The Rohingya: An Ethnography of 'Subhuman' Life 0199489351, 9780199489350

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The Rohingya

The Rohingya An Ethnography of ‘Subhuman’ Life

Nasir Uddin

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1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries. Published in India by Oxford University Press 22 Workspace, 2nd Floor, 1/22 Asaf Ali Road, New Delhi 110002, India

© Oxford University Press 2020 The moral rights of the author have been asserted. First Edition published in 2020 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. ISBN-13 (print edition): 978-0-19-948935-0 ISBN-10 (print edition): 0-19-948935-1 ISBN-13 (eBook): 978-0-19-909983-2 ISBN-10 (eBook): 0-19-909983-9 Typeset in ITC Giovanni Std 9.5/13 by Tranistics Data Technologies, Kolkata 700 091 Printed in India by Rakmo Press, New Delhi 110 020

To my father Osiur Rahman and only son Niloy Rahman. Both left me very untimely

Figures and Tables

Figures 1.1 Rohingya men and women in queue for biometric registration 1.2 Doing fieldwork among the Rohingyas in Pasan Para, Ukhia, in 2017

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2.1 Rangoon University Central Students’ Union in 1936, where the leading representatives were Rohingya Muslims (Rashid, Razzak) 2.2 Newly built Rohingya refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar

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3.1 Rohingyas are spreading over every corner of Ukhia and Teknaf on a daily basis

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4.1 Inside view of the Rohingya refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar 4.2 Local marketplace in Ukhia where plastic sheets are sold on the roadside by the local Bengalis 5.1 Reporting place of Rohingyas just after their arrival in Bangladesh but before their placement in camps 5.2 Typical Rohingya camp with roofs made of plastic sheets

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119 126

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Figures and Tables

6.1 In many cases, multiple families live in a single-room house in the Rohingya refugee camps 6.2 Common toilets for many households in the Rohingya refugee camps 6.3 Water supply for Rohingya refugees in camps—one tube well, many households 6.4 Inside a cramped tent in a refugee camp 6.5 People/kids standing in line to fill drinking water supplied by WFP’s water tanks 6.6 Many Rohingyas are doing small-scale business in camps 6.7 Organizations and countries supporting the massive Rohingya refugee situation in Ukhia and Tekaf of Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh 7.1 A Rohingya woman who was burnt alive but fortunately escaped death

140 144 147 150 153 157

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A4.1 Card given to the Rohingyas living in Bangladesh after their registration in the biometric database

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A5.1 Major ethnic groups in Myanmar

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A6.1 Following Myanmar’s fleeing Rohingyas

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Tables 2.1 List of MPs (period-wise)

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A7.1 Population Census, 2010

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A8.1 The main language (families) of the Bamar majority and the Rohingya, Kachin, and Wa minorities

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A9.1 Age and gender breakdown by camp/site

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A10.1 Population figures by period of arrival

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Figures and Tables

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A11.1 Population figures by specific needs

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A12.1 Resettlement of Myanmar refugees from Bangladesh, 2006–10

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A13.1 Bilateral trade between Bangladesh and Myanmar from financial year 2005–6 to 2012–13

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A14.1 Year-wise repatriation of Rohingya refugees

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A15.1 Kings of Arakan who had two names (Buddhist and Muslim)

224

Acknowledgements

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his book has taken four years of my intensive engagement; it embraces my research on, experiences of, and attachments with the Rohingyas over two decades. During the three years of its making, it has received a lot of support, cooperation, thoughts, information, critical comments, and academic inputs from many people, including friends, fellows, colleagues, students, co-researchers, and relatives. However, first and foremost, I would like to acknowledge those Rohingyas who have been incredibly helpful, appreciably open, and extremely instrumental in providing their time; sharing their pain, sorrow, and everyday experience of vulnerability and discrimination in dealing with their home state (Myanmar), host state (Bangladesh), and various state and non-state actors. Without the cordial and congenial help of the Rohingyas living in Ukhia and Teknaf, this book would not have seen the light of day. The villagers, both Rohingyas and Bengalis, of Vasan Para (pseudonym) in Teknaf and Pasan Para (pseudonym) in Ukhia have been whole-heartedly supportive during the last two decades by providing food, shelter, and all kinds of logistical aid during my stay in these villages. I am deeply indebted, in particular, to those Rohingya informants who fled persecution in Myanmar in 2017 and crossed into Bangladesh for sharing their painful and horrifying experiences of being eyewitnesses to the campaign launched in Rakhine State on 25 August 2017. I have interviewed more than 500 traumatized Rohingyas who were compelled to leave their homes, habitations, and livelihoods in Rakhine State following the 2017 crackdown.

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Acknowledgements

I express my gratitude to the staff, students, fellows, and faculties of the Refugee Studies Centre (RSC) at the University of Oxford, UK, and the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at SOAS University of London, UK, who helped me greatly during the preparation of the final draft of this book. This book has also hugely benefitted from the resources of the British Library; the British Museum; and the libraries of the London School of Economics (LSE), Overseas Development Institute (ODI), Transnational Justice Research at the University of Oxford, Queen Mary University of London, Department of History at SOAS University of London, and the Parliament Archives of the United Kingdom. I would also like to express my thanks to Professor Matthew Gibney (director of RSC at the University of Oxford, UK), Professor Katy Gardner (Department of Anthropology, LSE, UK), Professor David Lewis (Department of Social Policy, UK), Professor Michael Charney (Department of History, School of History, Religions & Philosophies, SOAS University of London, UK), Dr Azeem Ibrahim (author of The Rohingya: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide [2016]), Dr Kazi Fahmida Farzana (author of Memories of Burmese Rohingya Refugees: Contested Identity and Belonging [2017]), Professor Jennifer Hyndman (director of Center for Refugee Studies at York University, Canada), Professor Alison Mountz (director of International Migration Research Centre [IMRC] at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada), Professor Rachel Silvey (Asian Institute, University of Toronto, Canada), Dr Nasreen Chowdhory (Department of Political Science, University of Delhi, India), Yasmin Khan (Department of Geography, University of Toronto, Canada), Dr Anuradha Sen Gupta (The Graduate Institute, Geneva, Switzerland), Sucharita Sengupta (The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland), and many more colleagues, friends, well-wishers, and so on. I want to thank my German friend Julia Zimple who translated Dr Johann Severin Vater’s book from German to English for me. I express my heartfelt gratitude to Professor Farhana Begum (Department of Anthropology, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh), Professor S.M. Monirul Hassan (Department of Sociology, University of Chittagong, Bangladesh), Professor Indrajit Kundu (Department of Sociology, University of Chittagong, Bangladesh), Professor Alak Paul (Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Chittagong, Bangladesh), and Professor Kazi Khasrul Alam Quddusi (Department of Public

Acknowledgements

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Administration, University of Chittagong, Bangladesh). The Department of Anthropology at the University of Chittagong deserves special thanks. I am particularly thankful to my colleagues and fellows there: Professor Ala Uddin, Dr Khadija Mitu, Dr N.M. Sajjadul Hoque, Faruk Hossain, S.M. Sadat al Sajib, and Kazim Nur Sohad. I owe a lot to the support of the Refugee, Relief, and Repatriation commissioner’s office, Government of Bangladesh, which has been assigned with the responsibility of monitoring and taking care of the refugee situation and dealing with the repatriation process—for their tremendous help in enabling me to reach every corner of the Rohingya settlements in Ukhia and Teknaf. I am also grateful to those diasporic Rohingyas whom I met in India, Canada, the United States of America, Germany, the United Kingdom, Malaysia, and the Netherlands for sharing their experience of migration, settlement, and travelling all the way from Myanmar. I acknowledge the support of my research assistants—Dia Anam, Saima Sifat, and Tasnimul Hoque Shown—who helped me in recording the narratives of the newly arrived Rohingyas in 2017. I am indebted to Abul Kalam, a professional photographer, for providing a wonderful photograph for this book’s cover, which reflects the idea of subhuman life. I acknowledge the contribution of my family members in extending their unconditional and unprecedented help and support during my fieldwork, writing of the monograph, and dealing with hardships in the process of making this book. My elder brother, Mohammad Ali Zinnat (staff reporter at the Daily Star), has always been with me in my research ventures and academic endeavours. I also acknowledge the deep sacrifice of my partner, Farzana Ahmed, who took care of my family responsibilities and social duties to keep me away from timeconsuming tasks. In fact, without her relentless efforts, it would have been difficult for me to travel in my never-ending academic journey. I would also like to thank the team at Oxford University Press, which has been commendably instrumental in making this book a wellargued and solidly analytical one. Besides, I must thank the anonymous reviewers whose suggestions and comments were extremely helpful in developing the content and the theoretical and empirical part of this book.

Abbreviations

AI AL ALP ARIF ARNO ARSA BDT BGB BK BM BNP BP BRAC BROUK CGB CNG EFEO EU FDMN GO GoB GoM

Amnesty International Awami League Arakan Liberation Party Arakan Rohingya Islamic Front Arakan Rohingya National Organisation Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army Bangladesh Taka Border Guards Bangladesh Burmese Kyat (Burmese money, internationally known as MKK) Bangladesh Military Bangladesh Nationalist Party Bangladesh Police Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (now Building Recourses across Community) Burmese Rohingya Organization UK Coast Guard of Bangladesh Compressed Natural Gas Ecole Française d’ Extrême-Orient European Union Forcibly Displaced Myanmar Nationals Government Organization Government of Bangladesh Government of Myanmar

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Abbreviations

HRW ILO IMA IMRC IOM MSF NGO NUPA ODI OIC ORE RLO RPF RSC RSO RUCSU UN UNDP UNHCR UNICEF USD VDP WFP WHO

Human Rights Watch International Labour Organization Ittihad-ul Mujahideen of Arakan International Migration Research Centre International Organization for Migration Médecins Sans Frontières Non-governmental Organization National United Party of Arakan Overseas Development Institute Organisation of Islamic Cooperation Oxford Research Encyclopedias Rohingya Liberation Organization Rohingya Patriotic Front Refugee Studies Centre Rohingya Solidarity Organisation Rangoon University Central Students’ Union United Nations United Nations Development Programme United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees United Nations International Children’s Education Fund United States Dollar Village Defence Party World Food Programme World Health Organization

1

Introduction The Rohingya, Their Textual (Re)presentation, and a Contextual Framing

I

t was 25 September 2017, just one month after the military crackdown1 started on the civilian Rohingyas in Rakhine State, triggering an influx of hundreds of thousands of Rohingyas into Bangladesh. I was travelling by a compressed natural gas (CNG)2 scooter from Kutupalong3 to Balukhali4 when I saw hundreds of Rohingyas, mainly women and children, sitting on both sides of the road.5 At a certain point during my journey, I got off my scooter and spoke to some of those women. Most of them were dressed in ragged clothes, visible even through their burqas.6 At first, they thought that I had brought some relief aids for them, as they were sitting there hoping to receive food. Therefore, their interest in me was met with disappointment when they came to know why I stopped to speak to them. In fact, I had a strong feeling that it was not an appropriate time for a researcher to conduct fieldwork and ask questions about their conditions, their past, present, and future. Survival appeared to be a necessity for them and it was important for me to be empathetic to their plight, since I see myself as a pro-people scholar and humanistic ethnographer. However, the momentum of the larger crises and the terrible situation they were in compelled me to make a feeble attempt to talk to them, albeit hesitantly. I sat beside them and started asking them when they came here, how they reached here, why they left their homes in Rakhine State, and what kind of atrocities they witnessed the crackdown in Rakhine State. Among them, The Rohingya. Nasir Uddin, Oxford University Press (2020). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199489350.001.0001.

© Oxford University Press.

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The Rohingya

I met Lailee, a woman holding her one-year-old child with two of her other children, of seven or eight, beside her. Lailee was taken by a sense of gloom when she started explaining her recent experiences and her present conditions. She was seemingly reluctant in the beginning but started pouring her heart out spontaneously. Speaking of her unbearable pain, she narrated how her husband was brutally killed right in front of her eyes. Then she was gang-raped in front of her three children. She was dragged out of the house and thrown in the front yard. Then her house was burnt down. She saw her world being stolen and burnt to ashes, leaving her as a witness to her own tragedy. Weak and devastated, she could barely stand, let alone walk. Her urge to survive in the face of death and to rescue her children drove her to leave her home behind and join the countless other Rohingyas going towards the border to cross into Bangladesh. Three days after her arrival, she had still not found access to any temporary refugee camp supposedly set up by the Government of Bangladesh (GoB) with the help of International Organization for Migration (IOM)7 and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). She had been putting up on the roadside for three days, waiting for someone to bring food supplies so that she could feed herself and her children. Lailee, with her three little children, was sitting by the road with her sordid experience of the recent past, a vulnerable present, and a completely uncertain future. Suddenly, Lailee started lamenting, ‘Our lives are not the lives of human beings. Even animals’ lives are better than us to some extent considering the way in which the moghs8 and the military have behaved with us. Rohingya lives are not mainshor jibon (not human life). Het-ton ekkana hom achhe (We are lesser than human beings).’ Tears were rolling down her cheeks as she said this. Lailee’s narrative held a strong sense of grief, a deep degree of pain, and the wretchedness of being ‘human’, which Franz Fanon has framed as the ‘Wretched of the Earth’.9 Lailee’s narration reflected the pain and sorrow of many other Rohingyas who suffered similar experiences in the Rakhine State in the last couple of decades, starting in 1962 when the state military first took control of what was formerly known as Burma, now Myanmar.10 Since then, the history of the Rohingyas has been a story of cruel oppression, exploitation, exclusion, and persecution.11 But recently, particularly in 2017, the situation took a turn for the worse, which forced hundreds of

Introduction 3

thousands of Rohingyas like Lailee to flee to Bangladesh. I listened to several stories similar to Lailee’s, many of which have been stated in various chapters of this book. This book primarily aims to understand the painful grievances, severe suffering, and extreme vulnerabilities of Rohingya lives based on their personal and collective narratives, notes gathered from ethnographic fieldwork of more than two years, and a close observation of the evolving history of the Rohingyas’ issues for more than two decades.12 Apart from understanding the people’s narratives, this book also intends to take part in debates on the body of knowledge about people who are stateless, non-citizens, asylum seekers, camp people, forced migrants, and refugees, and those who experience vulnerability, atrocities, persecution, marginality, discrimination, and brutalities in one form or another. The established academic genre on stateless people, non-citizens, refugees, asylum seekers, forced migrants, and camp people considers these people as ‘taken for granted’. In this way, the academia quite often presents people’s vulnerable conditions, various forms of discrimination, and numerous systems of brutality as the ultimate outcomes of statelessness and non-citizenships, which otherwise legitimize the cruel, exploitative, oppressive, and unkind rules of the state. This book, looking into the case of the Rohingyas, questions this academic establishment and political rhetoric arguing whether statelessness and non-citizenship are, in fact, causes of extreme vulnerable conditions of some people across the world or whether the reasons lie elsewhere. Of course, I admit that one of the main reasons for the Rohingyas’ vulnerability is their lack of citizenship as they are not legally recognized by Myanmar13 and hence they do not belong to state structures. Yet, the levels of atrocity, degrees of persecution, dimensions of brutality, and the amount of raping and killing of civilian Rohingyas reveal something more than mere non-citizenship and statelessness, which I have discussed in detail and analysed in its relevant context in various chapters of this book. Ethnographic accounts, based on which the book is written, show that it is the nature of the state; the state’s very approach of dealing with people of cultural, religious, and ‘racial’ difference; and the exclusionary policy of a majoritarian framework of nationhood that are responsible for these happenings. Therefore, the book argues that the way Myanmar deals with the Rohingyas is not just because they are non-citizens, but it is precisely

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The Rohingya

these ways that reduce the Rohingyas to a status lesser than that of human beings or what I propose to call ‘subhuman’. ‘Subhuman’ is not a new idea in politics and history; it has been commonly used in genocide literature.14 The notion of the subhuman is well known in comparative genocide studies, having been used by the Nazis to describe Jews, Romans, and other people whom they considered lesser in nature and worthy of extinction.15 Generally, subhuman life means when a particular group of people live in a much worse situation than human beings normally do. Besides, subhuman is also used to indicate non-human categories of animals in anatomy. I intend to use this word to describe a particular category of people who are born as human beings but are treated as if they are lesser than human. As the different chapters of this book will show, my decade-long engagement with the Rohingyas as a researcher and my year-long fieldwork living among them have given me the impression that the Rohingyas are such a category of people in the eyes of the Myanmar state. The book is primarily ‘an ethnography of Rohingyas’, an ethnolinguistic and religious minority who have been residing in Myanmar for centuries. However, at present,16 a large majority of them live in Bangladesh as refugees,17 forcibly displaced persons,18 and asylum seekers.19 The book also intends to take part in the theoretical formulation of the ‘subhuman’ and critically engage with the body of knowledge regarding the stateless, non-citizens, refugees, and asylum seekers who have previously been theorized using terms such as ‘bare life’,20 ‘rejected people’,21 ‘non-citizens’,22 ‘statelessness’,23 and whose ‘citizenship is [the] right to have rights’,24 and so on.25 This book argues that academic forums and scholarly communities assume the vulnerability of the Rohingyas because of their statelessness and express this assumption through phrases such as ‘the state of stateless people’,26 ‘the face of stateless person’,27 ‘the miserable lives of non-citizens’,28 and ‘rights of others’,29 thereby justifying the conditions of these people created by the state and its agents, practices, institutions, and machinery. One often sees that the literature on non-citizens and stateless people presents the vulnerability of stateless people as being taken for granted. Unlike this academic establishment on the issue of non-citizens and stateless people, this book is adequately aware that not only are there hundreds of thousands of people who belong to a particular state along with holding citizenship in respective nation states and regions such as Egypt,

Introduction 5

Costa Rica, Ecuador, India, Central America, Europe, Middle East, Syria, Venezuela, and West Africa, but they also experience everyday forms of discrimination and persecution on a regular basis and extreme degrees of cruelty perpetrated by the state. Their situation is not any less vulnerable than that of the stateless and non-citizens. This legitimizes the production and reproduction of vulnerability as essentially not connected with non-citizenship or statelessness and also brings to attention the historical trajectories of state formation, totalitarianism in state structure, majoritarian attempts of nation-building, and the nature of the state towards the people from minority or marginalized communities living in the same state territory. With the ethnographic details of the extremely vulnerable conditions of the Rohingyas, the book argues that the nature of the state and its perspectives, policy, and approach towards the people of cultural, religious, and racial differences are instrumental in rendering their state of life ‘subhuman’. The way I propose to conceptualize the ‘subhuman’ is as one who is born in the human society but has no space in the human community. The ‘subhuman’ does not receive the treatment a human deserves and does not lead the life a human being would. They are born in the world, but the world does not own them in any state structure. Treated as o-manush (non-human), they do not exist in the legal framework of any state. Subhuman is a particular category of people who live in the borderlands of ‘life’ and ‘death’. Subhuman people are not human in their due dignity, rights, and voice.30 Citizenship scholars quite often justify the extreme vulnerability and the stark uncertainty of their lives as ‘taken for granted’ due to their non-citizenship and statelessness, following Arendt in her claims that ‘citizenship is the right to have [other] rights’.31 But I argue that citizenship and non-citizenship succeed the roles of the state. The Rohingyas, therefore, are in a position of acute vulnerability and endless uncertainty because of the nature of Myanmar (militarized and majoritarian) and its approach towards the people of ethnic (Rohingya versus Burman), religious (Islamic versus Buddhist), and racial (South Asian origin versus South-east Asian ones) difference. Using the example of the case of Rohingyas living at the border of Bangladesh and Myanmar, I propose five characteristics that qualify a group of people as ‘subhuman’. I have discussed each characteristic of subhuman life with detailed first-hand ethnographic narratives in

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The Rohingya

various chapters of this book. Five basic features that constitute ‘subhuman’ life include: (1) atrocious living conditions (which makes the place unliveable and forces people to leave); (2) illegal object in legal framework (which makes people legal entities instead of human beings, and hence, people are dealt with inhumanly); (3) homeless at home as there is nowhere to go (which renders people shelter-less as the home state denies them their right to live in their land of birth and as people of the soil); (4) a condition in which the subject is always vulnerable to being killed, raped, and burnt (which allows the state, state agents, and state practice to kill, rape, and burn these people and their properties with deliberate coercion); (5) a life deemed fit for extinction (which denotes a particular form of life which lacks the basic amenities for survival). Subhuman life could be an individual life or lives of a group of people, but the individual or the group must experience five conditionalities enshrined in its theoretical formulation. This book could also be understood through the lens of ‘the human rights of non-citizens’32 who encounter atrocities and oppressions committed by the state and its practices due to their status as non-citizens. Therefore, the book cuts across the boundaries of scholarship that include the anthropology of human rights,33 anthropology of the state,34 and anthropology of citizenship.35 The anthropology of human rights focuses on human rights from multiple perspectives, its implementation and protection, its institutional dimensions, and the dilemmas associated with human rights in cross-cultural perspective in local–global contexts. Anthropology of the state examines the institutions, spaces, ideas, practices, and representations that constitute the ‘state’ in the localsocietal dynamics. Therefore, both bodies of theoretical domain befit the case of the Rohingyas. On citizenship alone, anthropology has produced a rich amount of literature,36 which discusses the liberal connotations of universal rights, leaving out many local-social-cultural practices that inform noncitizens’ daily dealings with the political realities. Therefore, there is a need for ‘the anthropology of non-citizens’, which is still in the making. The broader divide in theories of citizenship is between (1) the liberal definitions in terms of political-economic rights and duties of an individual37 and (2) communitarian theories that emphasize the participatory and relational aspects of citizenship as a matter of community

Introduction 7

politics.38 Some have considered citizenship as a legal status39 while others see it as ‘a process’.40 However, non-citizenship is still relatively a non-issue in academia and policy formulation as academics are heavily involved in the issues of citizenship and human rights. Therefore, ‘it is difficult to examine the status of non-citizens, obligations towards them, and … their roles in political systems.’41 Consequently, there is a critical gap between theorizing non-citizens and the lived experiences of people. This book addresses this gap in the case of the Rohingyas. Having considered the conceptual framework of relations between the state of non-citizens, their atrocious conditions, and the dreadful roles of the state to make the lives of the Rohingyas ‘unliveable’, we are compelled to consider such a life as ‘subhuman’. Though considerable literature42 has been published on citizenship, there is still a dearth of ethnographic study of non-citizens in anthropology and in the social sciences. It is equally applicable to the Rohingyas as serious academic attention has not yet been paid to them. Despite the vast amount of work on the issues of the stateless, asylum seekers, migrants, and refugees across the world, very few critical academic works have been written on the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh and elsewhere as of today. Renowned historian Abdul Karim43 wrote a book about the history of the Rohingyas, particularly focusing on who the Rohingyas are and how they, for the first time, appeared in the demography of Arakan in Burma. Karim attempted to prove that the Rohingyas are the descendants of the Arab-origin traders and explorers who came to Arakan in the eighth century. However, he heavily relied on the works of the noted poets of the medieval period, namely Alaol,44 which has raised the question of whether poetry could be the basis of historical facts and an authentic source of history. Several subsequent scholarships have seemingly failed to establish a solid and authentic historical foundation of the Rohingyas in Arakan, since majority of them have used Karim as their main source of information. Abdur Razzak and Mahfuzul Haque45 have co-written a book that discusses the ethno-historical and political background of the Rohingyas and the history of Rohingya migrations in Bangladesh. Their book sheds light on the political history of Arakan in connection with the Rohingya influx in Bangladesh. It does not touch the current state of the Rohingyas in which state agencies are engaged in serious human rights violations and dreadful persecution. It seems more like a political statement than

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The Rohingya

a critical analysis of the existing crisis that the Rohingyas are experiencing. Imtiaz Ahmed46 edited a book on the plight of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh as an outcome of his experience as a consultant. The book contains eight chapters, including the ‘Introduction’ and ‘Conclusion’, that focus on the history of emergence of the refugee crisis, transformation of the state of Myanmar from colonial through post-colonial to the process of democratization, genealogy of influx that started from 1978, the current refugee situation in Bangladesh, and the potential policy recommendations regarding how to resolve the Rohingya refugee crisis. It recommends how and why the state, civil society, and international community should come forward to resolve the Rohingya refugee issue. However, it does not pay attention to the issue of how they become subject to discrimination and injustice committed by state institutions and state machineries at the local level in Bangladesh and Myanmar. My earlier work, an edited volume on the Rohingyas,47 puts together various perspectives—legal, political, ecological, socio-cultural, and transnational—to form a comprehensive framework for understanding the plight of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. It talks about the brief ethnic history of the Rohingyas, their shift of status from residents to stateless people in Myanmar and from stateless people to refugee-hood in Bangladesh, their roles in environmental degradation, their crisis of social integration, how the Rohingya crisis impacts interstate relations between Bangladesh and Myanmar, and so on. It also lacks rigour in explaining how the state regulates the everyday life of the Rohingyas despite their statelessness. Apart from four books specifically focusing on the Rohingyas, there are four more books48 that are widely referred to when studying the Arakan-Bengal relations and the history of Muslims in Arakan, with the Rohingyas placed at the centre of the discussion. Mohammad Ali Chowdhury has written a detailed historical genealogy of BengalArakan relations in his book,49 where he has wonderfully depicted the political trajectory of various dynasties in both Bengal and Arakan and how the relationship between both the neighbouring states has been changed on the basis of the bilateral trade, and strategic and geopolitical interests. As part of the Bengal–Arakan relations, Chowdhury has time and again brought up the issues of Rohingya settlement and their transborder mobility. The origin of Rohingya ethnicity and their struggle for existence in the state formation and nation-building in Myanmar

Introduction 9

is completely absent. Mohibullah Siddiquee edited a book50 in Bengali where he housed a couple of very good chapters that focused on the first arrivals of Muslims in Arakan, their exploration, their settlements, and their roles in the state management of Arakan. Some of the chapters in Siddiquee’s book are very informative and analytically sound, they focus on the historical chronology of Muslim settlement in Arakan that started from the seventh century. The book, in almost all chapters, claims that the emergence of Muslims is the beginning of the appearance of the Rohingyas in the demographic composition of Arakan. It lacks logical ground because the Muslims who first arrived in Arakan were not the Rohingyas by ethnicity. Therefore, the arrival of Muslims does not essentially confirm the emergence of the Rohingyas in Arakan. Besides, it does not contain anything regarding the current Rohingya situation in Bangladesh and Myanmar. Mahfuzur Rahman Akhanda has written a book51 on the history of Muslims in Arakan, which has heavily emphasized the Muslim arrival, their settlement, their struggle for survival, their role in the expansion of Islam, and their contribution to the spreading of Islam in this region, particularly in Arakan. It discusses little about the history of the Rohingyas separately; rather it largely pays attention to the history of Muslims in Arakan. Besides, it does not contain anything about the struggle of the Rohingyas following the decolonization process in Burma and later Myanmar. Akhanda has recently written another book52 in which a large chunk of information has been reproduced from the discussion in his earlier book, along with some updated information. He has attempted to touch upon the recurrent Rohingya refugee situation in Bangladesh and how the crisis has been represented by the local media. However, the book solely depends on secondary resources and lacks analytical depth. Habib Ullah’s book title53 seems interesting but it hardly has any historical record, authentic source, or academically acceptable data which can help us understand the history of the Rohingyas. Besides, the book is not systematically and methodologically organized enough to be treated as a serious academic piece, and thereby connot not be authenticated or used as a source in any quality academic writing. Apart from that, it has completely missed the dynamics of the Rohingya crisis that started from 1962. So, many books have been written on the Rohingyas, but rarely does anyone address the authentic history of the Rohingyas as an ethnic group, their

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The Rohingya

constant struggle for survival, and the recent horrifying experience of brutality perpetrated by the Myanmar state. I have recently written a book54 in Bengali based on the lives of the Rohingyas. In its introductory chapter, this book has attempted to explore the historical trajectories of Arakan and Burma to trace the ethno-history of the Rohingyas. Besides, the book talks about the recent developments of the Rohingya crisis, the role of Bangladesh state in handling this crisis, the deliberate policies of Myanmar to drive the Rohingyas out of Rakhine State, their atrocious living conditions in Rakhine State, the roles of international communities, the transforming relations between the local community and the Rohingyas in south-eastern Bangladesh, the roles of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and the possible solutions to the Rohingyas problem. My Bengali book on the Rohingyas is also based on my decade-long experience of dealing with the Rohingya issue and my recent field visits to Ukhia and Teknaf. Therefore, it could be considered as a comprehensive Bengali book for the local audience based on ethnographic field experience. Apart from all the aforementioned books, a good number of scholarly articles have been published that address various aspects of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. Paying attention to the gender issue, Gawher Nayeem Wahra55 discussed the context of how women are more vulnerable among Rohingya refugees. Eileen Pittaway56 wrote a chapter on the role of the international community and their failure to implement the successful repatriation of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. In her chapter, she has written about the potential of thirdcountry resettlement and local integration as a posssible solution to the Rohingya problem, but she suggested that voluntary repatriation is the best and lasting solution, something that the international community has failed to do. However, this write-up also lacks the current dynamics of the Rohingya problem. Utpala Rahman57 took the Rohingya refugee situation as a security issue to address how domestic security is threatened due to Rohingya involvement in militant activities; Chris Lewa58 wrote about the miserable living conditions and poor healthcare situation of Rohingya refugees living in Bangladesh; Kristy Crabtree59 shed light on their economic challenges and coping strategies; Victoria Palmer60 focused on the role and politics of Muslim aid agencies in operating relief programmes for the Rohingyas; A.K.M. Ahsan Ullah61 wrote about the social integration and political marginalization that

Introduction

11

historically shaped the current vulnerable conditions of Rohingya life; and Naushin Parnini62 illuminated how the Rohingya refugee issue reshapes Bangladesh–Myanmar bilateral relations. Susan Hutchinson63 wrote about the gender dimension of the Rohingya crisis, focusing particularly on pregnant women in refugee camps who crossed the border in 2016 and also more recently. However, she missed out on the broader spectrum of the Rohingya experience of brutality, atrocity, and persecution perpetrated by the state agents. Jobair Alam64 has written about the minority status of the Rohingyas in Myanmar, discussing four factors: (1) development of Burmese nationalism; (2) politicization of identity for Burmese majority; (3) taking away the citizenship of the Rohingyas; and (4) ethnic divisions in Myanmar society. These factors have played significant roles in (re)constructing their identity as a minority. The article also misses out on the severe sufferings of the Rohingyas due to state-sponsored violence and systematic atrocities. The list of articles could be longer, but majority of them are more or less in the genre of political analysis based on secondary sources and media reports. Therefore, in my opinion, most of these articles seriously lack the empirical data, personal narratives of Rohingyas’ lived experiences, and analytical strength to unfold the extreme degree of vulnerability that the Rohingyas are currently undergoing and which has made their existence lesser than that of humans. Besides, many reports published by many national and international organizations and human rights bodies65 are available, but most of them lack academic authenticity since they follow a set of prescribed ideas and agendas. In his recent book, Azeem Ibrahim66 attempted to establish the premise that what Myanmar is doing today with the Rohingyas in Rakhine State is a ‘fair genocide’, in what he calls ‘hidden genocide’. Ibrahim wrote about the history of the Rohingyas from the unknown past to 1848 when Burma decolonized, moved from independence to democracy (1948–2010), returned to democracy (2008–15), miseries of the Rohingyas (2008–15), the current situation in Rakhine State, why we should call the state’s atrocities as genocide under international law, and finally what would be a potential solution or what we could do. It largely leaves out the Rohingyas’ voices and first-hand narratives, as the whole book is based on secondary sources, historical data, newspaper reports, and personal analysis of the facts. The book also does not cover what the situation in Bangladesh is, as far as the Rohingyas

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The Rohingya

are concerned. Kazi Fahmida Farzana has recently published a book67 where she focuses on the Rohingya identities and its contestation with Myanmar state’s narratives about the Rohingyas and Rohingyas’ problem. She has also discussed reconstruction of the social memories of the Rohingyas and everyday life at refugee camps, but she has taken art and music as the symbol of identity and everyday resistance. She also misses out on the ground realities of how the Rohingyas face discrimination everyday due to their statelessness. She does not pay attention to the atrocious conditions in Rakhine State, which force hundreds of thousands of Rohingyas to flee to Bangladesh. The book also lacks an empirical foundation of discussion and analysis, and thereby, Rohingyas are not heard with due priority and privilege. Francis Wade68 published a book that discussed the degree of Buddhist violence and how such widespread violence made the Muslims ‘Others’ in the Myanmar state structure. His book is basically a journalistic analysis of the crisis, but he has paid adequate attention to the history of colonialism and the transition of postcolonial period along with its ethnic and religious divide between national majority and ethnic minorities including the Rohingyas. It has little discussion about the Rohingya crisis. Besides, one of the big concerns is that the entire crisis has been represented as a matter of religious intolerance, instead of Myanmar state’s nature and policy towards the ethnic, religious, and racial minority within its borders. Sabyasachi Basu Ray and Ranabir Samaddar69 have recently edited a volume on the Rohingyas in South Asia, which contains seven chapters focusing on: their statelessness, becoming ‘boat people’, their vulnerable state in India, particularly in Hyderabad and West Bengal, and their different forms of struggle in India and Bangladesh. It looks at the broader picture of historical and political dimensions of the Rohingya crisis, without having the narratives of the brutal experiences they lived through in 2016 and 2017. Anthony Ware and Costas Laoutides’s70 book, putting the word Rohingya within inverted commas confirms that the authors are not even ready to call them the Rohingyas. The book is basically about the Rohingya crisis from Myanmar’s perspective and the authors’ position becomes conspicuous right from the beginning of the book as they have taken a clear stand in supporting military roles in Myanmar. The book has seven chapters and all of them seem like ‘leaflets’ of the Myanmar state without considering the ground reality and horrible experiences that the Rohingyas lived through due

Introduction

13

to state-sponsored persecution in what is widely known as a ‘textbook example of ethnic cleaning’.71 Clearly, there is a serious dearth of good ethnographic and comprehensive studies to understand the plight of Rohingya refugees in Myanmar, where silent atrocities, deep injustice, and everyday discrimination are committed by the state and its agents. It is my attempt to fill this academic vacuum and provide policymakers with a comprehensive picture of the continuing crisis of the Rohingya refugees, which could be instrumental in resolving their problem through cooperation and rehabilitation rather than conflict. This book could also present before the international community the ground reality of what is happening in the lives of Rohingyas, with a considerable number of personal narratives and collective memories recorded from the lived experiences of the Rohingyas in both Bangladesh and Myanmar. More importantly, the book aims to bring the human rights of non-citizens and stateless people before the international community, rights bodies, academia, political sphere, and public domain with particular reference to the case of the Rohingyas in Bangladesh. This book is an outcome of my years of engagement with the Rohingya community spanning from 1997 to 2019. In my professional capacity, I began working on the Rohingya refugees from 2001 onwards when I joined the University of Chittagong as a faculty member of anthropology. Having lived in close proximity with the Rohingyas since my boyhood—as I was born and brought up in Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, which has been inhabited by Rohingya refugees since 1978—I got the opportunity to observe their presence, their everyday struggle for survival, and their interaction with the local host society. This is what explains my academic investment and the long analytical perspective, having been witness to the transformation of Rohingya problems in both Bangladesh and Myanmar over all these years. My training in anthropology at the University of Dhaka shaped my outlook of being open to a bottom-up approach, which gave me different insights, unlike the popular narratives regarding the Rohingyas in Bangladesh. Besides, my studies in Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, and India, as well as my research engagement with colleagues from various universities in the United States of America, Canada, Japan, India, Germany, and the United Kingdom on the complex relations of the state, marginality, and the people of

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The Rohingya

Figure 1.1

Rohingya men and women in queue for biometric registration

Source: Author’s personal collection.

cultural difference gave me a deep analytical scholarship and a solid theoretical foundation to understand the evolving relations between the state and the Rohingyas. This is instrumental to articulate a theoretical platform like ‘subhuman’ life and to understand the extreme vulnerability of the people.

Introduction

Figure 1.2

15

Fieldwork among the Rohingyas in Pasan Para, Ukhia, in 2017

Source: Author’s personal collection.

I have undertaken ethnographic research on both Rohingya refugees and unregistered Rohingyas who live in Bangladesh. The data discussed is comprehensive, descriptive, and qualitative in nature. I undertook classical ethnographic fieldwork in the communities of Teknaf and Ukhia—two sub-districts of Cox’s Bazar, a borderland between Bangladesh and Myanmar—for more than two years in different phases spread across a period of over two decades. Out of the many villages cohabited by unregistered Rohingyas and local Bengalis in Teknaf and Ukhia, I selected two—Vasan Para72 (pseudonym) in Teknaf and Pasan Para73 (pseudonym) in Ukhia.74 These two villages often appeared in newspaper reports for violent clashes between the Bengalis and the Rohingyas.75 I also visited the Kutupalong and Nayapara makeshift refugee camps—’Taal’ located in Ukhia and ‘Leda’ located in Teknaf—many times between 1997 and 2018. Apart from these, I recorded hundreds of case studies, life histories, genealogies, and personal narratives during this long period of my engagement with the Rohingyas as a researcher. I interviewed hundreds

16

The Rohingya

of Rohingyas in 1992, 2012, 2015, 2016, and 2017, following the new influx. Very recently, I interviewed more than five hundred newly arrived Rohingyas and recorded their personal narratives and collective memories regarding their settlement in Rakhine State, why they fled to Bangladesh, how they crossed the border and got shelter in Bangladesh, and their thoughts on their collective future. Besides, I interviewed many diaspora Rohingya communities who live in different countries across the world, particularly those from Waterloo-Kitchenware area in Canada,76 Heidelberg in Germany,77 Bradford in England, and Penang in Malaysia.78 This book ought not to be seen as just an outcome of fieldwork in a certain period of time, based on some selected case studies, and on the experience of a couple of sojourns following typical methodological categories of social sciences, particularly orthodox ‘ethnographic principle in practice’.79 I would rather present this work as an in-depth account of my decades-long intimacy and engagement with the Rohingya issue. This book is structurally organized into eight chapters, starting with Chapter 1 that provides a comprehensive introduction and ending with a concluding note in Chapter 8. Each chapter is independent as well as a part of the whole that constitutes a moving picture of the Rohingya life. Chapter 2 places the Rohingyas in their historical, political, and cultural context—who they are, where did they come from, how did they appear in the demographic composition of Burma, and the human geography of Arakan or what is now called the Rakhine State. It brings in the historical trajectory of Muslim settlements in this region dating back to the eighth century when Arab traders first anchored in northern Arakan and settled down there. Among other things, it also critically engages with the debate on whether the emergence of Muslims in Arakan laid down the foundation of Rohingya ethnicity or whether becoming Rohingya was tied to their distinctive social practices, cultural heritage, and a continuity of particular ethnicity. Towards this objective, the chapter explores the historical chronology of different political upheavals that have gradually pushed them to the margin of the state. It lays the ground for other studies to begin their research on the Rohingyas with a critical reconsideration of the ethnic, regional, and political history of Arakan/Rakhine State across time. Chapter 3 discusses the crises of social integration of Rohingya refugees in the host societies of south-eastern Bangladesh. It argues that

Introduction

17

hosting the refugee is always problematic and troublesome from the perspective of the host society and the host’s perception is hurtful to the refugees. State-level perception and local-level realities are strikingly different when it comes to hosting refugees. What the state thinks of as right-doing from the top might appear as wrong-doing from the bottom of society. Local society always encounters the problems in the periphery more directly and explicitly than the state in the centre. This chapter merely focuses on the dynamics of interaction between the host society and the migrated refugees at the grass-root level through the metaphor of ‘hosting’ and ‘hurting’. Though hosting and hurting are perceived from subjective interpretations, the chapter attempts to unveil the objective reality in the context of the dilemma regarding integration between refugees and the host society in the case of the Rohingyas in Bangladesh. Chapter 4 examines the plight of stateless people who are born in one state but live in another state, neither of which recognizes them as full citizens. This practice is in sharp contrast with the individual right to citizenship. In an era characterized by people’s increasing mobility, while moving across borders is becoming a universal right, albeit slowly, legal implications of the individual right to citizenship require that globally, citizenship should not be limited within territorial boundaries and nation states. The individual right to citizenship instead could even be de-territorialized and seen in a post-national framework, where border crossers could have the right to citizenship. This may open roads to resolving many looming issues of illegal migration, refugee conflicts, and complexities of interstate border crossing. Under this premise, this chapter particularly discusses the plight of the Rohingyas, an ethno-religious and linguistic minority of Myanmar, living in Bangladesh as refugees and illegal migrants, beneath the complex notions of citizenship. Chapter 5 focuses on the vulnerable conditions of the stateless people because the state, in various forms, regulates their everyday lives, committing severe injustices and producing various inequalities in the state structure. The notion of the modern nation state has produced the concept of citizenship, rendering some people stateless. Since the condition of statelessness sanctions that some people do not belong to any state, they cannot claim any rights from any state and therefore easily become subject to injustice, inequality, and discrimination and

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The Rohingya

are even subjected to death. The treatment of stateless people as illegal human bodies and as animals can be termed as ‘bare life’, as Agamben80 would argue. A life is ‘bare’ because it can be taken by anyone without any legal intercession and without incurring the guilt of homicide, as this life does not exist ‘before the law’. This chapter depicts a vivid picture of the Rohingyas, where the state intervenes in their everyday lives amid the production and reproduction  of vulnerabilities in order to reconfirm their statelessness. Chapter 6 presents a number of fresh ethnographic details that contain the personal narratives of the recently arrived Rohingyas in Bangladesh, following the horrifying campaign by the Myanmar security forces and vigilantes. This chapter builds on 10 representative cases that unfold the ground reality of what is happening with the Rohingyas in Rakhine State and Bangladesh. These personal narratives unfold the degree of cruelty, the level of atrocities, and the nature of brutality perpetrated by the Myanmar security forces, ethnic extremists, and Buddhist fundamentalists, experiences that are good enough to render the Rohingyas—a group of people lesser than human beings—‘subhuman’. Presenting the atrocious condition of the Rohingyas, their existence in Rakhine State as illegal bodies, their extreme uncertainty regarding what to do and whom to complain to, their lived memories of being raped, punished, and killed, this chapter brings out how their lives are ‘subhuman’. Chapter 7 pays attention to the people’s critical ‘living conditionality’ created by the condition of statelessness, non-citizenship, and refugee-hood. At the same time, rather than looking at such vulnerable conditions as taken for granted for the stateless people, this chapter critically engages with the body of scholarship on citizenship, asylum seekers, stateless people, and refugees, arguing whether these theories generated by academics otherwise are legitimizing the dehumanization process perpetrated by the states in various forms. This chapter offers a new perspective to contribute theoretically to the scholarship on the stateless, non-citizens, asylum seekers, and refugees by critical engagement with the idea of ‘bare life’, ‘rejected people’, ‘geontologies’, ‘statelessness’, and so on. It argues that there are many people living in this world who possess citizenship and belong to a particular state but have brutal experiences which are even more cruel than those faced by the Rohingyas. So, the reasons do not essentially lie in the absence of citizenship and non-recognition of the state, but they largely depend upon

Introduction

19

the nature of the state and its perspectives towards people of different ethnicities, religions, and ‘race’. Given the context, subhuman could be a framework to understand the acute vulnerable conditions of people and the nature of the state. It could also provide a new framework of understanding genocide, ethnocide, ethnic cleansing, and domicide. In my theorization, this chapter argues that ‘subhuman’ is a category of people who are born in the human society but have no space in the human community; they are born in the world, but the world does not own them in any state structure, and they always live on the borderline of ‘life’ and ‘death’. With ethnographic evidences, the chapter proves that the way the Rohingyas are dealt with in both Myanmar and Bangladesh shows that they are being treated as ‘subhuman’ since 1962. Chapter 8 discusses the existing scholarship on the potential solution of the Rohingya problem with a critical examination of the roles of regional political dynamics, South and Southeast Asian geopolitics, bilateral and multilateral interstate relations, and the roles of the global community. Following the latest influx in 2017, the local, national, regional, and international partners; well-wishers; journalists; experts; scholars; and international communities such as the United Nations (UN) (and its organs like UNHCR, United Nations International Children’s Education Fund [UNICEF]), IOM, International Labour Organization (ILO), European Union (EU), Amnesty International (AI), Human Rights Watch (HRW), Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and the Arab League—are calling for a permanent solution of the Rohingya problem. This chapter raises the following questions: solution for whom? (for the Rohingyas, who are not problem-creators); solution by whom? (by the international community that cannot create any meaningful pressure on Myanmar); and for what? (for bringing the Rohingyas back, whereas the Rakhine State and its people are not ready to accept them at any cost). This chapter finally attempts to explain some practical issues stemming from the field through ethnographic studies regarding how the Rohingyas think of changing their vulnerable and miserable lives in Bangladesh and Myanmar. It ends with a practical proposal, echoing what I have learned on the ground from my interaction with hundreds of Rohingyas, that is, repatriation could be the enduring and sustainable solution of the Rohingya crisis, but it should be done following three conditions: legal recognition, social safety, and human dignity.

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The Rohingya

Notes 1. It was circulated by the Myanmar state-sponsored media that 30 police posts and 1 military base were simultaneously attacked by a so-called Rohingya militant group known as the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), which left many injured. Then a combined campaign began, and in the name of counter-insurgency, Myanmar state forces cracked down on the civilian settlement areas inhabited by the Rohingyas, particularly Maungdaw, Buthidaung, and Thatchingdon. Detailed discussions can be found in this chapter and in Chapters 2 and 3. 2. CNG scooter is a three wheeler that runs on CNG. The CNG scooters are widely used as a common means of public transport in Ukhia and Teknaf for short distances. They operate from Teknaf refugee camps to Ukhia refugee camps. One CNG scooter can carry five passengers at a time. 3. Kutupalong is one of the two official camps located in Ukhia for the Rohingya refugees. Another one is Nayapara located in Teknaf. It is worth mentioning here that Teknaf is the borderland of Bangladesh and Myanmar. A small river called the Naf River is the demarcating water body between Bangladesh and Myanmar. The Rohingyas have to cross the Naf River to migrate to Teknaf in Bangladesh. Ukhia is an adjacent sub-district of Teknaf. The Rohingyas usually cross the border and take shelter in Teknaf, and then gradually move to Ukhia. 4. Balukhali is a temporary refugee camp built for the Rohingya refugees who arrived after 25 August 2017, following the campaign against Rohingyas by the Myanmar state forces in the name of counter-insurgency that I have discussed in detail in various chapters. Balukhali is located in Ukhia. 5. This is the only road to travel from Cox’s Bazar town through Ukhia to Teknaf. This road is still widely known as the Arakan Road since it was used as the only connecting road between Chittagong and Arakan during the preBritish, British, and even the post-British period. For details, see Nasir Uddin, ed., To Host or To Hurt: Counter Narratives on Rohingya Refugee Issue in Bangladesh (Dhaka: Institute for Culture and Development Research [ICDR], 2012b). 6. Burqa is a particular kind of over-cloth that Muslim women usually wear for maintaining purdah, a principle of Islamic dress code. 7. The IOM has worked to manage the shelter for the newly arrived Rohingyas since the beginning of the influx on 25 August 2017. The UNHCR was also working hard to manage the refugee situation. It was truly difficult for IMO and UNHCR to tackle the massive refugee flow in 2017. Therefore, many newly arrived Rohingyas had to wait for days to get registered in the temporary refugee camps in Teknaf and Ukhia. 8. Rakhine Buddhists are called moghs by the Rohingyas.

Introduction

21

9. See, for details, Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth (England: Penguin Books, [1961] 2001). 10. The political history of Burma’s transition to Myanmar has been discussed in detail in this chapter and in Chapter 2. 11. For details, see Penny Green, Thomas MacManus, and Alicia de la Cour Venning, Countdown Annihilation: Genocide in Myanmar (London: International State Crime Initiative, 2015); Azeem Ibrahim, The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide (London: Hurst & Company, 2016); Nasir Uddin, Not Rohingyas, but Royainga: Stateless People in the Struggle for Existence (in Bengali) (Dhaka: Murddhanno Publisher, 2017b); K. Fahmida Farzana, Memories of Burmese Rohingya Refugees: Contested Identities and Belonging (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017); Nasir Uddin, ‘Ethnic Cleansing of the Rohingya People,’ in The Palgrave Handbook of Ethnicity, ed. S. Ratuva (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019a). 12. A detailed description of my fieldwork has been discussed in the later part of this chapter. 13. The citizenship of the Rohingyas was taken away in 1982 by enacting the Myanmar Citizenship Law, which conferred citizenship to 135 national races excluding the Rohingyas. Detailed discussions are in Chapters 1, 2, and 3. 14. For details, see Sarah Donovan, Genocide Literature in Middle and Secondary Classrooms: Rhetoric, Witnessing, and Social Action in a Time of Standards and Accountability (UK and USA: Routledge, 2016). 15. See Amy Hungerford, The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature and Representation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003). 16. By ‘at present’, I mean the ‘post-2017 influx’ of the Rohingya refugee situation in Bangladesh because recent counter-insurgency campaigns by the Myanmar security forces, started on 25 August 2017, triggered the influx of more than 750,000 Rohingyas in addition to over 500,000–550,000 Rohingyas already existing in Bangladesh. Therefore, in terms of demographic composition, Bangladesh is currently hosting about 1.3 million Rohingyas, which is the highest in number across the world. 17. All Rohingyas currently living in Bangladesh are not officially designated as refugees. The Rohingyas who live in the official refugee camps in Nayapara in Teknaf and Kutupalong in Ukhia are officially refugees while the rest are now illegal Rohingyas. Recently, the Bangladesh government prepared a biometric database of more than one million Rohingyas who are officially termed as ‘forcibly displaced Myanmar nationals’. According to official statistics, there are 32,000 Rohingya refugees. Details have been provided in the subsequent chapters. 18. Rohingyas living in Bangladesh are now officially identified as forcibly displaced Myanmar nationals (FDMN). In that case, Rohingyas can be termed as ‘forcibly displaced persons’.

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19. The newly arrived Rohingyas are known as ‘asylum seekers’, but once they get registered under the biometric database system, they become ‘forcedly displaced Myanmar nationals’. 20. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 21. Myron Weiner, ‘Rejected Peoples and Unwanted Migrants in South Asia,’ Economic and Political Weekly 28, no. 34 (1993): 1737–46. 22. David Weissbrodt, The Human Rights of Non-citizens (USA: Oxford University Press, 2008). 23. Kristy Belton, ‘Statelessness: A Matter of Human Rights,’ in The Human Rights to Citizenship: A Slippery Concept, ed. Rhoda Howard-Hassmann and Margaret Walton-Roberts (Pennsylvania: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 31–44; Anna Fries, Memories of a Stateless Person (Bloomington: AuthorHouse, 2013). 24. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Books, 1994). 25. These ideas have been discussed in further detail in Chapters 2 and 7. 26. Nasir Uddin, ‘State of Stateless People: The Plight of Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh,’ in Human Rights to Citizens: A Slippery Concept, ed. Rhoda Howard -Hassmann and Margaret Walton-Roberts (USA: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 62–77. 27. Fries, Memories of a Stateless Person. 28. Rayner Thwaites, The Liberty of Non-citizens: Indefinite Detention in Commonwealth Countries (UK: Hart Publishing, 2014). 29. Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 30. See Nasir Uddin, ‘Life in Everyday Death: The Rohingyas in Bangladesh and Myanmar,’ Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs, Georgetown University, 19 October 2017a, accessed 25 April 2008, https:// berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/responses/life-in-everyday-death-the-rohingyasin-bangladesh-and-myanmar. 31. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism. 32. See, for details, Weissbrodt, The Human Rights of Non-citizens. 33. Mark Goodale, ed., Surrendering to Utopia: An Anthropology of Human Rights (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2009). 34. Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta, eds., The Anthropology of the State: A Reader (USA, UK and Australia: Blackwell Publishing, 2006). 35. Sian Lazar, ed., The Anthropology of Citizenship: A Reader (UK and USA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). 36. Lazar, Anthropology of Citizenship.

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23

37. Thomas H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (London: Pluto Press, [1950] 1992), 11; Kate Nash, ‘Between Citizenship and Human Rights,’ Sociology 43, no. 6 (2009): 1067–83. 38. Ruth Lister, ‘Inclusive Citizenship: Realizing the Potential,’ Citizenship Studies 11, no. 1 (2007): 29; H. Mahdi, Gender and Citizenship: Hausa Women’s Political Identity from the Caliphate to the Protectorate (Goteborg: Goteborg University, 2006), 6. 39. Benhabib, The Rights of Others. 40. Miguel Almeida, ‘Citizenship and Anthropology: Perplexities of a Hybrid Social Agent’ (paper presented at European Association of Social Anthropologists [EASA] Conference, Copenhagen, 17 August 2002). 41. Katherine Tonkiss and Tendayi Bloom, ‘Theorising Noncitizenship: Concepts, Debates and Challenges,’ Citizenship Studies 19, no. 8 (2016): 837. 42. Benhabib, Rights of Others; Margaret Somers, Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness and the Right to Have Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Brad K. Blitz and Maureen Lynch, eds., Statelessness and Citizenship: A Comparative Study on the Benefits of Nationality (Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar, 2011); Kristy Belton, ‘The Neglected Non-citizen: Statelessness and Liberal Political Theory,’ The Journal of Global Ethics 7, no. 1 (2011): 59–71; Lazar, Anthropology of Citizenship; David Kinley, Wojciech Sadurski, and Kevin Walton, eds., Human Rights: Old Problems, New Possibilities (Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar, 2013); Heather L. Johnson, Borders, Asylum and Global Noncitizenship: The Other Side of the Fence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Emma Larking, Refugees and the Myth of Human Rights: Life outside the Pale of the Law (London and New York: Routledge, 2014); Rhoda Howard-Hassmann and Margaret Walton-Roberts, eds., The Human Rights to Citizenship: A Slippery Concept (Pennsylvania: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). 43. Abdul Karim, The Rohingyas: A Short Account of Their History and Culture (Chittagong: Arakan Historical Society, 2000). 44. Alaol (c. 1607–1680) was one of the greatest poets of medieval Bengali literature. It is widely known that one day while Alaol and his father were going to Chittagong by boat, they were attacked by Portuguese pirates who killed his father and injured Alaol. The wounded Alaol was taken to Arakan as a prisoner where he first worked as a bodyguard but was later employed in teaching music and drama. Later on, he became one of the leading poets of medieval Bengali literature with the patronization of the then Arakan king. For details, see ‘Alaol,’ Banglapedia, accessed 27 April 2018, http://en.banglapedia.org/index. php?title=Alaol.

