Rohingya

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Location of the Rakhine State in Myanmar
Rohingya in the Rakhine State

The Rohingya are an ethnic group in Myanmar (formerly Burma), whose members speak as their mother tongue a variety of the Indo-Aryan Chittagong , which belongs to the Bengali branch of East Indian. Almost all Rohingya are Sunni Muslims. They live mainly in the northern part of the Myanmar Rakhine State (formerly Arakan ) bordering Bangladesh . Before the clashes in autumn 2017, around one million Rohingya were living in Myanmar.

According to the Citizenship Act of 1982, the Rohingya are not considered one of the 135 indigenous population groups and are therefore not eligible for Myanmar citizenship . Due to repression and persecution, at least one million Rohingya are living as refugees in Bangladesh and other countries in Asia.

Etymology, use of the term

According to the historian Jacques P. Unfortunately, the name Rohingya is historically documented only once, in a source from the late 18th century. The name seems to be a variant of the Burmese name of the province of Rakhine, adapted from the phonetics of the Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Rohingya .

Jacques P. unfortunately notes that the term has only been used sporadically for Muslim groups since the 1960s and was not used in the media as a term for an ethnic group until the 1990s, but was a collective term for various groups of insurgents who fought for the establishment of an independent Muslim state on the borders with Bangladesh in the former Arakan region . It was not until 1995 that the term spread internationally as a term for an ethnic group because it was used in English-language reports on the human rights situation . After 2012, Rohingya activists began pushing Muslims to label themselves Rohingya .

Researchers largely agree that the term has been used by Muslims living in Myanmar since the 1950s to affirm their identity as a legitimate and distinct ethnic group. Myanmar has 135 ethnic groups, and belonging to such a group is a guarantee of political influence. Unlike in other countries, belonging to a religion is not enough in Myanmar. The representatives of the Muslims demanded their own area in the former Arakan region and did not want to live in an Arakan state under a Buddhist government. The Buddhists, on the other hand, did not want to lose any part of their land.

Government agencies in Myanmar reject the designation Rohingya and instead speak of Bengalis to clarify their position that they are (illegal) immigrants from Bengal (Bangladesh). Displaced Muslims from the region who settled in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan in the 1970s are called "Burmese Muslims" there.

Even if activists of the Rohingya movement increasingly tried to replace the term “Muslim” in historiography with “Rohingya”, this is unfortunately not a tenable procedure for historians. It is not possible to determine from the records who the Rohingya are or want to be. It is an identity that is still being built in 2016.

Culture, language and demography

The Indo-Aryan language of the Rohingya is a variety of the Chittagong and is close to Bengali . As an Indo-European language, it belongs to a different language family than the Burmese language , the state language of Myanmar, which belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family . Rohingya is the only Indo-European language in Myanmar.

Rohingya speakers can easily communicate with speakers of the Chittagong, which is spoken in the near southeast of Bangladesh. The language has many borrowed and foreign words from Urdu , Hindi , Bengali and Arabic , but some words from Burmese and English are also incorporated. The language was originally written in Arabic script , but efforts have recently been made to write the language in Latin script . The result of this is called Rohingyalian.

Their religion - mostly Islam - is of great importance to the Rohingya. There are mosques and religious schools in every neighborhood and village.

history

Coins of the kings of Arakan

The origin of the group, which is known today as Rohingya , is controversial.

Representatives see themselves as a long-established ethnic group in Rakhine who converted to Islam around 1000 years ago.

That there was a Muslim population in the Kingdom of Arakan (Rakhine) is undeniable. However, researchers note that so far there is no evidence of a uniform Muslim population in the sense of the Rohingya activists in the ancient kingdom of Arakan. A presence of Islam in the region in the first millennium cannot be proven due to the lack of sources. Jacques P. Leider describes how, through a dogmatic reinterpretation of the historical sources, Rohingya historiographers tried to blur the typical plurality of the region in the historiography in order to create a "Rohingya historiography". Elements of Sufism and the role of a Muslim elite at the historical court in this form have no historical basis. Buddhist influences were largely ignored by historiographers in order to be able to declare the historical Arakan to be a predominantly Islamic country.

Western historiography assumes that the Muslim population in Rakhine originated from deported and fled Bengalis who were settled by kings in the 16th and 18th centuries. However, the proportion of Muslims in the group cannot be determined with any certainty.

