THE EIGHTH ISSUE OF FIHRM-AP — COMMUNITY-DRIVEN MEMORIALIZATION AND IDENTITY PRESERVATION OF THE ROHINGYA OF MYANMAR
About the Author: Raïss Tinmaung
Raïss Tinmaung is a Rohingya from Toronto. He is the founder and board chair of the Rohingya Human Rights Network where he has led campaigns, petitions, rallies, new chapter formations, community writing, and media production initiatives. He has led Rohingya delegations to present at the Canadian Parliament, the Museum for Human Rights, the Montreal Holocaust Museum, le musée national de beaux arts du Québec, the UN's Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar and the International Court of Justice. Raïss has also led a registered charity that supports grassroots-led education and vocational training programs for the Rohingya diaspora and host communities in Burma, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Pakistan. Apart from volunteering for his community, Raïss has also volunteered in long term development projects in Haiti, Ecuador, and South Africa.
About Rohingya Human Rights Network
The Rohingya Human Rights Network is a network of Rohingya civil society organizations, speakers, writers and human rights documenters inside the refugee camps and villages who are supported by diaspora communities and allies.
The Network writes articles, creates talk videos, documents human rights issues, meets with policy makers, solicits for petitions, participates in and organizes public speaking events, organizes peaceful rallies, publishes letters to editors, and collaborates with other civil societies, among other activities.
The Network collects, edits, and publishes/broadcasts community-issues and human rights awareness videos and articles produced and written by Rohingya inside the refugee camps and villages. It also documents and maps violation incidents and events on an interactive Rohingya human rights documentation website (not yet public).
Community-driven Memorialization and Identity Preservation of the Rohingya of Myanmar
Introduction and historical background
The Rohingya are an ethnic minority that have inhabited the Rakhine[1] region in northwestern Myanmar since the 8th century. They are primarily of East Indian ethnic origin[2], which makes them different from most of the population of Rakhine or Myanmar, who are of Arakanese and Bamar ethnic origins respectively. They are also predominantly Muslims, with some Hindus and Christians among them; contrary to the majority Buddhists[3] seen among Arakanese and Burmese populations. Despite ethnic and religious differences, the Rohingya, Arakanese, Burmese and other ethnic minorities coexisted peacefully for centuries.
Following the independence of Myanmar or Burma in 1948, the Rohingya were celebrated in the country in all spheres of social, economic, and political influence. They had programs broadcasted on national radio stations; there were Rohingya student associations at Yangon University and other prestigious educational institutions; there were even Rohingya officials in high level positions in public service. At a speech from the Vice Chief of Staff of the Union of Burma Armed Forces, Brigadier General Aung Gyi said “Rohingyas are equal and full citizens and an ethnic minority integral to the Union of Burma”.[4]
After Burma went through a coup d’etat in 1962, ethnic tensions in Rakhine as well as in other parts of the country increased significantly. In 1978, through a state backed campaign of terror, 200,000 Rohingya were chased from their homelands to seek refuge in Bangladesh. In 1982, the Burma Citizenship Act made the Rohingya stateless overnight. Through the implementation of the citizenship act, the Rohingya became targets of state sanctioned discriminatory practices. Restrictions on movement, obtaining education, livelihood, running a business or owning property without fear of arbitrary confiscation, accessing healthcare, obtaining marriage certificates, or even having children became difficult for the Rohingya. Arbitrary arrests of the Rohingya, extorsion, detention, and extra-judicial killings became common. The derogatory term “kalar”[5], equivalent to “nigger” in the African American context, became a common nickname for the Rohingya. Even monks and high-level religious figures called for Rohingya’s extermination[6], so much so that Burmese social media became flooded with posts such as “stuff pig’s fat inside the damn kalar’s mouth”, “get rid of the whole race”, “pour fuel and set fire so that they can meet Allah faster”, etc.[7]
State backed campaigns of violence and arson in Rohingya villages saw hundreds of thousands flee Myanmar to seek shelter in the refugee camps of Bangladesh in 1992, 2012, 2016, and 2017. The “Clearance Operation” of 2017 burned nearly 400, i.e., half of all Rohingya villages to the ground. Nearly 850,000 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh with survivors recounting unspoken horrors of children burned alive, women gang raped, and elderly and disabled hacked to death. In 2019, the Burmese government was taken to UN’s top court, the International Court of Justice, for its breach of the Genocide Convention. In 2020 the court directed Myanmar to “take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of the Genocide Convention”.[8]
Myanmar’s denial of Rohingya
The Burmese government is intent on denying the existence of Rohingya and has taken an official stance on this denial since passing the Citizenship Act of 1982. In Rakhine, Burmese state authorities have even gone door to door in Rohingya villages to confiscate pre-1982 identity cards and documents. Replacement documents and ID cards were subsequently issued by force wherein the Rohingya were referred to as “Bengalis”. In 2019, when the Burmese government went to defend itself at the International Court of Justice, the State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi and her delegates refused to acknowledge the Rohingya by their name, referring to them exclusively as “illegal Bengalis”.[9]
In 2020, Myanmar government’s official mapping authority, the General Administrative Department of the Ministry of the Office of the Union Government, erased the names of all Rohingya villages that were burned to the ground in 2017, from the government’s official maps. The UN’s Myanmar Information Mapping Unit followed suit.[10] This naturally paved ways for popular mapping platforms like Google Maps, Bing, Map box, Esri, etc. to erase names of exterminated Rohingya villages from their maps, seeing that Myanmar government and UN’s MIMU are authoritative sources of geospatial information.