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The Rohingya

45. Abdur Razzak and Mahfuzul Haque, A Tale of Refugees: Rohingyas in Bangladesh (Dhaka: Centre for Human Rights, 1995). 46. Imtiaz Ahmed, ed., The Plight of the Stateless Rohingyas (Dhaka: The University Press Limited, 2010). 47. Uddin, To Host or To Hurt. 48. M. Ali Chowdhury, Bengal-Arakan Relations (Kolkata: Firma KLM Private Limited, 2004); Mohibullah Siddiquee, ed., The Muslims in Arakan: History and Heritage (Chittagong: The Arakan Historical Society, 2000); Mahfuzur Rahman Akhanda, The History of Muslims in Arakan (in Bengali) (Dhaka-Chittagong: Bangladesh Co-operative Book Society, 2013); Habib Ullah, The History of Rohingyas (Chittagong: Bangladesh Co-operative Society, [1995] 2015). 49. See for details, Chowdhury, Bengal-Arakan Relations. 50. Siddiquee, The Muslims in Arakan. 51. Akhanda, The History of Muslims in Arakan. 52. Mahfuzur Rahman Akhanda, The Rohingya Problem and Bangladesh (in Bengali) (Rajshahi: Porilekh, 2018). 53. Ullah, The History of Rohingyas. 54. Uddin, Not Rohingyas, but Royaingas. 55. Gawher Nayeem Wahra, ‘Women Refugees in Bangladesh,’ Gender and Development 2, no. 1 (1994): 45–9. 56. Eileen Pittaway, ‘The Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh: The Failure of the International Protection Regime,’ in Protracted Displacement in Asia: No Place to Call Home, ed. Howard Adelman (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 83–104. 57. Utpala Rahman, ‘Rohingya Refugees: A Security Dilemma for Bangladesh,’ Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies 8, no. 2 (2010): 139–61. 58. Chris Lewa, Unregistered Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh: Crackdown, Forced Displacement and Hunger (Bangkok: The Arakan Project, 2010). 59. Kristy Crabtree, ‘Economic Challenges and Coping Mechanisms in Protracted Displacement: A Case Study of the Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh,’ Journal of Muslim Mental Health 5, no. 1 (2010): 41–58. 60. Victoria Palmer, ‘Analysing Cultural Proximity: Islamic Relief Worldwide and the Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh,’ Development in Practice 21, no. 1 (2011): 96–108. 61. A.K.M. Ahsan Ullah, ‘Rohingya Refugees to Bangladesh: Historical Exclusion and Contemporary Marginalization,’ Journal of Immigration and Refugee Studies 9, no. 2 (2011): 139–61. 62. Syeda Naushin Parnini, ‘Crisis of the Rohingya as Muslim Minority in Myanmar and Bilateral Relations with Bangladesh,’ Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 33, no. 2 (2013): 281–97. 63. Susan Hutchinson, ‘Gendered Insecurity in the Rohingya Crisis,’ Australian Journal of International Affairs 72, no. 1 (2017): 1–9.

Introduction

25

64. Jobair Alam, ‘The Rohingya of Myanmar: Theoretical Significance of the Minority Status,’ Asian Ethnicity 19, no. 2 (2018): 180–210. 65. For example, Médecins Sans Frontiers, 10 Years for The Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh: Past, Present and Future, 2002, accessed 29 July 2019. www.rnapress.com/data/itemfiles/5ae98e43d068cb749b3060b002601b95.pdf. 66. Ibrahim, The Rohingyas. 67. Farzana, Memories of Burmese Rohingya Refugees. 68. Francis Wade, Myanmar’s Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and the Making of a Muslim ‘Other’ (London: ZED Books, 2017). 69. S.B. Ray Chaudhury and Ranabir Samaddar, ed., The Rohingya in South Asia: People without a State (London and New York: Routledge, 2018). 70. Anthony Ware and Constas Laoutides, Myanmar’s ‘Rohingya’ Conflict (London: Hurst & Company, 2018). 71. M. Safi, ‘Myanmar Treatment of Rohingya looks like “Textbook Ethnic Cleansing”, Says UN,’ Guardian, 11 September 2017, accessed 28 October 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017sep/11/un-myanmars-treatmentof-rohingya-textbook-example-of-ethnic-cleansing. 72. Vasan Para means mobile village. The Rohingyas first come to Teknaf after crossing the Naf River. Then they stay in Teknaf for a short period of time before moving to other places, particularly to Ukhia. Since the Rohingyas use the space of Teknaf as their transit to move to other places, I metaphorically call my research site in Teknaf a mobile village or ‘Vasan Para’. 73. Pasan Para literarily means a cruel village. The Rohingyas cross the border and initially take shelter in Teknaf. After a few days/weeks/months, many of them move from Teknaf to Ukhia. After they arrive in Ukhia, the Rohingyas try to stay for a longer term as they do not have any other place to go to and, therefore, they usually settle down in Ukhia. Since they stay here for a longer period of time, they interact with the local people and are sometimes involved in various forms of conflicts of interest. The locals also blame the Rohingyas for many of their problems and miseries, which the Rohingyas consider as ‘cruel’ behaviour towards them. Considering the Rohingya perspective, I metaphorically use the pseudonym ‘Pasan Para’ for my research site in Ukhia. Though it is a simple village name, it contains some sort of reality. 74. As a local resident of Cox’s Bazar, both the villages are familiar to me, three of my relatives live there and hence I had easy access to the villagers. 75. Confrontations over accusations of cow stealing made by Bengali families against the Rohingyas, the raping of a Rohingya girl by a local Bengali, and the arrest of the Rohingyas by police in connection with militant activities are the reasons why these villages regularly appear in local and national dailies. 76. I met the diaspora Rohingyas living in Waterloo-Kitchenware in 2012 and 2017. I met as many as 20 Rohingyas there, discussed many issues with

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The Rohingya

them, and interviewed them. I also met some Rohingyas in Toronto in 2017 and interviewed them regarding the massive campaign against Rohingyas that took place in August 2017. 77. I interviewed a few Rohingyas in Germany in 2013 when I was a visiting fellow at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University. They had migrated to Thailand in 2012 and then subsequently shifted to Germany. I recorded their experience of migration from Rakhine State to Thailand and from Thailand to Germany. 78. I interviewed the Rohingya diaspora living in Bradford, London, in 2014 and 2018. I met many Rohingya activists and online bloggers in London in 2018 and met several Rohingyas in Malaysia in 2019. 79. For details, see Martyn Hammersley and Paul Atkinson, Ethnography: Principles in Practice (UK and USA: Routledge, 2007). 80. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. by D. Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).

2

Who Are the Rohingya? Life through Roshang, Arakan, and Rakhine State

D

uring the course of over two decades of my engagement with the Rohingyas as a researcher, I asked many Rohingyas across generations three simple questions: Why are you known as the Rohingyas? What has made the Rohingyas distinct from others? How are you different from Bengalis? The many Rohingyas whom I have met and interviewed in Ukhia, Teknaf, and other places1 since 1997 have time and again told me, ‘Araa baali na, araa rooinga’,2 which translates to ‘We are not Bengalis, we are Rohingyas.’ They also said, ‘Rooinga jatee3 have their own language, own ethnic history, and own culture. So, Rooinga jatee can never be Bengalis.’ In the two villages where I have been working for years, local Bengalis also often identify them as Rooinga. My host in Pasan Para, one of the two research sites where I have been carrying out ethnographic fieldwork for years, explained to me one day in 2015: ‘The Rooinga can never be Bengalis. Their behaviour, their attitudes, and their dealings with others are totally different from Bengalis. Their language, the vocabulary they use, the way they wear clothes, and the way they walk clearly distinguishes them from others. In fact, they are not Bengalis, they are Rooinga. Truly speaking, Rooinga can never be Bengalis.’ The two contested narratives, which are not essentially ‘two’ but represent hundreds of similar narratives as such, confirm the fact that the Rohingyas are not Bengalis due to their social and cultural markers and their ‘material and non-material culture’—what renowned anthropologist Fredrik Barth called ‘social organisation of cultural differences’.4 The Rohingya. Nasir Uddin, Oxford University Press (2020). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199489350.001.0001.

© Oxford University Press.

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When thinking about ethnic identity formation, I specifically take the framework proposed by Fredrik Barth, who very conspicuously discussed how the identity of an ethnic group takes shape in ‘association and interaction with others’. Barth talked about ethnic boundary, explaining that an ethnic group maintains its social and cultural boundary in association with other ethnic groups.5 Through interaction and close associations with others, a person (A) can recognize that s/he (A) is different from the other (B) and the other (B) also distinguish the person concerned (A) as distinct from them (B). Barth called it ‘social organisations of cultural differences’ where cultural differences mark boundaries between and among groups that help form ethnic identity. Many scholars6 explain the attributes of an ethnic group—when people feel that they belong to a particular group, they believe that they are the descendants of the same group, they feel ownership towards this group, the group also owns them, they feel a sense of difference from others, and others also admit and acknowledge that. These characteristics make an ethnic group. When contrasted with one another, the above statement that the Rohingyas feel that they belong to a particular ethnic group, distinct and separate from the Bengalis, as well the reverse perception of the latter community, we understand how each of the communities see and experience each other. What then explains Myanmar’s attempt at establishing a narrative wherein Rohingyas are not the citizens of Myanmar7 but they are, in fact, illegal Bengali migrants in Myanmar?8 Myanmar insists that the Rohingyas are Bengalis, and hence, cannot live in Rakhine State. Questions of citizenship and non-citizenship will be discussed in the subsequent chapters. Meanwhile, this chapter tries to answer some questions regarding the identity and ethnicity of the Rohingyas. The leading questions the chapter addresses are: Who are the Rohingyas? How did they come to be termed as the Rohingyas? When and how did they appear in the demographic composition of Arakan or what is now called the Rakhine State? Before unearthing why the Rohingyas now lead miserable lives in both Bangladesh and Myanmar, we first need to know the history and ethnology of the Rohingyas. This chapter brings in the historical trajectory of the Muslim settlement in this region, dating back to ‘the eighth century when Arab traders first came to the northern Arakan state and got settled down there’.9 The chapter also critically engages with the debate on whether the

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emergence of Muslims in Arakan essentially laid down the foundation of the Rohingya ethnicity or becoming Rohingya was related to their distinctive social practices, cultural heritage, and the continuity of a particular ethnicity. Towards this objective, the chapter explores, along with the Rohingya identity, the historical chronology of different political upheavals that have gradually pushed them to the margin of the state. It sets out to enter into the realm of the Rohingyas with a critical reconsideration of the ethnic, regional, and political history of Arakan/ Rakhine State of Burma/Myanmar across time.

Rohang, Rowsang, and the Rohingyas According to a popular saying, ‘Rohingyas are the inhabitants of Rohang, Rowsang or Rosaing which is the earlier name of Arakan now known as Rakhine state. Mrohong was the original Arakanese word of Rohang and Rohingyas were the inhabitants of Mrohong [Rohang].’10 In the medieval works of the poets of Arakan and Chittagong, such as Quazi Daulat, Mir Mardan, Shamser Ali, Quraishi Magan Thakur, Alaol, Abdul Ghani, and others, they frequently referred to Arakan as ‘Roshang’, ‘Roshanga’, ‘Roshango Shar’, and ‘Roshango Des’11 in their writings. However, the origin of the words ‘Arakan’, ‘Rohang’, and ‘Rohingyas’ is controversial since many historians12 are of different opinions over the issue. Arakan is an old coastal country of the Southeast Asian region. Historian Mohibullah wrote: The word Arakan is definitely of Arabic or Persian origin having the same meaning in both these languages. It is the corruption of the word Arkan plural of the word Al-Rukun. … In fact, the name of Arakan is of much antiquity. In Ptolemy’s Geografia (150 CE) it was named ‘Argyre’. Early Buddhist missionaries called Arakan as ‘Rekkha Pura’. In the Ananda Chandra stone pillar of Chandra dynasty (8th Century) at Shitthaung Pagoda in Mrauk-U the name of Arakan was engraved as ‘Arakades’s’. In a Latin Geography (1597 CE) by Peta Vino, the country was referred to as ‘Aracan’. Friar Manrique (1628–43 CE) mentions the country as Aracan.13

Arab ‘geographer Rashiduddin (1310 CE) wrote it as “Rahan or Raham”, a British traveller Relph Fitch (1586 CE) called it “Rocon” and Rennell’s map (1771 CE) depicted it as “Rassawn”. Even Tripura Chronicle “Rajmala” mentions the name of Arakan as Roshang.’14 Famous European

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traveller Francis Buchanan mentioned Arakan as Roung, Rossawn, and Russawn interchangeably.15 ‘Today the Muslims of Arakan call the country “Rohang” or “Arakan” and call themselves “Rohingya” or native[s] of Rohang. The Maghs [sic] call themselves “Rakhine” and call the country “Rakhine Pye” or country of Rakhine.’16 Based on A.S. Bahar’s PhD dissertation,17 M.A. Alam codifies the origin of the Rohingyas as follows: ‘Rohang, the old name of Arakan, was [a] very familiar region for the Arab seafarers even during the pre-Islamic days. Hence, the Rohingya Muslims, whose settlements in Arakan date back to seventh century CE are not an ethnic group which developed from one tribal group affiliation or single racial stock.’18 Many renowned historians are of the opinion that the Rohingyas are not a unique ethnic group, but a group developed from different stocks of people.19 However, the Rohingyas are predominantly Muslim by religion with a distinct culture, social-cultural organization, and civilization of their own. ‘[The Rohingyas] trace their ancestry to Arabs, Moors, Pathans, Moghuls, Central Asians, Bengalis and some IndoMongoloid people. Since Rohingyas are [a] mixture of many kinds of people ... the Rohingyas of Arakan still carried the Arab names, faith, dress, music and customs.’20 So, ‘the Rohingyas are nationals as well as an indigenous ethnic group of Burma. They are not [a] new born racial group of Arakan; rather they are as old an indigenous race of the country as any others.’21 This historical record and the earlier history of their settlement in the Arakan region, then known as Rohang, Rowshang, or Rohaing, also challenges and discards the latest state discourse that the Rohingyas are not the inhabitants of Myanmar but illegal Bengali migrants. I will discuss this in detail later in the book.

The Rohingya: History In order to identity Rohingya ethnicity, there is a common tendency to dig into the historical background,22 particularly the trend of tracing the time frame of when the Rohingyas first appeared in the demographic composition of Burma, now known as Myanmar.23 The state of Myanmar has produced a narrative of timing regarding the demographic appearance of the Rohingyas. What the Myanmar state says about the Rohingyas could be summarized thus: the Rohingyas are not the inhabitants of Myanmar and they have never been permanent residents of

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Burma. The Rohingyas are ‘illegal Bengali migrants’ who migrated to the Rakhine State during the British colonial period. The British brought a large number of Bengalis from then Bengal to British Burma for various reasons including agriculture, fishing, and other manual labour. The Rohingyas are not Burmese people at any level in the history of Burma. Their religion, culture, language, and physical appearance are different from that of Burmese people but similar to that of South Asians. These sorts of state narratives have been supported by some pro-Myanmar writers,24 some military-backed historians,25 and some extremist Burmese writers.26 However, the emergence of Islam in the Arakan state, the history of colonization and decolonization, and the history of people’s settlement in this region do not support the state narratives of Myanmar. There are five historical narratives regarding when and how Muslims arrived in Arakan, which is considered as the marker of the beginning of the preaching of Islam in this region. First, there is a legend which states that Hazrat Mohammad Bin Hanafi ([R] indicates one of the prophets in the history of Islam), the son of the fourth khalifa of Islam, first came to northern Rakhine State, what is now called Maungdaw, in 680 CE after their defeat in the Karbala war.27 During that time, northern Rakhine State was ruled by a queen named Kheyapari. Hazrat Hanafi engaged in warfare with Kheyapari, defeated her, and married her afterwards. Legend says that all her followers were converted to Islam, which marked the beginning of Islam in this region. In support of this legendary narrative, many contemporary scholars28 argue that there are two small hill peaks called Hanafi and Kheyapari Tongo or Tonki29 still existing in Maungdaw, which testify to the legend of Hanafi and Kheyapari. This is because it is presumed that these two hill peaks were named after Hanafi and Kheyapari.30 Unfortunately, this legend has no authentic source and, therefore, has not been academically justified till date. Besides, scholars who used this legend to trace Islam in Arakan could not provide any valid source of Hanafi’s arrival and settlement in northern Arakan.31 One of the lyrics of Barid Shah32 is used as the source of this legend, which could be really difficult to authenticate academically. The second batch of Muslims arrived in Arakan in the eighth century when Arab traders took shelter here after their ship was wrecked on the banks of the Rumbi River.33 It was during the tenure

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The Rohingya

of Mohathaing Sandia (788–810 CE) that the traders took shelter in Arakan. According to historical accounts, some traders and soldiers died while the remaining ones accepted the kind shelter offered by King Sandia and stayed in Arakan. Those traders and soldiers came to be known as Kular or foreigners in the history of Arakan.34 They started living in Arakan henceforth, got married, established families, gave birth to new generations, and continued lineages. They are considered the ancestors of today’s Rohingya populace. It is then that the Muslims appeared in the demographic map of Arakan and Islam took its place in this region.35 The third track of history regarding the appearance of Muslims in Arakan took place in 1430. The then Arakanese king Mun Shaw Moon alias Normikhla was in frequent conflicts with the Burmese king. Following a couple of small-scale attacks, the Burmese king finally captured Arakan and ousted the Arakan king in 1406. After this attack, the fall of the Arakan king, and his subsequent shelter in Bengal, there is a wonderful observation recorded by a noted historian of Arakan, A.P. Phayre: ‘Apprehending trouble [from Burmese King], the king of Arakan made communication with the king of Bengal, established friendly relations with him and both king[s] exchanged presents.’36 In fact, this friendly relation became very effective, and hence, the king of Bengal sheltered the king of Arakan after he was defeated by the king of Burma. Having failed to protect himself and his kingship, the then Arakanese king, known as Mun Shaw Moon alias Normikhla, fled his homeland and took shelter in Gorh, the then capital city of Bengal. At that time, Bengal was ruled by Sultan Gias Uddin Azam Shah. Normikhla stayed in Gorh for about 26 years and recaptured his lost throne and kingdom in 1430 with the help of the 30,000 soldiers provided by Sultan Jalal Uddin Mohammad Shah.37 After regaining his throne, Normikhla wanted the Bengali soldiers to stay in Arakan to protect the region from any further attack by the Burmese king. During this time, Rohang was made capital of Arakan state. Normikhla provided land and space for the 30,000 soldiers from Bengal who settled in Arakan. Most of them got married in Arakan and settled there. According to many historians, Normikhla took a Muslim known as Sulaiman Shah and introduced coinage in Arabic fonts as an acknowledgement of the help provided by the sultan of Gorh. In the history of Arakan, this batch of settlement is recorded as the third phase of Muslim settlement in this region.38

Who Are the Rohingya?

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The fourth phase of Muslim settlement in Arakan was recorded when Shah Suja arrived in 1660 CE. Shah Suja was defeated by Mir Jumla, the commander-in-chief of the Mughal battalion, during the rule of Emperor Aurangzeb. According to many historians, Shah Suja had planned to visit Mecca and then shift to Turkey or Iran for political asylum. However, the weather conditions were not favourable and this made him think of taking shelter in the nearby Arakan region. In response to the assurance of the then Arakanese king, Shah Suja, with his family, relatives, bodyguards, security soldiers, caretakers, cooks, followers, advisors, carriers, domestic servants, and trusted soldiers, took shelter in Arakan for his safety.39 Later on, Shah Suja, his family, and his bodyguards were all killed as a part of a conspiracy that was executed by the Arakanese king. One narrative of this conspiracy recorded by some historians40 claims that Shah Suja had a daughter named Amena Begum who was renowned for her beauty and attributes. The Arakanese king fell in love with her and offered to marry her, but Suja rejected this offer. This is said to be the reason why the king killed Shah Suja along with all his family members on 7 February 1661.41 However, the number of soldiers Shah Suja took with him while taking shelter remains uncertain as there are no proper historical records of it. The historian Karim assumed that the number of soldiers could be between five hundred and one thousand.42 After Shah Suja’s assasination, the remaining soldiers were allowed to stay in Arakan. They got married to the locals and settled down there. This group of people were Muslims and their offsprings formed a large part of the Muslim community in Arakan; they were later known as Kamanchi.43 The fifth phase of Muslims’ arrival in Arakan was historically recorded in 1824 when the British were occupying Arakan and Burma. From 1430 to 1784, Arakan was an independent state until the Burmese King Bodawpaya captured it once again and controlled it until 1824. Soon after Bodawpaya occupied Arakan, hundreds of thousands of Rakhine Buddhists and Arakanese Muslims took shelter in Bengal as a frontier territory. After 40 years of Burmese occupation, the British captured the Arakan state and, thereafter, a large number of Muslims and Hindus returned to Arakan. It should also be noted here that during those 40 years, many grew old and died, and hence could not return. Besides, many of them became involved in various occupations and businesses, got married in Bengal, and chose not to return. A new

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The Rohingya

group of Muslims and Hindus migrated to Arakan during the British colonial period as economic migrants.44 Following the fifth phase of Muslim arrival and settlement in Arakan, it is clear that Islam and Muslims have been a part of Arakan history for more than a thousand years. The emergence of Islam and the demographic appearance of Muslims do not necessarily confirm that the history of Muslims and Islam is the history of the Rohingya in Arakan state. This is so because, even with the arrival of Hanafi in 680 CE Arab traders in the eighth century, Gorh soldiers in 1430, Kamanchi in 1660, and the return of Muslims to Burma during the British period, they were not Rohingyas as such as none claimed themselves as Rohingyas and no historical records said so. Therefore, there is hardly any scope for controversy that Islam emerged in Arakan and the Muslims appeared in the demographic composition of Arakan more than thousands of years ago as many authentic historical records justify it.45 Besides, many renowned historians on Arakan also endorsed the thousand years of history of Islam and Muslims in Arakan,46 but no record has endorsed that the history of Muslims is the history of Rohingyas in Arakan.47 Many researchers,48 Rohingya activist-historians,49 and scholars50 sympathetic to the Rohingyas have been struggling to establish the theory that the arrival of Muslims in Arakan is the origin of the Rohingyas in Burma, but it does not stand because the Arab traders, if we take them as the first arrival of Muslims on record, were not Rohingyas under any circumstances. It is easily understandable and more sensible to draw a conclusion that with the combination of many trends of people—like Arabs, Moorse, Pathan, Mughals, and Bengalis—their lifestyles, languages, and cultures, the Rohingyas have emerged as a distinctive ethnic community in Arakan state over the years. So, in that consideration, the Rohingyas are a ‘mixed race’51 since there is no ‘pure race’ in this world.52 It altogether confirms two issues: First, Myanmar’s state narratives about the Rohingyas that they are not the inhabitants of Burma but are illegal Bengali migrations from the British colonial period is, at best, ‘manufactured history,’ invented to support the execution of Myanmar’s state policy to drive the Rohingyas out of the country. Second, the Rohingyas, particularly their ancestors, have been the inhabitants of Arakan for more than one thousand years since the emergence of Islam and arrival of Muslims in this region. The Rohingyas are a mixed ‘race’ formed over centuries evolved through the combination

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of many different communities, and now, they constitute a particular ethnic category having their distinctive language, culture, and social organization with the adoption of Islamic culture at large.

The Rohingya: Politics The present state of Myanmar is deliberately utilizing this academic and historical vacuum to justify various sorts of discrimination and atrocities against the Rohingyas. Myanmar claims that the Rohingyas were never the residents of Burma and that they migrated to Arakan from Bengal during the British colonial period, 1824 onwards. Myanmar used this state narrative in the formulation of its citizenship law enacted in 1982, where the eligibility criteria was set favouring those whose ancestors were living in Burma ‘before’ the British colonized this territory. Under this clause, the Rohingyas were stripped off their citizenship claims and rights in accordance with the state’s official claim. Such a politics of exclusion was based on systematically manufactured historical truth-claims. Records such as the ones I describe next indicate the presence of the Rohingyas in Burma long before the British colonized Burma. In order to dismantle the Myanmar state narrative, I will cite four authentic historical records that have been used as reference points to locate the Rohingyas in the historical-demographic canvas of Arakan.53 Francis Hamilton Buchanan is a known historian and his travel notes have been recognized as globally accepted historical documents. In 1799, he published an article titled ‘A Comparative Vocabulary of Some of the Languages Spoken in the Burma Empire’ in the journal Asiatic Researcher. Buchanan categorically mentioned that he talked to a group of people living in the Arakan region who identified themselves as Rooinga.54 This is supposed to be the first publicly available record of the Rooinga. Before this record, there were many indications, notations, and historical evidences—which I describe next—that corroborate the presence of an ethno-linguistic group, the Rohingyas, in Arakan, but these were recorded in a plurality of names. Buchanan, for the first time, recorded the presence of the Rohingyas by using their self-identification as ‘Rooinga’. It is to be mentioned here that almost all Rohingyas still identify themselves as ‘Rooinga,’ as described in the beginning of this chapter.55

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The Classical Journal has often been considered as the historical baseline, to some extent, of the people of the Southeast Asian region. In one of the Classical Journal issues published as early as 1811, there is a clear indication that a group of people who were living in the Arakan region called themselves Rooingas and were speaking in the Rooinga language.56 It is also worth mentioning here that the Classical Journal of 1811 has been used as one of the few credible historical records for the early history of Burma.57 Many internationally acclaimed scholars have used the Classical Journal of 1811 as the basic historical source for writing the history of Arakan.58 In the early nineteenth century, another written record of the languages spoken by the people living in the Arakan region was found. A German ethnologist named Johann Severin Vater had edited a book on the languages of ethnic groups who were then living in Arakan state, which was published in 1815.59 Vater mentions the name of an ethnic group that identifies itself as Ruinga or what is now known as Rohingya. According to Vater, these the Ruinga people were speaking in a particular language, which they called the Ruinga language.60 Walter Hamilton wrote a book titled A Geographical, Statistical, and Historical Description of Hindostan and the Adjacent Countries,61 where he clearly stated that ‘the Moguls know this country by the name of Rakhang, and the Mahomeddans, who have been long settled in this country call themselves Rooinga or the natives of Arracan’.62 Hamilton’s statement historically authenticates three important facts:63 1. A group of people identified themselves by the name Rooinga. It means that Rohingyas were living in Arracan (Arakan) long before 1824 when the British colonized Burma. 2. ‘Rooinga people have been long settled there’ indicates that the Rohingyas had been living in Arakan centuries before 1824. 3. The Rooinga were the natives of Arakan even in 1820 when the book was published and four years before the British colonized Burma. It clearly indicates that the Rohingyas have been the natives of Arakan (now Rakhine State) for centuries. Apart from the records I have presented and explained elsewhere, there are other historical records showing Rohingyas’ presence in Arakan before 1824.64 However, I am not going into further details

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here because this chapter is not about the identity and ethnicity of the Rohingyas. Sources such as the ones I referred to earlier were documented during the period 1784–1824 when Burma occupied the Arakan region, pre-dating the British colonization of the Arakan region. To cite Azeem Ibrahim, Thus there is a plentiful evidence of the existence of the Rohingyas in Arakan by the early nineteenth century in a sequence of works published at the time. None of these sources had any partial political interest in the ethnic make of this regions; none of them has any reason to invent such a new group like Rohingyas any more than they had an interest in suppressing such groups, and all clearly point to the fact that there was a major ethnic group in the region with a distinct language at the time clearly identifiable as Rohingyas [sic].65

It should also be mentioned here that Burma occupied and ruled the Arakan state only for 66 years (first, for 26 years from 1406 to 1430; and the second time, for 40 years from 1784 to 1824) during the 2,000 years of history of independent Arakan. Myanmar’s claims regarding the ownership of Arakan state are delegitimized if one were to follow the trail of historical records. This also brings forth an interesting paradox: whether it was the Rohingyas or the Burmese who first migrated and settled in Arakan or what we now call the Rakhine State. Since the task at hand for this is an ethnography of the Rohingyas’ present conditions, particularly the everyday forms of discrimination, their atrocious living conditions, and extreme vulnerability, we will not be able to delve deeper into the history of Arakan or the history of the Rohingyas.

The Rohingyas: Ethnicity An ethnic identity claim is crucially tied to history, but is not limited to history alone. Tracing ethnic identity and recognizing its legitimacy cannot merely be based on the demographic appearance in a particular region in a particular timeframe. Contemporary discourse is marked with contestations and differences over agreeable standards of identification of an ethnic group or indigenous people. Within both the academia and the political sphere, debates on the issue remain ripe. I will present three central arguments here to help understand the identity of the Rohingyas.

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One: On the Question of Language, Ethnicity, and Identity During my decade-long research engagement with the Rohingyas and close observation of the Rohingya life as a local resident of Cox’s Bazar for over two decades, I interacted with hundreds of Rohingyas and never found anyone claim himself or herself to be Bengali. Numerous conversations involved them identifying themselves as ‘rooinga’, which in the English language becomes ‘Rohingyas’. The claim of the community’s marked ethnic and linguistic difference from the Bengalis is one of the key indicators of who the Rohingyas are and who they get recognized as. The anthropological method demands that the community’s selfidentification take precedence over Myanmar state’s official narrative. It is now widely known that ethnicity does not essentially come across as a cultural idea in the twenty-first century as it has a strong political edge, but it adapts and accommodates many elements of culture in its articulation.66 Matters of political consciousness about rights and entitlements are now considered very important in framing the idea of ethnicity. In general, some specific characteristics are considered when determining the ethnic identity of a particular group of people. These sociocultural variables include the community’s selfidentification as members of an ethnic group; a sense of belonging to the said group; the sense of continuity as descendants of a certain group of ancestors; the carrying ahead of social and cultural heritage; the feeling of connectedness with that particular group—a community ethic; consciousness; and the belief systems that they associate with. These characteristics enable a community to establish their independent and distinctive ethnic identity.67 There is also the long-standing theoretical grounding of the renowned anthropologist Fredrik Barth to identify ethnic groups based on the framework of ethnic boundary, as discussed briefly earlier. Barth’s theoretical positioning is still widely used, even after five decades of its formulation, for the identification of ethnic groups, since it is universally recognized and academically accepted. Barth argues, ‘When a group of people think that they are a separate and distinct ethnic group, which have their own socio-cultural-political heritage and inheritance, and they all feel spiritually [connected] as members of a particular ethnic group, and other ethnic groups think of them as such, then this is their ethnic identity’.68 The Rohingyas all consider

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themselves as ‘rooinga’—as a people of the Rohingya ethnic group— identifying as the inhabitants of Arakan. Their linguistic culture is distinct from the larger family of languages of Myanmar; and they see and identify themselves as a distinct ethnic group within their particular political reality. Whether in the Barthian framework or that of ethnic boundaries, we can easily distinguish the Rohingya ethnicity.

Two: On Indigeneity Globally, there has been and continues to be a widespread debate over the universality of the definition of ‘indigenous people’ around themes such as their identity and rights. After a long discussion at the UN’s various councils and different forums, it was not possible to reach a generally accepted definition of ‘indigenous people’. Therefore, the responsibility of definition and determination has been given to the indigenous people in accordance with self-determination and self-definition (of indigenous nations).69 However, there is an agreement on some features that those who were living before the arrival of an intruder or occupier of a particular area (it is related to the colonial experience and applies to America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) and still live there are indigenous to the land. Those who have their own cultures, customs, and values; those who identify themselves as part of a separate collective sociocultural entity; and, in most cases, those who are considered minorities in the society are called indigenous people.70 Moreover, the importance of self-determination and self-definition has been given in the context of defining and identifying indigenous people in the ILO convention.71 When a group of people living in the framework of a state, who are a cultural minority, have their own culture distinct from that of the cultural majority, and have a distinct cultural heritage, inhereted trends, and are socially, economically, and politically marginalized in the structure of power and authority of the state, can claim themselves as indigenous people.72 In this consideration, the people of Kachin, Shan, Chin, Karen, Rakhain, Man, Kakon, Rohingyas, and so on, claim to be indigenous people of Myanmar because they are distinct from Bamar, the national majority. Myanmar has refused to confer legitimacy and citizenship on the Rohingyas, claiming that the Rohingyas are not ‘indigenous’ to Myanmar. Here, we need to keep

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in mind that ‘indigenous people’ and ‘earliest inhabitants’ are not synonymous with one another.73 Therefore, ‘who came first’ and ‘who the next was’ approach should not be the parameter for the identification of indigenous people.74 It is important to remember that the word ‘indigenous’ signifies a cultural category, while the ‘earliest migrants’— strictly speaking—refers to a demographic category. Myanmar claims that those whose ancestors have been living in erstwhile Burma from before 1824 are legitimate citizens of Myanmar. This claim, though, also does not stand because the Rohingyas, yet recorded as Rooinga, have been living in the Arakan region for centuries, which is historically and factually evident. The idea of indigenous people completely mismatches with this state narrative. If we consider the internationally recognized definition of ‘indigenous people’, and place it alongside the Bamars’ state-formation history of Burma, we will find that the Bamars emerged as the socially, economically, and politically dominant class of the modern state of Burma/Myanmar.75 As a national majority with majority representation backed by accumulation of power and position in state management, they have been enabled to govern—or should we say ungovern or misgovern—modern-day Myanmar, where the Rohingyas have been relegated to the margins as a cultural, demographic, and religious minority. If the people living in marginalized areas with their social and cultural differences are recognized as indigenous people globally,76 then why deny the Rohingyas of Myanmar their due status as indigenous people? This is state’s politics of cultural, religious, and racial discrimination. A lethal mix of blatant structural exclusions, with factors such as ethnic extremism, religious fundamentalism, military dictatorship or proxy governance and administrative powers of the military, discriminatory foundations to nation building, and a majoritarian approach of state formation, have created a Myanmar that does not honour standards of international principles of peoples’ rights and dignity.

Three: People of the Soil and Political Representation The Bengali community has a rhetorical phrase called vumi-putra, which translates to ‘son of the soil’, which is not a gender-sensitive phrase. The exclusion of the ‘daughter of the soil’ pushes us to think of a more

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41

gender-neutral or pan-gender phrase, such as ‘the people of the soil’. The phrase ‘the people of the soil’ spiritually means the inhabitants of a particular place,77 which involves deep attachment, belongingness, and emotion between the people and the place.78 ‘The people of the soil’ is used here as an analytical category in order to assert that the Rohingyas are ‘people of the soil’ of Arakan, and thereby delegitimize Myanmar’s claim that ‘they are illegal Bengali migrants’. In popular knowledge, when a person lives in a certain land for years, succeeding generations identify the land as ‘motherland’ or ‘fatherland’. There is a gendered and parental notion attached to land and the earth across cultures.79 I will use the discourse of ‘the people of the soil’ to elaborate the Rohingyas’ active presence on the soil of Arakan. The Myanmar state has established another narrative—that there was no word like the ‘Rohingya’ used before the 1950s and that it was a political category that came up as part of their political movement.80 It means that there were no Rohingyas in Burma before the 1950s. Interestingly enough, many pro-Myanmar scholars have supported this narrative and attempted to establish it with their writings, analyses, and historical notes.81 Among other theories is one that claims that Abdul Gaffar, a member of the Burmese Parliament, elected from Maungdaw, wrote an article in the Guardian Daily on 25 August 1951, where he, for the first time, used the word ‘Rohingyas’.82 Before that, there were no ‘Rohingyas’. I present here some evidences that are good enough to assert that the Rohingyas were ‘the people of the soil’ of Burma/Myanmar and they had been living in Arakan centuries before 1951 as its permanent inhabitants. Rangoon University, Burma, was politically very vibrant during the colonial period and even led the Independence movement during the process of decolonization,83 and therefore, the Rangoon University Central Students’ Union (RUCSU) was one of the leading and powerful political platforms in Burma. A Rohingya leader named Rashid was the elected vice-president of the RUCSU in 1936 and Bogyoke Aung San, the father of Aung San Suu Kyi, was the secretary general of the same committee. Figure 2.1 shows the leaders of RUCSU sitting together with Rashid, the vice-president of RUCSU, sitting in the middle with

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Figure 2.1 Rangoon University Central Students’ Union in 1936, where the leading representatives were Rohingya Muslims (Rashid, Razzak) Source: http://www.burmalibrary.org/docs14/ARAKAN-%20Question_of_Rohingyas_ Nationality-red.pdf, accessed on 30 October 2017.

Bogyoke Aung San and also the then secretary of RUCSU, on his left. The photo was taken in 1936. Interestingly, RUCSU was led by a Rohingya Muslim, while Bogyoke Aung San was serving as his secretary. This photo strongly demonstrates that the Rohingyas lived in Burma with a dominant political position even before decolonization, and that they were leading an organization like RUCSU. Not only that, Rangoon University had a formal forum for the Rohingya students called the Rangoon University Arakan Muslims Association. There are a lot of evidences of various social and political activities carried out by the Rangoon University Arakan Muslims Association in the 1950s long before Burma became decolonized.84 It also raises a valid question that if the Rohingyas were illegal Bengali migrants—as Myanmar claims today—how did they get admission in Rangoon University and how did they form an association with their own name? The evidence of organizational activities in Rangoon University in the 1950s clearly indicate a strong presence of the Rohingya Muslims even in the political sphere of Burma long before

Who Are the Rohingya?

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its Independence. It also supports the claim that the Rohingyas are the ‘people of the soil’ of Arakan, which is now called Rakhine State. Apart from this, Table 2.1 provides a list of the members of parliament (MPs) who were elected from the Rohingya communities and represented the Rohingyas in the parliament of Burma (later Myanmar) since 1936. Now, the question is: If the Rohingyas were illegal Bengali migrants, how could they become MPs through modes of electoral processes? A steady history of political representation in the Parliament shows that the Rohingyas have been, in fact, active subjects and inhabitants of Table 2.1

List of MPs (period-wise)

Year 1936

Position MCC

Name of Candidate Mr Gani Marakan

Area Represented Buthidaung+

1947

MLC

U Pho Khaing

Maungdaw Akyab West

MLC MLC MP MP MP MP

(a) Nasir Uddin Mr Sultan Ahmed Mr Abdul Gaffar Mr Abdul Gaffar Mr Abul Bashar Mr Sultan Ahmed Daw Aye Nyunt

Maungdaw Buthidaung Buthidaung North Buthidaung South Maungdaw North Maungdaw South

MP MP

(a) Zurah Mr Ezar Meah Mr Sultan Mahmood

Buthidaung North Buthidaung North

MP MP MP MP

Mr Abul Bashar Mr Sultan Ahmed Mr Abul Khair Mr Abdul Gaffar

(By election) Buthidaung South Maungdaw North Maungdaw South Both Maungdaw

MP MP MP MP MP

(Upper House) Mr Abul Bashar Mr Sultan Mahmood Mr Abul Khair Mr Rashid M.A. Subhan

and Buthidaung Buthidaung South Buthidaung North Maungdaw South Maungdaw North Both Maungdaw

(Upper House)

and Buthidaung

1951

1956

1960

(Cont’d)

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Table 2.1

(Cont’d)

Ma-Sa-La (BSPP) Period Year Designation Name of Candidate 1974 Hluttaw Member Dr Abdul Rahim Mr Abul Hussein 1978 Hluttaw Member Mr Abdul Hai

Region Represented Maungdaw Buthidaung Maungdaw

(a) U Tun Aung Kyaw SLORC Sponsored Elections 1990 Hluttaw Member Mr Fazal Ahmed U Chit Lwin

Maungdaw South Maungdaw North

(a) Ibrahim U Tin Maung

Buthidaung South

(a) Noor Ahmed U Kyaw Min

Buthidaung North

(a) Anwarul Haq U Shwe Yat

Akyab

Source: U Kway Min and Shamsul Anwarul Haque, An Assessment of the Question of Rohingyas’ Nationality, accessed 30 October 2017, http://www.burmalibrary.org/ docs14/ARAKAN-%20Question_of_Rohingyas_Nationality-red.pdf.

Burma before the decolonization, long before its colonization by the British, and later, by Burma. Manufactured narratives produced by the state of Myanmar are challenged when juxtaposed with historical evidence. The Myanmar state perpetuates this exclusion, depriving the Rohingyas of their status as the ‘people of the soil’ of Arakan, Burma, or what is now known as Rakhine State of Myanmar.

Ethnic Composition of the Rohingyas The Rohingyas are the ethno-linguistic and religious minorities who inhabit the northern part of Rakhine State (Arakan) in current-day Myanmar.85 In Rakhine State, they comprised 25 per cent of the state’s total population of 1,300,00086 until the displacement in 2016–18. Arakan was an independent kingdom until 1784, when it encompassed the Chittagong region in the southern part of today’s Bangladesh. As stated in the previous sections, I would like to add that the Arakanese had their first contact with Muslims in the eighth century, when Arab merchants docked at an Arakan port on their way

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to China. ‘The Rohingyas are [claim to be] the descendants of [this first group of Muslims] Moorish, Arab and Persian Traders, including Mughal, Turk, Pathan and Bengali soldiers cum migrants, who arrived between the ninth and fifteenth centuries, married local women, and settled in the region.’87 The Burmese king Bodawpaya conquered and annexed Arakan in 1784, triggering a long guerrilla war in which the Burmese allegedly killed more than 200,000 Arakanese. A failed attempt was made in 1796 to overthrow Burmese rule, resulting in the exodus of two-thirds of the Muslim Arakanese into the neighbouring Chittagong area.88 This marked the start of an influx of Arakanese Muslim refugees into colonial Bengal. When the British incorporated Arakan into their empire in 1885, many refugees returned. For centuries, the Rakhine Buddhists89 and Arakanese Muslims lived together in the territory until World War II. However, the advance of the Japanese army in 1942 sparked both the exodus of thousands of Muslims and the evacuation of the British from Arakan, creating a political void. ‘Communal riots between the Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingyas erupted, and some 22,000 Muslims fled to adjoining British Indian territories [now Chittagong and Chittagong Hill Tracts].’90 Shortly after Burma became independent in 1948, some Muslims carried out an armed rebellion, demanding an independent Muslim state within the Union of Burma. Though the rebellion was quashed in 1954, Muslim distrust of the Burmese administration remained and a backlash ensued that echoes even today. For example, ‘Muslims were removed and barred from civil posts, restrictions on [their] movement were imposed, and [their] property and land were confiscated.’91 Even so, the Rohingyas, as Muslims, were close to having their separate ethnic identity and autonomy, formally recognized in the 1950s, under the democratic government of U Nu, but these plans were thwarted by the military coup of General Ne Win in 1962. In fact, 1962 is historically considered as the beginning of the miseries of the Rohingyas, since the state under the military dictatorship started applying arbitrary rules that gradually pushed the Rohingyas to the margins of the society and the state. However, the Rohingyas were officially still not stateless people until 1982 when the Myanmar Citizenship Law was enacted. The decolonization in 1948 led to the process of state formation and nation building in Burma.92 Identities of various ethnic groups surfaced as the question of legitimacy in the discourse of the majoritarian

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notions of nationhood designed by Burman nationalists grew important. The process became more complicated when military rulers dominated the central political space and intervened in the policy framing of the state. The politics of inclusion and exclusion governed the state policy of nation building and state formation, which included some but excluded others. Within this divide, the Rohingyas living in Arakan were, in fact, part of the nation-building process and also included in state formation until 1962, when the military took over control of Burma. Ibrahim writes: The democratic government of the Prime Minister U Nu in [the] 1950s accepted that the Rohingyas were an indigenous ethnic group, but they were not one of the named-ethnicity given full nationalities in the Constitution of 1947. In a public speech on September 25, 1954 U Nu stated: The Rohingya has the equal status of nationalities with Kachin, Kayah, Karen, Mon, Rakhine and Shan.93

Since 1962, the history of the Rohingyas has been rife with exploitation, persecution, and discrimination. General Ne Win (1962–88) and his revolutionary council adopted a policy to suppress and oust the Rohingya Muslims from the country by banning all Rohingya activities and socio-cultural organization. In 1978, he launched ‘Operation Dragon’, which forced 250,000 Rohingyas to enter Bangladesh, causing tremendous economic and political problems. Though most Rohingyas returned to Myanmar in 1979 under an agreement between the two countries, returnee Rohingyas became outsiders, despite having lived in their homeland before. Finally, they were rendered stateless by the Myanmar Citizenship Law of 1982, which conferred the right of citizenship on members of 135 nationalities listed by the Government of Myanmar (GoM), excluding the Rohingyas. Thus, we can see how the laws of the modern nation state are implicated in the condition of the Rohingyas today: ‘Denial of citizenship is the key mechanism of exclusion, institutionalizing discrimination and arbitrary treatment against this group. Severe restrictions on their movement and marriages, arbitrary arrest, extortion, forced labour and confiscation of land are imposed on them.’94 The Rohingyas fled Myanmar for a number of reasons, including their atrocious living conditions, forced labour by military junta, unexplainable persecution, confiscation of their land and material

Who Are the Rohingya?

47

resources, restrictions on their movement that virtually confined them, restrictions on their marriage and education, frequent communal riots executed by Rakhine Buddhists against them, and the imposition of various other restrictions on their freedom of choice and liberty. The distinction between a refugee fleeing persecution and one seeking a better life does not mean much to the Rohingyas since both are true.95 Hundreds of thousands of stateless Rohingyas fled brutal oppression in Myanmar and migrated to Bangladesh, the neighbouring country, where they found linguistic (Chittagong language)96 and religion (Islamic) homogeneity with the people of the Chittagong region. How many Rohingyas live in Bangladesh currently is unknown because the exodus never stopped and new arrivals have no access to the refugee camps; therefore, there is no official record of the unregistered Rohingyas. However, following the recent influx that started from 25 August 2017, Bangladesh has prepared a biometric registration of more than one million Rohingyas97 as part of a repatriation process where already present and newly arrived Rohingyas are enlisted. Before this biometric registration process, prior to the massive influx in 2017–18, the number of unregistered Rohingyas, mainly living in south-eastern Bangladesh, was estimated at 350,000.98 In addition, around 32,000 Rohingyas are officially recognized as refugees by the GoB, who live in two official camps—Kutupalong in Ukhia and Nayapara in Teknaf 99—under the supervision of the UNHCR and with the help of many NGOs. Two makeshift camps—Taal in Ukhia and Leda in Teknaf—accommodate about 80,000 unregistered Rohingyas. So, before the arrival of over 750,000 new asylum seekers started on 25 August 2017, Bangladesh was already hosting about 500,000–550,000 Rohingyas. If we consider this as an official record, it could be assumed that currently about 1,300,000 Rohingyas are living in Bangladesh in permanent camps, makeshift camps, and temporarily built camps. After the new arrivals in 2017, 32 temporary refugee camps have been newly built in Ukhia and Teknaf (see Figure 2.2). Unlike registered ones, unregistered Rohingyas are forced to lead an inhuman life, since they are illegal residents with no status. They are largely unemployed and vulnerable to ill health, random exploitation, and mental and physical abuse. They do not even enjoy the basic and minimum standard of life unlike the registered refugees in the UNHCR camps. The UNHCR is mandated to protect refugees worldwide, but

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The Rohingya

Figure 2.2

Newly built Rohingya refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar

Source: Author’s personal collection.

makes no significant protest against the injustices committed against the unregistered Rohingyas. Even national media and civil society actors in Bangladesh have been reluctant to raise the Rohingya issue. Local people do not entertain the presence of the Rohingyas cordially, since the local communities of Ukhia and Teknaf who hosted the unregistered Rohingyas during the initial stages are themselves overcrowded and resource-poor.100 Consequently, thousands of self-settled Rohingyas are perceived as a burden and competitors for the already scant resources. Their vulnerable position makes them an easy punching bag for unscrupulous local politicians wishing to score political points.101 They are treated by both locals and state institutions—civil administration, law enforcement agencies, and local government bodies—as illegal migrants, unwelcome outsiders, and socially disordered settlers. This book tells the story of the Rohingyas in Bangladesh and details their treatment and lack of access to basic rights, all of which are contrary to the internationally endorsed law of human rights and the individual right to citizenship. Though the Rohingyas do not legally exist in the state structure of Bangladesh or Myanmar, they experience persecution and atrocities committed by the state, which is a violation of human rights.102 This book examines the ways in which the state becomes instrumental in the lives of the Rohingyas and controls them as non-citizens through what Michel Foucault called ‘bio-politics’103 and Elizabeth Povinelli calls ‘geontologies’.104 Building on empirical evidence, the book argues that the state does not legally attach to the non-citizens, but it is not

Who Are the Rohingya?

49

operationally detached from them to reconfirm their non-citizenship, which causes serious human rights violation. *** Proper understanding of the past is important to better understand the present conditions, and a critical assessment of the present is essential to predict the future. The current situation of the Rohingyas was not created overnight, but has been in the making as a result of the framework of nation building and state formation in Burma, which started from 1962. Gradually, the state has executed its policy of exclusion, making the Rohingyas politically, ethnically, and socially vulnerable, and taking their citizenship away to render them stateless. Then, the state initiated a particular project to drive them out of the country, which is described in many academic and legal terms like ‘ethnic conflict’, ‘ethnic cleansing’, and ‘genocide’. In the light of this discussion, it is quite clear that military establishment, political elites, ethnic extremists, and Buddhist fundamentalists collectively constitute a combined force to execute the state’s policy of driving the Rohingyas out of the country, which has created atrocious living conditions for the Rohingyas in Rakhine State. This chapter has attempted to provide a historical ground and foundation of Rohingya ethnicity, history, and political landscape so that the chapters that follow can build upon it. These chapters have ample ethnographic narratives reflecting the current state of the Rohingyas both in Bangladesh and Myanmar.

Notes 1. Apart from Ukhia and Teknaf in Cox’s Bazar, I interviewed many Rohingyas in Chittagong, Dhaka, Kolkata, Delhi, and Assam. I also interviewed Rohingyas living in London, United Kingdom (2009, 2014); Kitchenware of Waterloo, Canada (2012); Heidelberg, Germany (2013); Wisconsin, United States of America (2015); Toronto, Canada (2017); and Penang, Malaysia (2019). 2. The Rohingyas call themselves Rooinga, though English-speaking people call them Rohingya. It has a strong historical background that I have discussed in the later sections of this chapter. Also, for details, see Nasir Uddin, Not Rohingyas, but Royainga: Stateless People in the Struggle for Existence (in Bengali) (Dhaka: Murddhanno Publisher, 2017b).

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3. Rooinga jatee means Rohingya nations. 4. Barth, in his seminal theory of ‘ethnic boundary’, has discussed that two different ethnic groups become distinct in association with each other and thereby one recognizes another as distinct from itself. See Fredrik Barth, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (USA: Little, Brown and Company, 1969). 5. Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. 6. See Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries; T. Hylland Eriksen, Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives (London: Pluto Press, 2002); Richard Jenkins, Rethinking Ethnicity: Arguments and Explorations (Los Angeles, Delhi, London, and Singapore: SAGE Publications, 2008); Andreas Wimmer, ‘The Making and Unmaking of Ethnic Boundaries: A Multilevel Process Theory,’ American Journal of Sociology 113, no. 4 (2008): 970–1022. 7. Myanmar adopted the ‘Myanmar Citizenship Law’ in 1982, which conferred citizenship to 135 national races, excluding the Rohingyas. Since then, the Rohingyas are not recognized as citizens of Myanmar. See ‘Myanmar Citizenship Law’, accessed 6 August 2018, http://www.ibiblio.org/obl/docs/ Citizenship%20Law.htm. 8. See K. Fahmida Farzana, Memories of Burmese Rohingya Refugees: Contested Identities and Belonging (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017). 9. Abdul Karim, The Rohingyas: A Short Account of Their History and Culture (Chittagong: Arakan Historical Society, 2016), 23. 10. See M. Ali Chowdhury, Bengal-Arakan Relations (Kolkata: Firma KLM Private Limited, 2004). 11. Mohibullah Siddiquee, ‘Who Are Rohingyas and How? Origin and Development of Rohingyas in Arakan,’ in To Host or To Hurt: Counter Narratives on the Rohingya Refugee Issues in Bangladesh, ed. Nasir Uddin (Dhaka: The Institute of Culture and Development Research, 2012), 16. 12. Michael W. Charney, ‘Where Jambudipa and Islamdom Converged: Religious Change and the Emergence of Buddhist Communalism in Early Modern Arakan (Fifteenth to Nineteenth Centuries’ (PhD dissertation, Department of History, University of Michigan, 1999); Azeem Ibrahim, The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide (London: Hurst & Company, 2016); Iftekhar Iqbal, ‘Locating the Rohingya in Time and Space’, In the Shadow of Violence, Daily Star (Star Weekend), 13 October 2017. Accessed 28 March 2020. https://www.thedailystar.net/star-weekend/the-shadow-violence/ locating-the-rohingya-time-and-space-1475248; Karim, The Rohingyas; A.P. Phayre, History of Burma including Burma People, Pegu, Taungu, Tenasserim, and Arakan (Ludgate Hill, London: Trubner & Co., 1883); G.E. Harvey, History of Burma: From the Earliest Time to the 10 March, the Beginning of the English Conquest (New Delhi and Madras: Asian Education Services, [1925] 2000); Siddiquee, ‘Who Are Rohingyas and How,’ 15–28.

Who Are the Rohingya?

