4 The heyday of the migration was in the second half of the nineteenth century after opening of the Suez Canal, for the British colonialists needed more labor to produce rice which was in growing demand in the international market. In the 1921 Census, many Muslims in Arakan were listed as Indians (Bennison 1931: 213). Communal Violence Moshe Yegar suggests that during the colonial period the antiIndian riots broke out in Burma because of the resentment against unhindered Indian settlements particularly in Arakan, Tenasserim and Lower Burma (Yegar 1992:29-31). But those riots that took place in Rangoon and other major cities in 1926 and 1938 never had had any effects on the peoples of Arakan. A peaceful coexistence was possible for the two different religious/ethnic groups in the Mayu Frontier till the beginning of the World War II. At the beginning of colonial era the establishment of bureaucratic administration by the British repealed the traditional patron-client relationship in the Arakanese villages. The elected village headman had little influence on the elected village council. As John F. Cady wrote, the government policy of forbidding the village headman to take part in the activities related to the nationalist movements weakened the position of the headman as the leader of village community, and as well as his connection with the Buddhist monastery because most of the Buddhist monks were vigorously active in the movements (Cady 1958: 172-273). On the other hand British administration to a certain extent gave the Muslim village communities religious and cultural autonomy. Maung Nyo, a kyunok (headman of the village tract) of Maungdaw Township recorded 4 See Appendix I. According to the 1872 Census Muslims had already formed 26.1 per cent of the population of Akyab, the capital city of Arakan Division. Also see Appendix II. According to the 1881 Census 68,809 people of the population of Arakan Division that numbered 276,877 were born in Bengal. SOAS BULLETIN OF BURMA RESEARCH SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 403 how the new comers from the Chittagong District set up their village communities in the frontier area. They occupied the villages deserted by the Arakanese during the Burmese rule and established purely Muslim village communities. The village committee authorized by the Village Amendment Act of 1924 paved the way for the Imam (moulovi) and the trusteeship committee members of the village mosque to be elected to the village council. They were also allowed to act as the village magistrates and shariah was somewhat in effect in the Muslim villages (Charter 1938:34-38). At least the Islamic court of village had the jurisdiction over familial problems such as marriage, inheritance and divorce. There was no internal sense of unrighteousness and presence of nonbelievers in their community, and accordingly they believe no internecine struggle was for the time being necessary. However, the ethnic violence between Arakanese Buddhists and those Muslim Chittagonians brought a great deal of bloodshed to Arakan during the World War II and after 1948, in the opening decade of independent Burma. Some people of the Mayu Frontier in their early seventies and eighties have still not forgotten the atrocities they suffered in 1942 and 1943 during the short period of anarchy between the British evacuation and the Japanese occupation of the area. In this vacuum there was an outburst of the tension of ethnic and religious cleavage that had been simmering for a century. One of the underlying causes of the communal violence was the Zamindary System brought by the British from Bengal. By this system the British administrators granted the Bengali landowners thousands of acres of arable land on ninety-year-leases. The Arakanese peasants who fled the Burmese rule and came home after British annexation were deprived of the land that they formerly owned through inheritance. Nor did the Bengali zamindars (landowners) want the Arakanese as tenants on their land. Thousands of Bengali peasants from Chittagong District were brought to cultivate the soil (Report of the Settlement Operations in the Akyab District 1887-1888: 2, 21). Most of the Bengali immigrants were influenced by the Farai-di movement in Bengal that propagated the ideology of the Wahhabis of Arabia, which advocated settling ikhwan or brethren in agricultural communities near to the places of water resources. The peasants, according to the teaching, besides cultivating the land should be ready for waging a holy war upon the call by their DEVELOPMENT OF A MUSLIM ENCLAVE SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 404 lords (Rahman 1979: 200-204). In the Maungdaw Township alone, there were, in the 1910s, fifteen Bengali Zamindars who brought thousands of Chittagonian tenants and established Agricultural Muslim communities, building mosques with Islamic schools affiliated to them. However, all these villages occupied by the Bengalis continued to be called by Arakanese names in the British records (Grantham and Lat 1956: 41-43, 48-51). For the convenience of Chittagonians seasonal laborers the Arakan Flotilla Company constructed a railway between Buthidaung and Maungdaw in 1914. Their plan was to connect Chittagong by railway with Buthidaung, from where the Arakan Flotilla steamers were ferrying to Akyab and other towns in central and southern Arakan. In the period of the independence movement in Burma in 1920s and 1930s the Muslims from the Mayu Frontier were more concerned with the progress of Muslim League in India, although some prominent Burmese Muslims such as M.A. Rashid and U Razak played an important role in the leadership of the Burmese nationalist movement. In 1931, the Simon Commission was appointed by the British Parliament to enquire the opinion of Burmese people for the constitutional reforms and on the matter of whether Burma should be separated from Indian Empire. The spokeman of the Muslim League advocated for fair share of government jobs, ten percent representation in all public bodies, and especially in Arakan the equal treatment for Muslims seeking agricultural and business loans (Cady 1958: 294). In education, the Chittagonians were left behind the Arakanese throughout the colonial period. According to the census of 1901 only 4.5 percent of the Bengali Muslims were found to be literate while the percentage for the Arakanese was 25.5. Smart reported that it was due to the ignorance of the advantages of the education among the Chittagonian agriculturists. Especially Buthidaung and Maungdaw were reported to be most backward townships because the large Muslim population in that area mostly agriculturalists showed little interest in education. In 1894 there were nine Urdur schools with 375 students in the whole district. The British provincial administration appointed a deputy inspector for Muslim schools and in 1902 the number of schools rose to seventy-two and the students increased to 1,474 (Smart 1957: 207-209). Consequently, more Arakanese and Hindu Indians SOAS BULLETIN OF BURMA RESEARCH SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 405 were involved in the ancillary services of the colonial administration. Towards the middle of twentieth century a new educated and politically conscious younger generation had superseded the older, inactive ones. Before the beginning of the Second World War a political party, Jami-a-tul Ulema-e Islam was founded under the guidance of the Islamic scholars. Islam became the ideological basis of the party (Khin Gyi Pyaw 1960: 99). Regarding the beginning of the ethnic violence in Arakan, Moshe Yegar wrote that when the British administration was withdrawn to India in 1942 the Arakanese hoodlums began to attack the Muslim villages in southern Arakan and the Muslims fled to the north where they took vengeance on the Arakanese in Buthidaung and Maungdaw townships (Yegar 1972:67). However, an Arakanese record says: When the British administration collapsed by the Japanese occupation, the village headman of Rak-chaung village in Myebon Township and his two younger brothers were killed by the kula (Muslim) villagers. Although the headman was an Arakanese, some of the villagers were kulas. The two Arakanese young men, Thein Gyaw Aung and Kyaw Ya, organized a group and attacked the kula villages and some inhabitants were killed (Rakhine State People’s Council 1986: 36). It is certain that hundreds of Muslim inhabitants of Southern Arakan fled northward, and that there were some cases of robbing the Indian refugees on the Padaung-Taungup pass over the Arakan Yoma mountain ranges after the retreat of the British from the Pegu Division and southern Arakan. But the news of killing, robbery and rape was exaggerated when it reached Burma India border (Ba Maw 1968: 78). The British left all these areas to the mercy of both Burmese and Arakanese dacoits. However, N.R. Chakravati, an Indian scholar, gives a brief account of the flights of Indian refugees from the war zone in the Irrawady valley across the Arakan Yoma. Most of the estimated 900,000 Indians living in Burma attempted to walk over to India…100,000 died at the time… Practically all Indians except those who were not physically fit DEVELOPMENT OF A MUSLIM ENCLAVE SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 406 or were utterly helpless, began to move from place to place in search of safety and protection until they could reach India (Chakravarti 1971: 170). The estimated number of Chakravarti includes all the Indian refugees from the whole Burma proper excluding Arakan. The number of Chittagonian refugees put by Yegar was close to twentytwo thousand (Yegar 1972: 98). However, the leaders of ANC (Arakan National Congress), formed in 1939 and that later becoming the Arakan branch of Anti-Fascist Organization (AFO) formed a de-facto government, before the Japanese troops and Burma Independence Army (BIA) reached there. The ANC announced that anybody or any organization looting or killing the refugees would be brought before the justice and would be severely punished (New Burma Daily 1942: May 28). The Japanese air force attacked Akyab on 23 March 1942 and the British moved their administrative headquarter to India on March 30. The administration by martial law began in Akyab District on 13 April 1942 and with this racial tension burst to the surface, giving way to the public disorder (Owen 1946: 26). For all the bloody communal violence experienced by the Arakanese Buddhists in the Western frontier, I feel strongly that it is reasonable to blame the British colonial administration for arming the Chittagonians in the Mayu Frontier as the Volunteer Force. The V Force, as it is called by the British Army, was formed in 1942 soon after the Japanese operations threatened the British position in India. Its principal role was to undertake guerrilla operations against Japanese, to collect information of the enemy’s movements and to act as interpreters. But the British Army Liaison Officer, Anthony Irwin wrote that the participation of the local V Forces in the skirmishes with the Japanese in Arakan was discredited by the British commanders (Irwin 1946: 7-8, 16). The volunteers, instead of fighting the Japanese, destroyed Buddhist monasteries and Pagodas and burnt down the houses in the Arakanese villages. They first killed U Kyaw Khine, the deputy commissioner of Akyab District, left behind by the British government to maintain law and order in the frontier area; they then massacred thousands of Arakanese civilians in the towns and villages. A record of the Secretary of British governor of Burma in exile dated 4 February 1943 reads: SOAS BULLETIN OF BURMA RESEARCH SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 407 I have been told harrowing tales of cruelty and suffering inflicted on the Arakanese villages in the Ratheedaung area. Most of the villages on the West bank of the Mayu River have been burnt and destroyed by the Chittagonian V forces…. The enemy never came to these villages. They had the misfortune of being in the way of our advancing patrols. Hundreds of villagers are said to be hiding in the hills… It will be the Arakanese who will be ousted from their ancestral land and if they cannot be won over in time, then there can be no hope of their salvation (British Library, London, India Office Records R/8/9GS. 4243). After the Japanese occupation of Akyab (Sittwe), Bo Yan Aung, the member of the Thirty Comrades and commander of a BIA column, set up the administrative body in Akyab District and attempted to cease the violence in the frontier area. Bo Yan Aung discussed the matter with both Arakanese and Muslim leaders. He sent his two lieutenants, Bo Yan Naung and Bo Myo Nyunt to Maungdaw to negotiate with the radical Muslim leaders. They tried to persuade the Muslims to join in anti-imperialist and nationalist movement. But both of them were killed in Maungdaw and Bo Yan Aung was called back to Rangoon by the BIA headquarters (Rakhine State People’s Council 1986: 40-42). For most of the Chittagonians it was a religious issue that would necessarily lead to the creation of a Dah-rul-Islam, or at least to being united with their brethren in the west. It also aimed at the extirpation of the Arakanese or being forced them to migrate to the south where there were overwhelming majority of Arakanese Buddhists. The events during the war contributed the Chittagonians’ fervent sense of alienation from the heterogeneous community of the Arakan. Anthony Irwin called the whole area a “No Man’s Land” during the three years of Japanese occupation (Irwin 1946:27). Irwin explained how the ethnic violence divided the Arakan State between Arakanese and Chittagonians: As the area then occupied by us was almost entirely Mussulman Country … (from) that we drew most of our “Scouts” and Agents. The Arakan before the war had been occupied over its entire lenghth by both Mussulman and Maugh (Arakanese). Then in 1941 the two sects set to and DEVELOPMENT OF A MUSLIM ENCLAVE SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 408 fought. The result of this war was roughly that the Maugh took over the southern half of the country and the Mussulman the North. Whilst it lasted it was a pretty bloody affairs…My present gun boy a Mussulman who lived near to Buthidaung, claims to have killed two hundred Maughs (Arakanese) (Irwin 1946: 21). In the words of the historian, Clive J. Christie, the “ethnic cleansing in British controlled areas, particularly around the town of Maungdaw,” was occurring till the arrival of Japanese troops to the eastern bank of Naaf River (Christie 1996: 165). The British forces