British colonial records show that there has been migration of the Muslim population from Chittagong to Arakan since 1891 in various eras up to 1971. Unfortunately, the historian observed that Rohingya activists downplayed or partially ignored the influence of this immigration in order to be able to portray the present-day community as the sole descendants of an ancient Muslim community of Arakan.

Military operations

A Rohingya Fighter Surrenders (1961)

Since Burma's independence on January 4, 1948, the government has carried out twenty military operations against the Rohingya. The consequences of the sometimes massive military operations were the deaths of many Rohingya, the devastation of their settlement areas and sanctuaries and the sometimes systematic destruction of their infrastructures.

The twenty military operations were / are:

  1. Military operation (5th Burmese Government), November 1948
  2. Operation of the Burmese Regional Forces (BTF), 1949–1950
  3. Military Operation (2nd Government of China), March 1951–1952
  4. Mayu operation, October 1952–1953
  5. Mone-Thone Operation, October 1954
  6. Joint operation of the military and the United Settlers, January 1955
  7. United Military Police (UMP) operation, 1955–1958
  8. Captain Htin-Kway's operation, 1959
  9. Shwe Kyi operation, October 1966
  10. KyiGan operation, October – December 1966
  11. Ngazinka operation, 1967-1969
  12. Myat-Mon operation, February 1969–1971
  13. Major aung-than operation, 1973
  14. Sabe operation, February 1974-1978
  15. Nagamin surgery, February 1978-1979
  16. Shwe Hintha operation, August 1978-1979
  17. Galon operation, 1979
  18. Pyi-Thaya operation, 1991-1992
  19. Large-scale offensive, August – September 2017
  20. Na-Sa-Ka operations since 1992

Situation in Myanmar

Rohingya refugees in Rakhine (2012)

The Rohingya are not officially recognized as an independent population group in Myanmar. The United Nations classifies them as "the most persecuted minority in the world". As stateless people, they have no rights. They are not allowed to vote, have no access to higher education and are not allowed to leave the country officially. They are also subject to travel restrictions within the country. A 1982 law denies Rohingya citizenship and documents. Rohingya property is confiscated and private property is destroyed or stolen. According to Rohingya activists, confiscated Rohingya land was distributed by the government to Arakanese inside and outside the Rakhine state for settlement. According to these reports, more than a quarter of the total arable land was left to the jungle. The aim of the government is to transform the Rakhine state into a purely Buddhist region and the Muslims into an insignificant or manageable minority. Pagodas and Buddhist monasteries have also been built in places where Muslim sites previously stood. Special taxes, forced labor, marriage restrictions and manipulation of the registration of births and deaths restrict everyday life. There are also illegal detentions, torture, rape and murder. An estimated 1.5 million Rohingya are statelessly in exile, but here too they are subject to reprisals. At the instigation of Myanmar, Rohingya in exile are illegally imprisoned in various countries, including Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia , the United Arab Emirates , Thailand and Malaysia .

Conflicts and refugee movements

There were particularly large flows of refugees in 1942, 1962, 1978 and 1991. In 1978 around 200,000 Rohingya refugees sought protection in neighboring Bangladesh, and in 1991 another 250,000. After August 25, 2017, over 600,000 were added in the following two months alone (as of October 25, 2017).

Although some returned later, many remained in the refugee camps in the Cox's Bazar district . It is estimated that between one and one and a half million Rohingya have been exiled since Burma gained independence. These live mainly in Bangladesh (especially Chittagong ), Pakistan and Saudi Arabia , with a smaller number in the United Arab Emirates , Thailand and Malaysia .

At the beginning of 2009, Rohingya hit the headlines as boat refugees after Thailand refused them residence permits and deported around a thousand in simple motorless boats to the open sea. About 250 of them were later before to India belonging Andaman rescued and about 200 off the coast of Aceh in Indonesia . About 500 probably drowned. The Myanmar Consul General in Hong Kong commented on this in a letter to the Diplomatic Corps, in which he denied the Rohingya belonging to Myanmar with reference to their dark skin color. He described them as "ugly as goblins " in contrast to the light-skinned Burmese .