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13. Siddiquee, ‘Who Are Rohingyas and How,’ 15–16. 14. A. Mohammad Alam, A Short Historical Background of Arakan (Chittagong: Arakan Historical Society, 1999), 5, accessed 2 February 2018, https://www. kaladanpress.org/images/document/2018/A%20Short%20Historical%20 Background%20%20of%20Arakan.pdf. 15. See Phayre, History of Burma including Burma People, Pegu, Taungu, Tenasserim, and Arakan; Harvey, History of Burma. 16. See Amanullah, ‘The Etymology of Arakan,’ The Arakan 10, no. 2 (1997): 4; Alam, A Short Historical Background of Arakan, 21. 17. Abid Bahar, ‘The Dynamics of Ethnic Relations in Burmese Society: A Case Study of Ethnic Relations between the Burmese and the Rohingyas’ (Unpublished PhD dissertation, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada, 1982). 18. Cited in Siddiquee, ‘Who Are Rohingyas and How,’ 16. 19. Phayre, History of Burma including Burma People, Pegu, Taungu, Tenasserim, and Arakan; Harvey, History of Burma; Siddiquee, ‘Who Are Rohingyas and How,’ 15–28; Karim, The Rohingyas; Iqbal, ‘Locating the Rohingya in Time and Space’. 20. Siddiquee, ‘Who Are Rohingyas and How,’ 16. 21. Alam, A Short Historical Background of Arakan, 26. 22. See, for example, Jacque P. Leider, ‘Rohingya: The History of a Muslim Identity in Myanmar,’ in The Oxford Encyclopaedia of Asian History, eds. D. Ludden et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). 23. Burma became Myanmar in 1989. 24. For example, Aye Chan, ‘The Development of a Muslim Enclave in Arakan (Rakhine) State of Burma (Myanmar),’ SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research 3, no. 2 (2005): 396–420; Anthony Ware and Constas Laoutides, Myanmar’s ‘Rohingya’ Conflict (London: Hurst & Company, 2018). 25. For example, Jacque P. Leider, ‘Rohingya: The Name, the Movement, the Quest for Identity,’ in Nation Building in Myanmar, ed. Myanmar EGRESS (Myanmar: Myanmar Peace Center, 2013), 204–55; Jacque P. Leider, ‘Competing Identities and the Hybridized History of the Rohingyas,’ in Metamorphosis: Studies in Social and Political Change in Myanmar, ed. Renaud Egreteau and Francois Robinne (Singapore: NUS Press, 2015), 151–78. Here, it may be mentioned that when Oxford University Press’s Oxford Research Encyclopedias (ORE) Asian History series commissioned Dr Jacques Leider, head of the Bangkok-based Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO) and a well-known advisor to the Myanmar military’s Armed Forces Historical Museum in Naypyidaw, to write a reference article on the subject of the Rohingyas for their forthcoming series, the ORE Asian History (under ‘Political’, see ‘Rohingya: Emergence and Vicissitudes of a Communal Muslim Identity in Myanmar’), this sparked a huge protest from internationally acclaimed writers, scholars, academicians, and public intellectuals, including Noam Chomsky and Gayatri Spivak. See the statement

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of protest at ‘Oxford U. Press, Myanmar Genocide & Its Choice of Dr Leider as the Expert on Rohingyas,’ Change.Org, accessed 27 March 2018, https://www. change.org/p/vice-chancellor-of-oxford-university-re-oxford-u-press-myanmargenocide-its-choice-of-dr-leider-as-the-expert-on-rohingyas. 26. For example, Khin Maung Saw, Islamization of Burma through Chittagonian Bengalis as Rohingya Refugees (2001), accessed 10 November 2017, http://www. burmalibrary.org/docs21/Khin-Maung-Saw-NM-2011-09-Islamanisation_of_ Burma_through_Chittagonian_Bengalis-en.pdf. 27. Karbala is a famous war in the history of Islam that took place in 680 CE. Karbala is widely known as one of the heart-touching tragedies in Islamic history. For details, see ‘Battle of Karbala,’ Britannica, accessed 20 March 2018, https://www.britannica.com/event/Battle-of-Karbala. 28. Karim, The Rohingyas; Mahfuzur Akhanda, History of Muslims in Arakan (in Bengali) (Chittagong-Dhaka: Bangladesh Co-operative Society, 2013); Siddiquee, ‘Who Are Rohingyas and How’. 29. Alam, A Short Historical Background of Arakan, 8. 30. See Abuˉ al-Faz.l Ezzati, The Spread of Islam: The Contributing Factors (London: Islamic College for Advanced Studies Press, 2002), 482; Siddiquee, ‘Who Are Rohingyas and How,’ 19–20; Akhanda, History of Muslims in Arakan, 34–5. 31. Karim, The Rohingyas; Akhanda, History of Muslims in Arakan; Siddiquee, ‘Who Are Rohingyas and How’. 32. Shah Barid Khan was a medieval narrative poet. He wrote three narrative-poetry books: Vidyasundar, Rasul Bijay, and Hanifa-Kayrapari. For details, see ‘Shah Barid Khan’, Banglapedia, accessed 20 March 2018, http://en.banglapedia. org/index.php?title=Shah_Barid_Khan. 33. Karim, The Rohingyas; Akhanda, History of Muslims in Arakan; Siddiquee, ‘Who Are Rohingyas and How’; Chowdhury, Bengal-Arakan Relations. 34. Karim, The Rohingyas; Akhanda, History of Muslims in Arakan; Siddiquee, ‘Who Are Rohingyas and How’. 35. For details, see Karim, The Rohingyas; Akhanda, History of Muslims in Arakan; Siddiquee, ‘Who Are Rohingyas and How’. 36. Cited in Chowdhury, Bengal-Arakan Relations, 26. 37. See B. Bhattacharya, ‘Bengal Influence in Arakan, Bengal Past and Present,’ Journal of the Calcutta Historical Society 33, no. 65–6 (1927): 139–44. 38. For details, see Phayre, History of Burma including Burma People, Pegu, Taungu, Tenasserim, and Arakan, 78; Chowdhury, Bengal-Arakan Relations, 53–5; Richard Forster, ‘Magh Marauders, Portuguese Pirates, White Elephants and Persian Poets: Arakan and Its Bay-of-Bengal Connectivities in the Early Modern Era,’ Explorations 11, no. 1 (2011): 64; Siddiquee, ‘Who Are Rohingyas and How’, 21; Akhanda, History of Muslims in Arakan, 38–9; Delwar Hossain, ‘Tracing

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the Plight of the Rohingyas,’ in The Plight of the Stateless Rohingyas, ed. Imtiaz Ahmed (Dhaka: The University Press Limited, [2010] 2014), 14; Karim, The Rohingyas, 24–5; Iqbal, ‘Locating the Rohingya in Time and Space,’ 4; Alamgir Serajuddin, ‘Muslim Influence in Arakan and the Muslim Names of Arakanese Kings: A Resentment,’ Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh 31, no. 1 (1986): 17–23; Ahmed Jilani, The Rohingyas of Arakan: Their Quest for Justice (Dhaka: The University Press Limited, 1999); Bhattacharya, ‘Bengal Influence in Arakan, Bengal Past and Present,’ 141. 39. Nasir Uddin, ‘Life in Everyday Death: Rohingyas in Bangladesh and Myanmar,’ Berkeley Forum, Georgetown University, 19 October 2017a, accessed 22 October 2017, https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/forum/religion-andthe-persecution-of-rohingya-muslims/responses/life-in-everyday-death-therohingyas-in-bangladesh-and-myanmar. 40. Karim, The Rohingyas; Akhanda, History of Muslims in Arakan; Siddiquee, ‘Who Are Rohingyas and How’; Chowdhury, Bengal-Arakan Relations; Hossain, ‘Tracing the Plight of the Rohingyas’; Jilani, The Rohingyas of Arakan; Bhattacharya, ‘Bengal Influence in Arakan, Bengal Past and Present’. 41. See Akhanda, History of Muslims in Arakan, 42. 42. Karim, The Rohingyas, 79–80. 43. See Phayre, History of Burma including Burma People, Pegu, Taungu, Tenasserim, and Arakan, 78; Harvey, History of Burma, 95; Chowdhury, BengalArakan Relations, 128–32; Siddiquee, ‘Who Are Rohingyas and How’, 26–7; Akhanda, History of Muslims in Arakan, 43; Hossain, ‘Tracing the Plight of the Rohingyas,’ 14; Karim, The Rohingya, 41–4. 44. Farzana, Memories of Burmese Rohingya Refugees. 45. See Richard M. Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 12041760 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Ezzati, The Spread of Islam; Akhanda, History of Muslims in Arakan; Keith Leitich, Decoding the Past: The Rohingya Origin Enigma (Paper presented at the Third Annual Southeast Asian Studies Symposium, Keble College, University of Oxford, 22–23 April 2014); Karim, The Rohingyas. 46. See Phayre, History of Burma including Burma People, Pegu, Taungu, Tenasserim, and Arakan; Francis Buchanan, ‘A Comparative Vocabulary of Some of the Languages Spoken in the Burma Empire,’ Asiatic Researches 5: 219–40; Harvey, History of Burma; Charney, ‘Where Jambudipa and Islamdom Converged’. 47. See Uddin, Not Rohingyas, but Royainga, 32. 48. Habib Siddiqui, The Forgotten Rohingya: Their Struggle for Human Rights in Burma, Kindle Edition (Japan, 2007); Chowdhury, Bengal-Arakan Relations; Siddiquee, ‘Who Are Rohingyas and How’; Akhanda, History of Muslims in Arakan; Karim, The Rohingyas; Iqbal, ‘Locating the Rohingya in Time and Space’.

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49. Siddiqui, The Forgotten Rohingya; Bahar, ‘The Dynamics of Ethnic Relations in Burmese Society’; Mohammed Yunus, A History of Arakan: Past and Present (Chittagong: Magenta Colour, 1994); Uddin, Not Rohingyas, but Royainga. 50. Ezzati, The Spread of Islam; Maung Zarni and Alice Cowley, ‘SlowBurning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingyas,’ Pacific Rim Law & Policy Journal 23, no. 3 (2014): 683–754; Ibrahim, The Rohingyas; Farzana, Memories of Burmese Rohingya Refugees. 51. Uddin, Not Rohingyas, but Royainga, 37. 52. See Robert Wald Sussman, The Myth of Race: The Troubling and Persistence of an Unscientific Idea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014); Alain F. Corcos, Three Biological Myths: Race, Ancestry, Ethnicity (USA: Wheatmark, 2018). 53. See, for example, Ibrahim, The Rohingyas. 54. Buchanan, ‘A Comparative Vocabulary of Some of the Languages Spoken in the Burma Empire,’ 55. 55. Also see, Uddin, Not Rohingyas, but Royainga. 56. The Classical Journal of 1811, accessed 7 November 2017, https://archive. org/details/in. ernet.dli.2015.20962. 57. See for detail, Uddin, Not Rohingyas, but Royainga, 33. 58. For example, Charney, ‘Where Jambudipa and Islamdom Converged’; Ibrahim, The Rohingyas; Farzana, Memories of Burmese Rohingya Refugees. 59. I found this book in the British Library and my German friend, Julia Zimpel based in Berlin, translated it into English for me in 2018. 60. Cited in Ibrahim, The Rohingyas, 25. Please also see for details, J.S. Vater, ed., Examples of German Vernaculars: Dr. Seetzen’s Linguistic Legacy and Other Linguistic Research and Collections, In Particular on East India, trans. Julia Zimpel (Leipzig: Gerhard Fleischer, the Disciple, 1816). 61. W. Hamilton, Geographical, Statistical, and Historical Description of Hindostan and Its Adjacent Countries (Albemarle Street, London: John Murray, 1820). 62. Hamilton, Geographical, Statistical, and Historical Description of Hindostan and Its Adjacent Countries, 802. 63. Nasir Uddin, ‘Ethnic Cleansing of the Rohingya People,’ in The Palgrave Handbook of Ethnicity, ed. S. Ratuva (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019a). 64. Nasir Uddin, The Voices of the Victims: The ‘Subhuman’ life of the Rohingya (An unpublished research monograph on the Rohingya Victims of 2017 campaign in Rakhine State, 2019d). 65. Ibrahim, The Rohingyas, 25. 66. See Nasir Uddin, Eva Gerharz, and Pradeep Chakkarath, ‘Exploring Indigeneity: Introductory Remarks on a Contested Concept,’ in Indigeneity on the Move: Varying Manifestations of a Contested Concept, eds. Nasir Uddin, Eva Gerharz, and Pradeep Chakkarath (Oxford and New York: Berghahn, 2018), 1–25.

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67. See Lola Romanucci-Ross, George A De Vose, and Takeyuki Tsuda, eds., Ethnic Identity: Problems and Prospects for the Twenty-First Century (Lanham, New York, Toronto and Oxford: Altamira Press, 2006); Eriksen, Ethnicity and Nationalism; Marcus Banks, Ethnicity: Anthropological Constructions (London and New York: Routledge, 1996). 68. See Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries; Barth, ‘Models of Social Organizations’. 69. See the ‘United Nations Declaration for the Rights of Indigenous People’, United Nations, accessed 30 March 2019, https://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/ documents/DRIPS_en.pdf. 70. See Nasir Uddin, ‘The Local Translation of Global Indigeneity: A Case of the Chittagong Hill Tracts,’ Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 50, no. 1 (2019b): 68–85. 71. Particularly, Article 107 in the ILO Convention 1957 and Article 169 in the ILO Convention 1989 confirmed the definition of indigenous people across the world. 72. See, for details, André Béteille, ‘The Idea of Indigenous People,’ Current Anthropology 39, no. 2 (1998): 187–92; Justin Kenrick and Jerome Lewis, ‘Indigenous Peoples’ Rights and the Politics of the Term “Indigenous”,’ Anthropology Today 20, no. 2 (2004): 4–9; James Clifford, Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Uddin, Gerharz, and Chakkarath, ‘Exploring Indigeneity: Introductory Remarks on a Contested Concept’. 73. See Nasir Uddin, Commonsense of Scholarship: Indigenous People, Chittagong Hill Tracts and the Politics of Representation (in Bengali) (Dhaka: The Institute of Culture and Development Research, 2016). 74. See Clifford, Returns; Uddin, Commonsense of Scholarship. 75. See Mary P. Callahan, Political Authority in Burma’s Ethnic Minority States: Devolution, Occupation and Coexistence (Washington, DC: East-West Center, 2007); Michael W. Charney, A History of Modern Burma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Robert H. Taylor, The State in Myanmar (Singapore: The Singapore National University Press, 2009). 76. See Uddin, Gerharz, and Chakkarath, ‘Exploring Indigeneity: Introductory Remarks on a Contested Concept’. 77. Nel Vandekerckhove, ‘“We Are Sons of this Soil”: The Endless Battle Over Indigenous Homelands in Assam, India,’ Critical Asian Studies 41, no. 4 (2009): 523–48. 78. See Uddin, Not Rohingyas, but Royainga. 79. Vandekerckhove, ‘“We Are Sons of this Soil”’. 80. See Chan, ‘The Development of a Muslim Enclave in Arakan (Rakhine) State of Burma (Myanmar)’; Leider, ‘Rohingya: The Name, the Movement, the

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Quest for Identity’; Leider, ‘Competing Identities and the Hybridized History of the Rohingyas’. 81. See, for details, Chan, ‘The Development of a Muslim Enclave in Arakan (Rakhine) State of Burma (Myanmar)’; Leider, ‘Rohingya: The Name, the Movement, the Quest for Identity’; Leider, ‘Competing Identities and the Hybridized History of the Rohingyas’. 82. See Chan, ‘The Development of a Muslim Enclave in Arakan (Rakhine) State of Burma (Myanmar),’ 412. 83. See David Brown, The State and Ethnic Politics in SouthEast Asia (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 31. 84. See, Uddin, Not Rohingyas, but Royainga; Zarni and Cowley, ‘SlowBurning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingyas’; Siddiqui, The Forgotten Rohingya; Jilani, The Rohingyas of Arakan; Bahar, ‘The Dynamics of Ethnic Relations in Burmese Society’. 85. The name ‘Burma’ was changed to ‘Myanmar’, and ‘Arakan’ to ‘Rakhine State’, by the military government in 1989. 86. Agence France-Presse (AFP), Myanmar, [and] Bangladesh Leaders 'to Discuss Rohingya' (Paris: Agence France-Presse, 25 June 2012). 87. Imtiaz Ahmed, ‘State and Stateless in South Asia: Reaping Benefits from a Reconstructed Discourse on State and Nationality,’ Theoretical Perspective 9 & 10 (2002–3): 05. 88. For details, see Harvey, History of Burma; Karim, The Rohingyas; Médecins Sans Frontiers, 10 Years for the Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh: Past, Present and Future (Médecins Sans Frontiers, 2002); Nasir Uddin, ‘Of Hosting and Hurting: Crises in Co-existence with Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh,’ in To Host or To Hurt: Counter-Narratives on Rohingya Refugee Issue in Bangladesh, ed. Nasir Uddin (Dhaka: Institute of Culture and Development Research, 2012a), 83–98. 89. The people of Rakhine State, believed to be a mixture of an indigenous Hindu group and the Mongols, have inhabited Arakan since early historical times. Today, the Rakhine are Buddhists, speak a dialect of Burmese, and constitute the majority ethnic group in Rakhine State. 90. Karim, The Rohingyas. 91. Médecins Sans Frontiers, 10 Years for the Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh. 92. Burma was renamed as Myanmar in 1989. Hence, when discussing events/occurrences that took place before 1989, I will call the country Burma, and when discussing events that took place after 1989, I will call it Myanmar. Why Burma became Myanmar is also a matter of great historical, political, and reformist debate, which I will discuss in one of the later chapters. 93. Ibrahim, The Rohingyas, 48. 94. Chris Lewa, Unregistered Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh: Crackdown, Forced Displacement and Hunger (Bangkok: The Arakan Project, 2010).

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95. Scott Mathieson, ‘Plight of the Damned: Burma’s Rohingya,’ Global Asia 4, no. 1 (2009): 87. 96. The Rohingya speak in Chittagonian language, a dialect of Bengali language, and the people living in Chittagong region speak in the same language. 97. Tarek Mahmud, ‘Over One Million Rohingyas get Biometric Registration,’ Dhaka Tribune, 18 January 2018, accessed 20 March 2018, http:// www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/2018/01/18/one-million-rohingyasget-biometric-registration/. 98. This is an estimated number of unregistered Rohingyas, since there is no official record. The actual number of unregistered Rohingyas would be much larger than the estimate, as the flow of migration has continued. 99. Ukhia and Teknaf are two sub-districts of Cox’s Bazar district. 100. Nasir Uddin, ‘State of Stateless People: The Plight of Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh,’ in Human Rights to Citizens: A Slippery Concept, ed. Rhoda Howard -Hassmann and Margaret Walton-Roberts (USA: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 65. 101. Uddin, ‘Of Hosting and Hurting: Crises in Co-existence with Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh’. 102. Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Alison Kesby, The Right to Have Rights: Citizenships, Humanity and International Law (Oxford: The Oxford University Press, 2012); Emma Larking, Refugees and the Myth of Human Rights: Life outside the Pale of the Law (London and New York: Routledge, 2014). 103. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (Boston, MA: Vantage Books, 1976). 104. By theory of ‘Geontologies’, Elizabeth Povinelli talks about the mechanism of power that makes a distinction between ‘lives’ and ‘non-lives’, where ‘non-lives’ are dealt with differently unlike the ‘lives’. The Rohingyas are apparently non-lives and therefore dealt with accordingly from the statist perspective. For details, see Elizabeth Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).

3

Of Hurting and Hosting The Rohingyas in the Place of Migration

T

his chapter discusses the crises of social integration of Rohingya refugees in the host societies of south-eastern Bangladesh in the context of Ukhia and Teknaf, which are currently hosting more than one million Rohingyas.1 Many media reports have indicated that the influx of Rohingyas, both old and new arrivals, has been so large that the local Bengalis have become a demographic minority in their respective localities.2 Therefore, the social integration for the Rohingyas in Ukhia and Teknaf has become critical and complex, though not violent and hostile yet.3 This chapter attempts to understand the dynamics of social interaction between the host societies and the refugees in an attempt to comprehend the crises of social integration. It is to be noted here that the scenario of integrations presents the situation before the latest, and the biggest, influx started on 25 August 2017. Therefore, the information and experience contextualized here are based on my long years of fieldwork intermittently spanning from 2001 to 2019, in two villages, Pasan Para (Ukhia) and Vasan Para (Teknaf). Already taking different shapes between local Bengalis and Rohingya refugees, conditions have seemingly worsened because new arrivals have added newer dimensions4 to pre-existing ones. Hosting refugees is always problematic as seen by the host society, whereas the refugees perceive this tension as ‘hurting’. Gil Loescher and James Milner discussed the protracted refugee situation, detailing the crisis of social integration where refugees consider anything undesirable The Rohingya. Nasir Uddin, Oxford University Press (2020). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199489350.001.0001.

© Oxford University Press.

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as ‘hurting’ by the host society.5 They explained that the long-term presence of refugee populations has come to be seen by many host states as a source of insecurity. Consequently, host states have taken various essential measures, including keeping refugees in isolated and insecure camps, preventing new arrivals, and, in extreme cases, executing forcible repatriation.6 In fact, state-level perception and local-level reality are different at the level of principles and the actual reality of hosting refugees, as Alison Mountz explained in her book, Seeking Asylum, in the context of Canada, the United States of America, and Australia.7 What the state thinks of as ‘right-doing’—from the top all the way to the smallest unit of society—might appear as ‘wrong-doing’ to those at the bottom of society. It is at the local level that society encounters problems that the top-down implementation of a policy may lead to. Everyday issues are borne more directly and explicitly at the bottom ranks than at the level of state institutions.8 This chapter focuses on the dynamics of interaction, contestation, and conflict between the host society and migrated refugees at the grass-root level through the metaphorical registers of ‘hosting’ and ‘hurting’. Operationally speaking, by ‘hosting’, I mean the ways and processes in which migrants and refugees are dealt with in the host society; and by ‘hurting’, I mean the ways in which migrants and refugees receive the responses that contrast with their aspirations, expectations, and desires from the host society. Though hosting and hurting are perceived from subjective standpoints, the chapter attempts to unveil the relative objective reality in the context of the predicament of integration between refugees and the host society in the case of the Rohingyas9 in Bangladesh. Experience and history say that hosting the refugee is always hurtful, particularly when the host itself is a resource-poor and overpopulated country like Bangladesh.10 This is not only applicable to Bangladesh, but also to many other countries. Scholars11 are of the opinion that neighbouring states, for emergency cases, often provide refugees with temporary shelter, but for the host society, at the local level, warm reception is not the most obvious of responses. The state, in this case, follows the foreign policy of ‘fraternity’ with neighbouring states and ‘friendship to all, enemy to none’12 policy, but the local-level experiences are different and contested. With the demographic composition of the local community changing, at the behest of the state, the pressure on local social and economic resources and facilities also increases

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manifold. The state often overlooks the aid, extra resource allocation, and additional development focus it ought to provide to make up for the excess influx while rehabilitating the refugee population. Without the availability of adequate aid, additional support, added services, and additional resource allocation, the host community continues to be in conflict with the refugee community, and thereby the suffering on both sides. In the case of Rohingya refugees, ‘initially local people provided shelter to refugees on [the] grounds of humanity when they first started coming in 1978 and 1991/1992, but the sentiment comes in crisis when existing adversities meet the presence of additional people, hampering the everyday course of life of the host society.’13 When interpersonal relations become critical and the host community’s acceptance of the incoming refugees starts reducing, refugees consider it as ‘hurting’. They blame the hosts for hurting them, which is represented as a question of violation of human rights by the international organizations and local rights bodies.14 In fact, the locals of the host society quite often exploit the helplessness and vulnerable conditions of refugees, which is also left unaddressed in state-level readings of refugee problems.15 The grassroot-level veracity of hosting and hurting refugees gets little space in top-down interpretations of refugee issues where the local-societal reality remains untapped. This chapter argues that the question of hosting and hurting depends on the quandary of integration of refugees in the host society. The state and non-state agencies are critical in framing the structure of relations between the refugees and the host society. This structure is generally ignored in the analysis of the crises of integration of the refugees. The chapter addresses these issues with ethnographic details in the present context, that of the Rohingya refugees living in the south-eastern region, Teknaf and Ukhia of Bangladesh. They have been living in this region for decades as both registered and unregistered refugees.

Discourse of ‘Hosting’ and ‘Hurting’ Of the many cases I have recorded that are good enough to represent a comprehensive scenario of ‘hosting’ and ‘hurting’ between the Rohingya refugees and the local Bengalis, let us begin the discussion with a case of elopement. As a means to getting married, this act is seen as disobedience to family, guardians, and the existing social system in rural Bangladesh.16

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Though the number of marriages by elopement are significantly higher in urban Bangladesh and the rates are growing, such incidents still face social stigma and, thereby, are not well-received by both families and the community.17 We see that individual freedom of choice comes in conflict with community expectations, long-standing traditions, and the society’s desire for marriage to take place with prior consent, approval, and social sanction of families and guardians. Marriage in the traditional sense is a binding ritual between families, lineages, and communities, and not merely between two individuals; this is still the dominant culture in Bangladesh.18 Besides, marriage through elopement is still very much unwelcome from a religious perspective in rural Muslim families in Bangladesh because the idea of ‘holy’ is still socially and cultural constructed in Bangladesh; Elora Shehabuddin discussed this in detail in her ethnography on rural Bangladesh.19 Both in urban and rural Bangladesh, marriages that receive social sanction are still the ones that are endogamous, they are based on family and community’s approval. Therefore, marriage is not a social institution formed by the choice of two individuals, but a huge engagement and an active involvement of two families, and also two samajs,20 to some extent. In case of a Rohingya as spouse, family acceptance and social recognition are different because of the social discourse of honour and shame attributed to a refugee, particularly Rohingya refugees. In 2011, when I was doing fieldwork in Pasan Para, I recorded a case of an elopement that unveiled how the notion of social prestige is related to affinal relation with a Rohingya in Ukhia and Teknaf. When Jashim (27),21 a local Bengali man, married Rohima (22), a Rohingya refugee girl, and brought his new bride home, Jashim’s father, Makbul (50), was very shocked and disappointed. Jashim is his only son who, as per Bangladeshi customs, traditions and conventions, is expected to carry ahead the legacy, continuity, and burden of bangsha22 or the lineage. There was every reason for Makbul, as per local sentiment, family emotion, and traditional rules of keeping the bangsha in continuity, to be shocked by his only son’s ‘unwise’ deed. Makbul asked his son, ‘Why have you done this disastrous act? I had cherished the desire to arrange a big ceremony and hold a big party to celebrate your marriage in a festive fashion, inviting all villagers, friends, and relatives. You have spoilt my dreams, desires, honour, and prestige in the society. Your stupid move has destroyed the future of my bangsha. In fact, our future

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generations will go through an identity crisis due to your marriage to a Rohingya. Have you ever thought how I will continue my social and affinal23 relations with a Rohingya family? How will I call your fatherin-law beyai24 and hug him congenially? How will I introduce your father-in-law to my relatives, friends, and social mates as my beyai? Where will I hide my face now?’ ‘I am sorry,’ Jashim replied to his father, ‘I had no other choice as I fell in love with her.’ Jashim tried to defend his position in support of his elopement. He continued, ‘Father, all Rohingyas are not the same. She is a very good girl. Father, I love a human being, not a Rohingya and not a refugee. Since I knew that you would never accept a Rohingya woman as your daughter-in-law, finding no other alternative, I had to elope with her.’ When this exchange was going on between father and son, I was present there along with some other close relatives and next-door neighbours. The conversation ended with some heated words when Makbul said, ‘Leave my house and get out … do not show your face to me anymore as you have destroyed my honour and prestige in the society.’ Jashim also responded, ‘If you cannot show minimum respect for my emotions and decisions, if you cannot accept my wife, I cannot leave my wife and, hence, cannot stay here anymore.’ This conversation between father and son reveals the social context and the place of the Rohingyas in Bangladesh, where affinal relations with Rohingyas are considered as a ‘damage to social image’ and a ‘task of social stigma’. It is widely believed that marital association with a Rohingya jeopardizes the social status, social prestige, generational continuity of a lineage, and the dignity of identity for traditional Bangladeshis.25 This event reveals the dynamics of acceptance and rejection—hosting and hurting—of Rohingya refugees in the social fabric of Bangladesh. If we see a similar case from the perspective of Rohingya refugees, it unfolds a different scenario. During my fieldwork, I was following this event and wanted to know about the progress in the relationship between Jashim and Rahima and their relations with their respective families, if there were any. I found that Jashim started living separately with Rahima. I interviewed Rahima and her father. When I interviewed Rahima, she had, by the time, become a mother of two sons. After four years, in 2014, Rahima explained to me: Even today, my in-laws do not accept me as a member of their family. I have become a citizen of Bangladesh as Jashim’s wife and have a voter

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identification card as a recognition of my citizenship, but my fatherin-law has not accepted me yet. They are even reluctant to accept my two sons as their descendents and members of their lineage. Jashim has maintained a kind of cold relation with his family since we married, but my father-in-law has never visited us. Following our marriage, my parents had to face a lot of criticism, humiliation, and mental torture in public places time and again for committing ‘the crime of letting me marry Makbul’s son, Jashim’. It happens not only in my life but also in the lives of many other Rohingya girls, only because we are Rohingyas.

Rahima’s narrative is instrumental to understand the discourse of ‘hosting’ and ‘hurting’ because it reveals the cruel reality of BengalRohingya relations in Ukhia and Teknaf. Besides, Rahima’s story constitutes the notion of ‘hurting’, since it happens in the lives of many other Rohingyas. On record, only 32,000 Rohingyas out of more than one million, were officially registered and recognized as refugees by the GoB before the latest influx in 2016 and 2017. They used to live in two official camps—Kutupalong of Ukhia and Nayapara of Teknaf—under the supervision of the UNHCR. Now, the question is, if only 32,000 Rohingyas live in official refugee camps, what about the others? The rest of them—around one million who are officially unrecognized as refugees, who are now under the biometric registration system as ‘forcibly displaced Myanmar’s nationals’ (FDMN)—live in different villages, makeshift refugee camps, and roadsides of the south-eastern region of Bangladesh, though newly arrived Rohingyas are kept in 32 temporarily built refugee camps26 in Teknaf, Ukhia, and nearby places. The remaining ‘Rohingyas have been struggling to survive in and around the south-eastern part of Bangladesh, Teknaf and Ukhia, two sub-districts of Cox’s Bazar for years’.27 During my recent visits in 2017, 2018, and 2019, I witnessed the alarmingly excessive presence of the Rohingyas everywhere in Ukhia and Teknaf. Conversations with locals reveal a dramatic change in the mindset of the local people and host society. Amidst my decade-long academic engagement with the Rohingyas, I have observed that unregistered Rohingyas—that is, those who are not registered as newly arrived FDMN—are largely unemployed, vulnerable to ill health, and subject to labour exploitation, whereas registered refugees are supplied adequate food, have access to a basic healthcare system, and have been provided with shelter by the UNHCR, which is assigned to

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take care of them. It is also reported that until the new influx started in August 2017, UNHCR, local human rights organizations, and civil society remained silent on the rights of Rohingya refugees who were unregistered.28 Local people, on the other hand, do not entertain their presence warmly for many reasons. I wrote elsewhere long ago that: since Ukhia and Teknaf of Cox’s Bazar are an overcrowded and resourcepoor area, thousands of self-settled Rohingyas have been living in the local community for years and hence they are largely perceived as a burden on [the] already scant resources of the locality and a threat to the local job market. They are treated by both the local people and state institutions—civil administration, law enforcing agencies, local government bodies and bureaucrats—as illegal-migrants, unwelcome outsiders and socially disordered settlers.29

Destitute conditions have often driven some Rohingyas to petty crimes, which usually leads to a lot of backlash from the Bangladeshi hosts. The relationship between the host society and the Rohingya

Figure 3.1 Rohingyas are spreading over every corner of Ukhia and Teknaf on a daily basis. Source: Author’s personal collection.

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refugees had not been smooth for a long time and, since the latest influx, it has turned into a bitter and complex one. The genocide30 that displaced thousands of Rohingyas reveals new structural antagonisms between the hosts in south-eastern Bangladesh and the refugees. It is also be noted here that along with the tension between local Bengalis and Rohingya refugees, I have noticed that a new kind of tension is growing between Rohingya refugees who arrived earlier and the new arrivals. One of the reasons for this, according to me, is that the new arrivals are paid more attention and provided food, shelter, and daily essentials unlike the old ones. I will discuss this in the following chapters. Now, I will try to analyse this hurting and hosting phenomenon through a few more instances given in this chapter.

Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh: Contested Narratives In most cases, the situation of refugees is explained from two contested perspectives. One perspective is of the host society, which always portrays refugees as being responsible for mountains of misdeeds and boundless miseries, and for destabilizing their normal course of life. Another perspective is that of Rohingya refugees, who always claim that the host society often violates their rights as human beings and is very unkind to them. Nell Gabiam, in the context of Palestinian refugees in Syria,31 has explained that the host community can never meet the demands of the refugees as their needs are endless, but the refugees consider it as a denial of their entitlement. Based on her works on three camps in Syria, Gabiam analyses that two kinds of tensions work in the camps: politics of suffering, to keep alive the discourse around the Palestinian right of return; and politics of citizenship, to close the divide between the camp and the city.32 The divide remains alive and this ‘divide’ between the camps and the city is similar to what I metaphorically present as ‘hosting’ in the form of assisting the refugee situation and ‘hurting’ in the form of how the refugees look at the non-fulfillment of their expectation and desires.33 In the context of the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, we find a similar blame game between the two communities. Among the general public in Bangladesh, and the policymakers, NGOs, and international

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organizations, there are two contrasting points of view that have existed for long. One of the viewpoints (of the host community) states that the Rohingya refugees are a big burden upon the local society because they share the local facilities for their survival. Besides, they are destroying the law and order situation of the host society by stealing and committing robbery, damaging local ecology by cutting trees in the forests, capturing employment opportunities by selling cheap labour in the job market, and creating social instability by committing various crimes.34 Another viewpoint (of the refugees) explicates that the refugees are treated very inhumanly, exploited because of their vulnerable social conditions, forced to provide cheap labour, harassed sexually by the locals, tortured by security forces in violation of human rights, and oppressed economically by intermediaries.35 Both contested theses, as my research finds, have a degree of relevance and their own place—though sometimes grossly exaggerated by both parties—which rather intensifies the crises of the integration of refugees in the host society. Before entering a detailed discussion on issues of contested notions of reciprocal relations, I will cite two polarized narratives—one from a local Bengali and another from a Rohingya refugee—based on my experience of doing ethnographic fieldwork. During my fieldwork in Pasan Para, I was staying with a Bengali family. During an interview, conducted in 2012, Kamal Hossain (58), a local Bengali, explained to me his relations with Rohingyas: These Bormaya36 people, Rohingyas, have caused huge damage to our lives. They have no culture. They have no social norms and values. They do not know how to behave with the neighbours, elders, and the younger ones. They frequently commit various social crimes including robbery, stealing, and hijacking. They have destroyed the forests of the locality by cutting and selling wood in the market as firewood. Besides, they have created a serious unemployment problem by selling their labour cheap in the local job market. The cases of elopement have alarmingly increased since Rohingya boys and girls are exploiting local young boys and girls in the name of love and romance. Moreover, they are creating violence in connection with different local political wings patronized by the Awami League (AL37) and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP38). In fact, they are the real troublemakers and a threat to the local society and social stability.

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This interview was recorded seven years ago, and it is quite understandable that over the years, the antagonistic strain reflected above has become stronger. In fact, this interview serves as a sample indicating the dominant attitude of locals towards the Rohingya refugees, particularly towards the unregistered Rohingyas who are living in the 32 refugee camps located in Ukhia and Teknaf of Cox’s Bazar. The narrative, from a local Bengali’s viewpoint, emerges as one embedded in the everyday experience of life in dealing with the Rohingyas. It also reveals the local perception of Rohingya personhood, their culture, and their unwelcome existence in the local settings. Conversely, the Rohingyas’ attitude towards the local Bengalis has been shaped by their everyday struggle for survival, their living conditions, and the problems they face in dealing with the host community. While visiting Vasan Para in 2012, Mominul Islam (53), an unregistered Rohingya refugee, explained his position to me: We are often identified as illegal outsiders and, hence, are dealt with inhumanly. We are often regarded as burdens in all respects since local people think that we are capturing their meals. We cannot earn two meals a day, and hence, starvation has become part of our everyday life. No facilities—medical, educational, or residential—are provided to us as we are not registered as refugees. No GOs, no NGOs, and no international organizations like UNESCO or UNHCR provide us with any kind of support for our survival since we are not officially recognized. We want to be registered but the government declines to do so. The police treat us as socially disordered [that is, criminals committing social crimes] people. Local administrations treat us as illegal residents. Local people treat us like animals. In fact, we are treated as subhumans. We, Rohingyas, are not human beings.

This statement of a Rohingya shows how they are treated as subordinates by the host society. They feel helpless and exploited because they are denied recognition, legal rights, and entitlements. The statement clearly explains how the local host society deals with Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. A testimony of the lived experience of a Rohingya refugee, as stated earlier, is not a mere outburst of emotions of one individual but reflects the dismal and inhuman plight of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.

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Here, it should be made clear that the situation of the Rohingyas in Bangladesh has improved a little, after the massive influx in 2017, because several international and national NGOs came forward to support them. In the spectrum of supports, the old ones were also incorporated and hence their situations have improved along with the new arrivals. Despite contrasts, the two narratives provide us with a portrait of the state of relations and the degree of mutual interaction between Rohingya refugees and the local Bengalis. One view reveals how the local people deal with a large number of refugees in their everyday life, which is also instrumental in understanding the plight of the Rohingyas in Bangladesh. On the other hand, another view reveals how a large number of refugees, both registered and unregistered, lived in abysmal conditions in Bangladesh, at least until the massive influx of 2017.39 Considering both views, I will discuss the impediments to the integration of the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh in two separate sections: (1) Why, and on what grounds, had the local society accepted the Rohingyas and sheltered them in their locality? and (2) why are they rejecting them now? And why are the local Bengalis considering the Rohingyas as an unwanted burden in their lives? This section also narrates the kind of miseries the Rohingyas have been experiencing for decades, which they consider as ‘hurting’.

Hosting the Guests: Why Did the Local Society Accept the Rohingyas? The relationship between the Rohingyas and the local Bengalis has evolved over the years since the Rohingyas first migrated to this region. ‘What the situation in the beginning was did not last long and hence relationship between Rohingyas and local people has become critical with each passing day because of many conflicts of interest of classes [sic].’40 Hossain said, ‘When Rohingya refugees came to Bangladesh from Myanmar, the local people were sympathetic to them. They helped them, providing clothes, food, and even shelter. Over the years, the situation has changed. Now-a-days, the relationship between Rohingya refugees and the community people [local people] are not warm. The local[s] are becoming unhappy, if not hostile to the Rohingya refugees.’41

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Based on my long years of research engagement with the Rohingyas, I found two basic reasons why local Bengalis of south-eastern Bangladesh provided Rohingyas with shelter in their locality, while the Bangladeshi state had a different political strategy and foreign policy.42 In the beginning, in 1978, the Rohingyas were received warmly by the local people of Cox’s Bazar mainly on (1) humanitarian grounds and (2) the feeling of Muslim brotherhood. Many local Bengalis of Ukhia and Teknaf, along with several villagers of Pasan Para and Vasan Para, time and again, told me since 199743 that they felt that it was their duty to stand beside the Rohingyas since they were oppressed, tortured, persecuted, and inhumanly killed by the military junta of Myanmar and forced to leave their homeland. Besides, they also felt that it was their duty as the Rohingyas were also Muslims by religion. In fact, the local people of Ukhia and Teknaf said: ‘As human beings, we felt it was our moral and sacred duty to help other Muslim brothers and sisters in crisis’. I spent a long time conversing with the older local Bengali informants who shared their experiences of interacting with the Rohingyas. In most cases I found that local people, from the very beginning, received the Rohingyas very warmly and entertained them as ‘genuine guests’. Even in the beginning, in the late eighties, many locals made room for migrant Rohingyas in their house and fed them for weeks and months without expecting anything in return. Some local families provided many Rohingya families of five/six members each, with shelter and food for weeks without any hesitation. Quite a few helped them find shelter in and around their yards and facilitated jobs for them to survive. This hospitality gradually started to fade. Badsha Mian (52), a local Bengali, explained to me in 2012: Everyone has a mother, father, sisters, and sons. Problems, on the other hand, may come in everyone’s life. So, we should help each other in need and crises. When we learnt that [the] Rohingyas were severely tortured, killed, and forced to leave their country by the military junta and that [the] Rohingyas, finding no other alternative, were crossing the nearby border and coming in our land, we felt great sympathy for them and took initiatives to provide them with shelter. Many families came with little children, whereas several other families came with adult daughters. So, it appeared to us as a question of humanity, crisis of humanity, and hence, we gave them shelter on the grounds of humanity. We felt at that time that it was our sacred duty to stand by them on humanitarian grounds

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and we did so. Had we not made room for them and had turned them away, many of them would be forced to kill themselves as they could not possibly go back to Burma. That was why we gave them shelter and provided [them] food and other essentials.

Mohammad Ali, a local Bengali, the head of the household where I used to stay during my fieldwork, still holds a similar sense of feeling for the Rohingyas. He still thinks of the Rohingyas as a stateless people, Muslims in crisis, who need help to survive. He also thinks that supporting and lending a helping hand to the Rohingyas in crisis is, as he has said, ‘our moral and human duty as the[ir] closest neighbours’. Though the Rohingya presence by the time had become a critical issue among the locals of the host society due to, according to the majority of the local Bengalis’ claims, many sorts of misconduct by the Rohingya refugees, some like Ali still prefer to stand by the Rohingyas. In his words: There are always two categories of people: good and bad. Some Rohingyas are bad in their nature but not necessarily all Rohingyas. Besides, I sometimes think that they are victims of the situation. Bad times may come in everyone’s life. We Bengalis did go through a similar experience in 1971 during the liberation war when one crore people took refuge in India because it was a bad time for us. They are coming here just for the sake of their survival. This is not their pleasure trip; [it is] out of a lack of choice, they fled their homes, for the sake of their lives. We should try and think of ourselves in their situation. We all know that necessity never knows the law because poverty is the mother of all misdeeds.

This sort of solidarity, a feeling of empathy, as far as my experience goes based on interactions with local Bengalis, is becoming more and more scarce in Vasan Para and Pasan Para because most of the people have had bitter experiences in dealing with Rohingya refugees. Besides, the recent influx of Rohingyas has created a very critical situation,44 adding new dimensions to the dynamics of social integration, and has drastically altered people’s perceptions. Nonetheless, I still find that many local Bengalis have strong sympathetic feelings towards them, guided by the sentiment of Muslim brotherhood and fraternity, as mentioned earlier. One of my Bengali informants, Kamaluddin (49), second cousin of my host Mohammad Ali, told me: Muslims stand beside Muslims in crises. This is the basic lesson of Islam. When we came to know that our Rohingya Muslim brothers45 were in

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crises, oppressed and inhumanly tortured by military junta and nonMuslim Buddhists, we became worried for them. We thought of doing something for them at that time. We learnt that Rohingya Muslim brothers were crossing the border to take shelter in this region; we even went forward to receive them since we felt it was our sacred duty to support Muslims in crises. We provided them with shelter in and around our own homeland. We tried our best to help them so that they could survive here with their family members that included children, adult girls, and aged parents. We did it out of our moral duty for our Muslim brothers and sisters because the lesson of our holy book is that ‘Duniar Sokol Musalman Vai Vai’, meaning all Muslims across the world are brothers [and sisters] with each other.

During my stay in the field in different periods, I found that this relationship between the Rohingyas and Bengalis has transformed. Over four decades, the congenial relationship has turned into something that I have rhetorically termed as ‘hurting’. I discuss the reasons of ‘hurting’ in the next section because this section primarily presents the reasoning and attitudes of the local Bengalis regarding ‘hosting’ Rohingyas.

Hurting the Guests: The Construct of the Ungrateful Refugee, the Inhuman Chittagonian46 people are widely known for their generosity and hospitality. Nevertheless, the people of Teknaf and Ukhia are known to all as hosts hurting their guests, the Rohingya refugees. Various reports of Amnesty International, UNHCR, human rights groups, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), and so on, have strongly made public that many human rights violations have taken place in relation to the Rohingya refugees. My close observation of Rohingya migration and settlement in the south-eastern part of Cox’s Bazar for more than two decades made me understand that the feeling of Muslim brotherhood and deep sympathy for the exploited and oppressed people in the neighbourhood began to recede when the local people gradually found that Rohingyas were, according to their term, ‘penetrating’ their daily course of life and creating problems that they had not anticipated. The local people slowly observed that the Rohingyas were replacing them in the job market, occupying their lands, destroying forests by cutting and selling firewood

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in the market, and getting involved in various social crimes and criminal activities, mainly stealing, hijacking, and robbery. According to Makbul (57), a local Bengali, in 2012: It is true that we now no longer want [the] Rohingyas to stay in our land. Not only me, 99 per cent of local Bengalis are really fed up with Rohingya refugees, their behaviour, and their presence in our locality. Though we gave them shelter when they were in crises, in return they gave us unbearable problems and intolerable sufferings. It is indeed not our fault because their character is something like that; je thalate khai shei thalate-i tara paikhana kore [they defecate in the same plate they eat from]. Rohingya jat-tai emon je tara je kolshir pani khai, shei kolshi abar ghuta dia futa kore dei. Okritoggo. [Rohingya is the name of typical nation that make holes in the pitcher they drink from. They are a very ungrateful nation.] So, we cannot tolerate them for long. In fact, we have already done for them far more than our capacity [sic], but in return, they have given [us] unbearable pain personally and socially. Rohingya people are not manusher jaat [human race].

Makbul’s statement clearly reveals the unpleasant structure of relations between the local Bengalis and the Rohingya refugees living in Ukhia and Teknaf. However, this reflects one side of the relation, the Bengali perspective, but there is also a Rohingya perspective to this. On 14 October 2016, a ‘beating event’ over an allegation of snatching happened in Ukhia between some local Bengalis and a few Rohingya refugees. Some Bengalis from Ukhia Cotbazar47 searched for a Rohingya, Selim (28), and caught him in connection with a snatching that had taken place in the morning at a nearby road. Selim denied any involvement in the crime and said that he had been in Teknaf in the morning with his mother and had come back to Ukhia that afternoon. The Bengalis present there were not ready to listen to anything and started beating him brutally. By this time, a few more Rohingyas joined Selim and gave evidence in support of his presence in Teknaf in the morning. The Bengalis present there, rather than listening to them, started beating them as well. All the Rohingyas present there were beaten in a group by the Bengalis, who were heard saying things like, ‘You Rohingyas are spoiling our life; you Rohingyas are destroying our society; you Rohingyas are damaging our everything.’ I was present in Ukhia Cotbazar at the time and observed the entire event standing close by. After two days, on 16 October 2016, I met Selim at his home in Ukhia.

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I would like to mention here that I tried to release the Rohingya youths, but my attempts did not bear fruit. However, finally they were released. I met his wife and his mother who explained to me and convinced me that Selim had taken his mother to Teknaf to see his eldest uncle on Friday (14 October 2018). Selim’s mother asked me, ‘How could it be possible for Selim to snatch money from a businessman in Ukhia while he was in Teknaf? He took me to Teknaf in the morning and brought me back to Ukhia in the afternoon. Why was my son beaten up inhumanly in the bazar in front of all? Is this because we are Rohingyas? Is this because we are not manush (human beings)?’ Selim’s mother was talking as if she was asking me the answer as I, being a Bengali, apparently represented the host community in the situation. I did not have any answer to her questions. Makbul’s statement, the event of Cotbazar, and the subsequent questions raised by Selim’s mother paints a clear picture of the crisis of social integration of the Rohingya refugees in Ukhia and Teknaf, the south-eastern part of Bangladesh. What are the reasons that turned the warm and brotherly relationship between the Rohingya refugees and the local Bengalis into a confrontational one? And what led to the Bangladeshi hosts seeing the Rohingyas as lesser than human? I think the following points of conflict could be the principal causes48 for the now decaying relationship between them: (1) cultural differences between the Bengalis and the Rohingyas; (2) contest over the local job market and cheap, informal, skilled, and unskilled labour; (3) threat to the prevailing ethnic endogamy in Bangladesh; (4) environmental degradation and destruction of forest resources; (5) decline in law and order due to rise in criminal offences, reportedly committed by the Rohingyas; and (6) the rise in militant activities carried out by the Rohingyas. While details on the six principle causes have been discussed with ethnographic data in Chapter 4, here, I will discuss a couple of first-hand experiences that explain why the dealings of local Bengalis seem to be hurting the Rohingyas. Kalimullah, the beyai of my host Mohammad Ali, lives in the eastern corner of Pasan Para. He is an honest and emotional man with a soft personality. He gave shelter to Muslim Uddin, a Rohingya, who came from Myanmar in 1992. Muslim was accompanied by four other members of his family, his wife, two daughters, and one son. It was difficult for Kalimullah to give shelter to a family of five for a long time

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as his own family had six members. After a few days of their arrival, Kalimullah proposed to build a temporary house in the yard beside his own house on the agreement that Muslim would try to find shelter somewhere else and leave Kalimullah’s house at the earliest. It has been almost 26 years, but Muslim and his family members still live there. Meanwhile, they have built a brick house. Kalimullah made several attempts to evacuate them but failed. In subsequent years, Muslim gained popularity and power as he became a leader of the Rohingya community, finding strong linkages with the local political parties and many international human rights agencies. Whenever Kalimullah goes to law enforcement agencies and if the police comes to evacuate the Rohingya family, in response, it suddenly appears as a question of human rights violation, drawing media focus. This is, in fact, one side of the coin. There is another side to it. During my fieldwork, I observed innumerable counts of human rights violations committed by local Bengalis, security forces, and law enforcement agencies, which remained unaddressed most of the time.49 Using forced labour of Rohingya refugees at a cheap remuneration or even without payment; physical attacks without any sensible reason; sexual harassment of Rohingya women; torture by security forces without any reason; evacuating them from their temporary shelter without any notice; and so on50 have been common phenomena in the lives of Rohingya refugees living in and around Teknaf and Ukhia. I recorded many facts and events of such violations of human rights, which the Rohingyas really feel as hurting by the hosts. Badruduzza (42), a Rohingya, one evening in 2012, explained to me: We also think that it is really difficult for a country to adopt and feed more than 500,000 additional people51 in her land. It is also true that we Rohingyas have become, to some extent, a burden for this locality, which itself is an overcrowded and resource-poor area. I also admit that many of us, of course not all, have become involved in many social crimes that are destabilizing the local law and order system. Where will we go? Myanmar does not recognize us as its citizens on the one hand, and Bangladesh does not recognize us even as refugees, let alone citizens. What should we do? Nobody wants to employ us since we are Rohingyas and refugees. How will we feed our family? Starvation has become an inexplicable part of our life. Our children are suffering from malnutrition. How will we survive? Finding no other alternative, if we cut trees

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and sell in the market as firewood, we are accused of destroying the forest resources. What should we do to earn our livelihood? Is it our fault that we were born in this universe?

This narrative reflects the crisis of Rohingya refugees at the local level, which hardly features in the state’s understanding of the Rohingya problem. The main problem is indeed the question of survival. Whatever the Rohingyas do is more or less driven by the crucial question of survival but, on the other hand, is creating problems for the local people who once hosted them. I started this chapter with a case of elopement that reflected the structure of relations between Bengalis and Rohingyas in Teknaf and Ukhia. At the end of this chapter, I can cite another recent case of elopement that is good enough for the Rohingyas to define and refine the ‘treatment of host community’ as ‘hurting’. In order to settle the dispute between two families—one Rohingya and one local Bengali family— over an elopement case, an arbitrary meeting was called, where we can find the relations between the Rohingya refugee and the Bengali host society. I have used this case study in a forthcoming book chapter, but considering its strong relevance, I am citing the case here as well. Farid Uddin (54) is a Rohingya who came to Bangladesh in 1991 and settled down in Vasan Para. He told me about a local dispute settlement case in the local union parishad office: Mr Sirajul Islam, the elected member of a union parishad in Teknaf upazila, called a meeting at his office in 2014 at the request of HarunAr-Rashid, a local Bengali. I was summoned to attend the meeting. Many other local Bengalis were present there. A school teacher was also present there. Some local political leaders also attended the meeting. My daughter, Khushbu (19), and her husband, Karim (27), were there. I was surprised to see my daughter there because Khushbu had gone missing six days ago. I came to know that she had eloped with Karim and they had gotten married. I did not find them anywhere in Teknaf. I was rather happy to see my daughter. Mr Harun [had] complained to Mr Sirajul Islam against me and my daughter because, as per his complaint, my daughter and I had deliberately flattered and deluded his son Karim into marrying Khushbu. Therefore, he had been emotionally blackmailed into marrying my daughter. Now, Harun wanted his son back and demanded that my daughter should go back home. Sirajul Islam was asking my opinion. I tried to convince Mr Sirajul Islam and others

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present there that a matured boy and girl had consciously decided to marry each other and done so accordingly. They had stayed together for six days as husband and wife. How could I bring my daughter back? It would be injustice to my daughter and my family. It would destroy my daughter’s life and her future and bring social stigma to my family. I had still a couple of daughters and their future would be at risk too. I tried to convince the people present there with all my logic, emotions, requests, and earnest appeals. But all went in vain. Finally, Sirajul Islam gave a decision that it was still not too late and Khushbu should go back home and Karim would not meet her again in future. The decision was final, so I could not do anything. I came back home with my daughter who was crying as if her heart was bleeding. That night, my daughter committed suicide by hanging herself from the ceiling fan in her room using a scarf. I could do nothing but accept the writing of fate because we are Rohingyas. We have no one to complain to.52

This case shows how several local Bengalis deal with Rohingya refugees, where an unjust, unfair, and one-sided decision is made in favour of the host community while the refugees are left in an extremely vulnerable position. Therefore, the Rohingyas conceptualize the dealings, behaviour, and treatment by the local Bengalis as ‘hurting’ because there are some valid reasons behind it. In fact, mutual co-existence is also a big problem since both groups, despite religious and linguistic homogeneity, are different in their culture, mode of dealings, and philosophy of life. These differences also make the Rohingyas understand that the hosts are now hurting them because local people, insofar as my experience goes, are no longer ready to accept the Rohingya refugees in their locality. It is mainly because Rohingyas, as many local Bengalis claim, have created and are still creating lots of problems in their regular course of life. UNHCR and other international NGOs are paying attention to in-camp registered Rohingya refugees only, whereas large numbers of unregistered Rohingya refugees are left unaddressed in their agenda. Though following the influx of 2017, newly arrived Rohingyas are now paid adequate attention, it is also creating deep frustration and dissatisfaction among the local Bengalis, because they think the local Bengalis are getting left out in the entire ‘take care’ programme53 happening in the locality. The central state is also reluctant to reassure them in any way. This sort of reluctance on the part of the national and international agencies

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working in this area is also accelerating problems in the lives of the local people and the Rohingya refugees. *** In fact, whenever Rohingya refugees attempt to enter any aspects of the local life for the sake of survival, local people take it as unfair penetration and resist it. The resistance from local people appears to the Rohingyas as ‘hurting’, since it denies them access to possible sources of livelihood, and hence, they trapped in the crisis of survival. From the point of view of local people, they have every right to protect their lives, livelihood, and society by resisting Rohingya penetration, and from the Rohingya point of view, they have every right to survive and lead a life as human beings. Now the question of who will ensure the rights of both the local people and the Rohingya refugees is operationally and effectively absent. The state is always in a dilemma of whether to make room for Rohingya refugees or to repatriate them to Myanmar. International agencies, including UNHCR, IOM, and MSF, are putting pressure on the Bangladesh government to be tolerant in hosting Rohingya refugees in their land. This top-level contestation does not provide any effective solution to what the local Bengalis and the Rohingyas are encountering in their everyday life in the local-level social settings. In conclusion, I would rather say that hosts should not hurt the guests but why, how, and in what context hosts usually hurt (!) the guests should also be understood and given equal importance in order to lay down a comprehensive approach to resolve the social integration crisis of Rohingya refugees. This is because we must remember that every coin has two sides and both are equally important.

