Voices of the Rohingya People: A Case of Genocide, Ethnocide and 'Subhuman' Life 3030908151, 9783030908157

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Voices of the Rohingya People A Case of Genocide, Ethnocide and ‘Subhuman’ Life

Nasir Uddin

Voices of the Rohingya People

Nasir Uddin

Voices of the Rohingya People A Case of Genocide, Ethnocide and ‘Subhuman’ Life

Nasir Uddin Department of Anthropology University of Chittagong Chittagong, Bangladesh

ISBN 978-3-030-90815-7    ISBN 978-3-030-90816-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90816-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Rehman Asad / Alamy Stock Photo. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

The Rohingya Genocide survivors of 2017

Preface

The book holds plenty of authentic testimonies of genocide, ethnocide and domicide against Rohingya people perpetrated by the Myanmar security forces in 2017. The testimonies were recorded in the form of first-hand narratives and the voice of first-hand eyewitnesses. Most narrators went through unprecedented atrocities and unimaginable brutalities in the genocidal situation in the Rakhine state in Myanmar. Soon after the massive influx started in August 2017, the borderlands between Bangladesh and Myanmar appeared as a space of severe humanitarian crisis in the national and international media outlets as well as before the international community. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya people fled the ‘life-threatening’ atrocious situation in the Rakhine state and crossed the border just to ‘save their lives.’ Most Rohingya people became wounded, severely injured, and extremely frightened while crossing the border because they survived a deadly genocidal attack in the Rakhine state. A majority of them were seriously traumatized because they witnessed their family members being mercilessly killed and their houses being burnt down into ashes in front of their eyes. Many girls and women were raped, many of them were gang-raped, by the Myanmar security forces and some vigilantes. Soon after they arrived in Bangladesh, I with my ten-member research team started recording their first-hand experience in the form of oral narratives and very reflexive discussion. The vii

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records were done in September and October 2017 while many of them were settled in Balukhali and Kuptupalong Rohingya refugee camps. We altogether recorded more than 500 traumatized narratives of the Rohingya genocide survivors. The narratives are full of their experience of witnessing killing, raping, burning, torturing, and vandalizing their houses and properties. All narratives were recorded in the Rohingya language and later translated into English in their voices. This book presents a good number of their voices related to genocide, ethnocide, domicide, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity executed against the Rohingya civilians in the Rakhine state in 2017. I have presented many cases here with a detailed statement of the first-­ hand eyewitnesses, but in most cases, I have used pseudonyms to maintain anonymity as a fundamental principle of ethnographic research and writing ethnography. However, the narratives presented here have been kept as it was recorded in the voices of the Rohingya victims. Also, the information of their residence in Rakhine has been kept intact and their location in Bangladesh has not been altered. Many words in Rohingya narratives have been used in their original forms because the Rohingya use these words time and again and any alteration could change the depth, originality and validity of their narratives. For example, the Rohingya people call Myanmar Borma and hence I kept Borma instead of Myanmar. I have also used plenty of Rohingya words while presenting their narratives, but all local words have been written in italic forms with their English meaning in the bracket. It is also mentionable here that all Rohingya narratives have been presented in the form of first-person narratives to retain their originality and authenticity. There have been many books written on the Rohingya refugees and the Rohingya crisis but there is hardly any book where the vivid and lucid narratives of the Rohingya genocide survivors have been recorded and presented in their voices. This book fills up such an academic vacuum with the first-hand narratives of the Rohingya genocide survivors which unfold the authentic and valid testimonies of genocide, ethnocide, ethnic cleansing, violence against women and girls, domicide, and crimes against humanity. Chittagong, Bangladesh

Nasir Uddin

Acknowledgements

Writing a book always holds a plan, and needs patience, hard work, intensive readings, collecting plenty of information, articulation of information, interpretation of data, gathering field-level experience, translation of experience, contextualization, arguments and analysis. At the same time, the writing of a book receives help, support, co-operation, guidance, sacrifice and care from many categories of people including research informants, friends, fellows, students, teachers, co-researchers, colleagues, well-wishers, reviewers, consulting editors, publication personnel, relatives and family members. It is always a long journey where many people get involved in the making from starting to end. The book likewise owes debts to many people associated with one’s personal, professional and academic settings. First of all, I express my deep gratitude to those Rohingya genocide survivors who were kind enough to give ample time, share their atrocious experiences, provide brutal evidence and constant tears with me during the fieldwork in the Rohingya refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar. It was a very challenging task for me to record their narratives which were full of pain, sorrows, atrocity and brutality. As a researcher, I was aware to not be emotionally loaded even though it was difficult to record their terrible experiences without feeling emotion. However, I tried my level best to make an intelligent balance between ‘emotion’ and ‘profession’ though ix

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I uphold a strong sense of commitment to the people I study in the broader spectrum of humanity and global justice. I must give credit to my research assistants, namely Shakhawat Hossain, Shakila Jahan, Mishu, Prosenjit Das, Auna Sarbottoma, Ala Uddin Bokhary, Sumita Barua and Sujon Barua who helped me record vivid and fresh narratives of the Rohingya genocide survivors who crossed the border in August and September 2017. With the help of my research assistants, I recorded more than 500 traumatized narratives in the Rohingya language which were later translated into English. I would like to acknowledge the contribution of my colleagues at the University of Chittagong, Professor S. M. Monriul Hassan (Department of Sociology), Professor Dr. Abdullah Al Faruk (Department of Law), Professor Dr. Jamal Uddin (Department of Finance), Professor Dr. Shyamol Ranjan Chakrabarty (Department of Physics), Professor Dr. Alak Paul (Department of Geography & Environmental Studies), Professor Dr. Khairul Islam (Department of Computer Science and Engineering) and Professor Dr. Nazmul Islam Khan (Department of Sociology) who extended their support and encouragement all the way. I express my sincere thanks to the brilliant editorial team and wonderful production personnel of Palgrave Macmillan for their tremendous efforts and top level professional input which have made this book on par with international standards. Finally, I always acknowledge my infinite debt to my partner, Mrs Farzana Ahmed, who always takes the burden of my social and family responsibilities so that I can invest my full time in academic and professional activities. Nasir Uddin Department of Anthropology University of Chittagong Date: 30.01.2022

Contents

1 The Voices of Rohingyas: Contexts and Settings  1 1.1 Beginning   1 1.2 Voices of the Rohingyas and Others’ Voices on Their Behalf!   4 1.3 Human Geography of the Rohingya People   6 1.4 The Political History of Rohingya Displacement   8 1.5 Theoretical Contextualization  13 1.6 Structure of the Book and Chapter Overview  19 1.7 Conclusion  24 2 Research on Rohingya Refugees: Methodological Challenges and Textual Inadequacy 27 2.1 Introduction  27 2.2 Rohingya People in Texts: Contestations in the Context  29 2.3 Rohingya Research: Methodological Challenges  48 2.4 Conclusion  51

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3 Rohingya Experience of Atrocity: A Case of Genocide and the Crimes Against Humanity 53 3.1 Introduction  53 3.2 Who Are the Rohingyas?  55 3.3 ‘Seek and Hide’ of History: The Politics of Rohingya Existence  63 3.4 Citizenship, Statelessness, and Refugeehood  67 3.5 Evidence of Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing  71 3.6 Conclusion  76 4 The State, Vulnerability, and Uncertainty: The Rohingyas in Myanmar and Bangladesh 79 4.1 Introduction  79 4.2 Rohingyas, Identity, and the Genesis of Crisis  83 4.3 The State Accelerates ‘Transborder Movement’  88 4.4 The State Produces Vulnerability  92 4.5 The State Reproduces Vulnerability  94 4.6 Vulnerability Is Reproduced as the ‘Local State’ Matters 99 4.7 Conclusion 102 5 Erasing the Rohingya: Ethnocide, Domicide, and Ethnic Cleansing105 5.1 Introduction 105 5.2 Ethnocide: The Murder of a Culture 107 5.3 Ethnic Cleansing: The Cleaning of an Ethnic Community109 5.4 Domicide: The Murder of Home 111 5.5 Conclusion 126 6 Violence Against Women and Girls: Narratives of the Rohingya Rape Survivors129 6.1 Introduction 129 6.2 Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) 132 6.3 Conclusion 149

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7 The Intensity of Brutality: Dealing as if the Rohingyas are ‘Subhuman’151 7.1 Introduction 151 7.2 Theory of ‘Subhuman’ Life 154 7.3 Conclusion 171 8 Conclusion: The Rohingya in the Transition—Atrocious Past, Critical Present, and an Uncertain Future173 8.1 Introduction 173 8.2 The Future of Rohingya in Bangladesh 175 8.3 The Future of Repatriation 176 8.4 Trial of Myanmar for Committing Genocide 177 8.5 The Issue of Bhasan Char and the Discourse of Relocation 178 8.6 The Changing Public Discourse About Rohingya Presence180 8.7 Growing Infights and Increasing Cases of Killing in the Rohingya Camps 181 8.8 Conclusion 182

Glossary185 Bibliography187 Index201

Abbreviations

ADAB AFD ARSA ASEAN BBC BGB BRAC CA CERD CEDAW

Association of Development Agencies Bangladesh Armed Forces Division Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army Association for Southeast Asian Nations British Broadcasting Corporation Border Guard Bangladesh Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee Citizenship Act Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women CIC Camp-in-Charge CRC Convention on the Rights of the Child CSO Civil Society Organization CwC Communicating with communities DC Deputy commissioner DG Director general DSS Department of Social Services EU European Union FDMN Forcibly Displaced Myanmar Nationals FGD Focus group discussion GBV Gender-based violence

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GDP GoB GoM HRW ICC ICCPR ICDDR,B

Growth domestic product Government of Bangladesh Government of Myanmar Human Rights Watch International Criminal Court International Convention on Civil and Political Rights International Centre for Diarrheal Disease Research, Bangladesh ICESCR International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights ICJ International Court of Justice ICU Intensive care unit IDPs Internally displaced persons INGO International non-governmental organization IOM International Organization for Migration IPD Immigration and Population Department JMB Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh JRP Joint Response Plan LeT Lashkar-e-Taiba LPG Liquid petroleum gas MoDMR Ministry of Disaster Management and Relief MoFA Ministry of Foreign Affairs MoHA Ministry of Home Affairs MoHFW Ministry of Health and Family Welfare MoPME Ministry of Primary and Mass Education MSF Medecins Sans Frontiers MSNA Multi-Sector Needs Assessment NGO Non-governmental organization NLD National League for Democracy RRRC Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commissioner SAARC South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation SSC Secondary School Certificate UDHR Universal Declaration of Human Rights UNDP United Nations Development Programme UNFPA United Nations Population Fund UNHCR United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees UNHRC United Nations Human Rights Council UNICEF United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund

 Abbreviations 

UNSC UNO WB WFP WHO

United Nations Security Council Upazila Nirbahi Officer World Bank World Food Programme World Health Organization

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1 The Voices of Rohingyas: Contexts and Settings

1.1 Beginning Hundreds of people in the dread of being killed with wet, scanty, and torn clothes rushed to the Naf River1 to cross the border from Myanmar to Bangladesh. Many of them were running with extreme panic in the water, while some were holding infants on back and shoulder like ‘struggling for existence’.2 Some were carrying baskets full of babies and wounded dear ones, while others were bearing old fathers or mothers on their back. Some were holding remaining belongings wrapped with bed sheet or lungi,3 while others were severely wounded crawling on the  Naf River is a transboundary river marking the border of Bangladesh and Myanmar. It is an elongated estuary in the extreme south-east of Cox’s Bazar district dividing the district from Arakan (Myanmar). It raises in the Arakan hills on the south-eastern borders of the district and falls into the Bay of Bengal. See for detail, Banglapedia (National Encyclopaedia of Bangladesh), Naf River, Available at: http://en.banglapedia.org/index.php/Naf_River (Accessed on January 20, 2021). 2  ‘Struggle for existence’ is a Darwinian term which is widely used to present people in struggle for survival. The idea came from Darwin’s famous book ‘The Origins of Species’. See Darwin, Charles (1859). 3  The Lungi is a type of cloth like sarong which usually men wear as substitute of trousers and pant. It is a big tube-shaped or drum-shaped piece of cloth knotted at the waist and it is a very popular public and private costume in Myanmar. It is a kind of lower garment or a men’s skirt to wrap the 1

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ground. Some were bleeding as seriously injured, while others were so tired after walking for days that they couldn’t move even an inch. Some pregnant women were fast-breathing due to walking a long way, and some of them were lying down on co-walkers’ lap. Some were lying down in the knee-high water, while others just fell in death in the middle of Naf River due to over-bleeding for losing their hands or legs or some parts of the body by either bullet or landmine. It was an unbearable scenario and unprecedented humanitarian crisis the border of Bangladesh and Myanmar witnessed in August–September 2017. I was watching this terrible episode of a humanitarian crisis on the 27th, 28th, and 29th of August 2017, while hundreds of thousands of Rohingya were fleeing the Rakhine state due to the genocidal attack executed by Myanmar security forces and some vigilantes. The Rohingya influx started on the 25th of August 2017 when I was in Chittagong and quickly moved to Cox’s Bazar. I was standing on the bank of the Naf River on the Teknaf side and watching it with intolerable pain and sadness on and after the 27th, 28th, and 29th of August 2017. The influx continued until mid-September, and afterwards, the flow got to slow down. More than 750,000 Rohingya crossed the border during this time and took refuge in Ukhia and Teknaf, two south-eastern sub-districts of Bangladesh. It was a massive influx I saw in my lifetime yet I watched the influx in 1991–1992, 2012, and 2016. This time, the intensity of brutality was unprecedented and hence the majority of the newly arrived Rohingyas were extremely traumatized as they saw merciless killing around them, experienced random rape and ganged rape, witnessed burning many of their dear and near ones alive, and watched torching their houses and properties in front of their eyes. I recorded around 500 traumatized narratives from among these Rohingyas which hold great testimonies of genocide, ethnocide, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, domicide, and the severity of atrocity that took place following clearance operation perpetrated by the Myanmar military in collaboration with some Buddhist fundamentalists and some Bamar ethnic extremists. This book is based largely on these traumatized lower waist, usually below the belly button. Men wear lungi as both private and public dress in many south and Southeast Asian countries including Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Pakistan, Thailand, Singapore, and Cambodia.

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narratives of the first-hand eyewitnesses and victims who did go through such terrible and horrible experiences. As an introductory chapter, it sets out the contexts of the book paying particular attention to the historical trajectories and contemporary social, economic, and political dynamics that produced and put the Rohingya in an extremely vulnerable condition in both Myanmar and Bangladesh. It provides a comprehensive overview of the Rohingya crisis being rooted in the history of the region, the transition of different dynasties over centuries in Burma, racial and religious politics of state formation and nation-­ building in Burma (later Myanmar), and Myanmar’s political metamorphoses during the last couple of decades. It illuminates how the Rohingya people have gradually been pushed to the margin of the state and society by the combined forces that consist of the military establishment, political elites, corporate actors, faith fundamentalists, ethnic extremists, and state institutions in Burma/Myanmar. This chapter unfolds hidden transcripts of some popular texts being existed as a meta-­ narrative of Rohingya issues and some sub-texts being held as veiled voices of the known details but played a very vital role in the making of the Rohingya an acutely vulnerable people. By grounding a solid context at the beginning with known texts and unknown sub-texts, the chapter frames the structure of the book with exquisite arguments and alluring promises on Rohingya lives and livings in the borderland of Bangladesh and Myanmar. It basically sets out the central argument of the book as an ethnography, outlines the line of thematic structuration, and pledges to provide some solid and vivid narratives in the body of the book as voices of the victims where the Rohingyas are the ultimate victims.

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1.2 V  oices of the Rohingyas and Others’ Voices on Their Behalf! “My generation, my grandfather, great-grandfather—we have been oppressed for a long time and this has never been reported,” a young Rohingya named Habiburahman4 fled oppression in his ‘native’ Myanmar and now lives in Australia as a stateless person, recorded this voice in his book5 about his struggle and the suffering of Rohingya people in Myanmar, Bangladesh, and across the world. He continued, “Our history is [becoming] lost. The land where we lived in the past is now replaced with government buildings, new projects; everything has gone. The new generation of Burmese, they don’t know anything about Rohingya.”6 Habib wrote the book with the help of a French Journalist, Sophie Ansel,7 who has published extensive reports on the Rohingya.8 Habib is one of the hundreds of thousands of Rohingya who passed through more or less the similar experience of history, identity, exclusion, deprivation, exploitation, oppression, genocide, and expulsion, but got the scopes to reflect his lived experience while others’ narratives are either untold, unrecorded,  Habiburahman, known as Habib, is a Rohingya. Born in 1979 in Burma (now Myanmar), he escaped torture, persecution, and detention in his country, fleeing first to neighbouring countries in Southeast Asia, where he faced further discrimination and violence, and then, in December 2009, to Australia, by boat. Habib spent 32 months in detention centres before being released. He now lives in Melbourne. Today, he remains stateless, unable to benefit from his full human rights. Habib founded the Australian Burmese Rohingya Organization (ABRO) to advocate for his people back in Myanmar and for his community. 5  Habiburahman with Sophie Ansel. 2019. Frist, They Erased Our Name: A Rohingya Speaks. Melbourne & London: Scribe Publication. 6  Habiburahman with Sophie Ansel. 2019. Ibid. 7  Sophie Ansel is a French journalist, author, and director, who lived in South Asia for several years. It was during a five-month stay in Myanmar that she first encountered the Rohingya people and heard of their plight. She returned to the country several times and also visited the refugee communities in neighbouring countries like Thailand and Malaysia, where she met Habib in 2006. Habib helped Sophie to better understand the persecution faced by the Rohingya, and she has been advocating for their cause since 2011. When the Myanmar government accelerated the genocide of the Rohingya in June 2012, while Habib was detained in Australia, she helped him to write his story and the story of his people. (Source: Penguin Author’s biography. Available at: https://penguin.co.in/book_author/sophie-ansel/ [Accessed on May 19, 2021]). 8  Alcorn, Gay, “The Land where we lived has gone’-A life story of a Rohingya” The Guardian, August 04, 2019. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/04/rohingya-­ refugee-­myanmar-australia-oppression-suffering (Accessed on May 19, 2021). 4

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and unheard or dying in pain within themselves. A few Rohingyas shared their terrible experiences with some compassionate journalists which appear in many local and global media outlets. Some documentary films have been made which have tapped many visual narratives. Some human rights organizations have recorded the statements of the Rohingya victims who fled genocidal attacks in Rakhine in 2017. Besides, some rights activists working for Rohingyas, some Rohingya activists, and some diaspora Rohingyas have recorded some statements of the victims in the camps, which have also reflected the social sufferings, physical torture, and mental trauma of many Rohingyas. Besides, some academics gathered some descriptive narratives of the Rohingya victims who crossed the border in 2017 with the experience of genocidal attacks. All these forms of expression could be considered as voices of the Rohingyas reflected in others’ language, statements, and interpretation. Particularly, how academic texts reflect Rohingya voices is always entangled with academicians’ personal, political, cultural, and ideological positioning and hence not always objectively coded, but sometimes subjectively codified. Besides, when human rights bodies and rights activists tap the Rohingya voices and disclose on their behalf, these become emotionally loaded and akin to activists’ political pre-positioning. When the Rohingya diaspora activists mediate the Rohingya voices, there remain scopes of ethnocentrism that are also subjectively filtered. Considering all aspects of presenting the voices of the Rohingya, there is a question of subjectivity and objectivity as well as objective presentation and the politics of representation what I have discussed in detail in Chap. 2 in the form of methodological challenges. However, the plethora of pains, spectra of sufferings, scales of mental torture, the intensity of brutality, the countless transcript of veiled sentiments, and the number of eyewitnesses of genocidal atrocity have been left untold, unheard, unrecorded, and unfolded. This book is full of Rohingya voices where Rohingya victims have shared their pains, sufferings, sorrows, sentiments, emotions, miseries, and depressed feelings. The Rohingya victims have shared the loss of their lives, living, hopes, dreams, visions, and aspirations which have been planted and illuminated in this book with utmost care of originality.

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1.3 Human Geography of the Rohingya People There is no official, and even unofficial, statistics about how many Rohingya people in total live in the world. Nonetheless, we could calculate the tentative numbers of Rohingya people living in many countries to shape their human geography. Now, Bangladesh hosts more than 1 million Rohingyas as refugees in 34 temporary camps in Ukhia and Teknaf, two south-eastern sub-districts of Cox’s Bazar. Myanmar has about 500,000 mainly in three townships9 and about 130,000 of them live as internally displayed persons (IDPs) in confined camps in Sittwe in Rakhine state.10 Though Rohingya people are widely known as refugees in Bangladesh, they do not enjoy refugee status as are not officially recognized as refugees. They are officially identified as Forcibly Displaced Myanmar Nationals (FDMN).11 Apart from Bangladesh and Myanmar, about 40,000 Rohingya live in India as refugees. Southeast Asian countries host about 300,000 including about 150,000  in Malaysia. The Middle Eastern countries host about 250,000 including about 190,000 in Saudi Arabia alone. Pakistan hosts about 500,000 Rohingyas for decades. Some Western countries provided asylums to around 30,000 including 12,000 alone in the United States of America.12 Rohingya people have developed an active network of diaspora activism in the world across continents. Many of them formed some international rights organizations which are working for their citizenship rights, justice for what happened in 2017, supporting the trial of Myanmar at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and International Criminal courts (ICC) for committing genocide in Rakhine state. This kind of Rohingya diaspora activism has become very instrumental to mobilize public opinion globally against Myanmar and appealing to the international community to make  These three townships are Maungdaw, Rathedaung, and Buthidaung.  Wade, Francis. 2017. Myanmar’s Enemy Within Buddhist Violence and the Making of a Muslim ‘Other’. London: ZED Books. 11  Uddin, Nasir. 2020a. The Rohingya: An Ethnography of ‘Subhuman’ Life (Delhi: The Oxford University Press). 12  Uddin, R. Nasir. 2017. Not Rohingya, But Royanga: Stateless People in the Struggle for Existence (in Bengali). Dhaka: Murdhonno. 9

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Myanmar accountable for perpetrating genocide and crimes against humanity. It also works for ensuring the life-safety of the remaining Rohingyas in different townships in Rakhine state.13 Bangladesh has been trying its best to repatriate the Rohingya refugees to Rakhine through making different attempts, but it did not work well.14 The ICJ is continuing a trial of Myanmar under a case filed by Gambia accusing Myanmar of committing genocide in Rakhine state in 2017. International Criminal Court (ICC) also gave an order to investigate the accusation against Myanmar for committing crimes against humanity in the form of ‘deportation’.15 However, no light of hopes has shown up until now and nothing is rolling substantially holding any promise for the near future. Therefore, the Rohingya people living across the world are in a serious dilemma with their future mainly because Myanmar is not willing to create any space for Rohingya in Rakhine so that they could feel Rakhine is a relative comfort zone and better than before. The Rohingya crisis has become a major concern for Bangladesh because Bangladesh is no more willing to host them in its land and Myanmar has been reluctant for long to take the Rohingya back. The Rohingya refugees living in the crowded camps in Cox’s Bazar find no hopes, no vision, and no future. It is mentionable here that Bangladesh received huge international focus as the largest Rohingya hosting country in the world since 2017. Combined with the previously living about 400,000–450,00016 who cross the border to Bangladesh in 1978, 1991–1992, 2012, and 2016,  Cowper-Smith, Yuriko. 2019. “The global Rohingya diaspora throws lifelines to Bangladesh and Myanmar” The Conversation, July 05, 2019. Available at: https://theconversation.com/the-global-­ rohingya-diaspora-throws-lifelines-to-bangladesh-and-myanmar-117881 (Accessed on April 20, 2021). 14  Siddiqi, Bulbul. 2021. “The ‘Myth’ of Repatriation: The Prolonged Sufferings of the Rohingya”, in Nasir Uddin ed. The Rohingya Crisis: Human Rights, Policy Concerns and Burden Sharing (Delhi: SAGE Publications). 15  Uddin, Nasir. 2020b. Ibid. 16  There was no concrete numerical figure before 2017 about how many Rohingya refugees used to live in Bangladesh. There were two official camps—Kutupalong in Ukhia and Nayapara in Teknaf—and two makeshift camps—Taal in Ukhia and Leda in Teknaf—but many Rohingya were living there were not concretely recorded. Besides, many Rohingyas were living in Ukhia, Teknaf, Cox’s and other parts of Bangladesh who were remained undocumented. But my research findings confirm that about 400,000–450,000 Rohingya were living in Bangladesh before the massive influx of 2017. 13

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Bangladesh has sheltered more than 1 million Rohingya refugees in Cox’s Bazar, a borderland district of Bangladesh and Myanmar. With the help of many organizations (national and international) including UNHCR, WHO, ILO, UNICEF, UNDP, and WFP, Bangladesh has tried to provide all essential supports to host the Rohingya refugee in the camps. It is noteworthy that Bangladesh in collaboration with national and international NGOs has tried its best, but “there are still various forms of deficiencies and critical conditionality which are making Rohingya life challenging in the camps. Particularly frequent monsoon rain seriously hampers their normal course of life during the rainy seasons. On top of that, the appearance of the Covid-19 situation has made their life more difficult in the world’s largest refugee camps17 in Ukhia and Teknaf.”18 So, if we talk about the human geography of Rohingya people, actually we largely concern the Rohingya refugees living in Bangladesh refugee camps. And this book fundamentally holds the voices of the Rohingya who are living in the temporary refugee camps in Bangladesh and are the eyewitnesses of what happened to their lives in 2017.

1.4 T  he Political History of Rohingya Displacement Before presenting the voices of the Rohingya that hold strong cases of genocide, ethnocide, and crimes against humanity, it is imperative to deeply comprehend the research settings, its background, and the history of Rohingya experience of various forms of discrimination started from 1962, statelessness in 1982, and subsequent refugee-hood in Bangladesh started from 1978. The history of Rohingya identity and ethnicity also involves various academic and intellectual contestations which also offer another form of methodological challenges. There is no consensus among  The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs, The Rohingya Crisis, August 29, 2018. Available at: https://www.unocha.org/rohingya-refugee-crisis (Accessed on January 5, 2021). 18  See for detail, Uddin, Nasir. 2021. “The Rohingya Crisis: Unfolding Some Issues and Concerns” in Nasir Uddin ed. The Rohingya Crisis: Human Rights, Policy Concerns and Burden Sharing (Delhi: SAGE Publications). Uddin, Nasir. 2020b. Ibid. 17

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academics, historians, and scholars about the ethnicity and identity of Rohingya people. For example, some scholars like Jaque Laider, Aya Chan, and Derek Tonkin among many others believe that the whole idea of ‘Rohingya-ness’ is a very recent development that was intelligently designed to validate and legitimate the presence of ‘illegal Bengali migrants’ in Myanmar. According to this camp of scholars, the Rohingya people had not been the original residents of Myanmar before the British occupied Arakan. After the occupation, the British colonial administration brought them from then Bengal as migrant workers during the colonial period. Therefore, according to this camp of scholars, they didn’t have any ancestral presence in Arakan or Burma before 1826 when the British occupied the Arakan. Another group of scholars like Michal Charny, Azeem Ibraim, Ronan Lee, Fahmida Farzana, and Penny Green among others believe that the Rohingya have been living in the Arakan/ Rakhine state of Burma/Myanmar for several centuries even far earlier than the British occupied Arakan in 1826. This camp of scholars has explained with the evidence of Francis Buchannan, Joana Vater, and Classical Journal writings which have reconfirmed that a group of people living in Arakan state even long before 1826 who spoke in a particular language and who claim themselves that they were ‘Rohingya’. Between these two contrasted camps of scholars over a contested historical background and ethnic grounding of the Rohingya people, researchers need to take a justified position which also unfolds a new methodological challenge. Based on my intensive readings on the available literature on the history of Arakan, Bengal-Arakan relations, the history of public settlement in this region, I have very deliberately taken the position that Rohingya are not ‘illegal Bengali migrations’ to Arakan/Rakhine in Burma/Myanmar, rather Rohingya have been living in the Arakan for a couple of centuries. Besides, I provided a historical document to the available evidence which proved that Rohingya people had been living in the Arakan long before the British occupied the region. I found the huge work of Walter Hamilton’s in the British library which I discussed in detail in my other book.19 On top of that, I explained that before Burma  See for detail, Uddin, Nasir. 2020a. Ibid.; Uddin, R. Nasir. 2017. Not Rohingya, but Rohingya: Stateless People in the Struggle for Existence (Dhaka: Murdhanno Prokashon). 19

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was decolonized in 1948, Burmese ruled Arakan only 68 years (24 years from 1406 to 1430 and 40 years from 1784 to 1826) out of 1000 years of history of the independent Arakan kingdom. And the Rohingya people have been residents of independent Arakan for about 1000 years with different names before 1430 when Rosang/Rohang became the capital of Arakan. Charny also supported this argument that Arakanese Rakhine and Arakanese Muslims migrated to Arakan state about 1000 years ago20 and certainly far before Burmese penetrated Arakan. So, my position on Rohingya ethnicity is fairly clear and based on my convincing historically methodological position, I am giving a brief political history of Rohingya background. The methodologically authentic and academically accepted historical records21 confirm that the Rohingya have been living in Arakan, now called Rakhine after 1989, for centuries with different ethnic naming like Arakanese Muslims, Mohademdans, Rooinga, Mrohan, Ruinga, and Rohingya. Even before the decolonization in 1948, the Rohingya students were leading the Rangoon University Central Students Union (RUCSU) in 193522 and joined the anti-colonial movement along with Burmese political and military leaders. That was the reason why after decolonization, the Rohingya people got considerable space in the nation-­ building and the state formation in the Union of Burma. During that time, Rohingya politicians Mr. Abdul Gaffar and Mr. Sultan Ahmed were representing Rohingya people in the Constituent Assembly as elected members of the Parliament.23 Daw Sao Shwe Thaike, Burma’s first elected president who belonged to Shan ethnic group, said 1954  in a public speech, “‘Muslims of the Arakan certainly belong to one of the  Charney, Michael W. 2009. A History of Modern Burma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  See for details, Buchanan, Francis. 1799. “A Comparative Vocabulary of Some of the Languages Spoken in the Burma Empire.” Asiatic Researches 5: 219–240; Harvey, G.E. History of Burma: From the Earliest Time to the 10 March, the Beginning of the English Conquest (New Delhi and Madras: Asian Education Services, 2000 [1925]); Hamilton, W. Geographical, Statistical, and Historical Description of Hindostan and Its Adjacent Countries (London, Albemarle Street: John Murray, 1820); Phayre, A.P. History of Burma Including Burma People, Pegu, Taungu, Tenasserim, and Arakan (London: Trubner & Co., 188). 22  See Uddin, Nasir. 2017. Ibid. 23  Uddin, Nasir. 2020a. Ibid.; Farzana, K. Fahmida. 2017. Memories of Burmese Rohingya Refugees: Contested Identities and Belonging. London: Palgrave Macmillan; Ibrahim, Azeem. 2016. The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide. London: Hurst & Company. 20 21

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indigenous races of Burma. If they do not belong to the indigenous races, we [Shan] also cannot be taken as indigenous races.”24 The first prime minister of the Union of Burma U Nu said on September 25, 1954, “The Rohingya has the equal status of nationality with Kachin, Kayah, Karen, Mon, Rakhine and Shan.”25 These public utterances and declarations reconfirmed that the Rohingya had a very honourable and politically recognized position in the state policy and the national building process of post-colonial Burma. However, amid a military coup, General Ne Win seized state power in 1962 and since then the fate of the Rohingya people was full of darkness and persecution. Frequent torture, various forms of discrimination, killing and raping, random exploitations, regular oppression, wholesale extortion, and frequent state violence became the everyday event in the lives of Rohingya people.26 The junta government ruled Burma for about 49 years until 201127 and the Rohingya people did go through a similar experience which became from bad to worse. Penny Green and Thomas MacManus wrote that the history of Rohingya during this period observed regular physical torture, periodical killing, frequently torching houses, and intermittent raping.28 Imtiaz also write that the junta government launched a deadly operation called operation again or dragon king in 1978 which compelled about 250,000 Rohingya to flee Burman and take refuge in Bangladesh.29 I wrote elsewhere that “the fundamental attack came to Rohingya life, living, and existence in 1982 when the Burmese Government enacted a Citizenship Law conferring  Rogers, Benedict. 2016. Burma: A Nation at Crossroad [Revised Edition]. London: Rider Books, p. 158. 25   Ibrahim, Azeem. 2018. The Rohingya: Inside Myanmar’s Genocide. London: Hurts Publication, p. 48. 26  Uddin, Nasir. 2015. “State of Stateless People: The Plight of Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh.” In Human Rights to Citizens: A Slippery Concept, edited by Rhoda Howard-Hassmann and Margaret Walton-Roberts, 62–77. USA: University of Pennsylvania Press. 27  The junta government again seized the power on the 1st of February 2021. They still continue in power and nobody knows when they will end military dictatorship. 28  Green, Penny, Thomas MacManus, and Alicia de la Cour Venning. 2015. Countdown Annihilation: Genocide in Myanmar. London: International State Crime Initiative; Zarni, Maung, and Alice Cowley. 2014. ‘Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingyas.’ Pacific Rim Law & Policy Journal 23, no. 3 (2014): 683–754. 29  Ahmed, Imtiaz, ed. 2010. The Plight of the Stateless Rohingyas: Responses of the State, Society and International Community. Dhaka: The University Press Limited. 24

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citizenship to 135 nationals excluding the Rohingya. This Law formally made the Rohingya non-citizens and rendered them stateless.”30 I wrote in detail in my other book chapter that “following such a constitutional and legal exclusion in the state structure, Junta Government launched a second massive campaign called Operation Clean and Beautiful Nation in 1991–1992 which forced 250,000 Rohingyas to flee Myanmar to Bangladesh. Under a tripartite agreement with the involvement of the UNHCR, 236,000 Rohingyas were repatriated to Myanmar during 1992–1996, but most of them came back later on through illegal ways since the Rakhine state remained unsafe for them.”31 Then the following two decades did not observe any massive influx but in 2012 again around 120,000 Rohingya fled Myanmar and took shelter in Bangladesh. In 2016, about 87,000 crossed the border and took refuge in Bangladesh.32 In the following year in 2017, 750,000 Rohingya fled genocidal attacks in Rakhine state under the clearance operation perpetrated by Myanmar military force in collaboration with some ethnic extremists and some Buddhists fundamentalists. An Independent Facts Finding Commission formed by the United Nations published a report in 2018 which confirmed that in the clearance operation of 2017 about 10,000 Rohingya were killed in two months, 1900 girls and women were raped, and 392 villages were destroyed in the Rakhine state.33 So, undertaking research on or about Rohingya refugees demands a researcher to have adequate knowledge and a clear idea about the history of oppression, exploitation, persecution, and genocidal experience. Ahistorical comprehension in social research poses a crucial methodological challenge that delimits the comprehensive nature of in-depthless because the past in the form of history shapes the fertile ground for understanding the present. And the  Uddin, Nasir. 2015. Ibid.  Uddin, Nasir. 2019. “The State, Vulnerability, and Transborder Movement: The Rohingyas in Myanmar and Bangladesh.’ In Deterritorialised Identity and Transborder Movements in South Asia, edited by Nasir Uddin and Nasreen Chowdhory, 73–90. Singapore: Springer. 32  Uddin, Nasir. 2021. “The Rohingya Relocation to Bhasan Char: Myths and Realities.” In Nasir Uddin ed. The Rohingya Crisis: Human Rights Issues, Policy Concerns and Burden Sharing. Delhi: SAGE. 33  Uddin, Nasir. 2020c. “Pressuring Bangladesh to do more will not help the Rohingya”, Al-Jazeera, August 25, 2020c. Available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/8/25/pressuring-­ bangladesh-­to-do-more-will-not-help-the-rohingya (Accessed on January 05, 2021). 30 31

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deeper understanding of the present is essential to comprehend the situation from a holistic perspective.

1.5 Theoretical Contextualization Though every chapter of the book will present different relevant theoretical discussions about the central theme of the chapter, this section provides some basic ideas about the theoretical grounding of genocide, ethnocide, and ‘subhuman’ life as the book’s sub-title holds them with due priority. Strong theoretical grounding is necessary for a better understanding of any issue, subject, and object. For a deeper understanding of the Rohingya crisis and the genocidal event in 2017, a clear theoretical framework of genocide, ethnocide, and ‘subhuman life’ is essential.