began to take offensive in the warfare against the Japanese in northern Arakan in December 1944. The Arakanese troops of AFO maintained law and order in the areas from which Japanese forces withdrew. Of course there were some prominent Arakanese guerrilla leaders who cooperated with the Japanese during the war. British Battalion 65 occupied Akyab, the capital city of Arakan on 12 December 1944. As soon as Akyab was captured the British Army began arresting the Arakanese guerrilla leaders. U Ni, a leader of AFO in Akyab was accused of one hundred and fifty-two criminal offenses and sentenced to forty-two years in prison. Another leader, U Inga was condemned to death by hanging five times, as well as forty-two-year imprisonment. Consequently many guerrilla fighters escaped into hideouts in the forests (Myanmaralin Daily 25 September 1945). On the contrary, Anthony Irwin praised the Chittagonian V Forces as follows: It is these minorities that have most helped us in throughout the three years of constant fighting and occupation and it is these minorities who are most likely to be forgotten in the rush of Government. They must not be. It is the duty of all of us, for whom they fought, to see this (Irwin 1946: 86). During the early post-war years both Arakanese and Bengali Muslims in the Mayu Frontier looked at each other with distrust. As the British Labor Government promised independence for Burma, some Muslims were haunted by the specter of their future living under the infidel rule in the place where the baneful Arakanese are also living. In 1946 a delegation was sent by the Jami-atul Ulema-e Islam to Karachi to discuss with the leaders of SOAS BULLETIN OF BURMA RESEARCH SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 409 the Muslim League the possibility of incorporation of Buthidaung, Maungdaw and Ratheedaung townships into Pakistan, but the British ignored their proposal to detach the frontier area to award it to Pakistan. The failure of their attempts ended in an armed revolt, with some Muslims, declaring a holy war on the new republic. The rebels called themselves “Mujahid.” A guerrilla army of 2700 fighters was organized (Khin Gyi Pyaw 1960: 99; The Nation Daily 1953: April16). In fact the Arakanese were well on their way to rebellion. Under the leadership of two prominent and politically active Buddhist monks, U Pinnyathiha and U Seinda, a guerrilla force of four hundred to five hundred men was raised and assisted the Japanese in occupying the northern Arakan. U Pinnyathiha even announced that the Japanese government had agreed to his proposal for a separate Arakanese unit of Burma Independence Army. Later his force was known as the Arakan Defense Force, under the command of Kra Hla Aung, the protégé of U Pinnyathiha. Later two monks became leaders of Arakan Branch of AFO (AntiFascist Organization), turning their guns on the Japanese. At the middle of 1944 they were supported by the British with certain amount of arms to fight the Japanese. Brigadier Richard Gordon Prescott, Deputy Director of Civil Affairs reported to the governor: As result of arming certain members of AFO under the leadership of U Pinnyathiha and Kra Hla Aung, the AFO (in Arakan) are endeavoring to set up a parallel government to that of the British Administration and in fact repeating their modus operandi at the time of Japanese invasion of Arakan (British Library, London, India Office Record M/2500). In the meantime the AFO changed its name to AFPFL (Anti-Fascist and People’s Freedom League) with U Aung San, the ultimate hero of the Burmese independence movement, as its leader. When the AFPFL accepted the proposal of the governor of Burma to join the Executive Council, U Pinnyathiha remained as the AFPFL leader in Arakan while U Seinda was actively preparing a revolt. U Sein Da’s group was acting as a local government, controlling a number of villages in the Myebon township of Kyaukpyu District and Minbya township of Akyab District. The fact of the matter was that U Seinda was persuaded by the radical communists of Thakhin Soe’s DEVELOPMENT OF A MUSLIM ENCLAVE SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 410 faction of the Communist Party of Burma to choose the way to independence by violence (British Library, London, India Office Records M/4/2500). When the Aung San-Attlee Agreement was signed, U Seinda denounced it publicly. An All Arakan Conference was held in Myebon on 1 April 1947 and about ten thousand people from all parties in Arakan attended. U Aung San was openly assailed to his face as an opportunist by some people attending the conference, using rebellious slogans (British Library, London, India Office Records M/4/PRO: WO 203/5262). U Seinda with the communists behind him moved forward to the rebellion. Actually, Thakhin Soe’s Red Flag Communists took advantage of the misunderstanding between U Seinda and AFPFL. It was in fact an ideological struggle in the AFPFL, the national united front of Burma that was under the leadership of the charismatic leader U Aung San. On the other side some Arakanese intellectuals led by U Hla Tun Pru, a Barrister-at-Law, held a meeting in Rangoon and demanded the formation of “Arakanistan” for the Arakanese people (British Library, London, India Office Records, M/4/2503). All these movements of the Arakanese might have alarmed Muslims from the Mayu Frontier. In the wake of independence most of the educated Muslims felt an overwhelming sense of collective identity based on Islam as their religion and the cultural and ethnic difference of their community from the Burmese and Arakanese Buddhists. At the same time the Arakanese became more and more concerned with their racial security and ethnic survival in view of the increasingly predominant Muslim population in their frontier. The ethnic conflict in the rural areas of the Mayu frontier revived soon after Burma celebrated independence on 4 January 1948. Rising in the guise of Jihad, many Muslim clerics (Moulovis) playing a leading role, in the countryside and remote areas gave way to banditary, arson and rapes. Moshe Yeagar wrote that one of the major reasons of Mujahid rebellion was that the Muslims who fled Japanese occupation were not allowed to resettle in their villages (Yegar 1972:98). In fact, there were more than two hundred Arakanese villages in Buthidaung and Maungdaw townships before the war began. In the post-war years only sixty villages were favorable for the Arakanese resettlement. Out of these sixty, forty-four villages were raided by the Mujahids in the first SOAS BULLETIN OF BURMA RESEARCH SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 411 couple of years of independence. Thousands of Arakanese villagers sought refuge in the towns and many of their villages were occupied by the Chittagonian Bengalis (Rakhine State People’s Council 1986:58-60). The Mujahid uprising began two years before the independence was declared. In March 1946 the Muslim Liberation Organization (MLO) was formed with Zaffar Kawal, a native of Chittagong District, as the leader. A conference was held in May 1948 in Garabyin Village north to Maungdaw and the name of the organization was changed to “Mujahid Party.” Some Chittagonian Bengalis from nearby villages brought the weapons they had collected during the wartime to the mosques in Fakir Bazaar Village and Shahbi Bazaar Village (Department of Defense Service Archives, Rangoon, DR 491 (56)). Jaffar Kawal became the commander in chief and his lieutenant was Abdul Husein, formerly a corporal from the Akyab District police force (Department of Defense Service Archives, Rangoon, DR 1016). The Mujahid Party sent a letter written in Urdur and dated 9 June 1948 to the government of Union of Burma through the sub-divisional officer of Maungdaw Township. Their demands are as follows (Department of Defence Service Archives, Rangoon: CD 1016/10/11): (1) The area between the west bank of Kaladan River and the east bank of Naaf River must be recognized as the National Home of the Muslims in Burma. (2) The Muslims in Arakan must be accepted as the nationalities of Burma. (3) The Mujahid Party must be granted a legal status as a political organization. (4) The Urdur Language must be acknowledged as the national language of the Muslims in Arakan and be taught in the schools in the Muslim areas. (5) The refugees from the Kyauktaw and Myohaung (MraukU) Townships must be resettled in their villages at the expense of the state. (6) The Muslims under detention by the Emergency Security Act must be unconditionally released. (7) A general amnesty must be granted for the members of the Mujahid Party. DEVELOPMENT OF A MUSLIM ENCLAVE SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 412 Calling themselves “the Muslims of Arakan” and “the Urdur” as their national language indicated their inclination towards the sense of collective identity that the Muslims of Indian subcontinent showed before the partition of India into two independent states. When the demands were ignored the Mujahids destroyed all the Arakanese villages in the northern part of Maungdaw Township. On 19 July 1948 they attacked Ngapruchaung and near by Villages in Maungdaw Township and some villagers and Buddhist monks were kidnapped for ransoms (Department of Defense Service Archives, Rangoon: CD 1016/10/11). On 15 and 16 June 1951 All Arakan Muslim Conference was held in Alethangyaw Village, and “The Charter of the Constitutional Demands of the Arakani Muslims” was published. It calls for “the balance of power between the Muslims and the Maghs (Arakanese), two major races of Arakan.” The demand of the charter reads: North Arakan should be immediately formed a free Muslim State as equal constituent Member of the Union of Burma like the Shan State, the Karenni State, the Chin Hills, and the Kachin Zone with its own Militia, Police and Security Forces under the General Command of the Union (Department of the Defense Service Archives, Rangoon: DR 1016/10/13). Here it is again noticeable that in the charter these peoples are mentioned as the Muslims of Arakan. The word “Rohingya” was first pronounced by the Mr Abdul Gaffar, an MP from Buthidaung, in his article “The Sudeten Muslims,” published in the Guardian Daily on 20 August 1951. However, the new democracy in the independent Burma induced some Muslim leaders to remain loyal to the state. The free and fair elections were held and four Muslims were elected to the legislature from Buthidaung and Maungdaw townships. Meanwhile the Mujahid insurgency threw the frontier area into turmoil for a decade. During his campaign for the 1960 elections, Burmese Prime Minister U Nu who succeeded U Aung San after the independence hero was assassinated, promised the statehood for Arakanese and Mon peoples. When he came to the office after a landslide victory the plans for the formation of the Arakan and Mon states were affected. Naturally the Muslim members of SOAS BULLETIN OF BURMA RESEARCH SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 413 parliament from Buthidaung and Maungdaw Townships denounced the plan and called for the establishment of a Rohingya State. General Ne Win took power in a coup d’etat in 1962, and almost all the Rohingya movement went underground. The first step of Ne Win’s Burmese Way to Socialism was the nationalization of the private enterprises in 1964. The plan was clearly aimed at the transfer of private assets owned by the Indian and Chinese entrepreneurs into state ownership in the form of the public corporations. Most of the Indian and Pakistani businesspeople, living in the major cities of Burma, left Burma. In the two years following the decision to nationalize the retail trade, some 100,000 Indians and some twelve thousand Pakistanis left Burma for their homeland. The flow of Indians returning to India as a result of these policies began in 1964 (Donison 1970: 199-200). But the Muslim agriculturists from Northern Arakan, most of them, holding the national registration cards issued by the Department of National Registration in the post-war decade, were not concerned with the event and remained in the frontier areas till the Citizenship Law of 1982 was enforced in 1987. In 1973, Ne Win’s Revolutionary Council sought public opinion for drafting anew constitution. The Muslims from the Mayu Frontier submitted a proposal to the Constitution Commission for the creation of separate Muslim state or at least a division for them (Kyaw Zan Tha 1995:6). Their proposal was again turned down.When elections were held under the 1974 Constitution the Bengali Muslims from the Mayu Frontier Area were denied the right to elect their representatives to the “Pyithu Hlut-taw” (People’s Congress). After the end of the Independence War in Bangladesh some arms and ammunitions flowed into the hands of the young Muslim leaders from Mayu Frontier. On 15 July 1972 a congress of all Rohingya parties was held at the Bangladeshi border to call for the “Rohingya National Liberation” (Mya Win 1992: 3). Burma’s successive military regimes persisted in the same policy of denying Burmese citizenship to most Bengalis, especially in the frontier area. They stubbornly grasped the 1982 Citizenship Law that allowed only the ethnic groups who had lived in Burma before the First Anglo-Burmese War began in 1824 as the citizens of the country. By this law those Muslims had been treated as DEVELOPMENT OF A MUSLIM ENCLAVE SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 414 aliens in the land they have inhabited for more than a century. According to the 1983 census report all Muslims in Arakan constituted 24.3 percent and they all were categorized as Bangladeshi, while the Arakanese Buddhists formed 67.8 percent of the population of the Arakan (Rakhine) State (Immigration and Manpower Department 1987:I-14). In the abortive 1988 Democracy Uprising, those Muslims again became active, hoisting the Rohingya banner. Subsequently when the military junta allowed the registration of the political parties they asked for their parties to be recognized under the name “Rohingya.” Their demand was turned down and some of them changed tactics and formed a party, the National Democratic Party for Human rights (NDPHR) that won in four constituencies in 1990 elections as eleven candidates of the Arakan League for Democracy (ALD) were elected to the legislature. However, the Elections Commission abolished both the ALD and the NDPHR in 1991. Some of the party members went underground and into exile. Recently, the main objectives of the movement of some groups have been to gain the recognition of their ethnic entity in the Union of Burma and to obtain the equal status