Notes 1. The total number of Rohingya refugees living in Bangladesh is estimated to be more than 1,300,000. The biometric database prepared by the Bangladesh government includes 1,132,000, but a good number of Rohingyas still remain unrecorded. 2. According to the Bangladesh Population Census 2011, the total population of Teknaf upazila is 264,389 while that of Ukhia upazila is 207,379, but the total Rohingyas are more than 1,200,000. Therefore, many media outlets

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published reports that Rohingyas outnumber the locals in Teknaf and Ukhia. See ‘Rohingyas Outnumber Locals in Ukhia, Teknaf,’ Daily Independent, 27 October 2017, accessed 6 April 2014, http://www.theindependentbd.com/post/120913; Mayesha Alam, ‘How the Rohingya Crisis Is Affecting Bangladesh—And Why it Matters,’ Washington Post, 12 February 2018, accessed 16 August 2018, https://www. washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/02/12/how-the-rohingyacrisis-is-affecting-bangladesh-and-why-it matters/?noredirect=on&utm_term=. 4f85f11f7cb0; Tarek Mahmud, ‘Rohingya Influx: Refugees Outnumber Ukhia, Teknaf Locals,’ Dhaka Tribune, 23 October 2017, accessed 16 August 2018, https://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/2017/10/23/rohingya-influxrefugees-outnumber-Ukhia-teknaf-locals/. 3. Nasir Uddin, ‘Of Hosting and Hurting: Crises in Co-existence with Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh,’ in To Host or To Hurt: Counter-Narratives on Rohingya Refugee Issue in Bangladesh, ed. Nasir Uddin (Dhaka: Institute of Culture and Development Research, 2012a), 84.; Nasir Uddin, Not Rohingyas, but Royainga: Stateless People in the Struggle for Existence (in Bengali) (Dhaka: Murddhanno Publisher, 2017b); K. Fahmida Farzana, Memories of Burmese Rohingya Refugees: Contested Identities and Belonging (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017); Delwar Hossain, ‘Tracing the Plight of the Rohingyas,’ in The Plight of the Stateless Rohingyas, ed. Imtiaz Ahmed (2010; Dhaka: The University Press Limited, 2014), 22. 4. By newer dimensions, I mean that additional Rohingyas, about 700,000, need additional shelters, food supply, sanitation, water supply, and everyday essentials, which is creating tremendous pressure on local resources and facilities. 5. See Gil Loescher and James Milner, Protracted Refugee Situations: Domestic and International Security Implications (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). 6. Loescher and Milner, Protracted Refugee Situations. 7. Alison Mountz, Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border (Minneapolis and London: Minnesota University Press, 2010). 8. Uddin, ‘Of Hosting and Hurting,’ 83. 9. All Rohingyas are not refugees in official records even before 2017. Only those who live in the Kutupalong and Nayapara official refugee camps are officially designated as refugees. However, in the locality, people in general tend to identify them as ‘Rohingya refugees’. Therefore, when I write ‘refugees’ I mean all Rohingyas, irrespective of whether they are registered or unregistered, as local people tend to term it. 10. See Uddin, ‘Of Hosting and Hurting’. 11. For example, see Edward Mogire, Victims as Security Threats: Refugee Impact on Host State Security in Africa (England and USA: Ashgate Publishing

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Limited, 2011); Loescher and Milner, Protracted Refugee Situations; Mountz, Seeking Asylum. 12. Bangladesh could be cited as an example here, since the basic principle of Bangladesh foreign policy stated in the constitution is ‘friendship to all, enemy to none’. 13. See Uddin, ‘Of Hosting and Hurting,’ 84. 14. A Japan-based human rights organization ‘Human Rights Now’ has recently published a report on the human rights situation of the Rohingyas in both Myanmar and Bangladesh. The report has categorically blamed Myanmar for serious human rights violations, but at the same time it has also criticized Bangladesh for violating human rights of the Rohingyas. See ‘Investigative Report of Rohingya Refugee Camps in Bangladesh,’ Human Rights Now, accessed 18 August 2018, http://hrn.or.jp/eng/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/ Investigative-Report-of-Rohingya-Refugee-Camps-in-Bangladesh.pdf. Academics also criticized Bangladesh, although with a soft tone, for violating the human rights of the Rohingyas. For details, see A.K.M. Ahsan Ullah, ‘Rohingya Refugees to Bangladesh: Historical Exclusion and Contemporary Marginalization,’ Journal of Immigration and Refugee Studies 9, no. 2 (2011): 139–61; Nasir Uddin, ‘State of Stateless People: The Plight of Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh,’ in Human Rights to Citizens: A Slippery Concept, ed. Rhoda Howard-Hassmann and Margaret Walton-Roberts (USA: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 62–77. 15. See Uddin, ‘Of Hosting and Hurting,’ 85; Uddin, ‘State of Stateless People,’ 63. 16. Helaluddin Arefeen, ‘Some Aspects of Lineage Organization among the Muslims of Bangladesh,’ Man in India 92, no. 1 (2012): 1–12. 17. See Nicoletta Del Franco, Negotiating Adolescence in Rural Bangladesh: A Journey through School, Love and Marriage (New Delhi: Zubaan, 2012). 18. See Arefeen, ‘Some Aspects of Lineage Organization among the Muslims of Bangladesh’. 19. Elora Shehabuddin, Reshaping the Holy: Democracy, Development, and Muslim Women in Bangladesh (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 20. Samaj is a kind of social organization that works as an agency of social control and exercises an informal judicial system in rural Bangladesh. Samaj consists of elderly persons in the village, the imam of the mosque, chairperson or members of the local government, principal of the local school, and members of some renowned families (like lineage of chowdhry, talukder, chairman, and old zamindar) who claim that their sacred duty is to ensure social norms, values, tradition, and justice in the society. See Ashraful Aziz, Kinship in Bangladesh (Dhaka: ICDDR’B, 1979); Arefeen, ‘Some Aspects of Lineage Organization among the Muslims of Bangladesh’; M. Rezaul Islam, NGOs, Social Capital, and Community Empowerment in Bangladesh (Singapore: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016).

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21. I have used the age of every informant here in relation to citation so that readers can easily understand the context of the facts and events of action and actors in different citations. 22. Bangsha in Bangladesh and Bengali society carries family status and social prestige, which is instrumental in the social fabric in dealing, interacting, and communicating with and among individuals. Therefore, the prestige of bangsha is always regarded highly. This is crucial in arranged marriages and spouse selection with the consent of the family. Besides, names and lineages of bangsha also play an important role in maintaining social cohesion and are used as an influential agency of social control. For details, see Aziz, Kinship in Bangladesh; Arefeen, ‘Some Aspects of Lineage Organization among the Muslims of Bangladesh’. 23. Affinal relation indicates a type of kinship that develops based on marriage. In anthropology, kinships are of three kinds: affinal (through marriage), consanguineal (through blood relations), and fictive (emotionally significant relationship unrelated by marriage or birth). 24. ‘Beyai’ is a local term that is usually used to refer to people whose son and daughter get married. This is a commonly used term in the southeastern region in Bangladesh. In other parts of Bangladesh, ‘beyai’ is a term used to refer to the bride and bridegroom’s younger brothers and sisters. Beyai in kinship terminology in Bangladesh also denotes a joking relation between individuals. For details, see Helaluddin Arefeen, Changing Agrarian Structure in Bangladesh: Shimulia, A Study of a Periurban Village (Dhaka: Centre for Social Studies, 1986). 25. See, Uddin, ‘Of Hosting and Hurting,’ 86. 26. Among the 32 refugee camps, the main ones that are mentionable and big in size are Kutupalong, Nayapara, Taal, Leda, Balukhali, Tangkhali, Hariakhali, Unchiprang, and Shalbagan camps. 27. Uddin, ‘Of Hosting and Hurting,’ 87. 28. See Chris Lewa, Unregistered Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh: Crackdown, Forced Displacement and Hunger (Bangkok: The Arakan Project, 2010); Uddin, ‘Of Hosting and Hurting’; Imtiaz Ahmed, ed., The Plight of the Stateless Rohingyas: Responses of the State, Society and International Community (Dhaka: The University Press Limited, 2014). 29. Nasir Uddin, ‘Treatment of Unwelcome Guests: A Case of the Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh’ (Paper presented in the international conference on The Political Economy of South Asian Migrants, South Asian Region Formation Research Society, University of Delhi, India, 24–26 November 2010). 30. Ishaan Tharoor, ‘The World Let a Genocide Unfold,’ Washington Post, 18 December 2017, accessed 16 August 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/

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news/worldviews/wp/2017/12/18/in-2017-the-world-let-a-genocide-unfold/? utm_term=.7a0d47d96530. 31. Nell Gabiam, The Politics of Suffering: Syria’s Palestinian Refugee Camps (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2016). 32. Gabiam, The Politics of Suffering. 33. See Uddin, ‘Of Hosting and Hurting’. 34. See Nasir Uddin, ed., To Host or To Hurt: Counter Narratives on Rohingya Refugee Issue in Bangladesh (Dhaka: Institute for Culture and Development Research [ICDR], 2012b). 35. See Lewa, Unregistered Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh. 36. ‘Bormaya people’ means people from Burma, now Myanmar. Local people quite often term the Rohingyas as Bormaya people. 37. Bangladesh Awami League (AL), which is now in power. 38. Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which is now in opposition. 39. It should be clarified here that following the massive influx that took place in 2017, many national and international organizations came forward with various kinds of support to help meet the incoming refugees’ basic needs. Thereafter, the Rohingya situation started taking a different shape. My experience does not essentially confirm that newly arrived ‘helps and supports’ have ensured the ‘minimum standard of living’ after 2017, this will be discussed in the later chapters. This chapter is mostly based on my first-hand experience on the crises of social integration of Rohingyas refugees in the context of the ‘refugee situation before 2017’. 40. See Uddin, ‘Of Hosting and Hurting’, 86. 41. Hossain, ‘Tracing the Plight of the Rohingyas,’ 22. 42. Bangladesh, from the very beginning of the Rohingya influx, was reluctant to let them in because of three reasons: (1) Bangladesh is a poor country, and hence, it cannot host refugees; (2) it is already an overpopulated country, and hence, it cannot be burdened with additional people; and (3) it is not a signatory state of the UN Refugee Convention 1951, so it is not legally bound to host Rohingya refugees in its land. See Ahmed, The Plight of the Stateless Rohingyas; Uddin, ‘Treatment of Unwelcome Guests’. 43. Of course, I heard it long before 1997 as I was a local resident of Cox’s Bazar, but I started recording the narratives, quotations, and statements of both Rohingyas and local Bengalis only since 1997 when I started my professional research on the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. 44. See Chapters 4, 5, and 6. 45. Whenever the local people talk about Rohingya Muslims, many of them often refer to them as ‘Muslim brothers’. They do not say ‘brothers and sisters’, but they mean both when they utter ‘Muslims brothers’. Therefore, when I quote

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their narrative, I have tried to keep their statements as is. Hence, I have used ‘Muslim brothers’. 46. The people who live in the Chittagong region are widely and popularly known as Chittagonian people. 47. Ukhia Cotbazar is a famous place in Ukhia within Cox’s Bazar. It is basically a marketplace with a bus station from where people can catch a connecting bus to Cox’s Bazar, Chittagong, and even Dhaka. Also, people can go to Teknaf from Cotbazar. Besides, Ukhia Cotbazar is the centre point to visit Rohingya camps, particularly Kutupalong in Ukhia and Nayapara in Teknaf. It seems to be an urban space in the semi-urban city of Ukhia and Teknaf. 48. For details, see Uddin, ‘Treatment of Unwelcome Guests’; Uddin, ‘Of Hosting and Hurting’; Uddin, ‘State of Stateless People’. 49. See Chapters 4, 5, and 6. 50. In support of all these issues, plenty of case studies are presented in the later chapters. In order to avoid redundancy, I have refrained from putting cases one after the other here. 51. In 2012, the total number of Rohingyas refugees was about 500,000. 52. Nasir Uddin, ‘The State, Vulnerability, and Transborder Movement: The Rohingyas in Myanmar and Bangladesh,’ in Deterritorialised Identity and Transborder Movements in South Asia, eds. Nasir Uddin and Nasreen Chowdhory (Singapore: Springer, 2019c), 73–90. 53. Following the new influx that started on 25 August 2017, many international agencies, donor countries, and UN bodies are providing huge amount of reliefs to support their immediate survival. Local communities have been completely left out of this relief programme, which is creating a deep dissatisfaction among the locals.

4

State of Stateless People The Struggle for Existence and the Cry for Survival

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his chapter aims to take the readers through the intricate conditions of the Rohingyas—a world of statelessness, non-citizenship, and human rights abuse. Although the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) ascertains that ‘everyone has the right to a nationality’1 or citizenship, globally, there are millions of people2 who can be defined as non-citizens. These are the people who are stateless and are not recognized as nationals by any state.3 Since citizenship is a reciprocal relationship of rights and duties between individuals and the state, the stateless people cannot claim any rights from any state because citizenship is what Hannah Arendt calls, ‘the right to have all rights’.4 In some cases, international human rights law confers equal rights on both citizens and non-citizens.5 However, since many countries do not comply with international conventions such as the International Refugee Convention (1951), the Convention relating to Status of Stateless People (1954), and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), the rights of stateless people are not legally and constitutionally ensured everywhere in the world. Besides, the nature and policy of many states create a social, economic, and political environment that is very unfavourable for the refugees, asylum seekers, and stateless people. Refugees and asylum seekers are also considered non-citizens in host countries and are frequently deprived of rights conferred by The Rohingya. Nasir Uddin, Oxford University Press (2020). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199489350.001.0001.

© Oxford University Press.

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international human rights law. The lives of non-citizens, refugees, and asylum seekers are marked by their always already precarious struggle for survival and existence. Poor access to food, clean water, safe shelter, education, means of livelihood, healthcare, proper sanitation, and the absolute absence of social, political, and civil rights makes the lives of non-citizens, stateless people, and refugees acutely vulnerable. Owing to the lack of all forms of rights and an absence of minimum space for survival, such individuals can become objects of exploitation, oppression, torture, and sexual harassment, and are even subject to state persecution. They are most often treated as if they are lesser than human, bringing alive what Giorgio Agamben terms as ‘bare life’. Agamben used the phrase homo sacer to embody ‘bare life’. He explains that this life is ‘bare’ because it can be taken away by anyone without any legal arbitration and without incurring the culpability of homicide. ‘Bare life’ is practically ‘bare’ because it does not exist ‘before the law’. Anybody can kill a ‘bare life’ and not be accused of homicide as s/he is also outside the purview of law.6 Therefore, Agamben’s theory is important to understand the degree of vulnerability that stateless people experience in everyday life, a condition that is reproduced by the state’s discourse of non-citizenship. However, I differ from Agamben’s idea of ‘bare life’ to depict the extremely vulnerable conditionalities of ‘people’ by framing a new idea of ‘subhuman’, which I will discuss in detail in the later chapters. Nonetheless, I still think that Agamben is instrumental to understand the conditions of statelessness, non-citizenship, and refugeehood to some extent. In fact, the structure of the modern nation state produces the legal status of people in the name of ‘citizenship’, which makes others ‘non-citizens’, rendering them stateless and making them more vulnerable than others. Within the theoretical premise of statelessness, the lack of citizenship and refugeehood are components of this critical condition of ‘bare life’. Relevant also is Margaret Walton-Roberts’s idea of slippery citizenship in which ‘slipperiness of citizenship is fast becoming the norm for already vulnerable subjects, and in some cases is also generating further vulnerability’.7 This chapter examines the plight of the Rohingyas in Bangladesh living under the triple burden of refugeehood, statelessness, and human rights abuses.

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State of Stateless People: The Plight of the Rohingyas in Bangladesh The plight of the Rohingyas in Bangladesh can be understood by analysing how the state and host society deal with them because the ‘state’ of their living status is largely determined by the way in which the state and society host them. Institutional engagement, at both national and international levels, is also imperative for understanding the conditions of the Rohingyas in Bangladesh because the international community often claims that they are standing by the Rohingyas. I will discuss the plight of the Rohingyas as a stateless group in Bangladesh in two separate sections: relations with the state and relations with the host society.

Relations with the State In the late 1970s and the early 1990s, Bangladesh took every emergency measure to assist the Rohingyas entering Bangladesh, to ensure their minimum standard of living and their survival with the fulfilment of minimum necessities. Therefore, it can be stated that the ‘commitment undertaken by the GoB to assist these refugees, despite the fact that the state was not a signatory to the UN convention, was notable’.8 Soon after the Rohingyas migrated, four Bangladeshi ministries— the Ministry of Home Affairs, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Ministry of Food and Disaster Management—became actively involved in providing them with basic human needs and monitoring the refugee9 situation. Bangladesh established 20 refugee camps for the Rohingyas along the road to Teknaf. While Bangladesh was providing administrative support for monitoring the refugee situation and camp management, UN agencies—UNHCR, World Food Programme (WFP), UNICEF, World Health Organization (WHO)—were providing financial and logistical support. The GoB coordinated this massive refugee situation, temporary settlement, and later the gradual repatriation to Myanmar with the help of the UN and UNHCR. The remaining registered Rohingyas started living in two official camps in Cox’s Bazar, but their living conditions were miserable, albeit marginally better than the conditions of the unregistered Rohingyas.10

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It is to be noted here that this was the situation before the influx of 2016 and 2017 took place, and soon after this, the situation worsened, which I will discuss in detail in Chapters 5 and 6. However, the camps’ situation was not essentially ‘better’ in the strict sense of the term. Kristy Crabtree explains, ‘the refugee camps have been ranked among the world’s worst; there have been reports of rape and corporal punishment by the local population, and shelters are shoddily maintained by random pieces of tarp, plastic, and bamboo.’11 Concern regarding the state of these camps is further highlighted by the number of spontaneous and makeshift camps established in Teknaf and Ukhia. Despite the GoB’s efforts to assist the refugees, from the very beginning, the Rohingyas were regarded by the state as a burden that created additional pressure on local resources.12 Therefore, from the very beginning, the GoB tried to repatriate them to Myanmar by signing different bilateral agreements, one in 1978 and another in 1991/92. In fact, some have argued that ‘voluntary repatriation is the only durable solution available to refugees: ruling out the possibility of local integration’,13 particularly in the context of the Rohingyas’ social integration in the Bengali rural social setting. Nevertheless, the Rohingyas have gradually become more reluctant to be repatriated because the situation in Rakhine State remains unchanged and has, on the contrary, worsened over time. So many rendered stateless have lost hope of regaining citizenship rights in Myanmar. Thereby, many Rohingya families have integrated with the local society either through social interactions such as affinal relations, or through bilateral trade and employment agreements. With the help of UNHCR and its partner agencies, the GoB has been attempting to secure food and daily essentials. The camps have been set up only for those who are officially registered, leaving a huge number of unregistered refugees without support. However, I must admit that the Rohingyas are living in relatively ‘better’ conditions in temporarily built refugee camps after the 2016–17 influx, because the GoB, with the help of IOM and the UNHCR, along with many other GOs and NGOs, are taking care of them on an urgent and emergency basis and trying to provide basic essentials to them, though the resources remain inadequate. It is crucial to note that prior to the 2016–17 influx, due to the growing anti-Rohingya sentiments encouraged by the political elites as well as the local media, law enforcement agencies, border security forces, local government bodies, and civil

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administration would actively report and incarcerate unregistered Rohingyas as ‘illegal migrants’, who were then subjected to detention and forced repatriation. Recipients of such a targeted hunt and return were not just the new migrants, but also the older migrants. In her work, Chris Lewa explains: Unregistered Rohingya refugees have settled among the local population … eking out a hand-to-mouth existence without any humanitarian assistance, vulnerable to exploitation and arrest. … Bangladesh has generally tolerated their presence, but anti-Rohingya sentiments have steadily grown among the local population, manipulated by the local political elite and the media. … In parallel, at the end of 2007, the Bangladesh law enforcement agencies started arresting and pushing back Rohingya across the border to Burma. Initially, only new arrivals were targeted, but since mid-2009, self-settled refugees have also been deported.14

Forceful repatriation became the norm for both the unregistered15 and registered refugees. There are many examples of resistance against forced repatriation demonstrated by registered refugees in both Kutupalong and Nayapara camps. Sometimes, security forces physically torture refugees16 in order to force them to cross the border, though the last time this happened was before 2017. At Nayapara camp, some 12,000 refugees refused food rations provided by the authorities in 1997 as a form of protest against forcible repatriation. ‘Apparently, this was in reaction to earlier incidents in which women and children were allegedly hit with batons and forced into boats by Bangladeshi officials prior to making the Naaf River crossing into Arakan.’17 Similar resistance was observed in 2004, 2009, and 2011. In 2004, a group in the Nayapara camp staged a demonstration in protest of the GoB’s steps to repatriate them to Rakhine State. In 2009, when there was an attempt to bring the Rohingyas back to Myanmar, the new generation of Rohingyas who were born in Bangladesh after 1978 strongly resisted the move and clearly declined to return to Myanmar.18 In 2011, there was another attempt made by the GoB to accelerate the repatriation process, but majority of the Rohingyas strongly resisted the move, claiming that the situation in Rakhine State had worsened gradually and they did not want to go back only to put their lives at risk once again. During that time, I was doing fieldwork in Teknaf and talked to some protesters who outright declined to return to Myanmar because, as they said,

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‘We cannot jump into the fire knowing everything beforehand.’ Some others tried to justify their willingness to stay in Bangladesh from a religious point of view. Their reason was, ‘If we need to die, we will die in Bangladesh. In an Islamic country like Bangladesh where majority people are Muslims, we will at least receive the fate of having “funeral rituals” according to Islamic principles. If we die in Buddhist countries, we will die like non-Muslims. So, we are not going back to Myanmar in this situation without any life security. ’ Even very recently, when the GoB, backed by mounting international pressure, compelled Myanmar to sign an ‘agreement’19 to start a fresh repatriation process in 2017 and 2018, the newly arrived Rohingyas demonstrated their reluctance to go back. The GoB attempted two repatriation drives (on 15 November 2018 and 22 August 2019), but failed. Instead, they pressed various charters of demands before starting any sort of repatriation process. Rohingyas are not organized in a formal way to set up any uniform charter of demands collectively, I have seen three types of list of demands: (1) one in the form of computer-composed leaflets, which includes 9-point demands;20 (2) second one is in the form of hand-written banners, which shows 12-point demands;21 and (3) third one is a printed signboard which displays 13-point demands.22

Figure 4.1

Inside view of the Rohingya refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar

Source: Author’s personal collection.

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It is also interesting to note here that during this demonstration, I was in Ukhia and was trying to investigate the process of framing this charter of demands and how each was connected to the other group of demonstrators. I found no connection as such and no formal communication between the demonstrators, but their points of demands had a lot of similarities. All charters of demands included a few common points such as: (1) the Myanmar government must publicly announce that it is giving the Rohingyas their long-denied citizenship and would include them in the list of the country’s recognized ethnic groups; (2) the land once occupied by the Rohingyas must be returned to them and their homes, mosques, and schools should be rebuilt; (3) the military should be held accountable for the alleged killings, lootings, and rapes, and should stand trial under international legal framework; (4) the ‘innocent Rohingyas’ who were picked up in counter-insurgency operations must be released unconditionally; (5) the Rohingyas will only return when a neutral safeguard like a UN peacekeeping force will help them in their safe return; and (6) Myanmar should stop listing the Rohingyas with their photographs as ‘terrorists’ in state media and on government Facebook pages.23 It is to be mentioned here that even after four decades since 1978, the Rohingyas are denied freedom of movement, the right to work, and the right to education in Myanmar, and thus are denied the chance for self-reliance and self-determination in Myanmar, while also suffering the same in Bangladesh as refugees. Prytz Phiri explained, ‘Rohingya refugees of Bangladesh are forced to engage in clandestine activity, working illegally and for low wages. They have been suffering much from ensuring minimum standard of life and basic human needs.’24 Many unregistered Rohingyas, before the new influx in 2017, lived in makeshift camps in crude huts thrown together with bin liners, sticks, and mud. Sanitation was abysmal. Sewage facilities, hugely inadequate in the monsoon season, ran alongside the housing. A 2009 survey conducted by MSF found that 40 per cent of deaths in these unregistered camps were due to diarrhoea.25 I have recorded many cases during my fieldwork, before 2017, where Rohingya children died of diarrhoea and malaria due to the lack of sanitation facilities, safe drinking water supply, and limited access to minimum medical facilities. One of my key informants, Johir Uddin26 (54), a Rohingya, explained to me, in 2012, about their helplessness in connection to this health and disease

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issue. Johir came to Bangladesh in 2009 and, since then, he has been living in the Kutupalong Taal makeshift camp. He sometimes works as a day labourer, sometimes goes for boat fishing, and sometimes works at home making and repairing27 fishing nets. He explained to me: When anybody becomes sick or needs emergency medical services, we cannot immediately take him/her to the hospital as we are not allowed to go there. We cannot even go to a private clinic for emergency cases as doctors turn us away saying, ‘You are Rohingyas. You are illegal. You are destroying our lives here. We should not help you survive. You better go back to Myanmar.’ While we are dying, they are thinking of who a Rohingya is and who a non-Rohingya is.

Though Johir’s experience was critical in 2012, there are now some NGOs such as the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, now Building Recourses Across Community (BRAC), and international organizations such as the MSF that work in the Ukhia and Kutupalong areas to provide medical facilities to the Rohingyas. Following the 2017 influx, now the NGO Save The Children is also providing medical services on a very large scale along with regular support provided by the health department of the Ministry of Public Health of the GoB. Johir was not only talking about the crisis of health service but also about the miserable conditions of the unregistered Rohingyas in Bangladesh. Since they were unregistered, they had to go through various forms of critical experiences. Johir continued: Since we are considered illegal residents, we cannot seek help from law enforcement agencies, local administration, government hospitals, and even from UNHCR. Police, security forces, Border Guards Bangladesh (BGB), paramilitary forces, and even the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB)28 quite often raid and arrest us in order to push us back to Myanmar. I was arrested in January 2009 and thrown into the Naf River29 to swim across the border. When I refused to do so, BGB personnel kicked me on my hip due to which I fell into the Naf. My elder son was shot dead on the spot. On the Myanmar side, the Nasaka30 arrested us in groups and tortured us in ways I cannot dare to describe. We were pushed back to Bangladesh yet again. Swimming for hours to cross the Naf and walking three days through the jungles, we returned to Bangladesh. This is the life we lead. To whom do we complain? To whom are we to appeal? From whom should we seek a minimum space for living? We are the people who belong to no state.

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The cruelty, brutality, and the absolute inhumanity experienced by the Rohingyas because of the state’s forces is rampant, Johir Uddin being only one of the many such survivors rendered stateless. Their identity as non-citizens permits them to be seen as lesser than human or what I call ‘subhuman’. All this happens to the Rohingyas primarily because of their status as non-citizens in both Bangladesh and Myanmar, although I have argued in this book that ‘citizenship’ is not the only cause and remedy.31 In addition to the brutalities, the violence committed against stateless subjects includes cases of sexual violence and rape of Rohingya girls by local Bengalis and the security forces. Victims cannot seek justice from any agency of the state as they are non-citizens, and their precariousness turns them into objects of the worst kinds of exploitation. As Matthew Gibney reminds us, citizenship ‘is a gateway to other rights … the stateless are lacking the very right to have rights’,32 which is also famously stated in Hannah Arendt’s works as citizenship is the right to have rights.33 The Rohingyas cannot even file a case with the police, since they are not eligible to do so as ‘illegal migrants’ and unregistered Rohingyas. Local people, police, and security forces use this vulnerability to their own advantage and are frequently reported to be sexually harassing Rohingya girls during raids and forced repatriations. Though many such cases do not become public, it happens behind the ‘known means of information’34 in Bangladesh. I recorded one such case where the father of a raped girl talked to me in 2012. They then lived in Ukhia, but neither in the Rohingya camp (Kutupalong) nor in Pasan Para, where I did my fieldwork. They were living in a makeshift camp, Taal, in a temporarily built house with a plastic roof. The father narrated the incident which took place that evening: With much shame for me, I will tell you about a critical incident in my daughter’s life, which has literally made her abnormal. I had just crossed the border to Bangladesh and was living with my family in the borderland of Bangladesh and Myanmar. One late night, we were raided by the Bangladeshi security force who threatened to send us back to Myanmar. Suddenly, one of them saw my daughter and attempted to rape her. My wife and I tried to stop him but failed. Two of them raped my daughter and threatened to shoot us dead on the spot if we disclosed this incident to anyone. We, the whole family, went through a horrible

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experience during that time. After staying there for a couple of months, out of desperation, one night, we left the place and came to Ukhia and started living here from 2004. Unfortunately, we were caught here in the hands of a local goon, who was a politically powerful person. He gave us shelter in the yard of a house and supported us initially, helping us get settled there. Within a few days, he came at night and raped my daughter forcefully by using the same tactics of threat of eviction. We tried to resist but failed, as we were threatened to be evicted and handed over to the police. We could not go to the police station, let alone seek justice from the local leader, or lodge a complaint with any law-enforcing agency because we feared that we would face the same situation all over again. Staying there for a couple of months, we moved here and are living in the Taal with other hundreds of thousands of Rohingyas. After we moved here, the local goon did not dare to come here as many other Rohingyas are living here and we could seek help from them. My daughter became mentally ill after going through such terrible experiences. This is the sad story that many Rohingya girls living in Bangladesh experience in their lifetime.

This case reveals the extreme vulnerability of the Rohingyas in Bangladesh, though this is not a regular and frequent one. Nonetheless, it reveals that the state produces extreme vulnerabilities, which are then exploited by the community and the local-level agents of the state. In fact, the vulnerability of Rohingya life is the production of the problematic relations to people’s rights to ‘space’, meaning a geographical framing of citizenship and legal territoriality of existence. Following Walton-Roberts’s35 conceptualization of three ways of ‘slippery citizenship’, one could read the conditions of the Rohingyas in a similar light. She explains, ‘Citizenship is central to the space in which a person is empowered to exercise rights, and this geographical framing of citizenship is central to the differential rights various subjects can access in all areas of life.’36 Since the Rohingyas do not have any ‘space’ within the geographical framing of citizenship in either Bangladesh or Myanmar, they lead a right-less life, rendering their life miserable and inhuman to an extreme state of ‘subhuman’ life.

Relations with the Local People The relationship between the Rohingyas and the local people has changed over the years, resulting in a crisis of social integration, as

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discussed in Chapter 3. In the early years, migrant Rohingyas were received warmly by the local people for humanitarian reasons, as a symbol of sympathy for their neighbours and due to feelings of Muslim brotherhood. It is worth mentioning here that ‘both-way conditions’ perfectly matched in the beginning of the influx, which created a congenial and welcoming space for the Rohingyas. By both-way conditions, I mean a religious connection and mutual responses clicked timely, which worked as a ‘catalyst’ for the host society to host the ‘guests’ well. The Rohingyas presented their miseries ‘as the oppression of Buddhist against the Muslim’37 in Rakhine State. Majority of the people of Ukhia and Teknaf were predominantly religious and used to lead their lives following Islamic principles. Therefore, the ‘Muslim’ identity became the central reason for ‘hosting’ the Rohingyas in Ukhia and Teknaf in the late eighties. However, it did not last long since, gradually, the cohesive relations between the locals and the Rohingyas turned into a conflicting one. Analysing the case studies and the ethnographic notes I accumulated, I also described six principal reasons why the brotherly relationship between the Rohingyas and local Bengalis became confrontational. These were: (1) the sharing of scarce resources; (2) intolerant resistance by Bangladeshis against interethnic marriage between the Rohingyas and Bengalis; (3) Rohingyas’ intervention in a limited local job market; (4) pressures on the local environment; (5) domestic and international security issues, and (6) criminal offences reportedly committed by the Rohingyas. While a glimpse of these six reasons has been given in Chapter 3, I elaborate on these here with ethnographic details as our entry point.

Sharing Scarce Resources The local people, particularly those whom I met and interviewed in Ukhia and Teknaf, complained to me on various occasions that they have to share the already insufficient resources with the Rohingyas, including agricultural crops, farm goods, vegetables, poultry, and fish. The Rohingyas living in the locality are perceived as an added burden and competitors for these limited resources. Whenever the local Bangladeshis fall into any sort of crisis, the presence of the Rohingyas is made out to be the main cause for it. Faisal Mia (52) is

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one of my respondents and a dweller of Pasan Para. He ran a small tea stall in the Ukhia Bazar. During my fieldwork, I would often sit on a bench in front of his tea stall and talk to many local people and villagers. Faisal Mia was very popular for his sense of humour, and therefore, the local people used to gather at his tea stall and gossip over tea, cigarettes, and biscuits. His tea stall was a space of public gathering where he sold tea, cigarettes, toast, bread, biscuits, bananas, and similar items. Faisal Mia used to blame the Rohingyas for the various problems that the locals had to face in their everyday life. In response to a question on their persistent poverty, Faisal Mia said to me in 2014: Rohingyas are the main factor responsible for why we remain poor. The whole of Bangladesh is becoming rich and wealthy, but we remain at the same level in terms of socio-economic position. The flow of Rohingya migration has not stopped yet and it goes on. When a big influx takes place, media comes up with gorom-gorom (hot) stories, but they migrate to Bangladesh on a continuous basis. They share everything that we have, including food, shelter, resources, and habitat. You cannot see it with eyes open, but upon considerable thought, you find that the Rohingyas are the main reason why we cannot develop ourselves.

Consequently, the locals often point fingers at the Rohingyas for their many sorts of collective and social problems. The existing problem has been intensified by the new and massive influx that took place in 2017.

Elopement, Interethnic Marriage, and the Threat of the ‘Other’ Interethnic marriages between the Rohingyas and Bengalis are another factor for Bangladeshi reluctance and resistance against the Rohingyas, something which has been growing rapidly in Ukhia and Teknaf areas in recent years. As a result of interethnic intimacy, marriages between local Bengalis and the Rohingyas are very common in Ukhia and Teknaf. Younger Rohingyas, both girls and boys, become frequently romantically involved with Bengali youths. This is not a new phenomenon and in fact, interethnic marriages have been taking place in these areas on a regular basis since the Rohingyas first came in 1978. Some among both Bengalis and Rohingyas interpret this as an attempt by

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Figure 4.2 Local marketplace in Ukhia where plastic sheets are sold on the roadside by the local Bengalis Source: Author’s personal collection.

the Rohingyas to gain legitimacy and an honourable identity among the local Bengalis. One of my Rohingya informants, Moriam Khatun (32) who had an interethnic marriage and had the first hand experience of how it changed her position in society, explained to me in 2015: I fell in love with Kabir [a Bengali], got married, and gave birth to three children. I am now well-settled and treated as one of the Bengali family members, unlike the treatment I used to receive prior to my marriage. Before marriage, I was living without any status because the Rohingyas have no status and identity in the society, neither in Myanmar nor in Bangladesh, but now I have my own identity, husband, and a family.

After a long interview for the first time in 2015 and six more meetings between 2016 and 2018, I got the feeling that she is happy because marriage became the means through which she got a socially recognized identity and the status of someone belonging to a household, even though, as she added, ‘My parents-in-law quite often do not forget

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to remind me that I am a Rohingya, meaning a bad girl. I am happy that I have family, identity, and social status whilst others do not.’ However, interethnic marriages are still not well accepted and they have a strong negative connotation that is locally shaped and is considered to be a ‘damage of social image’ and ‘matter of social stigma’ by all the locals in the society. On multiple occasions, many of my Bengali informants in Pasan Para and Vasan Para told me that ‘such marriages are used for emotional exploitation and sexual blackmail by Rohingya women’. Golam Kuddus (51), a local Bengali who lived in Pasan Para, was the landlord of extensive cultivable land and employed many people to work on his land during peak agricultural seasons, expressed his feelings about this matter, which I recorded in 2014: Rohingya girls are very shoitan and chalak [evil and cunning]. They emotionally exploit Bengali youths to serve their purpose. They try and catch one young boy after another so that they can get out of their miseries. To tell the truth, they do not even have any character. One girl targets a couple of boys and maintains a regular relation with all of them at the same time to exploit them, but hides one case from another. Young Bengali boys hardly understand their tricks. To some extent, the girl sexually exploits all of them to convince one of them. If somehow one Bengali boy is convinced, then both of them elope and marry. As parents, after marriage we have nothing to do but to accept them. You can easily understand how difficult it is for us to accept a girl of such character as a daughter-in-law in the family. I do not need to go far as my eldest son married a Rohingya girl who became our family member. So, what I am telling you is my lived experience. Considering my family conditions as my elder son did it, I had to accept her but unfortunately she could not adjust in the family. She left my house, taking my elder son away. Now they live in a separate household. I gave birth to my son, took care of him, nurtured him to grow up, spent money-energy-time-care to educate him, but he has severed his ties with us now. This is how the Rohingya girls are breaking our family ties and kinship bondage.

Golam Kuddus’s statement seems distasteful, but during my fieldwork, I found that many local people hold this attitude towards the Rohingyas and interethnic marriage between the Rohingyas and Bengalis. These kinds of events—love, elopement, and marriage— significantly contribute to increased distance between the Rohingyas

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and the local Bengalis, and thus, they are subject to deep resentment by many local Bengalis.

A Lopsided View of the Job Market Growing unemployment among the locals has also become an acute issue of contention, since the Rohingyas, who came in 1978, 1991/1992, 2012, 2015, and 2016, have entered an already limited job market. Day labour, small-scale construction work, agriculture, carpentry, weaving, handicraft, dry fish business, fishing at the seashore, boat fishing, making fishing nets, small-scale cottage industry, rickshaw pulling, working in brick fields, and wood chopping are some of the sectors where the local people of Teknaf and Ukhia are largely employed. After the arrival of more than 750,000 Rohingyas, the local occupational setting has drastically collapsed because they occupied lands, hills, schools, madrasas, community centres, and all accessible open spaces in Ukhia and Teknaf. However, even before the new arrivals, the Rohingyas who came earlier used to sell their labour at lower rates compared to the locals in the aforementioned sectors of the job market and, hence, were preferred by the employers. Hossain Kabir (54), a local Bengali and also a day labourer in Vasan Para, told me: Our rate of day work is 300–350 Bangladesh Taka (BDT) with a meal at lunch. We work in construction sites, boat fishing, agricultural fields, weaving, small-scale cottage industry, and the like. Everywhere, we sell our labour on a daily basis and we earn 300–350 BDT. The Rohingyas sell their day labour much cheaper than we do, at rates which range from 50 to 150 BDT. Therefore, employers employ them instead of us due to their cheap labour. We cannot sell our day labour at 150 BDT, and employers are not ready to pay 300 BDT. In this way, the Rohingyas are occupying our job market gradually and we are becoming jobless and workless. They are capturing our meals. You tell us how would you tolerate those who snatch away your meals.

That the Rohingyas are being forced to work way below the minimum wages is seen as an invasive threat by the Bangladeshi locals. For the Rohingyas, this barter of dignity, labour power, and labour time becomes their only means of survival. What does not feature in this critique of the refugees’ perceived threat is the role played by the smallscale businesses owned by Bangladeshis. Profit seeking and cost cutting

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enables and encourages many Bangladeshi business owners to employ cheaper labour. One finds that an informed political understanding of minimum wages, labour time, and wage gap gives way and precedence to the mere naming and shaming of the Rohingya refugees. This lens of understanding could be found in some narratives of the Rohingyas, many of which I recorded during my fieldwork in Ukhia and Teknaf. Kabir Mian (47) is a Rohingya who came to Bangladesh in 1991 and has been living in Leda camps ever since. He was a professional day labourer who used to sell his labour on a daily basis. He told me in 2014 that the Rohingyas work for low wages because of their situation and the dynamics of the rhetoric of job market occupation. He said: If we do not sell our labour cheaper than the locals, why will other people, who themselves are locals, employ us? We take what is offered since we do not have the bargaining power. In fact, getting a job is more important than how much we earn because we have to survive, our family members included, at all costs. Are we to die of starvation?

Predictably, the same facts are interpreted from two different perspectives depending on the context. Rohingyas seeking jobs is ‘an undue penetration’ to the local Bengalis, but it is one of the many ‘survival strategies’ for the unregistered Rohingyas living in Ukhia and Teknaf.

The Alleged Damage to Local Ecology Another important reason behind the mushrooming negative attitudes towards the Rohingyas in Bangladesh is the environmental pollution allegedly brought about by them. It has become a popular public perception in Bangladesh that ‘the Rohingya people are damaging the local ecological settings’.38 ‘As a strategy to settle down in Bangladesh, the Rohingya people who have been allegedly encroaching in the forest have attempted to make matrimonial alliance and kinship with local encroachers and villagers within or nearby forests [sic].’39 The Rohingyas are said to have engaged in illegal felling, hunting, and fuel wood collection, which is largely destroying the local environmental setting in Ukhia and Teknaf. According to a study ‘the Teknaf range had almost 100 per cent forest cover in 1980. By 1990, it had dropped to 55 per cent. Current data show [that] only 8 per cent of natural forest cover remains in Teknaf Wildlife Sanctuary or TWS (Nishorgo Support

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Programme [NSP] 2006). At least 92 per cent forest area of TWS and the habitat of wildlife have disappeared during the last 25 years.’40 While the Rohingyas are held responsible for these changes, the role of other local activities and the possible involvement of Bangladeshi locals, climate change, and the impact of environmental policy over these years remains understudied and needs equal attention. Just pointing fingers at the Rohingyas has become a common practice in Ukhia and Teknaf whenever the question of environmental pollution comes up. One day, one of my key Rohingya informants, Harun Majhi (61), during my 2016 visit, said to me in jest, ‘Why is Dhaka one of the highest ranked places in the world in terms of environmental pollution, where no Rohingya lives? So, the presence of the Rohingyas is not the main reason for environmental pollution in Ukhia and Teknaf. Many local people are cutting forests, trees, and jungles and selling it in the market as firewood, but they accuse only the Rohingyas for deforestation.’ After the massive influx in 2016–18, an impact on the local environmental setting has become a great concern at the policy level.41 The allegations are that the Rohingyas are involved in illegal wood logging and trafficking, destroying the forest resources by using firewood for cooking, using open spaces for urination and defecation, building temporary shelters by cutting forests, and ‘living on forest resources which they use unsustainably by damaging the natural resources for the near future’.42 Against these accusations, the Rohingyas have their own explanation, unlike Harun Majhi who made a problematic comment. Kalimulla (50), one of my Rohingya informants, who came to Bangladesh in 1978 but was sent back as part of the repatriation process following an agreement between Bangladesh and Burma with the help of UNHCR. However, he returned to Bangladesh since the situation in Rakhine State remained unchanged. Since then, he has been living in Ukhia. I had many fruitful discussions with him over the years. One day, I was talking to him about the issue of environmental pollution created by the Rohingyas, and he responded (as recorded in 2014): What can I possibly do for our survival other than using the natural resources around us? Where will I go with my family members—my wife, three daughters, and two sons—if I do not make some space for living in this jungle? The GoB does not recognize us as refugees. Therefore, the UNHCR does not provide us with food or any other assistance. Even NGOs do not provide us with any assistance. We cannot go back to

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Myanmar since the junta does not recognize us as Myanmar’s citizens and Rakhine’s situation is worsening as far, we know. Myanmar’s Rakhine Buddhists are always ready to kill us there. Where will we go? How will we survive? Is our fault that we were born in this world?

He explained in detail the miserable conditions in which he and his seven family members lived. This resonates with the plight of many Rohingyas in Bangladesh. In fact, their statelessness has created these vulnerabilities and uncertainties in the life of Rohingyas, since neither Bangladesh nor Myanmar accepts them as citizens, thereby denying them their basic human rights of food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and education. However, it can definitely be said that the alleged ‘representation of [the] Rohingyas as destroyers of local ecological settings and huge environment denigration’ is contributing to the worsening relations between the local Bengalis and the Rohingyas. Even the local media is heavily biased in its approach and regularly publishes on environmental pollution, damage to local ecological settings, and deforestation, ‘allegedly’ due to the excessive use and continuous destruction by the Rohingya refugees. Many environmentalists, geographers, and researchers are regularly fuelling this flame.

Militant Activities The Rohingyas are allegedly involved in different militant activities in Bangladesh. Even the sensational Ramu incidents43 that took place in 2012 were said to have been orchestrated by the Rohingya.44 Many Arakanese rival groups, namely ARSA, Rohingya Solidarity Organisation (RSO), Arakan Liberation Party (ALP), and National United Party of Arakan (NUPA), are said to have tried to build networks and linkages with some radical groups in Bangladesh.45 They have reportedly established their training camps in the jungles of Teknaf and Ukhia and the nearby region, the Chittagong Hill Tracts, to use this region as a safe passage for arms trafficking. Many national and international media reports claim that this Rohingya crisis will destabilize the South and Southeast Asian states in terms of national and regional security issues.46 However, Pasan Para and Vasan Para did not have any visible presence of such radical and militant activism. Local Bengalis suspect that many Rohingyas are actively involved in militant activities. Hussain Mia, a local Bengali living in Pasan Para,

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who is involved in politics and holds a post in the local committee of a central political organization, once told me in 2016: It is not unlikely that many of them are involved in militant activities, because the way they were tortured, exploited, and killed in Myanmar, they could have formed a militant group to take revenge. It will become a problem if any Bangladeshi militant group uses this space for the implementation of local agendas. It is also not beyond doubt that many local militant groups, particularly some Islamist political parties, are getting in touch with them, supporting them, and using the space of their vulnerable conditions, which could be dangerous to the local security issues. The most important thing is if they become involved in international Islamist groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda; then it would be truly hazardous.

I found similar sentiments among many local Bengalis who hold definite suspicions that some Rohingyas are involved in local militant activities. In different news dailies, time and again, one finds reports of Rohingyas being alleged members of Islamist militant groups in this region, which is regarded as a serious security threat by the GoB. Following the 2017 influx, on suspicions of a potential connection with some of the Islamist groups, the relief and aid activities of three NGOs were halted by the home ministry of Bangladesh.47 Very recently, 41 more NGOs were ordered to stop their relief activities in Ukhia and Teknaf refugee camps. The GoB will not allow them to work in the refugee camps with any new project and programme48 based on intelligence reports of their activities against Rohingya repatriation. They are trying, as a government officer from Teknaf said on condition of anonymity, to ‘catch the fishes in the grey water’.49 Meanwhile, Bangladeshi intelligence forces have arrested and detained many Rohingyas, claiming that they are actively involved with militant Islamist groups.50 Actual and supposed involvement of the Rohingyas in militant activism is another instrumental factor in shaping the structure of relations between the state of Bangladesh, the Rohingyas, and the locals. It could be easily assumed that their lack of citizenship and their sense of deprivation as stateless people are part of the reason why some Rohingyas may become militants or get driven to drastic measures in desperate times. Amartya Sen51 argues that citizenship is integrally connected with the enhancement of human capabilities, and therefore, the granting

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of citizenship removes some of the ‘unfreedoms’ that place people at risk from want and fear. We see this resonating in the case of the Rohingyas as non-citizens, and thereby a stateless people, without a home, driven by state to a permanent state of exception. There seems to be no state with the political will to recognize their right to have rights, rendering their life subhuman and vulnerable to exploitation and rejection. *** Based on this discussion and analysis of the structure of relations between the state, local people, and the Rohingyas, we see that the role of Bangladesh in handling the Rohingyas is influenced by some key trends. First, as a non-signatory state of the 1951 Refugee Convention, Bangladesh legally absolves itself from the obligation of hosting refugees in its territory as per the Convention. Already driven to an absolute state of exception, the Rohingyas remain claimless, without access to law and order or protection, and bearing no rights. Given Bangladesh’s own underdeveloped and resource-poor identity, battling with problems of hunger in a population of over 160 million, extreme poverty, and looming Islamic radicalism in the country, the massive presence of more than 1,300,000 Rohingyas is seen and experienced as an added burden on its limited resources, marked by constant strife and tension. Historically, Bangladesh has not had cordial diplomatic, bilateral, or trade relations with Myanmar. Bangladesh’s border is frequently used for illegal trade, smuggling, and human trafficking by Myanmar-based groups. Therefore, there is always a sort of border tension between the two neighbouring countries. Next, many of Myanmar’s so-called terrorist groups are said to have been active inside the Bangladesh territory and use it as a safe passage for arms trafficking.52 It is also widely discussed that such practices promote militant activities inside Bangladesh, which is regarded as a serious security threat for the country, not to deny the presence of home-grown militant groups in Bangladesh.53 In the security make-up of the region, Myanmar is constructed as an ‘unsafe other’, as a security threat to Bangladesh, and the Rohingyas are thus seen as an extension of this threat. Despite the condition of the relationship between the two countries, the Rohingyas deserve to be treated as human beings with dignity and

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rights, a life as accorded by international and national judicial and legal frameworks.54 Myanmar’s policies first rendered them stateless and later forced them to flee their homeland, rendering them refugees. When they were compelled to cross the border, Bangladesh regarded them as illegal migrants and an economic burden. Driven to be a stateless, placeless people in transit, where are they to go? How will they survive? As human beings, they also have the right to citizenship, one of the most basic human rights endorsed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Rohingya issue must therefore be seen as a question of basic deprivation of rights, especially the individual right to citizenship endorsed by international law and jurisprudence. In that context, apart from what is going on in Myanmar, human rights violations are taking place, atrocities are being committed, basic human needs are still left unfulfilled and essential human necessities are unmet, particularly for unregistered Rohingyas in Bangladesh. Bangladesh is now serving the in-camp Rohingya refugees living in both permanent and temporary refugee camps built in Ukhia and Teknaf, until the last influx, through the active support of UNHCR, IOM, and its local and international partners, while the larger number of out-camp Rohingyas are left unassisted, unsupported, and uncounted in the state’s policy, projects, and state’s plan for rehabilitation or lawful repatriation through bilateral contact with Myanmar. These unregistered Rohingyas try to integrate with the local population, which creates tension and conflict in local societal dynamism, for example, crisis in the local job market, burden on scarce resources, interethnic marriages, threat to the law and order situation in the locality, and so on. Consequently, the social distance between the local people and the Rohingyas is gradually increasing. Therefore, the Rohingya refugee issue needs urgent attention to resolve it within the framework of individual rights and entitlements as human beings, as endorsed by international jurisprudence ratified by the UN. As member countries of the UN, Bangladesh and Myanmar should also be brought under the legal obligation of the UN charter in an attempt to save the Rohingyas and, in the end, to uphold the spirit of humanity. However, this book takes the issue further by arguing that the entire Rohingya crisis is not only a crisis of statelessness, non-citizenship, and violation of human rights, but involves the nature of the state and the state’s policy towards people

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of cultural, racial, and religious difference, which makes others treat them as ‘subhuman’.

Notes 1. United Nations General Assembly, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 15(1), New York (1948). 2. See Kristy Belton, ‘Statelessness: A Matter of Human Rights,’ in The Human Rights to Citizenship: A Slippery Concept, ed. Rhoda Howard-Hassmann and Margaret Walton-Roberts (Pennsylvania: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 31–44. 3. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Convention Related to Status of Stateless People, Article 1(1), Geneva (1954). 4. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Books, 1994). 5. David Weissbrodt, The Human Rights of Non-citizens (USA: Oxford University Press, 2008). 6. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. by D. Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 7. Margaret Walton-Roberts. ‘Slippery Citizenship and Retrenching Rights’, in The Human Rights to Citizenship: A Slippery Concept, ed. Rhoda HowardHassmann; and Margaret Walton-Roberts (Pennsylvania: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 242. 8. Bangladesh is neither a signatory to the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees nor to its 1967 Protocol and has not enacted any national legislation on asylum and refugee matters … [but] Bangladesh has acceded to several of the existing international rights, Covenants and Conventions and have provisions within its Constitution that uphold the rights and duties within the UN Charter and further safeguard the legal protection of non-citizens within its territory. See Pia Prytz Phiri, ‘Rohingyas and Refugee Status in Bangladesh’, Forced Migration Review (2008): 1, accessed 22 March 2013, https://www.fmreview. org/burma/phiri. 9. At that time, the Rohingyas who migrated to Bangladesh were widely regarded as ‘refugees’, but now Bangladesh is very diplomatic in using the terminology to indicate the Rohingyas living within its boundary. During the late 1970s and early 1990s, the Rohingyas were regarded as ‘refugees’, hence I am also using the word ‘refugee’ here. 10. The Rohingyas used to live in sheds in the two camps. The GoB supervised the process of building these sheds funded by UNHCR. There are 852

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sheds in the two camps where 5,112 families are accommodated, since each shed contains 6 families. Information obtained during a field visit in June 2011. 11. Kristy Crabtree, ‘Economic Challenges and Coping Mechanisms in Protracted Displacement: A Case Study of the Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh,’ Journal of Muslim Mental Health 5, no. 1 (2010): 42. 12. See Imtiaz Ahmed, ed., The Plight of the Stateless Rohingyas (Dhaka: University Press Limited, 2010). 13. Delwar Hossain and Faridul Alam, ‘Response of the State,’ in The Plight of the Stateless Rohingyas, ed. Imtiaz Ahmed (Dhaka: University Press Limited, 2010), 89. 14. Chris Lewa, Unregistered Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh: Crackdown, Forced Displacement and Hunger (Bangkok: The Arakan Project, 2010), 2. 15. Here, it needs to be made clear that when I talk about ‘registered’ and ‘unregistered’ Rohingyas, I mean the time before the biometric registration was done. In fact, following the massive influx in 2017, the GoB has taken the initiative to bring all the Rohingyas living in Bangladesh, both new arrivals and the old ones, under a registered database so that the planned repatriation can be done smoothly. Besides, there was a mounting demand from the civil society, human rights organizations, media, and left-leaning political organizations to prepare a complete list of how many Rohingyas indeed live in Bangladesh. Considering everything, the GoB has made a biometric database of more than one million Rohingyas, and the registration process is still going on. However, my field-level experience says something else. I have found many Rohingyas escaping the registration process in the fear that soon after registration, they might be sent back to Myanmar. However, authorities claim that without registration, nobody will receive any help and support, and hence, everybody must register if they want to survive. 16. I have provided some ethnographic evidences with first-hand narratives of the victims in the later part of the chapter. Also, some cases of physical torture have been stated in some relevant contexts in Chapters 5, 6, and 7. 17. Carl Grundy-Warr and Elaine Wong, ‘Sanctuary under Plastic Sheet: The Unresolved Problem of Rohingya Refugees,’ IBRU Boundary and Security Bulletin, (1997): 87, accessed 2 October 2018, http://www.mcrg.ac.in/WC_2015/ Reading/D_Unresolved_Problem_Rohingya_Refugees.pdf. 18. See Wael Mahdi, ‘The Rohingya’s Lives in Limbo,’ National, 9 June 2009, accessed 25 September 2018, https://www.thenational.ae/world/mena/ the-rohingya-s-lives-in-limbo-1.490350. 19. Ruma Paul and Yi-Mou Lee, ‘Bangladesh Agrees with Myanmar to Complete the Rohingya Return in Two Years,’ Reuters, 16 January 2018, accessed 10 October 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/

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us-myanmar-rohingya-bangladesh/bangladesh-agrees-with-myanmar-to-complete-rohingya-return-in-two-years-idUSKBN1F50I2. 20. A. Taib Ahmed, ‘Rohingyas Organise against Repatriation before Recognition,’ Daily Pothom-Alo, 28 February 2018, accessed 2 October 2018, https://en.prothomalo.com/bangladesh/news/171735/Rohingyas-organiseagainst-repatriation-before. 21. Maaz Hussain, ‘Rohingyas Say They Won’t Return to Myanmar Now,’ Voice of America, 6 March 2018, accessed 2 October 2018, https://www.voanews. com/a/rohingya-fear-repatriation-is-unsafe/4282273.html. 22. United Nations News, ‘UN Agencies and Myanmar Lay Groundwork for Possible Rohingya Return,’ 1 June 2018, accessed 2 October 2018, https://news. un.org/en/story/2018/06/1011171. 23. See Zeba Siddiqui, ‘Exclusive: Rohingya Refugee Leaders Draw Up Demands Ahead of Repatriation,’ Reuters, 19 January 2018, accessed 6 April 2018, https:// www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-petition-exclusive/exclusiverohingya-refugee-leaders-draw-up-demands-ahead-of-repatriation-idUSKBN1F80SE; Michael Safi, ‘“We Cannot Go Back”: Grim Future Facing Rohingya One Year after Attacks,’ Guardian, 25 August 2018, accessed 27 September 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/aug/24/rohingyaone-year-after-attacks 24. Phiri, ‘Rohingyas and Refugee Status in Bangladesh’, 1. 25. For details, see Misha Hussain, ‘For Rohingya in Bangladesh, No Place Is Home,’ Times, 19 February 2010, accessed 1 August 2012, http://www.time.com/ time/world/article/0,8599,1966621,00.html. 26. I have deliberately used pseudonyms for the informants so that they do not face harassment from any quarter for their contribution to my research. Besides, I have included their age along with the name, so that the context of the event can be clearly understood. 27. Making and repairing fishing nets is a common job that the Rohingyas do at home. After every fishing trip in the Bay of Bengal, most of the fishing nets get torn and the Rohingyas repair them at very cheap rates. 28. The RAB is an elite anti-crime and anti-terrorism unit of the Bangladesh Police. 29. Naf is a river marking the border of Bangladesh and Myanmar. 30. The Myanmar border security force is called Nasaka. 31. See also Cresa L. Pugh, ‘Is Citizenship the Answer? Construction of Belonging and Exclusion for the Stateless Rohingya of Burma’ (Working Paper No. 107, International Migration Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford, 2013). 32. Matthew Gibney, Statelessness and the Right to Citizenship (Oxford: Refugee Study Center, University of Oxford, 2006), 50. 33. See Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism.