Genocide The United Nations’ convention on the Prevention and the Punishment of the Crimes of Genocide adopted in 1948 has clearly defined the fundamental features that qualify a particular type of deadly crime as genocide. The clear idea of genocide came to the world very recently though Jean-­ Paul Sartre said, the fact of genocide is as old as humanity.34 Based on the experience of World War II, genocide in the so-called civilized society and the modern world is considered as a heinous crime and atrocious act against any particular community or a group of people, but it existed along with the beginning of human history. Norman M. Naimark wonderfully explained the historical background of genocide what validates the remarks of Sartre. He said, “Extended families, clans, and tribes routinely engaged in genocidal actions against their rivals, just as ancient empires and modern nation-states enacted their murderous hatred for imagined or real enemies in mass killing.”35 He continues, “Over the  Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘On Genocide’, in Richard A. Falk, Gabriel Kolko and Robert Jay Lifton, eds., Crimes of War, New York: Random House, 1971, pp. 534–549 at p. 534. 35  Naimark, Norman M. 2017. Genocide: A World History. New  York: The Oxford University Press, p. 1. 34

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ages, genocide has had both internal and external dimensions. Political leaders of societies small and large, primitive and modern, have turned against internal groups—tribal, ethnic, religious, social—and sought their elimination as a way to preserve privilege, avoid dissidence, consolidate power, and accumulate wealth.”36 In the modern world, for the first time, the word ‘genocide’ was first coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944.37 Even before that Winston Churchill called genocide “the crime without a name.”38 Leslie Alan Horvitz and Christopher Catherwood wrote that “it is only in the 20th century that genocide became so systematic and was carried out with such brutal efficiency, beginning with the deportation of Armenians from Ottoman territory, which may have taken the lives of as many as 1.8 million people in 1915. Nazi Germany engaged in mass extermination on a scale never seen before: By the end of World War II, the Nazis and their allies had killed about 6 million Jews.”39 The UN Convention on the prevention and the punishment of the Crimes of Genocide which was adopted in 1948 in the UN general assembly confirmed the following: Article II: in the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such: (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.40 Even after the adoption of the genocide convention, the world observed many genocidal cases even after the World War II, for example,  Naimark, Norman M. 2017. Ibid.  Raphael Lemkin. 1944. Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress. Washington: Carnegie Endowment for World Peace. 38  Cited in Mria, Willian Schabas. 2009. Genocide in International Law: The Crime of Crimes. Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press, p. 17. 39  Horvitz, Leslie A. and Catherwood, Christopher. 2006. The Encyclopaedia of War Crimes and Genocide. New York: Fact on File Publication, p. 166. 40  The United Nations (UN). 1948. The UN Convention on the Prevention and the Punishment of the Crimes of Genocide. Available at: https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-­ crimes/Doc.1_Convention%20on%20the%20Prevention%20and%20Punishment%20of%20 the%20Crime%20of%20Genocide.pdf (Accessed on July 7, 2021). 36 37

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Bangladesh in 1971 (3 million killed by Pakistan), Cambodia between 1975 and 1979 (1.7 million killed); East Timor in 1975 (200,000 killed); Guatemala between 1960 and 1996 (20,000 killed); Bosnia in 1992–1998 (200,000 killed); Rwanda in 1994 (800,000 killed); and Darfur, beginning in 2003 (approximately 200,000 killed in three years).41 Genocide on the Rohingya people in the Rakhine state perpetrated by Myanmar is the latest addition to this list.

Ethnocide Ethnocide is a kind of systematic killing in an attempt to vanish and eliminate a particular ethnic group as well as their ethnicity, culture, history, and cultural heritage from the ethnic composition in the world. In some cases, ethnocide and ethnic cleansing create confusion about their nature, objective, and outcome but mark a clear distinction. When an attempt is made to drive out of their ancestral lands, habitats, and perineal attached to clean up their existence is called ethnic cleansing. Leslie A. Horvitz and Christopher Catherwood defined ethnic cleansing as “the forcible removal of a civilian population from their homeland is a tactic that while outlawed by international law has been widely employed in conflicts throughout history.”42 But ethnocide is a kind of mass killing to totally root out a group of people with their culture, ethnicity, and cultural heritage. Ethnocide is sometime synonymous to genocide but there is a sharp distinction between the two concepts in terms of their nature, operations, and consequences. The political and academic history of ethnocide inform us that ethnocide is a form of killing to eliminate a culture or a group of people who possess a particular culture and heritage, but genocide is a systematic killing of people or a group of people. Though ethnocide is synonymously used with genocide, ethnocide particularly underscores the total elimination of a culture that an ethnic group upholds as their source of identity, a trace of history and cultural heritage. 41 42

 See for detail, Horvitz, Leslie A. and Catherwood, Christopher. 2006. Ibid., p. 167.  Horvitz, Leslie A. and Catherwood, Christopher. 2006. Ibid., p. 148.

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When the systematic killing intends to eliminate and root out the culture of an ethnic group by killing the members of the group could be called ethnocide. Philipp Casula has made a peculiar difference between ethnocide and genocide with the case of Afghanistan and Chechnya. He said, “Both ethnocide and genocide have the same starting point: a notion of the Other as representing a negative difference. However, ethnocide and genocide handle this Otherness differently: genocide proceeds to physically remove difference, while ethnocide rests on the assumption that the Other can be reformed and improved.”43 However, I completely disagree with Casula’s perception of ethnocide because the terms ‘reformed’ and ‘improved’ seem positive in their nature but ethnocide is absolutely a detrimental task to the people applied as it is also a kind of devastating attempt to destroy a culture and ethnicity. Rather I would say ethnocide is more dangerous than genocide because genocide intends to ‘kill’ people, but ethnocide aims to ‘kill’ culture and ethnicity. Two brilliant works44 wonderfully depicted ethnocide in two different contexts which strongly support that ethnocide is a process of eliminating a group of people along with their culture and ethnicity. Joe Thomas in his ethnography has revealed, based on his first-hand experience, the socio-cultural dynamics of the Vietnamese refugees in detention centres in Hong Kong. The ethnography presents that the administrators, following the British Asylum Policy, addressed the crisis during the period of 1988–1995 by executing dreadful human rights violations and succeeding ethnocide of the Vietnamese refugees who were trapped as asylum seekers in the detention centres. He categorically identified it as ethnocide because it was not just killing a group of people but eliminating them as a group of people of cultural difference. In another book, René Lemarchand explained the causes and consequences of ethnic conflict in Burundi in a very detailed way. Lemarchand presented a conspicuous background of Burundi transition to multiparty democracy in 1993 and the subsequent coup and  Casula, Philipp. 2015. ‘Between “ethnocide” and “genocide”: violence and Otherness in the coverage of the Afghanistan and Chechnya wars.’ The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity 43 (5): 700–718, p. 702. 44  Thomas, Joe. 2017. Ethnocide: A Cultural Narrative of Refugee Detention in Hong Kong. UK and USA: Routledge; and Lemarchand, René. 1994. Burundi: Ethnocide as Discourse and Practice. New York: Cambridge University Press. 43

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widespread violence, but it unfolded the bloodbaths between 1972 and 1988. He brought a socially constructed fault line between Hutu and Tutsi who created political myths between each other to justify and validate wide-ranging violence and killing widely known as Rowanda genocide. It is notable here that during the period of 100 days between April 7 and July 15, 1994, it is said that around 500,000 to 800,000 members of the Tutsi minority ethnic group were slaughtered. While many called it genocide, Lemarchand came up with an analysis of terming it as ethnocide. He explained brilliantly the way how ethnicity of a particular ethnic group could be instrumental to exploit the system of political discourse to execute and justify brutal ethnocide. It could be a similar application to understand the Rohingya situation in the Rakhine state in Myanmar because what Myanmar security forces did was of course a confirmed genocide, but it should be justified to term it ‘ethnocide’.

‘Subhuman’ Life ‘Subhuman’ life is a new idea in the scholarship on refugees, illegal migrants, asylum seekers, internally displaced persons (IDPs), camp people, forcibly displaced persons (FDPs), non-citizens, and stateless people. In my widely read ethnography The Rohingya: An Ethnography of Subhuman Life, I brought in the idea of ‘subhuman life’ with the case of Rohingya people living in the borderland of Bangladesh and Myanmar. I have been working for years to build this new theory what I call ‘subhuman’ life theory to understand the people living in an acute marginalized, extremely vulnerable, and atrocious condition. I have discussed in detail the subhuman theory in my book with a lot of ethnographic evidence. In brief, I would say that ‘subhuman’ life is a theory to understand severely vulnerable conditions of the people or people in an extremely vulnerable condition in relation to an authoritarian nature of the state. It could also provide a new framework for understanding genocide, ethnocide, ethnic cleansing, and domicide. I argued that ‘Subhuman’ is a category of people who are born in human society, but have no space in the human community. ‘Subhuman’ does not receive

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treatments what a human deserves, and does not lead a life like a human being. ‘Subhuman’ people are born in the world, but the world does not own them in any state structure. ‘Subhuman’ are treated as like o-manush (non-human) since they do not exist in the legal framework of any state. ‘Subhuman’ people are a particular category of people who live in the borderland of ‘life’ and ‘death’. ‘Subhuman’ people are not human beings in their due dignity, rights and voices as are dealt with as if they are lesser than human beings.45

This theory of ‘subhuman’ life is widely spreading up across the world with huge appreciation. It has been cited widely in academic pieces, dissertation research, and scholarly publications across the world. In fact, during the last couple of years, I shared the theory of subhuman life with cross-disciplinary audiences across the world and received their very valuable feedbacks which strengthened the argument of the theory. I gave three consecutive talks on the theory of ‘Subhuman’ at Asia Institute in the University of Toronto, International Migration Research Centre (IMRC) at Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo and Centre for Refugee Studies at York University, Canada, in 2017. I also gave lectures on the ‘subhuman theory’ at the 8th Humboldt Foundation Winners Forum Meeting in Bonn, Germany, on October 18, 2018. Besides, I gave a series of lectures on the ‘subhuman’ theory at the Refugee Studies Centre (RSC) of Oxford University, Department of Anthropology and Sociology at SOAS and the Centre for Migration, Refugees, and Belonging at the University of East London in November 2018. I also gave another series of lectures on the ‘subhuman theory’ at Columbia University, New York University, the New School of Social Research, the University of Delaware, and Cornell University in October 2019. Furthermore, I gave a couple of lectures on subhuman life theory at the University of Melbourne, Flinders University, and the University of Adelaide in December 2019. According to the ‘subhuman’ theory, five characteristics could qualify a group of people as ‘subhuman’. Five basic features that constitute ‘subhuman’ life include:

 Uddin, Nasir. 2020a. Ibid., p. 5.

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(1) atrocious living conditions (which makes the place unliveable and forces people to leave); (2) illegal object in legal framework (which makes people [il]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 the lives of a group of people, but the individual or the group must experience five conditionalities enshrined in its theoretical formulation.46

If we put Rohingya people and their genocidal experience in 2017 in the framework of the subhuman life theory, we could easily understand that the ways the Rohingya people were dealt with in 2017 and before in Rakhine state by the Myanmar security forces as if they are lesser than human beings what I prefer ‘subhuman’ life. I will discuss it more with much ethnographic evidence in Chap. 7.

1.6 Structure of the Book and Chapter Overview Following a brief introduction in Chap. 1, Chap. 2 highlights the methodological challenges of doing ethnographic research on the refugee issues with the case of the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. Handsome amounts of research have mushroomed during the last couple of years particularly after 2017 when a large influx took place following a massive campaign of the Myanmar military against civilian Rohingyas in Rakhine state. But, doing research on the Rohingya people involves a serious methodological challenge because of the scarcity and validity of the information. There are four ways to gather information about Rohingya: (1) 46

 Uddin, Nasir. 2020a. Ibid., pp. 5–6.

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information provided by state or state-sponsored (in fact censored!) media in Myanmar which lack authenticity, (2) some drone footages of infected areas of the Rakhine state captured by the Guardian and the Amnesty International which provides some visual images, but these do not give any clear idea about what exactly happened to the Rohingya people, (3) some amazing photographs and video footages taken from Bangladesh border about burning houses and sky-going smokes which give some glimpses about domicide but do not provide a conspicuous idea about homicide, ethnocide, and genocide, and (4) narratives of the first-hand witnesses who did go through the intensity of atrocity in Rakhine state following the August 25, 2017, campaign, but there is a little scope to verify and cross-check the narrative whether these uphold real facts or improvised fictions. This chapter discusses in detail the methodological challenges of Rohingya research with a convincing way of presenting the narratives about what happened to them in Myanmar. It also critically engages the theoretical inadequacy to understand Rohingya vulnerability and helplessness since available theoretical establishment quite often considers refugees and stateless people as a legal category which seems unfit in the case of the Rohingya crisis. Chapter 3 merely deals with identity politics centring on the Rohingya people in both Bangladesh and Myanmar bringing in the old question with the renewed argument: Who are the Rohingya? Myanmar identifies them as ‘illegal Bengali migrants’ who migrated to Burma during the British colonial period. And today’s Rohingyas are the descendants of those migrated Bengalis and thereby Rohingyas are the ‘illegal Bengalis Migration’. On the other side of the border, Bangladesh does not recognize them even as refugees, but ‘illegal Bormaya [Burmese] migrants’ and still locally Rohingya people are widely known as ‘bormaya’ [people of Burma]. Following the massive influx in 2017, the Bangladesh government has prepared a biometric database that officially identifies the Rohingya as Forcibly Displaced Myanmar Nationals (FDMN). In the framework of the modern nation-state, the Rohingya people are non-­ existent human beings as they are nowhere in the legal framework of both Bangladesh and Myanmar as if they either fell down from the sky or grew up from the land. Such space of nonentity created a space for Myanmar security forces to execute genocide and ethnic cleansing. This chapter

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discusses the issue of Rohingya identity digging into the history of Arakan and its public settlement across time and space. Subsequently, it critically engages with the identity politics of making and unmaking of a particular group, the Rohingya, on both sides of the border. It also sheds light on the way Rohingya have been made as “the people of no man’s land” as if they are “no-land’s man” amidst the transforming socio-political and ethno-nationalist dynamics of colonial and post-colonial transition in the region. Finally, it presents some first-hand narratives of genocide survivors which unfold that identity politics accentuated the genocidal attack against the Rohingya people in Rakhine. Chapter 4 is about the plight of ‘stateless’ people, not recognized as nationals by any state, albeit the state in various forms regulates their everyday life committing severe injustice and practising various inequalities by producing illegibility in the state structure. In fact, the structure of the modern nation-state has produced the concept of statelessness and non-citizens though the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) confirms that “everyone has the right to a nationality.” Since the state of statelessness confirms people belonging to no state, they cannot claim any rights from states though the International Refugee Convention (1951), the Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless People (1954) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966) confirm the rights of even non-citizens. Nonetheless, the lives of stateless people that include non-citizens, refugees, or asylum seekers can easily become subject to injustice, inequality, discrimination, and illegibility and are even subject to death. The treatment of stateless people as ‘illegal’ human bodies is what George Agamben termed ‘bare life’; a life is ‘bare’ because it does not exist ‘before the law’. This chapter examines such a group of stateless people, the Rohingya, living in Myanmar and Bangladesh beneath the intricate relations of migration, statelessness, and vulnerability. The Rohingya people became stateless soon after Myanmar in 1982 enacted its Citizenship Law which conferred to 135 nationals as its citizens excluding the Rohingya. Since then, many Rohingya people migrated to Bangladesh on a large scale though the influx started in 1978. However, the Rohingya people experience persecution, atrocities, and everyday forms of discrimination committed by the state despite their stateless identity. With empirically informed analysis, this chapter explains how

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the vulnerability is (re)produced in the lives of refugees due to their statelessness when transborder movement has become the general feature of the twenty-first-century state system in the name of ‘global society’. Chapter 5 illuminates the discourse of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and domicide with the Rohingya experience of atrocity in Rakhine state. In response to an attack by ARSA (Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army) on some police check posts and a military base, Myanmar security forces launched a deadly operation called Operation Clearance which resulted in the killing of 10,000 civilian Rohingyas, raping of about 2000 girls and women, burning completely or partially about 400 villages and drive around 750,000 Rohingya out of their homeland. Considering the degree of causalities and the intensity of brutality, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) termed it as ‘a textbook example of ethnic cleansing’, whilst many internally acclaimed media outlets and renowned scholars have termed it as genocide. This chapter presents some very relevant traumatized narratives of first-hand witnesses who lived through the experience of military operations, which could justify whether it is ethnic cleansing or genocide. This chapter also brings in the extensive review of genocide literature and cases with the historical background and the context of declaring the UN Genocide Convention in 1948 and the importance of the Rome Statutes adopted in 1998. This chapter presents the voices of the victims who did go through the experience of extreme atrocity perpetrated by the Myanmar security forces. Apart from analysing the genocide and ethnic cleansing, the chapter also sheds light on domicide which has largely been ignored in the entire literature grown up based on the Clearance Operation taken place on the 25th of August 2017 and afterwards. Chapter 6 presents a detailed description and analysis of violence against Rohingya women and girls as the state’s policy of ethnic cleansing as a weapon of extinction of an ethnic group from the demographic map of Myanmar. In the context of the Clearance Operation in 2017, one of the most dominant features, but still less talked about, of atrocities and brutalities committed by the Myanmar security forces and vigilantes is the violence against Rohingya girls and women. According to a report published in 2018 and prepared by an Independent Facts Finding Committee formed by the United Nations, about 1900 Rohingya girls

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and women were raped and most of them were gang-raped in two months (September and October 2017) in Rakhine state. This chapter presents some very disturbing testimony of rape survivors many of them were either raped or gang-raped by the Myanmar security forces and vigilantes following the all-out campaign started on the 25th of August 2017. This chapter presents rape survivors’ experience of being raped, the context of raping, and what happened afterwards what helped them survive and cross the border to Bangladesh. As the voices of victims, these traumatized narratives unveil the degree of atrocity, the intensity of brutality, and the context of ethnocide in the extreme violence against the Rohingya girls and women. Finally, this chapter concludes with a polemic analysis of the facts and evidence, which are fully emotionally loaded and professionally academically decoded, to understand the space of ‘violence against women’ in the broader spectrum of the theoretical and empirical foundation of genocide and ethnic cleansing. Chapter 7 presents the intensity of brutality with Rohingya narratives which substantiates the theory of ‘subhuman’ life what I developed as a distinctive theory of understanding the people in the extreme form of vulnerability. Rohingya people who fled the persecution and crossed the border following the 2017 military operation time and again expressed their experience of being tortured, killed, and raped by using some sentences that unveil the way how the Myanmar military behaved with them as if they are not human beings, but something else. Hundreds of traumatized narratives recorded from those Rohingya who fled the recent brutal military campaign reveal that the Rohingya people were dealt with in the Rakhine state in a very inhuman way and the military didn’t show minimum respect to them as human beings. The chapter presents some strong traumatized narratives of Rohingya people who did go through the extreme form of atrocity and an acute degree of brutality in 2017 unfolding that the way the Rohingya people dealt with as if they are lesser than human beings what I prefer to call ‘subhuman’ life. In fact, the narratives presented in this chapter further testify and consolidate the claim that the Rohingya time and again said that they were treated as if they are not human beings, but ‘subhuman’. This chapter presents the first-hand narratives of the Rohingya people as the voices of the victims within the

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theoretical framework of ‘subhuman’ life to further consolidate its strong claim of understanding people in an extreme vulnerability. The concluding chapter, Chap. 8, provides a comprehensive picture of current Rohingya situations in both Myanmar and Bangladesh in order to portray the Rohingya in transition. It is urgently needed to know where the Rohingya people stand in Bangladesh in terms of repatriation and resettlement and in Myanmar in terms of bringing them back to their place of birth and the questions of conferring citizenship, social safety, and human dignity. The chapter also discusses trials of Myanmar in different international courts (ICC, ICJ, and Argentina) to understand whether such legal trials could really contribute anything substantial to resolve the Rohingya problem and accelerate the repatriation process or it is simply an internationally organized human rights activism. It also presents the changing public discourse in Bangladesh regarding Rohingya presence as well as their repatriation and resettlement. Besides, this chapter touches on the roles of the international community and the AID industry whether they are supporting Bangladesh to sustain or solve the problem. Furthermore, the chapter attempts to sum up what the Rohingya people want as the potential solution to the Rohingya crisis because sometimes solutions could come up from the bottom instead of applying a top-down approach. Finally, it presents some predictions of the Rohingya crisis based on the decade-long experience of Rohingya research analysing the atrocious past, critical present, and uncertain future of the Rohingya people in transition.

1.7 Conclusion This chapter basically presents the context of the Rohingya influx particularly after the clearance operation launched in 2017 which continued the following two months. It briefly provides the scenario about what kind of terrible and horrible situation was created that forced hundreds of thousands of Rohingya to flee their homeland and take refuge in Bangladesh. The chapter provides a comprehensive and critical overview of the literature, what I call ‘text’, during the post-2017 period most of which failed to depict the degree of atrocity and intensity of brutality

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perpetrated by Myanmar security forces and vigilantes. Some called it genocide, some called it ethnic cleansing, and some call ‘crimes against humanity’ but all drew the conclusion largely based on media reports and human rights documents. Also, some very appealing photographs of the Rohingya influx appeared on many internationally acclaimed media outlets which motivate the international community to come to a conclusion that what happened to Rakhine state in 2017 is a clear genocide. But even before 2017 what was happening to the Rohingya people in Rakhine was already declared as genocide by two well-researched documents by Yale Law School47 and Queen Mary University London48 because genocidal activities were going on there from 2012 what Maung Zarni and Cowley Alice called ‘slow-burning genocide’49 and Azim Ibrahim called ‘hidden genocide’.50 Given the context, the book presents the traumatized narrative of the genocide survivors and eyewitnesses of the genocidal attack which could unfold the real picture of what exactly happened to the Rohingya people in 2017.

 Lowenstein, Allard K. 2015. Prosecution of the Rohingya Muslims: Is Genocide Occurring in Myanmar’s Rakhine State. Yale: International Human Rights Clinic, Yale Law School. (Available at: https://law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/documents/pdf/Clinics/fortifyrights.pdf [Accessed on January 02, 2021].) 48  Green, Penny, Thomas MacManus, and Alicia de la Cour Venning. 2015. Countdown Annihilation: Genocide in Myanmar. London: International State Crime Initiative. 49  Zarni, Maung, and Alice Cowley. “Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingyas.” Pacific Rim Law & Policy Journal 23, no. 3 (2014): 683–754. 50  Ibrahim, Azeem. The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide. London: Hurst & Company, 2016. 47

2 Research on Rohingya Refugees: Methodological Challenges and Textual Inadequacy

2.1 Introduction Doing social research always involves some sorts of challenges depending on the context of the research settings, complexities of the object of study, and the ontological and epistemological debates regarding the methodological tools themselves in the twenty-first-century empirical research.1 Besides, the researcher’s personal, political, ideological, cultural, and social background become instrumental in conducting social research in the interface of subjectivity and objectivity as well as authenticity and reflexivity.2 It becomes more complicated when it comes to the question of refugee research by a researcher having the background of the host society. Refugee research itself is a problematic one since the researcher needs to maintain an intelligent balance between upholding the rights of refugees and respecting the sentiments of the host society. While I started researching the Rohingya refugee more than two decades ago, it was not so problematic since I was strongly guided by some local sentiments  See for details, Uddin, Nasir. 2011. “Decolonising Ethnography in the Field: An Anthropological Account.” International Journal of Social Research Methodology 14(6): 455–467. 2  Watson, C.W. (Ed.). 1999. Being There: Fieldwork in Anthropology. London: Pluto Press. 1

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sympathetic to the refugee people, my training in Anthropology to be empathetic to the object of research, and my commitment to the people in serious humanitarian crisis. But gradually the structure of relations between the refugees and host society has been drastically transformed turning into a negative track though not hostile yet. Being a member of the host society, I was informed, to some extent influenced though not so strongly, by the changing pattern of relations between the host community and the Rohingya refugees. At the same time, my commitment to the object of my research remained unchanged as the Rohingya refugees are the victims in all respects in Myanmar and they crossed the border and took refuge in Bangladesh to flee persecution and genocidal attacks.3 So, fleeing their homeland and taking refuge in the land of migration was not determined by themselves but by the conditions created by Myanmar and the state’s exclusive policy as part of political strategies. ‘Blaming the victims’4 should not have any space in anthropological research and hence my position remained the same which was not always well accepted by the host society. Then it became a big challenge for me as I was not well received by the authority composed of Bengali officers and personnel who were assigned and entitled to take care of Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh. Yet, following the 2017 influx, I tirelessly advocated for Bangladesh at home and abroad to accelerate the repatriation process so that Rohingya refugees could go back to Myanmar with legal recognition, social safety, and human dignity.5 My advocacy for the Rohingya repatriation was not well appreciated by some Rohingya activists, some diaspora Rohingyas, and some human rights activists in Bangladesh and hence my relationship with them became a little bit unpleasant. Nonetheless, it serves both my commitment to the Rohingya people and the responsibility towards my society and the country though it poses a big methodological challenge to my ongoing research. Apart from them,  See for detail, Uddin, Nasir. 2020a. The Rohingya: An Ethnography of Subhuman Life. Delhi: The Oxford University Press. 4  ‘Blaming the victim’ means there is a popular tendency to blame those who are the victims of any event and the trends are articulated and constructed by the perpetrators to justify what they have done so far. See for detail, Said, Edward & Hitchens, Christopher (Eds.). 2001. Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarships and the Palestinian Questions. London & New York: Verso. 5  Uddin, R. Nasir. 2017. Not Rohingya, But Royanga: Stateless People in the Struggle for Existence (in Bengali). Dhaka: Murdhonno. 3

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I find a serious vacuum in the domain of theories regarding refugees, illegal migrants, stateless, non-citizens, camps people, IDPs, and asylum seekers to understand deeply and comprehensively the case of Rohingya refugees. Therefore, my intensive and exhaustive readings of the literature helped me understand the textual inadequacy to understand the Rohingya crisis on move. This chapter, therefore, presents methodological challenges of Rohingya research based on my personal experience of doing ethnographic research on/with/among the Rohingya refugees living in Bangladesh. It also presents a critical analysis and a comprehensive overview of the ‘texts’ in terms of published materials on the Rohingya people in an attempt to provide readers with a broader spectrum of knowledge about the Rohingya people, their lives and livings, their pains and pleasure, their past and present, their ethnicity and identity, and their articulation of aspiration and their mission of vision of their uncertain future. In so doing, the book deserves its place in the scholarship of Rohingya people particularly for a deeper understanding of the Rohingya crisis amid unveiling and unfolding an eloquent and lucid picture by the vivid narratives of the first-hand experience and eyewitnesses of what happened in August 2017 in Rakhine state.

2.2 R  ohingya People in Texts: Contestations in the Context Before the massive influx in 2017, Rohingya people received inadequate attention from the international community, serious academics, scholar researchers, media, and even Bangladeshi people though Bangladesh has been dealing with the Rohingya crisis since 1978. Nonetheless, following the massive influx in 2017, the Rohingya people and their crisis received unprecedented attention from media, researchers, UN bodies, human rights organizations, academics and non-government organizations (NGOs) from across the world which resulted in the production of a plethora of literature what I consider here as a ‘text’. Now the question arises how and whether the ‘text’ adequately accommodates the history of the people, the context of the problem, and the contents of the problem.

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The available texts cover up Rohingya crisis in the form of their statelessness in Myanmar and subsequent refugee-hood in Bangladesh, but the contestation of the context, particularly Rohingyas’ position in the historical, ethnic, and political matrix of Burma across time and spaces, has been left unaddressed in most of the ‘text’. Therefore, we need to depend on old historical materials to discuss the Rohingya identity and ethnicity as well as the transforming relationship between the state and Rohingya during the last couple of centuries in first Burma and later Myanmar. There are a few texts written with authentic documents and records to refute Myanmar’s state narrative about Rohingya identity and ethnicity (they are illegal Bengali migrants)6 which the Myanmar state used for their exclusion from the state structure and deprivation of all forms of civil, social, and political rights. Also, Myanmar has been using the same state’s narrative to justify the genocide, ethnocide, and ethnic cleansing committed against the Rohingya in 2017. Therefore, some solid academic texts were expected to come out to refute Myanmar’s fabricated state narrative about Rohingya identity and ethnicity. Whereas hundreds of texts have been produced to discuss Rohingya lives and living in Bangladesh ranging from the lack of food crisis, inadequate sanitation, lack of proper healthcare, water crisis, deficiency in nutrition, management in monsoon rains, ecological degradation, declining law and order situation, growing tension with the host society, inflight between and among the Rohingya factions and fractions, Rohingya involvement in illegal border trade, illegal escapes from the camp, women-child trafficking, Rohingya involvement in militancy, the crisis of repatriation, to the roles of NGOs in the camps and so on. Given the context of the inadequate text on the Rohingya identity and ethnicity, I have elaborately presented the ethnic background of the Rohingya in Arakan in my previous two books.7 This section presents the available literature on the Rohingya  Myanmar has very intelligently designed a state narrative about the identity of Rohingya people that ‘they are illegal Bengali migrants’ who migrated to Arakan during the British colonial era started from 1824. Since the Rohingya are illegal migrants, they are not entitled to citizenship or any forms of rights and hence subject to persecution. That’s how Myanmar is justifying whatever they are doing to the Rohingya people in Myanmar over the last several decades. 7  Uddin, Nasir. 2020a. The Rohingya: An Ethnography of Subhuman Life (Delhi: The Oxford University Press); Uddin, R. Nasir. 2017. Not Rohingya, but Rohingya: Stateless People in the Struggle for Existence (Dhaka: Murdhonno Prokashon). 6

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people in brief with a critical reconsideration to unearth the vacuum for further research.

Edited Volumes A couple of remarkable edited volumes meanwhile published on the Rohingya people which are widely cited in the discussion about Rohingyas’ debatable past, critical present, and uncertain future. Of all, I will briefly discuss seven volumes that I consider countable in the scholarship on Rohingya people. Of all, Razzak and Hoque edited A Tale of Refugees: Rohingyas in Bangladesh (1995),8 Siddiquee edited The Muslims in Arakan: History and Heritage [in Bengali] (2000),9 Ahmed edited The Plight of the Stateless Rohingyas: Responses of the State, Society & the International Community Migration and Citizenship Legal Practice (2010),10 Uddin edited To Host or To Hurt: Counter-Native on the Rohingya Refugee Issues in Bangladesh (2012),11 Chowdhury and Sammadar edited The Rohingya in South Asia (2018),12 Chowdhory and Mohanty edited Citizenship, Nationalism and Refugeehood of Rohingyas in Southern Asia (2020),13 and Uddin edited The Rohingya Crisis: Human Rights Issues, Policy Concerns and Burden Sharing (2021).14 Razzak’s and Hoque’s book present the ethnopolitical history of Arakan, the ethnic background of the Rohingya emergence in the region and their vulnerable situation created by the state and state policies in  Razzak, Abdur and Hoque, Mahfuzul. 1995. A Tale of Refugees: Rohingyas in Bangladesh. Dhaka: Center for Human Rights. 9  Siddiquee, Mohibullah (ed.). 2000. The Muslims in Arakan: History and Heritage. Chittagong: The Arakan Historical Society. 10  Ahmed, Imtiaz (ed.). 2010. The Plight of the Stateless Rohingyas: Responses of the State, Society & the International Community Migration and Citizenship Legal Practice (Dhaka: The University Press Limited). 11  Nasir Uddin (Ed.). 2012. To Host or to Hurt: Counter Narratives on Rohingya Refugee Issue in Bangladesh, pp. 83–98. Dhaka: Institute for Culture and Development Research. 12  Chaudhury, S. B. R., & Samaddar, R. (eds). 2018. The Rohingya in South Asia: People Without a State. London: Routledge. 13  Chowdhory, Nasreen & Mohanty Biswajit (eds.). 2020. Citizenship, Nationalism and Refugeehood of Rohingyas in Southern Asia. Singapore: Springer. 14  Uddin, Nasir. 2021. The Rohingya Crisis: Human Rights Issues, Policy Concerns and Burden Sharing. New Delhi: SAGE. 8

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connection with the intermittent Rohingya influx in Bangladesh. It provides some basic ideas about the Rohingya people and their history, but it misses out on the authoritarian roles of the state to render Rohingyas an object of frequent oppression, everyday exploitation, systematic human rights violation, and outrageous persecution. The fundamental critique of this could be as if it contains some very flat political statement without any critical engagement with the issues and the problem of the Rohingya people. Though it provides some useful information, it does not contain any up-to-date information on the Rohingya crisis in both Myanmar and Bangladesh. More importantly, the Rohingya crisis has been remarkably changed during the last three decades as it has taken an extreme form of persecution since the book was published in 1995 and eventually the book lacks it. Siddiquee’s book contains a couple of very good book chapters that focus on the appearance of the Muslims in the demographic composition of Arakan, their settlements, and their engagement in the state’s operation of the Arakan kingdom. Some chapters are very useful for having plenty of rare information on the historical chronology of Muslim’s settlement in this region from the seventh to ninth century. The book also houses some very good chapters about different types of issues relevant to the Rohingya rights and entitlements which they have been deprived of during the last couple of decades. However, the book lacks a serious historical authenticity because the majority of chapters claim that the Muslim settlement marked the emergence of Rohingyas in Arakan. But we know that Arab traders were not Rohingya by ethnicity. Therefore, the arrival of Muslims should not be considered as the emergence of Rohingya in Arakan as a historical fact. Ahmed’s book came out of consultancy work, but it is hugely informative. Having eight chapters, the book presents the background of the refugee crisis in the larger context of the transition of Burma/Myanmar state from decolonization (1948) to democratization (2010). It also discusses the history of Rohingya influx in Bangladesh from 1978 to 1991–1992, but it misses out the same in 2012, 2016, and 2017 because the book was published in 2010. Therefore, it is not up-to-date to accommodate the current Rohingya crisis which has taken a different momentum following the massive influx in 2017. Nonetheless, the main strength

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of the book is its strong policy recommendations about how the state, civil society, and the international community could be instrumental in the resolution to the Rohingya crisis. The volume that I edited in 2012 on Rohingyas attempts to provide a comprehensive understanding of the hitherto plight of Rohingya refugees living in Ukhia and Teknaf and the socio-economic and political implications of Rohingya presence in Bangladesh. It talks about the brief ethnic history of Rohingyas, their shifting status from residents to stateless people in Myanmar and from stateless people to refugees in Bangladesh, their roles in environmental degradation, the crisis of their social integration, how the Rohingya crisis impacts inter-state relations between Bangladesh and Myanmar, and so on. But it also lacks rigour in explaining how the state regulates the everyday life of Rohingya despite their statelessness. Most importantly, it leaves aside any polemic discussion regarding the potentials and probabilities of resolving the Rohingya crisis. Chowdhury’s and Sammadar’s book (2018) contains some very good and well-researched chapters that cover up the plight of Rohingyas in South Asian countries largely in India and Bangladesh. The editors claim that “this book explores the broader picture of the historical and political dimensions of the Rohingya crisis, and examines subjects of statelessness, human rights and humanitarian protection of these victims of forced migration. Further, it chronicles the actual process of emergence of a stateless community—the transformation of a national group into a stateless existence without basic rights.”15 The book has seven chapters of which four deal with specific Indian cases, two focus on both India and Bangladesh together, and one chapter seems more general, but no particular chapter on the Bangladesh case. Therefore, the book promises to cover South Asian countries, but it is limited within largely India and slightly Bangladesh leaving the state of Rohingya in Pakistan and the remaining South Asian countries. Besides, the book lacks the real struggle of Rohingya people since there is no specific chapter on Bangladesh though more than one million Rohingya refugees live in Bangladesh.

15

 See Chaudhury, S. B. R., & Samaddar, R. (eds). 2018. Ibid.

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Chowdhory’s and Mohanty’s edited book (2020) is a good one of this kind and it provides some very good quality chapters enough to depict the plight of Rohingya refugees in India and Bangladesh. Besides, it presents some polemic analyses of their citizenship conundrum, the history of exclusion resulting in the state of statelessness, and the consequential refugee-hood in neighbouring countries particularly in India and Bangladesh. The editors claim that “this book provides an in-depth investigation of citizenship and nationalism in connection with the Rohingya community. It analyses the processes of production of statelessness in South Asia in general and concerning the Rohingyas in particular. This book seeks to fill that gap and explores a dialogue between the state and its citizens and non-citizens that results in the production of statelessness. In theoretical terms, the book addresses the construction of citizens and non-citizens on the part of the state, and the process of symbolic othering, achieved through various state practices couched in terms of nationalism.”16 However, the inclusion of the Myanmar case doesn’t do justice to the title (Southern Asia) as it goes beyond the border. Besides, thematically the content of the book covers more conceptual, theoretical, and analytical aspects of the Rohingya crisis rather than an empirically grounded and comprehensively informed portrayal of the Rohingya crisis. I have edited and published the latest book (2021) on this list. I claim at the beginning of the book that “[It] covers the Rohingya crisis from a comprehensive perspective both regionally and thematically since it showcases the plight of the Rohingya in Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Southeast Asia and the West, particularly in Canada. It does so by covering their struggles for survival, health issues, environmental impacts in Bangladesh, citizenship issues in the framework of legality and illegality in India, critical conditions in Myanmar and their diasporic situation in the Western countries. This book also concerns the policy issues including the dynamics of repatriation, the roles of the international community and the global civil society under the framework of ‘burden sharing’ and ‘global justice’. All the relevant chapters have touched upon the recent military coup in Myanmar which has changed many future predictions of the resolution to the Rohingya crisis and many policy issues dealt  See, Chowdhory, Nasreen & Mohanty Biswajit (eds.). 2020. Ibid.

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with by the international community.” However, this book also could accommodate more chapters on many other aspects of Rohingya life in the camp and Myanmar. Besides, only a case from Canada can’t unveil the comprehensive picture of diaspora Rohingya activism across the world.

