By
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22 September 2014Posted in: Burma
The most controversial aspect of the census recently held in Burma
has been the denial of the large Muslim population in Arakan to identify
Mr.Carlos Sardiña Galache,a woman repoter and Maung Kyaw Nu at FCCT.
themselves as Rohingya, the term of their choice. The government ban
means as many as one million people remain uncounted in Arakan. That is
scarcely surprising, as the Burmese government, Rakhine
ultra-nationalists and seemingly a majority of the Burmese population
have denied for years the existence of the Rohingya identity. According
to them, the Rohingya ethnicity is an invention devised by immigrants
from Bangladesh to take over the land in Arakan.
Few people have made more effort to deny the claims of ethnicity by
the Rohingya than Derek Tonkin, former British ambassador to Thailand
and editor of the website Network Myanmar. Mr. Tonkin has reached
his conclusions after digging deeply in colonial British archives, where he has not found a single use of the term
Rohingya.
His command of the British colonial records is nothing less than
impressive, but by relying almost solely on these sources he only offers
a partial picture, from which I think he draws incorrect conclusions.
The debate on whether the Rohingya ethnicity should be regarded as
one of the “national races” or not, assumes – implicitly or explicitly –
as its framework of reference the definition to be found in the
controversial Citizenship Law passed in 1982. According to this
definition, only those ethnic groups which were already in Burma in 1823
qualify as “national races.”
Rather than attempting to defend Rohingya claims, I argue that the
notion of “national races” itself, and thus the set of assumptions
hitherto determining the terms of the debate, are fundamentally false
and do not facilitate any understanding of the history and present
social realities of Burma.
This notion has reduced the debate on Rohingya identity to a
confrontation between three different historical narratives: what we
might call “Rakhine history” and “Burmese History” on the one side (on
this point both are basically indistinguishable, albeit there are
important divergences in other aspects), as opposed to the “Rohingya
history” on the other. As in many other nationalist histories all around
the world, these narratives are loaded with myths and distortions. They
are also mutually contradictory, making it impossible to find any
common ground for all sides involved.
Competing historical narratives
Burmese and Rakhine nationalists often accuse the Rohingya of
falsifying their history in order to advance their claims for ethnicity.
It is true that Rohingya historians tend to minimize or ignore
altogether the importance of the migration of laborers to Arakan from
Bengal during colonial times; moreover, some have made claims that are
historically incorrect: for instance, Rohingya historians often claim
that some Muslim kings ruled Arakan in the 15th century.
Meanwhile, mirroring the distortions of “Rohingya history,” Rakhine
historians tend to minimize, or to ignore altogether, the large numbers
of Muslims living in Arakan before colonial times and to emphasize only
the influx of Bengali laborers during colonial times. Now some Rakhine
go so far as to claim that “illegal immigrants from Bangladesh” have
arrived as recently as a few years ago and have continued arriving up to
the first wave of sectarian violence in 2012,
a highly dubious assertion for which there is no evidence.
On the Burmese side, we find assertions of a history of unity and
continuity stretching back for hundreds of years and which was only
broken by the traumatic colonial experience. Thus, in 2002, the military
ruler, Senior General Than Shwe claimed that “thanks to the unity and
farsightedness of our forefathers, our country has existed as a united
and firm Union and not as separate small nations for over 2,000 years.”
This extraordinary kind of assertion only makes sense in the context
of the state-building project to unify all the ethnic groups under the
guardianship of the (Bamar-controlled)
Tatmadaw(Burmese
military). This has been the ultimate goal for the Burmese state since
Ne Win staged his coup d’état in 1962. It is in this context that, at
least during the last two decades, the generals have been increasingly
trying to present themselves as the heirs of the Burmese kings and their
mission as that of restoring some sort of “natural Burmese order” which
the British interrupted.
There is no doubt that the British colonization of Burma dealt a
highly traumatic blow to every dimension of social order in Burma, from
which it has yet to recover. The British dismantled completely all the
political institutions and cultural structures that had more or less
glued together the society of central Burma and replaced them with
others that the Burmese often did not understand or refused because they
had been imposed by force by foreign invaders.