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34. By ‘known means of information’, I mean that the media news items and reports of international human rights organizations are the only sources of information about the Rohingyas. In fact, we hardly have any information about what is happening in the life of the Rohingyas unless it is published in newspapers. There are many things that happened in the lives of the Rohingyas before the huge media and global attention they got in 2017. 35. Walton-Roberts, ‘Slippery Citizenship and Retrenching Rights’. 36. Walton-Roberts, ‘Slippery Citizenship and Retrenching Rights,’ 4. 37. In fact, not only in 1978, even now the Rohingyas often tend to present the critical conditions in Rakhine State as a result of the religious intolerance of Rakhine Buddhists. The Rohingyas often present the reason for their migration as the fact that ‘they are Muslims’. However, the newly arrived Rohingyas also accuse the Myanmar security forces along with the Rakhine Buddhists. 38. See M.Z. Rahman, ‘Livelihoods of Rohingyas and Their Impacts on Deforestation,’ in Deforestation in the Teknaf Peninsula of Bangladesh, eds. M. Tani and M. Rahman (Singapore: Springer, 2018), 113–25. 39. Mohammad Khan, Salim Uddin, and Emdad C. Haque, ‘Rural Livelihood among the Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh and Their Impacts on Forests: A Case of the Teknaf Wildlife Sanctuary,’ in To Host or To Hurt: Counter-Narratives on Rohingya Refugee Issue in  Bangladesh, ed. Nasir Uddin. (Dhaka: Institute of Culture and Development Research (ICDR), 2012), 102. 40. Khan, Uddin, and Haque, ‘Rural Livelihood among the Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh and Their Impacts on Forests,’ 102–3. 41. A joint study on the environmental impact of Rohingya influx, by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and UN Women, with support from the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change of Bangladesh, was unveiled on 18 September 2018, where it has been stated that the policy makers of the GoB have been seriously concerned about the potential environment impact of the Rohingya settlements in Ukhia and Teknaf. ‘Report on Environmental Impact of Rohingya Influx,’ United Nations Development Programme, accessed 29 September 2018, http://www.bd.undp.org/content/ dam/bangladesh/docs/Reports/Summary%20of%20Environmental%20 Impact%20of%20Refugee%20Influx.pdf. 42. Mohammed Selim Uddin and Mohammed Abu Arfin Khan, Comparing the Impact of Local People and Rohingya Refugees on Teknaf Game Forest (USA: East-West Center, 2010). 43. A renowned Buddhist temple in Ramu of Cox’s Bazar was vandalized by some miscreants, which triggered massive media attention as a symbol of religious intolerance and communal violence. See, for details, Harun ur Rashid, ‘Ramu Violence: International Implication,’ Daily Star, 10 October 2012, accessed 20 January 2018, https://www.thedailystar.net/news-detail-253124.

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44. For details, see Jyotirmoy Barua, ed., Ramu: A Collection of Communal Violence (in Bengali) (Dhaka: Drik, 2013). 45. Mayesha Alam, ‘How the Rohingya Crisis Is Affecting Bangladesh— and Why It Matters,’ Washington Post, 12 February 2018, accessed 3 October 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/02/12/ how-the-rohingya-crisis-is-affecting-bangladesh-and-why-it-matters/ ?noredirect=on&utm_term=.4c94f3da6667; Didier Chaudet, ‘The Rohingya Crisis: Impact and Consequences for South Asia,’ The Journal of Current Affairs 2, no. 2 (2018): 1–17; Nyshka Chandran, ‘Terror Groups May Take Advantage of Myanmar's Rohingya Crisis,’ CNBC, 13 September 2017, accessed 4 October 2018, https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/13/myanmar-rohingya-crisis-islamic-terrorgroups-may-take-advantage.html. 46. ‘It Can Destabilise the Entire South Asia,’ Daily Star, 7 October 2017, accessed 4 October 2018, https://www.thedailystar.net/backpage/it-can-destabilise-entire-south-asia-1472773; Mayesha Alam, ‘5 Things You Need To Know about the Rohingya Crisis—And How It Could Roil Southeast Asia,’ Washington Post, 14 September 2017, accessed 20 January 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/09/14/5-things-you-need-to-knowabout-rohingya-crisis-and-how-it-could-roil-southeast-asia/?utm_term=. cd5044ac1d04; Step Vaessen, ‘Rohingya Crisis: A Threat to Stability in Southeast Asia,’ Al Jazeera, 10 September 2017, accessed 4 October 2018, https://www. aljazeera.com/blogs/asia/2017/09/rohingya-crisis-threat-stability-southeastasia-170910173120308.html. 47. See ‘3 NGOs Barred from Relief Works for Rohingyas,’ Daily Star, 1 October 2017, accessed 20 January 2018, https://www.thedailystar.net/ myanmar-rohingya-crisis/three-ngo-barred-relief-works-rohingyas-cox-bazarbangladesh-1475002. 48. Muktadir Rashid, ‘Restriction of 41 NGOs Irk Development Workers,’ Daily New Age, 27 August 2018, accessed 10 October 2018, http://www.newagebd.net/article/49253/restrictions-on-41-ngos-irk-development-workers. 49. ‘Catching fishes in the grey water’ is a very popular proverb in Bangladesh. It means there are some people who are always busy trying to make profit even in a crisis situation. Some government officers and some local Bengalis think that there are some NGOs who are trying to make money from the plight of the Rohingyas. 50. ‘“Several” Suspected Rohingya Insurgents in Custody: Bangladesh Official,’ Radio Free Asia, 18 April 2018, accessed 10 October 2018, https://www. rfa.org/english/news/myanmar/bangladesh-arrests-04182018161609.html. 51. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

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52. See, for details, Nasir Uddin, Not Rohingyas, but Royainga: Stateless People in the Struggle for Existence (in Bengali) (Dhaka: Murddhanno Publisher, 2017b). 53. The Rohingya Solidarity Organization (RSO) is allegedly involved with militant activities. In 2009 and 2011, the Bangladesh security forces and law enforcement agencies found a large number of arms, guerrilla fighters, and destructive weapons in the deep forests of Ukhia and Bandarban hill district. For details, see Mahfuzul Chowdhury and Nasir Uddin, ‘Of Hurting and Hosting: Crises in Co-existence with Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh,’ in To Host or To Hurt: Counter-Narratives on Rohingya Refugee Issue in Bangladesh, ed. Nasir Uddin (Dhaka: Institute of Culture and Development Research [ICDR], 2012a), 31–46. 54. See also Abdullah Al-Faruque, ‘Plight of Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh: Legal Aspects of the Problem,’ in To Host or To Hurt: CounterNarratives on Rohingya Refugee Issue in  Bangladesh, ed. Nasir Uddin (Dhaka: Institute of Culture and Development Research [ICDR], 2012), 65–80.

5

The (Re)production of Vulnerability State in Everyday Life of Stateless Rohingyas

T

here are more than twelve million people in the world, including the Rohingyas who are stateless,1 without a state’s recognition of citizenship to them. The question of citizens and non-citizens determines peoples’ inclusion and exclusion in the legal framework of the modern nation state.2 In fact, some people are rendered legal objects instead of human subjects in the world mainly due to the constitutional endorsement of citizens and non-citizens. The modern nation state system has thus solidified the concept of citizenship and non-citizenship, though the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) ensures that ‘everyone has the right to a nationality’.3 As noncitizens are legally stateless, they also become rights-less people as being a citizen involves rights and entitlements along with duties and obligations, since ‘citizenship is a reciprocal relationship of rights and duties between individuals and states’.4 Given the context, the state of statelessness confirms the conditions of rights-lessness though ‘human rights are also conferred to non-citizens’,5 even if procedurally, by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In the state’s legal framework, the stateless are considered ‘illegal bodies’ who are subjected to atrocities and even persecution amid various forms of vulnerabilities within the state’s structures. It denotes that vulnerability is produced and reproduced by the state itself via its frequent intervention in the lives of stateless people. This chapter focuses on the Rohingyas’ experience, as stateless people and non-citizens, of state’s penetration in their The Rohingya. Nasir Uddin, Oxford University Press (2020). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199489350.001.0001.

© Oxford University Press.

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everyday life, which results in severe atrocities and dreadful injustice through (re)production of vulnerability. In Bangladesh, the Rohingyas generally held the status of registered refugees and unregistered illegal migrants until the new influx of 2017, but as per the newest official articulation they have been given the status of forcibly displaced Myanmar nationals (FDMN).6 Those who are ‘officially registered’ and live in ‘official’ camps under the supervision of the UNHCR are ‘Rohingya refugees’, while the rest who are not officially registered and live either in makeshift camps or in other localities are known as ‘illegal migrants’. It was factually true until the new influx took place in 2017 and onwards, but now they, both old ones and new arrivals, have a new identity as ‘FDMN’. Local Bengalis call them Bormaya7 (Burmese people) as they migrated from Borma. In the framework of the modern nation state, the Rohingyas are non-existent human beings as they are nowhere in the legal framework of either Bangladesh or Myanmar. Therefore, the Rohingyas experience persecution, atrocities, and everyday forms of discrimination committed by the state despite their stateless identity. This chapter, with the case of Rohingyas, explains how the lives of stateless people are shaped, regulated, and controlled by the state due to their lack of citizenship, in the form of what Michel Foucault calls ‘bio-politics’8 as a form of controlling/regulating ‘bodies’ and Elizabeth Povinelli9 calls ‘geontologies’10 as a form of controlling people through a mechanism of power. With empirically and ethnographically11 informed analysis, the chapter argues that even if the lack of citizenship renders people stateless, the state continues to regulate their everyday life in order to perpetuate their condition of ‘statelessness’ by making them objects of differential treatment, and thereby committing severe injustices and violations of human rights. Along with my earlier year-long fieldwork, based on the empirical evidences recorded among the traumatized Rohingyas who fled persecution to cross the border to Bangladesh following 25 August 2017 when a massive campaign took place against the civilian Rohingyas in Rakhine State, this chapter argues that vulnerability is indeed produced and reproduced by the state itself.

Vulnerability and the State in Myanmar Vulnerability is a particular state of being that consists of uncertainty, insecurity, and the possibility of being harmed—in various ways such as

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deadly attack, violence, killing, and even elimination and extermination from social, political, and physical spaces—in a hostile environment created by the state in most cases. The reason why the Rohingyas have crossed the border into Bangladesh is due to an extreme form of vulnerability created by the state of Myanmar, explained in part in previous chapters, which backtracks ‘the vulnerable theory’ of Martha Fineman.12 Fineman underscores the role of the state as a political institution for the reduction of vulnerability and the assurance of equity and equality in the society. Since human beings inherit vulnerability, Fineman strongly stands for the state to take up the issue of vulnerability to redress it effectively so that social justice and social services for all are confirmed in the society. According to her theory, ‘vulnerability is inherent to the human condition, and that governments therefore have a responsibility to respond affirmatively to that vulnerability by ensuring that all people have equal access to the societal institutions that distribute resources. The theory thus provides an alternative basis for defining the role of government and a justification for expansive social welfare policies.’13 However, my first-hand experience of doing ethnographic fieldwork among the Rohingya refugees in Ukhia and Teknaf reveals a clear departure from the theoretical position of Fineman. In the case of the Rohingyas, the state of Myanmar has produced and reproduced fearful living conditions in Rakhine State, making the Rohingyas extremely vulnerable and compelling them to flee to Bangladesh to escape persecution. I would prefer to bring in the idea of ‘state crime’, framed by Penny Green and Tony Ward,14 to understand the roles of the state in the generation and reproduction of vulnerability because both argued that ‘state crimes’ are deviant or illegal activities perpetrated by the state to implement its policy and achieve its goal, even violating human rights. Judith Butler’s15 idea of ‘precarious life’ is also befitting for a better understanding of the production and reproduction of Rohingyas’ vulnerabilities. Butler conceptualized ‘precarious life’, explaining that ‘[such life] considers the political implications of those normative conceptions of the human that produce, through an exclusionary process, a host of “unlivable lives” whose legal and political status is suspended.’16 The life experiences of the Rohingyas whom I interviewed are indeed more than ‘precarious’ because along with the suspension of their legal and political life, they are considered worthy of extinction, what

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Isabell Lorey calls ‘the state of insecurity’.17 Lorey has further clarified the ‘precarious life’ in the form of the state of insecurity, explaining that ‘precarization means … more than the lack of security.… By way of insecurity and danger it embraces the whole of existence, the body, modes of subjectivation. It is threat and coercion.… Precarization means living with the unforeseeable, with contingency.’18 Therefore, what the Rohingyas have been experiencing in Rakhine State is more than a ‘precarious life’. The Rohingya narratives stated in this chapter confirm two interconnected proven facts: First, Myanmar, as a state, has created extremely unliveable conditions—what I have called ‘atrocious living conditions’—that have pushed the Rohingyas to the state of vulnerability. It unfolds that the Rohingya vulnerability is basically a state-created ‘state of being’ because Myanmar is deliberately implementing a policy that the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said is the ‘textbook example of ethnic cleaning’19 and some called it ‘genocide’.20 Second, the way in which the Myanmar security forces and Buddhist fundamentalists treated the Rohingyas, which is reflected in the narratives of many Rohingyas I interviewed during my fieldwork, as if their lives are worthy of extinction, denotes an extreme form of vulnerability.

Migration, Local Acceptance, and the Reversal of Relations Migration trends and patterns are multifaceted, but transborder movement does not always mean migration from one country to another only in search of economic fortunes.21 Increasing number of refugees and asylum seekers across the world in the twenty-first century indicate that the states are gradually becoming intolerant towards people from different cultural, religious, and racial backgrounds. To some extent, state policies are framed in a way that makes the socioeconomic-political setting of a country unliveable for those people who are excluded in the framework of majoritarian statehood and a unilinear nationhood. The Rohingyas are the victims of such a ‘majoritarian statehood’ (a state for Burmese people) and ‘unilinear nationhood’ (a state for Bamar nationals)22 in Myanmar. Soon after the Rohingya became stateless even in Myanmar, which they believe is their nation state, they started migrating to other

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countries to escape persecution, though large-scale migration started in 1978 to flee Operation Nagamin (see Chapters 2 and 3). Based on my long years of research engagement with the Rohingyas, I found that, among other nations, they migrated to Bangladesh due to three reasons: First, Bangladesh is an immediate neighbouring country, and therefore, the Rohingyas had easy access to it. It has been found in the literature of refugee studies23 that when any atrocious situation created in a particular state forces people to leave the country, the people immediately cross the nearest border. Second, there is a linguistic similarity with the people of south-eastern Bangladesh, being Muslims and speaking in the Chittagonian language. What I mean by linguistic similarity needs clarification. Arakan, the former name of Rakhine State, and the southern part of present Chittagong, once belonged to the same geographic region and there was no border between Arakan and this part of Bengal. Therefore, there was regular contact between the people of Bengal and Arakan. Amid such free flow of interaction, the Rohingya language accommodated a lot of words from the Chittagonian dialect, which is a regional dialect of Bengali. Though the Rohingya language constitutes of vocabulary from various languages including Arabic, Urdu, Persian, Turkish, and Burmese due to interaction with different nations at various points during the history of Arakan,24 Bengali vocabulary and sentence-making pattern formed a significant part of Rohingya language because of their intimate interaction over the centuries. The third reason behind the Rohingya migration to Bangladesh is their religious affinity. The consistent persecution of the Rohingyas in the Arakan region of Myanmar by the Rakhine Buddhists with the support of the country’s military force in the years 1978, 1991/1992, 2012, 2015, 2016, and 2017–18, created a deep sense of sympathy among the Muslims in south-eastern Bangladesh, something I elaborated upon in great detail in previous chapters. In Bangladesh, the Rohingyas do not enjoy even refugee status. Against international pressure to shelter and host the Rohingyas as refugees in its land, Bangladesh often clarifies its position on three grounds: (1) Bangladesh is not a signatory state of the International Refugee Convention 1951 and has never ratified it and so, Bangladesh is not legally obligated to host refugees on its land; (2) Bangladesh is already an over-populated and developing country, and hence, it cannot,

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under any circumstances, host an additional 1.3 million people on its land; and (3) if the Rohingyas are given ‘refugee status’, they will start claiming various kinds of rights under international legal frameworks, which Bangladesh does not intend to provide them. The three explanations seem convincing from the Bangladeshi point of view, but from the Rohingya perspective, they are in Bangladesh only to save their lives as nobody, many said to me, would willingly leave their country of origin. Many Rohingyas explained to me time and again that ‘they have basic human rights as human beings in the world’. In Bangladesh, apart from the state’s position, local people, particularly people of Ukhia and Teknaf, have gradually become unwelcoming and, to some extent, intolerant of the Rohingya presence in their neighbourhood. During my fieldwork, I observed innumerable counts of human rights violations committed by local Bengalis, security forces, and law enforcement agencies, whom I prefer to term as ‘local states’ because they are the representatives of the central state,25 which most of the times remained unaddressed. I have written elsewhere that: ‘Using forced labour of Rohingya refugees with cheap rate or without any payment, physical attacks without any sensible reason, sexual harassment of Rohingya women, torture by security forces without any reason, evacuating from temporary shelter without any notice, etc. have been common phenomenon in the lives of Rohingyas … living in and around Teknaf and Ukhia.’26 During my fieldwork over many years, I have recorded some facts, figures, and events of such violations of human rights, a few of which I am presenting in the following sections to draw attention to the argument that people become subject to acute atrocities and various forms of discrimination due to their lack of citizenship and state of statelessness.

Discourse of ‘Fate’ and the State of Vulnerability The idea of fate, locally called kopal, is very significant in Rohingya life in both Myanmar and Bangladesh. Sometimes, it is called nioti, meaning destiny. Rohingyas often blame their kopal for their miserable lives and take it as nioti or for granted. Anthropology has a long tradition of the study of ‘fate’ and ‘destiny’ in various forms in classic27 and modern28 ethnographies. Very recently, in a special issue of

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HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory on the anthropology of destiny, the editors, Alice Elliot and Laura Menin, explained: Questions surrounding humans’ capacity to act and effect change when life and possibility are partially or wholly determined by external, often non-negotiable, powers have long been at the core of theological and philosophical traditions—from the ancient Greek notion of moira and early Asian philosophies of karma, to centuries-old Islamic debates on the concept of qada-. ʾwaʾl-qadar (God’s decree and determination).29

They also wrote, ‘anthropology often discusses destiny in conjunction with other powerful forces and entities such as luck and fortune, providence and chance’.30 The Rohingyas quite often use the words ‘kopal’ and ‘nioti’ to indicate their inability and non-capacity to control what is happening in their lives. In fact, in Rohingya narratives, fate contains the self-explanation of people’s gain and loss, what people just cannot explain to their own satisfaction. Fate is an imaginary explanation to justify one’s unexpected and undesired experiences and destination. It happens when people’s gain or loss goes beyond the limit of aspiration and expectation. Fate is believed to be God’s will, something beyond the control of ordinary people, and therefore people blame or credit ‘fate’ for their gain or loss. Therefore, the Rohingya discourse of fate and their state of vulnerability are intertwined and interrelated because sometimes their vulnerability is taken as their kopal and nioti, rather than accusing those responsible. Yet, in most cases, it reflects their inability to resist what is happening in their lives. Many Rohingyas, in both Vasan Para and Pasan Para, on many occasions, talk about a common proverb, kualer lihon no-jai hondon (one cannot escape one’s fate), because it has been written by Allah. This is a common belief among the Rohingyas living in both Pasan Para and Vasan Para that Allah has prescribed a predetermined fate for everyone, about how and when one is born and dies, what one makes of one’s life, what all happens in one’s life, and what one’s destiny is. Sometimes, they explain their critical conditions, in both Bangladesh and Myanmar, as Allah-r Ichha, meaning Allah’s will. The Rohingya villagers in both the paras believe that life, death, marriage, livelihood, joys, happiness, sorrows, status, prestige, and positions are the states and events of human experience that are inscribed by the creator, Allah, in each person’s life, even before they are born. So, they try to justify what they experience as

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non-citizens and stateless people in Bangladesh, and even in Myanmar, as their ‘fate’ written by Allah. During my fieldwork in July 2016, Hasan Mia, a Rohingya who lives in Vasan Para, said: Arrar jibon gorer-o na, ghator-o na (our lives belong to others because we belong to no one). Since nobody is willing to accept us and shelter us, we are dealt with as inhuman entities. Since we are neither Burmese (citizens of Myanmar) nor Bengalis (citizens of Bangladesh), therefore, we are not recognized by either Bangladesh or Myanmar. Since we do not have any citizen identity, we are the objects of ill treatment in both countries. We have taken it for granted as stateless people have no space in any state in the universe. Since you live in others’ territory, others will write your fate. Our kopal is written with what we are here today and nioti has brought us here today. Unfortunately, kopaler lihon, no-jai hondon (fate’s writing cannot be escaped).

Hasan Mia’s statement contains both his inability to alter his predetermined fate and his deep grievance of his present vulnerable conditions in Bangladesh. Interestingly, many Bengali villagers whom I interviewed told me that the miserable life of Rohingyas is actually their fate since ‘kualer lihon no-jai hondon’. Sekandar Khan31 (49), a local Bengali resident of Pasan Para in Ukhia, was talking to me about the fate of Rohingyas in October 2015. He said: Rohingyas are not good human beings because they have a tendency of stealing, robbing, and misappropriating others’ material wealth. They have come here through illegal paths, live in the locality illegally, and are involved in illegal activities. Everything about their lives is illegal just as they are. In fact, people without a state are the people without social and political integrity. They are non-citizens, and hence, they do not feel any duties and responsibilities to[wards] any state. They do not abide by the rules of any state as they are stateless. Therefore, their behaviour has become peculiarly unfit in a civilized society. In fact, what they are today is their ultimate ‘kopal’ and ‘nioti’. They have no ‘ghor’ (house), no ‘bari’ (home).32 Kopal kharap hole karo to kichu korar nai (if the fate is bad, what can others do)?

Both narratives, one from a Rohingya and another from a Bengali, explicitly reveal that people who have no legal and constitutional status in the state’s framework always become subject to inhumane treatment due to their stateless identity,33 which they sometimes take as their

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kopal and nioti. It is interesting to note that their miserable lives and living conditions are often made sense of via the register of ‘fate’. ‘Fate’, then, becomes the architecture that holds the vulnerable conditions and powerlessness of people who are deprived of minimum standards of living and life. Under the notion of ‘fate’, what the local Bengalis and Rohingya refugees said could be summed up in three ways: First, citizenship is the legal status of people in the society, which at the same time determines the place and status of non-citizens in the host society. Since non-citizens hold ‘illegal’ existence, they are treated as illegal migrants and unwelcome outsiders or, at best, refugees who always hold a subordinate social and political position in the host society. Second, under the dynamics of perceiving ‘fate’ as ‘God’s will’, stateless people and refugees take their miserable living conditions as ‘fate’, due to their incapability to amend what has already been written by God. They often become subject to human rights violations, bad health facilities, poor living conditions in slums and camps, atrocities, and discrimination committed by state agents, which many Rohingyas consider as their ‘kopal’. Third, the people of the host society look at stateless people and refugees with a negative image because the host society has to share their scopes and resources as well as shoulder the ‘burden’ of additional people. Since it is understood that citizenship is the relationship of people with the state confirming certain amenities in terms of rights and duties,34 stateless people remain beyond this ambit and, hence, could do anything without any moral or legal obligation to the state. Since the stateless people move from one state to another, they become ‘doubly marginalized’35 as suspended from their place of origin and as unwelcome people in the place of migration. In the case of Rohingyas, Myanmar has gradually become intolerant about the presence of Rohingyas in its state territory. Therefore, they were forced to leave Burma in 1978 in the name of Operation Nagamin, made stateless in 1982 by the enactment of the debatable Myanmar Citizenship Law, and compelled to flee due to the launch of a deadly operation called Operation Clean and Beautiful Nation in 1991/92, with another similar clearance operation in 2017. So, the Rohingyas have gradually been pushed to the margins of the state in Myanmar. In Bangladesh, the Rohingyas do not enjoy even a refugee status as they are now collectively labelled as FDMN through the making of the biometric database.

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Figure 5.1 Reporting place of Rohingyas just after their arrival in Bangladesh but before their placement in camps Source: Author’s personal collection.

Living with the ‘Local State’ and the (Re)production of ‘Bare Life’ In the modern political system, ‘the state’ is popularly understood as the necessary political institution of a centralized government that holds and operates ‘legitimate’ use of force and power within a given territory. Instead of concentrating on the centre of power and its organized operation, anthropologists pay attention to local forms of the state amidst its various roles and operations. Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta concentrate on ‘everyday practices of bureaucrats and their representation of the state’.36 Similarly, James Scott37 regards state not in its centrality but in its existence in the margin, and hence, the margin historically tends to run away from the state. James Ferguson also argued that the ‘expansion of bureaucratic state power, then does not necessarily mean that “the masses” can be centrally coordinated or ordered around more efficiently; it only means that more power relations are referred

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through state channels’.38 Anthropologists now focus on the manifestations of the state in everyday discourse and of how people experience the local agents of central bureaucratic state. Veena Das and Deborah Poole explain, ‘in mapping the effects and the presence of “the state” in local life, anthropologists often look for signs of administrative and hierarchical rationalities that provide seemingly ordered links with the political and regulatory apparatus of a central bureaucrat state.’39 In a similar fashion, Gupta understands state with ‘the analysis of the everyday practices of local bureaucracies and the discursive construction of the state in public culture’.40 Therefore, an effective way of understanding the state is to grasp how people at the local level define and redefine political order and bureaucratic system. Talal Asad has argued that ‘the state dominates and defends the community, orders and nurtures its civil life … the state’s abstract character is precisely what enables it to define and sustain the margin as margin through a range of administrative practices’.41 So, the ranges of administrative practices at the local level could be meaningful symptoms to understand state in people’s everyday life. Here, I consider the ‘local state’ in three dimensions: (1) the law enforcement agencies as the classic representation of the central state; (2) ‘local people’ who represent the dominant notions of ‘stateness’ before the Rohingyas; and (3) the civil administration and local bureaucracy reflected as the ‘local state’ in south-eastern Bangladesh. I will discuss the ways in which these three forms of ‘local state’ deal with the Rohingyas in Ukhia and Teknaf and contribute to their marginal, stateless, and vulnerable identity.42

Relations with the Classic Representation of the State In Bangladesh, the law enforcement agencies are often considered the classic representation of the state.43 In that sense, the classic representation of the state in Bangladesh consists of the Bangladesh Police (BP), the BGB, the RAB, the Bangladesh Military (BM), the Bangladesh Ansar Village Defence Party (VDB), and the Coast Guard of Bangladesh (CGB). Since migrated Rohingyas are stateless and are living in Bangladesh as ‘illegal people’, they face arbitrary detention and arrests, imprisonment, and frequent torture at the hands of the law enforcement agencies day in and day out. The police personnel in Pasan Para in Ukhia and the BGB

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in the Vasan Para in Teknaf are in charge of law and order and dealing with crimes involving Rohingyas. Before the arrival of the new migrant Rohingyas in 2017 and prior to the settlement of 32 temporary Rohingya refugee camps, the police frequently raided the two makeshift camps— Taal in Ukhia and Leda in Teknaf—of Rohingya refugees on alleged grounds of possession of illegal drugs and arms and ammunition, and to crack down on criminals. This is because Rohingya camps have always been reportedly represented as places of various alleged criminal activities including drug business, arms trade, human trafficking, sex work, and the hub of thieves and robbers; their camps are sites of rampant and indiscriminate police brutality. In fact, camps across the world are largely represented with various negative connotations.44 Many local and national dailies regularly publish news on Yaba45 trade, border smuggling, illegal arms trading, various kinds of social crimes, and militant activities where Rohingyas living in Ukhia and Teknaf and Rohingya camps are directly involved. This sort of perception and media representation further aids and abets the frequency of raids by law enforcement agencies in the Rohingya camps and in villages where unregistered Rohingyas live. Similar raids take place in Vasan Para and Pasan Para, but less frequently in comparison to those in Taal and Leda. Under the garb of raids, law enforcement agencies often violate human rights as severe atrocities take place. ‘Rohingyas are treated very inhumanly, exploited using the space of their vulnerable social conditions, forced to provide cheap labour, harassed sexually … tortured by security forces as violation of human rights.’46 I have recorded numerous cases of police raids that many Rohingyas told me about on several occasions. Hasibuddin (62), an unregistered Rohingya living in Pasan Para, explained to me in July 2012: It was November 2011, when I was living in a roadside house with my family. Some police personnel came at midnight and woke me up. The officer was accusing me of committing a robbery that took place in Ukhia Bazar two hours ago. The police officer was saying that a few witnesses had informed him that I was one of the dacoits who did the robbery. The robbers robbed one electronics shop and one shop of full of ladies’ clothes. While the officer was talking to me, the other police personnel started searching my house. They did not feel like taking my consent before beginning the search. My wife, two daughters, and one son who were sleeping were brought out of the house. They searched my house

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meticulously but found nothing. Then some of the police personnel started beating me and accusing me of hiding the stolen goods somewhere else. I tried to explain, but they were not ready to listen to me and remained unconvinced. When my wife, daughters, and son came forward and attempted to save me, the rest of the policemen started beating them. After half an hour of torture, they stopped beating. They said that they would arrest me if I did not provide them ‘true information’ and return all the stolen goods within two days. I was sleeping at home while the robbery was taking place; how could I return the stolen goods? But they seemed to stick to their position and I was warned of detention if I did not return the stolen goods. This is not a single event, but a frequent one that we have been experiencing in Pasan Para since we came to stay here. We cannot complain to anyone or seek justice from any authority since we are considered illegal residents in Bangladesh. Like me, many other Rohingyas living here often go through similar experiences. Now we understand in every breath, haak (rights) is not ours because we have no mulluk (state).

This narrative shows how law enforcement agencies deal with Rohingyas in Bangladesh. However, this is not a unique case as it happens on a regular basis. Many Rohingyas who came in 1978 and 1991/1992 went through various forms of discrimination and arbitrary treatment by the local state on many occasions. Jasim Ali, a Rohingya who crossed the border in 1991 and now lives with his family in Leda refugee camp in Teknaf, told me once in 2015 about his bitter experience of BGB torture. Jasim Ali is well-informed about Rakhine State, Rohingya past and present, and the state of different Rohingya camps in Bangladesh. He was one of the key informants in my research and helped me improve my Rohingya-speaking ability even though I am a Chittagonian. He explained to me: The Naf River is used for frequent Yaba tablet trading. Smugglers transport the tablet from Myanmar to Bangladesh through the Teknaf border of Bangladesh. The BGB, entitled to guard the border, often arrest smugglers and Yaba traders with hundreds of thousands of Yaba. Many Rohingyas living in Leda camp are said to be involved in Yaba trading and transportation at the Myanmar and Bangladesh border. One evening, a jeep of BGB soldiers raided the Leda camp searching for Yaba tablets, but found nothing. They looked for me as I am known to many as one of the educated Rohingyas who can communicate with people outside the Rohingya world. When I came to talk to them, they started questioning me, asking:

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Who are the Yaba business people here? Where are they? How much percentage do you take from them? Who are the other Rohingyas involved in bringing Yaba tablets from Borma? Where do you keep the Yaba tablets? Where is the gudam ghar (store of Yaba tablets)? What are the channels to send Yaba to Chittagong and Dhaka? I said that I heard some people are involved in Yaba trading, but I do not know who they are. The BGB officers, without saying anything, started hitting me with rifles. In a couple of minutes, I started bleeding, but they continued shouting, ‘do not try to be over smart’, ‘we know you are the Yaba boss’, and ‘lying is your culture’. At one point, they stopped beating me and said, ‘We are leaving but will come again. We have given you shelter here to stay in peace, but not to do illegal business and Yaba trading.’ I was still bleeding and lying on the ground when the BGB jeep left. I could do nothing but endure this physical torture. We have nowhere to go, but to accept our destiny of inhuman suffering and everyday forms of discrimination.

I recorded many stories during my fieldwork in Vasan Para and Pasan Para as well as other makeshift camps where I found that ‘arbitrary detention’, ‘merciless beating’, ‘frequent raids’, ‘accusations of stealing and robbery’, and ‘threat of eviction’ were very common. This strongly demonstrates that the state is very much present at the very local level of Rohingya samaj (society) and in the everyday life of the Rohingyas, though they are widely known as stateless people. What Hasibuddin and Jasim Ali said manifest two important aspects of Rohingya life in dealing with the ‘local state’: First, if any crime happens and any offense takes place in the locality in Ukhia and Teknaf, south-eastern Bangladesh, Rohingyas are the first suspects and accused, branded and reduced to the status of perpetrators due to their social status and the ease with which they can be framed. It has become a taken-for-granted fact in the last two decades that Rohingyas are definitely involved in cases of stealing, robbery, hijacking, and snatching that takes place in Ukhia and Teknaf. Second, the Rohingyas have no formal rights to lodge complaints with any office or seek justice from any authority; they, in most cases, have no rights to say anything but have to accept what is said to them. In fact, during my fieldwork spanning different periods of time, I listened to many Rohingyas and recorded several cases similar to Hasibuddin’s experience, which reveal that the Rohingyas are dealt with inhumanly, as they are regarded as ‘bare life’,47 a life without any legal existence, and ‘non-life’,48 meaning a life without recognition by any

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authority, which I call ‘subhuman life’. This statement also unfolds the premise that the lack of citizenship makes people a non-entity in the state structure because citizenship is what gives us, as Arendt phrased it, ‘the right to have all rights’.49

Relations with the Dominant Notions of ‘Stateness’ During my fieldwork in Vasan Para and Pasan Para, I was told time and again by the local Bengalis about the various crimes committed by the Rohingyas. ‘Oun hono mainshor jaat no’ (they are not human race) is a common sentence that majority of local Bengalis begin with when talking about the Rohingyas. In most cases, local Bengalis blame the Rohingyas for their innumerable miseries. Jafarullah (59), a local Bengali, had this to say about the Rohingyas in December 2014 while I was in Vasan Para. Rohingya are not manush (human), januar januar (animals; beast). If you give them food, they demand shelter. If you give them shelter, they want to sleep with your spouse. If you give them a plate of rice, after eating, they will make a hole in the plate. They do not know how to acknowledge people for their help, as they are beimaneer jaat (extremely ungrateful nation). They can turn their eyes back in a minute without any sensible reason. They can break the relations of ten years in ten seconds without any feelings. They can kill one only for 100 BDT without any feeling of guilt. They are encouraging their young girls to exploit our sons and allow elopement. Through this process, they are destroying our social bondage and family hierarchy. They are now used as the political cadres of militant groups, which is making our social and political life unstable. Besides, stealing, robbery, and hijacking are like ‘panta-vat’ (water-rice) for them, something they are doing frequently as if they have the license to do so. The Rohingyas have made our lives more complicated. In fact, since they have come into our lives, peace has gone from the society.

This statement reveals how bad the relations between the local Bengalis and Rohingyas are in the area. Many local Bengalis do not even think of Rohingyas as human beings, which is reflected in Jafarullah’s statement. One can easily imagine that if this what they think of the Rohingyas, what kind of treatment must the latter be receiving from Bengalis. In fact, the stateless status of Rohingyas in Bangladesh

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contributes to the representation of strong stateness embedded in Bengali behaviour, which is supported by the state agents. We can thereby understand the dominant notion of stateness supported by state agents in the behaviour of local Bengalis, something Paul Brass explains thus: ‘the state could be understood based on its role in supporting the privileged sections of society’.50 Rohingya lives in Bangladesh are subject to arbitrary treatment by local Bengalis who uphold notions of stateness in their behaviour or what I prefer to call ‘local state’. Bangladesh became independent in 1971 following a bloody liberation war, which was the outcome of a strong sense of Bengali nationalism. From the very beginning of the state formation and nation-building, Bengalis have felt a strong sense of ownership of the Bangladeshi state that is explicitly reflected in dealing with non-Bengalis, particularly indigenous people living in Bangladesh.51 But indigenous people have citizenship and are considered as residents of Bangladesh, whereas the Rohingyas are non-citizens and majority of them are regarded as non-refugees. Besides, Rohingyas are accused of creating numerous problems in the lives of Bengalis. During my fieldwork in Pasan Para, Saiful Kalam (57), an unregistered Rohingya refugee, explained to me in July 2016: The Rohingyas in the land of Bangladesh are treated as nothing less than a curse, a curse for the local Bengalis. We are regarded as criminal migrants, illegal outsiders and, hence, are dealt with unexplainable cruelty. Let me share one experience. One early morning, when I had just woken up and was having breakfast with my family members, a group of local Bengalis came to my yard and started shouting my name. I came out and wanted to know what had happened. They were blaming me and accusing me of stealing coconuts (300 in number) from my neighbour Kabir Mia’s backyard last night. I tried to convince them that I did not do it, that I would not do so as Kabir Mia is my neighbour. They seemed very angry and were not ready to listen to anything. After some angry conversation, one of them started beating me and the rest of them set fire to my house and burnt it down. My family members were trying to take some household goods out of the house, but they failed as they were not allowed to do so. I had to watch my little straw house burning in front of my eyes. We were thrown on the street. This is the irony of our lives. Where will we go? Whom will we complain to? Where will we seek justice from? We cannot seek anything from anyone. Our choice, desire,

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and dreams are determined by the local people as they deal with us like animals. Therefore, sometimes, we feel we are not human beings because we are Rohingyas. Many Rohingyas have started believing that Rohingyas are not human beings.

The narrative of Saiful Kalam unveils the cruel reality of Rohingya life, especially the everyday humiliation meted out to them by Bengalis. This is not an individual’s narrative or the telling of an individual event, but an integral part of everyday survival for Rohingyas in the south-eastern part of Bangladesh, as far as my field experience goes. Saiful Kamal’s statement shows two important aspects of the structure of relations between the local Bengalis and Rohingyas: First, the lack of citizenship not only makes people stateless, but also valueless, depriving them of human recognition and dignity. Second, citizenship also gives rise to a sense of stateness among the citizens of a state, composed of the elites dominant enough to rule and regulate the life of non-citizens. The displaced Rohingyas in Bangladesh are ruled and regulated by this sense of stateness embedded in Bengalis’ attitudes towards them.

Figure 5.2

Typical Rohingya camp with roofs made of plastic sheets

Source: Author’s personal collection.

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Relations with the ‘Local States’ Local bureaucracy through the local government that deals with people at the local level is considered the manifestation of the central state because it reflects and implements the state’s policy and politics; therefore, it is called the ‘local state’.52 In Bangladesh, the local government consists of city corporations, zila parishad (district council), pawrashova (city), upazila parishad (sub-district council), and union parishad (union council), which are the local organs of the central government. Since Teknaf is a pawrashova and Ukhia is an upazila, Rohingyas living in Teknaf need to deal with ward commissioners and ward officials, whilst those who live in Ukhia need to deal with the union parishad chairperson, members, and union parishad officials. In fact, Rohingyas living in south-eastern Bangladesh have very little to do with this ‘local state’, but the local states still play a vital role in regulating their lives. The Rohingyas have very limited engagement with the local administration and the local representation except in two ways. First, in order to handle cases of elopement, the Rohingyas often need to go to the union parishad in Ukhia and ward office in Teknaf to attend a meeting called by the elected chairperson or commissioners of the parishad. Second, they need to go to the union parishad in Ukhia and ward office in Teknaf to deal with land disputes because they build temporary shelters on land that belongs to the government or what is locally called ‘Khash land’. During my fieldwork, I noticed that in many cases, the Rohingyas were accused of doing all misdeeds and given punishments in the forms of physical assaults, fines, gifting a cow or dozens of hens, and holding ears in front of all. Sometimes, verdicts such as ten slaps on the spot in front of everyone were also given. However, Rohingyas cannot help but accept the decision and punishment given by the chairperson and members at the meeting. I observed many such cases in both Pasan Para and Vasan Para where the Rohingyas were given stern punishments despite them not being responsible. Lokman Hasan, an unregistered Rohingya of Pasan Para in Ukhia, one day explained to me in October 2012: One union parishad member of Ukhia, Faizuddin Chowdhury, a powerful local Bengali, called a meeting in the evening and I was summoned to attend the meeting as I was the main accused. My wife was also asked to attend the meeting with me. I appeared at the meeting on time. I saw

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that many local Bengalis were present there before I arrived. Chowdhury was chairing the meeting as an elected commissioner of the union parishad, who was entitled and empowered to settle the local disputes. I was accused of encouraging my daughter (Sabiha, 20) to elope with a local boy (Hashem, 26). Hashem’s father, Azizul Hoque, was telling the meeting: eta etar mayare aar fuar pechhone lagai diee. Aar fuar matha nosto gori diee. Etar maya aar fuaree vulai-valai palai gioi. Mul ashami oilo Lokmainna. (He allowed his daughter to exploit my son. His daughter tricked my son into marrying her. His daughter exploited my son. They eloped three days ago. The main culprit is not his daughter, but him, Lokman.) The chair of the meeting asked me to respond to Hashem’s father’s accusation, but what could I say? I said two young adults fell in love and decided to marry. What’s my fault? What could I do? Chowdhury finally gave a judgment saying, ‘Hashem’s parents have brought up and educated their son with great hardship. Hashem was the centre of their hopes and aspiration. However, your daughter has ruined everything. Besides, you know that marrying a Rohingya girl is a matter of social stigma in the local society. Your daughter has ruined everything by tarnishing Hashem’s parents’ social prestige and status. Since your daughter did it, you must take the responsibility.’ As punishment, I was asked to give 1 milking cow, 20 hens, and 20,000 BDT to Hashem’s parents. Apart from these, I was ordered to provide one colour TV, one sofa set, one bedstead, one dressing table, and one cabinet as dowry to Hashem’s parents. Finally, I was threatened that if my other daughters would commit this ‘crime’, I would be evicted with my family from Ukhia. I tried to convince them that it would be impossible for me to meet their demands and punishment. I was given six months’ time, but I could not manage to put that kind of money together by the end of a year even. Consequently, my daughter Sabiha was kicked out of her in-laws’ house due to my failure to provide the dowry set upon me in the meeting. However, I could not seek any justice from Chowdhury or anyone else. I could not lodge any complaint with any court or any law enforcement agencies because I do not have any legal identity. Actually, all this happened because we have no mulluk. No mulluk, no haak (no state, no rights).

This narrative reveals many issues that are crucial for understanding the ways in which the local state deals with the Rohingyas. The Rohingyas are quite often victimized under various pretexts. Three important issues have come up from this narrative. First, the local state always works in favour of the majority, whilst the minority are less prioritized which is widely found in the Chittagong Hill Tracts where

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indigenous people experience similar treatment from the local states.53 However, in the case of non-citizens who are neither majorities nor minorities, the local state behaves blindly and indiscriminately because it does not care about whether it is justice or injustice, right or wrong, and fair or unfair. The arbitrary becomes a constant mode of oppression of the Rohingyas. Lokman is the recipient of such blind arbitration. Second, the local state makes the vulnerable more vulnerable. Having knowledge of the incapacities and the desperate condition of the Rohingyas, with its punishment, the community throws any possible room of humanitarian process out of the window. Third, the stateless Rohingyas have to accept all sorts of impositions regardless of their consent, of any notion of fair or unfair because of their precarious position in Bangladesh. The story of the citizen then finds its legitimacy in the negation of the non-citizen. *** People migrate from one place to another and one state to another for various reasons, such as the promise of a better economic fortune, but the Rohingyas migrated to Bangladesh to escape persecution after having been stripped of their citizen status in Myanmar, despite having lived there for centuries. Fleeing persecution, the Rohingyas migrated to Bangladesh in search of a better life, but they have not achieved the dignity of a refugee or an asylum seeker. They are, at best, seen by Bangladeshi society as ‘illegal migrants’, ‘socially disordered people’, ‘unwelcome intruders’, and ‘illegal objects.’ More often than not, the atrocities, injustice, and rights violation they have been subjected to have been marked by the prejudice and hatred of the local state. Vulnerability becomes the fabric of the everyday, statelessness and non-citizenship its threads and weave. Since citizenship is the gateway to many other rights, non-citizens are deprived of all sorts of human rights, civil and political rights, which render their lives ‘bare’ in an Agambenian sense. ‘Bare’ life is a disposable and unworthy life. In Bangladesh, the local state, community, and the central state together contribute to the dehumanization of the Rohingyas. While the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the Declaration of Non-Nationals (1985) confirm their human rights, Bangladesh continues to cite the problem of scant resources and homegrown poverty.

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Between the recognition and the denial of the Rohingyas as people, it is more urgent than ever to consider their plight from the point of view of rights and entitlement as human beings and not the instrumentalist, evasive view of the Bangladeshi state.

Notes 1. See Kristy Belton, ‘Statelessness: A Matter of Human Rights,’ in The Human Rights to Citizenship: A Slippery Concept, eds. Rhoda Howard-Hassmann and Margaret Walton-Roberts (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 31–44. 2. See Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 3. See Article 15 (1 & b) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948 that reads: (1) Everyone has the right to a nationality; (2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality. ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights,’ United Nations, accessed 13 January 2019, http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/. 4. Nasir Uddin, ‘State of Stateless People: The Plight of Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh,’ in Human Rights to Citizens: A Slippery Concept, eds. Rhoda HowardHassmann and Margaret Walton-Roberts (USA: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 62. 5. See David Plotke, ‘The Rights of Noncitizens: Introduction,’ Politics & Society 42, no. 3 (2014): 287–91; Rogers M. Smith, ‘National Obligations and Noncitizens: Special Rights, Human Rights, and Immigration,’ Politics & Society 42, no. 3 (2014): 381–98; David Weissbrodt, The Human Rights of Non-citizens (USA: Oxford University Press, 2008). 6. See Nasir Uddin, Not Rohingyas, but Royainga: Stateless People in the Struggle for Existence (in Bengali) (Dhaka: Murddhanno Publisher, 2017b). 7. Since 1978, when the Rohingyas started crossing borders, they were widely known as ‘the people from Burma’ and hence called ‘Bormaya’ in general. 8. See Michel Foucault,  The History of Sexuality,  Volume  1 (Boston, MA: Vantage Books, 1976). 9. See Elizabeth Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). 10. By the theory of ‘geontologies’, Elizabeth Povinelli talks about the mechanism of power that makes a distinction between ‘lives’ and ‘non-lives’, where ‘non-lives’ are dealt with differently compared to ‘lives’. The Rohingyas are apparently ‘non-lives’ and are therefore dealt with accordingly from the statist perspective. See Povinelli, Geontologies.

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11. The chapter is based largely on ethnographic fieldwork undertaken before the new arrival of the Rohingyas following the massive campaign that started on 25 August 2017. The fieldwork was undertaken for 16 months in total between 2001 and 2016 in different phases in two villages, namely Vasan Para (pseudonym) located in Teknaf and Pasan Para (pseudonym) located in Ukhia of Cox’s Bazar in the south-western part of Bangladesh. This empirical experience has been supplemented by my close observation as a local resident of Cox’s Bazar for more than two-and-a-half decades of the flow of Rohingya migrations, the process of their temporary settlements, the attempts at permanent social integration, and the roles of state and non-state actors in dealing with the Rohingyas in the south-eastern part of Bangladesh. The data used here is comprehensive and descriptive in nature; the methodology of the research is qualitative and ethnographic. 12. M. Fineman, ‘The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition,’ Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 20, no. 1 (2008): 1–23. 13. Cited in N. Kohn, ‘Vulnerability Theory and the Roles of Government,’ Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 26, no. 1 (2014): 3. 14. See, for details, P. Green and T. Ward, State Crime: Governments, Violence and Corruption (London: Pluto Press, 2004). 15. J. Butler, The Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (London/ New York: Verso, 2004). 16. Butler, The Precarious Life, xv. 17. I. Lorey, State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious, trans. A. Derieg (London/New York: Verso, 2015). 18. Lorey, State of Insecurity, 1. 19. Michael Safi, ‘Myanmar Treatment of Rohingya Looks like “Textbook Ethnic Cleansing”, says UN,’ Guardian, 11 September 2017, accessed 28 October 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/11/un-myanmars-treatment-ofrohingya-textbook-example-of-ethnic-cleansing. 20. For details, see Penny Green, Thomas MacManus, and Alicia de la Cour Venning, Countdown Annihilation: Genocide in Myanmar (London: International State Crime Initiative, 2015). 21. See Nasir Uddin and Nasreen Chowdhory, eds., Deterritoiralised Identity and Transborder Movement in South Asia (Singapore: Springer, 2019). 22. See Nasir Uddin, The Voices of the Victims: The ‘Subhuman’ Life of the Rohingya (An unpublished research monograph on the Rohingya victims of 2017 campaign in Rakhine State, 2019d). 23. See Kirsten McConnachie, Governing Refugees: Justice, Order and Legal Pluralism (London and New York: Routledge, 2014); Elena FiddianQasmiyeh,  Gil Loescher,  Katy Long, and  Nando Sigona, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies (Oxford: Oxford University

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Press, 2014); Anna Triandafyllidou, ed.,  Routledge Handbook of Immigration and Refugee Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 2015). 24. See Uddin. Not Rohingyas, but Royainga; Abdul Karim, The Rohingyas: A Short Account of Their History and Culture (Chittagong: Arakan Historical Society, 2016). 25. See Akhil Gupta, Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence and Poverty in India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). 26. Nasir Uddin, Not Rohingyas, but Royainga: Stateless People in the Struggle for Existence (in Bengali) (Dhaka. Murddhanno Publisher, 2017a), 95. 27. For example, Meyer Fortes, Oedipus and Job in West African Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959); Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, [1996] 2001); E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande (Oxford: Clarendon Press, [1937] 1976). 28. For example, Michael Lambek, Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte: Local Discourses of Islam, Sorcery, and Spirit Possession (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); Donald J. Hatfield, ‘Fate in the Narrativity and Experience of Selfhood: A Case from Taiwanese Chhiam Divination,’ American Ethnologist 29, no. 4 (2002): 857–77; Stéphanie Homola, ‘Caught in the Language of Fate: The Quality of Destiny in Taiwan,’ HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8, no. 1/2 (2018): 329–42. 29. Alice Elliot and Laura Menin, ‘For an Anthropology of Destiny,’ HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8, no. 1/2 (2018): 292. 30. Elliot and Menin, ‘For an Anthropology of Destiny,’ 283. 31. Sekandar Khan is a local business person. He used to work in a Rohingya camp as field facilitator for an NGO in 2010–12. Now he has a dry-fish business, which is profitable. He sometimes employs Rohingyas in his dry-fish factory because he can hire them at lower wages. He has strong reservations about the Rohingyas based on his personal experience. I interviewed him in a local restaurant in 2015. 32. ‘Ghor’ and ‘Bari’ are used in everyday conversation in the Chittagong region. Here, ‘ghor’ means house, a physical entity, and ‘bari’ means family, a social entity. According to many Bengali locals, the Rohingyas have no ghor as they live in a tent-like house and no bari as their family members are scattered here and there in both Bangladesh and Myanmar. 33. See, for details, Alison Kesby, The Right to Have Rights: Citizenships, Humanity and International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Emma Larking, Refugees and the Myth of Human Rights: Life outside the Pale of the Law (London and New York: Routledge, 2014). 34. See Rhoda Howard-Hassmann and Margaret Walton-Roberts, eds., The Human Rights to Citizenship: A Slippery Concept (Pennsylvania: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).