Authored Books Apart from seven edited books specifically focusing on the Rohingyas, there are more few books17 which are widely preferred when it comes to the question of Arakan-Bengal relations and the history of Muslims in Arakan and the Rohingyas are placed at the centre of discussion. Habib Ullah wrote a very interesting book in terms of its title,18 but it hardly contains any authentic source and academically acceptable historical data to provide any convincing history of the Rohingya people, their identity and ethnicity. I reviewed critically this book in another piece of mine explaining that “the book is not systematically and methodologically organized to claim itself as a serious academic piece and thereby could not be authenticated and used as a source in any quality academic writing. Apart from that, it has completely missed the dynamics of Rohingya crisis started from 1962.”19 According to a renowned historian Abdul Karim20 Rohingyas are the descendants of Arab origin traders and explorers who came to Arakan in the eighth century. Karim’s argument is widely cited by the scholars who worked after its publication because  Chowdhury, M.  Ali. 2004. Bengal-Arakan Relations. Kolkata: Firma KLM Private Limited; Siddiquee, Mohibullah (ed.). 2000. The Muslims in Arakan: History and Heritage. Chittagong: The Arakan Historical Society; Karim, Abdul. 2000. The Rohingyas: A Short Account of Their History and Culture, Chittagong: Arakan Historical Society; Akhanda, Mahfuzur Rahman. 2013. The History of Muslims in Arakan (in Bengali). Dhaka-Chittagong: Bangladesh Co-operative Book Society; Ullah, Habib. 2015 (1995). The History of Rohingyas. Chittagong: Bangladesh Co-operative Society; Uddin, Nasir. 2017a. Not Rohingyas, but Royaingas: Stateless People in the Struggle for Existence (in Bengali). Dhaka: Murdhonno Publisher; Ahmed, Kawser and Mohiuddin, Helal. 2020. The Rohingya Crisis: Analysis, Responses and Peacebuilding Avenues. Lanham, Boulder, New  York and London: Lexington Books. 18  Ullah, Habib. 2015[1995]. The History of Rohingyas. Chittagong: Bangladesh Co-operative Society. 19  See Uddin, Nasir, 2020, ibid. 20  Karim, Abdul. 2000. The Rohingyas: A Short Account of Their History and Culture, Chittagong: Arakan Historical Society. 17

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Karim was hitherto one of the noted and leading historians in Bangladesh. However, what was the source of Karim’s historical conclusion generated some debates because he heavily relied on writings of the middle-aged well-known poet Alaol.21 Therefore, whether poetry could be considered as an authentic historical source or not also needs a new form of investigation which has not been done yet. Rather, Mohammad Ali Chowdhury has written a detailed historical genealogy of Bengal-Arakan relations in his book22 where he has wonderfully depicted the political trajectory of various dynasties in both Bengal and Arakan. He also explained the way how the relationship of both the neighbouring states has been transformed depending on the bilateral trade, strategic, and geopolitical interests. As part of the Bengal-Arakan relations, Chowdhury has time and again brought the issues of Rohingya settlement and their transborder mobility. However, the book still does not convincingly respond to the questions of the roots of Rohingya ethnicity. Mahfuzur Rahman Akhanda in his book23 aimed to lay out the history of Muslims in Arakan explaining the arrival of Muslims in Arakan, their initial settlement trouble, and then their struggle for survival, and their contributions to spreading out Islam across the region particularly in Arakan. Nonetheless, the book presents a very insufficient history of Rohingya emergence in the demographic composition in this region despite detailing the history of Muslims in Arakan. Most importantly, the book completely escapes the recurrent Rohingya crisis and their struggle for survival in the wake of the decolonization of Burma/Myanmar amid the state-building and unilineal nation formation. Akhanda recently

 Alaol (c 1607–1680) is one of the greatest poets of medieval Bengal 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 attacked them, killed his father and injured Alaol. The wounded Alaol was taken to Arakan as prisoner where he first worked as a bodyguard but was later employed in teaching music and drama. Then later on, he became one of leading poets of medieval Bengal literature with the patronization of then Arakan King. For details, see http://en.banglapedia.org/index. php?title=Alaol (Accessed on April 27, 2018). 22  See for details, Chowdhury, M. Ali. 2004. Bengal-Arakan Relations. Kolkata: Firma KLM Private Limited. 23  Akhanda, Mahfuzur Rahman. 2013. The History of Muslims in Arakan (in Bengali). Dhaka-­ Chittagong: Bangladesh Co-operative Book Society. 21

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produced another book24 which is full of his earlier production25 yet has added some recent development of the Rohingya issues to the content covering Rohingya refugee situations in Bangladesh and how it is mediated by the local media. The most notable aspect of his book is that it is largely based on secondary resources without any contact with the Rohingya and their ground realities. To this slot, I have added one book26 written in the Bengali language which immediately became one of the best-selling Bengali books on the Rohingya, the Rohingya crisis, and their uncertain future. In the beginning chapter, I have explored in detail with some very solid evidence the historical trajectories of Arakan and Burma to dig out the ethnohistory of Rohingya people and the roots of their separate Rohingya ethnicity. Besides, “it contains the recent development of Rohingya crisis, the roles of Bangladesh state to handle the Rohingyas crisis, deliberate policies of Myanmar to drive the Rohingyas out of Rakhine, their atrocious living conditions in Rakhine state, the roles of international communities, transforming relations between the local community and the Rohingyas in South-eastern Bangladesh, the roles of NGOs and the potential solutions of Rohingyas problem.”27 My Bengali book about Rohingya people is solely based on both my decade-­ long experience of Rohingya research and the recent multiple field visits to Ukhia and Teknaf, temporary Rohingya refugee camps. Consequently, my Bengali book on Rohingya has been considered as a leading comprehensive book for the local readership, Bengali-speaking people based on ethnographic field experience. Besides, the book has provided an extensive list of historical documents as part of the Appendix. Muhammad Abdul Bari published a short-length book28 on the Rohingya issue describing Myanmar’s state policy of exclusion which renders them stateless and non-citizen. He argued that the Rohingya status  Akhanda, Mahfuzur Rahman. 2018. The Rohingya Problem and Bangladesh [in Bengali]. Rajshahi: Porilekh. 25  Akhanda, Mahfuzur Rahman. 2013. Ibid. 26  Uddin, Nasir. 2017a. Not Rohingyas, but Royaingas: Stateless People in the Struggle for Existence (in Bengali). Dhaka: Murdhonno Publisher. 27  See Uddin, Nasir, 2020, ibid. 28  Bari, Muhammad Abdul. 2018. The Rohingya Crisis: A People Facing Extinction. UK: Kube Publishing Limited. 24

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of being non-citizens easily became a tool for the state to execute genocide and commit crimes against humanity in 2017 which forced hundreds of thousands of Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh. This book is very concise in its shape and content but powerfully depicted the atrocious and genocidal experience of the Rohingya people. The book at the end calls for the international community including the United Nations to come forward and stand the Rohingya to bring justice for them so that they can be repatriated to their homeland with full citizen rights. Kawser Ahmed and Helal Mohiuddin very recently wrote a book29 on the Rohingya crisis and the local, regional, and global response to it. It discusses the history of Rohingya naming in search of their ethnic roots, the genesis of the Rohingya crisis and its implication with regional security issues, geopolitics, and geo-economics of the Rohingya crisis, and potential avenues of peacebuilding as far as the Rohingya conflicts are concerned. This is indeed an important book that provides a comprehensive overview of the crisis but it seems more policy analysis from the top and view from the populist and conventional way of conflict management and peacebuilding process disregarding the ground realities in everyday life of the Rohingya people in Bangladesh, Myanmar, and other parts of the world.

Some Well-Cited Single-Authored Books Apart from the above-discussed books, some are widely cited authentic publications on the recurrent Rohingya crisis. Azeem Ibrahim in his widely cited book30 very powerfully argued that what Myanmar has been doing for decades against the civilian Rohingya living in Rakhine state is fairly a ‘hidden genocide’. In my another book, I reviewed the book explaining that “Ibrahim wrote about the history of Rohingya’s background from unknown past to 1848 when Burma decolonised, from independence to democracy (1948–2010), the return to democracy  Ahmed, Kawser and Mohiuddin, Helal. 2020. The Rohingya Crisis: Analysis, Responses and Peacebuilding Avenues. Lanham, Boulder, New York and London: Lexington Books. 30  Azeem Ibrahim. 2016. The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide. London: Hurst & Company. 29

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(2008–2015), the implication of the Rohingyas (2008–2015), the current situation in Rakhine state and why we should call state’s atrocities as genocide under international law and finally what would be a potential solution for what we could do.”31 It has a detailed explanation of the Rohingya crisis and their deep-rooted history in Arakan with very solid historical and archival evidence, but fundamentally it is based on secondary sources, newspaper reports, and his personal experience of activism for the rights and justice for Rohingyas. Kazi Farzana in her book32 deals with the question of Rohingya identities which is contrasted to Myanmar’s state narratives. She has attempted the reconstruction of the Rohingya historical background, their identity and ethnicity based on their social memories and their life in refugee camps in Bangladesh. She has used art and music as tools to identify identity, ethnicity, and everyday resistance. This is also a very useful book to understand the recurrent state of the Rohingya, but her book lacks the Rohingya experiences of ethnocide, genocide, and structural arrangement of discrimination shaped by the state policy and state practices in Myanmar. She has less used empirical data to substantiate her argument since Rohingya voices are not well reflected in her analysis. Francis Wade’s book33 discussed the nature of Buddhist violence to generate a ‘culture of fear’ instrumental to render the Muslims an ‘other’ in the state structure of Myanmar. I reviewed Wade’s book in my writing34 saying that “the book is a journalistic analysis of the crisis rooted in the history of colonialism and the transition of postcolonial along with its ethnic and religious divide. But it has a little discussion about the Rohingya crisis. Besides, one of the big concerns is that the entire crisis has been represented as a question of religious intolerance instead of its state’s nature and policy towards the ethnic, religious and racial minority in the state of Myanmar.” Another book jointly written by Anthony Ware

 See Uddin, Nasir, 2020, ibid.  Kazi Fahmida Farzana. 2017. Memories of Burmese Rohingya Refugees: Contested Identities and Belonging. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 33  Wade, Francis. 2017. Myanmar’s Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and the Making of a Muslim ‘Other’. London: ZED Books. 34  See Uddin, Nasir, 2020, ibid. 31 32

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and Costas Laoutides35 has discussed in detail the Rohingya crisis based on their practical experience of researching Myanmar. This is the main strength of the book that it is written based on extensive research experience in Myanmar. However, Ware and Laoutides have put Rohingya in an inverted comma which denotes that both the authors do not even ready term the Rohingya people by their original name. No book should be judged by its cover but the cover has strongly been reflected in almost every page of the book as both the authors have uncritically subscribed to Myanmar’s perspective and position about the Rohingya crisis. One of the renowned scholars on Myanmar Ashley South wrote, “This is one area where the present book [Ware & Laoutides’ book] is lacking: there is little contextualisation of the Rohingya crisis within the broader history of armed ethnic conflict in the country.”36 When the UN has termed the atrocities perpetrated against Myanmar as a “textbook example of ethnic cleaning,”37 the book explains it as a counter-insurgency operation and so on. I have written and published an ethnography38 exclusively on the extremely vulnerable and atrocious living conditions of the Rohingya people in Arakan. I have presented an in-depth analysis of what happened in 2017 in Rakhine under clearance operation which forced to flee 750,000 people to Bangladesh. I have stated the first-hand narratives of eyewitnesses of genocidal attacks, random raping, merciless killing, torching the houses and properties, and evidence of ethnocide. In this book, I have formulated a theory what I call ‘subhuman life’ to understand the extreme form of vulnerability and an acute stage of being extinction with the case of the Rohingya people within the broader spectrum of statelessness, refugee-hood, non-citizenships, IDPs, forcibly displaced people, forced migration, asylum seekers, and camp people. In fact, through the  Ware, Anthony & Laoutides, Constas. 2018. Myanmar’s ‘Rohingya’ Conflict. London: Hurst & Company. 36  Ashley South. 2020. “Myanmar’s ‘Rohingya’ Conflict” (Review). The Journal of Contemporary Asia 50(1): 168–175, p. 169. 37  Safi, M. 2017. “Myanmar treatment of Rohingya looks like ‘textbook ethnic cleansing’, says UN.” The Guardian, September 11, 2017. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2017sep/11/un-myanmars-treatment-of-rohingya-textbook-example-of-ethnic-cleansing (Accessed on October 28, 2018). 38  See Uddin, Nasir, 2020, ibid. 35

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lens of subhuman life theory, the recurrent state of the Rohingya people has been vividly depicted and genuinely presented. Ronan Lee has published an important book39 which very conspicuously illuminates that what Myanmar did to Rohingya in 2021 is a clear genocide. The book presents human rights violations, forced migrations, and extra-judicial killings on an enormous scale perpetrated by the Myanmar military and Aung San Suu Kyi, the then state councillor of Myanmar supported it. It also discusses Rohingya identity, history, and culture along with a detailed discussion about the early stages of genocide. The book is based on extensive interviews by the Rohingya themselves in Myanmar and diaspora Rohingyas, but it seriously lacks the local voices of the Rohingya who have been living in Bangladesh for decades.

Scholarly Pieces and Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles Apart from all books mentioned above, some very good numbers of scholarly articles have been published that address various aspects of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. But it must be mentioned here that the number of published articles has been double in the last five years in comparison to the number before 2017. It indicates that the Rohingya crisis received tremendous academic interest from across the globe. I will discuss some leading articles published after 2017 because the book is the recurrent state of the Rohingyas during the post-2017 genocide. Jobair Alam40 has published an article about the status of Rohingya people in Myanmar and indicated four factors: (i) development of Burmese nationalism; (ii) politicization of identity for Burmese majority; (iii) taking away of the citizenship of Rohingya; and (iv) ethnic divisions in Myanmar society have played significant roles in (re)constructing their identity as a minority. This analysis provides very little new thing because many scholars have written it before. Most importantly, it has left out atrocious living conditions of the Rohingya people in the Rakhine state  Lee, Ronan. 2021. Myanmar’s Rohingya Genocide Identity, History and Hate Speech. London: Bloomsbury. 40  Alam, Jobair. 2018. “The Rohingya of Myanmar: Theoretical Significance of the Minority Status.” Asian Ethnicity 19 (2): 180–210. 39

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due to the state’s systematic violence and brutal atrocities. Besides, this article is largely based on secondary sources and unauthentic media reports. C. Christine Fair wrote article41 which discusses the root causes of the Rohingya conflict and some untold issues of why the problem is not resolved. Citing Bertil Litner, Fair said, the Rohingya problem is not resolving due mainly to the strategic competition between India and China in the Southeast Asian region what he terms as the Great Game East Citing Bertil Litner, a respected Thailand-based scholar of Asian affairs.42 Yousuf Storai in his article43 discussed the deadly operation against the Rohingya people in the Rakhine state in 2017 and called it a ‘systemic ethnic cleansing’, but the article is fully based on secondary resources. David Lewis wrote an important article44 about humanitarianism, civil society, and the Rohingya refugee crisis in Bangladesh. Drawing on the literature on the local and international dimensions of humanitarianism, David explores the transforming character of Bangladesh’s civil society concerning the changing expressions of religious sentiments locally and globally. The article also explores the importance of both formal and informal responses historically in the context of Bangladesh as its citizens became refugees in 1971 in India. However, it lacks the Rohingya experience of genocide that they did go through in Rakhine state in 2017. Nehginpao Kipgen in his article45 wrote an apt analysis that without addressing the question of identity and citizenship, there will be no possibility of resolving the Rohingya crisis. He explains, “The Rohingya crisis has been lingering on for several decades…while the ultimate solution lies in Myanmar, there is lack of political will, at least at the moment, from the Myanmar government to address the core issues.” This article is also a kind of policy analysis without any active involvement of the Rohingya people’s view towards the lasting solution to the Rohingya  Fair, Christine. 2018. “Rohingya: Victims of a Great Game East.” The Washington Quarterly 41 (3): 63–85. 42  Fair, Christine. 2018. Ibid. 43  Storai, Yousuf. 2018. “Systematic Ethnic Cleansing: The Case Study of Rohingya.” Arts and Social Science Journal 9(4): 1–9. 44  Lewis, David. 2019. “Humanitarianism, civil society and the Rohingya refugee crisis in Bangladesh.” The Third World Quarterly 40(10): 1884–1902. 45  Kipgen, Nehginpao. 2019. “The Rohingya Crisis: The Centrality of Identity and Citizenship.” The Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 39(1): 61–74. 41

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c­ risis. Kunal Mukherjee wrote piece46 on the historical question of ethnic minorities in Myanmar as a lens to understand the Rohingya crisis. He argues that “problematic race relations in Myanmar today should not be viewed in isolation but should be seen as a part of a historical continuum. The British colonial policies of divide and rule, political leaders and their obsession with Buddhism in the post-independence period and xenophobic tendencies during the long years of the military junta have all collectively contributed to the very complex situation in which the country finds itself today when it comes to race relations.”47 He has given suggestions to democratize the state policy and state institution. This is a very popular prescription that democratization of Myanmar could resolve many problems, but we witnessed the process from 2011 when democratization started and found nothing hopeful and meaningful. Rather, genocidal attacks on Rohingya in 2012, 2016, and 2017 took place under a so-called democratic government led by the so-called icon of democracy Aung San Suu Kyi. Nyi Nyi Kyaw came up with a different argument in his article48 where he claims that over-focusing on the enactment of the Citizenship Law in 1982 for rendering the Rohingya a stateless group of people put aside the core issues of the Rohingya crisis. He explained, “The statelessness of the Rohingya is better understood as a plight that has been largely caused by de facto nuances and complexities surrounding the citizenization and naturalization of the Rohingya.”49 This article’s central argument is also unclear about how the implementation of the citizenship law could resolve the Rohingya crisis when the very law tripped the Rohingya of their citizenship rights. Patrick Hein wrote in his article50 that the there-­ ethnicization of politics in Myanmar has made Rohingya ethnicity paradoxical because the state formation and nation-building process followed  Mukherjee, Kunal. 2019. “The Ethnic Minority Question and Rohingya Crisis in Contemporary Myanmar.” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 39 (1): 26–43. 47  Mukherjee, Kunal. 2019. Ibid., p. 26. 48  Kyaw Nyi Nyi. 2019. “Unpacking the Presumed Statelessness of Rohingyas.” The Journal of Immigration & Refugee Studies 15(3): 269–286. 49  Kyaw Nyi Nyi. 2019. Ibid., p. 282. 50  Hein, Patrick. 2018. “The Re-ethnicisation of Politics in Myanmar and the Making of the Rohingya Ethnicity Paradox.” India Quarterly 74 (4): 1–12. 46

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a unilineal way that disregarded the presence of cultural plurality and multi-ethnicity. Hein has used Paul Brass’s concept of Hindu-Muslim violence in India, but genocidal attacks on the Rohingya civilian were not simply motivated by the anti-Muslim sentiments. Rather, it was the state’s intentional strategies to execute an ethnic cleansing mission that was completely absent in Hein’s writing. Tanzimuddin Khan and Saima Ahmed jointly published an article51 on the Rohingya crisis in connection with the United Nations’ inherent structural weakness which the UN couldn’t contribute anything to resolve the Rohingya problem. They said, “The structural weaknesses inherent in the Charter and the politico-­ economic interests of China and Russia, the two permanent members of the UNSC, are broadly rendering the organization ineffective to deal with the Rohingya crisis.”52 This is a very important article that provides readers with a comprehensive analysis of the ineffective roles of the UN to redress the Rohingya crisis, but it doesn’t contain the atrocious experience of the Rohingya about the genocide, ethnocide, and homicide which this book fundamentally deals with. Amena Mohsin has written and published article53 on the Rohingya refugee women which is one of the ignored aspects of the Rohingya crisis. Her article examines the hopes, aspirations, and future thinking of the Rohingya people with the lens of the Rohingya refugee women’s voices in Bangladesh as they carve out their spaces as a people both cognitive and physical in a land that is not theirs; for land which they claim to be their own. The writing is based on the author’s field visits to Cox’s Bazar on December 24–26, 2017, and February 23–27, 2018, which helps her tap the Rohingya refugee women voice. This is a very important addition to the scholarship on the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh but it also misses out on the broader spectrum of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and the crimes against humanity executed by the Myanmar military forces and

 Khan, Tanzimuddin & Ahmed, Saima. 2019. “Dealing with the Rohingya crisis: The relevance of the general assembly and R2P.” Asian Journal of Comparative Politics XX (X): 1–23. 52  Khan, Tanzimuddin & Ahmed, Saima. 2019. Ibid., p. 2. 53  Moshin, Amena. 2019. “Caught between the nation and the state: Voices of Rohingya refugee women in Bangladesh.” Asian Journal of Comparative Politics XX (X): 1–14. 51

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vigilantes. Adam E. Howe published a very informative article54 focusing on the genealogy of the state’s policy of exclusion applied to the Rohingya Muslim minority in the Rakhine state. He argued that 2017s operation clearance didn’t happen all of a sudden but it was the projection of a process of exclusion started in 2012. He wrote, “Buddhist nationalist monks, including members of the ‘969’ Movement and Ma Ba Tha, in concert with the Burmese government, have acted as authoritative voices in society, depicting the Rohingya ethnoreligious group as an existential threat to the country’s majority Buddhist population. As such, hate-filled rhetoric has provided a politically unstable Burmese regime with an ideological justification for human rights abuses committed in Rakhine State.”55 The article is also more about policy concerns and facts analysis but doesn’t have anything about the Rohingya victims’ voices to manifest what kinds of terrible atrocities and brutalities were perpetrated by the Myanmar security forces in the name of counter-insurgency. Ken MacLean wrote a wonderful article56 where he correlates the practice of erasure and the Rohingya crisis. He argues that progressive erasure of citizenship creates the ground for the progressive erasure of home and vice versa, with the result being the largest cross-border humanitarian crisis in Asia today. The basic tone of his argument is that stripe of citizenship indeed is an attempt of executing ethnic cleansing what he explains by using two concepts ‘lawfare’ and ‘spacio-cide’. This article is very helpful for the understanding of what happened to the Rohingya in 2017, but it lacks empirical data of the first-hand eyewitnesses and victims of the event. Shamsul Bari wrote article57 on the Rohingya refugee crisis where he, given present turmoil context in and around the refugee camps in Bangladesh warns of what he calls ‘a time bomb waiting to explode. The relations between the host community and the Rohingya refugees are gradually deteriorating which sometimes turns into a conflict  Howe, Adam E. 2018. “Discourses of Exclusion: The Societal Securitization of Burma’s Rohingya (2012–2018)” Journal of Asian Security and International Affairs 5(3): 1–22. 55  Howe, Adam E. 2018. Ibid., p. 1. 56  MacLean, Ken. 2019. “The Rohingya Crisis and the Practices of Erasure.” Journal of Genocide Research 21(1): 83–95. 57  Bari, Shamsul. 2020. “The Rohingya Refugee Crisis: A Time Bomb Waiting to Explode.” Social Change 50 (2): 285–299. 54

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leaving some injured from both sides. Even there are several infights meanwhile taken place among different factions and sub-groups among the Rohingya which has caused a couple of death cases. Nonetheless, the situation should not be analogised with a ‘time bomb’ which could explode everything anytime. Therefore, what Bari has predicted so far seems very oversimplification of the declining relationship between the local people and the Rohingya refugees. Ala Uddin has very recently written article58 about inter-ethnic marriage between the Rohingya refugees and the local Bengalis where he argues that Rohingya people are using this space as a means of survival strategies. He argues that in the absence of adequate food, shelter, and security in refugee camps, Rohingya women try to manage their survival by marrying Bangladeshi men with the hope of obtaining citizenship and other basic rights. Though this is a well-­ researched article, it has nothing new since in Rohingya life in Bangladesh it has been in practice since the Rohingya migrated to Bangladesh dated back to 1978.59 More importantly, the article has hardly anything about the brutal experience of the Rohingya who did go through genocide, ethnocide and domicide in August 2017 and afterwards. This list could be longer but more or less the same theme of writings which seriously lacks the atrocious face of the 2017 genocide what this has drawn with the first-hand narrative of the victims. Even before 2017, some very good scholarly articles were published covering the gender issue,60 the roles of the international community and their failure to redress the Rohingya crisis,61 domestic and regional security issues due to the presence of Rohingya Bangladesh,62 their miserable  Uddin, M. Ala. 2021. “The meaning of marriage to the Rohingya refugees, and their survival in Bangladesh.” The Journal of Refugee Studies 34(2): 2036–2051. 59  Uddin, Nasir. 2012. “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, edited by Nasir Uddin, 83–98. Dhaka: Institute of Culture and Development Research (ICDR). 60  Gawher Nayeem Wahra. 1994. ‘Women Refugees in Bangladesh,’ Gender and Development 2(1): 45–49. 61  Eileen Pittaway. 2008. “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, pp. 83–104. (London and New York: Routledge). 62  Utpala Rahman. 2010. “Rohingya Refugees: A Security Dilemma for Bangladesh.” Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies 8(2): 139–161. 58

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living conditions and poor healthcare situation in Bangladesh,63 their economic challenges and coping strategies,64 the role and politics of Muslim aid agencies in camps,65 their social integration and the political marginalization,66 how the Rohingya crisis reshapes Bangladesh-Myanmar bilateral relations67 and the gender dimension of the Rohingya crisis, focusing particularly on pregnant women in refugee camps who crossed in 2016.68 The pre-2017 literature literarily failed to depict the genocidal portrait of the Rohingya refugees which they have been experiencing since 1978 though it started taking extreme and intensive shape from 2012.69 What was happening to the Rohingya people was a confirmed genocide which was evident in two well-research documents prepared by Yale Law School70 and Queen Marry University.71 Therefore, most of the scholarly articles published before and after 2017 largely lack victims’ voices, empirical data, manifest of eyewitness and hence analytical strength to portrait the real picture of atrocity and extreme form of brutality what the genocide survivors did go through. Therefore, though a plethora of literature has mushroomed during the post-2017 period, there is still a severe dearth of solid ethnographic understanding of the victims’ experience of genocide, ethnocide, ethnic  Chris Lewa. 2010. Unregistered Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh: Crackdown, Forced Displacement and Hunger. Bangkok: The Arakan Project. 64   Kristy Crabtree. 2010. “Economic Challenges and Coping Mechanisms in Protracted Displacement: A Case Study of the Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh,” Journal of Muslim Mental Health 5(1): 41–58. 65  Victoria Palmer. 2011. “Analysing Cultural Proximity: Islamic Relief Worldwide and the Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh.” Development in Practice 21(1): 96–108. 66  A.K.M.  Ahsan Ullah. 2011. “Rohingya Refugees to Bangladesh: Historical Exclusion and Contemporary Marginalization.” Journal of Immigration and Refugee Studies 9(2): 139–161. 67  Syeda Naushin Parnini. 2013. “Crisis of the Rohingya as Muslim Minority in Myanmar and Bilateral Relations with Bangladesh.” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 33(2): 281–297. 68  Susan Hutchinson. 2018. “Gendered Insecurity in the Rohingya Crisis.” Australian Journal of International Affairs 72 (1): 1–9. 69  See for detail, Howe, Adam E. 2018. Ibid. 70  Lowenstein, Allard K. 2015. Prosecution of the Rohingya Muslims: Is Genocide Occurring in Myanmar’s Rakhine State. Yale: International Human Rights Clinic, Yale Law School. (Available at: https://law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/documents/pdf/Clinics/fortifyrights.pdf [Accessed on January 02, 2021].) 71  Green, Penny, Thomas MacManus, and Alicia de la Cour Venning. 2015. Countdown Annihilation: Genocide in Myanmar. London: International State Crime Initiative. 63

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cleansing, homicide and crimes against humanity. This book intends to fill this academic vacuum which provides policymakers and state stakeholders with a comprehensive feel of what happened to Rohingya life in 2017 and its aftermath. Since this book presents victims’ narratives and their collective memories about 2017’s genocide and other forms of atrocities, the international community and global civil society body could utilize it for mobilizing global opinion to resolve the Rohingya crisis amid the voluntary repatriation of the Rohingya refugee with dignity, legal recognition and social safety.

2.3 Rohingya Research: Methodological Challenges Handsome amounts of research have mushroomed during the last five years after 2017 when a large influx took place following a deadly campaign of Myanmar military forces against civilian Rohingyas in Rakhine state. Most of the literature came out during the post-2017 influx largely based on the journalistic reports that appeared in media outlets, some documents prepared by human rights organizations and some are based on short term field visits to Cox’s Bazar refugee camps. Considering the various accesses to information, it becomes problematic to authenticate and validate the information if it is not gathered through direct contacts with the stakeholders in general and victims in particular. Therefore, researching the Rohingya people involves a serious methodological challenge because of the scarcity and validity of the information. Available access to information informs that there are four ways to gather data about Rohingya people and what happened to them in 2017 in Rakhine state: Firstly, researchers and media receive information from Myanmar which is strongly filtered and sponsored (in fact censored!) by the state. Myanmar’s media reports are heavily controlled by the state72 and hence seriously lack authenticity because the state-sponsored reports are always  See for details, Ebbighausen, Rodion. 2021. “Myanmar’s media under pressure from all sides” DW, May 2, 2021. Available at: https://www.dw.com/en/myanmars-media-under-pressure-from-­­ all-sides/a-57405936 (Accessed on July 10, 2021). 72

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censored by and comply with the state policy. Therefore, state-sponsored reports always reflect a statist view which naturally misses out on the neutrality, impartiality, objectivity and value-freeness of the issues, facts and figures.73 So, what happened to the Rohingya people in 2017 was not well-documented by authentic and justifiable stakeholders. What we know all were provided by the Myanmar state and state-sponsored media. (2) Secondly, researchers and media have some drone footages and satellite images of affected areas of the Rakhine state captured, after the genocidal attacks were over, by the Guardian,74 the Amnesty International and Human Right Watch (HRW), and so on, which provide some visual images, and areal pictures manifesting clearly about what kind of massacre and domicide took place in August 2017.75 However, these drone footages still do not adequately reflect and give any clear idea about what was happened to the Rohingya people and the intensity of genocidal atrocities committed under clearance operation in Rakhine state. Nonetheless, I must admit that some images and drone footages are good enough to provide us with some villages being completely burned down and turned into ashes.76 (3) Thirdly, we have some amazing photographs and video footage taken and shot from the Bangladesh border standing on the bank of the Naf River on the Bangladesh side. The photographs and footages show some houses burning with wild-flam of fire and sky-­ going smokes which give some glimpses about domicide but not a conspicuous idea about homicide, ethnocide and genocide taking place in the different Rohingya villages. (4) Fourthly, the direct interview of the  See for details, Kironska, Kristina & Peng, Ni-Ni. 2021. “How state-run media shape perceptions: an analysis of the projection of the Rohingya in the Global New Light of Myanmar.” South East Asia Research 29(1): 16–31. 74  Hodal, Kate. 2017. “Myanmar: new footage reveals scorched-earth campaign against Rohingya.” The Guardian, September 14, 2017. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/global-­ development/2017/sep/14/myanmar-new-footage-reveals-scorched-earth-campaign-against-­ rohingya (Accessed on July 10, 2021). 75  See for details, The Voice of America. 2017. Drone and Satellites Expose Myanmar’s Pain. Available at: https://www.voanews.com/east-asia/drone-and-satellites-expose-myanmars-pain (Accessed on July 10, 2021). 76  See for details, Yasin, Dar. 2017. “Drone footage shows thousands upon thousands of Rohingya Muslims streaming into Bangladesh.” National Post, October 17, 2017. Available at: https://nationalpost.com/news/world/thousands-more-rohingya-muslims-cross-border-into-bangladesh (Accessed on July 10, 2021). 73

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genocide survivors, provide some genuine first-hand experiences of victims to present the relatively real picture of what was happened to Rohingya lives in the Rakhine state. The narratives of traumatized Rohingya could be used as first-hand authentic evidence because they did go through the intensity of atrocities in the Rakhine State following the 25 August 2017 campaign. This sort of experience sharing could be considered a more solid, valid, and authentic source of information. Because such first-hand statements of genocide survivors could provide a lucid picture of the context of understanding genocide, ethnocide, domicide, ethnic cleansing, and the crimes against humanity being taken place under clearance operation. At the same time, I must admit that there is little scope to verify and cross-­check the narratives of Rohingya genocide survivors whether their statements and experience uphold real facts or facts with slight fiction. Nonetheless, victims’ narratives shall be the most authentic source of information among the four accesses to the information on Rohingya research. This book is fundamentally based on the victims’ narratives that I with my research assistants recorded soon after the genocidal survivors, Rohingyas, crossed the border in Bangladesh in 2017. The Rohingya people started coming to Bangladesh on the 25th of August 2017. At first, all new arrivals were taken to a transit camp from where they were shifted to different camps in Balukhali and Kutupalong. I started recording 50,000 traumatized narratives from the beginning of September and continued till the end of November 2017. I employed ten well-trained and professional research assistants in Balukhali and Kutupalong refugee camps who worked for two months. The ten assistants were fresh graduates in Anthropology and well trained in recording, coding, decoding, and transcribing ethnographic data which are descriptive, comprehensive, and narratives in nature. Despite having their professional training in Anthropology to collect ethnographic data, I further trained them so that they could maintain the maximum degree of authenticity, accuracy, and validity of the narratives of 500 survivors. Every research assistant collected 50 narratives of genocide survivors and rape victims. Altogether, ten research assistants collected and prepared 500 narratives which became a great testimony of what happened to the Rohingya people in the Rakhine state of Myanmar in 2017. I intensively took care of their fieldwork so that they could properly record the

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narratives. I double-check every case of recording and the subsequent translation. My research assistants also cross-checked every case after translating their oral data into written text. With intensive care, all narratives were collected, recorded, and translated into text. This book contains many first-hand traumatized narratives of the Rohingya people who did go through the horrible experience in August 2017.

2.4 Conclusion This chapter mainly presents a critical re-read of the available ‘texts’ which has been intensified during the post-2017 influx. It is acknowledgeable that there are some good quality researches on the Rohingya people and their crisis has already been done and subsequently translated into published forms; books, edited volumes, book chapters, journal articles, paper series, unpublished thesis, monographs, and dissertations as well as in the form of various types of reports. Nonetheless, there are still some vacuums to fill up with the solid, valid, and authentic narrative of victims having first-hand experiences of observing genocide, ethnocide, and the crimes against humanity. The book is full of first-hand narratives of genocide survivors. Apart from this, this chapter also illuminates some methodological challenges researchers face while researching the protracted refugee situations because it involves moral, ethical, and political dynamics of rights and entitlements as far as the refugees are concerned.77 With the case of my experience of researching on/with/among the Rohingya for more than two decades, I have brought in some serious ontological and epistemological concerns what an ethnographer in particular, and social research, in general, has to deal with in the field while doing fieldwork on the refugees having the background of being one of the host community. I have touched upon the methodological issues regarding the way how an ethnographer’s personal, political, cultural, and ideological background becomes both weakness and strength in the field of  See for detail, Block Karen, Warr Deborah, Gibbs Lisa, and Riggs Elisha. 2012. “Addressing Ethical and Methodological Challenges in Research with Refugee-background Young People: Reflections from the Field.” The Journal of Refugee Studies 26(1): 69–87. 77

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r­ efugee research.78 How an ethnographer can overcome such dilemma intelligently and make an epistemic balance between emotion and profession confirms the quality, validity, and authenticity of the data and information gathered. The following chapters will judge the quality, validity, and authenticity of the narratives of Rohingya genocide survivors currently living in Southeastern Bangladesh.