But pre-colonial Burma was by no means an era of uniform political
order and stability. In fact, the centuries between the first Burmese
kingdom which managed to unify this territory, the Pagan dynasty
(1057-1287), and the colonial times was a period in which central
authority was only gradually asserted, at every point confronting many
difficulties and including long periods of anarchy when petty states
competed for power.
In any case, before the first Anglo-Burmese war, the domains of the
Burmese kingdom were never coterminous with those of the present Burmese
state: in large areas, particularly in the hills to the North and East,
the grip of the Burmese kings was at best extremely weak. And the
Arakanese kingdom was only invaded in 1784, just forty years before it
was taken by the British.
It is an anachronism to talk about borders, as we understand them
now, in Southeast Asia before the arrival of the colonial powers. As the
anthropologist Edmund R. Leach
put it
more than fifty years ago in his paper, “The Frontiers of ‘Burma’:”
pre-colonial Burma was a “wide imprecisely defined frontier region lying
between India and China” where “the indigenous political systems which
existed prior to the phase of European political expansion were not
separated from one another by frontiers in the modern sense and they
were not sovereign Nation-States.”
Therefore, it makes little historical sense to classify any ethnic
group as a “national race” on the basis that it already inhabited
before the colonial period a territory demarcated
after the beginning of the period.
Colonial conceptions of ethnicity
What the Burmese, Rakhine and Rohingya historical narratives have in
common is an essentialist and racialist conception of ethnic identities
as something primordial and fixed in time. Arguably, this is one of the
most enduring and deleterious legacies of the British rule in Burma and
lies at the heart of the now hegemonic and highly dangerous notion of
“national races.”
When the British arrived in Burma, they found a land with a
bewildering and confusing (for the external observer) variety of human
groups, and where ethnic affiliations were enormously fluid. To make
sense of that complex human landscape, they imposed a rigid grid of
ethnic classification in which they conflated the mother tongue of the
speakers with the category of “tribe” or “race.”
But, as the scholar Victor Lieberman
has shown in his paper,
“Ethnic Politics in Eighteenth-Century Burma,” ethnicity had virtually
no bearing at all as a marker of political loyalty to the different
kingdoms which ruled Central Burma during the 17th and 18th centuries.
Ethnic distinctions were even more blurred in the “hill areas,” as
Edmund R. Leach showed in his classic book
Political Systems of Highland Burma.
The distinction between Kachin and Shan categories was rather vague,
and it was not uncommon for “Kachins” to turn Into “Shan” or vice versa
depending on the social systems in which they decided to live, a
phenomenon which, according to Leach, “cannot readily be fitted into any
ethnographic scheme which, on linguistic grounds, places Kachins and
Shans into different ‘racial’ categories.”
But that is exactly what the British did. And the colonial officials
held a set of views of ethnicity and race strongly influenced by the
social Darwinist prejudices of the time, and they attributed to the
different groups personal and innate characteristics: the Karen or
Kachin were stereotyped as simple and honest people, included within the
“martial races;” the Burmans were devious and childish, not to be
trusted, and so on.
On the basis of these spurious classifications, they recruited people
to their armies using ethnicity as criteria, and favored some groups
over others. They also tended to employ Indians as civil servants,
rather than Burmese, because they had more experience with the colonial
bureaucratic system and thus were better trained. These policies
reinforced, and in some cases generated, ethnic classifications which
are still widely accepted in Burma, and animosities that survive to this
day.
The anthropologist F. K. Lehman identified the problem more than fifty
years ago in his study “Ethnic Categories in Burma and the Theory of
Social Systems.” According to him, before the colonial period, “the
Burmans had a reasonably correct tacit understanding of the nature of
their relations with bordering peoples, tribal and non-tribal,” an
understanding which was lost due “to the importation of very explicit
European ideas about nations, societies and cultures.”
Lehman suggested that when people identify themselves as members of
an ethnic group, they were merely “taking positions in culturally
defined systems of intergroup relations,” and that those ethnic
categories were “only very indirectly descriptive of the empirical
characteristics of substantive groups of people.” Therefore, local or
regional groups were “inherently likely to have recourse to more than
one ethnic role system and more than one ‘identity’.”
