Rohingya -- Myanmar's stateless and nameless

SIMON ROUGHNEEN, Asia regional correspondent
February 9, 2017 12:00 pm JST

A Rohingya woman in Maungdaw District, Arakan State, Myanmar (Photo by Carlos Sardina Galache) 

YANGON Myanmar's minority Muslim Rohingya are holding fast to their identity in the face of official discrimination, public scorn and military action.

Excluded from Myanmar's 2014 census unless they assented to the epithet "Bengali," most of the country's roughly 1.1 million Rohingya live as virtual aliens in Rakhine State in western Myanmar. How long they have lived in Rakhine State and under what name is a highly contentious matter in Myanmar.

"The Arakanese people and the Myanmar people do not accept the term Rohingya," said Aye Maung, chairman of the Arakan National Party, the biggest party in Rakhine State.

Like the Myanmar government, Aye Maung refers to the Rohingya as "Bengali," implying that the Rohingya are foreigners.

Rohingya disagree. "Nobody can deny us to call ourselves by our name, that is our right," said Tun Khin, president of the Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK.

A 1982 law renders Tun Khin ineligible for Myanmar citizenship, though he was born in the country and his grandfather was a parliamentary secretary during Myanmar's post-independence period of democratic rule from 1948 to 1962. The citizenship law, Tun Khin says, "is the core cause of our problem."

During the post-independence period, wrote former U.K. diplomat Derek Tonkin, the term Rohingya "was a designation which the Myanmar government itself quietly acknowledged and even on occasions used, though only infrequently, in the late 1950s and early 1960s."

"It is preposterous to say there is no such group as the Rohingya," said Matthew Walton, Senior Research Fellow in Modern Burmese Studies at the University of Oxford. "What does seem to be the case is that the consistent use of the term is largely, though not exclusively, a post-World War II phenomenon."

No Myanmar official now accepts the term, even though the long-oppressed National League for Democracy won 2015 national elections. Discussing the Myanmar army's operations near the border with Bangladesh, NLD spokesman Nyan Win said that "these people in northern Rakhine are not Burmese."

Suu Kyi asked foreign diplomats not to use term "Rohingya," but it seems that a directive asking local officials not to use the label "Bengali" has been ignored. A government investigation into violence in Rakhine State reported no evidence of persecution of the "Bengali" population there.

Ref:https://asia.nikkei.com/magazine/20170209/On-the-Cover/Rohingya-Myanmar-s-stateless-and-nameless