enjoyed by other ethnic groups. But some elements have adopted the radical idea of founding a separate Muslim state. The following are the Rohingya organizations currently active on the Burma-Bangladesh border (Mya Win 1992: 3): 1. RSO (Rohingya Solidarity Organization) 2. ARIF (Arakan Rohingya Islamic Front) 3. RPF (Rohingya Patriotic Front) 4. RLO (Rohingya Liberation Organization) 5. IMA (Itihadul Mozahadin of Arakan) Conclusion After Burma gained independence, a concentration of nearly ninety percent of the area’s population, the distinguishing characteristics of their own culture and the Islamic faith formed an ethnic and religious minority group in the western fringe of the republic. For successive generations their ethnicity and Islam have been practically not distinguishable. At the beginning they adopted the SOAS BULLETIN OF BURMA RESEARCH SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 415 policy of irredentism in favor of joining East Pakistan with the slogan, “Pakistan Jindabad,” (Victory to Pakistan). This policy faded away when they could not gain support from the government of Pakistan. Later they began to call for the establishment of an autonomous region instead. Pakistan’s attitude toward the Muslims in Arakan was different from the Islamabad’s policy toward Kashmiris. During the Independence War in Bangladesh most of the Muslims in Arakan supported West Pakistan. After Bangladesh gained independence Dhaka followed the policy of disowning those Chittagonians. Consequently they had to insist firmly on their identity as Rohingyas. Their leaders began to complain that the term “Chittagonian Bengali” had arbitrarily been applied to them. But the majority of the ethnic group, being illiterate agriculturalists in the rural areas, still prefers their identity as Bengali Muslims. Although they have showed the collective political interest for more than five decades since Burma gained independence, their political and cultural rights have not so far been recognized and guaranteed. On the contrary the demand for the recognition of their rights sounds a direct challenge to the right of autonomy and the myth of survival for the Arakanese majority in their homeland. A symbiotic coexistence has so far been inconceivable because of the political climate of mistrust and fear between the two races and the policy of the military junta. The Muslims from the other parts of Arakan kept themselves aloof from the Rohingya cause as well. Thus the cause of Rohingyas finds a little support outside their own community, and their claims of an earlier historical tie to Burma are insupportable. DEVELOPMENT OF A MUSLIM ENCLAVE SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 416 Appendix I British Burma Census of 1872 (Akyab Town) Group Male Female Total Hindu 1,884 28 1,911 Mohomendan 3,516 1,502 5,018 Buddhist 5,892 5,627 11,519 Christian 216 109 325 Others 387 70 457 Grand Total 11,895 7,335 19,230 (Department of Revenue, Agriculture and Commerce 1875, 42) SOAS BULLETIN OF BURMA RESEARCH SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 417 Appendix II The Statement Showing the Distribution of People According to their Birth Places British Burma Census of 1881 (Arakan Division) Birth Place Male Female Total Akyab Dist. 144,746 132,131 276,877 Bassein 721 518 1,239 Hanthawaddy 178 157 335 Henzada 230 232 471 Kyauk Pyu 79,487 79,180 158,667 Mergui 3 2 5 Moulmein town 24 23 47 North Arakan 7,138 6,853 13,991 Prome 805 628 1,433 Rangoon Town 112 75 187 Sandoway 27,410 27,363 54,773 Shway Gyin 1 4 5 Tavoy 17 1 18 Tharawaddy 4 9 13 Thayetmyo 704 599 1,303 Thone Gwa 6 5 11 Toungoo 9 3 12 Assam 8 8 Bengal 49,374 19,435 68,809 Bombay 5 3 8 Central 2 1 3 Diu 27 27 Goa 5 5 Madras 1,823 31 1,854 Nepal 49 10 59 N-Western Provices 246 14 260 Oudh 2 2 Punjab 63 6 69 Afganistan 4 4 Arabia 3 3 (Government of British Burma, British Burma Census, 1881: Appendix LXXVIII) DEVELOPMENT OF A MUSLIM ENCLAVE SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 418 REFERENCES Primary Sources Ba Maw. 1958. 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Government of India. 1943. Records of the Governor’s Secretary Office. India Office Records 8/9. London: British Library. Government of the Union of Myanmar. 1987. Rakhine State 1983 Population Census. Rangoon: Immigration and Manpower Department, Ministry of Home Affairs. Grantham, S and Lat, Maung. 1956. Burma Gazetteer: Akyab District, Volume (B). Rangoon: Government Press. Forchhammer, Emil. 1892. Papers on Subjects Relating to the Archaeology of Burma: A Report on the History of Arakan. Rangoon: Government Press. Irwin, Anthony. 1945. Burmese Outpost (Memoirs of a British Officer who fought in Arakan with the Arakanese V Forces during the Second World War). London: Collins. SOAS BULLETIN OF BURMA RESEARCH SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 419 Myanma-Alin Daily, September 25, 1945. Rangoon: Myanmaralin Press. Owen, Frank. 1946. The Campaigns in Burma. London: His Majesty Stationary Office. Phayre, Arthur. 1841. “Account of Arakan.” Journal of the Asiatic Society, 10: 629 – 712. Smart, R.B.1957. Burma gazetteer: Akyab District, Volume (A). Rangoon: Government Press. Talish, Shihabuddin. 1907. “The Frengi Pirates of Chatagaon.” Jadunath Sakar (tr.). Journal Asiatic Society of Bengal (3): 419-425 Tha Gyaw, Bonebauk. 1971. Tawhlanyay-khayeeway (On the Road to Revolution). Rangoon: Thandar Aung Sarpay Walker, H.B. 1891. “Journey on the Ann Pass.” Records of the Intelligence Department. Rangoon: Government Press Secondary Sources Ba Tha. 1959. “Shah Shuja in Arakan.” The Guardian Magazine, 6(9): 26-28 -------- 1960. “Rowengyas in Arakan.” The Guardian Magazine, 7(5): 33-36 Charney, Michael W. 1999. Where Jambudipa and Islamdom Converged: Religious Change and the Emergence of Buddhist Communalism in Early Modern Arakan (Fifteenth to Nineteenth Centuries). PhD Dissertation.Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Charter, Langhan.1938. “The Archives of Arakanese Families,” Journal of Burma Research Society (38): 34-38 Christie, Clive J. 1996. A Modern History of Southeast Asia: Decolonization, Nationalism and Separatism. London: I. B. Tauris Publishers Donison, F.S. 1970. Burma. London:Ernest Benn Furnivall, J.S. 1957. Colonial Policy and Practice. London: Cambridge University Press. Gaffar, Abdul. 1951. “The Sudeten Muslims.” The Guardian Daily, August 20, 1951, Rangoon: Guardian Press. Khin Gyi Pyaw. 1960. “Who Are the Mujahids in Arakan?” Rakhine Tazaung Magazine. Rangoon: Rangoon University Arakanese Culture Association. DEVELOPMENT OF A MUSLIM ENCLAVE SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 420 Kyaw Zan Tha, U. 1995. “Background of the Rohingya Problem.” Rakhine Tazaung Magazine. Rangoon: Rangoon University Arakanese Culture Association. Mya Win. 1992. “If We Appraise the Attempts Made to Sow Enmity against Myanmar Naing-ngan.” Working Peoples’ Daily: January 25, 1992. Rahman, Fazlur. 1979. Islam. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rakhine State People’s Council. 1986. Pyinay-phyitsin-thamaing (Chronological Records of Arakan State) A type-written Manuscript for circulation. Akyab (Sittwe). Rahman, Fazlur.1979. Islam. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Razzaq, Abdur & Haque, Mahfuzul. 1995. A Tale of Refugees: Rohingyas in Bangladesh. Dhaka: Center for Human Rights. Yeagar, Moshe.1972. The Muslims of Burma: A Study of Minority Group. Wiesbaden.
©2005 AYE CHAN SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research, Vol. 3, No. 2, Autumn 2005, ISSN 1479- 8484 The Development of a Muslim Enclave in Arakan (Rakhine) State of Burma (Myanmar)1 Aye Chan Kanda University of International Studies Who are the Rohingyas? Burma gained independence from Great Britain in 1948 and this issue is a problem that Burma has had to grapple with since that time. The people who call themselves Rohingyas are the Muslims of Mayu Frontier area, present-day Buthidaung and Maungdaw Townships of Arakan (Rakhine) State, an isolated province in the western part of the country across Naaf River as boundary from Bangladesh. Arakan had been an independent kingdom before it was conquered by the Burmese in 1784. Rohingya historians have written many treatises in which they claim for themselves an indigenous status that is traceable within Arakan State for more than a thousand years. Although it is not accepted as a fact in academia, a few volumes purporting to be history but mainly composed of fictitious stories, myths and legends have been published formerly in Burma and later in the 1 The present paper was written for distribution and discussion at a seminar in Japan. During the seminar, there was a debate between the author and Professor Kei Nemoto concerning the existence of the Rohingya people in Rakhine (Arakan). Nemoto, in a paper written in Japanese, agreed with the Rohingya historians that the Rohingyas have lived in Rakhine since the eigth century A. D. The author contests the vailidity of these claims. The present paper was also read at the 70th Conference of Southeast Asian historians of Japan, held at the University of Kobe, on 4 to 5 February 2003. SOAS BULLETIN OF BURMA RESEARCH SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 397 United States, Japan and Bangladesh. These, in turn, have filtered into the international media through international organizations, including reports to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (Ba Tha 1960: 33-36; Razzaq and Haque 1995: 15).2 In light of this, it is important to reexamine the ethnicity of the ‘Rohingyas’ and to trace their history back to the earliest presence of their ancestors in Arakan. And history tells us that we do not have to go back very far. In the early 1950s that a few Bengali Muslim intellectuals of the northwestern part of Arakan began to use the term “Rohingya” to call themselves. They were indeed the direct descendants of immigrants from the Chittagong District of East Bengal (present-day Bangladesh), who had migrated into Arakan after the province was ceded to British India under the terms of the Treaty of Yandabo, an event that concluded the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824-1826). Most of these migrants settled down in the Mayu Frontier Area, near what is now Burma’s border with modern Bangladesh. Actually, they were called “Chittagonians” in the British colonial records. The Muslims in the Arakan State can be divided into four different groups, namely the Chittagonian Bengalis in the Mayu Frontier; the descendents of the Muslim Community of Arakan in the Mrauk-U period (1430-1784), presently living in the Mrauk-U and Kyauktaw townships; the decendents of Muslim mercenaries in Ramree Island known to the Arakanese as Kaman; and the Muslims from the Myedu area of Central Burma, left behind by the Burmese invaders in Sandoway District after the conquest of Arakan in 1784. Mass Migration in the Colonial Period (1826-1948) As stated above, the term “Rohingya” came into use in the 1950s by the educated Bengali residents from the Mayu Frontier Area and cannot be found in any historical source in any language before then. The creators of that term might have been from the second or third generations of the Bengali immigrants from the Chittagong District in modern Bangladesh; however, this does not mean that there was no Muslim community in Arakan before the state was absorbed into British India. 2 See http://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/burma/burm for the report to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. DEVELOPMENT OF A MUSLIM ENCLAVE SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 398 When King Min Saw Mon, the founder of Mrauk-U Dynasty (1430-1784) regained the throne with the military assistance of the Sultan of Bengal, after twenty-four years of exile in Bengal, his Bengali retinues were allowed to settle down in the outskirts of Mrauk-U, where they built the well-known Santikan mosque. These were the earliest Muslim settlers and their community in Arakan did not seem to be large in number. In the middle of the seventeenth century the Muslim community grew because of the assignment of Bengali slaves in variety of the workforces in the country. The Portuguese and Arakanese raids of Benga (Bengal) for captives and loot became a conventional practice of the kingdom since the early sixteenth century. The Moghal historian Shiahabuddin Talish noted that only the Portuguese pirates sold their captives and that the Arakanese employed all of their prisoners in agriculture and other kinds of services (Talish 1907: 422). Furthermore there seem to have been a small group of Muslim gentry at the court. Some of them might have served the king as Bengali, Persian and Arabic scribes. Because the Mrauk-U kings, though of being Buddhist, adopted some Islamic fashions such as the maintaing of silver coins that bore their Muslim titles in Persian and occasionally appearing in Muslim costumes in the style of the Sultan of Bengal. Accordingly there were Muslim servants at the court helping the king perform these Islamic conventions (Charney 1999: 146). Arthur Phayre, the first deputy commissioner of Arakan, after the British annexation, reported about the indigenous races of Akyab District and the Muslim descendents from the Arakanese days as: The inhabitants are, In the Plains – 1. Ro-khoing-tha (Arakanese)-2. Ko-la (Indian) – 3. Dôm(Low Caste Hindu). In theHills – 1. Khyoung-tha – 2.Kumé or Kwémwé – 3. Khyang – 4. Doing–nuk, Mroong, and other tribes… While the Arakanese held these possessions in Bengal, they appear to have sent numbers of the inhabitants into Arakan as slaves, whence arose the present Ko-la population of the country (Phayre 1836: 680 – 681). During the four decades of Burmese rule (1784-1824), because of ruthless oppression, many Arakanese fled to British Bengal. According to a record of British East India Company, there SOAS BULLETIN OF BURMA RESEARCH SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 399 were about thirty-five thousand Arakanese who had fled to Chittagong District in British India to seek protection in 1799 (Asiatic Annual Register 1799: 61; Charney 1999: 265). The following report by Francis Buchanan provides a vivid picture of the atrocities committed by the Burmese invaders in Arakan: Puran says that, in one day soon after the conquest of Arakan the Burmans put 40,000 men to Death: that wherever they found a pretty Woman, they took her after killing the husband; and the young Girls they took without any consideration of their parents, and thus deprived these poor people of the property, by