 See for detail, Habib, Rima. 2019. “Ethical, methodological, and contextual challenges in research in conflict settings: the case of Syrian refugee children in Lebanon.” Conflict and Health 13 (29): 1–7. 78

3 Rohingya Experience of Atrocity: A Case of Genocide and the Crimes Against Humanity

3.1 Introduction In 2017, the global community witnessed a massive influx of the Rohingyas, known as the most persecuted ethnic minority in the world, to Bangladesh as they fled unprecedented atrocities and unexplainable brutalities perpetrated by the Myanmar security forces and vigilantes. The denial of citizenship through the enactment of the Myanmar Citizenship Law in 1982 rendered the Rohingya people stateless. The state of being stateless became an extremely instrumental and influential pretext behind the merciless killing, ruthless violence, random raping, reckless burning of houses and properties, and unexplainable persecution against Rohingya people in Rakhine state. Though it has recently taken a dangerous shape and drew wider global attention, the Rohingya people had been undergoing various forms of discrimination, forced

This chapter is a revised version of an earlier book chapter titled “Ethnic Cleansing of the Rohingya People” published in The Palgrave Handbook of Ethnicity, edited by S. Ratuva in 2019, pp. 1575–1591. Though the chapter has been substantially revised, I do acknowledge the original publisher. With the rigorous revision, the chapter has been reprinted here with due permission of the publisher. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 N. Uddin, Voices of the Rohingya People, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90816-4_3

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displacement, arbitrary detention, and an acute practice of vulnerability in their everyday life since 1962 when for the first time the military took over the state power of then Burma. Since then, state-sponsored violence, systemic persecution under different state policies, massive human rights violations, and forcibly pushing them to cross the border became a regular experience of Rohingya people. The latest one that started on August 25, 2017, superseded all previous records and created a new example of ‘genocide’. The intensity of brutality and severity of atrocities was so extreme that the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) termed it as “the textbook example of ethnic cleansing,” yet the connotation and the notions of ethnic cleansing seem rather softer in consideration of the amounts and degrees of killing, raping, and torching houses across Rohingya villages. I would rather prefer to term it as a ‘confirmed genocide’, and this chapter fundamentally deals with the issues of genocide and ethnic cleansing based on the narratives of genocide survivors. In response to an attack by Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA)1 to some police check posts and a military base, Myanmar security forces launched a deadly operation called Operation Clearance which resulted in the killing of 10,000 civilian-Rohingyas, raping of about 2000 girls and women, burning completely or partially about 400 villages, and driving around 750,000 civilian-Rohingyas out of their homeland. Considering the degree of causalities and the intensity of brutality, the UNHRC termed it as a textbook example of ethnic cleansing, whilst many internationally acclaimed media outlets and renowned scholars termed it as genocide. This chapter presents some very relevant traumatized narratives of first-hand witnesses who lived through the experience of military operations, which could justify whether it is ‘ethnic cleansing’ or ‘genocide’.  The Arakan Rohingya Solidarity Army (ARSA) first came to public attention in October 2016 soon after it was said to have attacked three police outposts in the Rathedaung and Maungdaw townships, killing nine police officers and leaving many injured. It was also accused of attacking 30 police outposts and one military base in August 2017. It was previously known as Harakatul Yakeen. Though ARSA is declared as a ‘terrorist group’ by Myanmar, the ARSA claims that it fights for the rights of Rohingya people being denied citizenship rights and experienced various forms of discrimination in Myanmar. See for details, Edroos, Faisal. 2017. “ARSA: Who are the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army?” Aljazeera, September 13, 2017. Available at: https://www.aljazeera. com/news/2017/9/13/arsa-who-are-the-arakan-rohingya-salvation-army. (Accessed on July 27, 2021). 1

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Also, the way Myanmar security forces vandalized and torched the houses of Rohingya people to burn the entire villages left enough space to understand domicide in Rakhine state. This chapter also brings in the extensive review of genocide literature and cases with the historical background and the context of declaring the UN Genocide Convention in 1948 and the importance of the Rome Statutes adopted in 1998. This chapter presents the voices of the victims who did go through the experience of extreme atrocity perpetrated by the Myanmar security forces.

3.2 Who Are the Rohingyas? The Rohingya, an ethnolinguistic and religious minority, have been living in Arakan (Rakhine since 1989) state of Burma, now Myanmar, for centuries.2 In August 2017, worldwide attention was drawn to this region when the Myanmar Military began an unprecedented campaign. Combined with the previous amounts of Rohingya refuges, now Bangladesh is hosting more than one million Rohingyas in its south-­ eastern part.3 Myanmar’s Citizenship Law adopted in 1982 rendered them legally ‘illegal’ in the state structure as it conferred citizenships to 135 nationals excluding the Rohingya people. In Myanmar, the Rohingya people are often identified as ‘illegal Bengali migrants,’ which as a discourse has been intelligently designed and articulated by the state policy across time and space in Myanmar.4 Interestingly enough, the Rohingya  See for details, Buchanan Francis.1799. “A Comparative Vocabulary of some of the Languages Spoken in the Burma Empire.” Asiatic Researcher, 5: 219–240; Charney, Michael W. 1999. Where Jambudipa and Islamdom Converged: Religious Change and the Emergence of Buddhist Communalism in Early Modern Arakan (fifteenth to nineteenth centuries) A PhD dissertation, Department of History, University of Michigan; Karim Abdul. 2016 [1997]. The Rohingyas: A Short Account of Their History and Culture. Dhaka: Jatya Shahitya Prakash; Ibrahim Azeem. 2016. The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide. London: Hurst & Company; Uddin, R.  Nasir. 2017. Not Rohingya, but Royanga: Stateless People in the Struggle for Existence [in Bengali]. Dhaka: Murdhanno Prokashon; Uddin, Nasir. 2020a. The Rohingya: An Ethnography of ‘Subhuman’ Life. Delhi: The Oxford University Press. 3  World Health Organization (WHO) Report. 2018. WHO appeals for international community support; warns of grave health risks to Rohingya refugees in rainy season. March 29, 2018. Available at: https://reliefweb.int/report/bangladesh/who-appeals-international-community-support-warnsgrave-health-risks-rohingya. (Accessed on October 28, 2018). 4  Ibrahim, Azeem. 2016. Ibid. 2

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people are called ‘illegal Burmese migrants,’ locally called bormaya, in Bangladesh. The Government of Bangladesh (GoB) has recently prepared their biometric database terming them as ‘Forcibly Displaced Myanmar Nationals’ (FDMN). In that sense, legally and structurally in the state framework, the Rohingya people exist nowhere as Myanmar does not recognize them as citizens, and Bangladesh denies recognizing them even as refugees. Factually, the denial of citizenship and subsequent statelessness turned into an instrument that Myanmar has been exploiting to drive them out of the country creating “unlivable and atrocious conditions”5 in Rakhine state. However, it started in 1962 when the military first took over the state power, but the large-scale influx of Rohingyas to Bangladesh began in 1978 following the ‘Operation Nagamin’ executed by then Burmese armies.6 The recent phenomenon is the prolongation of the previously continued atrocious and exclusionary policy of the state of Myanmar. Though the chapter addresses the current situation of Rohingyas what has reached here through different political upheavals in Burma/Myanmar that have gradually pushed them to the struggle for existence, it is essential to know the ethnic, regional, and political history of Arakan/Rakhine and Burman/Myanmar across time and space in an attempt to find the position of Rohingyas and the reasoning behind committing ‘genocide’ against and ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Rohingya people. The Rohingya people are widely known as the inhabitants of Rohang (or Rowsang or Rossan) which was the earlier name of Arakan, but now known as Rakhine state.7 In the medieval works of the poets of Arakan and Chittagong, like 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’.8 It is admissible here that literary works should not be used as an  Uddin, Nasir. 2020a. Ibid.  Uddin Nasir. 2012. “Of hurting and hosting: Crises in co-existence with Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.” In: Uddin Nasir (Ed.). To Host or to Hurt: Counter Narratives on the Rohingya Refugee Issues in Bangladesh, pp. 83–98. Dhaka: ICDR. 7  Alam AM. 1999. A Short Historical Background of Arakan. Chittagong: The Arakan Historical Society. Available at: https://www.kaladanpress.org/images/ document/2018/A%20Short%20Historical%20Background%20%20of%20Arakan.pdf. (Accessed on February 2, 2018). 8  Karim Abdul. 2016 [1997]. Ibid. 5 6

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authentic source of history, but the names of places could be found in the contemporary literature which could be academically authenticated.9 Besides, characters of fiction/literature are made of imagination, but the names of places are often used in real forms. Therefore, it is widely accepted that Arakan’s earlier name was Rohang (or Rowsang or Rossan). Besides, many historians10 supplemented this paradigm of naming. Mrohong was the original Arakanese word of Rohang, and the Rohingya people were believed to be the inhabitants of Mrohong [Rohang].11 Arakan is an old coastal country in the Southeast Asian region. Historian Siddiquee wrote, “The word Arakan is the corruption of the word Al-Rukun… In Ptolemy’s Geografia (150 AD) it was named ‘Argyre’. Early Buddhist missionaries called Arakan ‘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 AD) by Peta Vino, the country was referred to as ‘Aracan’. Friar Manrique (1628–1643 AD) mentions the country as Aracan.”12 Historian Alam wrote, “Arab geographer Rashiduddin (1310 AD) termed it ‘Rahan or Raham’, the British traveller Relph Fitch (1586 AD) called it Rocon, Rennell’s map (1771 AD) indicated it ‘Rassawn’, legendry Tripura Chronicle Rajmala named it Roshang and Francis Hamilton Buchanan mentioned it Roung, or Rossawn.”13 We also find in Siddiquee’s writing, “By the Bengal Hindus, at least by such of them as have been settled in Arakan, the country is called ‘Rossawn’. The Mohammedans who have long settled at Arakan call the country  See for details, Ritchie, Donald. 2015. Doing Oral History. New York: The Oxford University Press.  Chowdhury MA. 2004. Bengal-Arakan Relations. Kolkata: Firma KLM Private Limited; Harvey GE. 2000 [1925]. History of Burma: From the earliest time to the 10 March, the beginning of the English conquest. New Delhi: Asian Education Services; Iqbal, I. 2017. “Locating the Rohingya in time and space.” In: In the shadow of violence (Dhaka Courier Weekend), October 13 Issue: 3–7; Karim A. 2016 [1997]. The Rohingyas: A short account of their history and culture. Dhaka: Jatya Shahitya Prakash; Siddiquee M. 2012. “Who are Rohingyas and how? Origin and development of Rohingyas in Arakan.” In: Uddin Nasir (ed.) To host or to hurt: Counter-narratives on the Rohingya refugee issues in Bangladesh, pp.  15–28. Dhaka: ICDR; Phayre AP. 1883. The history of Burma includes the Burma people, Pegu, Taungu, Tennaserim, and Arakan. London: Trubner & Co. 11  Chowdhury MA (2004) Bengal-Arakan relations. Firma KLM Private Limited, Kolkata. 12  Siddiquee M. 2012. Ibid, p. 12. 13  Alam AM. 1999. Ibid. 9

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‘Rohingaw’ and called themselves Rohinga or the native of Arakan. The Persians called it Rkon.”14 “Today the Muslims of Arakan call the country ‘Rohang’ or ‘Arakan’ and call themselves ‘Rohingya’ or native of Rohang.”15 Arguably, the inhabitants of Rohang were easily identified what is now known as the Rohingyas people. Many renowned historians16 and scholars17 are of opinions that the Rohingya people are not a unique ethnic group but a group developed from different stocks of people during different turns of the history of this region. However, the Rohingya people are predominantly Muslim by religion with a distinct culture, social-cultural organizations, and ethnic markers of their own.18 Siddiquee wrote, “they trace their ancestry to Arabs, Moors, Pathans, Moghuls, Central Asians, Bengalis and some Indo-Mongoloid people. Since Rohingyas are a mixture of many kinds of people, their cheekbone is not so prominent and their eyes are not so narrow like Rakhine Maghs and Burmans. Their noses are not flat and they are a bit taller in stature than the Rakhine Maghs but darker in complexion. They are of some bronzing coloured and not yellowish. The Rohingyas of Arakan still carried the Arab names, faith, dress, music and customs.”19 So, “the Rohingyas are nationals as well as an indigenous ethnic group of Burma. They are not a newborn racial group of Arakan; rather they are as old an indigenous race of the country as any others.”20 The historical records and the earlier history of their settlement in the Arakan region, then known as Rohang, Rowshang, or Rohaing, altogether confirm that the Rohingya people are one of the oldest residents of Arakan which discards the state discourse of Myanmar that “Rohingyas are illegal Bangladeshi migrants in Myanmar.”  Siddiquee M. 2012. Ibid, p. 16.  Amanullah. 1997. “The Etymology of Arakan.” ARAKAN 10(2): 4–5. 16  Iqbal, I. 2017. Ibid; Karim A. 2016 [1997]. Ibid; Charney, Michael W. 1999. Ibid. 17  Iqbal, I. 2017. Ibid; Karim A. 2016 [1997]. Ibid; Charney, Michael W. 1999. Ibid; Uddin, Nasir. 2020a. Ibid; Akhanda M. 2018. The Rohingya problem and Bangladesh. Rajshahi: Porilekh; Farzana K Fahmida. 2017. Memories of Burmese Rohingya Refugees: Contested identities and belonging. London: Palgrave Macmillan, London. 18  Uddin, Nasir. 2020a. Ibid. 19  Siddiquee M. 2012. Ibid, p. 16. 20  Alam AM. 1999. Ibid, p. 26. 14 15

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To justify the ongoing ethnic cleansing in Rakhine state, Myanmar has produced a state narrative about the demographic appearance of the Rohingya people in Arakan. According to Myanmar’s narratives that I have summarized based on the available information21 circulated by the Myanmar state authority and the remarks of military and political establishment: “the Rohingyas are not the inhabitants of Myanmar and they have never been the permanent residents of Burma. The Rohingyas people are illegal Bengali migrants who migrated to the Rakhine, formerly Arakan, the 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 day labour. The Rohingyas are not Burmese people at any level in the history of Burma. Their religion, culture, their language, and their physical appearance are unlike Burmese people. Rather, they are very similar to the South Asian people.” This sort of state narrative has been supported by some pro-Myanmar22 and the military-backed historian23 and some extremist Burmese writers.24 However, the emergence of Islam in the Arakan state, the history of colonization and decolonization, and earlier records of people’s settlement in this region do not support the state narratives of Myanmar. As per historically authenticated fact, the first group of Muslim people arrived in Arakan in the eighth century when Arab traders got shelter  Radio Free Asia. 2017. Bengalis, are not native to Myanmar. October 12, 2017. Available at: https://www. rfa.org/english/news/myanmar/bengalis-10122017191055.html. Accessed on September 2, 2018. 22  Chan A. 2005. “The development of a Muslim enclave in Arakan (Rakhine) state of Burma (Myanmar).” SOAS Bulletin Burma Research 3(2): 396–420; Tonkin D. 2014. The Rohingya identity: Further thoughts. Network Myanmar. Available at: www.networkmyanmar.org/ESW/Files/ Rohingya-Identity-II.pdf. Accessed on November 2, 2018; Ware A. & Laoutides C. 2018. Myanmar’s ‘Rohingya’ conflict. London: Hurst & Company. 23  Leiden JP. 2018. “Rohingya: The history of a Muslim identity in Myanmar.” In: Ludden D et al (eds.) The Oxford research encyclopedia of Asian history. New  York: The Oxford University Press; Leider JP. 2013. “Rohingya: the name, the movement, the quest for identity.” In: Myanmar EGRESS (ed.) Nation-building in Myanmar, pp.  204–255. Myanmar: Myanmar Peace Center; Leider JP. 2015. “Competing identities and the hybridized history of the Rohingyas.” In: Egreteau R, & Robinne F (eds) Metamorphosis: Studies in social and political change in Myanmar, pp. 151–178. Singapore: NUS Press. 24  Saw KM. 2001. Islamization of Burma through Chittagonian Bengalis as Rohingya refugees. Available at: http://www.burmalibrary.org/docs21/Khin-Maung-Saw-NM-2011-09Islamanisation_of_Burma_through_Chittagonian_Bengalis-en.pdf. Accessed on November 10, 2017. 21

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after their shipwrecked on the bank of Rumbee River.25 It was the tenure of Mohathaing Sandia (788–810) when this incident took place in Arakan. According to the history of the Muslims in Arakan, some traders and soldiers were said to have died, while the remaining ones took shelter with the kind and generous consideration of King Sandia. Those traders and soldiers are known as Kular or foreigners in the history of Arakan.26 They started living in Arakan and gave birth to new generations and continued lineages, which are considered, by some scholars and historians,27 the earlier ancestors of today’s Rohingya population. Then in 1430, the second phase of Muslims in Arakan came when ousted Arakanese King Mun Shaw Moon alias Normikhla regained his thorn defeating the Burmese king with the help of 30,000 Mughal soldiers who were predominantly Muslims. 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 exchanged parents.”28 I wrote elsewhere that “Normikhla stayed in Gorh for about 26 years and re-captured his lost thorn and kingdom in 1430 with the help of 30,000 soldiers provided by then Bengal King Sultan Jalal Uddin Mohammad Shah. After regaining his throne, Normikhla wanted the Muslim soldiers to stay in Arakan state to protect the region and frontier areas from any further attack by then Burmese king.”29 During this time, Rohang was made the capital of Arakan state. Normikhla provided land and space to the 30,000 soldiers from Bengal who then settled in Arakan. Most of them got married in Arakan and settled down there. According to many historians,30 Normikhla took a Muslim name known as Sulaiman Shah and introduced an official coin in Arabic fonts as an acknowledgement of the  Akhanda M. 2013. The history of Muslims in Arakan [in Bengali]. Chittagong: Bangladesh Co-operative Book-Society; Harvey GE. 2000 [1925]. Ibid; Chowdhury MA. 2004. Ibid; Phayre AP. 1883. Ibid. 26  Chowdhury MA. 2004. Ibid. 27  Akhanda M. 2013. Ibid; Chowdhury MA. 2004. Ibid; Karim A. 2016 [1997]. Ibid; Siddiquee M. 2012. Ibid. 28  Cited in Chowdhury MA. 2004. Ibid, p. 26. 29  Uddin, Nasir. 2020a. Ibid. 30  Chowdhury MA. 2004. Ibid; Akhanda M. 2013. Ibid; Siddiquee M. 2012. Ibid; Karim Abdul. 2016 [1997]. Ibid; Akhanda M. 2018. Ibid. 25

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s­upport of the Sultan of Gorh. In the history of Arakan, this branch of settlement is recorded as the second phase of Muslim settlement in this region.31 The next phase of Muslims settled in Arakan when Shah Suja arrived in 1660. Shah Suja was defeated by Mir Jumla, the Commander in Chief of Mughal Battalion, during the dynasty of Emperor Awrongajeb. According to many historians, in response to the assurance of the then Arakanese King for ensuring their safety, Shah Suja with his family, relatives, bodyguards, security soldiers, caretakers, cooks, followers, advisors, carriers, domestic servants, and trusted soldiers took shelter in Arakan.32 But, later on, Shah Suja was killed with his family and trusted bodyguards in a conspiracy executed by the then Arakanese King. After the killing of Shah Suja, the remaining soldiers were allowed to stay in Arakan who got married to the locals and settled down there. These groups of people were Muslims, and their offsprings formed a large group of Muslim communities in Arakan state who were later known as Kamanchi.33 The last phase of Muslims’ arrival in Arakan was recorded in 1824 when the British occupied Arakan. From 1430 to 1784, Arakan was an independent state until the Burmese King Budapaya captured it once again and controlled it until 1824. Soon after Budapaya occupied the Arakan state, hundreds of thousands of Rakhine Buddhists and Arakanese Muslims took shelter in then Bengal as a frontier territory. After 40  years of Burmese occupation (1784–1824), when the British captured the Arakan state, a large number of Muslims and Hindus returned to Arakan. This migration is historically considered as the fourth phase of Muslim, along with some Hindus, settlements in Arakan.34  See for details, Chowdhury MA. 2004. Ibid, pp. 53–55; Siddiquee M. 2012. Ibid, p. 21; Akhanda M. 2013. Ibid, pp. 38–39; Phayre AP. 1883. Ibid, p. 78; Karim A. 2016 [1997]. Ibid, pp. 24–25; Iabal, I. 2017. Ibid, p. 4; Uddin, Nasir. 2020a. Ibid; Forster R. 2011. “Magh marauders, Portuguese pirates, white elephants and Persian poets: Arakan and its bay-of-Bengal connectivities in the early modern era.” Exp Dermatol 11(1): 63–80. 32  Uddin, Nasir. 2020a. Ibid, pp. 31–32. 33  See for details, Chowdhury MA. 2004. Ibid, pp. 28–32; Siddiquee M. 2012. Ibid, pp. 26–27; Phayre AP. 1883. Ibid, pp. 78; Harvey GE. 2000 [1925]. Ibid, p. 95; Akhanda M. 2013. Ibid, p. 43; Karim A. 2016 [1997]. Ibid, pp. 41–44; Hossain D. 2014 [2010]. “Tracing the Plight of the Rohingyas.” In: Ahmed I (ed.) The plight of the stateless Rohingyas, pp. 11–40. Dhaka: The University Press Limited, p. 14. 34  See for details, Chowdhury MA. 2004. Ibid; Siddiquee M. 2012. Ibid; Phayre AP. 1883. Ibid; Harvey GE. 2000 [1925]. Ibid; Akhanda M. 2013. Ibid; Karim A. 2016 [1997]. Ibid; Hossain, 31

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Given the aforementioned historical contexts of Muslim arrival and settlement in Arakan state, it is clear that Islam and Muslim have been part of Arakan history for more than a thousand years. But, the emergence of Islam and the demographic appearance of Muslims do not essentially confirm that the history of Muslims and Islam is the history of Rohingya people in Arakan state. Because of the arrival of Arab traders in the eighth century, Gorh’s soldiers in 1430, Kamanchi in 1660, and the return of Muslims during the British period were not the Rohingya people by ethnicity. There is no space for the controversy that the emergence of Islam and the appearance of Muslims in the demographic composition of Arakan took place more than thousands of years ago as many authentic historical records justify it.35 Besides, many renowned historians on Arakan also endorsed the thousand years of history of Islam and Muslims in Arakan,36 but no record has endorsed the history of Muslims in the history of Rohingya people in Arakan.37 Many researchers and historians,38 many Rohingya activist-historians,39 and many scholars compassionate to Rohingyas40 have been struggling and trying to establish the theory that the arrival of Muslims in Arakan is ‘the origin of Rohingyas’ in Burma, but it does not stand because Arab traders, if we take as the first arrivals of Muslims, were not Rohingyas under any circumstances. But it 2014. Ibid; Uddin, Nasir. 2017. Ibid. 35  Karim A. 2016 [1997]. Ibid; Akhanda M. 2013. Ibid; Eaton R. 1993. The rise of Islam and the Bengal frontier, 1204–1760. Berkeley: University of California Press; Ezzati A a-F. 2002. The spread of Islam: the contributing factors. London: Islamic College for Advanced Studies Press; Leitich K. 2014. Decoding the past: the Rohingya origin enigma. Paper presented at the Third Annual Southeast Asian Studies Symposium, Keble College, University of Oxford, April 22–23, 2014. 36  Phayre AP. 1883. Ibid; Harvey GE. 2000 [1925]. Ibid; Buchanan Francis. 1799. Ibid; Charney M. 1999. Ibid. 37  Uddin, Nasir. 2017. Ibid, p. 32. 38  Chowdhury MA. 2004. Ibid; Siddiquee M. 2012. Ibid; Akhanda M. 2013. Ibid; Karim A. 2016 [1997]. Ibid; Iqbal, I. 2017. Ibid. 39  Siddiquee M. 2012. Ibid; Bahar A. 2012. Racism to Rohingya in Burma. Available at: http://www. kaladanpress.org/images/document/Racism-to-Rohingya-in-Burma.pdf. Accessed on November 4, 2017; Yunus M. 1994. A history of Arakan: past & present. Chittagong: Magenta Colour. 40   Elahi KM. 1987. “The Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh: Historical Perspectives and Consequences.” In: Rogge J (ed) Refugees: A Third World Dilemma. New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield; Ezzati A a-F. 2002. Ibid; Zarni M. & Cowley A. 2014. Slow-burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingyas.” Pacific Rim Law & Policy Journal 23(30): 683–754; Ibrahim, Azeem. 2016. Ibid; Farzana, Fahmida. 2015. Ibid; Farzana, Fahmida. 2017. Ibid.

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is easily understandable and more sensible to assume that with the combination of many trends of people, their lifestyles, languages, and their culture like Arabs, Moors, Pathan, Mughal, and Bengals, the Rohingyas have been emerged as a distinct ethnic community in Arakan state over the long period. So, in that consideration, the Rohingyas are a ‘mixed race’,41 since there is no ‘pure race’ in this world as “pure race in an unscientific idea”42 particularly in today’s world when the entire idea of “indigeneity is on the move”43 and the notion of “identity is deterritorialised.”44 It altogether confirms two theses: firstly, Myanmar’s state narrative about the Rohingya people that they are not the inhabitants of Burma and they had never been in Burma but are illegal Bengali migrations who migrated during the British colonial period is a ‘manufactured history’ and ‘distorted truth’ invented to support the execution of Myanmar’s state policy to drive the Rohingya people out of the country. Secondly, the Rohingyas, particularly their ancestors, have been the inhabitants of Arakan for more than 1000 years since the emergence of Islam and the arrival of Muslims in this region. However, the Rohingyas are a mixed ‘race’ formed over centuries based on the combination of many trends of people, and now the Rohingyas constitute a particular ethnic category with their distinctive language, culture, and social organizations with a large adaptation of Islamic culture.

3.3 ‘Seek and Hide’ of History: The Politics of Rohingya Existence Myanmar is deliberately utilizing this academic and historical vacuum to justly various forms of discrimination and atrocities against the Rohingya people what the UN Human Rights Council terms as ‘ethnic cleansing.’  Uddin, Nasir. 2017. Ibid, p. 37.  See for details, Sussman RW. 2014. The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea. Cambridge, MA: The Harvard University Press. 43  Gerhrz, Eva, et  al. 2018. Indigeneity on the Move: Varying Manifestations of a Contested Concept. Oxford & New York: Berghahn. 44  Uddin, Nasir, and Nasreen Chowdhory (Eds). 2019. Deterritoiralised Identity and Transborder Movement in South Asia. Singapore: Springer, 2019. 41 42

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Myanmar claims that Rohingyas were never the residents of Burma and they were migrated to Arakan from Bengal during the British colonial period starting from 1824. Before that, there were no Rohingyas in the land of Burma. Myanmar has constructed this state narrative and used it in the formulation of its citizenship law enacted in 1982 where eligibility criteria were set that those who are entitled to the citizenship of Myanmar are those who were living in Burma before the British colonized this territory. Under the pretext of this clause, the citizenship of the Rohingya people was taken away as, according to state narratives, Rohingyas came to Burma during the British colonial period and there were no Rohingyas before 1824. This is a fair politics of exclusion and deliberately ‘manufactured historical narrative’45 because there are some very authentic evidence and records that confirmed the presence of Rohingya people in Burma even long before the British colonized Burma. To dismantle the myth of this Myanmar’s state narrative, I will cite some authentic historical records which are good enough to locate the Rohingya people in the historical-demographic canvas of Arakan long before the British colonized Burma. Francis Hamilton Buchanan’s travel notes have been recognized as a globally accepted authentic historical document. He published an article in 1799 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 speak in a particular language and identified themselves as Rooinga.46 It is considered the first record of Rooinga in the history of Burma which later transformed and took shape into the Rohingya. Before this record, there were many indications, authentic notations, and historical evidence of the presence of Muslims in Arakan but were recorded in different names. Buchanan for the first time recorded the presence of Rohingyas by using their self-identification as ‘Rooinga’. It manifests the Rohingya people as a distinctive group of people living in the Arakan even before 1799, 25 years before the British occupied Arakan.

 Uddin, Nasir. 2017. Ibid.  Buchanan, Francis. 1799. Ibid, p. 55.

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It is to be mentioned here that Rohingya people still identify themselves as ‘Rooinga’.47 The Classic Journal has often been considered as the historical baseline of the people of the Southeast Asian region. In the Classic Journal published in 1811, there was a clear indication that a group of people were living in the Arakan region and speaking ‘Rooinga language’, and they used to call themselves Rooingas.48 It is also mentionable here that the Classic Journal of 1811 has been used as one of the authentic historical records for the early history of Burma.49 Many internationally acclaimed scholars50 have used the Classical Journal as a historical source to write the history of Arakan. So, according to the information recorded in the Classical Journal of 1811, it is evident that a group of people who identified themselves as Rooingas were living in the Arakan region in and before 1811. Another record was found in an edited book titled “Examples of German vernac-ulars: Dr. Seetzen’s linguistic legacy and other linguistic research and collections, in particular on East India” edited by Dr. Johann Severin Vater published in 1816 before the British colonized Burma. A German ethnologist Johann Severin Vater mentioned a name of ethnic group, with the reference to Francis Buchanan, who identified themselves as “Ruinga” what is now known as Rohingyas.51 According to Vater, these Ruinga people were speaking in a particular language what they called “Ruinga language”.52 Vater’s notation about a “Ruinga language”-speaking ethnic group then living in Arakan also clearly demonstrates that the

 Uddin, Nasir. 2017. Ibid.  The Classical Journal. 1811. https://archive.org/details/in. ernet.dli.2015.20962. Accessed on November 7, 2017. 49  Uddin, Nasir. 2017. Ibid, p. 33. 50  Tarling N. 2001. Southeast Asia: A Modern History. Australia: The Oxford University Press; Singer N. 2008. Vaishali and the Indianization of Arakan. New Delhi: A P H Publishing Corporation; Gutman, P. 2001. Burma’s lost kingdoms: Splendours of Arakan. Bangkok: Orchid Press; Hamilton, W. 1820. Ibid. Cotterell, A. 2015. A history of South East Asia. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Private Limited. 51  Vater JS (Ed.). 1816. Examples of German vernaculars: Dr. Seetzen’s linguistic legacy and other linguistic research and collections, in particular on East India. Leipzig: Gerhard Fleischer, the Disciple. 52  Cited in Ibrahim, Azeem. 2016. Ibid, p. 25. 47 48

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Rohingya people were the residents and inhabitants of Arakan state in and before 1816. Walter Hamilton wrote a book53 titled A Geographical, Statistical, and Historical Description of Hindostan and the Adjacent Countries published in 1820 where he clearly stated that “the Moguls know this country by the name of Rakhang, and the Mahommedans, who have been long settled in this country call themselves Rooinga or the natives of Arracan” (1820: 802). Hamilton statement historically authenticates three important facts: 1. A group of people identified themselves in the name of Rooinga. It means that Rohingya people were living in Arracan (Arakan) before 1824 when the British colonized Burma. 2. “Rooinga people have been long settled there” indicates the Rohingya people had been living in Arakan long centuries before 1824. 3. The Rooinga were the natives of Arracan even in 1820 when the book was published and 4  years before the British colonized Burman. It indicates the Rohingya people have been the natives of Arakan (now Rakhine) for centuries. There are more historical records of Rohingya presence before 1824 in Arakan that I have presented and explained elsewhere,54 but I am not going to further detail it here because this chapter is not about the identity and ethnicity of the Rohingya people. However, it is an important point to be noted here that the four historical records that I have used here were documented during the period (1784–1824) when the Burmese king ruled the Arakan region and definitely before the British colonized the Arakan territory. “Thus, there is 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 region; 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 point to the fact that there was a major ethnic group in the region with a distinct language at the  Hamilton, W.1820. Ibid, p. 802.  Uddin, Nasir. 2020a. Ibid.

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time identifiable as Rohingyas.”55 So, it fairly delegitimizes the fabricated claims and manufactured narrative by the Myanmar state that Rohingya people were not the residents of Burma before the British colonized the region. The real fact is that the Rohingya people were the residents and inhabitants of the Arakan region long even before the British colonized it. It is also to be mentioned here that factually Burma occupied and ruled the Arakan state only for 66 years (26 years from 1406 to 1430 and 40 years from 1784 to 1824) during more than 2000 years of history of independent Arakan. Therefore, what Myanmar claims today regarding the ownership of Arakan state could be outright discarded by the historical fact? Rather it could be a valid question to rise whether Rohingyas or Burmese are the earlier migrants and residents of Arakan now known as the Rakhine state. Noted historian Michael Charney wrote, “Both Rohingyas Muslims and Rakhine Buddhists migrated and got settled down in Rakhine state 1000 year ago and factually the Rohingya people, perhaps not its present form, came to Arakan state before the Bamar came.”56 If it is the fact, the Rohingya people could claim themselves as the natives of Arakan.

3.4 Citizenship, Statelessness, and Refugeehood Arakan was an independent kingdom until 1784 when it encompassed the Chittagong region in the southern part of today’s Bangladesh. I have already discussed that “The Rohingyas are [claimed 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 9th and 15th centuries, married local women, and settled in the region.”57 The Burmese king Bodawpaya conquered and annexed Arakan in 1784, triggering a long guerrilla war in which the  Ibrahim, Azeem. 2016. Ibid, p. 25.  Charney, Michal. 1999. Ibid. 57  Ahmed, I. 2002–2003. “State and stateless in South Asia: reaping benefits from a reconstructed discourse on state and nationality.” Theoretical Perspective 9 & 10, p. 3. 55 56

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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.58 This marked the start of an influx of Arakanese Muslim refugees into Bengal. When the British incorporated Arakan into its empire in 1885, many refugees returned. For centuries, the Buddhist Rakhine59 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. Karim wrote, “Communal riots between the Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingyas erupted, and some 22,000 Muslims fled to adjoining British Indian territories [Chittagong].”60 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 even echoes today.61 For example, “Muslims were removed and barred from civil posts, restrictions on movement were imposed, and property and land were confiscated.”62 Even so, the Rohingyas, as Muslims, were close to having their ethnicity 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 1962.63 After the military took over the state power, the plight of the Rohingya people started to deteriorate and was gradually pushed to the margin of  Harvey, GE. 2000 [1925]. Ibid; Karim A. 2016 [1997]. Ibid; Médecins Sans Frontiers Report. 2002. 10 years for the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh: past, present and future. Available at: http:// www.rna-press.com/data/itemfiles/5ae98e43d068cb749b3060b002601b95.pdf. Accessed 28 Oct 2018; Uddin, Nasir. 2012. “Of hurting and hosting: crises in co-existence with Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.” In: Uddin, Nasir (ed.) To Host or to Hurt: Counter-Narratives on the Rohingya Refugee Issues in Bangladesh, pp. 83–98. Dhaka: ICDR. 59  Uddin, Nasir. 2020a. Ibid. 60  Karim A. 2016 [1997]. Ibid. 61  See for details, Ware, A. and Laoutides, 2018. Ibid, p. 14. 62  Médecins Sans Frontiers Report. 2002. 10 years for the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh: past, present and future. Available at: http://www.rna-press.com/data/itemfiles/5ae98e43d068cb749b306 0b002601b95.pdf. Accessed 28 Oct 2018. 63  Uddin, Nasir. 2012. Ibid. 58

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the state. In 1978, a massive campaign took place against the Rohingya people by the Burmese military which triggered an influx of 250,000 Rohingyas to Bangladesh. Still, the Rohingya people were enjoying a particular form of citizenship in the Arakan state of Burma until 1982. However, the Rohingya people became stateless soon after Myanmar in 1982 enacted its Citizenship Law, which conferred citizenship to 135 nationals excluding the Rohingyas. Since then, many Rohingyas started migrating to Bangladesh, Thailand, Malaysia, and Middle Eastern countries to flee persecution64 on the regular basis. In 2007, the Rohingyas drew global media attention, yet at a minimal level, and attracted the concerns of rights organizations as a “new boat people”65 because hundreds of Rohingyas died in the sea in their journey towards Thailand and Malaysia. But, in 2017, the Rohingya people heavily captured the attention of the international community, leading global media outlets, and rights organizations due to the massive influx (more than 750,000) in Bangladesh. In fact, in the framework of the modern nation-state, the Rohingyas are non-existent human beings as they are nowhere in the legal and structural framework of either Bangladesh or Myanmar.66 Therefore, the Rohingya people experience persecution, atrocities, and everyday forms of discrimination committed by the state despite their stateless people. The Rohingya people were denied all sorts of rights in Myanmar because “citizenship is considered as the rights of having rights.”67 The Rohingya people started migrating to the south-eastern part of Bangladesh in the late 1970s, but a big number came in the early 1990s. The first influx took place in 1978 when about 200,000 fled to Bangladesh. “It is said that oppression, discrimination, violence and forced labour practices by the Myanmar authorities triggered an exodus of more than  Hossain, D. 2014 [2010]. Ibid.  Lewa, Cris. 2008. Asia’s new boat people. Available at: http://www.fmreview.org/sites/fmr/files/ FMRdownloads/en/burma/lewa.pdf. Accessed on January 2, 2018. 66  Uddin, Nasir. 2012. Ibid; Uddin, Nasir. 2015. “State of Stateless People: The Plight of Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh” in Rhoda Howard-Hassmann and Margaret Walton-Roberts (Eds.). Human Rights to Citizens: A Slippery Concept, pp. 62–77. USA: The University of Pennsylvania Press. 67  Arendt, H. 1994. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Books; Kesby, A. 2012. The Rights to have Rights: Citizenships, Humanity and International Law. Oxford: The Oxford University Press. 64 65

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250 thousand Rohingya Muslims to cross the border between 1991 and 1992. Since then, the flow of this migration to the Bangladesh territory continued which contributed to shaping a big figure living as refugees in this country.”68 Over the years, approximately 230,000 refugees have been reportedly repatriated to Myanmar under the supervision of the UNHCR. However, most of them along with the new group of Rohingyas again returned to Bangladesh in many illegal ways and started living as unregistered Rohingyas in various localities of Teknaf and Ukhia. The number of such Rohingya returnees is estimated at 250,000. Besides, 125,000 Rohingyas came in 2012, and 85,000 crossed the border to Bangladesh in 2016. In a recent remark, the Minister of the Ministry of Expatriate Welfare informed that 250,000 Rohingyas live in the Middle Eastern countries with Bangladeshi passports.69 With the recent influx following August 25, 2017, it is estimated that more than 700,000 Rohingyas crossed the border. Bangladesh government has recently prepared a biometric database of around 1.3 million Rohingyas as part of the repatriation process, while still many have remained undocumented. Excluding expatriates, now approximately 1.3 million Rohingya people live in Bangladesh. They live in almost 30 temporarily built refugee camps in Ukhia and Teknaf of Cox’s Bazar which is now considered as the biggest refugee camps in the world.70 In Myanmar, the Rohingya people are deprived of their social, economic, civil, political, and basic human rights because the state treats them as if they are lesser than a human being what I call “subhuman”71 due to their ethnic, religious, and racial difference. In Bangladesh, they are not well received because Bangladesh is already an overpopulated country and the south-eastern part of Bangladesh is a resource-poor area  Uddin Nasir. 2010. “Treatment of unwelcome guests: A case of Rohingya refugee in Bangladesh.” The paper presented at an international conference on Political Economy of South Asian Migrants organized by South Asian Regional Formation Research Society held on November 24–26, The University of Delhi, India. 69  Muntaha S (2018) Expatriate minister: 250,000 Rohingyas went abroad with Bangladeshi pass-­ ports. Available at: https://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/2018/04/28/expatriateminister-­250000-rohingyas-went-abroad-bangladeshi-passports/. Accessed on June 2, 2018. 70  World’s largest refugee camps in (2018.) Available at https://www.raptim.org/largest-refugee-­ camps-in-2018/. Accessed on October 2, 2018. 71  Uddin, Nasir. 2020a. Ibid. 68

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which I have discussed earlier. Besides, Bangladesh is not one of the signatory states of the UN Refugee Convention 1951 and hence does not feel obliged to host the Rohingya people as refugees. Besides, “the critical experience of dealing with Rohingyas who crossed the border in 1978, 1991/92, 2012, 2016 and 2017 have also discouraged Bangladesh to be cordial and sympathetic to them.”72 Given the scenario, the Rohingyas are in an acute vulnerable stage in both Bangladesh and Myanmar which has been created by Myanmar.