As a consequence of the fluidity of these roles, Lehman Asserted that
“we cannot reconstruct any demonstrable discrete ancestral group for
some ‘ethnic category’ –no matter whether we define such a possible
ancestral group as a discrete dialect group, or as a group with
relatively sharp discontinuities from its neighbors.” But this kind of
“discrete ancestral groups” is precisely what the notion of “national
races” assumes as certain.
Arakan: “The Palestine of the Farther East”
In 1891, the Swiss Pali scholar and archeologist Emil Forchhammer wrote a small book about Arakan
in which he described it as the “Palestine of the Farther East,”
because, as he put it, Arakanese Buddhism was the inspiration of the
Buddhism practiced in the rest of Burma. More than two hundred years
later, the comparison has a different resonance: as in Palestine, Arakan
is the land of a conflict with some religious undertones between two
communities. As in Palestine, the conflict involves a clash of
historical narratives. And, as in Palestine, one of the two communities
has been stripped of its political rights.
Arakan is separated by a range of mountains from the rest of Burma,
making it relatively isolated from the Irrawaddy delta and central
Burma. For most of its history, Arakan’s relations with the kingdom of
Bengal in the west were just as rich and close as with the Burmese
kingdoms in the north, if not more so, thus creating a culture distinct
from that of Burma.
As in the rest of Southeast Asia, there were not clear borders
between Arakan and Bengal in pre-modern times, the areas of influence of
both kingdoms overlapped and were constantly fluctuating. The historian
G. E. Harvey wrote in his classic
History of Burma that,
throughout the Middle Ages, “when Bengal was in the ascendant, some
kings sent tribute to Bengal and when the Arakanese were in the
ascendant they received tribute from the Ganges delta,
‘The Twelve Towns
of Bengal’.” At that time, the Bengali court provided a political model
for the Arakanese kingdom, and from the 15th to the 17th century, it
was common for the kings to use Muslim/Bengali designations and to issue
coins with the kalima, the Muslim profession of faith.
Meanwhile, as Harvey points out, though the geographical isolation of
Arakan from Burma “rendered her immune to attack on the east, the
resultant peace did not give her unity, because her territory is a long
thin strip of coast intersected by hill torrents.”
This fragmentation made
the Arakanese kings more tolerant than the
Burmese kings to the religious beliefs of the different communities
under their rule. In his doctoral dissertation, Where
Jambudipa and Islamdom Converged: Religious Change and the Emergence of
Buddhist Communalism in Early Modem Arakan (Fifteenth to Nineteenth
Centuries), Professor Michael Charney wrote: “In Arakan the royal
center was not simply indifferent to promoting one particular religious
identity over another, but rather was one of the chief barriers
restricting the emergence of a Theravada Buddhist orthodoxy in the
Arakan littoral.”
Arakanese kings did not try to establish a “Buddhism kingdom” or
centralize the Sangha, as their Burmese counterparts did, but worked
through local patron-client networks and tried to present themselves as
the patrons of whatever religion was practiced at a local level, be it
Buddhism, Islam or even Catholicism in some Portuguese communities in
the coast. Charney argues that this prevented for centuries the creation
of communal identities based on religious beliefs, Buddhist or Muslim;
and that these did not emerge until the late 18th century, and even then
only under external influences.
There were Muslims in Arakan as early as the Ninth century but it is
likely that their presence was not very strong. It was in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries that the Arakanese and Portuguese communities
settled in Southern Bengal (then under the authority of the Arakanese
court) started to raid Bengal for slaves and transferring thousands of
them to Arakan. The Arakanese kings settled most of these slaves in
Northern Arakan, but took the well-educated in Mrauk-U to serve in the
court as functionaries.
Before its conquest by the Burmese in 1784, there was already a
substantial rural Muslim population in Arakan. “Perhaps up to
three-quarters of Danra-waddy’s [northern Arakan, including Sittwe and
Mrauk-U] population by the 1770s may have been Muslim,” asserts Charney.