which in Eastern India the aged most commonly support their infirmities. Puran seems to be terribly afraid, that the Government of Bengal will be forced to give up to the Burmans all the refugees from Arakan (Buchanan 1992: 82).3 A considerable portion of Arakanese population was deported by Burmese conquerors to Central Burma. When the British occupied Arakan, the country was a scarcely populated area. Formerly high-yield paddy fields of the fertile Kaladan and Lemro River Valleys germinated nothing but wild plants for many years (Charney 1999: 279). Thus, the British policy was to encourage the Bengali inhabitants from the adjacent areas to migrate into fertile valleys in Arakan as agriculturalists. As the British East India Company extended the administration of Bengal to Arakan, there was no international boundary between the two countries and no restriction was imposed on the emigration. A superintendent, later an assistant commissioner, directly responsible to the Commissioner of Bengal, was sent in 1828 for the administration of Arakan Division, which was divided into three districts respectively: Akyab, Kyaukpyu, and Sandoway with an assistant commissioner in each district (Furnivall 1957:29). The migrations were mostly motivated by the search of professional opportunity. During the Burmese occupation there was a breakdown of the indigenous labor force both in size and structure. Arthur Phayre reported that in the 1830s the wages in 3 Puran Bisungri was an officer of the Police Station of Ramoo what is called Panwah by the Arakanese. He was a Hindu, born in Arakan and fled the country after Burmese invasion of 1784 (Buchanan 1992: 79). DEVELOPMENT OF A MUSLIM ENCLAVE SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 400 Arakan compared with those of Bengal were very high. Therefore many hundreds, indeed thousands of coolies came from the Chittagong District by land and by sea, to seek labor and high wages (Phayre 1836:696). R.B. Smart, the deputy assistant commissioner of Akyab, wrote about the ‘flood’ of immigrants from Chittagong District as follows: Since 1879, immigration has taken place on a much larger scale, and the descendants of the slaves are resident for the most part in the Kyauktaw and Myohaung (Mrauk-U) townships. Maungdaw Township has been overrun by Chittagonian immigrants. Buthidaung is not far behind and new arrivals will be found in almost every part of the district (Smart 1957: 89). At first most of them came to Arakan as seasonal agricultural laborers and went home after the harvest was done. R. B. Smart estimated the number at about twenty-five thousand during the crop-reaping season alone. He added that about the same number came to assist in plowing operations, to work at the mills and in the carrying trades. A total of fifty thousand immigrants coming annually were probably not far from the mark (Smart 1957: 99). Moreover, hunger for land was the prime motive for the migration of most of the Chittagonians. The British judicial records tell us of an increase in the first decade of the twentieth century in lawsuits of litigation for the possession of land. The Akyab District Magistrate reported in 1913 that in Buthidaung Subdivision, the Chittagonian immigrants stand to native Arakanese in the proportion of two to one, but six sevenths of the litigation for land in the court was initiated by the Chittagonians (Smart 1957: 163). Another colonial record delivers about a striking account of the settlements of the Bengali immigrants from Chittagong District as: “Though we are in Arakan, we passed many villages occupied by Muslim settlers or descendents of the settlers, and many of them Chittagonians” (Walker 1891(I): 15). The colonial administration of India regarded the Bengalis as amenable subjects while finding the indigenous Arakanese too defiant, rising in rebellion twice in 1830s. The British policy was also favorable for the settlement of Bengali agricultural communities in Arakan. A colonial record says: SOAS BULLETIN OF BURMA RESEARCH SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 401 Bengalis are a frugal race, who can pay without difficulty a tax that would press very heavily on the Arakanese….(They are) not addicted like the Arakanese to gambling, and opium smoking, and their competition is gradually ousting the Arakanese ( Report of the Settlement Operation in the Akyab District 1887-1888: 21). The flow of Chittagonian labor provided the main impetus to the economic development in Arakan within a few decades along with the opening of regular commercial shipping lines between Chittagong and Akyab. The arable land expanded to four and a half times between 1830 and 1852 and Akyab became one of the major rice exporting cities in the world. Indeed, during a century of colonial rule, the Chittagonian immigrants became the numerically dominant ethnic group in the Mayu Frontier. The following census assessment shows the increase of population of the various ethnic/religious groups inhabiting Akyab District according to the census reports of 1871, 1901 and 1911. There was an increase of 155 percent in the population in the district. According to the reports, even in an interior township Kyauktaw, the Chittagonian population increased from 13,987 in 1891 to 19, 360 in 1911, or about seventy-seven percent in twenty years. At the same time the increase of the Arakanese population including the absorption of the hill tribes and the returning refugees from Bengal was only 22.03 percent. The Assessment of the Census Reports for 1871, 1901, and 1911 Races 1871 1901 1911 Mahomedan 58,255 154,887 178,647 Burmese 4,632 35,751 92,185 Arakanese 171,612 230,649 209,432 Shan 334 80 59 Hill Tribes 38,577 35,489 34,020 Others 606 1,355 1,146 Total 276,671 481,666 529,943 DEVELOPMENT OF A MUSLIM ENCLAVE SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 402 It should be noted that all the Chittagonians and all the Muslims are categorized as Mohamedan in the census reports. There was an increase of 206.67 percent in Mahomedan population in the Akyab District and it was clear that only a few numbers of the transient agricultural laborers went home after the plowing and harvesting seasons and most of them remained in Arakan, making their homes (Smart 1957:83).4 The heyday of the migration was in the second half of the nineteenth century after opening of the Suez Canal, for the British colonialists needed more labor to produce rice which was in growing demand in the international market. In the 1921 Census, many Muslims in Arakan were listed as Indians (Bennison 1931: 213). Communal Violence Moshe Yegar suggests that during the colonial period the antiIndian riots broke out in Burma because of the resentment against unhindered Indian settlements particularly in Arakan, Tenasserim and Lower Burma (Yegar 1992:29-31). But those riots that took place in Rangoon and other major cities in 1926 and 1938 never had had any effects on the peoples of Arakan. A peaceful coexistence was possible for the two different religious/ethnic groups in the Mayu Frontier till the beginning of the World War II. At the beginning of colonial era the establishment of bureaucratic administration by the British repealed the traditional patron-client relationship in the Arakanese villages. The elected village headman had little influence on the elected village council. As John F. Cady wrote, the government policy of forbidding the village headman to take part in the activities related to the nationalist movements weakened the position of the headman as the leader of village community, and as well as his connection with the Buddhist monastery because most of the Buddhist monks were vigorously active in the movements (Cady 1958: 172-273). On the other hand British administration to a certain extent gave the Muslim village communities religious and cultural autonomy. Maung Nyo, a kyunok (headman of the village tract) of Maungdaw Township recorded 4 See Appendix I. According to the 1872 Census Muslims had already formed 26.1 per cent of the population of Akyab, the capital city of Arakan Division. Also see Appendix II. According to the 1881 Census 68,809 people of the population of Arakan Division that numbered 276,877 were born in Bengal. SOAS BULLETIN OF BURMA RESEARCH SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 403 how the new comers from the Chittagong District set up their village communities in the frontier area. They occupied the villages deserted by the Arakanese during the Burmese rule and established purely Muslim village communities. The village committee authorized by the Village Amendment Act of 1924 paved the way for the Imam (moulovi) and the trusteeship committee members of the village mosque to be elected to the village council. They were also allowed to act as the village magistrates and shariah was somewhat in effect in the Muslim villages (Charter 1938:34-38). At least the Islamic court of village had the jurisdiction over familial problems such as marriage, inheritance and divorce. There was no internal sense of unrighteousness and presence of nonbelievers in their community, and accordingly they believe no internecine struggle was for the time being necessary. However, the ethnic violence between Arakanese Buddhists and those Muslim Chittagonians brought a great deal of bloodshed to Arakan during the World War II and after 1948, in the opening decade of independent Burma. Some people of the Mayu Frontier in their early seventies and eighties have still not forgotten the atrocities they suffered in 1942 and 1943 during the short period of anarchy between the British evacuation and the Japanese occupation of the area. In this vacuum there was an outburst of the tension of ethnic and religious cleavage that had been simmering for a century. One of the underlying causes of the communal violence was the Zamindary System brought by the British from Bengal. By this system the British administrators granted the Bengali landowners thousands of acres of arable land on ninety-year-leases. The Arakanese peasants who fled the Burmese rule and came home after British annexation were deprived of the land that they formerly owned through inheritance. Nor did the Bengali zamindars (landowners) want the Arakanese as tenants on their land. Thousands of Bengali peasants from Chittagong District were brought to cultivate the soil (Report of the Settlement Operations in the Akyab District 1887-1888: 2, 21). Most of the Bengali immigrants were influenced by the Farai-di movement in Bengal that propagated the ideology of the Wahhabis of Arabia, which advocated settling ikhwan or brethren in agricultural communities near to the places of water resources. The peasants, according to the teaching, besides cultivating the land should be ready for waging a holy war upon the call by their DEVELOPMENT OF A MUSLIM ENCLAVE SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 404 lords (Rahman 1979: 200-204). In the Maungdaw Township alone, there were, in the 1910s, fifteen Bengali Zamindars who brought thousands of Chittagonian tenants and established Agricultural Muslim communities, building mosques with Islamic schools affiliated to them. However, all these villages occupied by the Bengalis continued to be called by Arakanese names in the British records (Grantham and Lat 1956: 41-43, 48-51). For the convenience of Chittagonians seasonal laborers the Arakan Flotilla Company constructed a railway between Buthidaung and Maungdaw in 1914. Their plan was to connect Chittagong by railway with Buthidaung, from where the Arakan Flotilla steamers were ferrying to Akyab and other towns in central and southern Arakan. In the period of the independence movement in Burma in 1920s and 1930s the Muslims from the Mayu Frontier were more concerned with the progress of Muslim League in India, although some prominent Burmese Muslims such as M.A. Rashid and U Razak played an important role in the leadership of the Burmese nationalist movement. In 1931, the Simon Commission was appointed by the British Parliament to enquire the opinion of Burmese people for the constitutional reforms and on the matter of whether Burma should be separated from Indian Empire. The spokeman of the Muslim League advocated for fair share of government jobs, ten percent representation in all public bodies, and especially in Arakan the equal treatment for Muslims seeking agricultural and business loans (Cady 1958: 294). In education, the Chittagonians were left behind the Arakanese throughout the colonial period. According to the census of 1901 only 4.5 percent of the Bengali Muslims were found to be literate while the percentage for the Arakanese was 25.5. Smart reported that it was due to the ignorance of the advantages of the education among the Chittagonian agriculturists. Especially Buthidaung and Maungdaw were reported to be most backward townships because the large Muslim population in that area mostly agriculturalists showed little interest in education. In 1894 there were nine Urdur schools with 375 students in the whole district. The British provincial administration appointed a deputy inspector for Muslim schools and in 1902 the number of schools rose to seventy-two and the students increased to 1,474 (Smart 1957: 207-209). Consequently, more Arakanese and Hindu Indians SOAS BULLETIN OF BURMA RESEARCH SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 405 were involved in the ancillary services of the colonial administration. Towards the middle of twentieth century a new educated and politically conscious younger generation had superseded the older, inactive ones. Before the beginning of the Second World War a political party, Jami-a-tul Ulema-e Islam was founded under the guidance of the Islamic scholars. Islam became the ideological basis of the party (Khin Gyi Pyaw 1960: 99). Regarding the beginning of the ethnic violence in Arakan, Moshe Yegar wrote that when the British administration was withdrawn to India in 1942 the Arakanese hoodlums began to attack the Muslim villages in southern Arakan and the Muslims fled to the north where they took vengeance on the Arakanese in Buthidaung and Maungdaw townships (Yegar 1972:67). However, an Arakanese record says: When the British administration collapsed by the Japanese occupation, the village headman of Rak-chaung village in Myebon Township and his two younger brothers were killed by the kula (Muslim) villagers. Although the headman was an Arakanese, some of the villagers were kulas. The two Arakanese young men, Thein Gyaw Aung and Kyaw Ya, organized a group and attacked the kula villages and some inhabitants were killed (Rakhine State People’s