The Burmese government and extremist Buddhist domination groups in Myanmar have been quite successful thus far in eradicating the Rohingya from their homelands. They have burned more than half of all Rohingya villages and have chased nearly a million Rohingya away from their homes in the last decade. Thousands have perished in the Andaman Sea in human trafficking boats as they try to escape to Malaysia and Indonesia. Out of the 3.5 million Rohingya worldwide, barely 600,000 remain in Myanmar, out of which nearly 130,000 live in Internally Displaced Persons[11] camps. No one is allowed to use the word Rohingya in Myanmar today. Not only is Rohingya’s existence in Myanmar at risk, even their identity and historical memory in their homelands is under threat of extermination.
Memorialization and identity preservation efforts
To turn the tides of identity extermination, the Rohingya Human Rights Network along with a group of Rohingya civil society organizations in the refugee camps of Bangladesh and the surviving villages of Myanmar have begun working on an initiative to document and memorialize all Rohingya villages into an electronic geospatial repository. The effort involves collecting multimedia and graphics information that would preserve the memories of Rohingya’s existence in Myanmar. This entails doing a population-wide outreach effort to collect and document articles that preserve Rohingya’s memories and identities in their homelands. This endeavor would be conducted in several phases:
Phase 1: identify and place all the Rohingya villages in Myanmar, including exterminated villages, on an online geo spatial repository, using authorized pre-2020 mapping data resources.
Sample plotting of exterminated villages on a georeferenced mapped
Phase 2: conduct a population-wide survey to gather articles that memorialize each of the villages as well as sites of conscience within them, such as cemeteries, mosques, schools, ‘madrassas’, clinics/pharmacies, etc.
Phase 3: conduct a population-wide survey to gather names and histories of individuals who lived in each of the villages, including individuals that lost their lives during massacre campaigns.
Phase 4: append the gathered information to each village record and share with the Rohingya population world-wide, as well as the international human rights community at large.
The challenges associated with the above endeavor are immense. Since it is community-led and community-driven, the first and foremost challenge would be to properly train community members to do documentation work. This would require access to training professionals, tools, equipment, etc. that facilitate learning.
Working in the refugee camps is also a challenge by itself. With turbulence from gangs and drugs related violence on the rise, outreach in the camps has become increasingly restrictive in the past few years. Even worse is the challenge of access to the surviving villages in Myanmar. Apartheid rule imposed by Myanmar’s military severely restricts movement of the Rohingya from one village to another, making it nearly impossible to do any coordinated activity. Furthermore, fighting between the military and ethnic armed groups, with Rohingya caught in the crossfire makes conditions extremely difficult for human rights documenters to work in Myanmar.
The global scatter of Rohingya refugees also poses a significant challenge in performing a population-wide outreach effort. After Bangladesh, the Rohingya diaspora lives in large numbers in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia. A smaller number reside in North America, Europe, and Australia, although more and more refugees are being gradually resettled in the U.S. currently.
Finally, funding remains one of the largest obstacles to successfully undertake an operation of the above magnitude. To conduct a population-wide outreach is a massive effort that requires a workforce of staff and volunteers with paid stipends, training tools, equipment resources, etc. to effectively perform their work. Funding would also be required to organize the collected data and process it efficiently for a meaningful output.
Closing remarks
The Rohingya community-driven memorialization and identity preservation effort will be the first of its kind to document Rohingya sites of conscience and historical-cultural significance. The output will be of immense value to the Rohingya themselves as they make efforts to memorialize their original homelands, find ways to preserve their own cultural heritage and ethnic identity.
The output will also be of immense value to the international human rights community because of its potential utility as an education and advocacy tool. Additionally, it may be useful in peacebuilding and repatriation efforts for the 1 million Rohingya in Bangladesh refugee camps who aspire to return to their homelands in Rakhine some day. Finally, it may be useful to justice and accountability mechanisms who may utilize certain portions of the output to launch their own special investigations.
Most importantly, since the effort will be driven and implemented by the Rohingya themselves, it will be an exercise in community capacity building and empowerment. It will therefore be a source of pride and strength for the Rohingya today and their future generations.
[1] “Timeline: A Short History of Myanmar’s Rohingya Minority” from the Wall Street Journal
[2] “Muslins and Rohingya in Myanmar” from the Minority Right Group
[3] “Conflict in Myanmar” from Religion and Public Life of Harbard Divinity School
[5] “'Don't call me Kalar': BLM-inspired message reaches Myanmar” from France 24
[7] Why Facebook is losing the war on hate speech in Myanmar (reuters.com)
[8] “ICJ – The Gambia v. Myanmar” from Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (un.org)
[9] “ICJ speech: Suu Kyi fails to use ‘Rohingya’ to describe minority” from Aljazeera