After it from June 2012 in Rakhine State had come to ethnic unrest, the Myanmar President expressed Thein Sein over the High Commissioner for Refugees of the United Nations ( English United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees , UNHCR ) suggested that the Rohingya in either UNHCR Should go to camps or leave the country. He also stated that the Rohingya are "illegal immigrants" and that they are ready to be deported to any country that would accept them. Serious unrest broke out again at the end of October 2012.

Burnt village in Rakhine (2017)
Kutupalong Refugee Camp (2017)

The situation escalated again on August 25, 2017 when various targets in Myanmar were attacked simultaneously and the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) assumed responsibility for the attacks. A counter-offensive by the army and police and fear of attack by the insurgents sparked a refugee movement in which Buddhists fled or were evacuated from Islamist fighters, while refugees from Myanmar's Islamic minority overran the border into Bangladesh in order to seek protection there. The situation quickly deteriorated, and observers concluded that the Myanmar military was using the attacks to justify a large-scale offensive. Around 2,600 houses and huts in Myanmar are said to have been burned down within a week. One week after the offensive began, the UNHCR counted 58,600 Rohingya refugees who had newly arrived in Bangladesh. You join the 400,000 Rohingya who fled to Bangladesh in the 1990s. It was reported from among the refugees that the Myanmar military had systematically evicted them. According to UNHCR estimates, the number of refugees already reached 120,000 two weeks after the start of the conflict. After two weeks of fighting, the ARSA declared a unilateral, month-long ceasefire until October 9, 2017. Its purpose was to facilitate the delivery of relief supplies to those in need in Rakhine State. The Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina, appealed to Myanmar on September 12 to take the refugees back in. Their number has now swelled to around 370,000, which means that more than a third of all Rohingya have been expelled from the neighboring country. The United Nations condemned the evictions of the last few weeks as systematic and thus as ethnic cleansing . After more than 400,000 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh, the local government began restricting the refugees' freedom of movement. The refugees were asked to stay in government-designated camps and not to live in the homes of relatives or friends. The people of Bangladesh were asked not to accept any more refugees; bus and truck drivers should also no longer take Rohingya with them.

In the two months after August 25, 2017 alone, around 604,000 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh. In total, there were almost one million Rohingya refugees there at the end of October 2017.

After Myanmar came under massive international criticism due to the refugee crisis, Aung San Suu Kyi made his first public statement on September 19, 2017 in a speech in Myanmar's capital Naypyidaw on the situation of the Rohingya and condemned human rights violations. She announced new efforts to find a peaceful solution and asked the international community to be patient. Aung San Suu Kyi also stated that most of the villages in the Rakhine region were not affected by the wave of violence. She invited foreign diplomats to visit Rakhine to find out about the situation there. Prior to their speech, the US had called on the Myanmar government to end the military's crackdown on the Rohingya. In connection with the crisis, Aung San Suu Kyi canceled her participation in the upcoming UN General Assembly.

In November 2017, the Myanmar Foreign Ministry announced that it had signed a memorandum of understanding with Bangladesh to allow the Rohingya who had fled to be repatriated. According to the government of Bangladesh, the repatriation should begin within two months. The conditions in the overcrowded refugee camps in Bangladesh are considered catastrophic. The number of refugees there was estimated at around 700,000 Rohingya at the beginning of March 2018. According to the agreement, a return to Myanmar must be "safe", which is an illusion for many of those affected due to the fact that the military had razed certain villages to the ground.

After human rights experts condemned the violence against the Rohingya as “genocide” and some states and the United Nations condemned it as “ethnic cleansing”, the then US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who traveled to Myanmar, accused Myanmar of “ethnic cleansing” for the first time.

On May 23, 2018 the Neue Zürcher Zeitung mentioned in an article a report by Amnesty International , according to which in August 2017 “members of a militant Rohingya group carried out at least one, possibly even two massacres of Hindus”, as they “only until then the Burmese army ":" Some of the survivors were kidnapped and forced to convert to Islam. The tormentors also wanted to drive out Buddhists in the village inhabited by Hindu and Buddhists on the pretext that they had the wrong belief. ”The Reuters news agency also found out that Myanmar's government and military systematically invent such massacres allegedly committed by Rohingya.

For April 2019, the government of Bangladesh has announced the beginning of the resettlement of Rohingya refugees to the previously uninhabited island of Bhasan Char , on which infrastructure and accommodation had been built in previous years. Around 100,000 people are to be settled on the remote island.