Council 1986: 36). It is certain that hundreds of Muslim inhabitants of Southern Arakan fled northward, and that there were some cases of robbing the Indian refugees on the Padaung-Taungup pass over the Arakan Yoma mountain ranges after the retreat of the British from the Pegu Division and southern Arakan. But the news of killing, robbery and rape was exaggerated when it reached Burma India border (Ba Maw 1968: 78). The British left all these areas to the mercy of both Burmese and Arakanese dacoits. However, N.R. Chakravati, an Indian scholar, gives a brief account of the flights of Indian refugees from the war zone in the Irrawady valley across the Arakan Yoma. Most of the estimated 900,000 Indians living in Burma attempted to walk over to India…100,000 died at the time… Practically all Indians except those who were not physically fit DEVELOPMENT OF A MUSLIM ENCLAVE SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 406 or were utterly helpless, began to move from place to place in search of safety and protection until they could reach India (Chakravarti 1971: 170). The estimated number of Chakravarti includes all the Indian refugees from the whole Burma proper excluding Arakan. The number of Chittagonian refugees put by Yegar was close to twentytwo thousand (Yegar 1972: 98). However, the leaders of ANC (Arakan National Congress), formed in 1939 and that later becoming the Arakan branch of Anti-Fascist Organization (AFO) formed a de-facto government, before the Japanese troops and Burma Independence Army (BIA) reached there. The ANC announced that anybody or any organization looting or killing the refugees would be brought before the justice and would be severely punished (New Burma Daily 1942: May 28). The Japanese air force attacked Akyab on 23 March 1942 and the British moved their administrative headquarter to India on March 30. The administration by martial law began in Akyab District on 13 April 1942 and with this racial tension burst to the surface, giving way to the public disorder (Owen 1946: 26). For all the bloody communal violence experienced by the Arakanese Buddhists in the Western frontier, I feel strongly that it is reasonable to blame the British colonial administration for arming the Chittagonians in the Mayu Frontier as the Volunteer Force. The V Force, as it is called by the British Army, was formed in 1942 soon after the Japanese operations threatened the British position in India. Its principal role was to undertake guerrilla operations against Japanese, to collect information of the enemy’s movements and to act as interpreters. But the British Army Liaison Officer, Anthony Irwin wrote that the participation of the local V Forces in the skirmishes with the Japanese in Arakan was discredited by the British commanders (Irwin 1946: 7-8, 16). The volunteers, instead of fighting the Japanese, destroyed Buddhist monasteries and Pagodas and burnt down the houses in the Arakanese villages. They first killed U Kyaw Khine, the deputy commissioner of Akyab District, left behind by the British government to maintain law and order in the frontier area; they then massacred thousands of Arakanese civilians in the towns and villages. A record of the Secretary of British governor of Burma in exile dated 4 February 1943 reads: SOAS BULLETIN OF BURMA RESEARCH SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 407 I have been told harrowing tales of cruelty and suffering inflicted on the Arakanese villages in the Ratheedaung area. Most of the villages on the West bank of the Mayu River have been burnt and destroyed by the Chittagonian V forces…. The enemy never came to these villages. They had the misfortune of being in the way of our advancing patrols. Hundreds of villagers are said to be hiding in the hills… It will be the Arakanese who will be ousted from their ancestral land and if they cannot be won over in time, then there can be no hope of their salvation (British Library, London, India Office Records R/8/9GS. 4243). After the Japanese occupation of Akyab (Sittwe), Bo Yan Aung, the member of the Thirty Comrades and commander of a BIA column, set up the administrative body in Akyab District and attempted to cease the violence in the frontier area. Bo Yan Aung discussed the matter with both Arakanese and Muslim leaders. He sent his two lieutenants, Bo Yan Naung and Bo Myo Nyunt to Maungdaw to negotiate with the radical Muslim leaders. They tried to persuade the Muslims to join in anti-imperialist and nationalist movement. But both of them were killed in Maungdaw and Bo Yan Aung was called back to Rangoon by the BIA headquarters (Rakhine State People’s Council 1986: 40-42). For most of the Chittagonians it was a religious issue that would necessarily lead to the creation of a Dah-rul-Islam, or at least to being united with their brethren in the west. It also aimed at the extirpation of the Arakanese or being forced them to migrate to the south where there were overwhelming majority of Arakanese Buddhists. The events during the war contributed the Chittagonians’ fervent sense of alienation from the heterogeneous community of the Arakan. Anthony Irwin called the whole area a “No Man’s Land” during the three years of Japanese occupation (Irwin 1946:27). Irwin explained how the ethnic violence divided the Arakan State between Arakanese and Chittagonians: As the area then occupied by us was almost entirely Mussulman Country … (from) that we drew most of our “Scouts” and Agents. The Arakan before the war had been occupied over its entire lenghth by both Mussulman and Maugh (Arakanese). Then in 1941 the two sects set to and DEVELOPMENT OF A MUSLIM ENCLAVE SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 408 fought. The result of this war was roughly that the Maugh took over the southern half of the country and the Mussulman the North. Whilst it lasted it was a pretty bloody affairs…My present gun boy a Mussulman who lived near to Buthidaung, claims to have killed two hundred Maughs (Arakanese) (Irwin 1946: 21). In the words of the historian, Clive J. Christie, the “ethnic cleansing in British controlled areas, particularly around the town of Maungdaw,” was occurring till the arrival of Japanese troops to the eastern bank of Naaf River (Christie 1996: 165). The British forces began to take offensive in the warfare against the Japanese in northern Arakan in December 1944. The Arakanese troops of AFO maintained law and order in the areas from which Japanese forces withdrew. Of course there were some prominent Arakanese guerrilla leaders who cooperated with the Japanese during the war. British Battalion 65 occupied Akyab, the capital city of Arakan on 12 December 1944. As soon as Akyab was captured the British Army began arresting the Arakanese guerrilla leaders. U Ni, a leader of AFO in Akyab was accused of one hundred and fifty-two criminal offenses and sentenced to forty-two years in prison. Another leader, U Inga was condemned to death by hanging five times, as well as forty-two-year imprisonment. Consequently many guerrilla fighters escaped into hideouts in the forests (Myanmaralin Daily 25 September 1945). On the contrary, Anthony Irwin praised the Chittagonian V Forces as follows: It is these minorities that have most helped us in throughout the three years of constant fighting and occupation and it is these minorities who are most likely to be forgotten in the rush of Government. They must not be. It is the duty of all of us, for whom they fought, to see this (Irwin 1946: 86). During the early post-war years both Arakanese and Bengali Muslims in the Mayu Frontier looked at each other with distrust. As the British Labor Government promised independence for Burma, some Muslims were haunted by the specter of their future living under the infidel rule in the place where the baneful Arakanese are also living. In 1946 a delegation was sent by the Jami-atul Ulema-e Islam to Karachi to discuss with the leaders of SOAS BULLETIN OF BURMA RESEARCH SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 409 the Muslim League the possibility of incorporation of Buthidaung, Maungdaw and Ratheedaung townships into Pakistan, but the British ignored their proposal to detach the frontier area to award it to Pakistan. The failure of their attempts ended in an armed revolt, with some Muslims, declaring a holy war on the new republic. The rebels called themselves “Mujahid.” A guerrilla army of 2700 fighters was organized (Khin Gyi Pyaw 1960: 99; The Nation Daily 1953: April16). In fact the Arakanese were well on their way to rebellion. Under the leadership of two prominent and politically active Buddhist monks, U Pinnyathiha and U Seinda, a guerrilla force of four hundred to five hundred men was raised and assisted the Japanese in occupying the northern Arakan. U Pinnyathiha even announced that the Japanese government had agreed to his proposal for a separate Arakanese unit of Burma Independence Army. Later his force was known as the Arakan Defense Force, under the command of Kra Hla Aung, the protégé of U Pinnyathiha. Later two monks became leaders of Arakan Branch of AFO (AntiFascist Organization), turning their guns on the Japanese. At the middle of 1944 they were supported by the British with certain amount of arms to fight the Japanese. Brigadier Richard Gordon Prescott, Deputy Director of Civil Affairs reported to the governor: As result of arming certain members of AFO under the leadership of U Pinnyathiha and Kra Hla Aung, the AFO (in Arakan) are endeavoring to set up a parallel government to that of the British Administration and in fact repeating their modus operandi at the time of Japanese invasion of Arakan (British Library, London, India Office Record M/2500). In the meantime the AFO changed its name to AFPFL (Anti-Fascist and People’s Freedom League) with U Aung San, the ultimate hero of the Burmese independence movement, as its leader. When the AFPFL accepted the proposal of the governor of Burma to join the Executive Council, U Pinnyathiha remained as the AFPFL leader in Arakan while U Seinda was actively preparing a revolt. U Sein Da’s group was acting as a local government, controlling a number of villages in the Myebon township of Kyaukpyu District and Minbya township of Akyab District. The fact of the matter was that U Seinda was persuaded by the radical communists of Thakhin Soe’s DEVELOPMENT OF A MUSLIM ENCLAVE SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 410 faction of the Communist Party of Burma to choose the way to independence by violence (British Library, London, India Office Records M/4/2500). When the Aung San-Attlee Agreement was signed, U Seinda denounced it publicly. An All Arakan Conference was held in Myebon on 1 April 1947 and about ten thousand people from all parties in Arakan attended. U Aung San was openly assailed to his face as an opportunist by some people attending the conference, using rebellious slogans (British Library, London, India Office Records M/4/PRO: WO 203/5262). U Seinda with the communists behind him moved forward to the rebellion. Actually, Thakhin Soe’s Red Flag Communists took advantage of the misunderstanding between U Seinda and AFPFL. It was in fact an ideological struggle in the AFPFL, the national united front of Burma that was under the leadership of the charismatic leader U Aung San. On the other side some Arakanese intellectuals led by U Hla Tun Pru, a Barrister-at-Law, held a meeting in Rangoon and demanded the formation of “Arakanistan” for the Arakanese people (British Library, London, India Office Records, M/4/2503). All these movements of the Arakanese might have alarmed Muslims from the Mayu Frontier. In the wake of independence most of the educated Muslims felt an overwhelming sense of collective identity based on Islam as their religion and the cultural and ethnic difference of their community from the Burmese and Arakanese Buddhists. At the same time the Arakanese became more and more concerned with their racial security and ethnic survival in view of the increasingly predominant Muslim population in their frontier. The ethnic conflict in the rural areas of the Mayu frontier revived soon after Burma celebrated independence on 4 January 1948. Rising in the guise of Jihad, many Muslim clerics (Moulovis) playing a leading role, in the countryside and remote areas gave way to banditary, arson and rapes. Moshe Yeagar wrote that one of the major reasons of Mujahid rebellion was that the Muslims who fled Japanese occupation were not allowed to resettle in their villages (Yegar 1972:98). In fact, there were more than two hundred Arakanese villages in Buthidaung and Maungdaw townships before the war began. In the post-war years only sixty villages were favorable for the Arakanese resettlement. Out of these sixty, forty-four villages were raided by the Mujahids in the first SOAS BULLETIN OF BURMA RESEARCH SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 411 couple of years of independence. Thousands of Arakanese villagers sought refuge in the towns and many of their villages were occupied by the Chittagonian Bengalis (Rakhine State People’s Council 1986:58-60). The Mujahid uprising began two years before the independence was declared. In March 1946 the Muslim Liberation Organization (MLO) was formed with Zaffar Kawal, a native of Chittagong District, as the leader. A conference was held in May 1948 in Garabyin Village north to Maungdaw and the name of the organization was changed to “Mujahid Party.” Some Chittagonian Bengalis from nearby villages brought the weapons they had collected during the wartime to the mosques in Fakir Bazaar Village and Shahbi Bazaar Village (Department of Defense Service Archives, Rangoon, DR 491 (56)). Jaffar Kawal became the commander in chief and his lieutenant was Abdul Husein, formerly a corporal from the Akyab District police force (Department of Defense Service Archives, Rangoon, DR 1016). The Mujahid Party sent a letter written in Urdur and dated 9 June 1948 to the government of Union of Burma through the sub-divisional officer of Maungdaw Township. Their demands are as follows (Department of Defence Service Archives, Rangoon: CD 1016/10/11): (1) The area between the west bank of Kaladan River and the east bank of Naaf River must be recognized as the National Home of the Muslims in Burma. (2) The Muslims in Arakan must be accepted as the nationalities of Burma. (3) The Mujahid Party must be granted a legal status as a political organization. (4) The Urdur Language must be acknowledged as the national language of the Muslims in Arakan and be taught in the schools in the Muslim areas. (5) The refugees from the Kyauktaw and Myohaung (MraukU) Townships