3.5 Evidence of Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing What Myanmar state force, Burmese ethnic extremists, and Buddhist fundamentalists are currently doing with the Rohingya people is called by the UN Human Rights Council as “a textbook example of Ethnic Cleansing.”73 The statistical figures are good enough to provide an adequate rationale that it is a clear ethnic cleansing. From August 25, 2017, more than 700,000 Rohingyas fled the Rakhine state,74 more than 25,000 people were killed, and 19,000 women and girls were raped.75 Sixty-two per cent of the villages of Maungdaw were destroyed as the satellite images showed, and a total of 470 villages turned into ashes.76 Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya became wounded and many more became paralyzed. Now, no more than 250,000 Rohingyas live in three townships (Maungdaw, Buthidaung, and Rathedaung) since the rest of the majority

 Uddin, Nasir. 2020a. Ibid.  Safi, M. 2018. “Lives will be lost: 700,000 Rohingya face cyclone season under tarpaulin.” The Guardian, April 27, 2018. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/27/ rohingya-refugees-cyclone-monsoon-season-bangladesh-myanmar. Accessed on October 20, 2018. 74  Safi, M. 2018. Ibid. 75  The Daily Star. 2018. “Killing of Rohingyas: death toll could be up to 25,000.” The Daily Star, August 18, 2018. Available at: https://www.thedailystar.net/news/frontpage/killing-rohingyas-­ death-toll-could-be-over-10000-1622392. Accessed on October 28, 2018. 76  The Daily Independent. 2017. “300 of 470 Rakhine villages completely destroyed.” The Daily Independent, October 26, 2017. Available at: http://www.theindependentbd.com/post/120700. Accessed on October 28, 2018. 72 73

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were ‘cleaned’ from their settlement.77 So, the figures stated above clearly demonstrate that what the Myanmar security forces did in the Rakhine state is a clear ethnic cleansing. The degree of atrocity was so intense that many internationally acclaimed scholars78 and globally credible media outlets (e.g., The New York Times,79 The Guardian,80 the BBC,81 Al-Jazeera,82 etc.) have termed it ‘genocide’.83 I would also like to use the term ‘genocide’ instead of ‘ethnic cleansing’ because what the Myanmar security forces did in 2017 is not just ‘cleaning’ the Rohingya people from the Rakhine state but something far more than what could easily qualify as genocide in the framework of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide adopted in 1948 and the Rome Statues of the International Criminal Court (ICC) adopted in 1998.84 I have some first-hand evidence and eyewitnesses of such atrocities perpetrated by the Myanmar security forces, Burmese ethnic extremists, and Buddhist fundamentalists. I have recorded 500 narratives in the descriptive form of newly arrived Rohingyas who have gone through an extreme level of atrocities, an acute form of brutalities, and unexplainable torture following the massive campaign that started on August 25, 2018. I am giving  Human Rights Watch (HRW). 2017. The massacre by the river: Burmese army crimes against humanity in Tula Toli. December 19, 2017. Available at: https://www.hrw.org/report/2017/12/19/ massaare-river/Burmese-army-crimes-against-humanity-Tula-Toli. Accessed on October 28, 2018. 78  See for details, Zarni, M. and Cowley, A. 2014. Ibid; Ibrahim, Azeem. 2016. Ibid; Green P, Thomas MM, Venning, A. 2015. Count down annihilation: genocide in Myanmar. London: International State Crime Initiative. 79  Kristof N (2018) I saw a genocide in slow motion. The New York Times, March 2, 2018. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/02/opinion/i-saw-a-genocide-in-slow-motion.html. Accessed on October 28, 2018. 80  Tisdall S. 2018. “World’s awkward silence over Rohingya genocide warnings.” The Guardian, January 3, 2018. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/03/worlds-awkward-­ silence-over-rohingya-genocide-warnings. Accessed on October 28, 2018. 81  British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). 2018. “Myanmar Rohingya: UN says military leaders must face genocide charges.” BBC Report August 27, 2018. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/ news/world-asia-45318982. Accessed on October 28, 2018. 82  Al-Jazeera. 2013. The hidden genocide. January 16, 2013. Available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/ programmes/aljazeerainvestigates/2012/12/2012125122215836351.html. Accessed on October 28, 2018. 83  Uddin, Nasir. 2017. Ibid. 84  Uddin, Nasir. 2017. Ibid. 77

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three cases here which are strong enough to provide a feel about the ethnic cleansing in the Rakhine state of Myanmar. Case-One: Fatema Begum (27) I have lost everything and have nothing to say. I got married when I was 17 years old. My husband was a businessman and used to sell household goods in Maungdaw Bazar. His earning was good enough to run our family of six members. I had three sons and one daughter. Of three, one was still at breastfeeding age. We had our own wood-made two-storied house in the Koillarbah area of Northern Maungdaw. We were living with tension and constant insecurity because time and again some Rakhine youths and Burmese military used to visit our house under the pretext of searching for illegal arms and Rohingya militants. Every time, we had to pay a big amount of money to convince them. This was the way how we were living in Maungdaw. But this time Burmese military came on August 30, 2017, listened to none and nothing, and started ransacking the household goods and available essentials at home. They vandalised the entire house. They picked me up and taken to a bedroom. My all children were crying. My husband was trying to snatch me away from them and he attempted a couple of times. Suddenly one of the soldiers shot him on his head and he fell down on the ground and died on the spot. I was so shocked to see dying my husband in front of me. Then, four of them did gang-rape me in front of my children. I was severely bleeding and soon after I lost my sense. When my sense came back, I was lying down in the yard and saw my kids crying around me. I also saw that my house turned into ashes as they burnt the house and my husband was burnt inside the house. At night with many other Rohingyas, I with my four children also joined the march towards the border of Bangladesh. On the way, the Borma military suddenly started random firing and many of our co-­ walkers were killed on the spot. I saw that my two sons also lying down on the street as bullets hit their bodies. The living ones started running and I also did so leave my two sons’ dead bodies on the street. Finally, we could enable to cross the border and now in Bangladesh. I don’t have any idea what I will do with my two children; where I will go; how I will survive; and where the destination of our lives is. I see dark in everywhere my life.

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[Interviewed on September 24, 2017, at a Roadside temporary tent, Teknaf, Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. I have used this case elsewhere,85 but I am using it here considering its intensity and high relevance.]

Case-Two: Hasheuzzaman (41) I used to work in the field all day long as a farmer. I was living in Tulatoli where the mass killing took place in Maungdaw Township with my wife, two children and parents. I had my own land for agriculture and used to rear domestic animals. I had my own house built on sizable land. However, I was compelled to leave everything to flee a definite death. I had two options: either to live in Tulatoli for the sake of my huge property being ready to accept death any moment or to flee the definite death giving up all properties. I chose the second option. I saw the military killing poor Rohingya people mercilessly in front of my eyes which compelled others to cross the border. Nobody could escape the military oppression. They came to my house, tortured me, and my parents. My wife was hiding, but they found her under a curt. Then they undressed her in front of us. I was kept on gun-point. My two children were holding me tightly and crying loudly. My parents couldn’t endure it anymore and then went to refrain them, but one of the military soldiers shot my parents. Both my father and mother died in a minute. I became senseless watching this horrible scenario in front of my eye. My two children were crying. The military soldiers did gang-rape my wife in front of my children while I was senseless. I couldn’t do anything. They looted my wife’s ijjat (honour) and killed my parents. As a husband, it was horrible to see my wife being gang-raped but I couldn’t do anything. We—my raped wife, my two children and I—spent the night and joined others towards the Bangladesh border at dawn. It took 2 days to cross the border. On the way to cross the border, I saw hundreds of thousands of Rohingya people running. I saw many of them seriously wounded, raped; burnt on legs and hands; and terribly traumatized to see their near and dear ones being died in front of their eyes. Now I am in Kutupalong struggling to take care of my  Uddin, Nasir. 2019. “The State, Vulnerability, and Transborder Movement: The Rohingyas in Myanmar and Bangladesh.” In Deterritorialised Identity and Transborder Movements in South Asia, edited by Nasir Uddin and Nasreen Chowdhory, 73–90. Singapore: Springer, 2019. 85

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wife as she has become literally abnormal and hence my two children remain unattended. I don’t know what to do, where to go and what my destination is. [The interview was conducted on October 10, 2017, in Teknaf.]

Case-Three: Mohammad Mainuddin (46) I was born in Keo Tan Kauk and raised there. Keo Tan Kauk was the place where the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) attacked the Borma military camp on the 25th of August. Soon after the attack took place, the Borma military surrounded the village and started firing guns and burning the houses. I was there at that time. Almost all houses in the village were burnt down, and almost all villagers were killed. Only a few manage to escape and I was one of them. On the way to escape, the Borma military fired guns and the bullet hit me. I took shelter in a nearby village. One of my relations gave a bandage to my wounded leg. See my leg [showing his wounded place of leg and bandaged foot] and try to understand the brutality of the Borma military. I was there for 2 days and left because the military and Rakhine Buddhist young started ransacking the village to drive the villagers out of their homes. I saw hundreds of people ranging from children to aged ones running towards the Bangladesh border. I also joined one of the groups. We were the first group of Rohingya who fled Borma and crossed the border to Bangladesh. I can’t bear the pain anymore when I feel that all members of my family except myself are dead now. My father and mother, my wife, my three daughters and two sons died on the very 1st day of the military attack. Many of them were wounded but burnt alive as firing and burning were going together. Not only my family members, many villagers first received bullets, became wounded, and later burnt alive since nobody dared to flee as random firing was going on during the whole night. I with my wounded leg walked miles after miles to reach the Bangladesh border. I saw many babies were born on the roads as pregnant mothers were fleeing and many newborn babies died thereafter. I saw many were maimed by land mines placed at the border by the Borma military. I saw hundreds of death-­ bodies lying on both sides of the road. I still stick to the horrible experience I have gone through. I can’t remove the scene of brutality and

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atrocity from my eyes. I even can’t sleep properly since I often go through some horrible nightmares as countless death-bodies, red flaming of fire, and the scared sounds of burning people always hunt me even while sleeping. [Interview was taken on October 16, 2017, in Teknaf, Cox’s Bazar.]

3.6 Conclusion I could give an analysis separately based on the three cases, but I think these cases do not need any academic interpretation as they themselves are strong enough to provide a vivid scenario of why the UN called it the “textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”86 The three cases clearly demonstrate that what is happening in the Rakhine state of Myanmar following August 25, 2017, is definitely an ethnic cleansing. What does ethnic cleansing mean? United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect says, “A United Nations Commission of Experts mandated to look into violations of international humanitarian law committed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia defined ethnic cleansing in its interim report S/25274 as “rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area.” In its final report S/1994/674, the same Commission described ethnic cleansing as “a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.” The commission also suggests some features which qualify some form of atrocities as ethnic cleansing such as “murder, torture, arbitrary arrest and detention, extrajudicial executions, rape and sexual assaults, severe physical injury to civilians, confinement of civilian population in ghetto areas, forcible removal, displacement and deportation of the civilian population, deliberate military attacks or threats of attacks on civilians and civilian areas, use of civilians as human shields, destruction  Uddin, Nasir. 2017. Ibid.

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of property, robbery of personal property, attacks on hospitals, medical personnel, and locations with the Red Cross/Red Crescent emblem, among others.” If we deeply consider and analyse the case of Fatema Begum, Hasheuzzaman, and Mohammad Mainuddin which reflects a glimpse of hundreds of thousands of cases, we could easily say that what has happened in 2017  in the Rakhine state of Myanmar with the Rohingyas people clearly justifies what the UN Human Rights Council said as “the textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”

4 The State, Vulnerability, and Uncertainty: The Rohingyas in Myanmar and Bangladesh

4.1 Introduction “It was August 26, the Borma military [Burmese military] and kichu moiggar poa [some Rakhine Buddhist youths] came to our village and started random killing, raping and burning house after houses. My wife and I were at home with my son of 10 and daughter of 13 years old. We locked our main door of the house, gathered together in fear at a corner of a room, and silently recited ‘Allah, Allah’. Suddenly, a group of military personnel broke the door and entered our house. They caught me and put me at gunpoint. Seven or eight of them did gang-rape my wife and my teenage daughter. My son was crying and one of the soldiers shot him suddenly not to ‘disturb’ them. I couldn’t do anything but cry and lament. My daughter died afterwards due to excessive bleeding since I couldn’t bring her to the doctor. The following night, I was meeting with some This chapter is a revised version of an earlier book chapter titled “The State, Vulnerability, and Transborder Movements: The Rohingya People in Myanmar and Bangladesh”, page: 73–90, published in Uddin, Nasir, and Nasreen Chowdhory, eds. Deterritoiralised Identity and Transborder Movement in South Asia. Singapore: Springer, 2019. Though the chapter has been substantially revised, I do acknowledge the original publisher. With the rigorous revision, the chapter has been reprinted here with due permission of the publisher. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 N. Uddin, Voices of the Rohingya People, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90816-4_4

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other Rohingya co-villagers to plan how to flee to Bangladesh. When I came back, I saw my house burning and my wife was burnt alive as she was asleep. Standing still, I watched my whole house turning into ashes. My whole life became ashes in two days.” Shamsul Alam (47),1 a Rohingya who recently crossed the border to flee a brutal military crackdown in Myanmar’s Rakhine state beginning on August 25, 2017, explained to me how the Rohingya life was so vulnerable in Rakhine state. He continued, “My story is not a solitary one, but hundreds of thousands of Rohingyas did go through more or less the similar experience following the recent campaign in Borma2 [Myanmar]. Rohingyas are living in Borma [Rakhine] bacha-morar majhamajhi [on the frontier line of life and death].” In response to my question on the comparative experience between Bangladesh and Myanmar in terms of vulnerability, Mr. Alam continued, “We are no longer under life-threat in Bangladesh, and here the degree of safety is better than Borma. Besides, we feel and enjoy here some sorts of human dignity. However, the remaining conditions are more or less the same; for instance, food scarcity, inadequate medical facility, no education for children, lesser than poor living conditions, no proper sanitation, insufficient water supply, and the threat of women-­ child trafficking.” Mr. Alam’s narrative unfolds some critical propositions which are conducive to understanding the triplicate relations of the state, vulnerability, and transborder movement. It clearly shows that the state creates vulnerable conditions within the state territory which triggers transborder movement. Why the Rohingyas have crossed the border into Bangladesh is due to the extreme vulnerability created by the state which disregards ‘the vulnerable theory’ of Martha Fineman.3 Fineman emphasizes the role of the state to reduce vulnerability and ensure equity for the people. She strongly stands for the state to take up the issue of vulnerability to redress for ensuring social justice for all in the society. According to her theory, “vulnerability is inherent to the human  I have used the age of every informant throughout so that it helps understand the gravity and intensity of the fact and event used in an attempt to substantiate the argument of the chapter. 2  The Rohingyas whom I met always term Myanmar as Borma. Therefore, I have used Borma when I quote them, but Myanmar in my discussion and analysis since it is an official name. 3  Fineman, Martha. 2008. “The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition.” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 2(1): 1–23. 1

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condition, and 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.”4 Alam’s experience is a clear departure from a theoretical proposition by Fineman. In the case of Rohingyas, the state of Myanmar has produced and reproduced conditions in the Rakhine state making the Rohingyas extremely vulnerable which compels them to flee to Bangladesh. I would rather bring in the idea of ‘State Crime’ framed by Penney Green and Tony Ward5 to understand the roles of the state in the generation of vulnerability because both argued that ‘state crime’ is deviant or illegal activities perpetrated by the state to implement its policy and achieve its goal even violating human rights.6 Judith Butler’s idea of ‘Precarious Life’7 is also befitting for a better understanding of the 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.”8 Mr. Alam’s experience of life is indeed more than ‘precarious life’ since here their legal and political life not only suspended but they are considered worthy of extinction what Isabell Lorey calls ‘the state of insecurity’.9 Lorey has further clarified the ‘precarious life’ in the form of the state of insecurity explaining that “Precarization means more than…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  Cited in Kohn, Nina. 2014. “Vulnerability Theory and the Roles of Government” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 26(1): 01–27. 5  Green, Penny & Ward, Tony. 2004. State Crime: Governments, Violence and Corruption. London: Pluto Press. 6  See, Green, Penny & Ward, Tony. 2004. Ibid. 7  Butler, Judith. 2004. The Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence. London & New York: VERSO. 8  Butler, Judith. 2004. Ibid, p. XV. 9  Lorey, Isabell. 2014. State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious (Trans. by: Aileen Derieg). London & New York: VERSO. 4

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means living with the unforeseeable, with contingency.10 Therefore, what the Rohingyas have been experiencing in the Rakhine state is more than a ‘precarious life’. If we deeply analyse, we find that Mr. Alam’s narrative confirms a couple of inter-connected premises: firstly, Myanmar has created an extreme unliveable condition what I have called ‘atrocious living conditions’ in elsewhere11 that has pushed them to the state of vulnerability. It means Rohingya vulnerability is state-created because the Myanmar state is deliberately implementing a policy of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in an attempt to clean the Rakhine state by driving them out of the region. Secondly, the ways the Myanmar security forces and Buddhist fundamentalists treated Rohingyas, what is reflected in the narratives of Mr. Alam, as if their lives are worthy of extinction which denotes an extreme form of vulnerability. Finally, this narrative unfolds another reality that the transborder movement is not always determined by the people themselves but the state-­created conditionalities which bring the lives of people vulnerable to death. This chapter, apart from the nexus between the state and vulnerability, argues that the transborder movement in the twenty-first century is not always determined by the people themselves, but the state itself becomes instrumental in creating vulnerable conditions to drive them out of the country. With the empirically informed analysis, the chapter analyses the triplicate relations of the state, vulnerability, and the transborder movement with the case of Rohingyas in Bangladesh and Myanmar. Theoretically, this chapter argues that the modern structure of state makes some people stateless as it still controls and regulates their everyday life, what Michel Foucault calls ‘governmentality’12 and Elizabeth

 Lorey, Isabell. 2014. Ibid, p. 01.  Uddin, Nasir. 2020a. The Rohingya: An Ethnography of “Subhuman” Life. Delhi: Oxford University Press. 12  Foucault, Michel. 1976. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. Boston, MA: Vintage Books. 10 11

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Povinelli calls ‘Geontologies’.13 With the empirically14 informed analysis, the chapter argues that non-recognition as citizens by the state renders people stateless, which make them “an object of subjective treatment”15 amidst committing severe injustice, acute discrimination, and the serious violation of human rights compelling them to cross the transborder. This chapter with the case of Rohingyas discusses how the roles of the state are contributory to the production of vulnerability which accelerates transborder movement. Finally, it sheds light on two central arguments that (1) the state creates extreme vulnerability for the people which triggered the transborder movement as a ‘life-saving strategy’ and (2) the state in various forms confirms vulnerable conditions even though they are transborder migrants.

4.2 R  ohingyas, Identity, and the Genesis of Crisis Before further discussions on the Rohingya vulnerability, this section provides a comprehensive idea about the Rohingya with a brief historical note. The Rohingya is an ethnolinguistic and religious minority who have long been the residents (currently about 500,000) of Myanmar and now a large in number (about 1.2 million) live in Cox’s Bazar, south-­ eastern district of Bangladesh. They became stateless soon after Myanmar  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 unlike the ‘lives’ are treated. The Rohingyas are apparently ‘non-lives’ and therefore dealt with accordingly from the statist perspective. See for details, Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2016. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press. 14  The chapter is based on ethnographic fieldwork undertaken for 16 months 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, the Southwestern part of Bangladesh. This empirical experience has been supplemented by my close observation as a resident of Cox’s Bazar for more than two decades and a half of the flow of Rohingya migrations, the process of their temporary settlements, the attempts of permanent social integration, and the roles of state and non-state actors in dealing with the Rohingya peoples in the Southeastern part of Bangladesh. The data used here are comprehensive and descriptive in nature which renders the methodology of the research is qualitative and ethnographic. 15  Uddin, Nasir. 2020a. Ibid. 13

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in 1982 enacted its Citizenship Law, which conferred citizenship to 135 nationals excluding the Rohingyas. Since then, many Rohingyas started migrating to Bangladesh, Thailand, Malaysia, and Middle Eastern countries to flee persecution.16 In 2007, the Rohingyas drew global media attention, yet at a minimal level, and attracted the concerns of rights organizations as a ‘new boat people’17 because hundreds of Rohingyas died in the sea in their journey towards Thailand and Malaysia. But, in 2017, the Rohingyas heavily captured the attention of the international community, leading global media outlets, and rights organizations due to the massive influx (700,000) in Bangladesh. The Rohingyas are regarded as both registered refugees18 and unregistered illegal migrants19 in Bangladesh. The Rohingyas have become either refugees or illegal migrants due mainly to their lack of citizenship and the state of statelessness as they do not belong to any state.20 In Myanmar, the Rohingya are often identified as ‘illegal Bengali migrants’, whilst in Bangladesh, they are ‘illegal Burmese migrants’. Bangladesh Government has recently prepared their biometric database terming them as ‘Forcibly Displaced Myanmar Nationals ’. In the framework of the modern nation-state, the Rohingyas are non-existent human beings as they are nowhere in the legal and structural framework of either Bangladesh or Myanmar.21 Therefore, the Rohingya experience persecution, atrocities, and everyday forms of discrimination committed by the state despite their stateless

 Hossain, Delwar. 2014. “Tracing the Plight of the Rohingyas” in Imtiaz Ahmed (ed) The Plight of the Stateless Rohingyas, pp. 09–35. Dhaka: University Press Limited. 17  Lewa, Chris. 2008. “Asia’s New Boat People”. Available at: http://www.fmreview.org/sites/fmr/ files/FMRdownloads/en/burma/lewa.pdf (Accessed on January 02, 2018). 18  Those who are officially registered and live in official camps under the supervision of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) are ‘Rohingya refugees’. 19  The rest who are not officially registered and live either in makeshift camps or in other localities are known as ‘illegal migrants’. 20  Ahmed, Ahmed, ed. 2014. The Plight of the Stateless Rohingyas. Dhaka: University Press Limited; Uddin, Nasir. 2015. “The State of Statelessness People: A Case of the Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh” in Howard-Hassmann and Walton-Roberts (eds). The Human Rights to Citizenship: A Slippery Concept, pp. 62–77. Pennsylvania: The University of Pennsylvania Press. 21  Uddin, Nasir, ed. 2012. To Host or To Hurt: Counter Narratives on Rohingya Refugee Issue in Bangladesh, pp. 83–98. Dhaka: Institute for Culture and Development Research (ICDR); Uddin, Nasir. 2015. Ibid. 16

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people. The Rohingyas were denied all sorts of rights in Myanmar because “citizenship is considered as the rights of have rights.”22 The Rohingya started migrating to the south-eastern part of Bangladesh in the late 1970s, but a big number came in the early 1990s. The first influx took place in 1978 when about 200,000 fled to Bangladesh.23 “It is said that oppression, discrimination, violence and forced labour practices by the Myanmar authorities triggered an exodus of more than 250,000 Rohingya Muslims to cross the border between 1991 and 1992. Since then, the flow of this migration to the Bangladesh territory continued which contributed to shaping a big figure living as refugees in this country.”24 Over the years, approximately 230,000 refugees have been reportedly repatriated to Myanmar under the supervision of the UNHCR. However, most of them along with a new cluster of Rohingyas again returned to Bangladesh in many illegal ways and started living as unregistered Rohingyas in various localities of Teknaf and Ukhia. The numbers of such returnee Rohingyas are estimated at 250,000.25 Now, just 32,000 Rohingyas are officially registered who are recognized as refugees by the Government of Bangladesh and live in two official camps— Kutupalong of Ukhia and Nayapara of Teknaf—under the supervision of the UNHCR. Among the unregistered Rohingyas, about 40,000 live in a makeshift camp in Ukhia called Taal and about 30,000 live in a makeshift camp in Teknaf called Leda. The rest of Rohingyas sporadically live in different localities of Teknaf and Ukhia constitutes about 350,000–400,000 before the recent influx took place. Besides, many Rohingyas are believed to have socially integrated into the society  Arendt, Hannah. 1994. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Books; Kesby, Alison. 2012. The Rights to Have Rights: Citizenships, Humanity and International Law. Oxford: The Oxford University Press. 23  Elahi, K. Maudood. 1987. “The Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh: Historical Perspectives and Consequences,” In John Rogge (ed.), Refugees: A Third World Dilemma. New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, p. 231. 24  Uddin, Nasir. 2010. “Treatment of Unwelcome Guests: A Case of Rohingya Refugee in Bangladesh.” The paper was presented at an international conference on the Political Economy of South Asian Migrants organized by the South Asian Regional Formation Research Society held on November 24–26, the University of Delhi, India. 25  This is indeed an approximate estimate of the number of unregistered refugees since there is no official record of them. But the actual number of unregistered Rohingya refugees are much more than what is estimated since the flow of migration is continued. 22

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building either affinal relations or professional contacts.26 Many, particularly those who came three decades ago, now hold Bangladeshi passports and own National Identity Card (NID) and have integrated into the local society. Many have migrated to Gulf countries with Bangladeshi passports as international labour migrants.27 In a recent remark, the Minister of the Ministry of Expatriate Welfare informed that 250,000 Rohingyas are living in the Middle Eastern countries with Bangladeshi passports.28 The recent influx following the 25th of August, 2017, it is estimated that more than 700,000 Rohingyas crossed the border. Bangladesh Government has recently prepared a biometric database of around 1.1 million Rohingyas as part of the repatriation process whilst still many have remained undocumented. Excluding expatriates, now approximately 1.2 million Rohingyas live in Bangladesh. Whilst the previously registered Rohingyas who live in the UNHCR camps are provided with food, shelter, limited scale health, and education, albeit insufficient, the large number of unregistered Rohingyas who live in different villages and roadsides in the south-eastern region of Bangladesh lead a very miserable life.29 In fact, “these unregistered 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. It is reported that unregistered Rohingyas are largely unemployed, vulnerable to ill health and subject to labour-exploitation.”30 Newly arrived Rohingyas live in temporarily built refugee camps in Kutupalong, Balukhali, and Tangkhali, who are also receiving food  Professional contact means a kind of contact with the corrupted official to get a Bangladeshi passport in exchange for bribery, working contact with the local people by selling the cheap labour and moving to big cities like Chittagong and Dhaka to work as construction workers, rickshaw pullers, vendors, and day-labourers. Through these processes, some Rohingyas are gradually integrating into Bangladeshi society. See for details, Uddin, Nasir. 2012. Ibid. 27  Jain, Prakash and Oommen, Ginu, eds. 2016. South Asian Migration to Gulf Countries: History, Policies and Development. New York: Routledge; Siddiqui, Tasneem. 2016. “International Labour Migrations and Remittances” in Ali Riaz and Mohammad Rahman, eds. Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Bangladesh. London & New York: Routledge. 28  Muntaha, Sadia. 2018. “Expatriate minister: 250,000 Rohingyas went abroad with Bangladeshi passports.” Available at: https://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/2018/04/28/expatriate-­ minister-­250000-rohingyas-went-abroad-bangladeshi-passports/ (Accessed on June 02, 2018). 29  Uddin, Nasir. 2012. Ibid; Uddin, Nasir, 2015. Ibid. 30  Uddin, Nasir. 2012. Ibid, p. 87. 26

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ration, primary healthcare, water supply, shelter, and daily essentials through inadequate in comparison to what they need. The UNHCR is mandated to protect refugees from human rights violations, but it has made no effective effort to protect Rohingyas in Myanmar. In Bangladesh, the national media, local human rights organizations, NGOs, and the representative of the civil society do not speak up for the rights of Rohingya at a significant level when Bangladesh is attempting to ­repatriate them without ensuring their life safety and social security. Furthermore, the local people do not ready to host the Rohingyas anymore because they think that Rohingya presence is crucial for their various social problems.31 Besides, both Ukhia and Teknaf of Cox’s Bazar are resource-poor areas, and also overcrowded and therefore very likely about 1.2 million Rohingyas have created an additional burden on the local resources, job markets and social spaces. As a result, the state institutions—civil administration, law enforcing agencies, local government bodies, and bureaucrats—treat them as “illegal migrants, unwelcome outsiders and socially disordered settlers.”32 During my fieldwork, many Rohingyas also admitted that they used to do some illegal activities for their survival and the local police office records supported their admission and the allegations against them. I wrote elsewhere “many Rohingyas over the years have been found guilty of doing various sorts of social crimes which local people rarely tolerate. Therefore, the relationship between the host society and Rohingya refugees did not go smoothly for a long time and it indeed turned into a complex one.”33 However, the situation of Rohingya people in Bangladesh is still critical and the majority of Rohingyas do not have a minimum standard of life and do not enjoy minimum rights as human beings. This is large, not only, because they are stateless people and have no citizenship conferred by any state. In Myanmar, Rohingyas are deprived of their social, economic, civil, political, and basic human rights because the state treats them as if they are lesser than human beings what I call

 Uddin, Nasir. 2012. Ibid; Uddin, Nasir. 2020a. Ibid.  Uddin, Nasir. 2020a. Ibid. 33  Uddin, Nasir. 2012. Ibid, p. 87. 31 32

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‘subhuman’34 due to their ethnic, religious and racial difference. In Bangladesh, they are not well received because Bangladesh is already an overpopulated country and the south- eastern part of Bangladesh is a resource-poor area. Besides, Bangladesh is not one of the signatory states of the UN Refugee Convention 1951 and hence does not feel obliged to host Rohingyas. Besides, the critical experience of dealing with Rohingyas who crossed the border in 1978, 1991/1992, 2012, 2016 and 2017 have also ­discouraged Bangladesh to be cordial and sympathetic to them. Given the scenario, the Rohingyas are in an acute vulnerable stage in Bangladesh and Myanmar which has been created by the state particularly Myanmar.

4.3 T  he State Accelerates ‘Transborder Movement’ Historically people move from one place to another mainly in search of a ‘better life’ which is academically interpreted as economic migrations.35 In hunting and gathering society people’s mobility was regulated in search of food through hunting and gathering. During the horticulture episode of history, people’s mobility was limited since they used to invest domestic labour force in horticulture. During the agricultural epoch of history, the agrarian mode of production demanded wage-labourers, though not at large as the capitalist mode of production requires, that brought people from outside accelerating people’s mobility. However, during the age of capitalist mode of production which demanded huge labour forces, people started moving from a small city to the big one and country sites to metropolitan ones for gaining livelihood which could also be considered as ‘economic migrants’.36 Gaining economic fortune motivated people to move from one place to another and until recently it was one of the

 Uddin, Nasir. 2020a. Ibid.  Dalton, Dave. 2008. Economic Migrants: People on the Move. USA: PawPrints. 36  Dalton, Dave. 2008. Ibid. 34 35

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governing reasons behind all sorts of translocal and transborder migrations.37 Entire Europe and its human geography constitute several early migrations particularly the Germanic peoples, the Turks, the slaves, and others what Anna Triandafyllidou calls “circular migration between Europe and its neighbourhood.”38 Sixty million European migrants colonized America, Australia, Oceania, the northern half of Asia, and the parts of Africa from the sixteenth century to the twentieth century. ‘The Great Atlantic Migration’ which is considered as the largest migration in the history of transborder migration took place from Europe to North America between 1870 and 1914, the first major wave of which began in the 1840s with mass movements from Ireland and Germany.39 Following the industrialization started in 1780  in England and Western Europe, people from rural areas migrated to urban centres in search of jobs which is also a kind of searching ‘economic fortune’. Following the First World War, transborder mobility increased since people were moving from one country to another as migration turned into a common phenomenon. However, following decolonization in Southern Africa, Southeast Asian countries, South Asia, and Latin America, in the process of nation-­ building and state formation, the question of identity came up as a central point of conflict and contestation in the context of national majority and ethnic minority divide. In most cases, since the central state is somehow formed by the national majority, ethnic minorities, also the people of cultural, religious, linguistic, and racial difference, were dealt with an authoritarian notion of statehood resulting in conflict, insurgency, and rivalry.40 Then the state appeared with its all-exploitative types of machinery and oppressive policies to create an extremely vulnerable condition that forces the people of cultural, religious, ethnic, and racial differences to cross the border to flee persecution. Therefore, the transborder  Taran, Patrick. 2011. “Globalization, migration and labour: Imperatives for a rights-based policy” Journal of Globalization Studies 2(1):58–77. 38  Triandafyllidou, Anna. 2013. Circular Migration between Europe and its Neighbourhood: Choice or Necessity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 39  Nugent, Walter. 1995. Crossings: The Great Transatlantic Migrations, 1870–1914. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. 40  Uddin, Nasir. 2018b. The State Matters: The Rohingyas in Home State and Host State. An Unpublished Research monograph. 37

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movement is not essentially motivated by economic aspiration only and the articulation of better fortune anymore, but the fleeing persecution and escaping extreme vulnerability in the countries of origin. This premise is evidentially found in South Asian states.41 The Rohingya refugee in Bangladesh is an ideal case to understand the triplicate relations of the state, vulnerability, and transborder movement. I have recorded hundreds of personal narratives of the terrible and horrific experience of recent atrocities committed by the Myanmar security forces, ethnic extremists, and Buddhist fundamentalists42 which combinedly formed a force to create an extremely vulnerable condition enough for the Rohingyas to become transborder migrants in Bangladesh. I recorded a personal narrative of Mr. Maruf on October 12, 2018, at Kutupalong Camp, Block-B, Ukhia, Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, what unfolds the degree of vulnerability he experienced in the Rakhine state of Myanmar. His tone: My name is Maruf (45). I had two sons and three daughters. My wife was pregnant and expecting another issue in the following four months. I used to live in the Gartali area of Moungdaw township. My children were still little in age, and two of them were supposed to go to school but couldn’t. Rohingya children had once an opportunity to go to Madrasha but now is no more because Burma [Myanmar] government has curtailed this opportunity in many areas. I had a small grocery shop on a roadside close to my residence. I came to know that Borma military [Myanmar Security force] and kichu moigg [some Rakhine Buddhists] together started killing people mercilessly, slaughtering Rohingyas one after another, burning houses randomly, raping women and girls forcedly, and looting valuables in nearby Rohingya villages. Many Rohingyas rushed to our villages who lost their families and everything that they had as they explained to me. The frightened villagers were planning to leave Maungdaw and flee to Bangladesh. My wife and I also decided to join them the following night. I was a bit hesitant because I had a small shop, a piece of cultivable land and a medium semi-brick-built house. I earned and established these assets with a lot of hardship and it was really difficult for me to leave everything. But,  Banerjee, Paula, et al. eds. 2016. The State of being Stateless: An Account of South Asia. New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan. 42  Uddin, Nasir. 2018a. “Life in Everyday Death: A Case of Rohingyas” Berkeley Centre for Global Religion, USA: Georgetown University. 41

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my wife convinced me that if I were alive, I could earn it again, but if my life didn’t exist what would I do with this property. Considering the safety of my family, I decided to leave the following night. But, the next day morning before we did wake up, the Borma military and some moigga attacked our villages and started burning houses after houses. Many Rohingyas were burnt alive while sleeping in the morning. Many were able to escape with their lives but saw their dearest ones burning alive. I had a similar experience because I somehow escaped myself and save my pregnant wife, but my two sons and three daughters were asleep and hence bunt with my house. I tried to get in the burning house to save my sons and daughters, but a military soldier did hit me with the gun handle and I became senseless. I didn’t know anything then what happened the next. When I woke up, I saw that my neighbours were carrying me with a group of other Rohingyas who were marching towards the Bangladesh border. My pregnant wife was walking beside me. Finally, we could cross the border and come to Bangladesh. Why have our lives become hell overnight? What’s our fault? They dealt with us as if we are not human beings!