Meanwhile, “some Bengali Muslims in Mrauk-U participated in the
development of an elite Muslim culture in the royal city, perhaps
reflecting their privileged backgrounds in Banga [Southern Bengal].”
It is worth mentioning that the border along the Naf River between
the British-controlled Bengal and Arakan did not have the same meaning
for the British and the Burmese. If, as Leach pointed out, pre-colonial
Burma was a “wide imprecisely defined frontier region lying between
India and China,” Arakan was a “frontier region” between Burma and
Bengal.
Whatever border there was between Arakan and Bengal, it disappeared
completely after the first Anglo-Burmese war (1824-1826), when Arakan
passed to British hands. At that time, Charles Paton, the
sub-Commissioner of Arakan, estimated that,
from a total population of 100,000 people, 60 percent were ‘Mughs’
(Rakhine), 30 percent were ‘Mussalman’ (Muslims) and 10 percent
‘Burmese’. It is clear that those were highly tentative figures, but at
the same time it’s impossible to deny that there was a substantial
Muslim population in Arakan before the arrival of the British.
It is also undeniable that there was migration of Muslims from
Chittagong during colonial times, and that not all of the newcomers were
seasonal laborers. This immigration was encouraged by the British,
something that was resented by the Buddhist Rakhine population and
contributed to reinforce the communal divisions between Muslims and
Buddhists in the region. There is no need to repeat here the arguments
demonstrating this, the
reader can review the article published by Mr. Tonkin to find extensive evidence for that.
The point is that there was a migratory wave of Muslims from Bengal
in colonial times that joined an already sizeable Muslim population made
up of the descendants of the slaves taken by the Portuguese and the
Arakanese during the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries.
Present-day Rohingya are the descendants of both waves of migration,
which intermingled to such a degree that now it would be impossible to
distinguish who descends from one or the other.
In any case, as Lehman pointed out, it would be impossible “to
reconstruct any demonstrable discrete ancestral group” for the people
who now have chosen to call themselves Rohingya, as it would be
impossible for any other Burmese ethnic group. But that does not imply
that the Rohingya ethnicity is not real
now. In any case, the
Rohingya identity was not “invented” recently out of the blue, as some
claim; it had been “gestating,” so to speak, for at least three hundred
years, and the term itself was not new.
The “R-word”
The first known record of a very similar word to
Rohingya used to refer to the Muslim inhabitants of Arakan is to be found in
an article about the languages
spoken in the “Burma empire” published by the Scottish physician
Francis Buchanan in 1799. He wrote: “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.”
It has been argued that
Rooinga (or Rohingya) derives from Rohang, the word used in Bengal to refer to Arakan, and thus was just another way to say Arakanese.
Michael Charney suggests tentatively
that “Rohingya may be a term that had been used by both Hindu and
Muslim Bengalis living in Rakhaing [Arakan] since the sixteenth century,
either as resident traders in the capital or as war captives resettled
in the Kaladan River Valley.” But he is careful to point out that in the
past “Rohingya and Rakhaing [Rakhine] were not mutually exclusive
ethnonyms. Rakhaing’s topography may have led to Rohingya and Rakhaing
emerging as separate versions of the same term in different geographical
contexts that came, in the eighteenth century to be associated closely
with the predominant religious makeup of the local area concerned.”
The evidence available shows that the term Rohingya was not widely
used to describe a distinct ethnic group until the twentieth century. I
would argue that the explanation for this is as simple as that there was
no reason for the Rohingya to distinguish themselves in such a manner
until the rise in Burma of the Bamar and other ethno-nationalisms
against British colonialism.
The beginnings of the Burmese nationalist movement were strongly
Buddhist in character, and some of the first nationalist leaders were
monks. Thus, Burmese nationalism acquired a religious hue from the
beginning. On the other hand, the Burmese have always viewed Indians
with suspicion, and particularly Muslims. At that time, the general
public did not distinguish much between Burmese Muslims and Indian
Muslims, so Burmese Muslims felt they needed to distance themselves from
Indian Muslims throughout the country.