must be resettled in their villages at the expense of the state. (6) The Muslims under detention by the Emergency Security Act must be unconditionally released. (7) A general amnesty must be granted for the members of the Mujahid Party. DEVELOPMENT OF A MUSLIM ENCLAVE SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 412 Calling themselves “the Muslims of Arakan” and “the Urdur” as their national language indicated their inclination towards the sense of collective identity that the Muslims of Indian subcontinent showed before the partition of India into two independent states. When the demands were ignored the Mujahids destroyed all the Arakanese villages in the northern part of Maungdaw Township. On 19 July 1948 they attacked Ngapruchaung and near by Villages in Maungdaw Township and some villagers and Buddhist monks were kidnapped for ransoms (Department of Defense Service Archives, Rangoon: CD 1016/10/11). On 15 and 16 June 1951 All Arakan Muslim Conference was held in Alethangyaw Village, and “The Charter of the Constitutional Demands of the Arakani Muslims” was published. It calls for “the balance of power between the Muslims and the Maghs (Arakanese), two major races of Arakan.” The demand of the charter reads: North Arakan should be immediately formed a free Muslim State as equal constituent Member of the Union of Burma like the Shan State, the Karenni State, the Chin Hills, and the Kachin Zone with its own Militia, Police and Security Forces under the General Command of the Union (Department of the Defense Service Archives, Rangoon: DR 1016/10/13). Here it is again noticeable that in the charter these peoples are mentioned as the Muslims of Arakan. The word “Rohingya” was first pronounced by the Mr Abdul Gaffar, an MP from Buthidaung, in his article “The Sudeten Muslims,” published in the Guardian Daily on 20 August 1951. However, the new democracy in the independent Burma induced some Muslim leaders to remain loyal to the state. The free and fair elections were held and four Muslims were elected to the legislature from Buthidaung and Maungdaw townships. Meanwhile the Mujahid insurgency threw the frontier area into turmoil for a decade. During his campaign for the 1960 elections, Burmese Prime Minister U Nu who succeeded U Aung San after the independence hero was assassinated, promised the statehood for Arakanese and Mon peoples. When he came to the office after a landslide victory the plans for the formation of the Arakan and Mon states were affected. Naturally the Muslim members of SOAS BULLETIN OF BURMA RESEARCH SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 413 parliament from Buthidaung and Maungdaw Townships denounced the plan and called for the establishment of a Rohingya State. General Ne Win took power in a coup d’etat in 1962, and almost all the Rohingya movement went underground. The first step of Ne Win’s Burmese Way to Socialism was the nationalization of the private enterprises in 1964. The plan was clearly aimed at the transfer of private assets owned by the Indian and Chinese entrepreneurs into state ownership in the form of the public corporations. Most of the Indian and Pakistani businesspeople, living in the major cities of Burma, left Burma. In the two years following the decision to nationalize the retail trade, some 100,000 Indians and some twelve thousand Pakistanis left Burma for their homeland. The flow of Indians returning to India as a result of these policies began in 1964 (Donison 1970: 199-200). But the Muslim agriculturists from Northern Arakan, most of them, holding the national registration cards issued by the Department of National Registration in the post-war decade, were not concerned with the event and remained in the frontier areas till the Citizenship Law of 1982 was enforced in 1987. In 1973, Ne Win’s Revolutionary Council sought public opinion for drafting anew constitution. The Muslims from the Mayu Frontier submitted a proposal to the Constitution Commission for the creation of separate Muslim state or at least a division for them (Kyaw Zan Tha 1995:6). Their proposal was again turned down.When elections were held under the 1974 Constitution the Bengali Muslims from the Mayu Frontier Area were denied the right to elect their representatives to the “Pyithu Hlut-taw” (People’s Congress). After the end of the Independence War in Bangladesh some arms and ammunitions flowed into the hands of the young Muslim leaders from Mayu Frontier. On 15 July 1972 a congress of all Rohingya parties was held at the Bangladeshi border to call for the “Rohingya National Liberation” (Mya Win 1992: 3). Burma’s successive military regimes persisted in the same policy of denying Burmese citizenship to most Bengalis, especially in the frontier area. They stubbornly grasped the 1982 Citizenship Law that allowed only the ethnic groups who had lived in Burma before the First Anglo-Burmese War began in 1824 as the citizens of the country. By this law those Muslims had been treated as DEVELOPMENT OF A MUSLIM ENCLAVE SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 414 aliens in the land they have inhabited for more than a century. According to the 1983 census report all Muslims in Arakan constituted 24.3 percent and they all were categorized as Bangladeshi, while the Arakanese Buddhists formed 67.8 percent of the population of the Arakan (Rakhine) State (Immigration and Manpower Department 1987:I-14). In the abortive 1988 Democracy Uprising, those Muslims again became active, hoisting the Rohingya banner. Subsequently when the military junta allowed the registration of the political parties they asked for their parties to be recognized under the name “Rohingya.” Their demand was turned down and some of them changed tactics and formed a party, the National Democratic Party for Human rights (NDPHR) that won in four constituencies in 1990 elections as eleven candidates of the Arakan League for Democracy (ALD) were elected to the legislature. However, the Elections Commission abolished both the ALD and the NDPHR in 1991. Some of the party members went underground and into exile. Recently, the main objectives of the movement of some groups have been to gain the recognition of their ethnic entity in the Union of Burma and to obtain the equal status enjoyed by other ethnic groups. But some elements have adopted the radical idea of founding a separate Muslim state. The following are the Rohingya organizations currently active on the Burma-Bangladesh border (Mya Win 1992: 3): 1. RSO (Rohingya Solidarity Organization) 2. ARIF (Arakan Rohingya Islamic Front) 3. RPF (Rohingya Patriotic Front) 4. RLO (Rohingya Liberation Organization) 5. IMA (Itihadul Mozahadin of Arakan) Conclusion After Burma gained independence, a concentration of nearly ninety percent of the area’s population, the distinguishing characteristics of their own culture and the Islamic faith formed an ethnic and religious minority group in the western fringe of the republic. For successive generations their ethnicity and Islam have been practically not distinguishable. At the beginning they adopted the SOAS BULLETIN OF BURMA RESEARCH SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 415 policy of irredentism in favor of joining East Pakistan with the slogan, “Pakistan Jindabad,” (Victory to Pakistan). This policy faded away when they could not gain support from the government of Pakistan. Later they began to call for the establishment of an autonomous region instead. Pakistan’s attitude toward the Muslims in Arakan was different from the Islamabad’s policy toward Kashmiris. During the Independence War in Bangladesh most of the Muslims in Arakan supported West Pakistan. After Bangladesh gained independence Dhaka followed the policy of disowning those Chittagonians. Consequently they had to insist firmly on their identity as Rohingyas. Their leaders began to complain that the term “Chittagonian Bengali” had arbitrarily been applied to them. But the majority of the ethnic group, being illiterate agriculturalists in the rural areas, still prefers their identity as Bengali Muslims. Although they have showed the collective political interest for more than five decades since Burma gained independence, their political and cultural rights have not so far been recognized and guaranteed. On the contrary the demand for the recognition of their rights sounds a direct challenge to the right of autonomy and the myth of survival for the Arakanese majority in their homeland. A symbiotic coexistence has so far been inconceivable because of the political climate of mistrust and fear between the two races and the policy of the military junta. The Muslims from the other parts of Arakan kept themselves aloof from the Rohingya cause as well. Thus the cause of Rohingyas finds a little support outside their own community, and their claims of an earlier historical tie to Burma are insupportable. DEVELOPMENT OF A MUSLIM ENCLAVE SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 416 Appendix I British Burma Census of 1872 (Akyab Town) Group Male Female Total Hindu 1,884 28 1,911 Mohomendan 3,516 1,502 5,018 Buddhist 5,892 5,627 11,519 Christian 216 109 325 Others 387 70 457 Grand Total 11,895 7,335 19,230 (Department of Revenue, Agriculture and Commerce 1875, 42) SOAS BULLETIN OF BURMA RESEARCH SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 417 Appendix II The Statement Showing the Distribution of People According to their Birth Places British Burma Census of 1881 (Arakan Division) Birth Place Male Female Total Akyab Dist. 144,746 132,131 276,877 Bassein 721 518 1,239 Hanthawaddy 178 157 335 Henzada 230 232 471 Kyauk Pyu 79,487 79,180 158,667 Mergui 3 2 5 Moulmein town 24 23 47 North Arakan 7,138 6,853 13,991 Prome 805 628 1,433 Rangoon Town 112 75 187 Sandoway 27,410 27,363 54,773 Shway Gyin 1 4 5 Tavoy 17 1 18 Tharawaddy 4 9 13 Thayetmyo 704 599 1,303 Thone Gwa 6 5 11 Toungoo 9 3 12 Assam 8 8 Bengal 49,374 19,435 68,809 Bombay 5 3 8 Central 2 1 3 Diu 27 27 Goa 5 5 Madras 1,823 31 1,854 Nepal 49 10 59 N-Western Provices 246 14 260 Oudh 2 2 Punjab 63 6 69 Afganistan 4 4 Arabia 3 3 (Government of British Burma, British Burma Census, 1881: Appendix LXXVIII) DEVELOPMENT OF A MUSLIM ENCLAVE SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 418 REFERENCES Primary Sources Ba Maw. 1958. Breakthrough in Burma, memoirs of a revolution, 1939-46. New Haven: Yale University Press. Bennison, J.J.1931. Census of India of 1931, Volume XI, Part I, Burma. Rangoon: Government Press. Buchanan, Francis. 1992. Francis Buchanan in Southeast Bengal (1798): His Journey to Chittagong, the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Noakhali and Comilla. Dhaka: Dhaka University Press. Census Commissioner of India. Census of India, 1881. Calcutta: 1896 Department of Defense Service Archives. Rangoon. CD 1016/10/11 ----------------------Do ------------------------------------. CD 495(56) ----------------------Do-------------------------------------. DR 1016/10/13 Department of Revenue, Agriculture and Commerce 1875.The Census of British Burma. Rangoon: Government Press Government of British Burma. 1875. Report on the Census of British Burma. Rangoon: Government Press Government of British Burma. 1888. Report on the Settlement Operations in Akyab District 1887-88. Rangoon: Government Press. Government of India. 1943. Records of the Governor’s Secretary Office. India Office Records 8/9. London: British Library. Government of the Union of Myanmar. 1987. Rakhine State 1983 Population Census. Rangoon: Immigration and Manpower Department, Ministry of Home Affairs. Grantham, S and Lat, Maung. 1956. Burma Gazetteer: Akyab District, Volume (B). Rangoon: Government Press. Forchhammer, Emil. 1892. Papers on Subjects Relating to the Archaeology of Burma: A Report on the History of Arakan. Rangoon: Government Press. Irwin, Anthony. 1945. Burmese Outpost (Memoirs of a British Officer who fought in Arakan with the Arakanese V Forces during the Second World War). London: Collins. SOAS BULLETIN OF BURMA RESEARCH SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 419 Myanma-Alin Daily, September 25, 1945. Rangoon: Myanmaralin Press. Owen, Frank. 1946. The Campaigns in Burma. London: His Majesty Stationary Office. Phayre, Arthur. 1841. “Account of Arakan.” Journal of the Asiatic Society, 10: 629 – 712. Smart, R.B.1957. Burma gazetteer: Akyab District, Volume (A). Rangoon: Government Press. Talish, Shihabuddin. 1907. “The Frengi Pirates of Chatagaon.” Jadunath Sakar (tr.). Journal Asiatic Society of Bengal (3): 419-425 Tha Gyaw, Bonebauk. 1971. Tawhlanyay-khayeeway (On the Road to Revolution). Rangoon: Thandar Aung Sarpay Walker, H.B. 1891. “Journey on the Ann Pass.” Records of the Intelligence Department. Rangoon: Government Press Secondary Sources Ba Tha. 1959. “Shah Shuja in Arakan.” The Guardian Magazine, 6(9): 26-28 -------- 1960. “Rowengyas in Arakan.” The Guardian Magazine, 7(5): 33-36 Charney, Michael W. 1999. Where Jambudipa and Islamdom Converged: Religious Change and the Emergence of Buddhist Communalism in Early Modern Arakan (Fifteenth to Nineteenth Centuries). PhD Dissertation.Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Charter, Langhan.1938. “The Archives of Arakanese Families,” Journal of Burma Research Society (38): 34-38 Christie, Clive J. 1996. A Modern History of Southeast Asia: Decolonization, Nationalism and Separatism. London: I. B. Tauris Publishers Donison, F.S. 1970. Burma. London:Ernest Benn Furnivall, J.S. 1957. Colonial Policy and Practice. London: Cambridge University Press. Gaffar, Abdul. 1951. “The Sudeten Muslims.” The Guardian Daily, August 20, 1951, Rangoon: Guardian Press. Khin Gyi Pyaw. 1960. “Who Are the Mujahids in Arakan?” Rakhine Tazaung Magazine. Rangoon: Rangoon University Arakanese Culture Association. DEVELOPMENT OF A MUSLIM ENCLAVE SBBR 3.2 (AUTUMN 2005): 396-420 420 Kyaw Zan Tha, U. 1995. “Background of the Rohingya Problem.” Rakhine Tazaung Magazine. Rangoon: Rangoon University Arakanese Culture Association. Mya Win. 1992. “If We Appraise the Attempts Made to Sow Enmity against Myanmar Naing-ngan.” Working Peoples’ Daily: January 25, 1992. Rahman, Fazlur. 1979. Islam. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rakhine State People’s Council. 1986. Pyinay-phyitsin-thamaing (Chronological Records of Arakan State) A type-written Manuscript for circulation. Akyab (Sittwe). Rahman, Fazlur.1979. Islam. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Razzaq, Abdur & Haque, Mahfuzul. 1995. A Tale of Refugees: Rohingyas in Bangladesh. Dhaka: Center for Human Rights. Yeagar, Moshe.1972. The Muslims of Burma: A Study of Minority Group. Wiesbaden.