Mr. Maruf ’s experience illustrates an acute state of vulnerability what Agamben calls “the state of exception”43 and Butler terms as “precarious life”44 existed in the Rakhine state of Myanmar. Maruf ’s narrative reveals mainly three important points: firstly, it is the state which produces the state of vulnerability within its state territory as part of the state’s policy to deal with the people of cultural, religious, ethnic, and racial differences like the Rohingyas in Myanmar. Secondly, the state along with other forces creates an ‘atrocious living condition’45 what Green and Ward said ‘state crime’,46 which compels the target people to leave the country what academics phrase as ‘transborder movement’. Thirdly, such transborder movement is not essentially motivated by the premise in search of ‘economic fortune’ and ‘better off life’, but for saving their lives from persecution.

 Agamben, Giorgia. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (trans. by D.  Heller-­ Roazen). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 44  Butler, Judith. 2004. Ibid. 45  Uddin, Nasir. 2020a. Ibid. 46  Green, Penny and Ward, Tony. 2004. Ibid. 43

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4.4 The State Produces Vulnerability The state at present has become to some extent more authoritarian and exploitative. Marx long ago said that a state is a tool of exploitation and it protects the interests of the elite and ruling classes of the society.47 All classic notions of state indeed serve the interests of the ruling class of the society in the age of capitalism and hence it excludes people including “the rights of others”48 to prioritize profit. Myanmar as a state also serves the interests of the military establishment, civilian elites, ruling class of the society, and political class of the country.49 Therefore, it deals with the people of cultural differences like Kachin, Chin, Shan, and Rohingyas in a way as if they are unwelcoming intruders. Particularly, Myanmar state deals with the Rohingyas living in the Rakhine state inhumanly by producing extreme forms of vulnerability. Though the state’s oppressive role in dealing with the Rohingyas started a couple of decades ago, the campaign launched in 2017 was so extreme that the United Nations termed it as “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing” and many international rights bodies including Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International (AI), renown genocide scholars,50 and acclaim media outlets (including CNN, BCC, The New York Time, the Independent, Al Jazeera) called it ‘genocide’.51 During my fieldwork, I have recorded many horrific narratives which unfold that an extreme form of vulnerable condition was created by the state in Myanmar which compelled them to cross the border. I recorded a personal narrative of a traumatized woman  Wetherly, Paul. 2005. Marxism and the State: An Analytical Approach. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. 48  Benhabib, Seyla. 2004. The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 49  Ibrahim, Azeem. 2016. The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide. London: Hurts Publication. 50  Zarni, Maung, and Cowley, Alice. 2014. “Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingyas.” Pacific Rim Law & Policy Journal 23(30): 683–754; Green, MacManus and Venning. 2015. Countdown Annihilation: Genocide in Myanmar. London: International State Crime Initiative; Ibrahim, Azeem. 2016. Ibid; Wade, Francis 2017. Myanmar’s Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and the Making of a Muslim ‘Other’. UK: ZED Books; Lee, Ronan. 2021. Myanmar’s Rohingya Genocide: Identity, History and Hate Speech. London: Bloomsbury. 51  Uddin, Nasir. 2018a. Ibid. 47

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named Ms. Fatema Begum (27) on September 24, 2018, at a Roadside temporary tent, Teknaf, Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. Her tone: I have lost everything and have nothing to say. I got married when I was 17 years old. My husband was a businessman and used to sell household goods in Maungdaw Bazar. His earnings were good enough to run our family of six members. I had three sons and one daughter. Of three, one was still at breastfeeding age. We had our own wood-made two-storied house in the Koillarbah area of Northern Maungdaw. We were living with tension and constant insecurity because time and again kichu Moiggar Foa [some Rakhine youths] and Borma military used to visit our house under the pretext of searching illegal arms and Rohingya militants. Every time, we had to pay a big amount of money to convince them. This was the way how we were living in Maungdaw. But, this time Borma military came on August 30, 2017, listened to none and nothing and started ransacking the household goods and available essentials at home. They vandalised the entire house. They picked me up and taken to a bedroom. My all children were crying. My husband was trying to snatch me away from them and he attempted a couple of times. Suddenly one of the soldiers shot him on his head and he fell to the ground and died on the spot. I was so shocked to see dying my husband in front of me. Then, four of them did gang-­ rape me in front of my children. I was severely bleeding and soon after I lost my sense. When my sense came back, I was lying down in the yard and saw my kids crying around me. I also saw that my house turned into ashes as they burnt the house and my husband was burnt inside the house. At night with many other Rohingays, I with my four children also joined the march towards the border of Bangladesh. On the way, the Borma military suddenly started random firing and many of our co-walkers were killed on the spot. I saw that my two sons also lying down on the street as bullets hit their bodies. The living ones started running and I also did so leaving my two sons’ dead bodies on the street. Finally, we could enable to cross the border and now in Bangladesh. I don’t have any idea what I will do with my two children; where I will go; how I will survive; and where the destination of our lives is. I see dark in everywhere my life.

Fatema’s experience unfolds the brutal face of the state which does not only create extremely vulnerable conditions, but also forces the people to

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choose between ‘definite death’, which is called ‘collective violence’,52 and moving out of the country. Since people tend to be alive, they choose to leave the country and cross the border which accelerates the transborder movement. Fatema’s narrative tells two significant aspects of the nexus between vulnerability and transborder movement. Firstly, the state has become so powerful, which could do and undo anything when it comes to the question of the people of religious, ethnic, and racial differences like Rohingyas in Myanmar who are thought of the worthy of extinction. Secondly, transborder movements are gradually increasing across the world as the state itself is no more a container of the people’s civil, social, and political rights53 as Taylor claims the state is a container of economic, social, and political issues that a state deals with. Rather it makes people’s lives so vulnerable that people feel self-pressure to cross the boundary like Rohingyas are crossing the boundary and take refuge in Bangladesh.

4.5 The State Reproduces Vulnerability While Mr. Alam was explaining his dreadful experience of the Myanmar state’s atrocities, he was also talking about the state of the Rohingya situation in Bangladesh. Noticeably, his experience as a new arrival and the same of other Rohingyas who came in 1978, 1991/1992, and 2012 are not the same. Newly arrived Rohingyas are relatively well received, provided shelter and supported with food supply, primary healthcare, and everyday essentials, though inadequate, due to international support and pressure.54 But, those Rohingyas who came in earlier in Bangladesh (particularly in 1978, 1991/1992, and 2012) and got settled down in different makeshift camps, temporary shelters, roadside plastic tents, and in yards of local people have long been going through another form of vulnerability. In most cases, the state agents and state institutions are instrumental in the production of vulnerability in the lives of Rohingyas in  Brass, P. R. 1997. Theft of an Idol: Text and Context in the Representation of Collective Violence. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 53  Taylor, Peter J. 1994. “The State as Container: Territoriality in the Modern World-System” Progress in Human Geography 18 (2): 151–162. 54  Uddin, Nasir. 2018a. Ibid. 52

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Bangladesh. When we talk about ‘the state’, it generally represents the central state, but the recent trend in Anthropology to the study of the state is a bit different. Rather than focusing on the bureaucratically organized and structurally centralized one, anthropologists pay attention to the local state in its local manifestation and its operation at the local-­ societal representation. Though the idea of ‘local state’ emerged sporadically in various researches,55 the seminal compilation of Veena Das and Debora Poole56 first brought more meticulously the idea of the state at the local-societal framework presenting a couple of empirical cases on how the state lives on the margin away off the centre.57 Talal Asad with a polemic analysis substantiated the idea of state on the margin.58 Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta with the empirically grounded analysis presented “everyday practices of bureaucrats and their representation of the state.”59 James Ferguson has taken it on further with a case study in African explaining 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 through stat channels.”60 One of the leading contributors of the scholarship on ‘local state’61 is Akhil Gupta who with a case of India presents “the analysis of the everyday practices of local bureaucracies

 Ferguson, J. 1994. The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development”, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; Gupta, A. 1995. “Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics and the Imagined State” American Ethnologist 22(2):375–402. 56  Das, V., Poole, D. eds. 2004. Anthropology in the Margins of the State. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 57  Das, V., Poole, D. eds. 2004. Ibid, p. 05. 58  Asad, T. 2004. “Where are the Margins of the State?” In Anthropology in the Margins of the State. (eds.) V. Das & D. Poole. pp. 279–288. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 59  Sharma, Aradhana and Gupta, Akhil, eds. 2006. The Anthropology of the State: A Reader. USA, UK and Australia: Blackwell Publishing, p. 277. 60  Ferguson, J. 1994. The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development”, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 263. 61  See also Das, V., Poole, D. (eds.) 2004. Ibid; Gupta, A. 1995. Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics and the Imagined State. American Ethnologist 22(2): 375–402; Gupta, Akhil. 2012. Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence and Poverty in India. Durham: Duke University Press; Sharma, Aradhana and Gupta, Akhil (eds.). 2006. The Anthropology of the State: A Reader. USA, UK and Australia: Blackwell Publishing. 55

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and the discursive construction of the state in public culture.”62 In fact, the ranges of administrative practices at the local level could be meaningful symptoms to understand the state in people’s everyday life what now is widely known as ‘local state’.63 I wrote in elsewhere that I consider the ‘local state’ in three dimensions: (a) the law enforcing agencies as the classic representation of the central state, (b) ‘local people’ that represents the dominant notions of ‘stateness’, and (3) the civil administration and local bureaucracy reflected as the ‘local state’ in Southastern Bangladesh.64 Here I will present the roles of law enforcing agencies in the form of ‘local states’ as the classic representation of the central state. We will see how the local state is reproducing vulnerability in the lives of Rohingya people in Bangladesh. The Bangladesh Police (BP), the Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB), the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), the Bangladesh Military (BM), the Bangladesh Ansar VDB, and the Coast Guard of Bangladesh (CGB) are the law enforcing agencies that constitute the classic and formal representation of the state. How these formal state agents treat Rohingyas in the south-eastern part of Bangladesh could unfold the dynamics of dealing in both “home-state and host-state.”65 “Since migrated Rohingyas are stateless people and living in Bangladesh as unregistered, undocumented and illegal ‘objects’, they face often detention, arbitrary arrests and frequent torture by the law enforcing agencies what unfold their relations with the state.”66 Bangladesh police and the BGB often raid Pasan Para in Ukhia and Vasan Para in Teknaf where I have been doing fieldwork for years in search of ‘unlawful objects’. The police intermittently raid Taal in Ukhia and Leda in Teknaf for discovering drugs, arms, and criminals, “because Rohingya camps have always been represented as the place of various forms of critical activities  Gupta, A. (1995). “Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics and the Imagined State” American Ethnologist 22(2):375–402, p. 376. 63  Uddin, Nasir & Gerharz, Eva. 2017. “The Many Faces of the State: Living in Peace and Conflict in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh” Society and Conflict 2(1): 208–226. 64  Uddin, Nasir. 2020a. Ibid. 65  Uddin, Nasir. 2018b. The State Matters: The Rohingyas in Home State and Host State. An Unpublished Research monography. 66  Uddin, Nasir. 2015. “The State of Statelessness People: A Case of the Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh” in Howard-Hassmann and Walton-Roberts (eds). The Human Rights to Citizenship: A Slippery Concept, pp. 62–77. Pennsylvania: The University of Pennsylvania Press. 62

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including drug business, arms trade, prostitutes-suppliers, militant producer, and the hub of thieves and robbers.”67 Many Chittagong-based dailies and Dhaka-based printing and electronics media regularly publish news on Yaba68 trade, border smuggling, illegal arms trading, various kinds of social crimes and militant activities where Rohingyas and Rohingya camps are said to have directly involved.69 Media presentation and public perception indeed justify the raid of law enforcing agencies in Rohingya settlements. However, such raids to some extent cause serious human rights violation which remains unpublished in local and national dailies. I have recorded many such raid cases during my long year fieldwork in Ukhia and Teknaf. Mr. Akber Ahmed (49) of Pasan Para in Ukhia explained to me an experience of a police raid in his house in 2015. A sub-inspector with six armed-police constables raided my house at dawn while I with my wife, two daughters and three sons were sleeping. They were shouting standing in the yard and calling by my name “Akber, Oi Akber! Wake up! Open the door”. I opened the door and saw them standing along with a few local Bengalis. Before telling anything, a police constable started beating me holding my hair. Three others joined him in beating and shouting that I did steal Mojaffar’s house, my neighbour, last night and steal all necessary household items. The items include, as they were telling, a mobile phone, a colour TV, a small laptop, gold jewellery of neckless and bracelets, wristwatches, costly sharees and other clothes, shoes, and cash of 40 thousand BDT. I was trying to convince them that I couldn’t do that as I was asleep at home. They didn’t ready to hear anything and kept saying, ‘chomer mar boro gola’ meaning ‘a thief sounds loud!’ My sons and daughters came forward to rescue me from the aggressive constables, but accompanied Bengalis joined the team to beat them up along with me. At one point of beating, the police sub-inspector stopped them and started telling me that since I had stolen the laptop, jewellery and other necessary valuable goods, I would have to bring them all back in 24 hours. I was seriously wounded, and also my three sons, but I was still trying to tell them that since I didn’t steal, how could I bring them back. The sub-­  Uddin, Nasir. 2020a. Ibid.  Yaba is a kind of tablets which are used to increase human sexuality. Myanmar is the largest Yaba producing country in the world and as a borderland Teknaf and Ukhia are popularly known as Yaba trading zones. 69  Uddin, Nasir. 2018b. Ibid. 67 68

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inspector didn’t want to listen to anything and warned me of doing what he said. Otherwise, I would be put in jail in connection with stealing Mojaffor’s house. I couldn’t bring the goods and valuable stolen items back, and I was put in jail the day after. I was in jail for three months. My whole family suffered much from the food, and everyday essentials during my absence, but no one came up to stand beside us. I stayed in jail for three months without doing any crime. Since then, I became known in the locality as a thief and my children are facing social stigma for my imprisonment in connection with stealing. I have none to complain to and no forum to seek justice because we are illegal migrants in Bangladesh. We are not recognised by any state; neither Bangladesh nor Myanmar. What’s wrong? We were vulnerable in Myanmar in one form, but we are having the experience of vulnerabilities in another in Bangladesh. Rohingya people are indeed not manush [human beings].

Akber’s narrative shows a glimpse of how the Rohingyas are dealt with in Bangladesh; particularly the ways how the law enforcing agencies, the classic representation of the state, produces different forms of vulnerable conditions for Rohingyas in Bangladesh. Therefore, when we talk about ‘refugee rights’, it makes no sense to some extent because refugee rights are sometimes indeed myths and Akber’s experience unfolds the reality of the myth. Two very important and fundamental issues come up from Akber’s narrative. Firstly, the Rohingyas are treated arbitrarily as they have no space for lodging complaints with any office and seeking justice from any authority due to their vulnerable social and political positioning as they lack any legally recognized status in Bangladesh. Secondly, if any stealing and robbery case comes up or any crime and offence take place in Ukhia and Teknaf nearby Rohingya settlement, Rohingyas are at first place accused of being the perpetrators as they are looked upon as illegal migrants and socially disorder people and thereby easy to victimize. This is how the local state reproduces another form of vulnerable conditions for the Rohingyas as they are treated inhumanly as if they are

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‘rejected people’,70 ‘bare life’,71 ‘non-life’,72 and ‘subhuman’73; they do not exist before the law. Akber’s statement also unfolds that the state, whether it is a central state or local state, creates vulnerability for the people who are in the state of extremely vulnerable position. In that sense, vulnerability is self-productive since the state of vulnerability push people to further vulnerable position where the Rohingyas are currently living. The state is the main player where it is immaterial whether it is “home-state or host-state.”74

4.6 V  ulnerability Is Reproduced as the ‘Local State’ Matters In Bangladesh, local governments are entitled and empowered to settle local disputes, plan, monitor, and implement local level development initiatives and deal with local issues as the representative of the central government. It is indeed another formal local representation of the central state because it reflects and implements the state’s policy and hence could be considered as the ‘local state’.75 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, Rohingya living in Teknaf needs to deal with Ward Commissioners and Ward Officials whilst those who live in Ukhia need to deal with Union Parishad Chairman, Members and Union Parishad Officials.”76 The Rohingyas  Weiner, Myron 1993. “Rejected Peoples and Unwanted Migrants in South Asia” Economic and Political Weekly 18(34): 1737–1746. 71  Agamben, Giorgia. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (trans. by D.  Heller-­ Roazen). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 72   Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2016. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press. 73  Uddin, Nasir. 2020a. Ibid. 74  Uddin, Nasir. 2018b. Ibid. 75  Gupta, A. 1995. Ibid. 76  Uddin, Nasir. 2020a. Ibid. 70

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who live in Teknaf and Ukhia Upazila have no formal relations with the local states except two levels of engagement what I have written elsewhere in detail.77 Firstly, to handle the case of elopement, the Rohingyas often need to go to Union Parishad in Ukhia and Ward Office in Teknaf to attend a meeting called by the elected Chairman of Commissioners of the Parishad. Secondly, Rohingyas need to go to Union Parishad in Ukhia and Ward Office in Teknaf to deal with the land dispute because they temporarily build shelters/houses on the lands which belong to the Government what is locally called ‘Khash land’. The punishments are also very unorthodox like “in the forms of physical assaults, a penalty of giving money, gifting a caw or dozens of hens and holding ears in front of all. Sometimes, ten-slapping by the opponents in front of all on the spot was also given as verdicts in the meeting.”78 During my fieldwork, I attended and observed many such meetings of dispute settlement in both Pasan Para and Vasan Para where the Rohingyas were given stern ­punishment though in most cases they did not commit any crime and offence. But they had to accept the decision made by the ‘local states’. I have recorded many cases of dispute-settlement meetings and am presenting one here. Farid Uddin (54) is a Rohingya who came to Bangladesh in 1991 and got settled down in Vasan Para. Farid Uddin explained to me about a local dispute settlement case in the local union Parishad office. Mr. Sirajul Islam, a Union Parishad Chairman of a Union in Teknaf Upazila, called a meeting at his office in 2014 at the request of Harun-Ar-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 meetings. My daughter, Khushbu (19), and her husband, Karim (27) were there. I was surprised to see my daughter there because Khushbu was missing six days ago and I came to know that she eloped with Karim and they got married. But I didn’t find them anywhere in Teknaf. I was rather happy to see my daughter. Mr. Harun complained to Mr. Sirajul Islam against me and my daughter because, as per his complaint, my daughter and I deliberately flattered and deluded his son Karim to marry Khushbu. Therefore, he was emotionally blackmailed to marry my daughter. Now, Harun wants his  Uddin, Nasir. 2020a. Ibid.  Uddin, Nasir. 2020a. Ibid.

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son back and demands my daughter should go back home. Sirajul Islam was asking my opinion. I tried to convince Mr. Sirajul Islam and others present there that both matured boys and girls had consciously decided to marry each other and do so accordingly. They had stayed six days together as husband and wife. How could I bring my daughter back? It should be fair 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 to present there with all my logic, my emotions, my requests, and my earnest appeal. But, all went in vain. Finally, Sirajul Islam gave the decision that it was still not too late and Khushbu should go back home and Karim would not meet her again in future. And the decision was final as I didn’t have anything to do. I came back home with my daughter who was crying as if her heart was bleeding. That night, my daughter committed suicide with the scarf hanging with a ceiling fan in her room. I had nothing to do but just to accept the writing of fate because we are Rohingyas. We have none to complain, nowhere to go and no forum to seek justice. This is a life we lead in Bangladesh.

Farid Uddin’s narrative tells many issues which are crucial to understanding the way how the ‘local state’ deals with the Rohingyas. The Rohingyas are quite often victimized under various pretexts one of which is reflected in this case. Two important issues have come up from this narrative: firstly, the local state always works in favour of the majority, whilst the minority are less prioritized. However, in the case of non-citizens and refugees who are neither majorities nor minorities, the local state behaves blindly because it does not care about whether it is justice or injustice, right or wrong, and fair or unfair. It just takes arbitrary decisions in favour of the locals. Therefore, here Mr. Farid Uddin was not listened to properly and his arguments were not considered at all. Rather, the decision was given as a one-sided verdict. “Eloping her daughter in the name of romance, staying with her for six days as husband, and returning her to home with an arbitration headed by the local state” is simply an example of another form of vulnerability. The local state treats the people having an acute vulnerability in a way, knowing their vulnerable condition so that they cannot but accept the decision given. Through this way, the victims are further victimized, and vulnerable people are further put in vulnerable conditions where the local state does preferential treatment. In

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this case, Harun-Ar-Rashid is a local Bengali, but Mr. Farid Uddin is a Rohingya who is a non-citizen and stateless person. Therefore, the decision was given keeping in mind that Farid Uddin would have nothing to do but to accept it so that he would become further victimized. Secondly, the stateless people have to accept all sorts of impositions regardless of right or wrong and fair or unfair because of their lack of citizenship in the land. Therefore, Mr. Farid Uddin had to accept the decision of the meeting and the unexpected untimely death of her daughter where the representative of the central state takes a clear position against the vulnerable one. It reveals that the state is reproducing vulnerabilities which in turn is being exacerbated with the presence of everyday state such as the functioning of ‘local’ state processes.

4.7 Conclusion Having presented some compelling narratives of the Rohingyas who have been experiencing persecution, ethnic cleansing, genocide, domicide, and an acute form of vulnerability in Myanmar for more than four decades, along with some forms of discrimination and vulnerability in Bangladesh, this chapter tends to establish four basic potential propositions. Firstly, the state has always been instrumental in the reproduction of vulnerability what Geen and Ward said ‘state crime’79 for the people who are unwelcoming in the national space due to their religious, ethnic, and racial difference. Secondly, the state-created vulnerability forces people to choose between “leaving the country by crossing the border” and “receiving definite death.” Since people tend to be alive, they ultimately prefer to cross borders as a strategy of life-saving which indeed accelerates transborder movement. In that sense, the state promotes the transborder movement. Thirdly, vulnerability is a particular form of people’s marginalized positioning which renders them further vulnerable because extreme vulnerability holds nothing to resist, none to complain, and no space to seek justice. Rohingyas lives in Bangladesh presents that vulnerability is  Green, Penny and Ward, Tony. 2004. Ibid.

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self-productive because the local state deals with the Rohingyas as if they are ‘bare life’ (Agamben, 1998), ‘non-life’ (Povinelli, 2016), ‘rejected people’ (Weiner, 1993), and ‘subhuman’ (Uddin, 2020a). Finally, the chapter unfolds there is a triplicate nexus of the state, vulnerability, and transborder movement because the relations between and among them are ‘causes’ and ‘consequential’ where the state is the key player. The position of Rohingyas in both their home state (Myanmar) and host state (Bangladesh) proves this relation with the vivid and lived experience of the Rohingyas, who are considered as “the most persecuted ethnic group in the world.”

5 Erasing the Rohingya: Ethnocide, Domicide, and Ethnic Cleansing

5.1 Introduction “We were dealt with so inhumanly and mercilessly as if we were some unwelcome guests in this world. No one expected us but we arrived and emerged in this world against everyone’s will. We are not entitled to live in this world as everyone seems unwilling to receive us. That could be the reason why Myanmar security forces wanted to erase us from the map of Myanmar”—Golam Kabir, a Rohingya refugee of 42 years old living in Kutupalaong Rohingya refugee camp in Ukhua, was explaining to me while sharing his painful experience encountered in the Rakhine state in August 2017. I was interviewing him in the Balukhali camp in October 2017. He continued, “the Borma military killed my two sons, one daughter of 12 years, my father & mother and a younger brother at home within an hour. I couldn’t do anything to save them. Only I was saved because I was not at home when the Borma military raided my house, ransacked everything in my house and killed everyone, except my wife, of my family. My wife was raped by a couple of soldiers by force and she became senseless after all the torture. The military thought she was dead and hence they left my house without shooting her.” Tears were rolling © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 N. Uddin, Voices of the Rohingya People, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90816-4_5

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down on his cheek while Golam Kabir was sharing his horrible story. He had a nice family with two sons, a daughter, parents, and a younger brother. All were killed in an hour except his raped wife. Golam Kabir crossed the border at the beginning of September 2017 and took shelter in the Balukhali refugee camp in Ukhia. At one point in his narration at the doorstep of his bamboo-made small tent1 in Balukhali, he was asking me “Could you tell us why we were treated in this horrible way? Was it only because we are not citizens of Myanmar though they snatched our citizenship away from us illegally by enacting Citizenship Law in 1982? Was it because we are Muslims?” At one point of his questions, he was giving the answers explaining, “They want to obliterate the Rohingya koam (nation) erasing from the world. They want to kill us randomly so that the Rohingya koam are killed in total. Their intention was clear as they wanted to clean the presence and existence of the Rohingya from the map of Myanmar.” Golam Kabir did not have an opportunity to go to school to acquire knowledge about the academic definition and theory of ethnocide and ethnic cleansing but his narrative unfolds the action, practice, and notion of ethnocide and ethnic cleansing on the ground. This is the way how empirical knowledge establishes and formulates the theoretical foundation of concepts, ideas, and issues that we deal with in social science on the one hand. First-hand ethnographic data on the other hand could reconfirm the strength and validity of the established theory. Golam Kabir’s narrative conspicuously unfolds that what happened in the Rakhine state in 2017 had a sharp indication of ethnocide and ethnic cleansing as it had intended to eras the Rohingya population from the demographic composition of Myanmar. The chapter particularly deals with ethnocide and ethnic cleansing that happened to the Rohingya people in Myanmar in 2017. The chapter presents five very solid and lucid narratives of genocide survivors which are good enough to authenticate that a clear intention of ethnocide and ethnic cleansing took place in the Rakhine state. Apart from analysing ethnocide and ethnic cleansing, the chapter also sheds light on domicide which has largely been  This is the typical housing pattern of 34 temporarily built Rohingya refugee camps in Kutupalong and Balukhali in Ukhia. One small house, practically a small room, made of bamboo and a plastic sheet is allocated for a household. Though it was the initial pattern of the house, later the house space, structure, and quality were reshaped in many refugee camps. 1

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ignored in the entire scholarship grown up based on the Clearance Operation taken place on the 25th of August, 2017, and afterwards. I would also like to discuss domicide here because in many cases I found that destroying civilian houses in Rohingya hamlets was a common nature of the clearance operation. This chapter also critically discusses the reasoning behind massive domicide in the Rakhine state.

5.2 Ethnocide: The Murder of a Culture Ethnocide is a process of extermination of a particular ethnic group from the ethnic mosaic of a state, who are distinct from the national majority. Combination of Greek word ‘ethnos’ meaning a nation and Latin word ‘cide’ meaning ‘to killing’, the etymological meaning of ethnocide denotes ‘killing a nation’ with the agenda of exclusion in the process of state formation and nation-building. Ethnocide has most often been used to refer to the policy and politics of colonial occupants which were designed to eliminate the ‘indigenous’ culture of the occupied territory. Ethnocide was also widely referred to the American policies about Indian cultures because there were a lot of cases of ethnocide recorded where the cultures of indigenous communities were treated to eliminate by destroying their material and non-material culture and cultural artefacts.2 We have many cases of ethnocide in Australia, Americas, Africa, and some part of Europe.3 The Encyclopaedia of World Problem and Human Potentials states the nature of ethnocide in a very delicate way. It states, “A culture may be suppressed by the prohibition of the use of its language, and the destruction or prevention of the use of libraries, museums, ethnic schools, historic monuments, places of worship and other cultural institutions and objects. In its extreme form, it may involve the prevention of births among an ethnic group and transference of children to another group…The systematic extermination of native races and indigenous tribes by outsiders, either ‘nationals’ of the country in question, or  See for details, Hitchcock, Robert K. 2003. “Genocide, Ethnocide, Ecocide, with Special Reference to Indigenous Peoples: A Bibliography.” Available from http://www.aaanet.org/committees/cfhr/bib_hitchcock_genocide.htm (Accessed on October 02, 2021). 3  See for details, Hitchcock, Robert K. 2003. Ibid. 2

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foreigners, is undertaken to expropriate land and safeguard implanted workers from attack. Ethnocide maybe by killing or by the destruction of the social structure and pauperization of the people or their enslavement, leading to disease, death, and lack of reproduction.”4 Rapheal Lemkin (1944) has provided a very detailed and comprehensive description of ethnocide as part of the definition of genocide.5 Lemkin most often used genocide and ethnocide synonymously and interchangeably. Nonetheless, ethnocide could be distinctly and sharply identified as cultural genocide since committing ethnocide means killing an ethnic community as a whole with their culture and heritage. But there is a debate about the idea of ethnocide whether it is only the murder of culture without any physical destruction or it is the extermination of culture with physical destruction. For example, Barry Sautman claimed that ethnocide is the extermination of culture but it does not involve any form of physical extermination of its people.6 Contrarily, Robert Jaulin expressed the opinion that ethnocide is of course both cultural extermination and physical killing or destruction of the people holding that culture.7 I agree with Jaulin because without involving the physical harm to the people and the destruction of ethnic settings, it is very difficult to execute the extermination of culture. The cases of ethnocide taking place across the world over a long period showed that ethnocide heavily involved physical destruction and even mass killing of the people along with the murder of their culture.8 It is mentionable here that the Genocide Convention adopted by the United Nations did not include the concept of ‘ethnocide’ in its legal framework. Therefore, it does not have any legal  See for details, Encyclopaedia of World Problem and Human Potentials. 2019. Ethnocide. Available at: http://encyclopedia.uia.org/en/problem/149861 (Accessed on October 02, 2021). 5  See for detail, Lemkin, Raphael. 1944. Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation—Analysis of Government—Proposals for Redress. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 6  See for detail, Sautman, B., 2003, “Cultural Genocide and Tibet.” Texas International Law Journal, 38: 173–248. 7  Cited in Lukuna Barbra. 2007. Ethnocide, Mass Violence & Résistance, [online], published on 3 November 2007, accessed 17/05/2021, http://bo-k2s.sciences-po.fr/mass-violence-war-massacreresistance/en/document/ethnocide, ISSN 1961-9898. 8  See for detail, Hassen, Mohammed. 2002. “Conquest, Tyranny and Ethnocide against Oromo: A Historical Assessment of Human Rights Conditions in Ethiopia, ca. 1880s–2002.” Northeast African Studies 9(3):15–49. 4

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status in the genocide scholarship and the international legal framework. However, it holds a very strong position in the realm of scholarship regarding genocide, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, domicide, and mass killing. If we take the case of the Rohingya genocide into account, we find that ethnocide took place in the Rakhine state with the large-scale physical destruction of the Rohingya community along to exterminate the Rohingya culture and their existence from the ethnic composition of the Myanmar state. The cases presented in the latter part of this chapter reconfirm the Rohingya ethnocide with massive physical destruction.

5.3 E  thnic Cleansing: The Cleaning of an Ethnic Community Though conceptually and operationally ethnocide and ethnic cleansing coincide with each other quite often in genocide scholarship, ethnic cleansing in the contemporary world has a clear definitional boundary and conspicuous conceptual territory. Many scholars who worked on ethnic cleansing attempted to clarify the distinctive nature of ethnic cleansing. Ilan Pappe wrote, “from an abstraction associated almost exclusively with the events in the former Yugoslavia, ‘ethnic cleansing’ has come to be defined as a crime against humanity, punishable by international law. The particular way some of the Serbian generals and politicians were using the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ reminded scholars they had heard it before. It was used in the Second World War by the Nazis and their allies, such as the Croat militias in Yugoslavia.”9 Though both ethnocide and ethnic cleansing generate bewilderment about their nature, objective, and outcome, but mark a clear distinction. When an attempt is made to drive the particular ethnic group out of their ancestral lands, habitats and perineal attached to clean up their existence are generally called ethnic cleansing. The way ethnic cleansing is executed is detrimental to the civil way of life and the modern system of state management. This is the reason why Michael Mann (2005) called it “the dark side of  Pappe, Ilan. 2007. The Ethnic Cleansing of the Palestine. Oxford: OneWorld, page: 01.

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modern democracy.” He explained, “Murderous ethnic cleansing is a hazard of the age of democracy since amid multiethnicity the ideal of rule by the people began to entwine the demos with the dominant ethnos, generating organic conceptions of the nation and the state that encouraged the cleansing of minorities.”10 Ethnic cleansing has a log dark background in the history of human civilization. However, the irony is that even after the emergence of the modern democratic system in the age of cultural pluralism and multi-­ cultural society, ethnic cleansing is still going on in many parts of the world. Ther Philipp explained, “The twentieth century, more than any other era in history, was shaped by organized terror. It was the century of concentration camps, gulags, and ideologically motivated mass murder. ‘Ethnic cleansing was not at the end of the scale of terror, partly because of the motivations behind it. The primary goal of ethnic cleansing was not to murder and destroy a population group but to forcibly remove one from a given area. Unlike the Nazis’ death camps and the Bolsheviks’ gulags, ethnic cleansing was not invented by a totalitarian dictatorship and did not signify a breach of civilization. Ethnic cleansing is a product of the nation-state and hence one of the basic components of modern Europe. This explains in part why it occurred on such an extensive scale, affecting at least thirty million people in Europe in the twentieth century and laying waste to a large part of the continent.”11 Not only in Europe, we have observed the cruel cases of ethnic cleansing in Africa, Americas, Southeast and South Asia. If we take the case of the Rohingya people and their atrocious experience, we find a fresh example of ethnic cleansing in the twenty-first century. The cases presented here will manifest a lucid example of ethnic cleansing being taken place before your eyes.