The tensions between Buddhists and Muslims in Arakan, which had been
mounting during colonial times, came to a head in the Second World War.
When the British retreated to India and the Japanese advanced in Arakan,
the Rakhine Buddhists sided mostly with the Japanese and the Burmese
Independence Army of Aung San, while the Muslims were armed by the
British; but the conflict soon turned into a civil war between Muslims
and Buddhists. When the war ended, the north was mainly Muslim, the
south was mainly Buddhist, and the communal divisions reached a point of
no return.
Anti-Rohingya discourses often recall the Mujahid insurgency that
took place in Arakan during the fifties. As the goal of some of the
insurgents was the annexation of northern Arakan by East Pakistan,
Rohingya are accused of disloyalty to the Burmese State. But there was
scarcely any popular support for the rebellion, and many of its victims
were Rohingya. In fact, some Rohingya leaders demanded U Nu to provide
them with weapons in several occasions, a demand which was never met.
Meanwhile in Rangoon, Rakhine nationalists were pushing for a
separate Arakan State, while Rohingya politicians, wary of their Rakhine
neighbors after the Second World War sectarian violence, demanded a
separate region in the north for them ruled directly by Rangoon. And
during the Parliamentary period (1948-1962) and the first years of Ne
Win’s dictatorship, there were not only many Rohingya organizations,
both in Arakan and Rangoon, but the government recognized Rohingya as a
Burmese ethnic group,
as documents compiled by Dr. Zarni show.
It was the government of Ne Win and its military successors who
denied Rohingya their rights and began to persecute them, from the
mid-seventies until now. And it can be argued that, paradoxically,
nothing has done more to reinforce the Rohingya identity than the
attempts to suppress it.
Burma and its national identities
There is no historical precedent for an independent political entity
for Burma as it exists now, and the different groups that make up the
complex ethnic tapestry of Burma were never under the authority of a
single government before the arrival of the British. Like many other
post-Colonial countries, Burma emerged from British rule as a country
deeply divided along ethnic and sectarian lines.
The Bamar was in some ways an underprivileged group during the
colonial era but, after turning the tables in the Second World War,
since independence it has become the privileged group. As a result of
these competing nationalisms and the repeated attempts of the Bamar
majority to impose its centralized vision of a Nation-State, the Burmese
state has failed to generate a supra-national identity powerful enough
to include and transcend the several ethno-nationalisms that awoke
during colonial times.
The Rohingya identity is not more “artificial” or “invented” than any
other, but the story of its ethnogenesis does not fit easily in the all
too narrow concept of “national races” as is currently understood in
Burma: ethnic groups which were already fully formed as we know them now
in pre-colonial times. Others would also fail the test, because the
test itself stems from a misunderstanding of ethnicity and group
formation, but it is the political context that has determined that the
Rohingya, and the Rohingya alone, should fail it. Their mere existence
as a people is a serious challenge to the weak mainstream historical
narrative imposed by the military regime.
This, and the Rohingya’s cultural, religious and linguistic
differences, has made them expedient scapegoats in the context of a
failed process of nation-building. Nothing glues together a divided
community more than a common threat, real or imagined, and nothing has
united the Rakhine and the Bamar more than identifying the Rohingya as
their common enemy. The consequence is
a campaign of ethnic cleansing
that has been going on for decades. In this situation, it would be very
naïve to believe that they are suffering such persecution because they
have choose to call themselves
Rohingya, a claim for ethnicity
that they have as much right to make as any other community in Burma,
instead of accepting the designation “Bengalis” enforced by the Burmese
regime.
If, as Mr. Derek Tonkin claims, the word Rohingya “is offensive to
many Burmese,” that tells us more about those Burmese than about the
Rohingya themselves. Burmese define themselves and what it means to be
Burmese in the very act of exclusion. What is at stake in the way that
the Burmese nation treats and identifies the Rohingya and other Muslim
communities is not only the future of those communities, but also the
kind of Burma that the Burmese want to build for themselves.
Carlos Sardiña Galache is a freelance journalist based in Bangkok. A longer version of this essay is available here. You can visit his website here.