History of Rakhine
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Rakhine State occupies the northern coastline of Myanmar up to the border with Bangladesh and corresponds to the historical Kingdom of Arakan. The history of Rakhine is divided into 7 parts - the independent kingdoms of Dhanyawadi, Waithali, Lemro, Mrauk U, Burmese occupation from 1784 to 1826, British rule from 1826 to 1948 and as a part of independent Burma from 1948.
The Arakanese kingdom was conquered on 31 December 1784 by the Burmese Konbaung Dynasty. In 1826, Arakan was ceded to the British as war reparation after the First Anglo-Burmese War. It became part of the Province of Burma of British India in 1886, after the annexation of Burma by the British. Arakan became part of the Crown Colony of British Burma which was split off from British India in 1937. Northern Rakhine state became a contested battleground throughout the Japanese occupation of Burma. After 1948, Rakhine became part of the newly independent state of Burma. However, the independence of Arakan was just in paper after a few years because Myanmenization or nationalism of Myanmar broke up civil war across nationwide. In 1973, Arakan became a state of the Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma, designated as the homeland of the Rakhine people.
Sporadic communal strife has plagued Arakan since colonial times, between the majority Arakanese who are Buddhist, and Muslim communities, many but not all of whom came into Arakan with British rule. The latest conflagration was in June and October 2012.
Dhanyawadi[edit]
Arakanese legends claim that the history of the Rakhine people began in 3325 BC, although archaeological evidence supporting this claim is unavailable. "The presently dominant Rakhine are a Tibeto-Burman race, the last group of people to enter Arakan during 10th century and on.” (Pamela; The Lost Kingdom, Bangkok, 2002, P-5)]. Various Arakanese kingdoms stretched from the Ganges Delta to Cape Negrais on the Irrawaddy Delta.
Ancient Dhanyawadi lies west of the mountain ridge between the Kaladan and Le-mro rivers. Dhannyawadi could be reached by small boat from the Kaladan via its tributary, the Tharechaung. Its city walls were made of brick, and form an irregular circle with a perimeter of about 9.6 kilometres (6.0 miles), enclosing an area of about 4.42 km2 (1,090 acres). Beyond the walls, the remains of a wide moat, now silted over and covered by paddy fields, are still visible in places. The remains of brick fortifications can be seen along the hilly ridge which provided protection from the west. Within the city, a similar wall and moat enclose the palace site, which has an area of 26 hectares (64 acres), and another wall surrounds the palace itself.
At times of insecurity, when the city was subject to raids from the hill tribes or attempted invasions from neighbouring powers, there would have been an assured food supply enabling the population to withstand a siege. The city would have controlled the valley and the lower ridges, supporting a mixed wet-rice and taungya (slash and burn) economy, with local chiefs paying allegiance to the king.
From aerial photographs we can discern Dhannyawadi's irrigation channels and storage tanks, centred at the palace site. Throughout the history of Rakhine, and indeed the rest of early Southeast Asia, the king's power stemmed from his control of irrigation and water storage systems to conserve the monsoon rains and therefore to maintain the fertility and prosperity of the land. In ceremonies conducted by Indian Brahmins the king was given the magic power to regulate the celestial and terrestrial forces to control the coming of the rains which would ensure the continuing prosperity of the kingdom.
VESALI (Waithali )[edit]
It has been estimated that the centre of power of the Arakanese world shifted from Dhanyawadi to Waithali in the 4th century AD. Although it was established later than Dhanyawadi, Waithali is the most Indianized of the four Arakanese kingdoms to emerge. Like other Arakanese kingdoms, the Kingdom of Waithali was based on trade between the East (pre-Pagan Myanmar,Pyu, China, the Mons), and the West (India, Bengal, Persia).
Anandachandra Inscriptions date back to 729 AD originally from Vesali now preserved at Shitethaung indicates adequate evidence for the earliest foundation of Buddhism and the subjects of the Waithali Kingdom practised. Dr. E. H. Johnston's analysis reveals a list of kings which he considered reliable beginning from Chandra dynasty. The western face inscription has 72 lines of text recorded in 51 verses describing the Anandachandra's ancestral rulers. Each face recorded the name and ruling period of each king who were believed to have ruled over the land before Anandachandra.
Important but badly damaged life-size Buddha images were recovered from Letkhat-Taung, a hill east of the old palace compound. These statues are invaluabe in helping to understand the Waithali architecture, and also the extent of Hindu influence in the kingdom.
According to local legend, Shwe-taung-gyi (lit. Great Golden Hill), a hill northeast of the palace compound maybe a burial place of a 10th-century Pyu king.
The rulers of the Waithali Kingdom were of the Chandra dynasty, because of their usage of Chandra on the Waithali coins. The Waithali period is seen by many[by whom?] as the beginning of Arakanese coinage - which was almost a millennium earlier than the Burmese. On the reverse of the coins, the Srivatsa(Arakanese/Burmese: Thiriwutsa), while the obverse bears a bull, the emblem of the Chandra dynasty, under which the name of the King is inscribed in Sanskrit.
Le-Mro[edit]
Mrauk U[edit]
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Mrauk U, which means monkey's egg, may seem to be a sleepy village today but not so long ago it was the capital of the Arakan empire where Portuguese, Dutch and French traders rubbed shoulders with the literati of Bengal and Mughal princes on the run. Mrauk U was declared capital of the Arakanese kingdom in 1431. At its peak, Mrauk U controlled half of Bangladesh, modern day Rakhine State (Arakan) and the western part of Lower Burma. Pagodas and temples were built as the city grew, and those that remain are the main attraction of Mrauk-U. From the 15th to 18th centuries, Mrauk U was the capital of a mighty Arakan kingdom, frequently visited by foreign traders (including Portuguese and Dutch), and this is reflected in the grandeur and scope of the structures dotted around its vicinity.[1]
The old capital of Rakhine (Arakan) was first constructed by King Min Saw Mon in the 15th century, and remained its capital for 355 years. The golden city of Mrauk U became known in Europe as a city of oriental splendor after Friar Sebastian Manrique visited the area in the early 17th century. Father Manrique's vivid account of the coronation of King Thiri Thudhamma in 1635 and about the Rakhine Court and intrigues of the Portuguese adventurers fire the imagination of later authors. The English author Maurice Collis who made Mrauk U and Rakhine famous after his book, The Land of the Great Image based on Friar Manrique' travels in Arakan.
The Mahamuni Buddha Image, which is now in Mandalay, was cast and venerated 15 miles from Mrauk U where another Mahamuni Buddha Image flanked by two other Buddha images. Mrauk U can be easily reached via Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine State. From Yangon there are daily flights to Sittwe and there are small private boats as well as larger public boats plying through the Kaladan river to Mrauk U. It is only 45 miles from Sittwe and the seacoast. To the east of the old city is the famous Kispanadi stream and far away the Lemro river. The city area used to have a network of canals. Mrauk U maintains a small archaeological Museum near Palace site, which is right in the centre of town. As a prominent capital Mrauk U was carefully built in a strategic location by levelling three small hills. The pagodas are strategically located on hilltops and serve as fortresses; indeed they are once used as such in times of enemy intrusion. There are moats, artificial lakes and canals and the whole area could be flooded to deter or repulse attackers. There are innumerable pagodas and Buddha images around the old city and the surrounding hills. While some are still being used as places of worship today, others are in ruins, some of which are now being restored to their original splendor.[1]
The city eventually reached a size of 160,000 in the early 17th century.[2] Mrauk U served as the capital of the Mrauk U kingdom and its 49 kings until the conquest of the kingdom by the Burmese Konbaung Dynasty in 1784.
Trading city[edit]
Due to its proximity to the Bay of Bengal, Mrauk U developed into an important regional trade hub, acting as both a back door to the Burmese hinterland and also as an important port along the eastern shore of the Bay of Bengal. It became a transit point for goods such as rice, ivory, elephants, tree sap and deer hide from Ava in Burma, and of cotton, slaves, horses, cowrie, spices and textiles from Bengal, India, Persia and Arabia. Alongside Pegu and later Syriam, it was one of the most important ports in Burma until the 18th century.[citation needed]
The city also traded with non-Asian powers such as Portugal and then the VOC of the Netherlands. The VOC established trading relations with the Arakanese in 1608 after the Portuguese fell in favour due to the lack of loyalty of Portuguese mercenaries, such as Filipe de Brito e Nicote in the service of the Arakanese king. The VOC established a permanent factory in Mrauk U in 1635, and operated in Arakan until 1665.[3]
At its zenith, Mrauk U was the centre of a kingdom which stretched from the shores of the Ganges river to the western reaches of the Ayeyarwaddy River. According to popular Arakanese legend, there were 12 'cities of the Ganges' which constitute areas around the borders of present-day Bangladesh which were governed by Mrauk U, including areas in the Chittagong Division. During that period, its kings minted coins inscribed in Arakanese, Kufic and Bengali.
Much of Mrauk U's historical description is drawn from the writings of Friar Sebastian Manrique, a Portuguese Augustinian monk who resided in Mrauk U from 1630 to 1635.
Colonial period[edit]
The people of Rakhine (Arakan) resisted the conquest of the kingdom for decades after. Fighting in border areas created problems between British India and Burma. The year 1826 saw the defeat of the Bamar in the First Anglo-Burmese War and Rakhine (Arakan) was ceded to Britain under the Treaty of Yandabo. Akyab was then designated the new capital of Rakhine (Arakan). In 1852, Rakhine (Arakan) was merged into Lower Burma as Arakan Division.
During the Second World War, Rakhine (Arakan) was given autonomy under the Japanese occupation and was even granted its own army known as the Arakan Defence Force. The Arakan Defence Force went over to the Allies and turned against the Japanese in early 1945.
Part of independent Burma[edit]
In 1948, Rakhine (Arakan) became a division within the Union of Burma. Shortly after, violence broke out along religious lines between Buddhists and Muslims. Later there were calls for secession by the Rakhine (Arakan), but such attempts were subdued. In 1974, the Ne Win government's new constitution granted Rakhine (Arakan) Division "state" status but the gesture was largely seen as meaningless since the military junta held power in the country and in Rakhine (Arakan). In 1989, the name of Arakan State was changed to "Rakhine" by the military junta
Rakhine State
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| Rakhine State ရခိုင်ပြည်နယ် Arakan State | |||
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| State | |||
| Myanma transcription(s) | |||
| • Arakanese | ra-khai-pray-nay | ||
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 Location of Rakhine State in Myanmar (Burma) | |||
| Coordinates: 19°30′N 94°0′ECoordinates: 19°30′N 94°0′E | |||
| Country | Myanmar | ||
| Region | West coastal | ||
| Capital | Sittwe | ||
| Government | |||
| • Chief Minister | Nyi Pu (NLD) | ||
| • Cabinet | Rakhine State Government | ||
| • Legislature | Rakhine State Hluttaw | ||
| Area | |||
| • Total | 36,778.0 km2 (14,200.1 sq mi) | ||
| Area rank | 8th | ||
| Population (2014 Census) | |||
| • Total | 3,188,807[1] | ||
| • Rank | 8th | ||
| Demographics | |||
| • Ethnicities | Rakhine, Kaman, Mro, Rohingya Khami and others | ||
| • Religions | Theravada Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism and others | ||
| Time zone | MMT (UTC+06:30) | ||
| Website | rakhinestate | ||
Rakhine State (Burmese: ရခိုင်ပြည်နယ်; MLCTS: ra.hkuing pranynay, Rakhine pronunciation [ɹəkʰàiɴ pɹènè]; Burmese pronunciation: [jəkʰàiɴ pjìnɛ̀]; formerly Arakan) is a state in Myanmar (Burma). Situated on the western coast, it is bordered by Chin State to the north, Magway Region, Bago Region and Ayeyarwady Region to the east, the Bay of Bengal to the west, and the Chittagong Division of Bangladesh to the northwest. It is located approximately between latitudes 17°30' north and 21°30' north and east longitudes 92°10' east and 94°50' east. The Arakan Mountains, rising to 3,063 metres (10,049 ft) at Victoria Peak, separate Rakhine State from central Burma. Off the coast of Rakhine State there are some fairly large islands such as Cheduba and Myingun Island. Rakhine State has an area of 36,762 square kilometres (14,194 sq mi) and its capital is Sittwe.[2]
Etymology
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The term Rakhine is believed to have been derived from the Pali word Rakkhapura (Sanskrit Raksapura), meaning "Land of Ogres" (Rakshas), possibly a pejorative referring to the original Negrito[citation needed] inhabitants. In Hindu religious Text, Austric Race (Austroloid Race-Aborigine Of eastern India) was called Rakshas (Ogre). The Pali word "Rakkhapura" ("Rakkhita") means "land of the people of Rakhasa" (also Rakkha, Rakhaing). They were given this name in honour of their preservation of their national heritage and ethics or morality.[citation needed] The word Rakhine means, "one who maintains his own race." In the Rakhine language, the land is called Rakhinepray, the ethnic Rakhine are called Rakhinetha.