 Mann, Michael. 2005. The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, page: 03. 11  Ther, Philipp. 2016. The Dark Side of Nation-States: Ethnic Cleansing in Modern Europe (Translated from the German by Charlotte Kreutzmüller). Oxford & New York: Berghahn, page: 01. 10

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5.4 Domicide: The Murder of Home Domicide is one of the neglected ideas in social research though it has become an integral part of the genocidal attack, the act of ethnic cleansing, mass killing, and vandalizing the people’s property as part of doing crimes against humanity. Nonetheless, the attention is less paid to domicide than ethnocide, genocide, and ethnic cleansing. The many narratives in my stock what if I recorded following the genocidal attack on the civilian Rohingyas manifest the vivid picture of domicide perpetrated by the Myanmar security forces and the vigilantes. Douglas Porteous and Sandra E.  Smith (2001) wonderfully explained domicide in their widely cited book. They said, “Citizens may lose their dwellings through expropriation—the power of compulsory purchase—for the common good or in the public interest. Where the loved dwelling—or, more likely, the cherished neighbourhood or landscape—once stood, there is now a park, an airport, a highway, a reservoir, or perhaps a rubble-strewn wasteland awaiting development. This deliberate destruction of a home against the will of the home dweller, we call domicide. Briefly, domicide is the murder of home.”12 Home does not essentially mean a well-structured and systemic composition of some building materials of construction based on a design for a human living but a space of relations, emotion, kin-­ bondage, memories, and familial peace. Home holds attachment, belongingness, and reciprocal bondage between persons and things. Qin Shao (2013) wonderfully unfolded the value of a home in human social life. He explained, “the home is a unique and fundamental physical and emotional space for fulfilling the essential human need for attachment and identity. This attachment is not merely to the physical space of the house; rather it is attachment also to the intangible—love, emotional bonds, family values, routines, rituals, and memories.”13 Inf act, amid living for a longer period, every part of a home holds a sense of attachment and emotion of belongingness. Home thus becomes part of our social life  Douglas Porteous, and Sandra E.  Smith. 2001. Domicide: The Global Destruction of Home. Montreal & Kingston, London & Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, page: 03. 13  Qin Shao. 2013. Shanghai Gone: Domicide and Defiance in a Chinese Megacity. Lanham, Boulder, New York, Toronto & Plymouth, UK: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, inc., page: 16. 12

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what Arjun Appadurai (2014) said is the “social life of things.”14 Therefore, intentional destruction of home is indicative of the damage of deep relation, profound emotion, sweet memories, and intimate bondage of people with their living place. In the targeted destruction under the clearance operation, the Rohingya helmets were heavily affected by the murder of their homes what is academically called domicide. The traumatized narratives I have recorded so far unfold some serious and touchy cases of domicide. In almost every case, the Myanmar military attacked the Rohingya people at home, vandalizing their properties, looting their valuables, raping girls and women, killing innocent civilian Rohingyas, and at the end of their operation, they set fire to their homes. Many Rohingya were burnt alive along with their home. Burning home, damaging home, and vandalizing home, an extreme form of domicide, are a clear message to the Rohingyas that the Myanmar authority wanted to erase them with their family memory, their emotion of bondage, their intimate attachment, and their sense of belongingness. Domicide was done in line with the mission of genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya community in Rakhine state. Case-One: Idris Alam (17) We used to live in Maungdaw. We were two brothers and two sisters. Our family had six members including my parents and myself but now I am the only one alive. Everyone in our family was mercilessly killed by the Borma military. My father was an Imam of a local mosque. We were living in the village with honour because of my father’s profession though it was the main problem for us among the Rakhine Buddhist fundamentalists. The Borma people didn’t consider us as the citizens of their (our) country. We were always treated as outsiders. They treated us as illegal Bengalis who have been living in the Rakhine state illegally for decades. But, the real fact is that my grandfather was born there. Even my grand-­ grandfather was born there. My father and we were born there too, but still, we were considered as outsiders and illegal Bengali migrants living in the Rakhine state illegally. Another problem was our religion because  Appadurai, Arjun. 2014. Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge. The Cambridge University Press. 14

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they always claimed that Borma is the country of Burmese Buddhists, not for Muslims. And their position was so rigid that they were never ready to accept people having different faiths particularly Muslims and other ethnicities like Rohingyas. They took all forms of rights—civil, political, social, and cultural rights—away from us many years ago. Our rights to the freedom of movement, rights to education, rights to marry, rights to work, and rights to perform religious activities were taken away and these became subject to permission by the authority. And taking permission always involved painful harassment and the payment of a huge amount of money. Nonetheless, we were trying to adjust with the system taking these forms of discrimination as our ‘fate’; an ultimate destiny written by Allah. When the violence broke out across Rohingya settlements in four townships—Maungdaw, Buthidaung, Rathedaung, and Akkyab—in late August, the Borma military randomly fired and killed many Rohingya civilians. The mosque where my father was leading the prayer as an Imam of the mosque was also under attack at the very beginning of the military campaign. Some devotees died inside the mosque and some were lying down on the floor. Fortunately, my father was one of those who could able to save their lives. But the military collected information about my father and attacked our house in the immediate evening. I was in the market at that time. They entered our house and tortured my father mercilessly. At one point, the military soldiers snatched my father out of the house and throw him in the yard and started beating him inhumanly. My elder brother was trying to save my father, but suddenly one of the soldiers shot him on his forehead. And he died on the spot. Having watched my brother dying and my father being beaten, my mother became senseless. My two sisters were taking care of my mother and trying to bring her sense back. By the time, my father was beaten to death. After killing my father, the military soldiers set fire to our house. It was hard to believe that my mother and two sisters were burnt alive inside the house. My elder brother’s dead body was also burnt inside the house. When I came back from the marketplace, I saw that my father’s dead body was fallen in the yard and our house turned into complete ashes. You can’t imagine how painful it was for me to bear this horrible violence that happened to my life. I was wordless and had no sense to think of what to do next. A

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couple of my co-villagers came later to see me and suggested that I should leave the place as soonest as possible. I didn’t dare to perform the funeral rituals for my father because it was a big question for me to survive though life and death became identical to me at that point. It was an irony that my father was an Imam of a mosque, but he didn’t receive minimum respect and Islamic funeral rituals at the time of his departure from the earth. As a son of an Imam, I couldn’t even bury him following Islamic principles. I requested my co-villagers who came to see to join me to perform a janaja15 for my father. But nobody dared to do that as everybody was thinking of saving their lives. I will never forgive myself for this sort of coward deed I did. Finally, I joined other Rohingyas who were marching towards the border to migrate to Bangladesh. It took four days to reach Kanchuban from there, I passed a canal by boat. Then we reached the bank of the Naf River by walking about another day. I saw there many men, women, boys, girls, old people, and children waiting. It was indeed an intolerable struggle. We had not enough food, water, and toileting access. We had to share everything and everyone was doing it willingly out of their fellow feelings since everyone was in an unexplainable painful situation. Many got sick. We stayed on the bank of the river for at least two days. Suddenly, the rain started which intensified our sufferings. Waiting people got wet and there was no shelter, no room and no roof over our head. We had to lay down for sleep on the sloppy and wetland at night though anybody could hardly sleep even for an hour. After two days, we got a boat and hired it for 6000 BDT per person to cross the border in Bangladesh. It was 200 times higher than the regular fare. Since I left my house empty-handed, I had no money with me. But everyone helped me as I was a son of their mosque’s Imam. The boat dropped us at Shahparir Dip. Many Bangladeshi people were waiting for us to help to get into Bangladesh. They took us to Bangladesh and provided us with food and water in the first place. Then they managed a vehicle for us to bring us to a camp but it was far away from the refugee camps located in Ukhia and Teknaf. Many people  Funeral rituals of a Muslim according to an Islamic principle. It is called namaj-e-Janaja which is performed by a group of people together to say the last prayer before a dead body is buried according to Islamic principles. 15

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were supplying us money, dry foods, water by stopping vehicles many times in the road-way. We first came to the Kutupalong refugee camp. There many people helped us. There we were provided medical facilities and primary medicines. Bangladesh militaries provided bamboos and plastic sheets to build houses. That’s the way how we got settled down here. Since I have no family, I haven’t received any house-building materials. I am living in a general tent where many like us live together. Where I am living is immaterial, but I can’t accept this situation. I have lost my whole family including my parents. Sometimes I lament why I was not at home while the Borma military was killing my all-family members and burning my house. Sometimes I feel it would be better for me to join my family members to live in heaven. Now, I will have to live in hell despite being alive since the experience of losing my whole family will haunt me forever. [Interview was taken in October 2017 at Kutupalong Refugee Camp, Ukhia]

Case-Two: Nurun Nahar (45) I used to live in Butchidaung with my family. I had two daughters and one son. My husband’s name is Motaleb Ali. My husband used to cultivate our land and sometimes catch fish in the river. Then we were leading a happy life in one sense in comparison to others. We were relatively well-­ off too as we had enough land for cultivation. I was also doing some homestead gardening and maintaining a home-poultry firm. My husband had a desire to send our daughters to school, but the situation didn’t permit it. We didn’t feel safe and hence couldn’t put our daughters at risk just for sending them to school. But, both of my daughters went to Madrasa for Arabic study. They could recite Quran and perform all religious activities according to Islamic principles. They used to attend classes at a nearby Madrasa for learning Quran and Islamic principles. Girls in our locality were always at risk whenever they went out though they used to wear Burqa.16 But, we sent our son to school and for that, we had to pay a big amount of money to local Moghs and government authority.  Burqa is over-cloth many Muslim women and girls use to wear when they go outside. This is originally black in colour but many women and girls choose the colour of Burqa according to their taste and the sense of fashion. 16

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One day, some Moghs attacked the school when my son was at the school. Then there was a clash between Moghs and the Muslims outside the school. Some Moghs students at the school with the help of outsiders severely beat some Muslim students including my son. My son became very scared and didn’t want to go to school anymore. We also decided not to send him to school anymore. But what struck my son was very alarming because some Mogh students were shouting saying “you are Rohingya and you can’t study at our school. You are Muslim and you can’t stay in our country.” But, you know our ten generations have been living in Arakan for more than a century. Though my son’s study was discontinued, my husband used to maintain good ties with the local authority and the local Moghs paying huge amounts of money at a reasonable interval because we had to keep our land for cultivation, harvest our crops twice a year, continue fishing, and maintain poultry firm at home. If we didn’t pay adequate money on time, it would not be possible to keep our land in our hands, we couldn’t harvest crops though we cultivated and produced them. Everybody knows that if you want to stay in the Rakhine state and maintain a good life keeping your property ownership, you have to continuously pay adequate money to the local authority and Moghs at a reasonable interval. The Majority of Rohingya people were poor and hence couldn’t pay money. Therefore, they had to lead a very miserable life. They, therefore, used to experience frequent torture, random harassment, regular detention, and sexual assault. We could pay and maintain a kind of relations with them. And we had a trust that they would not attack us under any circumstances since we paid them adequate money regularly. But, the Myanmar military and Moghs were cheaters and were not trustworthy. They showed their cruel and brutal face in August 2017. We came to know that the Myanmar military attacked our village in line with many other Rohingya villages. They were shooting and killing the civilian Rohingya people randomly. They were burning the house one after another. Soon after we heard the sound of firing, we ran out of the house and hid in the jungle of the nearby hill. A group of military soldiers raided our house and searched for us. They looted what they found and then set fire to it. We moved from the jungle of a little hill to the jungle of the nearby mountains for better safety. We stayed there for seven days.

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Since we didn’t have food in hand, we had to collect food from the neighbourhood and cook it in the jungle along with more than four families who were also hiding there. My brother’s family of six members also joined us there and they also shared our food. We were running out of food and started starvation. Until then, we were not thinking of leaving the country because we had land and properties. One day my brother and nephew got out of the jungle of the mountains to bring some food and essentials. But unfortunately, they were caught in the hands of the military. Both of them were kept in line and shot. They suddenly fell to the ground and were severely bleeding. Then the military left their dead bodies. We heard the sound of shooting and later saw their dead bodies lying down on the ground. We didn’t dare to go to see and bury them but thought of moving away from this place as soon as possible. We ran away from there and hid in another jungle of mountains. We stayed there for more than two days. By the time, we came to know that some military soldiers and some Moghs were killing innocent Rohingya mercilessly, raping girls and women, burning the whole village. We also came to know that during the last week around 5000 people were killed and more than a hundred villages were completely burnt down. Then we decided to leave the country and take refuge in Bangladesh. Then we started walking through the jungle and the path didn’t end as the border was still far away. We walked at night but hid in the daytime. We were six families walking together. We did not have any food or drinking water. One night, probably that was the last night, we were walking and getting very close to the border, suddenly we received random firing. Many of us started running to the nearby jungle and hills. But I saw that my husband and my eldest daughters along with six more people in the group were hit by bullets and lying down on the ground. I was so shocked to see that my brain was not working. I decided rather leave the place with my alive son and daughter. I ran and hid in the jungle. It was raining and we got wet. My daughter and son were crying for their father and sister, but I was thinking of how to cross the border to save the lives of my alive son and daughter. Finally, we got a boat to bring us to Bangladesh. I came to the Kutupalong refugee camp and got a small tent for living with my daughter and son though I had a two-storied wooden house in the Rakhine state. The military took away my everything: my house, my husband, my

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daughter, my land, poultry, and property everything. Now, I am living here with no present and no future. Just living with a very painful and atrocious past. [Interview was taken in October 2017 at Kutupalong Refugee camp, Ukhia]

Case-Three: Abul Kalam (37) I used to stay in Maungdaw town, Borma. I was a farmer by profession and used to work at my farm in Maungdaw. I had about 18 acres of land, 8 milking cows, and 6 cows of cattle. I used to cultivate rice and vegetables in my land. My income would have been much better for me and my family to lead a very good life. I used to produce a lot of surpluses and sell them in the market to buy necessary things and earn cash. The Borma military and local Moghs always kept their eyes on my activities and cash earning. Like other Rohingyas, I had to pay a big amount of money to them regularly to continue my firm and agricultural activities. I had three sons and two daughters. My eldest son was 13 years old and my youngest daughter was 1 year old. I was spending my time in Maungdaw with my family better than many other Rohingyas in our locality. Even I quite often helped others whenever they were in need and crisis. Despite Borma military and Moghs’ various forms of discrimination, I was living with a sort of mental peace because I had a belief, they won’t do any harm to me and my family. But, I was living in the realm of foolishness as August in 2017 completely altered my entire life, living, peace, and happiness. It destroyed my belief in people. When the Borma military tortured us in 2016, I sold many cows and buffalos at a very cheap price because I saw many of my relatives fleeing persecution and crossing the border into Bangladesh. I thought it could happen in my life at any time and I with my family might have to leave one day. I earned a lot of money but the local Moghs charged me a lot of extortion and I had to pay it since I had nothing to do. If I would do otherwise, they could snatch everything without leaving anything in my hands for me. So, I very politely gave them what they demanded. I also thought If I could make them happy and keep a good relationship with them, I could receive some sort of mercy in a time of crisis. But my belief turned into a frustrating false.

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On August 26, 2017, we heard that the Borma military was randomly shooting many civilian Rohingyas and killing them one after another brutally. They were attacking villages, ransacking the properties, vandalizing the essentials, and burning houses in villages after villages. We also came to know that the Borma military in association with some local Moghs looting Rohingyas valuables and properties. They were also raping girls and women wherever they were found. I was informed by my next-­ door neighbour that to escape such brutal and genocidal attacks, many Rohingyas were fleeing to cross the border. I was still thinking of staying in Maungdaw if necessary, paying plenty of money to the military, the local authority, and some local Moghs. I prepared some money and valuable items for them. When they would come to my house, I would willingly pay them. A group of 10/12 military soldiers came to my house on August 28, 2017, and entered my house by force breaking the main door. Without listening to anyone, they started vandalizing the furniture inside the house and looting whatever they found in front of them. When I was trying to talk to them, two of the soldiers started beating me. My eldest son came forward to save me, but he was also being beaten mercilessly. My wife went to a corner of the house and sat with fear holding my two sons and two daughters. My eldest son and I were laying down on the floor. They spent half an hour destroying the inside of my house and looted whatever they got. When they went out, we all were inside the house. They went out and set fire to the house. My wife suddenly went out of the house with my other sons and daughters leaving me and my eldest son inside. She again went into the house and tried to wake up us. I somehow escaped with my wounded body, but my eldest son was burnt inside the house. It was terrible to see my house burning and my eldest son was inside the house. My wife was crying very loudly and I was almost stunned. Nonetheless, I convinced my wife to leave Maungdaw immediately. We left the yard and went to the jungle with other Rohingyas. I had some money with me which I previously prepared for the Borma military and the local Moghs. We were walking in the jungle and it was very difficult to walk inside the jungle with four children. For me, it was so hard to walk because I was still seriously injured as I didn’t have any scopes to

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receive a minimum medical treatment. It was also difficult for my wife to walk in the jungle because she was carrying a one-year child with her. My other three children were also struggling to walk in the jungle. It took us about three days to reach the back of the Naf River. We used to hide in the daytime and walk at night. We were also suffering from a shortage of food and drinking water. Children suffered the most. The most terrible event came to my life when on day three we encounter a serious military attack on the way in the evening. We along with the other five families started walking towards the border in the evening, but suddenly the Borma military started firing on us. Everyone in the group started running here and there. Many of them received bullets and fell to death immediately on the spot. My wife, my one daughter and one son were also shot by the military. I saw them lying down on the ground with their bloodied bodies. Rather than taking care of them and looking into what happened to them, I ran away with my remaining son and daughter who were still alive. Finally, we reached the bank of the Naf River. Many were injured, many were ill, many were bleeding, and some were shocked to leave their dearest ones and see their horrible deaths. After waiting for a few hours, we got a serial to get in the boat to cross the border. We paid 10,000 Kyats per head. Suddenly the weather gets worse while we were in the boat. The boat started shaking in the middle of the Naf River. It started raining and all we became wet and frightened. Finally, we arrived at Shamlapur, a border village of Bangladesh. There was so much rain. Later we took shelter in a house for two days. They gave us a place to stay and also provided us with food for two days. Later, we came to the Balukhali Refugee Camp. We came here by a vehicle of Bangladesh militaries. They showed us a place. There was no room to build a house there. I was able to make it. From UNICEF, ​​we got a plastic tent. Another organization gave us some bamboo. With that, I built a house. I had everything in Maungdaw, but I have now nothing and hence am living like a beggar. I had a farm, land, cultivated crops, a house, and a happy family, but I have now nothing as am living in another country as a refugee. I am living with my one daughter and one son. I have nothing now, but a terrible memory of losing my wife, my two sons and one daughter. I have a vivid memory of looking at my house burning in front of my eyes.

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[Interview was taken in September 2017 at Balukhali Refugee Camp, Ukhia]

Case-Four: Morzina (24) I am from Buthidaung, Borma. My father’s house is next to my village. My father used to cultivate in his land. My mother was a housewife. I had six brothers and sisters. I was the youngest of all and that’s the reason why everyone loved me so much. I got married in a neighbouring village so that my family members could get in touch with me regularly. I got married in 2010; six/seven years before I left Borma. I studied in four classes in Borma. Then I could not go to school again. All my other brothers and sisters got married. It is Rohingya custom and social system that girls get early married so that they can live with their husbands relatively safer because unmarried girls are the prime targets of the Borma military and the local Moghs. My husband’s name is Belal Ahmed. He used to plough in the field. Later he sold our land and went to Malaysia. I had two sons. The eldest son was five years old and the younger son was three years old. My husband went to Malaysia three years ago. My little boy was then in the womb. I used to live in my father-in-law’s house. His younger brother used to stay there but in a separate household with his family. When the condition of Borma was getting worse day by day, I used to live in tension. The Borma military personnel used to rape girls and women, torture them, and then kill them afterwards. That was the common story we knew in Borma. We had the experience of such atrocities in 2016. In front of my eldest son, his grandfather got beaten up by the local Moghs and killed afterwards. He was very scared. We all were very afraid of watching the atrocity. After that my mother-in-law became very sick. Then we came to know in August 2017 that the Borma military was shooting people, burning villages, and raping girls and women. I also came to know that my parents’ family was also under attack and two of my family members were killed. I became so scared. That night I talked to my husband over the phone in Malaysia and decided to come out of Borma. The other members of my family-in-law decided to leave the place as soonest as possible. We started our journey with my mother-in-law’s family members. My brother-in-law talked to the broker, also a Rohingya working to transfer Rohingya from the Rakhine state to Bangladesh, before. We ran away

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with the sufficient cash and gold we had. On the way, we were caught by some local Moghs. They beat us a lot and snatched everything that we had with us away from all of us. My two sons were very scared. They kept crying and were beaten by the local Moghs. It was a lot of trouble we faced. After a while, my mother-in-law was vomiting fresh blood. After a while, she died. We somehow manage to bury her in the ground. There was no Salat-e-Janaza or Namaze Janaza (funeral prayer), burial clothes, and a holy bath what a dead body deserves before burial according to Islamic Principles. But, we could do nothing as we had to run towards the Bangladesh border. We reached the bank of the river after four days. We did not have any cash in hand at all. We ate water and some dry food for three/four days, and the kids were crying for food. I requested other Rohingyas to give some food to my children though I knew that they were likewise suffering from food and water shortage. It was a terrible time. Fear of death was hunting us on the one hand and the acute crisis of food and water was pushing us to fall in the death-whole on the other hand. My brother-in-law was trying to manage some food and water for me and my children. But, he didn’t return to join. A friend of my brother-­ in-­law informed me that he was caught with more than three Rohingya youths in the hand of the Borma military. Four of them were brutally killed on the street at brought daylight. I became very shocked because I lost my mother-in-law and now my brother-in-law. How would I face my husband since I couldn’t save his parents and brother? It was a very tough time for me. Suddenly rain started. The clothes were wet and again the kids were crying as it was. They had a fever as they caught a cold after catching rainwater and so did I. My feet were paining after walking along the path day and night. I suffered a lot with pain. I came to the bank of the Naf River and told people to call my husband in Malaysia. After talking with the broker, he arranges the money (30,000 Burmese Kyat) to help us cross the border from Borma to Bangladesh. Finally, we arrived in Teknaf. While crossing a village in Teknaf, the villagers offered us food, water, and some clothes including a burqa. This helped a lot. From Teknaf, we came to the Balukhali refugee camp with a truck. We came here and entered the camp with registration as ‘forcibly displaced Myanmar nationals’. We had no trouble registering and entering the camp. When we entered the camp, we arranged for a place. We set a tent

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next with the help of a local NGO and an International NGO. Everyone collects food rations and other essentials with different tokens. Standing in line for a long time gave a feeling that I am a beggar though I was a member of a very well-off family and my husband uses to earn a good amount of money in Malaysia. Now I am leading a life like a beggar and looking for everyday food depending on others. When my children cry for food, I feel completely helpless. Ignoring my sense of dignity and my principles, I stand in line to receive food from NGOs. The Borma military has made me a beggar throwing me with my children in the refugee camp. I want to go back to my country. My children should have a certain future. Leading a life like a refugee will not ensure the future of my children. The Borma government said, “we are Bengali. So, they have persecuted us and driven us out of this country. But we are Rohingya Muslims. Our identity is Rohingya, we are Muslims by faith. We want to get back to our country with our own identity. But, we want a safe return since we can’t trust the Borma Government which did a genocidal attack on us. Also, we don’t want to stay here in Bangladesh as a refugee.” [Interview was taken in September 2017 at Kutupalong Refugee camp, Ukhia]

Case-Five: Taslima (21) I used to live in Maungdaw in the state of Arakan what they call now as Rakhine state. I got married four years ago. My husband’s name is Mohammad Belal. I have three children. Although I was a housewife and taking care of my family. My husband was living in a joint family with his other four brothers and their family members. His brothers had a lot of children. Altogether, our family had around 30 members including girls, sons, women, young, and old. Despite having a lot of members in our family, the financial condition of the family was good enough. Our family had 17 acres of land in Maungdaw, and three projects of fishing in our locality. We were a joint family. My husband’s one brother lives in Saudi Arabia and used to send a lot of money every year. The remaining three brothers used to cultivate in their parental land and my husband used to do a motorcycle and motorbike business. Though the Borma military, the local authority, and some Moghs used to take a handsome amount of

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money regularly, we were living in a relatively peaceful manner. August’s incident in 2017 had taken everything away from me. Some local Moghs and militaries regularly raided our house even though they were periodically taking money. Many times, they cut the crops and paddy from our cultivating lands and taken away. We tried to stop sometime but it didn’t work out because it rather brought in different forms of torture and attacks. They started beating everyone irrespective of gender and age. We also noticed that they shot and killed some in our neighbourhood who tried to resist their move to cut their paddy from the field. Even many times, they caught fish from our fish projects without even informing us. We didn’t say anything since we knew the consequences. This is the way how we endured their physical and mental torture day by day, but we were happy it was relatively lesser than other Rohingya experienced in our locality. My husband had to supply the motorcycle and motorbike to the local authority and some local Moghs at free of fair since he had to run his business. Once or twice, my husband asked for money for the rental motorbike but received severe torture. Since then, he tried to avoid asking for a rental fee from them. That was a story before the genocidal attack kicked off in 2017 when we were somehow adjusting with the system and their dominant and exploiting pattern of dealing. But, August 2017 altered everything and changed our complete set-up. On August 25, 2017, we learned that the Borma military started random firing on the civilian Rohingya and killed many people. My husband was not at home until the evening because he was dealing with his motorbike and motorcycle issues. We also started listening to the sound of firing and the loud cry of the people nearby our house. Some local Moghs were also shooting the people in collaboration with the Borma military. At 8.15 p.m., my mother called me and informed me that the Borma military attacked our house killed my father, two brothers and raped their wives. My mother also informed me that the military set fire to our house and it was completely burnt by the time. She seemed so scared and didn’t know what to do at that time. She was also with my brothers’ two raped wives and their kids. I became so scared because my husband was still outside and many members of my family-in-laws house were outside at that time. My husband’s younger brother rushed to the house and informed me that my husband and his other brother were

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killed along with many other Rohingya people in Maungdaw Bazar when the military opened fire on them. I was so shocked to know that I even can’t see where my husband was then. My brother-in-law was then asking all of us to get ready to leave for Bangladesh since the Borma military was very close to our house. Suddenly, a panic situation was created among all of us and every one of this big family was getting ready with whatever they found available with them. Though I was so shocked, I also got ready with my three children to leave Borma for Bangladesh. Suddenly, a group of military soldiers with some local Moghs entered our house by force and started beating everyone. They asked every one of the houses to gather in the living room. Almost 28 members of the house gathered together in the living room. Children were standing close to their parents. The military started vandalizing the furniture and other goods inside the house. The Moghs were looting the valuables, ornaments, money, and others goods they found. They also snatched from the hands of the family members because, at that time, everyone was trying to leave the house for Bangladesh. Some were trying to hold their valuables and received severe beatings. Five soldiers attempted to rape the girls including me but some of the family members tried to stop them. Suddenly, the military shot them to death. Children started crying and the military started random firing to stop them. Within an hour, almost 20 members of our family died including one of my three children and the living room became blood. It was a horrible experience I was witnessing happening in front of my eyes. I was just 21 years old and I was not spared from their greedy eye. They took me to a room and three military soldiers raped me one after another. My two children were crying. I was bleeding after the ganged rape but I noticed that the military was leaving setting fire on the fire. Suddenly, I woke up, held my two children, and went out of the house. I noticed that the other living members of my family already left the place while I was being raped. I was lying down in the yard and saw the housing burning in front of my eye. Finally, I left the place to join others marching towards the border of Bangladesh. I was running with my two children: one son of three years old and one daughter of one year. I came to Bangladesh with another family. We walked and finally arrived at the bank of the Naf River on the Borma side. We walk for six days. We were hiding in the daytime and walking at night because if they

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realized and heard the sound, they would start shooting on us. The family with me hired a boat there. They want 60,000 Kyat, Borma money, per person. I did not have any money. I gave my two earrings. But they said these were not enough and they needed more money. Since I had nothing to give, the other family gave money on my behalf provided that I would pay them back later on. After an hour we reached the island of Shahpari. I met many Rohingya families there waiting for a shift to the refugee camps. I was looking for my family members but found none. After two days we came to the Kutupalong camp in an army vehicle. Here the army showed us a place. We have a house like a tent made of tripoli and bamboo. We had a brick-built house in Borma, but now we live in a tent made of plastic and bamboo. Just a couple of days ago, I had a big family of 30 members including my husband and three cute children, but I have none except two children of mine. We had 17 acres of land, fishing projects, and the business of motorbikes and motorcycles. But, within a couple of days, I lost everything including my family, my husband, my one child, and my full family-in-law. My father, my brothers, and their family. I have even lost the living members of my family and my family-in-­ law. It seems I had everything before the 25th of August but I had nothing after the 25th of August in 2017. [Interview was taken at the beginning of September 2017 at the Kutupalong Refugee camp, Ukhia]

5.5 Conclusion Theoretical discussions need substantial empirical ground and shreds of evidence to prove the claims made by the theoretical proposition. Therefore, empirical pieces of evidence are needed to substantiate the theoretical foundation and theories need empirical support. This sort of epistemological reciprocity creates the ground for generating a new form of knowledge and scholarship. The five cases presented in this chapter unfold some solid and lucid empirical evidence of ethnocide, ethnic cleansing, and domicide that took place in the Rakhine state in August 2017. The cases of Idris, Nurun Nahar, Abul Kalam, Morzina, and

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Taslima clearly show that the Myanmar military in collaboration with some ethnic extremists and some Buddhist fundamentalists executed merciless ethnocide and attempted to undertake a confirmed ethnic cleansing. Because all these cases unfold some brutal killing, random raping, and cruel torture which manifest the symptoms of ethnic cleansing and ethnocide. Apart from that, almost all cases show that the military did set fire to the houses which indicate the acts of domicide. Many Rohingya people were burnt alive which holds the attempt of ethnocide. Considering all of the aspects of various cases, a clear conclusion could be drawn that what the Myanmar security forces did in the Rakhine state in 2017 include the common characteristics of ethnocide, ethnic cleansing, and domicide.

6 Violence Against Women and Girls: Narratives of the Rohingya Rape Survivors

6.1 Introduction “When the Borma military entered our house, I was trying my level best to save my two teenage daughters and kept them in a corner of our master bedroom. My husband was trying to resist them in the living room, but suddenly, one of the soldiers shot him on his forehead. He fell on the ground and died on the spot which profoundly shocked me. It was hard to believe but I realized that my husband was no more. My two years son was crying and lying down on the floor but I could not dare to take care of him because I was still trying to protect my daughters by hiding them in the bedroom. Suddenly, a couple of soldiers entered the bedroom and found them sitting in the corner. Without any word, they started taking their clothes off. They were crying and trying to protect themselves, and so did I to save them but two of the soldiers started tearing my clothes as well. Suddenly, they threw me on the bed. I didn’t think that they would rape me but they brutally raped three of us all together at the same time in front of each other,” Mrs. Maksuda Begum,1 a Rohingya woman of  Mrs. Maksuda Begum was living in Butchidawng township in Rakhine state. Her husband was an agricultural worker cultivating in his paddy field. They were leading a very poor life. Apart from a

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45 years old, was explaining to me in September 2017 at the Kutupalong Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh. He was crying while telling me the ‘story’; not a story in the strict sense of the term but a painful bodily embodied brutal experience. It is mentionable here that when the Rohingyas say ‘Borma military’, they mean a group of soldiers in the official uniform of the Myanmar Military or Myanmar security forces. Tears were rolling down on Maksuda’s cheek while she was talking to me. She continued, “It was a horrible experience for a mother to watch her daughters being gang-raped.” Maksuda’s personal experience of being raped and of watching her daughters being gang-raped is indicative of the brutal atrocities perpetrated by the Myanmar security forces in the Rakhine state in 2017. It also reconfirms that violence against women and girls was another tool of genocidal attack as part of ethnic cleansing in the Rakhine state since women and girls have always been targeted for sexual exploitation, physical abuse, and bodily violence in a conflicting situation.2 This chapter presents some critical and powerful narratives of Rohingya rape survivors in 2017 genocidal attacks in the Rakhine state to unfold a vivid picture of violence against women and girls. In the context of the Clearance Operation in 2017, one of the most dominant features, but still less talked about, of atrocities and brutalities committed by the Myanmar security forces and vigilantes is the violence against Rohingya girls and women. According to a report published in 2018 and prepared by an Independent Facts Finding Committee formed by the United Nations, about 1900 Rohingya girls and women were raped and most of them were gang-raped in two months (September and October 2017) in Rakhine state.3 The number could be larger than the official statistic since many Rohingya girls and women tend not to disclose the experience of being raped because it is closely associated with the discourse of honour and shame in Rohingya society. In my recorded two-year-old son, Maksuda had two girls waiting for suitable ‘persons’ to get married. The critical experience of Maksuda could be a crucial case to understand the violence against women and girls (VAWG). Maksuda’s case has been stated in the latter part of the chapter. 2  Samuel, Kumudini, et al. 2019. Political Economy of Conflict and Violence Against Women: Cases from the South. London, UK: Zed Books Limited. 3  See for detail, Uddin, Nasir. 2020. The Rohingya: An Ethnography of ‘Subhuman’ Life. Delhi: The Oxford University Press.

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narratives, I found most of the girls and women were raped by the Myanmar security forces and their local Rakhine collaborators. It is to be mentioned here that rape is one of the many forms of violence against women. So, there is much more evidence of violence against women I found in the accounts of Rohingya narratives that I recorded just after they crossed the border fleeing genocidal attack perpetrated by the Myanmar security forces. This chapter presents some very ‘disturbing’4 testimony of rape survivors and violence against women many of them were either raped or gang-raped by the Myanmar security forces and vigilantes during the all-out campaign started on the 25th of August 2017. Violence against women in a conflict situation, war zone, and turbulence situation has been historically recorded as a weapon against the competing parties. But violence against Rohingya girls and women was implicated with the state’s policy of ethnic cleansing, ethnocide, and genocide. More than hundreds out of 500 narratives hold strong evidence of brutal violence against women being taken place in Rakhine in 2017. This chapter presents rape survivors’ experience of being raped, the context of raping, and what happened afterwards what helped them survive and cross the border to Bangladesh. As the voices of victims, these traumatized narratives unveil the degree of atrocity, the intensity of brutality, and the context of ethnocide in the extreme violence against the Rohingya girls and women. Finally, this chapter concludes with a polemic analysis of the facts and evidence, which are fully emotionally loaded and professionally academically decoded, to understand the space of violence against women and girls in the broader spectrum of the theoretical and empirical foundation of genocide, ethnocide, and ethnic cleansing.

 ‘Disturbing’ means very touchy and emotionally loaded narratives. Since it’s very hard to listen as it’s so horrible and cruel, ‘disturbing’ could be a suitable word as it ‘disturbs’ our sense of humanity. 4

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6.2 V  iolence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) Before further proceeding with the cases of Rohingya experience, it requires discussion about the theoretical framework and conceptual foundation of violence against women and girls (VAWG). The United Nations (UN) without any hesitation admits that “Violence against women and girls (VAWG) is one of the most widespread, persistent and devastating human rights violations in our world today remains largely unreported due to the impunity, silence, stigma and shame surrounding it.”5 It further itemizes the violence against women on its website in the following ways: “In general terms, it manifests itself in physical, sexual and psychological forms, encompassing: (1) intimate partner violence (battering, psychological abuse, marital rape, femicide); (2) sexual violence and harassment (rape, forced sexual acts, unwanted sexual advances, child sexual abuse, forced marriage, street harassment, stalking, cyber-­ harassment); (3) human trafficking (slavery, sexual exploitation); (4) female genital mutilation; and (5) child marriage.”6 Most academic pieces subscribe to the definition provided by the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women (DEVAW) adopted by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in 1993. It reads, “any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual, or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty whether occurring in public or private life.”7 The Declaration confirms that violence against women and girls does not essentially mean sexual violence only but any type of physical and psychological harm by force done by male counterparts could be counted as VAWG.  The Declaration also reiterates that VAWG is the consequence of “historically unequal power relations between men and  See for detail, The United Nations. 2020. International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. Available at: https://www.un.org/en/observances/ending-violence-against-women-day (Accessed on October 15, 2021). 6  See the United Nations. 2020. Ibid. 7  See the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner. 1993. Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women. Available at: https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/violenceagainstwomen.aspx (Accessed on October 15, 2021). 5

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women.” To me, unequal power relations between males and females are instrumental for sure but unequal power relations between two groups of people are equally important being having experience of violence by the powerful ones. Besides, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in 1979 by the United Nations further clarifies that “Recalling that discrimination against women violates the principles of equality of rights and respect for human dignity, is an obstacle to the participation of women, on equal terms with men, in the political, social, economic and cultural life of their countries, hampers the growth of the prosperity of society and the family and makes more difficult the full development of the potentialities of women in the service of their countries and humanity.”8 However, violence against women should be more strong phrase than discrimination against women. In that sense, violence against women and girls does more harm to them than discrimination against them. Nonetheless, both the international agreements clarify that violence against women and girls is a serious violation of human rights and detrimental to human dignity. Jacque True explained “In both these international agreements based on a consensus among states, VAWG pertains not only to physical and sexual violence but also psychological and emotional harm and suffering. Verbal abuse and threats, for instance, count as VAWG.”9 According to UN Women, “One in three women worldwide experience physical or sexual violence, mostly by an intimate partner. Violence against women and girls is a human rights violation, and the immediate and long-term physical, sexual, and mental consequences for women and girls can be devastating, including death.”10 The VAWG takes serious shape when it is used as a weapon of war and conflict to destroy and destruct the competing opponent what was happened in the Rakhine state in 2017. The discussions and narratives presented in previous chapters reveal that  See the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner. 1993. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. Available at: https://www.ohchr.org/ Documents/ProfessionalInterest/cedaw.pdf (Accessed on October 15, 2021). 9  True, Jacque. 2021. Violence Against Women: What Everyone Needs to Know. New York: The Oxford University Press, p. 3. 10  The UN Women. 2020. Ending Violence Against Women. Available at: https://www.unwomen. org/en/what-we-do/ending-violence-against-women (Accessed on October 15, 2021). 8

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Myanmar security forces executed a confirmed genocide against civilian Rohingyas in the Rakhine state where VAWG was used in the extreme form as a tool of ethnocide, genocide, and ethnic cleansing. The following cases will provide a lucid testimony of the VAWG. Case-One: Sufia Begum (44) I am a Burmese citizen though Borma doesn’t accept it. I used to live in Nakaiyadong village of Bozidong thana of Akkiyap district. I studied up to class five. Our family members were seven. I got early married and I had three sons and two daughters. We were looking for suitable persons (bridegroom) for my daughters because unmarried matured girls were always the centre of attraction of the Borma military and some local Moghs. From our point of view, having unmarried adult girls at home meant we were constantly under threat and tension. That’s why we were looking for ones but found none matching well. My husband had a grocery shop. Two years ago, the Borma army took my husband away from the house and sent him to jail. They didn’t explain any reason but he was accused of being connected with the Rohingya militant group called ARSA. But, we didn’t have any idea about ARSA and my husband didn’t have any connection with them, but he was sent to jail. Then we ran my husband’s grocery shop because we had to survive. I paid money to the local authority of the Borma government regularly, what my husband did, for continuing business. Not only from me but the local public representative of the government also collected the money from every shop in the market. We did not have any freedom there. We could not move freely from one place to another. Permission should be taken from the local authority to move from one place to another. To get permission, we had to pay money to the local public representatives. This permission was usually granted for one day. Again, we had to pay the local representatives if we wanted to visit the neighbourhoods. We had to return home by the same evening. We had to take permission from local representatives for all kinds of social activities like getting marriage, admitting children to school, organizing any social functions, and so on. Every year the Borma government used to take our family pictures so that they can check whether any new member was added to our family. If any baby was born in the family, we had to inform the local government office and register

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with the local authority of the government. Also, we had to pay a big amount of money for registering a newborn baby with the local registration office. Despite my husband being in prison, I with my five children was trying to adjust to everything and every exiting discriminatory system. I was running the grocery shop and maintaining the family expenditure with the earnings. I was trying to release my husband from prison. I was also protecting my two daughters from the eyes of military and local Moghs. Most of the time, they used to remain at home as they were living in a kind of house-confinement. If they needed to go out, they used to wear Burqa so that nobody could recognize them. Everything was going in the same way. But August’s incident altered everything in my life. The Borma military began random killing starting August 25, 2017. Soon after I heard of the military attack, I became so scared because my husband was in Borma prison, my two daughters were young and adult, my three sons were indeed children, and I was a woman. How could I save my family, my daughters, and myself? I took preparation to leave the house and cross the border as soonest as possible. But it was a very difficult decision to make to leave my husband in jail. I had no scope to contact my husband in any means so that I could do some consultation about what to do in this critical situation. I also came to know that the Borma military was randomly raping girls and women apart from killing. Then, I decided to leave the house at any cost as soon as possible. I talked to my next neighbour about leaving the house and they were also thinking alike. Finally, we decided to leave for Bangladesh the following night. While I was taking preparation to leave by bagging money, ornaments, and some other valuables, the Borma military attacked my house. They entered the house by breaking the main door. They were first looking for males for killing but found none. I was sitting on the corner of the master bedroom with my two daughters and three sons. Firstly, they looted all the valuable belongings including money and ornaments. Some of them took my one daughter; some took my another one; and some took me to three different rooms. I was trying to save my daughters but was beaten severely. My three children were crying loudly. Three of the soldiers took them and threw them out of the house. My youngest son, just one-year-old, died afterwards in the yard as he was hit by a military soldier. My other sons