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35. The idea of ‘doubly marginal’ came out of the discussion of the researcher’s position in the ethnographic fieldwork by Evans-Pritchard. According to Evans-Pritchard, an ethnographer is ‘doubly marginal’ in a sense, suspended between the ethnographer’s own society and the society under investigation (Adam Kuper, Anthropology and Anthropologists. The Modern British School, 3rd edition [London & New York: Routledge, 1996]. Here, I use ‘doubly marginal’ to indicate the extreme marginality of the Rohingyas who are marginal because Myanmar rendered them stateless and Bangladesh is not ready to recognize them as ‘refugees’. 36. Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta, eds., The Anthropology of the State: A Reader (USA, UK, and Australia: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 277. 37. See J.C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 38. J. Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 263. 39. See V. Das and D. Poole, eds., Anthropology in the Margins of the State (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), 5. 40. A. Gupta, ‘Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics and the Imagined State,’ American Ethnologist 22, no. 2 (1995): 376. 41. T. Asad, ‘Where Are the Margins of the State?’, in Anthropology in the Margins of the State, eds. V. Das and D. Poole (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), 281. 42. See Paula Banerjee, Anasua Basu Ray Chaudhury, and Atig Ghosh, eds., The State of Being Stateless: An Account of South Asia (New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2016). 43. See Nasir Uddin and Eva Gerharz, ‘The Many Faces of the State: Living in Peace and Conflict in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh,’ Society and Conflict 2, no. 1 (2017): 208–26. 44. For details, see Sigona Nando, ‘Campzenship: Reimagining the Camp as a Social and Political Space,’ Citizenship Studies 19, no. 1 (2015): 1–15. 45. Yaba is a kind of stimulant pill that is used to enhance sexuality. It contains a mixture of methamphetamine and caffeine. Myanmar is the largest Yaba-producing country in the world and, as a borderland, Teknaf and Ukhia are popularly known as Yaba-trading zones. 46. Nasir Uddin, Not Rohingyas, but Royainga: Stateless People in the Struggle for Existence (in Bengali) (Dhaka: Murddhanno Publisher, 2017a), 90. 47. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 48. Povinelli, Geontologies.

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49. See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Books, 1994). 50. P.R. Brass, Theft of an Idol: Text and Context in the Representation of Collective Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 51. See Uddin and Gerharz, ‘ The Many Faces of the State’. 52. See also Das and Poole, Anthropology in the Margins of the State; Gupta, ‘Blurred Boundaries’; Gupta, Red Tape; Sharma and Gupta, The Anthropology of the State. 53. See Uddin and Gerharz, ‘ The Many Faces of the State.’

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The Story of the ‘Subhuman’ Life Untold Pains and Miseries and Uncertain Futures

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ulnerability is a state of living that make peoples’ lives—both individually and collectively—inconsistent and irregular in terms of peace and stability. The vulnerable people exist in a state of complete uncertainty with an absolute absence of rights of any kind, facing the non-recognition of their existence by legal frameworks of the state.1 Extreme vulnerability enhances and perpetuates the conditions of vulnerability that render people helpless, reproducing a chain of helplessness. Vulnerability touches everyone: the forcibly displaced and dispossessed; asylum seekers; refugees; the stateless; working classes; the landless; the lower castes and classes; minorities in terms of gender, community, and ethnicity; the occupied and the militarized populations; the illegally detained and imprisoned; the assassinated; the survivors of civil war and mass crimes such as genocides and riots; the agrarian classes; the developing nations; and the Global South. From the community to the nation, from the regional to the transnational, vulnerability affects different segments of the population depending on their situational and material conditions and the structures enabling them.2 If it happens in the lives of migrants who have fled persecution, more often than not, the forcibly displaced people experience doubleedged vulnerabilities both in the place of origin and the place of migration. In the case of the Rohingyas, having left Myanmar, their place of origin, under the compulsion of life-threatening situations, they are unwelcome when they arrive in Bangladesh—branded as intruders, The Rohingya. Nasir Uddin, Oxford University Press (2020). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199489350.001.0001.

© Oxford University Press.

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illegal bodies, and a socio-economic burden.3 The extremely vulnerable live with the uncertainty of having nowhere to go and no one to turn to. This is the central argument of this chapter. If a group of people are denied the right to a home, denied access to a place to live in, and given no recourse to an organized community or body that recognizes their voice, they become extremely vulnerable in this world. This chapter contextualizes this premise with the case of the Rohingyas as the vulnerable people in both Myanmar and Bangladesh. One of the important methodological challenges of doing empirical research on the Rohingyas is to get insights about what is happening in the Myanmar part of the Rohingya world. Whatever I have discussed, stated, and analysed in this book is solely based on my decade-long engagement with the Rohingyas living in Bangladesh. In order to draw a comprehensive picture of the Rohingyas, we need to have a detailed narrative on what is happening inside Myanmar too. The information we receive about the plight of the Rohingyas in Rakhine State of Myanmar is based on four sources: (1) state-sponsored information provided by the state machinery and state-controlled agencies; (2) drone footage recorded by various international media outlets and human rights bodies; (3) high-quality photographs and footage of some Rakhine State villages taken by journalists on the Bangladesh– Myanmar border; and (4) testimonies based on the lived experience of the Rohingyas and how they crossed the border into Bangladesh and elsewhere. Of the four potential sources of information, the most authentic, reliable, and comprehensive information about the plight of the Rohingyas living in Rakhine State are the personal narratives of the newly arrived Rohingyas in Bangladesh, which I have discussed in the beginning of the book. The works of Primo Levi are notable here, based on which, among others, Agamben built his theory of ‘bare life’.4 This chapter aims to fulfil this vacuum because it contains the narratives of the Rohingyas who have recently crossed the border, having survived the blurring of boundaries between ‘life and death’ in Rakhine State. This chapter provides its readers with some excerpts and impressions on the lives of the Rohingyas and their vulnerable conditions in Rakhine State of Myanmar. Academia, particularly the social sciences, has a tendency not to listen to those narratives which we often talk about, particularly in the early anthropological literature of Lewis Henry Morgan,5 E.B. Tylor,6 and

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James Frazer,7 who were widely regarded as armchair anthropologists.8 This sort of practice is still dominant in many texts in social science, which do not listen to the voice of the people concerned as much as they should. Either we put our words into the mouths of the people being studied or we use our voices to tell their stories. Therefore, the people often end up becoming mere objects of discussion and remain unheard. Consequently, the gap between field-level narratives and what gets written about them remains unbridged, and hence, knowledge production remains in the hands of a coterie of academicians and researchers who are relatively privileged in terms of their social position, political background, economic status and the cultural capital at their disposal. Unequal relations between researchers and their subjects of study were codified through the prism of the politics of representation until the mid-1990s.9 But now, the discourse and methods are much more sustained and have moved to a newer direction. Ethnographic research is more and more collaborative between the researcher and the people, research where both reflect reciprocally in what could be called a ‘joint product’.10 In fact, reciprocal engagement, mutual trust, and long-term research collaboration11 between the ethnographer and the object of study could make the product of fieldwork, known as ethnography, more reliable, sensible, and argumentative in order to form a ‘cultural critique’.12 This chapter will build on the voices of the Rohingyas and their narratives from their lived experiences. It is worth mentioning here that though I have been conducting research work in these two villages for years, I have undertaken an extensive fieldwork of the recently arrived Rohingya refugees who are kept in Balukhali and Kutupalang temporary refugee camps set up in Ukhia. I have interviewed 500 of the newly arrived Rohingyas and recorded their narratives to tap into the current momentum of the Rohingya movement and their issues since 25 August 2017. Here, I present a few representative cases that will unveil the ground reality of what is happening with the Rohingyas in Rakhine State and Bangladesh thereafter. I have tried to pursue four crucial points of enquiry: (1) Where were they living in Rakhine State? What was their life like in the state of Myanmar? (2) Why did they flee Myanmar? What conditions compelled them to leave their home and homeland? (3) How did they cross the border? How did they get into Bangladesh? (4) Where do they live now? What is their present condition in Bangladesh? How do they imagine their future? I am presenting the

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English translation of these narratives here as it was recorded without adding any words, thoughts, or views. It is simply a word-by-word and sentence-by-sentence translation of what I recorded. I will give my analysis at the end of the chapter. Let us listen to them in their own voices.

Case One: Sayed Kashim [Recorded in October 2017] My name is Sayed Kashim and I am 36 years old. I was living in Hanjamagon Manupara in Rakhine State. We were a family of 10, including my 5 children. My parents and younger brother were living with us, but an older brother who was married had a separate household. I used to buy bamboo and many household accessories from Buthidaung to sell them in our village. Besides that, I had cultivable paddy land and I used to do agricultural tasks there. I used to do poultry farming and did do not have many cattle. My younger brother had a small grocery shop by a road near our house. I have not had an education, but I sent my children to a Rohingya school near our house. By selling paddy rice, bamboo, and home shades, I used to earn 200,000 Burmese Kyat (BK) per month. By the end of August 2017, the Myanmar military forces had begun torturing the Rohingya civilians of our area, killing many of our people with no mercy for children, women, and old people, let alone the youth. To save our precious lives, we decided to flee from our own house. We tried to resist having to leave our place, but there were no such opportunities to stay for a single moment in the village. They started burning house after house across villages. By the end of October, they had set fire to almost 40 villages. They even set our mosques on fire. We heard of several men who had been brutally killed and slaughtered with swords and bullets. Our homes turned into graveyards. It was evening when the military attacked our village. At first, they started chasing us with rods and we started running with whatever we had on. In our neighbourhood, women do not go outside without covering themselves in burqa. My parents were old. They were not able to run at that age. My mother fell down and died while running. I carried my mother’s body to the next village where we buried her in the first piece of land we found, without proper funeral rites of Islam. How

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could I have left my mother’s body on a strange street? Will one be able to forgive oneself for doing such a thing? During that attack, I lost my younger brother too and have no news about whether he and his family are alive or not. We took some dry food with us and ate it on the way, searching for a safe place, and crossed the border to reach Bangladesh. How we reached Bangladesh is another story in itself. By paddling, we reached Sheelkhali and then crossed it by boat, which usually charges 10,000 BK for a single person to be ferried. After coming here, we exchanged BK with the help of some brokers. Then we bought some food, ate it, and then marched towards Kutupalong. Seeing the other people, we stopped at a safe place. A man gave us shelter in their house. He shared his room with us. For the first two days, he managed food for us. Then we built a tent with local bamboo and some fabric that cost us 250 BDT so that we could at least sleep. That helpful and kind man let us use his bathroom and toilet. Couple of days later, some relief suppliers built a tube well for us. After coming here, we got 25 kg rice, 1 kg pulses, 1 kg potato, and 1 kg onion as relief provided by some NGOs. We came here one week ago. We are still living off it. We used to have three meals a day but that has not happened a single day since we crossed our border. We had a ration card, which is of no use now. The BM told us to move to the camp or we will not be fed. However, there was a shortage of space at the shelter. Though I had never imagined before that I will have to scrap for food one day, I feel ashamed that life has come to this. We are not getting proper medical support in the camp. Many of us are wounded and injured. Thanks to Allah, who sent some people to help us out for nothing in return. We are suffering at every level, but we feel much safer here in comparision to Rakhine State. If we can have shelter in the camp, then we may survive and perhaps we will get the blessings of all mankind. The main problem here is shelter. We are also jobless. Who will give us a job? It is an unknown place. We are scared. If we are able to get through our present time, then we may be able to make it through our future too. I respect the government [prime minister] that she allowed us to stay at this place. No one willingly flees from their place until they are forced to do so. We were forced to leave our own place just to save our lives. They told us that we are Bengalis but we are not. We want to return back to our own country. But if they still shoot at us and our death

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Figure 6.1 In many cases, multiple families stay in a single-room house in the Rohingya refugee camps. Source: Author’s personal collection.

is inevitable, then we would prefer to die here in Bangladesh and be buried here as Muslims. We want to go back to our country, that is, if the government of Myanmar allows us. If it denies us our home, then we request all the governments around the world to protest against it and to pressurize the Myanmar government to take their country people back so that we may live like you, as you can go anywhere in your region, as you breathe in every corner in your country. We want our snatched rights back; we want our seized freedom back. We want to live and die like humans do.

Case Two: Jhinuk Banu [Recorded in November 2017] Would you like to leave your own house and stay at another place? You cannot stay for more than three to four days in your neighbour’s house.

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We had to face a lot of torture from the Myanmar military and Burmese Moghs. That is why we fled to Bangladesh, fearing for our lives, and now live in your country. I am Jhinuk Banu, 75 years old. My husband is a maulavi.13 His name is Ismail Haque. We have only one daughter. She is married. Her husband is also a maulavi. Both my husband and our son-in-law used to do the same work in the same field. My aged husband retired soon. Our family was from a good background. We had plenty of land, farms, animals, and ponds, and we used to help the poor in that area. We used to help other Rohingyas. The situation changed within a very short span of time. Now we have to go door-to-door and place-to-place in search of food. We were happy when we were in our homes. In this place, we cannot even manage a piece of cloth for ourselves. The situation got more dangerous after 25 August 2017. If the Myanmar military saw five people in a group at a time, they shot them dead on the spot. In the daytime, we had to work silently without making our presence felt. If they heard us, they would fire at us. We had to switch off the lights and pretend to sleep in the evening after an early dinner. If they saw lights in our house, they would fire at us. Babies would not cry in terror. Every midnight, they would kill someone or the other. There were midnight massacres, genocide, and mass graves. These became routine. Civilians would shout and cry out, seeking help from others. We had nothing to do except tolerate this. Help us! Help us! In the morning, we heard more sounds of firing, people shouting and running everywhere to save their lives. We could not stay there any longer. We moved from one room to another in the house, waiting until it was night, so that we could escape. It was midnight when we escaped from our home. Our belongings were scattered in the yard. My paddy rice was about to ripen in a couple of days and be ready for harvest. I hope someone harvested them and relished the meal. My beloved animals were staring at me when I was escaping with my family. It was really hard for me and my husband to leave our house, where we had shared joys and sorrows together and stood by each other all these years. We were living in a place called Garatibil. We took shelter in a small house after escaping from our house that night. We planned to search for some food in the morning and go to the border area. The midnight massacre was yet to happen. The military kept firing at us the whole night. Each one of us was running to save our lives. I have never seen

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people running from death. I was old and scared. We ran away from that village to seek for another and then we came to the border and crossed the lake to reach Bangladesh through Shahpari Island. Crossing the lake is costly. They charged us some money. We came to Kutupalong 10–15 days ago. After coming here, we got only 25 kg of boiled rice. We used the toilets of the locals. We do not get proper medical support since we are not staying at the camp. There is shortage of food and clothes everywhere. We saw women begging for food. We do not beg because we belong to good families. It is not about our pride as much as about our self-respect. We do not step outside without covering ourselves properly with clothes. Though we got some saris provided by local NGOs and local people, the garment remains unfamiliar to us and of little use. Not being able to take a bath is one of the main problems we are facing here because more than a hundred people use one tube well and we feel ashamed to bathe in public. We cry for our home. Where are we? This place is not ours. We are not Bengalis. We request to the GoB to help us back safely to our place. Whatever we lost we will not be able to get back, but at least we have our dignity. We do not want to lose it even if it costs us our precious lives. If we get back to Burma, then we may be able to find some work and will manage to live there happily.

Case Three: Mohammad Ali [Recorded in October, 2017] I am Mohammad Ali. I am 15 years old. I have come here from Buthidaung, Burma. We were living in Gudampara. Including my mother, we are seven in the family. My father died because of his ill health many years ago. Then my elder brother took the responsibility of our family. My father was a day labourer. He used to earn 5,000 BK daily when he was alive. At that time, my elder brother was in school. My brother could not continue his studies after our father died. He had to start labourer’s work. Those days were really hard to survive as we had to struggle a lot. We had no cultivable land. We had to buy everything from the market. There was nothing for free. The tortures of the Moghs and the military were a cause of everyday pain for us. When they began a massive campaign against civilian Rohingyas, we left our

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place and joined others who were about to leave the area. We took with us whatever we could manage at the time. No one was there to show us the way to escape. We just joined the group whom we saw leaving towards the border of Bangladesh. The military fired at us when we were leaving the area. Many of us were wounded and some died on the way to Bangladesh. Those who died, we left their bodies on the streets, hills, and jungles. Many of our villagers came to this camp after we got here. We heard from them that our house had been set on fire. They killed two of my friends. The military raped my friend’s two sisters and killed them. Thanks to Allah that we were able to leave Burma and reach here as a family. When we heard the military was firing in the village next to our area, we decided to move towards Bangladesh that night. After my mother completed the Magrib prayers in the evening, we took a dark road to flee. We kept walking at night, and after six days and nights, we reached Naikhangpara. There were more families who joined us later. My friend’s family has lots of land. His father refused to leave the place. We requested him but in vain. During those six days, the military kept firing at us whenever they saw us. We chose to hide in the caves of the mountains in the forest. Finally, we managed to reach Naikhangpara, from where we could see Bangladesh. We took the help of a boat to reach the area safely. The boatman asked us to pay 70,000 BK per person, which we could ill afford. We had some money which had been sent to us by one of my uncles who lives in the Emirates, we gave this money to the boatman after we reached our destination. Those who did not pay were captured and beaten up by the boatmen. On the island of Shahpari, we saw the relief vehicles. They gave us some supplies. However, it was not enough because the number of people was more than the amount of relief supplies. Whatever we got was managed by my elder brother. My mother was injured while escaping. Then we came to Kutupalong by the BGB vehicle. Here, the doctors gave my mother some medicine so that she could be cured. We had no money by now and that is why we had to walk several miles on foot. We slept by the roadside for two nights. We did not find a tent after getting here. We were in a miserable condition because of the shortage of tents. Finally, we built ourselves a tent by managing some bamboo and a cloth drape as cover. We managed some cash and spent it on the tent. There were four more families with us. When we got here,

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Figure 6.2

Common toilets for many households in the Rohingya refugee camps

Source: Author’s personal collection.

there were no facilities of toilet or fresh water. A couple of days later, the BM came here and set up a tube well and a toilet for us. Now we have no problems. I like this place. I can play with many kids around here who are also like me. I mourn for my childhood friends who died in Burma. I also miss those I have not been able to see yet. I want to study and become a doctor in the future. I want to serve the Rohingyas because I have seen many people who are neglected by doctors and I feel bad for them. My father also died of medical negligence. That is why I want to be a doctor. The people of this country have schools and have a good life as well. I want to be like them when I return to our country. Some days are bad because we have to struggle to find food. However, we still have reasons to smile here. We feel relieved that here our lives are not at risk. I want to get back to my own country without fighting. We want to live with them as brothers. We do not want to live here forever. Thanks to the GoB and its raja (the prime minister) that she lets us stay here

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and provides us with food. You have done a really good job for these helpless people. We want nothing except our own house and human rights in Arakan.

Case Four: Sabura Khatun [Recorded in October 2017] My name is Sabura Khatun (55). I came here in September 2017, before this I was living in Karanibazar, Maungdaw, in Burma.14 I have two daughters and four sons. In Burma, we used to live in a bigger and furnished wooden house, but now we are bound to live in this small tent. We had 8–10 kani15 of cultivable land, one gonda16 of 4–5 kani, and a wider straw land. To go to our own hatchery we had to pay minimum 10,000–20,000 BK at check posts every time. We had to pay money even to cultivate our land. In fact, we had to pay to live in Rakhine State because only money could save our lives. In 2017, even money did not work and would not have saved our lives. Our lives in Burma were severely restricted. We could go for shopping only once a week. We were living in a village next to Tulatoli, which was engulfed in massive violence in 2017. Both my daughters got married and used to live in Tulatoli with their husbands and their in-laws’ family. When the military campaign broke out, the military indiscriminately killed many Rohingyas. The remaining ones started running here and there from Tulatoli and some of them took shelter in our village. The villagers of Tulatoli informed us that all members of my two sons-in-laws’ families were murdered by Myanmar security forces and Buddhist vigilantes. That was a very painful moment for us. It was hard to believe, and hence, we were trying to find them, but the news was reconfirmed by one of the neighbours of the family. After 27 August 2017, we saw many dead bodies and separated organs floating in the canal. All those bodies had floated down from Tulatoli. Sometimes we climbed up to the nearby hills in an attempt to see the situation of Tulatoli from the top and found that it was being heavily destroyed. Many who took shelter in our villages told us about their horrible experiences, such as the military and Mogh youth snatching away children from breastfeeding mothers and throwing them into the fire. If any mother tried to save her child, the military shot them dead on the

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spot. We also heard a lot of terrible stories of rape, killing, torture, and burning that forced us to leave Myanmar for Bangladesh. Before that, they besieged Tulatoli, Garatoli, Pukkul (eastern colony), Dioultoli, and Oyaikkum and murdered the people there. We saw many of these events from the top of the hills. Then we finally decided to leave our motherland. We had many cows and goats, which were let go one by one, because if they set fire to the house, the animals would not be able to escape and would die for sure. We noticed that all the people of the colony moved to Bangladesh. We started our journey from Karanibazar and it took us three days to reach the Bangladesh border. After walking a whole day, we reached Zionkhali. Then we came to Kuerkhali at night. On the way, a bridge was broken, so we had to cross the canal by swimming across it. We stayed there for a night. There was an empty house and we had brought rice with us. So, we boiled rice and ate there. In the morning, we reached the bank of the Naf River, the borderland of Bangladesh. Then we crossed the river by boat. The boatman charged us 50,000 BK per head. The amount was not fixed for all. If you have more people or you have more money, then you must pay more. We had no money and that is why I gave my gold earrings to the boatman. The earrings cost 2,000–2,500 BDT (equivalent to 30 US dollars). After crossing the river, we reached the bank of a hatchery at Lombabil, a borderland place on the Bangladesh frontier. Then we crossed a canal in exchange for 1,000 BDT per head. Then we arrived at Khanchapara from where the BM showed us how to get to the camp. Then the crowd, including us, started walking towards Kutupalong old camp. Local people gave us food for the first two days. When we reached the Bangladesh border, people gave us clothes, which is what we are wearing till now. At the same time, some Mulisas (helping persons) gave us money. They also gave money to everyone in Bangladeshi currency. Finally, we got some space in one of the temporary camps. We are living in this narrow space with inadequate facilities. Everything that you are seeing in this tent has been bought by us. Here, people call us Burmese Rohingya. In Burma, they called us Bangladeshi Bengali. In our registration card, GoB calls us Myanmar nationals, but Myanmar does not recognize us as its citizens. We are Rohingyas, who have no place in the world. No country or nation

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Figure 6.3 Water supply for Rohingya refugees in camps—one tube well, many households Source: Author’s personal collection.

considers us as their own. We are here not by our choice, but by our fate. We had never imagined that we would ever lead the life that we are leading here. Sometimes, I ask Allah why he did not take us away before putting us in this condition that has no present and no

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future, only horrible and terrible experiences of being killed, raped, and burnt.

Case Five: Mohammad Yunus [Recorded in October 2017] I am Mohammad Yunus. I am 57 years old. I used to live with my family in Maungdaw, Burma. I had a lot of land and I used practice farming on a part of it. I would grow rice and vegetables. I had five sons and two daughters. Four of my sons were married. They all were living in Maungdaw but as independent families. They had their own lives to lead, with different businesses. One of my sons and both my daughters lived with me. My son, who was studing in class tenth, helped me with the farming. My daughters knew Arabic. The Burmese government forbade our children’s education. It was a long time ago. There were different and strict rules for us. They imposed embargoes on our free movement, children’s education, marriage, and all sorts of business. We had to suffer a lot and were treated as if we were not the people of Burma but illegal intruders. They used to apply and introduce new rules and regulations; they used to take away our money and precious things and false cases would be filed against us without any reason. We had many house-related problems. They used to renew the license every six months, take pictures of our family, and keep track of our movements. We had to pay a fee even if someone was to give birth to a child. If someone failed to give home taxes, they arrested and detained them. One Friday, torture started under the pretext of some Rohingyas attacking police posts. Honestly speaking, we had no idea about it. We noticed that 40 motorcycles of Moghs arrived in the village and slaughtered 8 Rohingyas on the spot. Some of them ran away and some were seriously wounded. They were going to attend Jummah prayers, and at that time, the Moghs arrived and started firing at the Amirs. The military was behind all these attacks. They killed innocent people every day and shot at Rohingya women, children, men, and old people. One day, they attacked us. They brought some land mines, petrol, and guns. They set house after house on fire. Bombings and killings were rampant. We were running for our lives. Four of my sons’ houses

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were in the front. They burnt their houses. Only we know how we felt during our last few days in Rakhine State. It took us a day to reach the border because Maungdaw was nearer to the Bangladesh border. We came to Shahpari Island and entered Bangladesh with the help of brokers. We had to pay 5,000 BDT for crossing the river. The brokers helped us with converting our money, BK, into BDT. We spent it on food and transport. We got many things and they provided us food and water. They helped us out by giving us some money too. We came here about one month ago. For now, we are staying at the Balukhali camp. We were at Nykhangchari for a few days in the interim. We stopped there after seeing some Rohingyas building houses for themselves. Seeing them, we stopped there and bought some bamboos and material to cover the tent, which cost us 1,000 BDT. We made a tent there. Then the military moved us from there to a shelter in this camp. While leaving Nykhangchari, we took those materials with us so that we could build another tent when we got here. With the help of Allah, we got a token and thereby find food regularly. The arrangements for fresh water and clean toilets are good here. We never had nor felt the need to drink bottled water back in Burma. If the Bangladeshi government would not have allowed us to enter their country, we might have floated in the sea and died. We are free to go outside and move around freely here unlike in Burma. We have medical checkups and get medicines regularly. I never had the chance to visit doctors in Burma. You could not trust them. Moghs could do anything. If we were to talk about the future, there are no future plans in sight, but we do wish to return to our country, to our village. I cannot believe that my sons are dead. I do not know for how long I will survive. I will pray for my sons so that Allah can save us from this condition. We were caged in our own country. We request your government to make a deal with the Myanmar government so that we can go back there safely. We want our freedom. We do not want this life. We want to be accepted by the other people of Myanmar. We want to live there like the Moghs and other Burmese people. We want to educate our children. They told us time and again that we are Bengalis because we are Muslims. This is not true. We are Muslim, but we are Rohingyas. Though we are Muslim, this is not our place and this is not our country. We were not born here. We belong to our country, Burma.

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Figure 6.4

Inside a cramped tent in a refugee camp

Source: Author’s personal collection.

Case Six: Sanzida Khanam [Recorded in October 2017] I am Sanzida. I am 47 years old. I have five children. I studied up to Class 10 but could not complete my matriculation. Three of my children have studied up to Class 10 as well. My elder sister went to college. The others could not go to college because of the restrictions imposed by the government. I am a housewife. I helped my children in learning, besides household work. My husband was a contractor in the wood business. We had a total of eight kani17 of land for cultivation. We used to produce crops and vegetables there. We were a solvent family in Myanmar. In Arakan, we were always alert about military checking and we hid our young girls to protect them from the soldiers. Physical abuse, sexual harassment, and rape carried out by military soldiers were normal scenarios that took place frequently in Rakhine State. Besides, their

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target group mostly comprised the poor and ‘illiterate’ rural Muslims. They  used to look for young people to torture and detain, accusing them of being involved in ‘Rohingya militancy’. The Burmese military did not consider the Rohingyas as human beings. They were so brutal towards us. We witnessed that the military soldiers came to villages in Tulatoli and started firing indiscriminately, following the incident of 25 August 2017. The military started burning houses in series. We became very scared of the frequent shooting and burning. We heard about the attack where about 700 Rohingyas were slaughtered together in a village, Manupara, near our village. One of my cousins was a resident of that village. She called us during that time when the military and Moghs were slaughtering her husband in front of her. Her husband was a maulana, a religious teacher. After her husband’s death, she fled from there with her children, came to our village, and took shelter with us. The military and the Burmese government did not tolerate any Islamic activities as our religious rituals. They always accused pious Muslim men of being Rohingya terrorists. They had a tendency to insult bearded persons in public places. Anybody who worked in schools or offices could not keep a beard, though it is an important religious symbol for Muslims. It was mandatory for men to shave off their beard before marriage, otherwise they would not receive permission for marriage registration from the concerned authorities. I know many Rohingyas who were religious and had to shave off their beard in order to get married. Not only this, as per government direction, a Rohingya couple could not have more than two children. If they came to know about a couple with more than two children, they would charge a huge sum from them. For every newborn child, we had to give them two to three lakh BK. Then, if we wanted to include our baby’s name in the cherang,18 we had to give an additional two to three lakh BK. In fact, we passed our days with so many difficulties and in an extreme form of uncertainty. We spent a lot of money just to survive. Two of my brothers live in London. They always helped us in our time of need. Finally, we decided to leave Burma for the sake of our lives. It took us 12 days to reach Bangladesh after leaving home. It was a very painful and horrible journey. We paid 10,000 taka per head for crossing the border by boat.

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Now I am working with an NGO here. My grandson also works with an NGO. We need money to bear the expenditure of our daily needs like clothing, medication, meals, and many other things for our family. In camp life, there is nothing normal here. The relief supplies we are provided with here are not good enough for eating. So, we need to buy some fish, meat, and vegetables. Since relief is not sufficient to meet the needs of our family, we need to earn so that we can bear additional family expenses.

Case Seven: Muhammad Hafiz [Recorded in November 2017] I am Muhammad Hafiz. I used to live at Shudhapara in Arakan. I am married and have two children. I am a hafiz of the Quran. My father had the same designation too. I was in Class 7 when I left my school. Then I concentrated on Hafezi.19 My father was an imam in a nearby mosque. Then the great opportunity came to me when my father retired from the job. I got the job of teaching and started teaching others. Thereafter, the Myanmar government ruled that no one could pray and no one could take the name of Allah. If they saw five people at a place, they shot at them. Then the mosques were shut down, so I used to visit children’s homes to teach them Arabic and often they used to come to our place. The Moghs and the military used to hate the Muslims. Once as we were engaged in our daily prayer, we were attacked. They entered my room and kicked me. They molested my wife in front of my eyes. They tied me and started beating me and took me with them. They caged me in a cell and tortured me. There were more prisoners like me, and two of them had died. The signs of constant beatings were marked on their bodies. The smell of their dead bodies was intolerable as they had been left there for decomposing. They used to say we did not give them peace even after dying. They used to beat me brutally. They broke a part of my body, particularly the left leg and the left side of my hip. I still remember how painful it was. After five days, my wife’s brother came with 500,000 BK to release me from the cell. Before releasing me, they beat me up again and warned me that if they saw me again, they would kill me. On the very next day, we decided to leave Burma. I had sent my wife’s parents to Kutupalong camp already. I used to talk to them over the phone.

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I did not want to leave Arakan because I felt a religious responsibility to stand beside the Rohingyas in this crisis, however, I worried about my family the most. We came to Bangladesh 12 days ago. We crossed rivers and highlands and wandered around for five days before reaching the border. Then we entered through Tambrue border. We faced a lot of troubles. My wife and I fell sick as both of us had got wet in the rain; my wife had fever. We expressed our gratitude to Allah after we finally reached Bangladesh safely. Through the border, we came to a market and the BM took us to the Balukhali camp. After coming here, we saw the huge tents that had been built by others. We managed to build a tent with the help of the military. It is a very draughty place. Babies keep catching the flu. Yesterday, my wife got some medicine from the doctor. We have no problem in getting the token, but for food, we have to wait for a very long time. The toilet and fresh water are near to our place. Open defecation has led to poor

Figure 6.5 People/kids standing in line to fill drinking water supplied by WFP’s water tanks Source: Author’s personal collection.

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hygiene. Our tube well got jammed one day and the military repaired it on the same day. I feel really happy sometimes because I can pray here and read the religious books loudly without anyone bothering me. No one beats us or dares to shoot at us. My future plan is to return to my country. Arakan is our place, to which we feel a deep sense of belonging. We want to go there and live in peace. There is a problem of fresh food. I hope Allah will manage the best for us. I pray for these country people because, in these days, they were with us. Thanks to those outsiders who helped us by donating money and food. We are grateful to those who care about us and express deep concern for us. We request your government to pressurize Burma to take us back and return to us our freedom and rights. We have only one wish: to live as a Rohingya till the last breath.

Case Eight: Minara [Recorded in November 2017] I am Minara. I am 25 years old. I have three children. My husband and I used to live in Chadullarh Char in Bawllibazar in Arakan. Our village was attached to Tulatoli. My husband was a labourer. I used to live with my parents because my husband was unable to provide me with adequate food and other essentials. We had a big house and my father had some land as well some cattle. My husband had some ducks and chickens. As my husband did not have enough wealth, my father used to give us his own cultivated crops so that we could survive by selling them. Those days were good, and we were getting by. However, the Moghs and the military did not let us stay there in peace. Without any sensible reason, they started ravaging and torturing us. They used to steal and snatch our birds. Wherever they saw us, they treated us as Bengalis, as if we were illegal outsiders. The Burmese Moghs time and again said, ‘You came here from Bangladesh and mugged our land and are staying there.’ They started beating us. No one even dared to step outside their own house. For simple mistakes, we had to pay huge amounts of money or we would have been killed. They persecuted the women especially. They took my younger sister and beat her brutally. They wanted to rape her, however, she managed

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to escape. Our house used to be encircled with a bamboo fence, however, they removed it three years ago. They used to watch us from the top of the roof and attack us. We managed to pass our days somehow but now there are only dead bodies everywhere. The smell of the dead bodies has left the place sultry and uncomfortable. Of men, women, children, and old people, none was spared by the military and Moghs. They just captured and slaughtered them, and buried their bodies in mass graves. Only 10 people from our area survived, the rest were either killed or went missing. They beat almost 3,000–4,000 people from the north side of Maungdaw, labelling all of them as Bengalis. We had to please them by giving them precious things and cash. However, in the long run, we were unable to provide things for them because we did not have that kind of money. We had to live in our own country like outsiders. All the restrictions were imposed only on us. To marry someone, people had to give a huge amount of bribe to the chairperson or the police. We had to get photographed again and again, visit the office, and wait for hours together. We had to sign on several different papers. We had to give numerous depositions and testimonies. It was harrowing and humiliating. It was really hard to survive. We had to give a huge amount of money even if a childbirth was to take place. They used to ask 200,000 BK for each newborn baby. That is how they used to control and regulate our everyday life. We were doing everything that was asked of us. When it became a matter of our survival, we ran away from there. They killed my brother and father. My husband who was with them managed to escape alive. After we reunited in Bangladesh, he informed me about my brother and father’s demise. We came here about 20 days ago. I joined the other members of our area who were leaving Arakan and it took us eight days to reach here. We reached Shilkhali by paddle and then we located a boat. When we were leaving, the military tortured us again. Everyone who was on the boats got injured. They even seized our gold from us. They cut off some women’s ears for their earrings. My relative had some money but they took it all. Moreover, we had to pay the boatmen a huge amount of money for helping us cross the border. We had no clothes except the ones we were wearing. When we came here, the people of this area gave us clothes. We are still wearing those. Then the BGB took us from

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the village to the camp. When we were building our place, the military told us to do it far away from there. We feel cold because of inadequate clothing and need more warm clothes. We suffer frequent headaches, fever, and flu. When we visited the nearest medical camp, they told us to move away. We have tried three times since but they do the same thing. The medicines given are useless. After we got here at the camp, we got 75 kg rice and nothing more. We come here day after day to collect a token but have not managed one yet. The majhi, the leader of the camp, is not good with his words and often delays the scheduled time. This is why we do not get relief food properly. If we get three meals a day, then our lives become less miserable. Our kids keep crying for food. Do something for them, so that we may survive. I do not care about the future. My brother’s wife and I reached here first. My husband has not come here yet. We have to find him. This is another tension. The only looming worry is to feed our babies. There is nothing more we want. We request the GoB to send us back to our country safely. We want our rights back. They cannot call us Bengali Muslims. They will have to pay for the damage. If not, what will we do? We want back our money, house, and everything that they have taken from us and then we will go. If they deny this, then we may have to die here.

Case Nine: Saidul Islam [Recorded in November 2017] My name is Saidul Islam. I used to live in the area of Maungdaw Bagghona with my three daughters and two sons. My sons were studying in a madrasa. Of my three dauthers, one got married and two remained unmarried. I wanted my daughters to study but Burma was not the safest place for girls’ education. So, I could not, in fact did not dare to, give my daughters proper education, but I helped them learn the holy Quran. I had four bighas of cultivable land in Bagghona, a couple of small shops, and a two-storey wooden house on my own land. The land, some of which I inherited from my ancestors and the rest I bought, was used for cultivation by myself with the help of hired labourers. There were many people, shop employees as well as farmers who used to work under me as paid workers. I also

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Figure 6.6

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Many Rohingyas are doing small-scale business in camps.

Source: Author’s personal collection.

had some people to help my wife in everyday household work. I had visited Bangladesh a number of times for business purposes as well as to see my relatives who had crossed the border in 1978 and 1991. I was financially sound and could manage the military

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and the Moghs somehow by providing hundreds of thousands of BK and that is how we were allowed to stay in Burma. I still have a lot of my wealth in two Burma-based banks. In order to save my life and my family members, I have spent a lot of money. Nevertheless, I had to leave my country with empty hands. They had their eyes on my land and wealth for a long time. They were always afraid that Muslim rule would establish Rohingya rights as the Rohingyas were significant in number compared to the Moghs. They did not let the Rohingyas make progress with their education, economic development, and social advancement. The Rohingyas were their main targets. They treated us this way since they did not want us to develop any social and political awareness in the context of our rights and entitlements in Burma. As I had some money, I had to pay a large amount of money, like 100,000 BK, whereas other people had to pay 10,000 BK, for keeping themselves alive. If choppers or knives were found in the house during a search, they imprisoned us for seven months. Therefore, I had to pay them continuously to stop them from searching my house. In fact, I paid double to live happily but they ultimately kicked me out. Following the August crackdown, one night, some military personnel and Moghs raided my house and looted all the valuable belongings I had at home. They inhumanly tortured my wife, my sons, and me. My two daughters were saved because they were hiding in a jungle near our house. My married daughter was pregnant but even in that condition, she was raped and her husband was shot dead. I heard that and took my daughter away from there. There were hundreds of armed military forces around everywhere and the Moghs were patrolling with swords. I managed to reach out to some powerful people who helped arrange an escape route to Bangladesh. I paid whatever they asked for. One dark night, I left my house, properties, and my homeland with my daughters, sons, and wife. We faced no problems walking at night. We saw houses were burning at a distance. The fires helped us to see the road. We heard the sound of massive firing. We were walking carefully. Whenever we heard gunshots, we used to hide and wait for sometime before walking again. We took the hard way instead of the easier route because we were scared. My pregnant daughter was having labour pains. She was very unwell. I carried her on my shoulder. There

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were several Rohingya groups who had taken the same route. Later, we joined them. The jungle route was the safest. My eldest daughter and I stayed over a couple of nights with the other victims. I had visited Bangladesh a couple of times before but never crossed these rivers and woodlands. That is why I could not recognize the road properly. I had a sim card. The boatmen took 100,000 BK from us. We came to Bangladesh through the Shahpari Island. I called up my contact and he was waiting for us with some food. It is worth mentioning here that I was able to develop some close contacts in Teknaf through various forms of small-scale business. One amongst them allowed us to live in his house. I shifted there with my family. We stayed there for eight days. We then came to know from an announcement that if even a single Rohingya was found in someone’s house, the owner of the house would be sent to jail. I did not want that innocent family to be harmed because of us, so we moved to the camp. Then I paid 5,000 BK for a place and agreed that I would pay the house owner

Figure 6.7 Organizations and countries supporting the massive Rohingya refugee situation in Ukhia and Teknaf of Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh Source: Author’s personal collection.

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500 BDT monthly to stay there. Now we are safe here. I never thought I would see this day. We share our place with three other families. We are currently 19 people living together in one place. I brought a huge amount of money with me while fleeing Burma. I did not spend all the BK I had because I knew it would come in handy here. I have always helped others with money and necessary support, but now I myself have to stand in line for relief. I break down sometimes, thinking of my life in Burma and comparing it with my current situation. Allah has thrown me on the ground from the mighty sky. I have not starved for food yet and manage to procure two meals a day. A couple of days ago, an acquaintance bought a fish and we ate it with pleasure. The toilet is indeed not usable. Men have been defecating openly and women are living without proper access to clean toilets. The nearest toilet is located far from our tent. My daughter has been unwell. My wife took her to a doctor but they were busy, so they did not treat my daughter properly. I do not know whether I will be able to save my daughter. If her condition gets worse, then I will take her to the hospital. Some brokers are passing through our tent. They want to kidnap my other two daughters. Good and bad people are everywhere. I am worried about my daughters’ security. I cannot sleep at night. This place is intolerable. If I could manage some money, then I would plan to leave the camp, but checkpoints have been set up everywhere to ensure that the Rohingyas cannot move out of Ukhia and Teknaf areas; I know some people with whom I can do business. I have brought the papers of my land with me. They burnt my crops, but they could not burn my land. If I get a chance, I will go back and sell my land in Burma. I worry about my family. What will happen to them? I hope my sons will do something for us. I know that the military will not let us move anywhere, but I also know that I cannot do anything if I do not get out of here. Sometimes, I felt strong enough to resist the Burma military but at other times it was intolerable. We had no arms whereas they were heavily weaponized. I could not save our houses and lands that I had achieved through inhuman hardship. I request the GoB to pressurize Myanmar to accept us and let us return to our place. Above all, we all want to have our human rights, rights of praying, rights to our wealth and lives. We want to get back to our country.

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Case Ten: Taiyaba [Recorded in October 2017] I am Taiyaba (40) and I have four sons. I used to live in Maungdaw Shudhapara. My husband was a grocery businessman who used to sell everyday household essentials in a small market. We had no other property except for our house on our own land. My husband and I never got the chance to go to either a madrasa or a school, but we sent our sons to study, two of them to the madrasa and the other two to school. Our children were going through everyday forms of discrimination in school, unlike the privileged Burmese children. Higher education for a Rohingya was of no use, since we did not get any jobs there. The Rohingyas were not authorized to do government jobs in Burma. Five years ago they had formed some rules which stated that the Rohingyas could only send their children to school upto Class 5. However, even this allowing them to study upto Class 5 was only on paper, since the internal setting of Burmese schools was such that no Rohingya child could survive there for long amidst discrimination, mental torture, religious humiliation, and frequent racial attacks. Apart from making school unsuitable for Rohingya children, the Burmese government authorities instructed the teachers to ensure that the Rohingya children remained in the same class year after year. They used to take high amount of bribe to pass the students in the exams. Those who were unable to bribe them did not pass the examination. Due to the lack of financial solvency, many Rohingyas could not even dream of going to schools. Amidst such critical experiences over the decades, we felt that it was better for our children to remain uneducated rather than study with the Moghs in Burmese schools. If we sent our children to a religious school, they might learn some manners and follow the path of Allah. Some religious people used to visit our area to teach us about the religion of Islam and impart religious education. They convinced the Rohingyas to send their children to madrasas. The Burmese military closed down several mosques and the innocent maulavis were taken away; many of them were killed and slaughtered. As Muslims, we used to wear burqas and never stepped outside our house without covering ourselves. Moreover, we were not allowed to go outside without an umbrella. While walking, if the umbrella even brushed slightly against

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a Mogh, they used to beat us brutally. We never dared to look into their eyes. They often lied to the military that we threatened them, so that the military could torture us. There was no justice for us in Burma. Even the Moghs’ children used to throw stones at us when we walked on the streets. We had to turn off the lights immediately after it got dark. If they saw lights in our houses, they would enter the house and start beating us. Things made of iron were not allowed in our house as they considered these as weapons. We used knives and choppers for cooking. I used to hide them under the ground after using them, since they searched our houses quite often. Though cell phones were not allowed, I had one and I used to hide it as well. Once they found a ‘mobile recharge card’ at my house and beat me immediately as punishment. They wanted to take me with them, accusing me of ‘violating the rules’ but I convinced them by paying 300,000 BK to release me. They finally let me go but did not forget to torture me with rifle handles. In fact, that was what we used to experience time and again. Then, the 2017 crackdown took place, which was truly unprecedented and superseded all the previous incidents. They started burning village after village. They took boys and girls, killed them, slaughtered them, raped and molested them. Some of them managed to escape but the rest are either missing or were killed. I saw this in front of my eyes and that is what compelled me to leave my motherland. In order to save my family and myself from definite death, I left my home and property behind. There were several other families who joined us while we were leaving our country. Among the lot running towards the Bangladesh border, a girl who was in the later stages of pregnancy, suddenly got labour pains. She was leaving Burma at this critical stage because she found no hope of keeping her unborn baby alive here. Despite having unbearable labour pains, she could not cry out, afraid that the Moghs and Burmese military might sense her presence and kill her with her unborn child. We ran away from there. We walked for miles; it took us nine nights as we could not walk during the daytime lest we be caught and killed. Many of us were seriously injured but were still walking to reach the Bangladesh border. That is how we crossed Shilkhali, one of the entry points to get into Bangladesh. For travelling by a small boat, we had to pay 80,000 BK to Bangladeshi helmsmen. People always find their own way when they are in danger, and so did we. After arriving here,

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we rented a truck by giving 5,000 BDT and the driver left us in front of the gate of Kutupalong. Many of us could not find shelter in the camp immediately after our arrival. When my husband was looking for a shelter and did not find it, a Bengali woman with a good heart offered to let us stay in her house yard. She provided us food on the very first day, but from the next day, we started our struggle for the relief food. We brought bamboos and house shades to build a tent. Some unknown volunteers came and set up a tube well and a toilet for us. We received a ration card from some NGO workers, which confirmed food for our survival. We finally managed to get in the refugee camp in Kutupalong-1. My son is sick. The doctors gave him medicines but suggested that we take him to the hospital where we could get some free medicines for him. The military is forcing us to not go outside the camp. The camp is already crowded with too many people. Even though there is no adequate space in the camp, everyday more and more Rohingyas are joining us, which is also creating the crisis of food. We earnestly request the GoB and its prime minister to allow us to stay here till Burma accepts us as its citizens and takes us back, giving us our due rights. Though we fled to save our lives, we were indeed forced to do so; we want to go back to our country because Burma should be our final destination. We were born there; we want to die and be buried there. *** The personal narratives presented in the text show the plight of the Rohingyas in Myanmar, their extremely vulnerable conditions and the severe uncertainty of their lives and resources. The narratives and memories of the ten Rohingyas as stated in the previous sections, reflecting thousands of similar experiences, clearly demonstrate that the available theories—bare life,20 precarious life,21 rejected people,22 statelessness,23 asylum seeking,24 campzenship,25 slippery citizenship,26 human rights of non-citizens,27 the right to have rights,28 rights of others,29 state crime,30 and vulnerability31—to understand refugeehood, statelessness, non-citizens, human rights violation, vulnerability, camp life, and asylum seeking become inadequate when it comes to the questions of the Rohingyas, their struggle for existence and their

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experiences of genocide, domicide, and ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. Such inadequacy thus demands a new theoretical proposition to understand the extreme form of vulnerability, everyday experience of ‘life and death’, severe degree of atrocity, serious degrees of human rights violation, the acute shape of humanitarian crisis, constant struggle for existence, and lifelong battle for survival, and what I call the ‘subhuman’ life of the Rohingyas. The narratives reveal five features of Rohingya lives in Myanmar, which are symptomatic of my theoretical proposition of ‘subhuman’ life. First, the Rohingyas live in Rakhine State in an acutely atrocious condition because the degree of atrocities presented in different narratives earlier was so extreme that life under this condition is not a ‘human life’, but a life of ‘subhuman’. Second, the Rohingyas have no legal recognition in the state structure. They are neither citizens nor residents according to the Myanmar Citizenship Law, 1982. There, they do not enjoy any social, political, economic, and civil rights, and therefore, their lives are as if ‘worthy of extinction’. In fact, the question of legality seems to have made their lives ‘subhuman’, lesser than that of human beings. Third, the Rohingyas have ‘nowhere to go’ and ‘no one to turn to’ in order to escape their atrocious living conditions. Myanmar does not recognize them as citizens and Bangladesh does not recognize them as refugees. Therefore, the Rohingyas have brutal and horrifying experiences in Myanmar making them feel homeless at home, another feature of being ‘subhuman’. Fourth, all the narratives presented earlier unfold the cruel reality that the Myanmar security forces and Rakhine Buddhists have been given the free license to kill, rape, and burn the Rohingyas and that is exactly what they have done since 25 August 2017. Free license to be killed, raped, and burnt alive makes people’s lives lesser than that of human beings, that is, a ‘subhuman’ life. Fifth, a life lesser than that of a human being’s embraces the aforementioned four characteristics—atrocious living conditions, lack of legality and recognition, becoming homeless at home, and free license to be killed, raped, and burnt—but the narratives presented in the body of this chapter also inform us that the way the Rohingyas are dealt with is as if they do not deserve to live. A life lesser than a human being’s does not mean an ‘animal’s life’ because even animals, to some extent, are treated with some mercy, kindness, and care, but when I use the phrase ‘a life lesser than that of a human being’s’, it involves

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merciless atrocities, unkind brutalities, and an acute arbitrariness. The narratives presented in this chapter contain every symptom of the ‘subhuman’ life that the Rohingyas lead in Myanmar and, to some extent, in Bangladesh.

Notes 1. See M. Fineman, ‘The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition,’ Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 20, no. 1 (2008): 1–23; Nasir Uddin, ‘The State, Vulnerability, and Transborder Movement: The Rohingyas in Myanmar and Bangladesh,’ in Deterritorialised Identity and Transborder Movements in South Asia, eds. Nasir Uddin and Nasreen Chowdhory (Singapore: Springer, 2019c), 73–90. 2. N. Kohn, ‘Vulnerability Theory and the Roles of Government,’ Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 26, no. 1 (2014): 1–27. 3. Uddin, ‘The State, Vulnerability, and Transborder Movement.’ 4. See, for details, Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 5. Lewis Henry Morgan is considered the founding father of American anthropology. 6. E.B. Tylor is considered one of the founding fathers of the British social anthropology. 7. James Frazer is also considered one of the founding fathers of the British social of anthropology. 8. See, for details, Adam Kuper, Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School, 3rd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 1996). 9. See J. Clifford and G.E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: Poetic and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley, CA: California University Press, 1986); G.E. Marcus and M.M. Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 10. See Nasir Uddin, ‘Decolonising Ethnography in the Field: An Anthropological Account,’ International Journal of Social Research Methodology 14, no. 6 (2011): 455–67. 11. E. Campbell and L. Eric Lassiter, Doing Ethnographies Today: Theories, Methods, Exercise (USA and UK: Weil-Blackwell, 2015), 5. 12. Marcus and Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique. 13. Maulavi refers to the imam of a mosque. Sometimes, those who study in a madrasa are also socially known as maulavis. Here, maulavi indicates a professional category who work in the mosque and lead the prayer.

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14. Rohingya people still use ‘Burma’ in their everyday conversation instead of Myanmar. Since these narratives have been kept in the original version, except for translating them into English, I have kept the terms used in their narratives. 15. Kani is a traditional scale of land measurement. 16. Gonda means hatchery, which is used for fish production, cultivation, rearing, and marketing. 17. Kani is a unit of land measurement. 18. Cherang is a Burmese word that means a form that contains the details of household members. 19. Hafezi means an expert in the Quran who can recite it by heart from the beginning to the end. 20. Agamben, Homo Sacer. 21. J. Butler, The Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (London/ New York: Verso, 2004). 22. Myron Weiner, ‘Rejected Peoples and Unwanted Migrants in South Asia,’ Economic and Political Weekly 28, no. 34 (1993): 1737–46. 23. Kristy Belton, ‘The Neglected Non-Citizen: Statelessness and Liberal Political Theory,’ The Journal of Global Ethics 7, no. 1 (2011): 59–71. 24. Alison Mountz, Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border (Minneapolis and London: Minnesota University Press, 2010). 25. Sigona Nando, ‘Campzenship: Reimagining the Camp as a Social and Political Space,’ Citizenship Studies 19, no. 1 (2015): 1–15. 26. Rhoda Howard-Hassmann and Margaret Walton-Roberts, eds., The Human Rights to Citizenship: A Slippery Concept (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). 27. David Weissbrodt, The Human Rights of Non-citizens (USA: Oxford University Press, 2008). 28. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Books, 1994). 29. Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 30. P. Green and T. Ward, State Crime: Governments, Violence and Corruption (London: Pluto Press, 2004). 31. Fineman, ‘The Vulnerable Subject’.

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Theorizing ‘Subhuman’ Treatment of Rohingyas as Lesser than Human Beings

T

heories are born in social sciences to understand the state of human life in social, economic, political, and natural settings across the world. Therefore, theories generated based on a particular case in a particular regional setting under a particular background and circumstances could work out for a similar case in a different geographical region, as well as different histories and backgrounds.1 At the same time, some special context makes existing scholarship and theories inadequate and such inadequacy helps generate a new theoretical framework for a better understanding of a specific case.2 The current situation of Rohingyas in the borderland of Bangladesh and Myanmar has reached a point where, to some extent, the existing theories for understanding ‘refugeehood’, ‘statelessness’, ‘camp people’, ‘asylum seekers’, ‘transborder migrants’, and ‘extreme vulnerability’ have become inadequate, which I have primarily discussed in Chapter 6 with detailed first-hand narratives of the Rohingyas. Therefore, the book offers a new frame of thought for better understanding the recurrent situation of the Rohingyas and also other people living in similar socio-economic and political circumstances across the globe. This chapter pays attention to the people’s ‘critical living conditionality’, ‘dire uncertainty’, ‘atrocious experience’, and their ‘extreme vulnerability’, which makes them feel that they are lesser than human beings. I propose this as a ‘subhuman’ life. Many scholars3 have meanwhile talked about such categories of people and come to The Rohingya. Nasir Uddin, Oxford University Press (2020). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199489350.001.0001.

© Oxford University Press.