In early 2020, the International Court of Justice condemned Myanmar for the mass murders of the Rohingya and obliged the country to take immediate measures to protect the minority. In addition, the country has to report regularly on these measures. Because of the genocide, Germany stopped its development aid for Myanmar in February 2020. Since then, the money has been used to support the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.

literature

Web links

Commons : Rohingya people  - collection of images
Wiktionary: Rohingya  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ^ "The Rohingya" Harvard Divinity School 2017
  2. ↑ Jonathan Head: BBC News: What drives the Rohingya to sea? In: BBC News . February 5, 2009
  3. ↑ Fishing slaves in Southeast Asia ( Memento from March 30, 2015 in the Internet Archive ), In: tagesschau.de . March 29, 2015.
  4. ↑ Unfortunately, Jacques (2013). Rohingya: the name, the movement and the quest for identity. Myanmar Egress and the Myanmar Peace Center, http://www.networkmyanmar.org/images/stories/PDF17/Leider-2014.pdf , p. 4; P. 8.
  5. ↑ a b Jacques P. Leider: Competing Identities and the Hybridized History of the Rohingyas. In: Renaud Egreteau, François Robinne: Metamorphosis. Studies in Social and Political Change in Myanmar. NUS Press, Singapore 2016, ISBN 978-9971-69-866-9 , pp. 151-178, on p. 156 f.
  6. ↑ a b Unfortunately, Jacques (2013). Rohingya: the name, the movement and the quest for identity. Myanmar Egress and the Myanmar Peace Center, http://www.networkmyanmar.org/images/stories/PDF17/Leider-2014.pdf , p. 4.
  7. ^ Jacques P. Leider: Competing Identities and the Hybridized History of the Rohingyas. In: Renaud Egreteau, François Robinne: Metamorphosis. Studies in Social and Political Change in Myanmar. NUS Press, Singapore 2016, ISBN 978-9971-69-866-9 , pp. 151-178, on p. 155 f.
  8. ^ Jacques P. Leider: Competing Identities and the Hybridized History of the Rohingyas. In: Renaud Egreteau, François Robinne: Metamorphosis. Studies in Social and Political Change in Myanmar. NUS Press, Singapore 2016, ISBN 978-9971-69-866-9 , pp. 151-178, at p. 159.
  9. ↑ Unfortunately, Jacques (2013). Rohingya: the name, the movement and the quest for identity. Myanmar Egress and the Myanmar Peace Center, http://www.networkmyanmar.org/images/stories/PDF17/Leider-2014.pdf , p. 6 f.
  10. ^ Jacques P. Leider: Competing Identities and the Hybridized History of the Rohingyas. In: Renaud Egreteau, François Robinne: Metamorphosis. Studies in Social and Political Change in Myanmar. NUS Press, Singapore 2016, ISBN 978-9971-69-866-9 , pp. 151-178, at p. 164
  11. ^ Jacques P. Leider: Competing Identities and the Hybridized History of the Rohingyas. In: Renaud Egreteau, François Robinne: Metamorphosis. Studies in Social and Political Change in Myanmar. NUS Press, Singapore 2016, ISBN 978-9971-69-866-9 , pp. 151-178, at p. 163.
  12. ^ Jacques P. Leider: Competing Identities and the Hybridized History of the Rohingyas. In: Renaud Egreteau, François Robinne: Metamorphosis. Studies in Social and Political Change in Myanmar. NUS Press, Singapore 2016, ISBN 978-9971-69-866-9 , pp. 151-178, at p. 169.
  13. ^ Jacques P. Leider: Competing Identities and the Hybridized History of the Rohingyas. In: Renaud Egreteau, François Robinne: Metamorphosis. Studies in Social and Political Change in Myanmar. NUS Press, Singapore 2016, ISBN 978-9971-69-866-9 , pp. 151-178, on p. 159 f.
  14. ↑ a b c See Myanmar Travel Information: Myanmar People ( Memento of October 2, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) and Burmese consular says Rohingya do not belong to Burma ( Memento of February 16, 2009 in the Internet Archive ). In: Mizzima. February 13, 2009
