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.
Maungdaw-Butheetaung region of Arrakan.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 were about thirty-five thousand Arakanese who had fled to
Chittagong District in British India to seek protection in 1799.
The following report by Francis Buchanan provides a vivid picture of the atrocities committed by the Burmese invaders in Arakan:
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.
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.
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.
Dead on the streets in 1943 Bengal Famine.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
A starving man in 1943 Bengal Famine.
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”.
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:
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.
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.
------------------------------------------------------------------
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
------------------------------------------------------------------
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
------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
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.
Communal Violence
During the colonial period the anti- Indian riots
broke out in Burma because of the resentment against unhindered Indian
settlements particularly in Arakan, Tenasserim and Lower Burma. 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.
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 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.
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.
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 lords. 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.
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.
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.
Consequently, more Arakanese and Hindu Indians 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.
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.
Old Buddhist man with throat cut-off by Muslims in Maung Daw Township (8.06.2012).
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.
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. 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… or were
utterly helpless, began to move from place to place in search of safety
and protection until they could reach India.
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. 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. 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.
British officers of Bengali V Force in Arrakan (1942).
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.
The V Forces’ Bengali-Muslim 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.
V Force in the Arrakan jungle (1942).
A record of the Secretary of British governor of
Burma in exile dated 4 February 1943 reads: 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.
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.
Bo Yan Aung (Front Left) and BIA officers (1942).
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 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 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).
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 (Anti-Fascist
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.
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 faction of the Communist Party of Burma to choose the way to
independence by violence.
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.
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.
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.
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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. 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 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.
Armed Bengali Muslims training.
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. Jaffar Kawal became
the commander in chief and his lieutenant was Abdul Husein, formerly a
corporal from the Akyab District police force.
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 :
(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
(Mrauk-U) 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.
Muslim Enclave demanded by Mujahid.
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 nearby Villages
in Maungdaw Township and some villagers and Buddhist monks were
kidnapped for ransoms.
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.
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 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.
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 a new 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.
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”.
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 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.
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.”
Taliban-trained Bengali-Muslim
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:
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
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.
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-W Provinces 246 14 260
Oudh 2 2
Punjab 63 6 69
Afganistan 4 4
Arabia 3 3
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Dr Aye Chan, a former Rangoon University
lecturer, was arrested in May 1990 when two student leaders, who were
being followed by military intelligence, came to his house to seek
refuge. He was sentenced under to 15 years' imprisonment and spent 7
years in Insein and Tharawaddy prisons, mostly in solitary confinement.
He fled Burma a year after his release and resettled in Japan where he
is now a Professor at Kanda University.
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