Arakan, used in British colonial times, is believed to be a Portuguese corruption of the word Rakhine that is still popularly used in English. Many English language users[note 1] eschew the name changes promulgated by the military government.
History
The history of the region of Arakan (now renamed Rakhine) State can be roughly divided into seven parts. The first four divisions and the periods are based on the location of the centre of power of the main independent Rakhine-dominated polities in the northern Rakhine region, especially along the Kaladan River. Thus, the history is divided into the Dhanyawadi, Waithali, Laymro and Mrauk U. Mrauk U was conquered by the Konbaung dynasty of Burma in 1784–85, after which Rakhine became part of the Konbaung kingdom of Burma. In 1824, the first Anglo-Burmese war erupted and in 1826, Rakhine (alongside Tanintharyi) was ceded to the British as reparation by the Burmese to the British. Rakhine thus became part of the province of Burma of British India. In 1948, Burma was given independence and Rakhine became part (colony) of the new federal republic.
Independent kingdom
Based on Rakhine oral histories and inscriptions in certain temples, the history of the Rakhine region dates back nearly five thousand years.[citation needed] The Rakhine people trace their societal history back to as far as 3325 BCE and have given a lineal succession of 227 native monarchs and princes down to the last ruler in 1784. They also describe their territory of including, in varying points of time, the regions of Ava, the Irrawaddy Delta, the port town of Thanlyin (Syriam) and parts of eastern Bengal. However, the expanse of the successive Rakhine kingdoms does not exactly corroborate with certain known historical documentation.[citation needed]
According to Rakhine legend, the first recorded kingdom arose, centred around the northern town of Dhanyawadi in the 34th century BCE and lasted until 327 CE. Rakhine documents and inscriptions state that the famed Mahamuni Buddha image was cast in Dhanyawady in around 554 BCE when the Buddha visited the kingdom. After the fall of Dhanyawadi in the 4th century CE, the centre of power shifted to a new dynasty based in the town of Waithali. The Waithali kingdom ruled the regions of Rakhine from the middle of the 4th century to 818 CE. The period is seen as the classical period of Rakhine culture, architecture and Buddhism, as the Waithali period left behind more archaeological remains compared to its predecessor. A new dynasty emerged in four towns along the Laymro river as Waithali waned in influence, and ushered in the Lemro period, where four principal towns served as successive capitals.[citation needed]
The final Kingdom of Mrauk U was founded in 1429 by Min Saw Mon. It is seen by the Rakhine people as the golden age of their history, as Mrauk U served as a commercially important port and base of power in the Bay of Bengal region and involved in extensive maritime trade with Arabia and Europe.[citation needed] The country steadily declined from the 17th century onwards after the loss of Chittagong to the Mughal Empire in 1666. Internal instability, rebellion and dethroning of kings were very common. The Portuguese, during the era of their greatness in Asia, gained a temporary establishment in Arakans.[citation needed]
Non-Arakanese rule
On 2 January 1785, the internally divided kingdom fell to invading forces from Konbaung, Burma. The Mahamuni image was taken away by the Burmese as war loot. Thus, an expansionist Burma came into direct territorial contact with territories of the British East India Company, which set the stage for future flaring of hostility. Various geopolitical issues gave rise to the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824–26). As the image of Mahamuni had been taken as war loot by the Burmese, this time the huge bell of the temple was taken by the British Army and awarded to a soldier, Bhim Singh, a Risaldar in East India Company's 2nd Division of the British, for his bravery. This inscribed huge bell is still installed in a Mandir at village Nadrai near Kasganj town in present-day Kanshiram Nagar District of Utter Pradesh India. In the Treaty of Yandabo (1826), which ended hostilities, Burma was forced to cede Arakan alongside Tanintharyi (Tenasserim) to British India. The British made Akyab (now Sittwe) the capital of Arakan. Later, Arakan became part of the province of Burma of the British Indian Empire, and then part of British Burma when Burma was made into a separate crown colony. Arakan was administratively divided into three districts along traditional divisions during the Mrauk U period.
1940 onwards
Rakhine (Arakan) was the site of many battles during the Second World War, most notably the Arakan Campaign 1942-1943 and the Battle of Ramree Island. Arakan became part of the newly independent Union of Burma in 1948 and the three districts became Arakan Division. From the 1950s, there was a growing movement for secession and restoration of Arakan independence. In part to appease this sentiment, in 1974, the socialist government under General Ne Win constituted Rakhine State from Arakan Division giving at least nominal acknowledgment of the regional majority of the Rakhine people.
2010 onward (After 2008 constitution)
The Chief Ministers of Rakhine State have been
- Hla Maung Tin ( January 2011 – 20 June 2014)
He was an elected Rakhine State Hluttaw member representing USDP from Ann Township in 2010 general election. He resigned from the post after recurrent intense inter-communal conflicts between Muslims and Rakhine ethnic groups in 2012–14.[3]
- Major General Maung Maung Ohn (30 June 2014 – present)
He was Deputy Minister for Border Affairs and head of the Rakhine State's Emergency Coordination Center before he was named to become a military-appointed Rakhine State Hluttaw member by Election Commission on 21 June 2014. His appointment as Chief Minister was formalised on 30 June 2014 although Arakan National Party opposed it.[4]
Ethnic clashes and the Rohingya rebellion
2012 Rakhine State riots
The 2012 Rakhine State riots were a series of conflicts between Rohingya Muslims and ethnic Rakhines who are majority in the Rakhine State. Before the riots, there were widespread and strongly held fears circulating among Buddhist Rakhines that they would soon become a minority in their ancestral state.[5] The riots finally came after weeks of sectarian disputes including the death of ten Burmese Muslims by Rakhines and murder of a Rakhine by Rohingyas.[6][7] From both sides, whole villages were "decimated".[7][8] According to the Burmese authorities, the violence, between ethnic Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims, left 78 people dead, 87 injured, and up to 140,000 people have been displaced.[9][10] The government has responded by imposing curfews and by deploying troops in the region. On 10 June 2012, a state of emergency was declared in Rakhine, allowing the military to participate in the administration of the region.[11][12] Rohingya NGOs overseas have accused the Burmese army and police of targeting Rohingya Muslims through arrests and participating in violence.[9][13] However, an in-depth research conducted by the International Crisis Group shows that both communities are grateful for the protection provided by the military.[14] A number of monks' organisations have taken measures to block aid from NGOs that help Rohingyas.[15] In July 2012, the Burmese Government did not include the Rohingya minority group in the census—classified as stateless Bengali Muslims from Bangladesh since 1982.[16] About 140,000 Rohingya in Burma remain confined in IDP camps.[17]
Demographics
| Historical population | ||
|---|---|---|
| Year | Pop. | ±% |
| 1973 | 1,712,838 | — |
| 1983 | 2,045,559 | +19.4% |
| 2014 | 3,188,807 | +55.9% |
| Source: 2014 Myanmar Census[1] | ||
Rakhine State (formerly known as Arakan Province), like many parts of Burma, has a diverse ethnic population. Official Burmese figures state Rakhine State's population as 3,118,963.[18]
The ethnic Rakhine make up the majority, followed by a considerable population of Rohingya Muslims.[19][20] The Rakhine reside mainly in the lowland valleys as well as Ramree and Manaung (Cheduba) islands. A number of other ethnic minorities like the Kamein, Chin, Mro, Chakma, Khami, Dainet, Bengali, Hindu and Maramagri inhabit mainly in the hill regions of the state. Most of the Tibeto-Burmans living in Rakhine State adhere to Theravada Buddhism. Even the Chin, who are usually related with Protestant Christianity or Animism, of Rakhine state adhere to Buddhism due to the cultural influence of the Rakhine people. Muslims constitute more than 80-96% of the population near the border with Bangladesh and the coastal areas, even though they are subject to a government rule limiting them to two children per family. According to various local surveys conducted after the riots of 2012, it was found that if the +1 million diaspora outside Burma were included, the Rohingya would constitute about 62.7% of the population of the state of Rakhine.
Religion
Administrative divisions
Rakhine State consists of five districts, as below, showing areas and officially estimated populations in 2002:
- Sittwe (12,504 km2; 1,099,568 people)
- Mrauk-U (recently created out of Sittwe District)
- Maungdaw (3,538 km2; 763,844 people)
- Kyaukphyu (9,984 km2; 458,244 people)
- Thandwe (10,753 km2; 296,736 people)
- Total Rakhine State: 36,778 km2; 2,915,000 people
Combined, these districts have a total of 17 townships[22] and 1,164 village-tracts. Sittwe is the capital of the state.
Government
Executive
![[icon]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wiki_letter_w_cropped.svg){kind=small}
Legislature
Judiciary
Transport
Few roads cross the Arakan Mountains from central Burma to Rakhine State. The three highways that do are the Ann to Munbra (Minbya in Burmese pronunciation) road in central Rakhine,[23] the Toungup to Pamtaung road in south central Rakhine,[23] and the Gwa to Ngathaingchaung road in far southern Rakhine.[23][24][25] Air travel still is the usual mode of travel from Yangon and Mandalay to Sittwe and Ngapali, the popular beach resort. Only in 1996 was a highway from Sittwe to the mainland constructed. The state still does not have a rail line (although Myanmar Railways has announced a 480-km rail extension to Sittwe from Pathein via Ponnagyun-Kyauttaw-Mrauk U-Minbya-Ann).[26]
The airports in Rakhine State are
With Chinese investment, a deep sea port has been constructed in Kyaukphyu to facilitate the transport of natural gas and crude oil from the Indian Ocean to China without passing through Strait of Malacca.[27]
Rivers useful for transportation in Rakhine are
Economy
Rice is the main crop in the region, occupying around 85% of the total agricultural land. Coconut and nipa palm plantations are also important. Fishing is a major industry, with most of the catch transported to Yangon, but some is also exported. Wood products such as timber, bamboo and fuel wood are extracted from the mountains. Small amounts of inferior-grade crude oil are produced from primitive, shallow, hand-dug wells, but there is yet unexplored potential for petroleum and natural gas production.
Tourism is slowly being developed. The ruins of the ancient royal town Mrauk U and the beach resorts of Ngapali are the major attractions for foreign visitors, but facilities are still primitive, and the transportation infrastructure is still rudimentary.
While most places in Myanmar have chronic power shortages, in rural states like Rakhine the problem is greater. In 2009, the electricity consumption of a state of 3 million people was 30 MW, or 1.8% of the country's total generation capacity.[28] In December 2009, the military government added three more hydropower plants, Saidin, Thahtay Chaung and Laymromyit, at a cost of over US$800 million. The three plants together can produce 687 MW but the surplus electricity will be distributed to other states and divisions.[28]
Education
Educational opportunities in Myanmar are extremely limited outside the main cities of Yangon and Mandalay. The following is a summary of the public school system in the state in academic year 2013–2014.[29]
| AY 2013–2014 | Primary | Middle | High |
|---|---|---|---|
| Schools | 2,515 | 137 | 69 |
| Teachers | 11,045 | 2,909 | 1,337 |
| Students | 370,431 | 100,566 | 26,671 |
Sittwe University is the main university in the state.
Health care
The general state of health care in Myanmar is poor. The military government spends anywhere from 0.5% to 3% of the country's GDP on health care, consistently ranking among the lowest in the world.[30][31] Although health care is nominally free, in reality, patients have to pay for medicine and treatment, even in public clinics and hospitals. Public hospitals lack many of the basic facilities and equipment. In general, the health care infrastructure outside of Yangon and Mandalay is extremely poor but is especially bad in remote areas like Rakhine State. The entire Rakhine State has fewer hospital beds than the Yangon General Hospital. The following is a summary of the public health care system in the state.[32]
| 2002–2003 | # Hospitals | # Beds |
|---|---|---|
| Specialist hospitals | 0 | 0 |
| General hospitals with specialist services | 1 | 200 |
| General hospitals | 16 | 553 |
| Health clinics | 24 | 384 |
| Total | 41 | 1,137 |
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