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the conclusion that the state of statelessness, non-citizenship, and refugee-hood creates such an extreme living conditionality because these categories of people do not belong to any state and, hence, cannot claim any rights or blame anyone.4 The book, rather than looking at such vulnerable conditions as ‘taken for granted’ for the stateless people, critically engages with the body of scholarship of citizenship, asylum seekers, stateless people, and refugees by raising the question: Are statelessness and non-citizenship the only reasons? The chapter argues whether these theories generated by academics and scholars are otherwise rehumanizing the dehumanization process perpetrated by the states in various forms. This chapter offers a new perspective to contribute theoretically to the scholarship on the stateless, noncitizens, asylum seekers, and refugees through critical engagement with the idea of Agamben’s ‘bare life’,5 Weiner’s ‘rejected people’,6 Povinelli’s ‘geontologies’,7 Weissbrodt’s ‘non-citizens’,8 Belton’s ‘statelessness’,9 Butler’s ‘precarious life’,10 Benhabib’s ‘asylum as the right’,11 Nando’s ‘campzenship’,12 and Arendt’s ‘citizenship is the right to have rights’,13 introducing a new concept of subhuman life. It argues that there are many people living across the world who hold citizenship and belong to a particular state, but have had brutal experiences perpetrated by the state that are even more cruel than that of the Rohingyas. So, the chapter argues that the reasons for many people being in dire, vulnerable situations and extremely atrocious conditions in the world do not essentially lie in the absence of citizenship and non-recognition by the state but largely depend on the nature of the state and its attitude towards people belonging to different ethnicities, religions, and ‘race’, which could make a human life a subhuman one. Given the context, subhuman could be a framework to understand the acutely vulnerable condition of people in relation to the nature of the state and its policies towards the people of religious, cultural, ethnic, and racial difference. It could also provide a new framework of understanding genocide, ethnocide, ethnic cleansing, and domicide. Following my theorization, this chapter argues that ‘subhuman’ is a category of people who are born in the human society but have no space in the human community. They are born in this world, but the world does not own them in any state structure, and they always live on the margins of life and death. With ethnographic evidences, the chapter, as the continuation of previous chapters, proves that the Rohingyas are dealt with, in Myanmar at

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large and to some degrees in Bangladesh, as if they are not worthy of being human, but some category lesser than human beings, what I call subhuman, since 1962.

What Makes Human Life a Subhuman One? Based on my long years of experience in dealing with the literature on citizenship, statelessness, asylum seekers, transborder mobility, camp people, forced migrants, refugees, and illegal migrants and theories regarding these, I have found that the available theories are more or less closely related to a legal category and hence inadequate to understand the situation of the Rohingyas living in Myanmar and Bangladesh. Five basic conditionalities could constitute subhuman life. The conditions could be applicable for both individual and collective cases, and thereby an individual could be subhuman and so could an entire community. To some extent, one corresponds to the other, but each could be distinct case by case. A group of people who experience these five conditions lead a life as if they are lesser than human beings, which forms subhuman life. Five basic features of subhuman life are discussed next, with some abridged bullet points.

1. Atrocious Living Conditions When people experience an extreme form of atrocity perpetrated by the state institutions, state affects, and the agents of state that render the place, area or region unliveable, we may call it ‘atrocious living conditions’. The role of the state is instrumental here, and therefore, atrocities committed at a personal level and between people on personal grounds can not be considered as ‘atrocious living conditions’ since individuals can seek justice from the state or law enforcement agencies against the person involved. When the state itself perpetrates atrocities against an individual or a group of people, then it creates an atrocious living condition because victims have little space for redressal or possibilities for seeking justice or any sort of remedy. It should also be mentioned here that it matters little whether the victims have legal recognition or not; what is important here is how the state treats them and creates atrocious living conditions. In that sense, under the feature of ‘atrocious living conditions’, the categories of ‘citizens’

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and ‘non-citizens’ or ‘stateless’ and people belonging to the state are alike. Therefore, atrocious living conditions could render people’s lives subhuman.

2. Illegal Object in Legal Framework Legal recognition in the constitutional framework of the state structure is also instrumental to frame the concept of ‘legal bodies’ and ‘illegal objects’ in order to understand subhuman life. When an individual or a group of people are not recognized by any state and are not conferred citizenship by any state, the person or the group of people turn into ‘illegal bodies’, legally called ‘non-citizens’ and ‘stateless people’. Since ‘illegal bodies’ do not belong to any legal framework of the state, they can easily become subject to atrocities, discrimination, exploitation, and even death without any legal recourse, which, to some points, overlaps Agamben’s idea of ‘bare life’14 since illegal bodies do not exist before the law. Such a state of being could render people’s lives subhuman. The concept of being subhuman is sharply distinct from Agamben’s idea of ‘bare life’ in the degree of understanding as ‘bare life’ is concerned with people’s position in the legal framework, but ‘subhuman life’ pays attention to the practice and facts about how the state renders people illegal objects through state affects, practices, and agents. ‘Bare life’ looks from the ‘top’ but ‘subhuman’ sees from ‘below’. ‘Bare life’ talks about position, but ‘subhuman’ deals with practice.

3. Homeless at Home and Nowhere to Go When an individual or a group feels that they do not have any space to live in, any place to go, anyone to complain to, any forum to seek justice from, any institutions to demands rights from, and any space to breathe, they could be considered as subhuman. They are practically homeless at home.15 This is because people do not fall from the sky or are not born out of the ground, but they are born through the normal reproduction process of human beings and in a particular place. Therefore, every human being is entitled to citizenship to a particular state, which is endorsed by the universal declaration of human rights.16 But the politics of nationalism, majoritarian framework of nation building, and the unilinear process of state formation in the realm of

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modern state structure have made some people less and lower than the others, which renders them extremely vulnerable in the context of social, political, and national space. Under such circumstances, when people practically feel that they have nowhere to go, no one to turn to, no space for justice, they become hopeless and helpless as if they are homeless at home; this category could be considered as subhuman life.

4. Free License to be Killed, Raped, and Burnt When a group of people are freely allowed to be killed, raped, and burnt alive without any accountability on the part of the state, people, or the global community, then the lives of those people could be termed as subhuman. For instance, it includes situations where state’s agents and forces are involved in systematic killing, raping, and burning as part of state policy, and are given free reign to execute whatever they want as they are not accountable to anybody, any forum, or any institution. When law enforcement agencies themselves are involved in the violation of law and human rights through the execution of killing, raping, and burning without any legal hindrance, the victims’ lives become less worthy than human life. Therefore, such human beings become subhuman.

5. A Life of Worthy of Extinction Every human being deserves a minimum standard of living that distinguishes human beings from animals. As a human being, everyone is entitled to food, clothing, shelter, medicine, and education as these are the fundamental rights of human beings as endorsed by international legal framework and international jurisprudence.17 Considering all this, we presume that all human beings deserve to lead a life with due dignity, basic living essentials, and a minimal feeling of difference from animals. When the lives of a group of people become just a ‘bodily entity’ without having any basic human rights, any sort of social, political, and economic rights, any form of dignity, any sense of human living, and any notion of human life, then they become lesser than human beings. In addition to this, when the state deliberately designs a policy to drive them out of the country, completely erase their ethnicity in what is called ‘ethnic cleansing’,18 and commit genocide to

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eliminate them from the earth, then their lives become subhuman, as if their lives are worthy of extinction. The way they are dealt with, as if they are lesser than human beings, in what I call subhuman life, as they are worthy of extinction. The following sections will present, in addition to the ethnographic narratives presented in the previous chapters, what subhuman life is and why the Rohingya life is treated as a subhuman one.

People Between Life and Death A 12-year-old boy, in ragged clothes, was carrying his 3-year-old sister over his shoulders and walking mile after mile because his father had been shot dead on the spot and his mother had been raped in front of him and killed thereafter. He was fleeing with many others who had had similar experiences. Some of them in the group had lost their parents or brothers and sisters, while others saw their entire family being burnt alive. Among the group were two pregnant women who were walking this long distance with a lot of difficulty, given their condition. They were trying their level best to keep their unborn child alive. Two people in the group lost their hands due to military bullets; four of them were seriously injured and were barely able to move but were walking with the last ounce of strength left in them. It seems as if ‘death’ was walking with ‘life’, as many met ‘death’ while fleeing and the rest left the dead bodies of their near and dear ones on the way and moved towards Bangladesh. This group of people finally entered Bangladesh after walking for one day and seven hours, crossing lands and hills and riding by boat. Mobarak, the 12-year-old boy, was explaining this horrifying story to me, on 1 October 2017 in Ukhia, about why and how he, along with several others, left Rakhine State and crossed the border into Bangladesh. Mobarak’s story paints the picture of a war-torn area where two heavily armed forces are involved in a deadly battle and the civilians are fleeing for their lives with their belongings. The Myanmar state forces, along with some ethnic Rakhine extremists and Buddhist fundamentalists, were mercilessly killing, raping, and torturing the Rohingyas, looting their properties, and burning houses across villages in Rakhine State, which created the scenario that Mobarak narrated to me. Like this group, more than 750,000 Rohingyas fled persecution in Myanmar in

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hundreds of thousands of groups and came to Bangladesh after an alleged attack on 30 police camps and 1 military base by the radical ARSA (about which I have discussed in detail in previous chapters) and the subsequent military crackdown that started on 25 August 2017. In the name of counter-attack, Myanmar security forces indiscriminately fired on Rohingya civilians, burnt their houses down, raped several girls and women, and killed hundreds of Rohingyas mercilessly; this vividly reflected in many personal narratives of the recently arrived Rohingyas, presented largely in Chapter 6, as well as in other chapters as points of reference in order to provide firsthand narratives. The intensity of atrocities was so extreme that the global community, including the UN, the EU, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and the international rights forums like IOM, AI, and the HRW, spoke up in defence of the Rohingyas and blamed Myanmar for its deadly violence, severe brutality, and ‘crimes against humanity’. I have written about it before in previous chapters but I am repeating it once again for the sake of substantiating the theory of subhuman. The United Nations Human Rights Council termed it as a ‘textbook example of ethnic cleansing’19 where as many scholars20 and major international media outlets like Al Jazeera,21 the Guardian,22 the New York Times,23 BBC News,24 and the like, called it ‘genocide’.25 Several development agencies working at the borderland of Bangladesh and Myanmar to help the Rohingyas, particularly the wounded ones, old people, underage children, and pregnant women, have called this one of the most devastating humanitarian catastrophes in the history of refugee crises.26 Myanmar’s de facto leader, and also a Nobel laureate for peace, Aung San Suu Kyi, has also been accused by the international community and various rights forums across the world of supporting the ‘genocide’ and ‘the crime against humanity’ committed by the Myanmar security forces. The reason why the Rohingyas, often called ‘the most persecuted people in the world’, have been repressed and afflicted for decades is because of their identity as an ethno-linguistic and religious minority within the state of Myanmar.27 Besides, a growing anti-Muslim Buddhist sentiment instigated by Ashin Wirathu, a Buddhist monk named by Time magazine as the ‘Burmese Bin-Laden’,28 has contributed in creating a hostile condition unsuitable for the peaceful living of the Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine State.29

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The crisis did not appear overnight it has a history of exclusion, extreme nationalism, and religious fundamentalism, which has been discussed in previous chapters. The citizenship of the Rohingyas was taken away by the enactment of the Myanmar Citizenship Law adopted in 1982, which conferred citizenship on 135 national races excluding the Rohingyas even though they have been the residents of Arakan, what is now called Rakhine State, since the eighth century.30 Following the independence of Burma, now Myanmar, in 1948, the Rohingyas were about to gain state recognition, but after General Ne Win took charge in 1962, the military regimes started and continued until 2010 (see Chapter 2). During this period of time, the Rohingyas underwent brutal human right violations, acute forms of atrocities, severe degree of oppression, and harsh restrictions in their everyday life due to the dictatorship.31 The situation reminds the Rohingyas of living in the state of what I have phrased elsewhere as ‘everyday death’.32 Their lives were restricted, freedom of movement was cut off, education was halted, and even marriage became subject to military approval. Particularly, following the Citizenship Law of 1982, the Rohingyas started living in an ‘open air prison’, as they were confined to their villages. In 1978, a severe military crackdown took place in Arakan state that triggered a massive migration of 250,000 Rohingyas to Bangladesh. The second influx occurred in 1991/1992 when around 200,000 Rohingyas took refuge in Bangladesh. Following effective international pressure, under an agreement between Bangladesh and Myanmar, around 236,000 Rohingyas who fled in 1992 were repatriated, but a large number of them returned to Bangladesh because the situation in Rakhine State remained unchanged. Then a big riot between Rakhine Buddhists, supported by state agencies, and Rohingya Muslims took place in June 2012, which also compelled around 120,000 Rohingyas to flee to Bangladesh. In October 2016, 87,000 Rohingyas left Myanmar to escape deadly military operations. The operation in 2017 is a horrible example of the atrocities committed by the Myanmar security force, which compelled around 750,000 Rohingyas to flee and take refuge in Bangladesh. Of all the Rohingyas who crossed the border after 25 August  2017, 50 per cent are children, 30 per cent are women,33 15 per cent are old, and the remaining 5 per cent are youth. The demographic proportion manifests the utmost vulnerability of the Rohingyas living in both Myanmar and Bangladesh. Many reports34 and the

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narratives of the Rohingyas, illustrated in previous chapters, have confirmed that thousands of Rohingyas were killed in the Rakhine State by the security forces. Due to their miserable lives and inhuman state of living, the Rohingyas have become an ideal example of how people lead their lives in the presence of ‘everyday death’.35 Many attempts are being made to resolve the Rohingya crisis, but nobody knows when and how the Rohingyas will gain a peaceful life with the due human dignity that they deserve. Therefore, if we consider the situation of Rohingya vulnerability and the extreme atrocities they have lived through as just an outcome of non-citizenship and statelessness, I think it narrows down the gravity of the outrages and underestimates the intensity of brutality. This is because the Rohingya crisis does not essentially lie simply in the absence of citizenship,36 but is deeply rooted in the nature, policy, and practice of the state towards the people of religious, ethnic, cultural, and racial differences.

Just Alive Without a ‘Life’ Maksud, a 47-year-old Rohingya who arrived in Bangladesh in October 2017, spoke to me in Teknaf while I was visiting the temporary camps built for the newly arrived Rohingyas. He said: Having heard some chaos outside, I, along with my two daughters, 3-year-old son, and 6-months pregnant wife, fled via the back door. Two days ago, I had seen how the Burmese military and kichu moiggar foa (few Buddhist youths) were shooting and killing many Rohingyas mercilessly in the bazaar. While fleeing, we were caught by the Burma military. They hit me with rifles and I fell on the ground. Then they took my daughters away, raped them in a nearby jungle, and shot them thereafter. I could not even wait to see what was happening to them as I was running to save my son, carrying him on my shoulder, and holding my pregnant wife’s hand. After walking for two days and a night on the hills and through a jungle, we reached the bank of the Naf River. My wife was so tired that she could not even breathe. While we were crossing the ‘no-man’s land’, my wife stepped on a landmine and her body was torn apart in the blast that followed. I could not even recognize her face. I crossed the border with the other Rohingyas who had had more or less similar experiences. When I arrived in Bangladesh, I had lost everything: my daughters, my pregnant wife, my life in Arakan, and my land. I do

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not know what to do now, where to go, and how to survive. I am just alive without a ‘life’.

These narratives manifest some lucid notions of subhuman life that makes us understand that the lives of the Rohingyas are lesser than that of human beings. I have recorded many such heart-breaking stories that stand to argue that subhuman life is not just an outcome of statelessness, but involves ‘state’s crime’,37 an authoritarian approach towards the people of different cultures and an arrogant intolerance towards people from different religions and ethnicities. Saleha, a 37-year-old woman who came to Bangladesh in September 2017, explained to me in Ukhia: When the military entered our house, they first killed my husband and my son. I was holding my 10-month-old baby and my 11-year-old daughter was standing behind me in fear. Then three soldiers raped my daughter one after the other just beside her father’s and brother’s dead bodies. My daughter was bleeding and lying on the floor. I was dragged out of the house and tortured on the yard. They set fire to my house and my daughter was burnt alive inside. They took my baby and threw it into the fire. Having seen this cruelty, I fainted and did not know anything about what happened next. When I came to my senses, I saw two of my neighbours

Figure 7.1 death

A Rohingya woman who was burnt alive but fortunately escaped

Source: Author’s personal collection.

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carrying me with them towards the Bangladesh border. Finally, I crossed the border into Bangladesh and started living in a temporary camp. I am now lamenting why I am alive. Am I really alive? Within an hour, my whole life was destroyed and burnt alive. Why? Are we really manush naki januar (human beings or animals)? My brutal experience reminds me of it time and again. Rohingya life is mainshor jibon noo (not a human life)!!

Saleha’s narrative confirms once again that the Rohingyas’ live a subhuman life.

Critical Present and Complex Future Khadiza, a 39-year-old Rohingya woman, had just arrived with her four children the previous night, 23 January 2018, when the first batch of Rohingya refugees was supposed to be repatriated to Myanmar. I met her while visiting the Balukhali camp in Cox’s Bazar in late January and tried to understand why the Rohingyas were still fleeing Rakhine State when Myanmar was seemingly attempting to bring them back. Khadiza, with her children, was camping at a roadside dilapidated tent and was waiting to be placed in Balukhali camp. In response to my question, she explained to me: I lived in Maungdaw until the Myanmar military forces and vigilantes started a massive campaign to kill Rohingya civilians, torture them mercilessly, and burn their homes in other nearby Rohingya villages. My husband and I decided to leave Maungdaw for Bangladesh, but one day, some local government officials arrived in my village and reassured us of our safety so that we could stay at home. The officials said that nothing would happen again; the people who have already fled would be back in Rakhine State. Then we reversed our decision and decided to stay back in our homeland. However, the next morning, some Myanmar security personnel came and killed my husband in front of me, gang-raped me, and burnt my house. Later, I came to know that they were tricking the remaining Rohingyas into staying so that they could be killed in a group. Then, at night, with my raped, ill body, I left the place with my four children and walked seven hours to reach here. Bormaya [Myanmar government] is not bringing the Rohingyas back to give them a ‘life’, but to kill them.

Khadiza’s narrative paints a vivid picture of the ground reality of what was actually happening in Rakhine State when the process of repatriation was in force. Her statement is good enough to understand

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the tricks and politics of repatriation from Myanmar’s end and the underpinning reasons behind refugee Rohingyas’ reluctance to ‘go back home’. Therefore, the repatriation should not be something imposed from the top as an outcome of diplomatic agreement, but should come out of people’s everyday lived experience. In the name of repatriation, Myanmar is playing with the lives of a particular group of people whom they do not consider as ‘human beings’, but lesser than them, as subhuman. Even though the process of repatriation to Myanmar is apparently in force, new groups of Rohingyas are crossing the border into Bangladesh on a daily basis. While the representatives of Myanmar are sitting with their Bangladeshi counterparts and signing agreements to bring them back, Myanmar security forces continue to torture the remaining Rohingyas in Rakhine State and burn down their houses to create a critical condition that compels them to leave their homes, lands, and properties. The entire repatriation episode, thus, seems to be ‘a mockery to fool the global community, detract the international pressure, and trick with the friendly approach of Bangladesh’.38 Credible international media outlets claim that Myanmar is bulldozing the land, house, and properties to eliminate the signs of Rohingya settlement and erase the history of Rohingya existence in Rakhine State.39 So, the way Myanmar is dealing with the Rohingya issue also reflects how it looks upon the Rohingyas. Therefore, on one hand the Myanmar state representatives are pretending to bring the Rohingyas back to Rakhine State, and on the other hand, Myanmar state agencies are cutting off their food supply to create an extreme situation of starvation so that the remaining Rohingyas leave their homelands and flee to Bangladesh.40

‘A Life of Football’: Interpretation of Repatriation Following a brutal crackdown in Rakhine State perpetrated by Myanmar security forces, which triggered a massive influx of Rohingyas41 to Bangladesh during the first four months from 25 August 2017, the global community started demanding an immediate repatriation, but majority of the Rohingyas interpret it as a ‘football match’ between Bangladesh and Myanmar. Amir Hossain, a 59-year-old Rohingya who recently arrived in Bangladesh, explained to me on 30 October 2017,

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‘A Rohingya’s life is a life of football. One kicks to push in and another kicks us to push back.’ Another refugee, Zulekha Khatun, a newly arrived 51-year-old Rohingya woman, told me on 21 November 2017 in Ukhia, We, the Rohingyas, lead a life as if we are footballs. Everybody kicks us whenever [they] get a chance, but nobody scores and thereby no result. We live nowhere and do not know where we will go. Burma [Myanmar] states that Rohingyas are Bengalis, while Bangladesh claims Rohingyas are Bormaya [Burmese people]. It seems we are like a rolling football moving from one place to another determined not by us, but by others.

This statement is not an individual’s state of mind, but it reveals the grave vulnerability and deep uncertainties of Rohingya lives in both Bangladesh and Myanmar. During the last four decades, the Rohingyas, who are often identified as ‘the most persecuted ethnic minorities in the world’,42 have undergone a series of atrocities, systematic killing, random burning of houses and properties, uncountable rapes of girls and women,43 and forced displacement perpetrated by Myanmar security forces as part of the state’s policy that began in 1978, which made them think of themselves as ‘footballs’, a metaphor for their vulnerability. In 2017, the degree of atrocities was so extreme that the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) termed it as ‘a textbook example of ethnic cleansing’.44 The rhetoric of Hossain’s statement reveals the hidden transcript of Rohingyas’ interpretation of the repatriation dialogue between Bangladesh and Myanmar. On 2 October 2017, the union minister for the Office of the State Counsellor of Myanmar, U Kyaw Tint Swe, visited Bangladesh and willingly told Abdul Hassan Mahmood Ali, the then minister of foreign affairs of Bangladesh, to bring ‘Myanmar’s residents’ back. Following three meetings, Bangladesh and Myanmar reached an agreement, signed a deal, and formed a ‘joint working group’ to expedite the repatriation process45 while the killings were still going on in Rakhine State. Bangladesh seems to put belief in the ‘deal’ whilst the majority of Rohingyas do not due to their previous experiences. Their scepticism came true in a few days when many credible media outlets published news of forces destroying Rohingya homes and settlements46 in Rakhine State even after the formation of a ‘joint working group’. These contrasting pictures reveal that Myanmar’s ‘deal’ is a clear political and diplomatic trick to divert global attention and reduce the mounting international pressure.47 It seems to be an

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eyewash to lessen escalating criticism for committing unprecedented ‘violence’ perpetrated by Myanmar security forces, ethnic extremists, and Buddhist fundamentalists in Rakhine State. What Myanmar is doing with Bangladesh in the name of bilateral diplomacy is a mockery to prevent the possibility of multilateral engagement and the intervention of the UN in the process of meaningful and effective repatriation. Following 25 August 2017, until the beginning of 2019, more than 750,000 Rohingyas fled to Bangladesh and majority of them were women, children, and old people because many Rohingya youths are said to have been killed. According to reports from many international rights forums and the statements of newly arrived Rohingyas, more than 10,000 Rohingyas were killed, 354 Rohingya villages were completely burnt down, and hundreds of Rohingya girls and women were raped.48 The UNHRC termed it as ‘a textbook example of ethnic cleansing’, many others49 called it clear ‘genocide’. Due to this ongoing genocide in Rakhine State, Aung San Suu Kyi, the de facto chief of the state, has also been strongly criticized across the world for committing ‘genocide’ and ‘crime against humanity’50 as she implicitly supported this deadly violence. In protest of this massive killing, torture, and violation of human rights, the international community51 and international rights bodies52 condemned Myanmar and asked it to stop killing and driving out the Rohingyas, but Myanmar paid no heed to it. Atrocities are still being committed, though the magnitude is now a bit lower than it was at the beginning. The migration has not stopped yet,53 despite huge criticism from every corner across the world except Russia, China, India, and Japan. There are various forms of global, geopolitical, and regional interests 54 in the Rohingya issue among the global economic and political powers and forums, but the lives of the Rohingyas are in a ‘do or die’ situation. It is an irony that states and leaders in the global arena still think of their own political and economic interests whilst people are being killed inhumanly55 and being compelled to leave the country due to unprecedented persecution. Over one million Rohingyas, including old refugees and new arrivals, now suffer from inadequate nutrition; minimum healthcare, sanitation, drinking water facilities; and bare minimum space of living, which have created the biggest refugee crisis56 in recent history. In fact, following the adoption of the Myanmar Citizenship Law in 1982,57 when the citizenship of Rohingyas was taken away, their movement was strictly limited and

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strong restrictions were imposed by the Myanmar state authority on their education, liberty of making choices, and even the functions of social institutions. It is hardly surprising then that such experiences and the restriction of movement have led people like Hossain and Khatun to use the football analogy to describe the Rohingyas’ extreme state of vulnerability. Whilst Bangladesh still expects that Myanmar will finally take their ‘residents’ back, the majority of Rohingyas do not trust Myanmar. They believe they are being brought back to be killed, not for getting their lives back. Bangladesh is also not prepared to host Rohingyas for long and, hence, is trying to send them back at any cost. If this is the case, what is the final destination of the Rohingyas? Who will finally take responsibility for them? No one knows the answer. Considering all, the life that the Rohingyas lead is not what a human life should be, but it is indeed a subhuman life.

This Is a Subhuman Life: Bottom-Up Narratives Though academics frame theories based on their intensive reading, analysis, interpretation, long experience, and deep intellectual inputs, sometimes some theories are born out of the fields. I also found the idea of subhuman life in the field as I heard many Rohingyas, while being interviewed, time and again use the term, ‘egun hono manusher jibon no’, meaning this is not human life. When they say so, they do not mean that their life is similar to an ‘animal’s life’ as they say ‘kuttar jibon-o erto bade vala’, meaning the life of animals (like dogs) is sometimes better than theirs. So, when I propose the term ‘subhuman’ life, I do not essentially mean animal’s life, but a life lesser than that of human beings, whose understanding I found in the field among the Rohingyas. The following five cases will give us some lucid notions of subhuman life.

Case One: Osman (19) [Recorded in November 2017] My name is Osman. I was studying in a school at Burma but had to leave school before Class 3. We were eight brothers and two sisters. I had a brother who was older than me. I was the second son of my

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parents. Our house is in Daroga Para of Maungdaw. My father was a daily labourer who used to work on others’ farms. I could not continue my education due to financial hardship. After I left school, I started working in others’ plantation farms. I tried to save some money by doing additional work daily. One year ago, I bought a motorbike with the money I saved. After learning to ride the bike, I used to give rides to people for money. I was living with my parents and siblings. We used to run our family with whatever my father and I earned. My older brother used to work on the farm with my father. My brother is no more now, he was shot to death while farming a couple of months before we left Maungdaw. We did not know why he was killed. We brought his dead body back home and buried him behind the house. Within a week, the military campaign started and they began to kill people mercilessly. When they started burning villages all around, I immediately sent all my family members to Bangladesh. I dropped them off to the boat but I went back again. Who will take care of the properties if everyone leaves? I thought I will take care of it and will bring my family back when the situation becomes normal, so I stayed at home alone. Day after day, the situation became worse. They arrested young boys and killed them brutally in groups. They raped girls and women wherever they found them. They burnt down houses and properties randomly as if they wanted to clean the village. I somehow escaped death. I saw many of my relatives’ dead bodies falling here and there in front of me. I saw dead bodies lying on the yard, roadside, and in the crop fields. Their relatives could not even give them a funeral or bury the dead bodies. Instead, they left the bodies on the ground and fled the country. After witnessing this deadly situation, I decided to flee my country. I went to my house at night and took with me all the money I had saved and started running. However, I did not have to travel alone. On the way, I met many people who were fleeing the country and joined them. On several occasions, the military intercepted us, beat many of us, and plundered the goods. Somehow, we finally reached the border. Then we came to Bangladesh by a small boat. We had to pay 25,000 BDT to rent a boat. I came to Nitrong Para of Teknaf by boat. I have not got the opportunity to meet my family members in Bangladesh yet because I do not know where they are. I have decided to go from camp to camp to find them. The BGB did not prevent me from being docked here. So, without any

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hassle, I have begun my search for my family members from Teknaf. I have been here for about 15 days and I have no place to live. I go to the camp to look for my family and then sleep wherever I happen to be in the evening. The next day, I resume my search again in the morning, eating what people offer me on the way. Identifying me as a Rohingya, some shopkeepers cheat me, but some show sympathy as well. I had everything two months ago but I have nothing now. I have not only lost my family, property, and home, it seems as if I have lost my past, present, and future.

Case Two: Payara Begum (33) [Recorded in October 2017] My name is Payara Begum. I had six children. Their father was a daily labourer and used to work in Burma. We were living with our children at Rathedaung in Burma. Just prior to leaving for Bangladesh, the Burmese military took my husband away, arrested him without any reason, and kept him in prison with many other Rohingyas. I could not see him. I have heard that they are not being given any food there. All the people who were going to visit their relatives were also being imprisoned. Those who paid a lot of money to the military were able to bring their arrested relatives back. I do not know whether my children will be able to see their father again or not, whether they will be able to hug their father and call him ‘baba’. The military and some Burmese militants started torturing us to drive us out of the country. They started beating everyone, irrespective of whether they were children, adults, or elderly. The military also hit my right hand while I was fleeing, which resulted in a broken arm. It is very painful and I cannot even hold my baby properly due to the pain. The militants also burnt my small hut. I had a brother with me to save us, but he was shot in front of me. In his injured state, he asked me to ‘run away’. I ran away with my remaining strength. After a while, I heard gunshots and realized that they had killed my brother. Then, I saw my house burning. My brother was burning inside the house and I could do nothing. They killed both male and female, elderly and infants. I saw hundreds of dead bodies lying on both sides of the roads while I was fleeing. It was truly a horrible experience.

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From Halagaga, we walked for four days. I spent the night in the hills. We were walking without any food, many people died on the way. My two children walked barefoot. I carried the rest of the four children on my shoulders. I felt a lot of trouble with my broken hand. I could not leave my children anymore. Those who were with me also helped me. Only Allah knows how we reached here. Anyway, I crossed the border and reached the Balukhali camp by a military vehicle. We did not need to rent a boat to cross the border. If I had to cross by boat, I could not come to this side as I did not have a single penny. With Allah’s mercy I finally managed to get here with my children. Now I have my children with me, but I do not have any idea about my husband’s whereabouts. I do not know what the future holds for my children, my husband, and our life ahead. This is not a human life as I do not have any idea where to go, and whom to turn to. We are not only helpless, but also hopeless, as subhuman beings have nothing except a bodily entity (which in Payara Begum’s words: gaa-gotorer sharir chara morarton ar kichu nai).58

Case Three: Khurshida [Recorded in October 2017] My name is Khurshida and my hometown was in Kyandapara in Arakan state. I have two sons and two daughters. My husband was killed by the Moghs 12 years ago. He was a day labourer. One day, some Moghs hired him to carry some goods from a marketplace to their house. The load was so heavy that he fell down with the goods. That is the only reason he was shot dead on the road in broad daylight. Since then, I have been struggling to take care of my family of four children. I was born in a poor family and was married to a poor person. I was not educated, I only learnt how to read the holy Quran. I sent my children to school. My younger son was studying in Class 10 in a madrasa in Kyandapara. My elder daughter was 17 years old. She was married and had three children too. My son-in-law used to cultivate his own lands. My elder son was married too. He used to live with his family in Bawlibazar but now I do not know where he and his family

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members are. My younger son and daughter used to live with me in my paternal house. My husband had no wealth. Soon after he was killed, I went back to live with my parents. When my younger son grew up, he started earning some money by taking tuitions, but he spent it all for his marriage because we had to pay a large sum of money to the military to get permission for conducting the marriage. We were leading a heinous life there. I could not visit my own daughter's house. We were not allowed to step outside our house. Our livestock were not ours as the soldiers could take them away whenever they wished. Under the pretext of search, the soldiers quite often raided my house and many times stripped me and my daughter. This was the story of all the Rohingyas living there. In fact, we had to take their permission before taking every breath. One day, some military personnel came to our house looking for my young son. They kicked me on my head. My little daughter was hiding in a corner of the room, but they molested her. Whenever I requested them to leave her, they kicked me. The floor was bloodied with my daughter’s chastity. There were eight people who raped her one by one. Then they cut her head off her body and left her on the ground. I could not bear the scene and lost consciousness. I do not know for how long I remained unconscious. When I returned to my senses, I saw that they had set fire to my house. Some villagers carried my half-conscious body out of there. After coming out, I started looking for my son. I asked everyone but they were busy running to save their lives. Soon I came to know that my son had been with the other students of the madrasa and the military had shot every one of them and taken away their bodies. I was left speechless and was wailing loudly. Later, I joined other people who were leaving their own country and going towards the border of Bangladesh. Finally, I came to Bangladesh with many other Rohingyas who had had more or less similar experiences. I am still seriously traumatized and cannot do anything properly. Time and again, the horrible scenes of my daughter’s death come to my mind and my eyes carry the experience of witnessing this brutal event in my life. I could not even see my son’s face for one last time. I cannot imagine how people can behave so inhumanly with us. It is indeed because the Burmese military and Moghs do not consider the Rohingyas as human beings.

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Case Four: Ameen [Recorded in November 2017] I am Ameen. I used to live in Aiyendapara in Rakhine State. I had four sons and two daughters. Including my sons’ wives and their children, I had 13 members in my family. We had our own house on our own land. We had four buffaloes and chickens and ducks as well. Also, we had several bighas of cultivable land. My sons used to practice agriculture and horticulture on their lands. We were happy with whatever we had but perhaps destiny was not on our side. We were living like prisoners in our house and soon it turned into a cage for us. The Myanmar military forces were patrolling outside our village. They had even taken away our rights to call our own Allah. How pathetic it was! They were searching our house almost every day. They were imposing new rules to restrict our movements. People [the Rohingyas] even had to seek their [Myanmar military’s] permission before getting married. They took away our security by destroying the protecting fence and blockages that I set up at my own cost. One day they suddenly found some Burmese policemen’s bodies and blamed us for killing them. Then, another time, they came to our area and started beating our children and youths. At that moment, two of my sons were in the house and the other two were outside. Suddenly, a group of soldiers entered our house and started beating the women: my wife, daughters, daughters-in-law, and granddaughters. Some Mogh youths also joined the military forces in beating us. My youngest son protested, so they hit him with a sword and slaughtered him in front of me. After his death, they fired at his dead body. The Moghs snatched our precious jewellery and beat us brutally. They forcibly raped my granddaughter and one of my daughters in front of our eyes. My granddaughter was only 12 years old. Then they hanged them nude on a tree. They did not even spare the kids and newborn babies in our family. They killed my eldest son mercilessly. While leaving, they set fire to our house. We managed to escape the place but some parts of my back were burnt. I never left my children alone at the house when they were alive but I had to leave their dead bodies in that situation to save the rest of the members of my family. How we came here is another painful story. We came here through paddle walking. We mainly walked in the night and hid during the day.

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We had a lot of people with us. Once we heard the sound of open firing nearby, we scattered and hid ourselves. We saw scattered parts of human bodies everywhere on the ground. While crossing the lake, we saw dead bodies floating in the water. Only our Allah knows how we were saved by his grace. At last, we reached Bangladesh by crossing Naiongkhdia by boat through Shahpari Island. Now I live in Kutupalong camp and all sorts of necessary food and daily essentials are provided to us. My whole life has been destroyed by the Burmese military.

Case Five: Salma Begum [Recorded in October 2017] My name is Salma and I am 21 years old. I got married five years ago. My husband’s name is Mohammed Majid. My husband was involved in the pottery business. I had two daughters and one son. We had poultry chicken at home. There was some land behind our house where we used to cultivate vegetables. We used to buy the rest of the things from the market. We used to stay in Kilmudong in Burma. My children used to go to school and moktob59 in our locality. We fled from Burma and came to Bangladesh because the Burmese Moghs and the military were torturing us randomly. The military attacked our village over and over again. They had stopped our food supply for the last two months that we were there. We survived for some time with whatever we had at home. People from nearby villages were killed brutally and their houses were burnt down. We were looking for a suitable and safe day to flee, but they attacked our village one day. They took my husband away and tied him with many others in the village. They kicked them inhumanly, shot them, and killed them in groups, one after the other. Those who cried out with pain were shot a second time and killed immediately. After that, they lined up all the village girls in one place. Those who had little babies/children with them were put in the same line but their babies were snatched away and shot in front of the mothers. My children were also among them: one of my sons and two daughters were shot to death on the spot in front of me. Then they separated the women as per their choice to another place. They beat them and raped them there. They took me too. Four soldiers and Moghs raped me one after another.

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Then I fainted. I do not know what happened next. When I gained consciousness, I saw that my body was covered with blood. I felt very weak but got up somehow and hid myself in the forest. I was hiding in the forest for three days. After three days, I reached Nappua by a bus along with others. From there, I crossed the border by boat. I had a lot of hope that I would find my husband but I did not. I lost my babies and my husband. I do not know why Allah has kept me alive. The way the Burmese military and the Moghs dealt with us, it reminds us of our position in the human society, as if we are not human beings but lesser than them. *** Based on these cases of extreme vulnerability and endless uncertainty, we could say that the Rohingya life is truly a ‘bare life’60 and a life of ‘rejected people’,61 or that they lead a ‘precarious life’.62 But I prefer to call it subhuman life because the life that the Rohingyas lead is a life lesser than that of human beings. As I have already explained before, ‘subhuman’ is a category of people who are born in the human society, but have no space in the human community. Subhuman people do not receive the treatment that a human deserves , nor do they lead the life of a human being. Subhumans are born in the world, but the world does not own them in any state structure. Subhuman people are treated as o-manush (non-human) since they do not exist in the legal framework of any state. Subhumans are a particular category of people living in the borderland of life and death. Subhumans are not treated as human or given their due dignity, rights, and voice; they are dealt with as if they are lesser than human beings. The cases presented earlier clearly demonstrate that: (1) the Rohingyas have atrocious living conditions; (2) they have no legal recognition; (3) they are homeless at home as they have nowhere to go and no one to turn to; (4) they are allowed to be killed, raped, and burnt with free license; and (5) they lead a life full of uncertainty and extreme vulnerability as if they do not deserve a human life, as if their lives are lesser than that of human beings. The current Rohingya situation successfully fulfils the five conditions by which the Rohingyas could be identified as subhuman. Citizenship scholars quite often justify the extreme vulnerability and severe uncertainty as ‘taken for granted’ due to non-citizenship

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and statelessness, because as Arendt claims, citizenship is the right to have [other] rights63 and as Goncalo Matias said ‘citizenship is a human right’.64 But I argue that there are hundreds and thousands of people living across the world who possess citizenship and thereby belong to a particular state but experience everyday forms of discrimination, arbitrary persecution, human rights violation, acute forms of atrocities, and majoritarian domination where the roles of the state are at the centre. Therefore, non-citizenship and statelessness are not the only reasons behind the production of vulnerability and uncertainty, but the nature of the state and the state’s perspectives towards people of cultural, religious, and racial differences are the governing factors. The Rohingyas, therefore, are in a state of acute vulnerability and endless uncertainty because of the nature of the state (militarized and majoritarian) and its approach towards the people of ethnic (Rohingya versus Burman), religious (Islam versus Buddhist), and racial (South Asian origin versus Southeast Asian ones) differences.

Notes 1. See Daniel W. Rossides, Social Theory: Its Origins, History, and Contemporary Relevance (New York: General Hall, Inc, 1998). 2. See Matt Dawson, Social Theory for Alternative Societies (London, New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016). 3. Particularly, Hannah Arendt and Seyla Benhabib have talked about citizenship rights in relation to the absence of other forms of rights. See, for details, Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Books, 1994); Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 4. See Nasir Uddin, Not Rohingyas, but Royainga: Stateless People in the Struggle for Existence (in Bengali) (Dhaka: Murddhanno Publisher, 2017b). 5. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. by D. Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 6. Myron Weiner, ‘Rejected Peoples and Unwanted Migrants in South Asia,’ Economic and Political Weekly 28, no. 34 (1993): 1737–46. 7. Elizabeth Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). 8. David Weissbrodt, The Human Rights of Non-citizens (USA: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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9. Kristy Belton, ‘The Neglected Non-citizen: Statelessness and Liberal Political Theory,’ The Journal of Global Ethics 7, no. 1 (2011): 59–71. 10. J. Butler, The Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (London/ New York: Verso, 2004). 11. Benhabib, The Rights of Others. 12. Sigona Nando, ‘Campzenship: Reimagining the Camp as a Social and Political Space,’ Citizenship Studies 19, no. 1 (2015): 1–15. 13. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism. 14. See Agamben, Homo Sacer. 15. I have borrowed the idea of ‘homeless at home’ from my dissertation that I wrote about the indigenous people of the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Though both cases are completely different, the idea of ‘homeless at home’ seems very effective here. See Nasir Uddin, ‘Homeless at Home: An Ethnographic Study on the Marginality and Leadership among the Khumi in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, Kyoto University, Kyoto, 2008). 16. See United Nations General Assembly, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, New York (1948). Also see for detail, Weissbrodt, The Human Rights of Non-citizens. 17. See United Nations General Assembly, Universal Declaration of Human Rights. See also Michael K. Addo, The Legal Nature of International Human Rights (Leiden and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2010). 18. See Nasir Uddin, ‘Ethnic Cleansing of the Rohingya People,’ in The Palgrave Handbook of Ethnicity, ed. S. Ratuva (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019a); Penny Green, Thomas MacManus, and Alicia de la Cour Venning, Countdown Annihilation: Genocide in Myanmar (London: International State Crime Initiative, 2015); Maung Zarni and Alice Cowley, ‘Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingyas,’ Pacific Rim Law & Policy Journal 23, no. 3 (2014): 683–754. 19. Michael Safi, ‘Myanmar Treatment of Rohingya Looks like “Textbook Ethnic Cleansing”, says UN,’ Guardian, 11 September 2017, accessed 28 October 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/11/un-myanmars-treatmentof-rohingya-textbook-example-of-ethnic-cleansing. 20. Zarni and Cowley, ‘Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingyas’; Green, Thomas, and Venning, Countdown Annihilation; Azeem Ibrahim, The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide (London: Hurst & Company, 2016). 21. Al Jazeera, ‘The Hidden Genocide,’ 16 January 2013, accessed 28 October 2018, https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/aljazeerainvestigates/2012/12/ 2012125122215836351.html. 22. S. Tisdall, ‘World’s Awkward Silence over Rohingya Genocide Warnings,’ Guardian, 3 January 2018, accessed 28 October 2018, https://www.

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theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/03/worlds-awkward-silence-over-rohingyagenocide-warnings. 23. N. Kristof, ‘I Saw a Genocide in Slow Motion,’ New York Times, 2 March 2018, accessed 28 October 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/02/opinion/ i-saw-a-genocide-in-slow-motion.html. 24. British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), ‘Myanmar Rohingya: UN Says Military Leaders Must Face Genocide Charges,’ 27 August 2018, accessed 28 October 2018, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-45318982. 25. See Uddin, ‘Ethnic Cleansing of the Rohingya People.’ 26. Monkey Cage, ‘There’s a Massive Humanitarian Crisis in Bangladesh’s Rohingya Refugee Camps,’ Washington Post, 12 October 2017, accessed 2 April 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/10/12/ theres-a-massive-humanitarian-crisis-in-bangladeshs-rohingya-refugeecamps/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.21b98f13af76. 27. Ibrahim, The Rohingyas; K. Fahmida Farzana, Memories of Burmese Rohingya Refugees: Contested Identities and Belonging (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017); Uddin, Not Rohingyas, but Royainga. 28. See ‘The Face of Buddhist Terror’, Time, 1 July 2013, accessed 17 March 2019, http://content.time.com/time/covers/europe/0,16641,20130701,00. html. 29. Marella Oppenheim, ‘”It Only Takes One Terrorist”: The Buddhist Monk Who Reviles Myanmar’s Muslims,’ Guardian, 12 May 2017, accessed 17 March 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/may/12/onlytakes-one-terrorist-buddhist-monk-reviles-myanmar-muslims-rohingyarefugees-ashin-wirathu. 30. See Chapters 1 and 2 of this book. 31. See Uddin, Not Rohingyas, but Royainga; Nasir Uddin, The Voices of the Victims: The “Subhuman” Life of the Rohingya (An unpublished research monograph on the Rohingya victims of 2017 campaign in Rakhine State, 2019d). 32. Nasir Uddin, ‘Life in Everyday Death: The Rohingyas in Bangladesh and Myanmar,’ Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs, Georgetown University, 19 October 2017a, accessed 25 April 2008, https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/responses/life-in-everyday-death-the-rohingyas-in-bangladeshand-myanmar. 33. Of 30 per cent women, around 30,000 were rape victims and were pregnant, they gave birth to 16,000 babies within one year of their arrival in Bangladesh. See UNICEF News, ‘More than 60 Rohingya Babies Born in Bangladesh Refugee Camps Every Day,’ accessed 31 March 2019, https:// www.unicef.org/press-releases/more-60-rohingya-babies-born-bangladeshrefugee-camps-every-day-unicef.

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34. Max Bearak, ‘Aid Group Says at Least 6,700 Rohingya Were Killed in Burma in First Month of “Ethnic Cleansing”,’ Washington Post, 14 December 2017, accessed 31 March 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/12/14/aid-group-says-at-least-6700-rohingya-killed-in-burmain-first-month-of-ethnic-cleansing/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.5e451a6daa1a. 35. Uddin, ‘Life in Everyday Death’. 36. For details, see Cresa L. Pugh, ‘Is Citizenship the Answer? Construction of Belonging and Exclusion for the Stateless Rohingya of Burma’ (Working Paper No. 107, International Migration Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford, 2013). 37. P. Green and T. Ward, State Crime: Governments, Violence and Corruption (London: Pluto Press, 2004). 38. Nasir Uddin, ‘Ongoing Rohingya Repatriation Efforts Are Doomed to Failure!’ Opinion, Al Jazeera, 22 November 2018a, accessed 31 March 2019, https://www.academia.edu/37831623/Ongoing_Rohingya_repatriation_ efforts_are_doomed_to_failure_. 39. Shoon Naing, ‘Bulldozing Rohingya Villages Was Not “Demolition of Evidence”, Myanmar Official Says,’ Reuters, 26 February 2008, accessed 20 March 2018 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-enterprise/ bulldozing-rohingya-villages-was-not-demolition-of-evidence-myanmarofficial-says-idUSKCN1GA0VH. 40. Liam Cochrane, ‘Rohingya Crisis: Calculated Food Shortages Driving Exodus from Myanmar: Rights Groups Say,’ ABC NEWS, 18 October 2017, accessed 20 March 2018, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-18/ rohingyas-driven-from-myanmar-by-food-shortage-rights-groups-say/9060076. 41. The United News of Bangladesh (UNB), ‘UN: New Rohingya Arrivals from Myanmar Now 646,000,’ Dhaka Tribune, 9 December 2017, accessed 2 January 2018, http://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/2017/12/09/ un-rohingya-arrival-bangladesh/. 42. Amnesty International, ‘Who Are the Rohingyas? What Is Happening in Myanmar?,’ 26 September 2017, accessed 26 December 2017, https://www. amnesty.org.au/who-are-the-rohingya-refugees/. 43. The United News of Bangladesh (UNB), ‘Rohingya Women GangRaped by Myanmar Army,’ Daily Star, 13 November 2017, accessed 26 January 2018, https://www.thedailystar.net/frontpage/rohingya-girls-gang-rapedmyanmar-army-1490278. 44. The United Nations News, ‘UN Human Rights Chief Points to “Textbook Example of Ethnic Cleansing” in Myanmar,’ Global Perspective on Human Stories, 11 September 2017, accessed 27 January 2018, https://news.un.org/en/ story/2017/09/564622-un-human-rights-chief-points-textbook-example-ethniccleansing-myanmar#.Wj4_SZugeM8OperaStable\Shell\Open\Command.

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45. Associated Press, ‘Myanmar, Bangladesh Set Up Working Group for Rohingya Return,’ Fox News Channel, 19 December 2017, accessed 26 January 2018, http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/12/19/myanmar-bangladesh-setup-working-group-for-rohingya-return.html. 46. Deautsche Welle, ‘Myanmar Continues to Destroy Rohingya Villages,’ 18 December 2017, accessed 20 March 2018, http://www.egyptindependent.com/ myanmar-continues-destroy-rohingya-villages-hrw/. 47. See, Uddin, Nasir. ‘Ongoing Rohingya Repatriation Efforts Are Doomed to Failure!’. 48. Nasir Uddin, ‘Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh: Five Challenges for the Future,’ LSE South Asia (Blog), 21 November 2018b, accessed 31 March 2019, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/southasia/2018/11/21/rohingya-refugees-in-bangladeshfive-challenges-for-the-future/. 49. Penny Green, Thomas MacManus, Alicia de la Cour Venning, Azeem Ibrahim, Maung Zarni, Ashley Starr Kinseth, and others. 50. Shoon Naing, ‘Rights Group Accuses Myanmar of Crimes against Humanity,’ Reuters, 26 September 2017, accessed 25 January 2018, https:// www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya/rights-group-accusesmyanmar-of-crimes-against-humanity-idUSKCN1C10MR. 51. For example, the UN, EU, OIC, and the like. 52. For example, the AI and HRW. 53. Serajul Quadir, ‘Rohingya Refugees Still Fleeing From Myanmar to Bangladesh: UNHCR,’ US NEWS, 7 December 2017, accessed 22 December 2017, https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2017-12-07/ rohingya-refugees-still-fleeing-from-myanmar-to-bangladesh-unhcr. 54. Matteo Fumagalli, ‘How Geopolitics Helped Create the Latest Rohingya Crisis,’ The Conversation, 21 September 2017, accessed 25 January 2018, https://theconversation.com/how-geopolitics-helped-create-the-latest-rohingyacrisis-84309. 55. Uddin, ‘Life in Everyday Death’. 56. Sarah Wildman, ‘The World’s Fastest-Growing Refugee Crisis is Taking Place in Myanmar,’ VOX News, 18 September 2017, accessed 9 April 2018, https://www. vox.com/world/2017/9/18/16312054/rohingya-muslims-myanmar-refugeesviolence. 57. ‘Myanmar Citizenship Law’, United Nations Action for Cooperation against Trafficking in Persons (UN-ACT), accessed 22 January 2018, http://unact.org/publication/view/myanmars-citizenship-law-1982/. 58. The literal meaning of the sentence is: we simply have flesh and bones in our body, nothing else. The actual meaning is that we have no human dignity, no legal entity, no desires, no hopes, and no future. 59. A school for Islamic education, similar to a madrasa.

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60. Agamben, Homo Sacer. 61. Weiner, ‘Rejected Peoples and Unwanted Migrants in South Asia’. 62. Butler, The Precarious Life. 63. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism. 64. Goncalo Matias, Citizenship as a Human Right: The Fundamental Rights to a Specific Citizenship (Singapore: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016).

8

Conclusion Looking Forward

A

nthropologists often face one common question when they write about a problematic issue: What is the solution? I do feel that ‘selling a solution’ or ‘giving a prescription’ to resolve a problem is not the duty of ethnographers, though they uphold a strong sense of commitment towards their object of study. An ethnographer could provide a detailed description,1 deep insights, relatively objective scenarios, vivid narratives, ‘joint product’,2 and ground reality good enough to understand a particular group of people, society, culture, a problem, an issue, or a fact. ‘Understanding society is over, now the time is to change’3 could be applicable to some extent, but I feel it is still important to keep an intellectual distance between academia and activism,4 because academia demands a relatively objective position while activism holds a clear subjective repositioning.5 Therefore, policy prescription is not always a task for ethnography, but with their first-hand and comprehensive experience, ethnographers could contribute substantially to the policy formation in order to resolve the problem. Nonetheless, as an ethnographer, I feel an intellectual discomfort and academic uneasiness in discussing policy issues, since discussion regarding a sustainable solution for the Rohingya situation involves policy analysis. Rather, I am deeply interested in understanding the situation from the bottom, from the perspective of the people involved, so that a good number of vivid narratives unfold what is happening in Myanmar and Bangladesh as far as the current state of the Rohingyas is concerned. However, anthropologists The Rohingya. Nasir Uddin, Oxford University Press (2020). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199489350.001.0001.

© Oxford University Press.

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are often accused of avoiding the factual realities and being reluctant in addressing practical problems. I also feel that based on my long years of involvement with the Rohingya research and decade-long engagement with the Rohingya issues, I need to reflect on how to resolve the problem and think about effective strategies for a durable solution to the Rohingya crisis. Unfortunately, this is not a crisis that can be resolved within a short span of time, the reasons for which I will discuss in the later sections of this chapter. This chapter sheds light on the potential solutions to the Rohingya refugee situation6 with a critical examination of the roles of regional political dynamics, South and Southeast Asian geopolitics, bilateral and multilateral interstate relations, and the role of the global community.7 Following the latest influx that started in August 2017, the local, national, regional, and international partners and well-wishers, journalists, experts, scholars, and the international community—like the UN (and its other organs like UNHCR, UNICEF, UNHRC), IOM, ILO, EU, AI, HRW, OIC, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and the Arab League—are calling for a lasting solution to the Rohingya problem. This chapter raises questions of solution for whom (for the Rohingyas who are not problem creators), solution by whom (by the international community that cannot create any meaningful pressure on Myanmar to halt persecution), and for what (for bringing Rohingyas back whereas Rakhine State and its people are not ready to accept them at any cost). Finally, this chapter attempts to explain some practical issues stemming from the ground reality through ethnographic studies about how the Rohingyas themselves think of changing the vulnerable and miserable conditions of their lives in Bangladesh and Myanmar.

Life after Migration Following an all-out campaign by Myanmar security forces, some ethnic extremists, and some Buddhist fundamentalists against the civilian Rohingyas of Northern Rakhine State in 2017, the Rohingya situation has taken an alarming shape both in Myanmar and Bangladesh: a genocidal situation in Myanmar and a humanitarian situation in Bangladesh. Following the recent influx, 750,000 more Rohingya refugees have entered Bangladesh in addition to the existing 500,000–550,000.

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However, Bangladesh is not ready to host such a large number of Rohingyas on its land. Therefore, the newly arrived Rohingyas have fallen into a serious crisis as they are unable to meet even their basic needs, which has created new tensions between the old and new Rohingya refugees. Combining the old refugees and the new arrivals, more than one million Rohingyas are suffering from inadequate food and nutrition, lack of proper healthcare, substandard sanitation, shortage of drinking water, and lack of bare minimum space for living; this has created an acute humanitarian crisis from the late 2017. Therefore, this is now considered as the worst refugee crisis in recent history8 and a ‘humanitarian disaster of historic proportion’.9 At the beginning of the Rohingya crisis, particularly in 2017, donor countries supported them by providing food, medicine, and cash and by building temporary shelters, but all this has gradually reduced, which has created a mounting crises of hosting more than one million Rohingya people.10 Now, it is a big challenge for Bangladesh to ensure the supply of adequate food, basic medical facilities and healthcare, education for the children, proper sanitation facilities, clean drinking water, and a minimum standard of housing. Security issues are also becoming a major concern since women trafficking, child trafficking, and recruitment in militant activities have already become news items11 since vulnerable conditions can easily be exploited by any vested interest groups.12 All these symptoms reveal that after migration to Bangladesh, the Rohingyas are in a relatively safer position than they were in Myanmar in terms of life-threatening situations. However, they are now in a new domain of vulnerability. Bangladesh is hosting a large number of Rohingyas on humanitarian grounds and under serious international pressure, but this will not last long under any circumstances because there is a growing dissatisfaction and rising anti-Rohingya sentiment among the general public in Bangladesh.13 Besides, the local communities are gradually becoming intolerant of the Rohingyas day by day. This intolerance could turn into violence at any point of time. Therefore, the life of the Rohingyas after migration to Bangladesh has taken a new shape of dire uncertainty and acute vulnerability. Besides, Bangladesh is trying to repatriate the Rohingyas to Myanmar as soon as possible at any cost, which is completely understandable, but the situation in Myanmar is not favourable for their safe return. Therefore, the repatriation process could create another vulnerable condition for the Rohingyas, as discussed in Chapter 7.