  15. ↑ Kim Son Hoang: The Most Persecuted Minority in the World. In: Der Standard , July 30, 2012 (interview with Ulrich Delius).
  16. ^ Katja Dombrowski: Stateless persons without any lobby. In: D + C Development and Cooperation , April 3, 2015 (Interview with Johannes Kaltenbach)
  17. ↑ Sven Hansen: Counting the people, dividing the ethnic groups. In: Die Tageszeitung , March 31, 2014.
  18. ^ Arakan Rohingya National Organization (ARNO):, Facts about the Rohingya Muslims of Arakan
  19. ^ Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC): Rohingya Muslims tell of gang rapes and secret killings in Myanmar's hidden region
  20. ↑ a b Bernd Musch-Borowska: Sent to death. In: Deutschlandfunk , February 7, 2009.
  21. ↑ Thailand's military leaves boat refugees to their own devices. In: Der Tagesspiegel , January 27, 2009.
  22. ^ Boat people rescued off Indonesia. In: BBC News , February 3, 2009.
  23. ↑ Myanmar's Outrageous Racism Excused. In: Asia Sentinel , February 12, 2009 (English).
  24. ↑ Rohingya in Myanmar: Being President threatens 800,000 with expulsion. In: zenith - Journal for the Orient , July 12, 2012.
  25. ^ Myanmar moots camps or deportation for Rohingyas. In: ReliefWeb , July 12, 2012 (English).
  26. ↑ Thousands of people in Burma on the run. In: Spiegel Online . October 27, 2012.
  27. ↑ AP: "Rohingya refugees storm Bangladeshi border as pushback fails" Washington Post, August 28, 2017
  28. ^ Matthew Pennington, "Obama's Myanmar legacy in trouble and it's not Trump's fault," Washington Post, September 2, 2017
  29. ^ "Rohingya Muslims Flee as More Than 2,600 Houses Burned in Myanmar's Rakhine" New York Times / Reuters of September 2, 2017
  30. ↑ Michael Safi: "More than 120,000 Rohingya flee Myanmar violence, UN says" The Guardian, September 5, 2017
  31. ↑ Rohingya fighters call for a unilateral ceasefire in Myanmar. In: Süddeutsche.de . September 10, 2017. Retrieved September 10, 2017.
  32. ↑ Bangladesh calls on Myanmar to take back Rohingya refugees in the Guardian, September 12, 2017 (accessed September 12, 2017)
  33. ↑ "Bangladesh: Rohingya must stay in camps". tagesschau.de. Accessed September 18, 2017. https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/rohingya-bewegungungsfreiheit-101.html .
  34. ↑ Max Bearak: Bangladesh is now home to almost 1 million Rohingya refugees. In: The Washingtob Post. October 25, 2017, accessed October 28, 2017 .
  35. ^ "Aung San Suu Kyi condemns violence against Rohingya for the first time". faz.net. Accessed September 19, 2017. http://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/ausland/aung-san-suu-kyi-verolzent-erstmals-gewalt-gegen-rohingya-15205514.html .
  36. ↑ Refugees: Myanmar accepts Rohingya return from Bangladesh . In: zeit.de, November 23, 2017 (accessed November 24, 2017).
  37. ↑ The military razes villages to the ground , tagesschau.de, February 23, 2018
  38. ^ Morgengast SRF correspondent Wenger , SRF, 13 March 2018
  39. ↑ Action against Rohingya: Washington accuses Burma of ethnic cleansing for the first time . In: faz.net , November 23, 2017 (accessed November 24, 2017).
  40. ↑ " Myanmar: New evidence reveals Rohingya armed group massacred scores in Rakhine State " , amnesty.org, May 22, 2018
  41. ↑ " Rohingya militants apparently deliberately kill Hindus and Buddhists " , nzz.ch, May 23, 2018
  42. ↑ Exclusive: Fake photos in Myanmar army's 'True News' book on the Rohingya crisis. In: Reuters . August 30, 2018 (English).;
  43. ↑ "Rohingya relocation to Bhasan Char to start by mid-April" dhakatribune.com of March 3, 2019
  44. ↑ Myanmar must protect Rohingya from genocide. In: Spiegel Online . January 23, 2020 .;
  45. ↑ Myanmar must protect Rohingya from genocide. In: Zeit Online . January 23, 2020 .;
  46. ↑ Germany stops development aid for Myanmar. In: Zeit Online . February 26, 2020 .;