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Given the context, until Myanmar is prepared to bring the Rohingyas back ‘safely’ and the Rohingyas’ return can be termed as ‘voluntary repatriation’, it is wise to pay attention to the way they are struggling to cope in their new setting in the host society, how they are dealing with different forms of exploitation in the land they have migrated to, what they think of their future, and what the long-term and short-term consequences of the current refugee situation are in Bangladesh.

Exploitation and Support by Locals  ‘When people are on the knife of life and death, they become ready to do anything to save their lives,’ said Kalam, a 48-year-old Rohingya who came to Bangladesh in the beginning of September 2017, while explaining the way he crossed the border, the Naf River, the no man’s land between Bangladesh and Myanmar, and entered into Bangladesh. He continued: A Bangladeshi boatman demanded a fare 20 times higher than the regular crossing fee to bring me and my family from Myanmar to the Bangladesh side of Naf River. I paid [him] since I was running to save my life and my family. When we arrived in Teknaf, we did not get any shelter in any camp, and therefore, I took shelter with my family members in the yard of a local Bengali house. The household head had already built a small tent using a plastic sheet and bamboo pillars and offered to let us stay there. He demanded 3,000 BDT for the tent and 1,000 BDT as a monthly rent. I took shelter with my family there temporarily. This is how the local people are using our vulnerable conditions to make money. Now I am living in Balukhali camp, but I have spent everything I brought from Rakhine and don’t have a penny in my hand.

Kalam’s experience is not a solitary one since hundreds of local Bengalis are exploiting the vulnerable conditions of the Rohingyas and making money. This is the way vulnerability is reproduced in the form of everyday discrimination and many newly arrived Rohingyas have been going through this ever since they crossed the border. This is, in fact, one side of the coin, while the other side shows a different picture. I observed many local families supporting the newly arrived Rohingyas in many ways including giving them shelter at their homes, providing them food and clothes, and sometimes helping them get registered in order to secure a place in temporary refugee camps.14

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Kafil Uddin, a 58-year-old local Bengali living in Shamlapur in Teknaf, sheltered 32 Rohingyas from 9 families in his yard until they got registered and found a place in the temporary refugee camps. Kafil Uddin sheltered them and provided them with food, clothes, and many other daily essentials for five weeks. When I visited Kafil Uddin’s yard in October 2017, I saw many Rohingyas there who were living sporadically in different small tents made of plastic sheets. While talking to them, I came to know that Kafil Uddin gave them food, three meals a day cooked by his wife, for the first few days. By that time, the Rohingyas had started receiving food and money provided unofficially at the personal level through different charity organizations, local people, and other Bangladeshis from across the country. Ramiz Mian, one of the Rohingyas living in Kafil Uddin’s yard, who is 49 years old, told me that ‘If Kafil bhai (Brother Kafil) had not given us shelter and provided [us] necessary food in the first few days, we could not have survived. He appeared to us [as] a niamot (blessing) of Allah. He is also trying to get us registered in the Shaplapur refugee camps. We shall be ever grateful to him and his family.’ The second picture is gradually becoming blurred, though it has not disappeared yet, because the tension between the local communities and the Rohingya refugees is growing and taking a confrontational tone. Meanwhile, a couple of ethnic conflicts between the locals and the Rohingyas and infighting15 among the Rohingyas took place and resulted in a couple of deaths that were covered by national and international media.16 This is symptomatic, and hence, if tension mounts, it could take any shape to put the Rohingyas in a further vulnerable position. Therefore, how the Rohingyas are exploited by the locals and how they react to it is important for shaping the structure of relations between the Rohingyas and the host society.

Short-Term and Long-Term Challenges Rohingya refugee situations have both short-term and long-term consequences. Short-term challenges, which Bangladesh has already started facing, are multifold: (1) feeding more than 1,300,000 people with tonnes of food on a regular basis (daily, weekly, and monthly); (2) providing basic healthcare services (particularly to pregnant

200

The Rohingya

women, newborn babies, and aged people); (3) providing sanitation to more than one million additional people; (4) supplying drinkable water to prevent waterborne diseases; (5) arrangement of cooking materials instead of firewood to save forests and ecological settings; (6) providing education to children; and (7) running and maintenance of giant temporary refugee settlements. On the other hand, Bangladesh will have to face some long-term challenges as well, which include: (1) implementing voluntary repatriation with the involvement of UN bodies; (2) maintaining law and order situations because it will be difficult for Bangladesh to maintain more than one million refugees in order; (3) controlling women and child trafficking because trafficking channels of women and children are very active in this region as part of the South Asian trafficking network; (4) handling the transforming relations with the local people since gradually tensions between the host society and the Rohingyas are escalating and becoming worse day by day; (5) checking the potential involvement in militant activities because South Asia is popularly known as the hub of militant activism and it could easily include the Rohingyas by exploiting their vulnerable living conditions; and (6) the resettlement and relocation if their duration of stay in Bangladesh extends.17 In fact, the big challenge for the global community is to protect the Rohingyas from any forseeable humanitarian crisis. Also, hosting 1.3 million refugees in its land should not be Bangladesh’s burden alone, and therefore ‘burden sharing’ by the global community should be given due importance. Given the situation, standing beside Rohingya refugees and supporting them by ensuring that they have a minimum standard of human life could be the best possible way in which the global community could compensate for their collective failure to stop ‘genocide’ in Myanmar.

The State Is at the Centre My long years of engagement with the Rohingya issue and my recent experiences show that the main catalyst behind the Rohingya crisis is the state of Myanmar. While the twenty-first century is called the century of cultural pluralism, celebrated for its accommodation of differences, Myanmar is unparalleled in the exclusion of cultural others and nonaccommodative of differences in its national space. Following the

Conclusion 201

democratization process that started in 2011, it was expected that the Rohingyas would regain their position in Myanmar with legal recognition and human dignity,18 but the opposite happened. One of the reasons for this is that Myanmar is still under strong military dictatorship in the name of democracy, and hence, Suu Kyi has little power to alter the policy decisions of Myanmar state. Besides, Suu Kyi is a populist politician19 who has regained her political power based on the populist Buddhist sentiment. Therefore, Suu Kyi does not take any stand against ethnic extremists and Buddhist fundamentalists who are committing ethnic cleansing and genocide in Rakhine State. In fact, Myanmar’s internal political dynamics is shaping into a venomous condition for the Rohingyas and the state is the key player and main architect of this. Military administration, political establishment, and ethno-religious fundamentalism20 constitute a combined force to create an atrocious condition in Rakhine State, which compels the Rohingyas to flee to Bangladesh. It is important to note that the state is an abstract entity, but it takes either a humanitarian shape or an atrocious one depending upon the rulers of the state, that is, the government. State policy shapes the nature of the state and Myanmar’s state policy is to eliminate the Rohingyas from its land, this has made the Rohingyas life a subhuman one. Local states as agents of the central state perpetrate and execute its policy to eliminate the Rohingyas from the demography of Rakhine State. Keeping this policy in mind, Myanmar has created a situation good enough to render the Rohingyas subhumans. Therefore, there is no scope to consider the crisis of the Rohingyas in Myanmar as an ethnic conflict between the Rakhine and the Rohingya communities or as a religious riots between Rakhine Buddhists and the Rohingya Muslims. It is a state-sponsored, deliberate, and systematic campaign against the Rohingyas.

The Rohingyas and the ‘Subhuman’ Life This book offers a theoretical proposition to understand the plight of the people living in extremely vulnerable situations according to the following points: (1) atrocious living conditions (which means unliveable conditions for the people concerned); (2) illegal object in legal framework (which denotes a particular group of people who do not

202

The Rohingya

exist in the legal structure of the modern nation state); (3) homeless at home as they have nowhere to go (which reveals the critical condition of the people in the crisis of existence, as no state offers them a piece of land for living); (4) can be killed, raped, and burnt without impunity (which unfolds the extreme vulnerable conditions of a group who could be killed, raped, and burnt without any legal action against the perpetrators); and (5) a life deemed worthy of extinction (which denotes a social position in which the society considers your life worthy of extinction). Considering the situations prevailing in both Bangladesh and Myanmar that have been presented in different chapters of this book with first-hand vivid narratives, I do think that the Rohingyas are dealt with as if they are lesser than human beings, which I call subhuman life. First, the living conditions in Rakhine State are, for all intents and purposes, unliveable for the Rohingyas because the degree of brutalities committed there, which many term as ‘ethnic cleanings’ and ‘genocide’, has created atrocious living conditions that could easily render a human life into a ‘subhuman’ life. Second, as stateless people and non-citizens, the Rohingyas belong to neither Bangladesh nor Myanmar as they are non-existent entities in the legal structure of both the states. Since citizenship is the gateway to all sorts of rights,21 they do not have any social, political, economic, and civil rights. In that sense, the Rohingyas are legally ‘non-life’. As such, their life could be considered as lesser than that of human beings. Third, Burmese people call them ‘Bengalese’ and Bengalis call them ‘bormaya’ or the people from Burma. The Rohingyas are non-citizens in Myanmar and Bangladesh does not recognize them even as refugees. Therefore, they have no space to flee persecution, atrocities, brutalities, and random killing. They have no one to lodge complaints with and no forum to seek justice from. The global cry for ensuring justice for the Rohingyas is basically from their own sense of global commitment to ensure peace and justice for global humanity. The Rohingyas have nowhere to go and no one to turn to, which could make peoples’ lives extremely vulnerable. Fourth, a lot of personal narratives presented in different chapters of this book reveal the ground reality that Myanmar’s security forces, some ethnic extremists, and some Rakhine Buddhists have been given free license to kill, rape, and burn the Rohingyas at any point at any time. And this is what the Rohingyas have gone through following the military crackdown that started on

Conclusion 203

25 August 2017. Fifth, the way the Rohingyas were treated in Rakhine State following the recent military crackdown, as if their lives are worthy of extinction, is reflected in the various personal narratives and collective memories of the newly arrived Rohingyas in Bangladesh. To some extent, a Rohingya life is even lesser than a beast’s life because a beast’s life sometimes receives some sort of mercy, kindness, and care, but when I say ‘the life lesser than that of a human being’, it involves merciless atrocities, unkind brutalities, and uncaring cruelties as if that life is worthy of extinction. Considering all aspects of Rohingya lives, all sorts of personal narratives, all forms of collective memories, and all kinds of circumstantial evidence, it is evident that the Rohingyas are dealt with are as if they are lesser than human beings and lead what I prefer to call subhuman life.

Future of the Rohingyas Though the Rohingyas at Pasan Para and Vasan Para, majority of whom came in 1978 and 1991/1992, do not even think about going back to Rakhine State, the newly arrived Rohingyas are part of Bangladesh’s repatriation initiative. The recent move between Bangladesh and Myanmar gives the impression that Myanmar is reluctant about the process and is not inclined to bring them back. However, most of the newly arrived Rohingyas do not even have a clear idea about their future, let alone the repatriation process. Some want to go back to Rakhine State if the situation becomes better. Many of them said that they would go back to their ‘homeland’ if they are recognized as the citizens of Myanmar, their life safety is guaranteed, and they are dealt with like normal human beings. Many of the Rohingyas I met do not believe that Myanmar will ever take them back. Fazal, a 46-year-old Rohingya who arrived in Bangladesh in October 2017, told me: They did not push us here just to take us back again. When I, along with others who were a part of other groups, was severely beaten by many local Buddhist extremists and military soldiers, they repeatedly said that we are from Bangladesh, we are not Myanmar’s residents, we are illegal Bengali migrants, we have to go back to Bangladesh, and we have no place in Borma. Either we have to flee to Bangladesh or we have to die. The choice is ours. We chose to flee to Bangladesh. This is not because we feel that we are Bengalis; we did this to save our lives.

204

The Rohingya

Fazal’s statement indicates that majority of the Rohingyas believe that Myanmar will not take them back or return their homes, lands, and properties. Therefore, their future lies in three potential alternatives: (1) going back to Myanmar following the success of repatriation; (2) scopes of social integration in the host societies; and (3) leading a refugee life in the camps.22 Many of the Rohingyas do not even think about the future since they are currently caught up in the everyday struggles of ensuring that their present is ‘good’ and ‘comfortable’. Though I am not comfortable making policy suggestions to resolve the problem, due to my long engagement and deep involvement with research on the Rohingyas, I would like to make some concluding remarks. Amid interaction with hundreds of Rohingyas and in the process of understanding their pains and pleasures, joys and sorrows, past and present, and their uncertainty and vulnerability, I have found an idea for a solution to the problem. I can summarize their feelings in three conditions: legal recognition, social safety, and human dignity. In fact, the majority of the Rohingyas would like to go back to their ‘homeland’ with the assurance that they will be given citizenship (legal recognition); their life will be protected from any sort of uncertainty of killing, raping, burning, and torturing (social safety); and they will be treated with dignity (human dignity).

Notes 1. See Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1973). 2. See Nasir Uddin, ‘Decolonising Ethnography in the Field: An Anthropological Account,’ International Journal of Social Research Methodology 14, no. 6 (2011): 455–67. 3. Karl Marx’s famous thesis, ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it’, formulated a century ago, is still relevant in social sciences. For details, see Bhaskar Sunkara, ‘Why the Ideas of Karl Marx Are More Relevant than Ever in the 21st Century,’ Guardian, 25 January 2013, accessed 20 March 2018, https://www.theguardian. com/commentisfree/2013/jan/25/karl-marx-relevant-21st-century. 4. Signe Howell, The Ethnography of Moralities (London and New York: Routledge, 1997); also for details, see Mark Goodale, ‘Between Facts and Norms: Towards an Anthropology of Ethical Practice,’ in The Anthropology of Moralities, ed. Monica Heintz (Oxford and New York: Berghahn, 2013), 183–99; Didier

Conclusion 205

Fassin, ‘Beyond Good and Evil?: Questioning the Anthropological Discomfort with Morals,’ Anthropological Theory 8, no. 4 (2008): 333–44. 5. See Michael Flood, Brian Martin, and Tanja Dreher, ‘Combining Academia and Activism: Common Obstacles and Useful Tools,’ Austrian Universities Review 55, no. 1 (2013): 17–26. 6. When I write ‘Rohingya refugee situation’, I mean how the problem of the massive refugee influx that Bangladesh is now shouldering could be resolved. The critical conditions that the Rohingyas have been experiencing in Arakan/ Rakhine State of Burma/Myanmar should be taken into account in the broader spectrum of the problem. 7. When I use the term ‘global community’, I mean the international actors including those who are instrumental in dealing with the refugee situation, human rights issues, and the issue of democratization. Though the roles of international actors in conflict resolution are not out of question, here I use the term ‘global community’ in a more general sense of the term. 8. Economist, ‘The Rohingya Refugee Crisis Is the Worst in Decades,’ 21  September 2017, accessed 21 March 2018, https://www.economist.com/ blogs/graphicdetail/2017/09/daily-chart-13. 9. Sarah Wildman, ‘The World’s Fastest-Growing Refugee Crisis Is Taking Place in Myanmar. Here’s Why,’ VOX NEWS, 18 September 2017, accessed 20 March 2018, https://www.vox.com/world/2017/9/18/16312054/ rohingya-muslims-myanmar-refugees-violence. 10. Daily Star, ‘Donors [Are] Losing Interests in Rohingyas: WFP,’ 14 February 2018, accessed 22 March 2018, https://www.thedailystar.net/frontpage/ donors-lose-interest-rohingyas-wfp-1534360. 11. Nasir Uddin, Not Rohingyas, but Royainga: Stateless People in the Struggle for Existence (in Bengali) (Dhaka: Murddhanno Publisher, 2017b). 12. Nasir Uddin, ‘The State, Vulnerability, and Transborder Movement: The Rohingyas in Myanmar and Bangladesh,’ in Deterritorialised Identity and Transborder Movements in South Asia, eds. Nasir Uddin and Nasreen Chowdhory (Singapore: Springer, 2019c), 73–90. 13. See Nasir Uddin, ‘Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh: Five Challenges for the Future,’ LSE South Asia (Blog), 21 November 2018b, accessed 31 March 2019, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/southasia/2018/11/21/rohingya-refugees-in-bangladeshfive-challenges-for-the-future/. 14. Many cases of local support have been stated and narrated in this book. 15. Tarek Mahmud, ‘Infighting Causes Unrest at Rohingya Camps,’ The Dhaka Tribune, 4 March 2018, accessed 10 April 2018, http://www. dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/nation/2018/03/04/personal-conflicts-causeunrest-rohingya-camps/.

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16. See Tarek Mahmud, ‘Suspected Gang Member Killed in Rohingya Turf War,’ The Dhaka Tribune, 8 March 2018, accessed 10 April 2018, http://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/nation/2018/03/08/rohingya-man-shot-coxs-bazar/. 17. Uddin, ‘Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh’. 18. Uddin, Not Rohingyas, but Royainga. 19. See Ronan Lee, ‘A Politician, Not an Icon: Aung San Suu Kyi's Silence on Myanmar's Muslim Rohingya,’ Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations 25, no. 3 (2014): 321–33. 20. Azeem Ibrahim also discussed the commonality of interest among the political elites and military establishment as the reason behind the emergence of a force against the Rohingya Muslims. See Azeem Ibrahim, The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide (London: Hurst & Company, 2016). 21. See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Books, 1994). 22. Also see Nasir Uddin, ‘The Solutions to the Rohingya Crisis: Voices from the Field,’ South Asia Journal, 17 November 2018c, accessed 31 March 2019, http://southasiajournal.net/the-solutions-to-the-rohingya-crisis-voices-fromthe-field/.

Appendices

Appendix 1 Rohingya Organizations ARIF ARNO ARSA BROUK IMA RLO RPF RSO

Arakan Rohingya Islamic Front Arakan Rohingya National Organisation Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army Burmese Rohingya Organization UK (BROUK) Ittihad-ul Mujahideen of Arakan Rohingya Liberation Organization Rohingya Patriotic Front Rohingya Solidarity Organisation

208

Appendices

Appendix 2 The names of the villages located on both sides of the major rivers in Arakan: On both sides of the Lemru River: Sara, Bandar, Kualong, Rajarbil, Baldipara, Pangdu, Kambao, Shishruk, Melatudyng, Batang, Shendong, Piparang, Daspara, Meyonbu, Butlu, Halingbong, Halimapar, Chenbbli, Puran Para, Chittapara, Kottipara, Paikpara, Kaim, Barbassa, and so on. On both sides of the Mingan River: Nisa, Padong, Julapara, Mainakachcha, Manjundak, Sakhariperang, Rajapara, Babudong, and so on. On both banks of the Kaladan River: Chandana, Miurkul, Kainiperang, Bakaim, Shuling perang, Tangfak, Bhave, Afskau, Keri, Qazipara, Keyeda, Rohingya Para, Ramju Para, Ambari, Keyakta Khenda, Baharpara, Sinohpara, Lakhnanpara, Kulwari, Tangtangnirang, Pallarpara, Meyoktang, Shwepyai, Bawdali-ywa, and so on. On the both sides of the Mayu River: Villages and settlements are Rathedaung, Mujardia (Mozi Island), Auknanra, Aternanara, Kawakson, Machchari, Angperayang, Rajarbil, Raushenpereng, Jopepereng, Samila, Puimali, Rowainga-daung, Alikhang, Moi-daung, Suofang, Maruchang, Khnachang, Gaulengi, Badga, Gopphe, Tamee, Lawadang, Taimongkhali, Buthidaung, and so on. On south and eastern side of the River Naf: Maungdaw, Amtala, Battala, Walideng, Laingthe, Kazirbil, Bolibazar, Nagpura, Bara Sikdarpara, Kaaripara, Habshipara, Arabshah Para, Shuja Para, Rajarbil, Nurullahpara and Ali Thangaw, Udaung, Myinlwet, Shilkhali, Andaung. Source: Abdul Karim, The Rohingyas: A Short Account of Their History and Culture (Dhaka: Jatya Shahitya Prakash, [1997] 2016), 96.

Appendices

209

Appendix 3 The Mujahid Party sent a letter written in Urdu, dated 9 June 1948, to the government of the Union of Burma through the sub-divisional officer of Maungdaw township. Their demands were as follows (Department of Defence Service Archives, Rangoon: CD 1016/10/11): 1. The area between the west bank of Kaladan River and the east bank of Naf River must be recognized as the national home of the Muslims in Burma. 2. The Muslims in Arakan must be accepted as the nationals of Burma. 3. The Mujahid Party must be granted a legal status as a political organization. 4. The Urdu 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 (MraukU) 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. Source: Aye Chan, ‘ The Development of a Muslim Enclave in Arakan (Rakhine) State of Burma (Myanmar),’ SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research 3, no. 2 (2005): 411.

210

Appendices

Appendix 4

Figure A4.1 Card given to the Rohingyas living in Bangladesh after their registration in the biometric database Note: Photograph and ID have been intentionally erased. Source: Author.

Appendices

211

Appendix 5

Figure A5.1

Major ethnic groups in Myanmar

Note: This map does not represent the authentic international boundaries. It is not to scale and is provided for illustrative purposes only. Source: Shakeeb Asrar, ‘Rohingya Crisis Explained in Maps,’ Al Jazeera, 28 October 2017, accessed 16 May 2019, https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/interactive/2017/ 09/rohingya-crisis-explained-maps-170910140906580.html.

212

Appendices

Appendix 6

Figure A6.1

Following Myanmar’s fleeing Rohingyas

Notes: This map does not represent the authentic international boundaries. It is not to scale and is provided for illustrative purposes only. Source: Shakeeb Asrar, ‘Rohingya Crisis Explained in Maps,’ Al Jazeera, 28 October 2017, accessed 16 May 2019, https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/interactive/2017/09/ rohingya-crisis-explained-maps-170910140906580.html.

Appendices

213

Appendix 7 Table A7.1

Population Census, 2010

Arakan State Population by Township Sittwe Ponnagyun Mrauk-U Kyauktaw Minbya Myebon Pauktaw Rathedaung Maungdaw Buthidaung Kyaudpyu Munaung Ramree Ann Thandwe Toungup Gwa Total

282,509 129,845 208,435 224,421 198,831 120,101 176,231 169,713 506,986 292,486 19,668 72,171 149,184 110,707 125,486 147,076 80,148 3,013,998

Source: ‘Populations 2010,’ The Stateless Rohingya, accessed 20 October 2017, http://www.thestateless.com/populations-2010.

214

Appendices

Appendix 8 Table A8.1 The main language (families) of the Bamar majority and the Rohingya, Kachin, and Wa minorities Different Ethnic Groups, Their Languages, Language Family, and Population People

Main

Language Family

Bamar Rohingya Kachin Wa

Language Burmese Rohingya Jingpho Wa

Tibeto-Burman Indo-Aryan/European Tibeto-Burman Austro-Asiatic

Native Speakers (Million) 33.0 1.80 0.94 0.90

Source: Cited in Mahalia Gaskin Mcdaniel, John Leake, and Thomas Wanner, The Politics of Identity in Myanmar: The Rohingya, Kachin and Wa Ethnic Minorities (Institute of International Development and the University of Adelaide, 2017), 13.

763

669

692

709

669

508

617

525

583

560

548

529

559

Camp 1W

Camp 1E

Camp 3

Camp 7

Camp 9

Camp 24

Camp 10

Camp 8W

Camp 4

Camp 14

Camp 11

Camp 8E

Camp 2E

460

431

433

Camp 18

Camp 2W

Camp 5

84

697

Camp 26

Nayapara RC*

722

Camp 13

468

433

500

90

532

498

579

587

638

532

598

520

601

713

743

745

758

615

773

1,953

1,930

2,213

1,555

2,325

2,291

2,364

2,311

2,470

2,602

2,629

2,280

2,775

3,051

3,026

2,842

2,956

3,133

3,112

2,030

2,028

2,234

1,641

2,363

2,353

2,389

2,559

2,605

2,491

2,663

2,490

2,927

3,166

3,134

3,033

2,974

3,132

3,220

2,792

2,921

2,848

2,942

3,333

3,340

3,379

3,395

3,601

3,492

3,398

4,028

3,989

4,280

4,242

4,335

4,438

4,741

4,528

2,828

3,163

2,985

3,013

3,597

3,399

3,583

3,742

3,739

3,658

3,699

4,146

4,115

4,483

4,450

4,554

4,535

5,206

4,797

1,538

1,628

1,780

2,295

1,823

2,192

2,136

2,260

2,067

2,150

2,126

2,308

2,489

2,683

2,529

2,697

2,687

2,973

2,779

1,618

1,614

1,670

2,362

1,866

2,161

2,192

2,244

2,063

2,216

2,057

2,405

2,462

2,654

2,728

2,803

2,790

2,765

2,858

5,956

6,128

6,387

7,195

7,286

7,362

7,254

7,297

7,672

7,617

7,730

8,000

8,686

9,248

9,424

9,480

9,694

9,803

9,826

4,633

4,807

4,980

5,159

5,467

5,837

5,930

5,826

6,006

6,092

6,115

5,897

7,018

7,211

7,368

7,859

7,787

6,760

7,771

465

497

359

457

519

560

532

605

519

602

580

544

740

724

693

816

866

634

744

416

396

365

425

448

540

495

525

403

527

561

413

655

655

595

712

753

555

688

907

6,047

5,965

6,540

5,709

7,292

7,208

7,127

7,049

7,948

7,465

7,652

7,760

8,682

9,411

9,197

9,329

9,470

9,393

9,800

11,184

(Cont’d)

25,130

25,976

26,781

27,218

30,118

31,062

31,381

31,911

32,366

32,504

32,773

33,539

37,126

39,577

39,624

40,545

41,001

41,014

41,818

49,468

Male

910

Female

9,196

Male

11,540

Female

3,606

Male

3,435

Female

5,486

Male

5,304

Female

3,697

Male

3,540

Female

below 1

below 1

901

Adult

Adult

male

946

Total Individuals

Total Families

60+ Elderly

60+ Elderly

18–59

18–59

12–17 Children

12–17 Children

5–11 Children

5–11 Children

1–4

Children

1–4

Children

Infant

Age and gender breakdown by camp/site

Infant

Table A9.1

female

Camp 15

Camp

Appendix 9

Camp 19

224

181

140

131

105

Camp 21

Camp 23

Camp 25

Camp 20

Camp 4

108

15,367

15,347

90

80

111

129

158

199

215

217

304

60

325

405

380

387

67,774

459

374

481

596

710

808

908

1,092

1,418

1,012

1,593

1,605

1,592

1,757

70,607

464

416

522

640

701

845

958

1,147

1,443

1,149

1,676

1,701

1,799

1,870

99,747

634

498

676

829

1,105

1,451

1,347

1,674

1,887

1,903

2,244

2,353

2,558

2,543

105,126

626

534

697

868

1,189

1,491

1,412

1,710

1,972

2,037

2,495

2,570

2,615

2,810

61,378

309

273

350

413

742

632

760

1,028

1,029

1,475

1,423

1,522

1,675

1,704

61,973

333

265

348

468

685

650

797

1,062

1,043

1,435

1,464

1,436

1,668

1,630

215,030

1,290

1,108

1,475

1,803

2,209

2,687

2,970

3,307

4,029

4,552

4,843

5,022

4,842

5,510

167,448

1,040

888

1,169

1,350

1,578

1,690

2,367

2,383

3,089

3,540

3,769

4,030

3,963

4,281

15,937

86

58

92

121

168

170

182

219

228

255

350

385

378

440

390

14,127

62

53

86

98

112

159

137

185

245

239

286

327

336

378

5,826

209,869

1,299

1,119

1,495

1,794

2,143

2,661

3,017

3,150

4,020

3,548

4,826

4,880

4,587

5,276

25,031

909,861

5,501

4,630

6,112

7,446

9,497

10,963

12,277

14,262

16,952

17,737

20,803

21,788

22,216

23,714

Notes:*Kutupalong refugee camp includes 14,277 registered refugees of 2,617 families and Nayapara refugee camp includes 19,895 registered refugees of 3,704 families. **This represents refugees residing outside formal camp boundaries. Source: UNHCR.

Total

No camp**

Extension

Camp 20

83

238

Camp 27

Extension

265

Camp 17

80

335

Camp 16

Kutupalong RC*

410

432

Camp 22

404

Camp 12

Male

439

Female

4,592

Male

5,798

Female

1,555

Male

1,468

Female

2,922

Male

2,719

Female

2,147

Male

2,011

Female

below 1

below 1

463

Adult

Adult

male

527

Total Individuals

Total Families

60+ Elderly

60+ Elderly

18–59

18–59

12–17 Children

12–17 Children

5–11 Children

5–11 Children

1–4

Children

1–4

Children

Infant

Infant

female

(Cont’d)

Camp 6

Camp

Table A9.1

31

Camp 2W

Camp 5

16

1,881

Camp 18

3,757

4

Camp 11

Nayapara RC*

14

Camp 14

43

31

Camp 4

3,318

35

Camp 8W

Camp 2E

24

Camp 10

Camp 8E

2,158

Camp 24

77

Camp 9

52

Camp 1E

21

28

Camp 1W

108

85

Camp 26

Camp 7

15

Camp 3

12

129

8,615

59

20,374

14,056

171

15

55

126

152

96

10,459

317

468

99

236

107

412

60

50

Individuals

Families

Camp 13

Total

Total

Camp

Camp 15

Before 09 Oct 2016

Arrival Period

Appendix 10

558

1,407

195

248

1,687

871

1,081

601

343

728

804

523

1,680

1,109

943

1,646

1,043

827

784

765

Families

2,349

6,076

809

972

7,064

3,745

4,797

2,786

1,409

3,236

3,342

2,210

6,873

4,791

4,164

7,095

4,501

3,675

3,434

3,390

Individuals

Total

5,436

2,596

6,279

1,668

2,208

6,264

6,021

6,392

7,293

6,625

6,802

5,063

6,883

8,093

8,194

7,592

8,369

8,045

8,918

10,392

Families

Total

22,569

11,003

25,715

5,766

8,737

27,029

26,490

28,905

29,664

28,815

29,250

20,818

29,791

33,939

35,199

33,071

36,295

35,038

37,977

45,967

Individuals

Total

2017

Total

25 Aug 2017–31 Dec

2017

21

69

37

36

73

29

19

42

275

76

21

16

36

93

31

34

29

436

76

13

Families

Total

Total

78

232

135

106

239

113

73

165

1,143

296

81

52

123

350

130

122

95

1,889

308

51

Individuals

2018

01 Jan 2018–31 Dec

Population figures by period of arrival

09 Oct 2016–24 Aug

Table A10.1

1

12

13

–

6

1

2

–

6

1

1

–

6

8

8

5

1

–

7

2

Families

Total

Total

5

50

63

–

22

4

6

–

24

5

4

–

22

29

32

21

3

–

39

10

Individuals

Date

01 Feb 2019–Current Total

6,047

5,965

6,540

5,709

7,292

7,208

7,127

7,049

7,948

7,465

7,652

7,760

8,682

9,411

9,197

9,329

9,470

9,393

9,800

11,184

Families

Total

(Cont’d)

25,130

25,976

26,781

27,218

30,118

31,062

31,381

31,911

32,366

32,504

32,773

33,539

37,126

39,577

39,624

40,545

41,001

41,014

41,818

49,468

Individuals

10

9

5

Camp 22

Camp 16

Camp 19

74,222

421

328

236

260

85

1,155

57

142

153

14,907

15

46

54

49

258

21,877

87

88

135

117

252

287

143

275

216

155

400

282

207

264

1,126

Families

94,625

357

393

597

490

1,122

1,222

617

1,300

880

609

1,801

1,248

998

1,199

5,074

Individuals

Total

168,418

823

725

1,170

1,294

1,870

2,106

2,729

2,698

2,632

541

4,217

4,570

4,355

4,937

4,618

Families

Total

723,363

3,538

3,016

4,732

5,384

8,271

8,517

11,125

12,142

10,949

2,159

18,160

20,410

21,103

22,204

19,615

Individuals

Total

2017

2017

Total

25 Aug 2017–31 Dec

09 Oct 2016–24 Aug

4,086

177

224

130

325

4

16

129

148

1,136

18

201

19

15

59

23

Families

Total

Total

16,765

717

871

547

1,312

19

69

470

678

4,967

59

817

84

61

231

82

Individuals

2018

01 Jan 2018–31 Dec

210

110

4

–

–

–

–

3

–

1

1

3

–

–

7

1

Families

Total

Total

886

468

22

–

–

–

–

8

–

3

3

10

–

–

31

2

Individuals

Date

01 Feb 2019–Current Total

209,869

1,299

1,119

1,495

1,794

2,143

2,661

3,017

3,150

4,020

3,548

4,826

4,880

4,587

5,276

5,826

Families

Total

909,861

5,501

4,630

6,112

7,446

9,497

10,963

12,277

14,262

16,952

17,737

20,803

21,788

22,216

23,714

25,031

Individuals

Notes:*Kutupalong refugee camp includes 14,277 registered refugees of 2,617 families and Nayapara refugee camp includes 19,895 registered refugees of 3,704 families. **This represents refugees residing outside formal camp boundaries. Source: UNHCR.

102

15,278

Grand Total

58

Camp 20

No camp**

17

Camp 25

60

252

Camp 23

78

13

Camp 21

Camp 20 Extension

29

Camp 27

Camp 4 Extension

35

Camp 17

2,833

9

Kutupalong RC*

58

Individuals

Families

Camp 12

Total

Total

Camp

Camp 6

Before 09 Oct 2016

(Cont’d)

Arrival Period

Table A10.1

165

Camp 1W

161

152

168

154

Camp 11

Camp 5

Camp 8E

Camp 18

165

Camp 10

Camp 2E

119

131

Camp 9

242

244

Camp 13

Camp 4

175

Nayapara RC

203

225

Camp 7

176

174

Camp 1E

Camp 24

234

Camp 15

Camp 3

171

63

60

67

54

76

72

66

88

73

63

32

78

43

30

46

60

53

219

264

245

261

327

392

398

199

301

373

402

312

577

379

553

354

279

298

289

229

250

354

349

402

296

284

369

449

394

155

384

464

589

356

160

157

169

202

228

223

262

207

121

288

215

207

49

258

326

199

114

221

233

291

305

390

512

499

295

256

321

443

346

1,180

476

490

460

216

60

67

81

54

91

96

107

101

43

65

66

63

36

103

56

63

81

1,099

1,058

1,130

1,221

1,064

990

1,049

1,508

1,642

1,427

1,270

1,423

1,166

1,305

1,165

1,607

2,174

(Cont’d)

1,973

1,977

2,082

2,275

2,282

2,416

2,544

2,586

2,639

2,684

2,778

2,805

2,778

2,891

2,947

3,215

3,226

Needs

with Specific Parent

with Infants

Medical Condition

at Risk with

at Risk

Person With

Children

Children Children

Parents

Older Person

Older Person

with a Disability

Families with People

Single Female

Single Male

Families with People with Serious

Families with

Families with

Families

Families With

Unaccompanied

Population figures by specific needs

Separated

Table A11.1

Families with

Camp 26

Camp

Appendix 11

67

38

32

22

22

19

Camp 21

Camp 25

Camp 20

Camp 4 Extension

Camp 20 Extension

No camp

Source: UNHCR.

4,388

50

Camp 23

Total

55

Camp 27

124

Camp 19

70

81

Camp 12

Camp 22

52

Kutupalong RC

92

107

Camp 8W

106

108

Camp 2W

Camp 17

165

Camp 6

Camp 16

119

1,429

6

12

14

15

23

24

12

13

18

21

22

33

33

15

37

18

44

45

8,461

29

41

58

72

75

110

72

99

159

142

167

190

144

372

213

288

210

185

8,524

40

32

46

59

83

96

97

89

156

150

201

220

203

96

248

241

242

314

4,650

12

22

39

43

33

32

43

35

77

80

81

82

102

36

165

115

130

138

10,076

22

27

47

73

87

105

69

63

154

123

159

117

138

787

281

271

314

305

1,750

7

10

16

17

18

35

11

21

16

43

35

48

33

6

56

59

43

43

32,983

142

119

194

289

493

513

752

729

580

697

704

765

767

548

781

810

836

966

64,743

331

289

413

546

754

902

1,020

1,026

1,123

1,242

1,339

1,427

1,461

1,555

1,699

1,764

1,845

1,909

Needs

with Specific

Parent

with Infants

Medical Condition

at Risk with

at Risk

Person With

Children

Children Children

Parents

Older Person

Older Person

with a

Separated Disability

Families with People

Single Female

Single Male

Families with People with Serious

Families with

Families with

Families

Families With

Unaccompanied

Families with

(Cont’d)

Camp 14

Camp

Table A11.1

Appendices

221

Appendix 12 Table A12.1 Year 2006 Total 2007

Total 2008

Total 2009

Total 2010

Total Grand Total

Resettlement of Myanmar refugees from Bangladesh, 2006–10 Destination Canada Canada New Zealand United Kingdom Australia Canada Ireland New Zealand Norway Sweden United Kingdom United States Australia Canada Ireland New Zealand United Kingdom United States Australia Canada New Zealand United Kingdom United States

Submissions 28 28 204 54 121 379 151 212 112 11 12 19

Departures 13 13 75

75 76 23 4 19 34

32 549 120 3 12 112 302 549 108

112 272 492 1,997

156 108 122 82 27 109 17 465 134 17 6 47 7 211 920

Source: Esther Kiragu, Angela Li Rosi, and Tim Morris, States of Denial: A Review of UNHCR’s Response to the Protracted Situation of Stateless Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh (Bangladesh/Myanmar: UN High Commissioner for Refugees [UNHCR], 2011), accessed 3 November 2017, http://www.refworld.org/docid/5142eb7a2.html.

222

Appendices

Appendix 13 Table A13.1 Financial Year 2005–6 2006–7 2007–8 2008–9 2009–10 2010–11 2011–12 2012–13

Bilateral trade between Bangladesh and Myanmar from financial year 2005–6 to 2012–13 Imports from Myanmar

Export to Myanmar

(in Millions U$$) 66.64 60.00 57.85 66.60 57.00 166.9 65.25 84.00

(in Millions U$$) 5.19 6.31 9.58 9.17 10.24 9.00 13.45 13.67

Source: Ministry of Trade and Commerce and Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2013, Bangladesh government, cited in Jashim Uddin, ‘Prospects for Attaining New Height in Bangladesh–Myanmar Relations: Bangladesh Perspectives,’ Bangladesh International Institute for Strategic Studies Journal 35, no. 1 (2014): 12.

Appendices

223

Appendix 14 Table A14.1 Year 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 Total

Year-wise repatriation of Rohingya refugees Number of refugees 5,962 46,129 82,753 61,504 23,045 10,073 106 1,128 1,323 283 760 3,231 210 92 236,599

Source: UNHCR website and Kutupalong Information Center in Ukhia.

224

Appendices

Appendix 15 Table A15.1

Kings of Arakan who had two names (Buddhist and Muslim)

Sl. 1.

Name of kings Min Saw Mum or

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

Narameikhla Naranu or Min Khari Basawpyu Min Dawlya Basawnyo Yanaung Salingathu Minyaza Kasabadi Mim Saw O Thatasa Min Khaung Raza Min Bin Min Dikha Min Palaung Minyazagyi Min Khamaung Thiri Thudamma

Reigning period 1430–4 1434–59 1459–82 1482–92 1492–4 1494 1494–1501 1501–13 1513–15 1515 1515–21 1521–31 1531–53 1553–5 1571–93 1593–1612 1612–22 1622–38

Muslim names Sulaiman Shah or Sawmum Shah Ali Shah or Aki Khan Kalima Shah Mu-Khu-Shah Muhammad Shah Nuri Shah Shiek Abddullah Shah Ilayas Shah-1 Ilayas Shah-11 Jallal Shah Ali Shah El-Shah Azad Zabuk Shah Daud Khan Sikandar Shah Salim Shah-1 Husain Shah Salim Shah-11

Source: Mahfuzur Rahman Akhanda, The History of Muslims in Arakan (in Bengali) (Dhaka-Chittagong: Bangladesh Co-operative Book Society, 2013), 255; Karim, The Rohingyas, 30; M.S. Colls and Bu Shan Shwe, ‘Arakan’s Place in the Civilization of the Bay: A Study of the Coinage and Foreign Relations,’ in The Rohingyas of Arakan: History and Heritage, edited by Mohibullah Siddiquee, 62–6 (Chittagong: Ali Publishing House, 2014).

Glossary

Balukhali bangsha bari beyai

bhai Bormaya Borma burqa

Cherang ghor Gonda Gorom haak hafezi ichha januar jaat/jatee

The name of a refugee camp in Ukhia Lineage Home The relation between the bride’s father and the bridegroom’s father in the Chittagonian region. It is quite often known as a very genial relation Brother People from Burma or the people who have migrated from Burma Burma/Myanmar Burqa is a particular kind of over-cloth that Muslim women usually wear for maintaining purdah, a principle of Islamic dress code Household details form House It means hatchery, which is used for fish production, cultivation, rearing, and marketing Heat Rights Master of the Quran who can recite it by heart from the beginning to the end Desire Animals Nation

226

Glossary

jibon jummah Kamanchi kani khalifa kopal kular Kutupalong Leda Magrib majhi manush maulavi Mogh moktob mulisas mulluk niamot nioti o-manush panta-vat parishad Pasan Para purdah Samaj

Taal upazila Vasan Para vumi-putra

Life Friday prayer A category of Muslims living in Myanmar A traditional scale of land measurement King in Islamic Saltanat Fate Foreigner The name of a refugee camp in Ukhia The name of a makeshift camp for Rohingya refugees A prayer that Muslims say at sunset The leader of a Rohingya refugee camp Human being The imam of a mosque Name given to Rakhine Buddhists by the Rohingyas School for Islamic education, like a madrasa Helpful person State Blessing Destiny Bad people who are unlike a human being Water-rice Council Cruel village Veil A kind of social organization that works as an agency of social control and exercises an informal judicial system in rural Bangladesh. The name of a makeshift camp for Rohingya refugees Sub-district Floating village Son of the soil

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Index

Agamben, Giorgio, 84, 170 Akhanda, Mahfuzur Rahman, 9 Alaol, 7, 23n44 Amnesty International (AI), 19 anti-Rohingya sentiments, 86–7, 197 Arakanese Muslim refugees, 45 Arakan kings, 224 Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), 20n1 Arakan state, 7, 29, 44, 114, 174 emergence of Islam in, 31 Muslim settlement in, 32–3 state population by township, 2010, 213 villages and rivers, 208 Arendt, Hannah, 83, 91 Asad, Talal, 120 asylum seekers, 3, 22n19 Balukhali, 20n4, 137 Bamars, 39–40, 113, 214 Bangladesh cases of Rohingyas in, 152–4 classic representation of state in, 120–4 law enforcement agencies, 120

local government, 127 state formation and nation building, 125 stateless status of Rohingyas in, 124–5 Bangladeshi perspectives on Rohingyas, 7–8, 65–8, 77n1, 85–102, 114–15, 124 as a burden, 86, 135–6 damages to local ecology, 98–100 forced repatriation, 87 interethnic marriages, 94–7 militant activities, 100–2 relationship with locals, 92–3, 125–6 relation with state, 85–92, 127–9 repatriation process, 88 resource sharing, 93–4 threat of the ‘Other’, 94–7 unemployment, 97–8 Bangladesh–Myanmar bilateral relations, 11 Bangladesh Population Census 2011, 77n2 bare life, 4, 18, 84, 123, 129, 136, 163, 168, 170, 188

Index 245

Barth, Fredrik, 27–8, 38 Bengal–Arakan relations, 8 Bengalis–Rohingyas violent clashes, 15, 25n75 human rights violations, 74, 115 interethnic marriages, 94–7 narratives, 72–5 principal causes, 73–4, 76, 93 bio-politics, 48, 111 blame game, 65–6 Bodawpaya, King, 45 Brass, Paul, 125 Buchanan, Francis, 30 Building Recourses Across Community (BRAC), 90 Burma/Myanmar, 17–19, 39–44 armed rebellion, 1948, 45 dealing with Rohingyas, 3–4 democratization process, 200–1 dominant class of, 40 human rights violations, 79n14, 103 Myanmar Citizenship Law, 45–6, 50n7 politics of inclusion and exclusion, 46–7 process of state formation and nation building in, 45–6 relationship with Bangladesh, 102–3 state narratives about Rohingyas, 34–5 vulnerabilities of Rohingya lives in, 20n1, 111–13, 142–9, 156–64 Butler, Judith, 112 camp people, 3 Chittagonian people, 71 Chowdhury, Mohammad Ali, 8 citizenship, 17, 83, 91, 110, 174 as a legal status, 7

slippery, 84, 92 theories of, 6 classic representation of state, 120–4 Compressed Natural Gas scooters, 20n2 Cox’s Bazar, 13, 15, 38, 63, 71, 85 Crabtree, Kristy, 10, 86 cultural pluralism, 200 Das, Veena, 120 earliest migrants, 40 Elliot, Alice, 116 environmental impact of Rohingya influx, 98–100, 107n41 ethnic boundary, 28, 38, 50n4 cleaning, 13, 19, 113, 171–2 identity formation, 28, 38 ethnicity of Rohingya, 8, 16, 29, 37–44 Barth’s theoretical positioning, 38–9 communal riots between Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingyas, 45 ethnic and linguistic difference from Bengalis, 38 ethnic composition, 44–9 as illegal Bengali migrants, 41–4 linguistic culture, 38–9 as people of the soil of Burma/ Myanmar, 41 rights and entitlements, 38 sociocultural variables, 38 ethnographic research, 137 European Union (EU), 19 Fanon, Franz, 2 ‘fate’ and ‘destiny’, idea of, 115–18 fate of Rohingyas, 115–18 Ferguson, James, 119

246

Index

Fineman, Martha, 112 Fitch, Relph, 29 forced migrants, 3 forcibly displaced Myanmar nationals (FDMN), 4, 21n18, 63, 111, 118 Foucault, Michel, 48, 111 Frazer, James, 137 Gabiam, Nell, 65 gender issue, 10 genocide, 11 geontologies, 48 Gibney, Matthew, 91 Green, Penny, 112 Gupta, Akhil, 119–20 Hanafi, Hazrat Mohammad Bin, 31 Haque, Mahfuzul, 7 hosting and hurting of refugees, 17, 59–65 discourse of, 60–5, 71–7 treatment of host community as hurting, 71–7 human rights, anthropology of, 6 Human Rights Now, 79n14 human rights violations, 7, 49, 71, 74, 79n14, 103, 115, 118, 189 Human Rights Watch (HRW), 19 illegal bodies, 170 indigenous people, defining and identifying, 39 parameter for identification, 40 interethnic marriages, 94–7 International Labour Organization (ILO), 19 International Organization for Migration (IOM), 2, 19, 20n7 Karbala, Battle of, 31, 52n27 Karim, Abdul, 7

Kheyapari, Queen, 31 Kutupalong, 15, 20n3, 21, 47, 63, 87, 137 Lewa, Chris, 10, 87 living conditionality, 18 local state, dimensions of, 120 Lorey, Isabell, 113 majoritarian statehood, 113 marriages by elopement, 61, 94–7 family acceptance and social recognition of Rohingya as spouse, 61 narratives, 62–3 Matias, Goncalo, 189 Menin, Laura, 116 Mia, Hasan, 117 migration trends and patterns, 113–15 life after, 196–8 reasons for Rohingyan migration to Bangladesh, 114 militant activities of Rohingyas, 100–2 Moghs, 2, 20n8, 141–2, 145, 148–9, 151–2, 154–5, 158, 161–2, 184–8 Mohibullah, 29 Moon, Mun Shaw (Normikhla), King, 32 Morgan, Lewis Henry, 136 Mountz, Alison, 59 Muslims ‘Others,’ 12, 94–7 Myanmar Citizenship Law, 45–6, 50n7, 118, 164, 174, 180 Ne Win, General, 45–6 non-citizens/non-citizenship/ statelessness, 3–7, 83–4, 110, 168, 188–9 lives of, 84 non-governmental organizations (NGOs), 10

Index 247

Operation Clean and Beautiful Nation, 118 Operation Dragon, 46 Operation Nagamin, 114, 118 Palestinian refugees, in Syria, 65 Palmer, Victoria, 10 people of the soil, 40–4 Phayre, A.P., 32 Phiri, Prytz, 89 Pittaway, Eileen, 10 Poole, Deborah, 120 Povinelli, Elizabeth, 48 distinction between ‘lives’ and ‘non-lives’, 57n104 power relations, 119–20 precarious life, 112 Rahman, Utpala, 10 Rakhine Buddhists, 45 Rakhine State, 1–2, 11–12, 16, 29, 43–4, 49, 87, 201 cases of Rohingyas in, 138–42, 150–2, 164 Ramu incidents, 100, 107n43 Rangoon University, 42 Rangoon University Arakan Muslims Association, 42 Rangoon University Central Students’ Union, 41–2 Rashiduddin, 29 Razzak, Abdur, 7 reciprocal relations, 66–8 refugee camps, 15, 126 health and disease in, 89–90 living conditions, 89 rehabilitation of refugees, 13, 60, 103 relief programmes for Rohingyas, 10 repatriation of Rohingya refugees, 10, 19, 47, 59, 85–8, 91, 99, 101, 103, 105n15, 177–81, 197–8, 200, 203

Rohang, 29–30 Rohingya language, 114 Rohingya organizations, 207 Rohingya refugees, 78n9, 104n9–10 access to healthcare system and food, 63–4 in Bangladesh. See Bangladeshi perspectives on Rohingyas crisis, 8–9, 46–7, 58–9 future of, 203–4 historical and political dimensions of, 12 human rights violations, 60, 71–7, 79n14 impact on local society, 66, 72–6 issue of unregistered refugees, 47–8 marriages, 61–3 naming and shaming of, 98 narratives on, 66–8 relationship between host society and refugees, 64–5, 68–71, 92–3, 198–9 as security issue, 10 short-term and long-term consequences, 199–200 Rohingyas ancestry, 30 of Arakan, 30, 41, 43 in Bangladesh, 47 criminal activities and crime rate, 64, 66, 71–2, 121 ethnography, 4 etymology, 29–30, 49n2 historical background, 30–5 history of political representation, 43–4 identity, 27 politics of discrimination and atrocities, 35–7, 48 structural exclusions of, 40

248

Index

Rohingya Solidarity Organization (RSO), 109n53 Rosaing, 29–30 Rowshang, 29–30 Sandia, Mohathaing, 32 Scott, James, 119 self-settled Rohingyas, 48 Shah, Sultan Gias Uddin Azam, 32 Shah, Sultan Jalal Uddin Mohammad, 32 Sharma, Aradhana, 119 Shehabuddin, Elora, 61 Siddiquee, Mohibullah, 9 slippery citizenship, 84, 92 social integration of Rohingya refugees, 8, 16–17, 58, 70, 73, 77, 81n39, 86, 92, 131n11, 204 ‘social organisation of cultural differences’, 27–8 state crime, idea of, 112 stateless people, 45, 49, 70, 83–86, 101–102, 110–11, 117–18, 168, 170, 202. See also Bangladeshi perspectives on Rohingyas; non-citizens/non-citizenship/ statelessness as illegal human bodies or animals, 18 international conventions on, 83 vulnerability of, 4, 17 stateness, notions of, 124–6 subhuman, notion of, 14, 18–19, 84, 91, 104, 124, 167–8, 201–3 atrocious living conditions, 169–170 concept of ‘legal bodies’ and ‘illegal objects’, 170 ethnic cleansing and, 171–2 features of, 6

free license to be killed, raped, and burnt, 171 homeless, 170–1 life, 6 narratives, 181–8 notion of, 4–5 Suu Kyi, 201 Tylor, E.B., 136 Ullah, A.K.M. Ahsan, 10 Ullah, Habib, 9 unilinear nationhood, 113 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 2, 47, 64, 111 United Nations International Children’s Education Fund (UNICEF), 19 United Nations (UN), 19, 85, 103, 180, 200 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 83, 110, 129 unregistered Rohingyas, 15, 47, 57n98, 63, 67, 85, 87, 89–91, 98, 103, 105n15, 121 vulnerabilities of Rohingya lives, 3, 11, 110, 135–6, 172–5 atrocious living conditions, 113 case narratives, 138–65, 175–8 cases of sexual violence and rape, 91–2 ‘fate’ and ‘destiny,’ idea of, 115–18 Lailee’s narrative, experiences, and present conditions, 2 in Myanmar, 111–13 Wahra, Gawher Nayeem, 10 Walton-Roberts, Margaret, 84, 92 Ward, Tony, 112

About the Author

Nasir Uddin is a cultural anthropologist and professor of anthropology at the University of Chittagong, Bangladesh. Uddin studied and carried out research at the University of Oxford (UK), SOAS at the University of London (UK), the London School of Economics (LSE) at the University of London (UK), Heidelberg University (Germany), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (The Netherlands), Ruhr-University Bochum (Germany), Delhi School of Economics at the University of Delhi (India), the University of Hull (UK), Kyoto University (Japan), and the University of Dhaka (Bangladesh). He has been presented with and earned many prestigious awards and fellowships including the Japanese MEXT Scholarship, British Academy visiting scholarship, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation fellowship, visiting scholarship at LSE, and visiting fellowship at the University of Oxford. His research interests include refugees, statelessness, and citizenship; deterritoriality of identity and transborder movements; indigeneity and identity politics; notions of power and the state in everyday life; borderlands between Bangladesh and Myanmar as well as Bangladesh and India; the Rohingyas; the Chittagong Hill Tracts; and South Asia in general. He has edited books including Life in Peace and Conflict: Indigeneity and State in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (2017),  Indigeneity on the Move: Varying Manifestations of a Contested Concept (2017 [co-edited with Eva Gerharz and Pradeep Chakkarath]), and Deterritorialised Identity and Transborder Movement in South Asia (2019 [co-edited with Nasreen Chowdhory]).