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were also injured. I couldn’t see what happened to them as some military soldiers were unclothing me. I was trying to save myself but I couldn’t. When they were raping me one after another, I was hearing the painful cry of my two daughters in the other two rooms. It was very difficult for me to bear the pain physically and mentally. When they left me, I hurriedly came out of the room and tried to see the condition of my other two daughters. I saw that my youngest daughter was severely bleeding and dying gradually. I saw my eldest daughter lying on the bed who became senseless. I tried to wake her up and put some water on her face. She was also heavily bleeding due to gang-rape. I took care of her but I came to know that my youngest daughter already died. Then I decided to leave the house the same night without waiting for the next night. I took my one severely injured daughter and two wounded sons with me and started running towards the Bangladesh border. I saw many Rohingya running towards the Bangladesh border who did go through more or less the same experience. My daughter couldn’t walk properly and my sons were lying down on the ground every five minutes. It was also difficult for me to walk. Therefore, I had to struggle and take unbearable pain to bring all of them to the border. It took six days for us to reach the Bangladesh border walking through hills, plains, and jungles. Finally, we could cross the border. Now we live in the Kutupalong refugee camp. Here in Bangladesh, my whole family—my daughter, my sons, and me—received primary medical treatment soon after we entered Bangladesh. My daughter is still not physically good enough, and mentally she has been destroyed. My whole life has been destroyed. I don’t have any idea about my husband. Even I don’t know whether he is still alive or not. I am now wondering whether my daughter becomes pregnant or not. I am also in the same trauma. ‘The August 2017’ has taken everything away from us but left horrible memory and constant mental pain. [The narrative was recorded in September 2017 at the Kutupalong Refugee Camp, Ukhia]

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Case-Two: Zainub Khatun (25) We lived in Maungdow’s Nagpura area which is largely inhabited by the Rohingya Muslims. I did use to ‘do nothing’ except take care of my family. ‘Doing nothing’ means I was doing no homestead forestry, no household poultry, no hand-made handicraft at home, and no money-earning activities in any means. I got married when I was just 16 years old. Early marriage is our tradition because guardians believe that if girls get married, they are safer and their ijjat will be saved. So, the sooner the girls marry, the better they are safe. I had two sons and we were four in number in my family though my house-in-law was a big family. In that sense, we were living in a joint family of my husband but in a separate house located in the same yard. The financial condition of my parents-in-law was not good enough. They didn’t have their land. But my parents had a couple of acres of land and they used to lease the land to the shifting cultivators. My father-in-law used to take sublease land from others for cultivation. I had three brothers-in-law. My husband was an agricultural worker but the rest of his brothers used to do business and fishing. We all lived like a family living in the same yard bounded by a bamboo wall though my brothers-in-law’s families were living in a separate house. My husband was the youngest among all brothers in his family. Their wives also lived with us with their children but in a separate house. So, it was a big family indeed. Since our family was becoming bigger, other brothers of my husband built a separate house in the same yard. But, my husband and we were living with our parents-in-law. In August 2017, we left Rakhine as the last batch from our family. Suddenly, we came to know that my two brothers-in-law were killed in Maungdaw Bazar in a random firing accident where the Borma military killed many Rohingya civilians mercilessly. Their family even couldn’t try to find their dead body as they knew that it would result in nothing. They immediately left the house to save themselves and their children. Initially, they took shelter at their parents’ house. The third brother-in-law was suggesting that we should all leave the place as soon as possible but my parents-in-law were reluctant to flee suddenly. My parents-in-law were requesting us to wait and see the situation and then take the decision after a few days. They were optimistic that the situation would improve soon. We were informed that the military was killing people, burning

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houses, and raping girls and women. We were also hearing the sound of shooting and loud cries of people which made us understand that the Borma military was not far from us. We might be attacked at any time. My parents-in-law also did not take time to understand that the military came to our area because they also heard the shout and crying voice which was getting closer. Then, they finally decided to leave the house and march towards Bangladesh. It was about 6.00 pm when we started packing for leave-taking all valuable essentials. My husband managed a couple of families living beside us who were also taking preparation to leave. Suddenly a group of military soldiers with some Moghs entered our yard and were searching for males of the family. They found only my husband and my father-in-law because my two brothers-in-law were killed and another brother-in-law by the time left the place. So, my husband and my father-in-law were taken together and lined up. Then both of them were shot by the military and they were killed in a minute. My mother-­ in-­law was trying to rescue them from the military when they were grabbing them both to line up, but she was severely beaten by other soldiers. She fell to the ground, became senseless, and was heavily bleeding. I was sitting in a corner of my bedroom and holding my two sons. My mother-­ in-­law by the time was no more in this world. The three of the soldiers entered the bedroom, snatched me from my sons, put me on the bed. They forcibly unclothed me and tortured me one after another. I tried and cried, but couldn’t do anything. My sons were crying. I was brutally ganged raped by a couple of military soldiers. It was so painful for me and at one point I was bleeding. The bed became red-blooded but they didn’t stop themselves. After one hour of torture, they left me. They went out and left in a group. I became almost senseless but was thinking of my sons. Physically, I became so weak that it was difficult for me to stand and walk. But, for the sake of my two sons, I woke up and tried to manage my sons and calm them down. I saw the dead bodies of my husband and parents-in-law lying down on the ground. I saw the whole house was completely vandalized. All valuable goods and stuff were looted. It was so shocking to see my whole life, my dreams, my family, and my everything were destroyed in one and a half an hour. As per our previous decision, I left the house with my two sons and joined other neighbours to march towards the border of Bangladesh. We

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came to Hachabil from Nagpura. We stayed one day in Hachabil. Then we moved to Quarbil from Hachabil. There we stayed only for one night. From Quarbil we came to Shilhali and we stayed one night there too. Then we stayed two nights in Hudukhali. The Hudukhali area was bigger than others and hence we had to stay for two nights. After Hudukhali, we came to the Tombru border of Bangladesh. We stayed one night in Tombru. From Tombru we crossed the Sambala river and during the Asar prayer, we came to Bangladesh. We crossed the river by a small boat. We had to pay 50,000 Kyat (Burma currency) for each boat. A boat could accommodate and carry six to seven people at a time to cross the river. But our boat carried ten people and sank when it got close to the bank of the river. Then we walked the rest of the riverway but it was very difficult for me to walk in the water holding one son on my shoulders while another neighbour was carrying my other son. Even after reaching the bank of the river, we started walking again. At one point in the walk, we got a truck that was then carrying Rohingya to the camp in exchange for a big amount of money. We got in the truck and the truck driver brought us to the Kutupalong transit camp. We were standing outside the camp for a while and then were taken to a transit camp. Then from the transit camp, we were registered for and allocated to a camp to take shelter. Now, I am living there with my two sons. To be honest, I don’t still feel that I am alive. I am just living physically but mentally I have been destroyed. Every part of my body carries the touch and torture of evil and the symbol of Borma military soldiers. I can’t forget the horrible experience I did go through when I was being tortured by the military soldiers. Sometimes, my mind doesn’t work, my sense doesn’t function, and my memory becomes suddenly blind. I am still heavily traumatized. [The narrative was recorded in October 2017 at the Kutupalong Refugee Camp, Ukhia]

Case-Three: Sultana Razia (30) I was living with my husband and my children in Chionchori Lemora village in Maungdaw township. We were four in our family. I had two sons. The eldest one was ten years old and the youngest one was six. I was

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a housewife and a homestead gardener. My husband was an agriculture worker and used to work in his lands. Even we hired other Rohingyas to work in our lands during the ploughing and harvesting season. My husband got the land from his father as inherited property. We had 50 Kani11 of lands in Maungdaw. He used to cultivate some part of it, did a poultry farm in another part, and reared cows in the remaining lands. There was a military base in MiyaMugh which was very close to our land property and our village. The army quite often visited our farms and took cows and other poultry items as many as they washed. Sometimes, my husband requested not to take too many, but he received in return severe physical torture. Many times, it happened and then he left requesting them. But, it was gradually becoming so intolerable particularly after 2012 when there was a riot between Rohingya and some Rakhine Buddhists in the Rakhine state. It took a dangerous shape in 2016 when the military was attacked by some Rohingya miscreants. On August 25, 2017, at 10  pm, about 100 Borma army personnel entered our village and surrounded our entire village. I was sleeping with my husband and two children. Suddenly, we heard that some people were hitting our main door to open it and shouting by using various abusive words for Rohingya. We all woke up and became so scared. First, we were thinking of not opening the door but we realized that they would soon break if we don’t. Soon after my husband opened the door, a couple of military soldiers just shot him and he fell to die instantly. They didn’t allow a single second for my husband to say anything and utter a single word. I was so shocked to watch my husband’s sudden death. My two sons became almost wordless and the youngest one started crying loudly. One of the soldiers slapped him with heavy force to stop him but his crying became louder. Another soldier suddenly shot him on to stop his crying sound forever. It was completely unexpected that I couldn’t even think of they could shoot my little child. He was severely bleeding. When I was crying sitting beside the dead body of my son, two soldiers came close to me and tried to take me to the bedroom. I was trying to relieve myself from their holdings but they forcibly took me away. My  Kani is a unit measurement that is traditionally used in the land tenure system in South and Southeast Asian countries. 11

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eldest son was also trying to save me from them, but suddenly he was also shot by another soldier standing behind me. I was so shocked that I couldn’t even cry. Just endless tears were rolling down my cheek. Two soldiers took me to the bedroom and unclothed me. My sense was not properly working. I was half senseless and half with sense. Both soldiers raped me together and I was just indulging their unexplainable torture. While they were torturing me, other soldiers were looting my house taking all the valuables including ornaments, money, other electronic items, and so on. My body became completely numb. But I had still a little sense and could sense what was happening there. I noticed that after two soldiers left me on the bed, the other two soldiers entered the bedroom and started raping me. It was painful for me but I had nothing to do. When the second round of torture was over, I was severely bleeding. When they were leaving the room, one of them was telling another to shoot me. But, they were talking about not to shoot me and instead set the fire to the house. When they went out of the room, it was simply impossible for me to stand up. But, when the Borma military group were leaving the house, they torched the house what I smelt and sensed. Suddenly, I attempted to get out of the house and I did it by the way of crawling on the floor. Finally, I could able to save myself but my two sons and my husband were inside the house and burnt. Even they couldn’t die as Muslims with the funeral of the Islamic rituals. Once I was thinking of jumping on the fire to die with my husband and sons. But, I didn’t know what prevented me from doing so. When I got off my house, I saw many people were rushing to the Bangladesh border. It is because many like me lost their family members, raped and wounded by the Borma military torture. I also joined them to cross the border. It took four days from Borma to Bangladesh. I started from Chionchori Lemora with our many co-villagers at night on the 25th. I with many others reached the Minjini hill from Chionchori Lemora on foot. Then we spent a night on the hill. We were crossing the Minjini hill on foot. We reached the bank of Purma canal. Then we crossed the Purma canal by a small boat. While crossing the Purma canal, I saw many dead bodies of children, men, and women floating in the canal. Then we reached Kheongmeong the next day. We reached the Sheelakhali border from Kheongmeong walking through a mountain. Then we crossed the

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Naf River by boat the next day and reached Kansupara on the border of Bangladesh. This is the way how I arrived in Bangladesh. Bangladesh army on the border caught us and kept us sitting for the Government of Bangladesh’s permission. They provided some food and clothes. When the army permitted us to enter Bangladesh, we felt a kind of relief but my terrible experience was still haunting me. We were walking towards the camp with the crowded people. The Border Guard of Bangladesh (BGB) brought us to the Kutupalong refugee camp by car. I was given emergency treatment as a rape victim with many others. I stayed ten days in the temporary hospital, the Kutupalong camp hospital. Then some NGO workers gave me treatment in the camp. I took medicine properly and am physically feeling better now. But, I am dangerously traumatized since I saw my husband and sons’ cruel death just before my eyes. Also, the horrible physical torture by the military soldiers still reminds me of the day and scared me of hell. I have lost everything in Rakhine: my husband, my sons, my lively family, my property, and my ijjat. My body is carrying the evil touch of the military which I will have to bear during the rest of my life. [The narrative was recorded in October 2017 at the Kutupalong Refugee Camp, Ukhia]

Case-Four: Khurshida Begum (33) I used to live in Tami village located in Buthidaung township in the Rakhine state. Tami is the last and the bordering village of other townships. I was living with my husband, my children (one daughter and two sons), and my parents-in-law. We were seven in number in our family. I had a sincere interest to study at school to be educated but I didn’t get the chance due to the unfavourable conditions in our locality particularly for the girls. I got married when I was just 17. I used to live at home and do household work. My husband used to cultivate the land. We had five or six Kani of land. We were spending our time adjusting to different forms of discrimination in our everyday life because we took it for granted as “written as our fate.” We have taken it for granted that since we are born as Rohingya, we are destined to experience persecution, exploitation, and discrimination. However, we didn’t expect at all the severity of brutality

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and atrocity we faced in 2017. Particularly, my personal experience was so cruel, barbarous, and inhuman that I can’t forget it for a single second. It always haunts me day and night. It has been one month I came to Bangladesh. We heard that some Rohingya miscreants attacked some police stations and a military base, but we didn’t know the reason why they did so. Subsequently, we also came to know that the Borma military started torturing, killing, and abducting innocent Rohingya in the name of searching the Rohingya miscreants. My parents-in-law became so scared because they had gone through such an atrocious experience a couple of years ago. They were suggesting we pack the belonging and get ready to leave for Bangladesh. But my husband was convincing them explaining that nothing serious would happen because the Borma military was looking for the miscreants who attacked them. My husband had a firm belief that the Borma military would not harm civilian Rohingyas. I also thought that it would become okay soon because we did go through more or less a similar experience in 2016 but it became calm down in a couple of months after the incident took place. However, I didn’t have any trust and belief in the Borma military since they could do anything to the Rohingya people as they didn’t look up to us as human beings. It was the 27th of August, we started hearing the shouting and loud cry of the people living in our neighbourhood which made us scared. My husband wanted to go out to see what was happening outside, but I didn’t let him do so. My parents in law became so scared that they were feeling sick. Suddenly at 9.00 pm, some soldiers of the Borma military and some local Moghs together came to our house and knocking the door forcibly. We locked the door and didn’t dare to open it. At one point, they broke the main door and got inside the house. Then they started beating my father-in-law and my husband with stick and bayonet. My father-in-law fell on the floor as he was severely bleeding. They started vandalizing the goods, furniture, and crookeries. It was generating noise and my two sons were crying loudly. I was holding them sitting in a corner of my bedroom. My mother-in-law was also with me and holding my daughter of 13 years old. My husband and my father-in-law were in the living room. Soon after my father-in-­ law became senseless and fell on the floor, my husband was taking care of him and trying to wake him up. When a few military soldiers were

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attempting to enter the bedroom, my husband was trying to resist them. The military and my husband stood face to face. The soldiers started shooting my husband and tens of bullets hit his body and he became spot dead. I became so scared that I couldn’t even cry. The Moghs and a few military soldiers entered the bedroom. I was trying to save my two sons and my mother-in-law was trying to save my daughter. Two Moghs were taking my daughter and putting her on the bed. My mother-in-law was trying to hold my daughter and bring her back from the bed. A Mogh suddenly hit my mother-in-law with a sharp knife and suddenly my mother-in-law fell on the ground and became spot dead. Two soldiers held me, took me from my sons, and put me on the bed. My sons were crying and I was also trying to save myself but I couldn’t. Both my 13-year-old daughter and I were raped on the same bed in front of my two sons (one is 10 years old and another is 8). It was a horrible experience in my life that I had to go through. After torturing us, they left us on the bed and went out of the house. Before that, they looted everything that we had. It was so painful to see my 13-year-old daughter laying down on the bed being raped. I lost my husband and my parents-in-law within an hour of disaster in my life in 2017. I managed to take care of my daughter and my two sons. I came to know that houses after houses were being burnt and many Rohingyas were burnt alive. The survivors were rushed to the Bangladesh border to save their lives. I also decided to leave the place and did so empty-handed the following night. From Tami, we went to Fatiha. In Fatiha, we stayed there for three nights at the house of one of my relatives who by the time left for Bangladesh. So, the house was empty. We noticed and observed continuous attacks on the Rohingya settlements. Once I was thinking of going back to my place again if things became cool in a few days but it didn’t happen. In 2016 and even before that, we had the experience of fleeing and hiding in the jungle but we could return to our place. This time things were getting worse. The sound of firing and loincha (rocket launcher) didn’t stop. After three days at Fatiha, we along with another family from the locality started walking towards the border of Bangladesh. Walking for more than five days from Fatiha, we came to Purma khal. Then we got a boat to cross the border to Bangladesh. For the eight people (four of us and the other four of another family), we had to pay

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370,000 kyats (Burma currency). I had no money but my accompanied family paid all on our behalf in an agreement that we would pay them back later on. After crossing the Naf river we reached this side and Bangladesh’s area name was Unsiparang. We didn’t know anything about the roads. But we found a truck and hired it for us. The truck driver brought us to the Balukhali refugee camp. I do not know how much money our accompanied family had to pay to the driver because my youngest son was crying loudly and I couldn’t stop him. Besides, my daughter was still not physically stable until then. We were then taken to the camp hospital and then from the camp hospital to Cox’s Bazar hospital afterwards. We stayed 25 days in the hospital with my daughter. Then we were settled in the Balukhali refugee camp. I don’t know what wrongs I did for what we got a severe punishment. I will ask Allah to judge the crime committed against me and my family. I lost everything in this accident. I am deeply concerned about my daughter and her future. I don’t know what will happen to my two sons. The whole life became blurred and uncertain. I am carrying the legacy of this atrocity and will do the same for the rest of my life. [The narrative was recorded in October 2017 at the Kutupalong Refugee Camp, Ukhia]

Case-Five: Jerina Khatun (50) My house was located in Hadibil, Maungdaw. It was not far away from the Bangladesh border. I was living with my three sons, their wives, and grandchildren. We all live together in a joint family. I got married when I was just 16. When my sons were young my husband was killed by the Borma military. My husband was an agricultural worker working in others’ paddy fields. We had never been a well-off family. At that time, we were living from hand to mouth. One day in 1992, the Borma military raided our house in search of RSO (Rohingya Solidarity Organization) activists and ransacked our house. They vandalized everything available inside the house. My husband was severely tortured to admit that he was one of the RSO activists, but he didn’t because he didn’t have any connection with the ROS or its activities. But, the Borma military mercilessly beat him and in half an hour my husband fell to death. My three sons

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were crying as they were literarily children and it was terrible for them to watch their father being beaten to death. In the beginning, I was trying to hide but when my husband was being mercilessly beaten, I came up and tried to rescue him. It produced a negative result since they became hurry to kill my husband so that they could torture me. And they did so. They killed my husband and took me to the bedroom while my three sons were sitting outside the room and crying. I tried my level best to rescue myself from them but failed. Four soldiers raped me one after another. It was a terrible experience in my life. I was severely bleeding. When the Borma military left our house, I came out of the bedroom and managed my three sons to calm down. I took primary medical treatment and started feeling physically a little better. But my neighbours came to know that I was gang-raped by the Borma military and it brought a kind of social stigma for my whole life although many Rohingya girls and women had a similar experience. It was very difficult to lead a life with three children without a husband who was the only earning person in the family. On top of that, an unbearable social stigma was living with me in my mind and body. I attempted to commit suicide a couple of times but the lives and future of my three children refrained me from doing so. Then I struggled a lot to bring them up during the last three decades. My three sons gradually became adults and matured. They started earning and supporting the family. One became a small trader; one became an Imam of a local mosque; and the third one became a farmer working in others’ paddy fields like his father. My three sons got married one after another. Their wives started taking care of me. They gave birth to children year by year. Now, I have seven grandchildren of different ages. My three sons with their wives and children live with me. Now, my family has 14 members including myself. Our days were going well in the sense that we didn’t need to lend anything from anyone. My family’s economic condition was not good enough, but it’s not bad as well. However, the genocidal attack by the Borma military in 2017 damaged everything in my life. The Moghs and the Borma military did not allow any Rohingya to live in peace. At any time, they searched our house and looted whatever they wanted. Most of the time, they physically tortured the family members when they raided the house. They time and again reminded us that “you

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are not the citizens of Borma, but you are Bangladeshis. You are not Burmese, but Bengalis. You are Muslims and Burma is not the country for Muslims. Go back to your country, Bangladesh.” This kind of physical and mental harassment and assault was constantly happening to the Rohingya people in the different townships. But the 2017 incidents superseded all the previous experiences. We were informed that the Borma military was attacking Rohingya houses and settlements and randomly killing people. I became so scared because I had the experience of brutal military treatment. I asked all of my family members to remain at home including my sons, their wives, and their children. We were listening to the loud cry of the people’s up-­ roaring, sound of firing, and also the sound of fire-breakout. We were realizing the intensity of this attack could be more severe than before. I asked all my family members to get prepared to leave the place. It was the 28th of August, a group of military soldiers came to our house and started destroying everything found in the living room. My sons were staying in their rooms with their wives and children. I was sitting in the living room. They called my three sons and asked them to stand in line. They did so accordingly. Suddenly, the Borma military opened fire on them and they were hit by countless bullets. I saw my three sons lying down on the floor and I jumped over their bloodied bodies. By the time, they were no more in this world. Then three groups of military soldiers entered the three bedrooms where my sons’ wives and their children were staying and crying. They raped my three wives in front of their children. They were crying and asking help from me but I couldn’t do anything to rescue them from the sexual torture of military soldiers. The children were crying loudly. Some of them were beaten by the army being busy raping my sons’ wives. When they left my house, I found that my youngest daughter-­ in-­law was senseless and the other two were severely bleeding. Also, my four grandchildren were killed by the military. I noticed that at the time of leaving, the Borma military set fire to the house. Then I became hurried to take alive ones out of the house. Finally, I could able to rescue my two daughters-in-law and their three children. My youngest daughter-in-­ law was burnt alive inside the house. On the same night, I decided to leave the place to march towards the Bangladesh border. Because I had a fear that if I would stay there anymore, I might lose my whole family. I

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left Maungdaw with the remaining members of my family. I had some money since I separately kept them with me. We started from Hadibil at night and reached Moning Para near the sea the next morning. We saw hundreds of Rohingya having gathered together there waiting for a boat to cross the river. We crossed the Naf River by paying 100,000 Burmese currency and came to Shah Porir Dip. After getting off the boat, we took shelter at some Bangladeshi people’s home at Shah Porir Dip. They gave us food, clothes, and shelter. We were a big group when we came from Hadibil. All people were not accommodated at one’s home. So, we took shelter in different homes of the local people. Six members of my family took shelter in the same house. The next day morning, we went to Saferang by walking from Shah Porir Dip. My eldest son’s wife’s one relative, who migrated to Bangladesh in 1992, lives in Saferang. We stayed there for four days. Then we came to Teknaf by paying BDT 50 per person. From Saferang we exchanged Burmese Kyat with Bangladeshi Taka. The broker gave us almost half of the regular exchange rate. From Teknaf we came to the Balukhali camp by paying 500 BDT. After leaving the bus the Bangladeshi Army took us inside the Balukhali camp. Many Rohingya were with us. We managed to take shelter in the camp with the help of another Rohingya family previously known in Maungdaw town. They were previously staying in camp. Firstly, we made a home with bamboo given by the camp in charge. Now we are living here in a relatively safer condition but my two daughters-in-law are still heavily traumatized because they lost their husband, their children, and their ijjat. My experience in 1992 and their experience in 2017 are almost identical. And you can find hundreds of Rohingya girls and women who have the experience of being brutally raped by the Borma military and Moghs. This is the world of injustice and the world stands by the rapists, but not for raped victims and survivors. We lodged our case with the court of Allah and Allah will trial the rapist Burmese. [The narrative was recorded in October 2017 at the Balukhali Refugee Camp, Ukhia]

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6.3 Conclusion Historically, violence against women and girls (VAWG) has become an inescapable part of war, conflict, and crimes. It becomes more intense in the context of genocide, ethnocide, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. Sexual abuse, raping, and torturing women and girls have always been used as a tool of attack and destroy the competing opponents. It turns into a more consolidated form when the state takes part in the violence against women and girls as part of state policy to execute genocide, ethnocide, and ethnic cleansing. The Myanmar state security forces called Tatmadaw did a similar VAWG because it was a state policy of conducting genocide against Rohingya people who are ethnically, linguistically, and religiously different from the national majority and national ethnicity. The cases presented here bring fair testimony of committing an extreme form of violence against Rohingya women and girls in the Rakhine state in 2017. Particularly, the narratives of Sufia Begum, Zainub Khatun, Sultana Razia, Khurshida Begum, and Jerina Akhter unfold some very concrete testimony: (1) the Myanmar security forces randomly committed violence against Rohingya women and girls, (2) some local Rakhine Buddhists fundamentalist and some ethic extremists collaborated with the military operation, (3) the clearance operation used ‘raping women and girls’ as a common tool of executing genocide and ethnic cleansing in the Rakhine state in 2017, (4) no minimum mercy was considered for anyone irrespective of their ages, marriages, and classes as the security forces raped randomly whomever they found at home, (5) in most cases, the security forces with the local Rakhine extremists did gang-rape which indeed intensified the intensity of brutality in the context of the broader spectrum of genocide taken place in the Rakhine state in 2017.

7 The Intensity of Brutality: Dealing as if the Rohingyas are ‘Subhuman’

7.1 Introduction “When my eight months kid (boy) was snatched from my holdings and thrown into the fire being set to our house, I felt as if my heart was taken out of my body for burning. I couldn’t believe that any human being could do this. My baby was burning alive in the fire and I was howling so loudly but they were enjoying watching my lamenting. I forgot for a moment that I was gang-raped by four soldiers minutes ago and my husband was killed in front of my eyes right before I was taken to the bedroom for raping because I was watching my kid burning alive in the fire. My kid was burnt along with my house just before my eyes. I couldn’t do anything but watch my whole life burning with wildfire.” Rahela (26) was explaining her experience of life to me at the beginning of September 2017  in the Kutupalong refugee camp in Ukhia. She was still heavily traumatized when she was telling the cruel story that she did go through in August 2017 in Rakhine state. Her face seemed still frightened and she was tearing continuously while she was narrating her lived experience. It was a combination of pains, sorrows, anger, helplessness, shock, vulnerability, and grievance that I saw at her face and feelings. She crossed the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 N. Uddin, Voices of the Rohingya People, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90816-4_7

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border on the 28th of August 2021 along with hundreds of Rohingya who fled genocidal attacks in Rakhine. This is not Rahela’s solitary experience but hundreds of Rohingya civilians experienced and eyewitnessed more or less the similar intensity of brutality. She continued, “No one could treat a human being in this brutal and horrible way. They could do it because they didn’t treat us as a human being but a group of people lesser than human beings”. What Rahela explained in her narrative in her language very strongly relates to my theory of ‘subhuman’ life which I formulated in my book.1 ‘Subhuman’ does not essentially mean a sub-­ group of humans but a particular category of people who are dealt with as if they are lesser than human beings. However, it is not an individual’s criminal activities, but the state itself involves in the execution of genocide, ethnocide, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity that can produce ‘subhuman’ life. This chapter presents some solid cases of brutality perpetrated by the Myanmar security forces which further substantiate the way the Rohingya people were treated in the Rakhine state in 2017 as if they were not human beings and they didn’t deserve anything a human being is entitled to under the framework of UN values of human rights and global justice. The existing scholarship on refugee studies tends to focus on the refugee situations particularly how the displaced people seek refuge in other countries and how they struggle to get settled down as refugees in the place of migration rather than what the conditionalities force people to leave their place of origin. Entire scholarships on the refugee are heavily loaded with the discussions of the struggle for their survival, the roles of the international community to support the refugee situation, their human rights or refugee rights in the place of migration, and their everyday struggle for various goods and services.2 Media projection also focuses on the refugee situation rather than unearthing reasons behind the emergence of the refugee crisis. International agencies, human rights bodies, and aid organizations remain busy by supporting the people in  See for detail, Uddin, Nasir. 2020. The Rohingya: An Ethnography of Subhuman Life. Delhi: The Oxford University Press. 2  See for detail, Uddin, Nasir. 2021. “The Rohingya Crisis: Unfolding Some Issues and Concerns” in Nasir Uddin (ed.) The Rohingya Crisis: Human Rights Issues, Policy Concerns and Burden Sharing, pp. 1–22. Delhi, California, London and Singapore: SAGE Publication. 1

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refugee situations rather than why they are in an extremely vulnerable condition remain adequately unaddressed. This chapter illuminates the ground facts about why Rohingya people felt the urgency and compulsion to leave their homes, livings, properties, and habitats in the Rakhine state. Because it is widely accepted that nobody seeks asylum and receives refugeehood in a country other than the country of origin willingly. Refugees across the world are made refugees by others; particularly the state or by the interventions of powerful states in the state management of the weaker states as history says so. This chapter like previous others also reveals the intensity of brutality which renders the Rohingya people ‘subhuman’. Rohingya people who fled the persecution and crossed the border following the 2017 military operation time and again expressed their experience of being tortured, killed, and raped by using some sentences that unveil the way how the Myanmar military behaved with them as if they are not human beings, but something else. Hundreds of traumatized narratives I recorded from those Rohingya who fled the recent brutal military campaign reveal that the Rohingya people were dealt with in the Rakhine state in a very inhuman way and the military didn’t show minimum respect to them as human beings. The chapter presents some strong traumatized narratives of Rohingya people who did go through the extreme form of atrocity and an acute degree of brutality in 2017 unfolding that the way the Rohingya people dealt with as if they are lesser than human beings what I call ‘subhuman’ life. The narratives presented in this chapter further testify and consolidate the claim that the Rohingya time and again do that they were treated as if they are not human beings, but ‘subhuman’. This chapter presents the first-hand narratives of the Rohingya people as the voices of the victims within the theoretical framework of ‘subhuman’ life to further consolidate its strong claim of understanding people in extreme vulnerability. I have formulated the theory called ‘subhuman’ life in my ethnography published in 2020 which appeared as a much-talked-about theory in the scholarship on non-­ citizens, refugees, illegal migrants, asylum seekers, forcibly displaced people (FDPs), internally displaced people (IDPs), camp people, and stateless people. This chapter provides some additional empirical evidence and analytical tools to substantiate the theory of ‘subhuman’ life.

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7.2 Theory of ‘Subhuman’ Life3 I have developed a theory that I call ‘subhuman’ based on my long-year engagement in refugee research. In the domain of scholarship on refugees, migrants, asylum seekers, camp people, forcibly displaced people, stateless, non-citizens, and internally displaced people (IDPs), there are some popular theories which I felt inadequate to understand the Rohingya situation and Rohingya crisis within the broader spectrum of people in an extreme form of vulnerability. Because the way the Rohingya people were treated and dealt with could hardly be understood within the existing theoretical framework that I detailed explained in my book.4 This sort of inadequacy inspired me to formulate a new theory of what I called ‘subhuman’ life with the ludic and vivid ethnographic evidence of the Rohingya experience of genocide, ethnocide, domicide, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. It should be made clear at the beginning that it is not me calling the Rohingya people ‘subhuman’ but the Rohingya people whom I met explain their life as ‘subhuman life’ based on the atrocious and brutal treatment they received from the Myanmar security forces. According to subhuman theory, five conditions could render the life of people ‘subhuman’ one. The conditions are (1) atrocious living conditions, (2) illegal objects in the legal framework, (3) homeless at home and nowhere to go, (4) free license to be killed, raped, and burnt, and (5) a life worthy of extinction. These five conditions are essential to deeply understand the causes why the life of a group of people become the life of subhuman. I have explained, “when people experience an extreme form of atrocity perpetrated by the state institutions, state affects, and the agents of the 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 cannot be considered as  For this section of the chapter, I sincerely acknowledge the Oxford University Press, because I have cited a long passage from my book, the Rohingya: An Ethnography of ‘Subhuman’ Life (2020). This book for the first time has brought in the idea of subhuman life theory and hence I have to cite hugely from the book. Particularly, five conditions are well explained in the book and so, I have cited the original source. Therefore, I owe my debt to the Oxford University Press and my book. 4  See for detail, Uddin, Nasir. 2020. Ibid. 3

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‘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.”5 Similarly, I wrote, “illegal object in legal framework” in my book saying that “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.”6 For the third condition (homeless at home and nowhere to go), I have explained, “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.”7 On feature four (free license to be killed, raped, and burnt), I have written, “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 the systematic killing, raping, and burning as part of state policy, and are given free rein to execute whatever they want as they are not accountable to anybody, any forum, or any institution.”8 For the final characteristic of subhuman theory, I have explained, “Every human being deserves a minimum standard of living that distinguishes human beings from animals…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  See Uddin, Nasir. 2020. Ibid, p. 169.  See Uddin, Nasir. 2020. Ibid, p. 170. 7  See Uddin, Nasir. 2020. Ibid, pp. 170–171. Also see, 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). 8  See Uddin, Nasir. 2020. Ibid, p. 171. 5 6

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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… 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.”9 Why the majority of Rohingya feel as they are people lesser than human beings could be better understood if we deeply listen to them in their voices and try to understand the transcript of their pains and feelings. I have told before in previous chapters I have collected more than 500 traumatized narratives of the Rohingya who crossed the border in 2017 and are the eyewitnessers and did go through the experience of the intensity of brutality. I have presented seven cases here more to understand the intensity of brutality for a better understanding of the theory of ‘subhuman’ life. Case-One: Sayed Alam (22) I used to live in Foirabajar10 in Maungdaw town in Myanmar. I was an agricultural worker by profession and involved in my father’s land for cultivation. I got married four years ago I had two kids. My parents were also living with me. We were six members in our family. I produced various types of crops and earned money by selling them in ‘haat’.11 I used to earn a fair amount of money to lead a decent life. If any Rohingya did something good like making money or accumulating capital and wealth, they would immediately be identified and targeted by the local government officials and the law enforcing agencies. They met the specific person and were often abducted by lodging a false case with the local court against the wealthy Rohingya person. Then they demanded a huge amount of money. Those who refused to pay were gone missing in many  See Uddin, Nasir. 2020. Ibid, pp. 171–172.  Foirabazar means a marketplace of baggers. It is a name of a locality that is based on the Rohingya language. Foirabazar is a village full of Rohingya people which was destroyed during the military crackdown in 2017. 11  ‘Haat’ means a local market place where various types of goods are sold and bought. Local people are the sellers and buyers of ‘haat’. Basically, everyday essentials and various types of household goods are sold and bought in the ‘haat’. 9

10

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cases and never returned. Likewise, it happened to me. They filed a case against me and abducted me three times. Every time, my family had to pay a huge amount of money to release me. This was the way how I had to pay 300,000 taka a year. For one or two years, I could not afford money to pay them, but they began to physically torture me either coming to my home in front of my wife, parents, and children or taking me to the police station. Some local Moghs also used to collect money from the wealthy persons as extorsion regularly. I also had to pay them money whenever and whatever they demanded. Local Moghs could do anything whatever they wished but we could not resist anything because of the fear of facing severe consequences. Local Moghs could kick Rohingya anytime anywhere but we had none to complain against them. If any Rohingya dared to resist, Moghs went to police asking to take action and police did so without any investigation. In this way, many Rohingyas were arrested and some of them were released by giving money to the police. Those who were unable to pay the money stayed in the prison for months and years. One of my relatives was taken to jail just for a quarrel, but he has been serving in person for more than 13 years. That’s the lives we were leading in the Rakhine state but we were trying to adjust for the sake of life, living, and family. An unexpected nightmare came to our lives in August 2017 when the military started a deadly crackdown on the civilian Rohingyas. We were listening to the loud cry and shouting in our neighbourhoods. We came to know that the Borma military was killing people and burning houses in our neighbourhoods. My parents were asking me to leave the place immediately, but I was thinking of staying more few days with the hope that the situation would be calmed down. I was not going out and all of my family members were staying at home and praying to Allah to save us from the military attack. But, it seemed our prayer was not accepted by Allah! We were attacked on the 29th of August. Soon after the military personnel entered our house, they ransacked almost everything and looked for valuables to loot. My father attempted to resist them, but one of the soldiers shot my father. He died on the spot. I was trying to get close to my father but three of the soldiers started beating me mercilessly. My wife was holding my two kids but they didn’t spare my wife. Two soldiers stacked my two kids from their mother’s holdings and my wife

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was forcibly raped in front of me. My mother was sick and having witnessed everything she became senseless. My two kids were crying on the ground. The youngest one was crying so loudly and suddenly one of the soldiers kicked him with shoes. Suddenly, the youngest one became silenced and died afterwards. I couldn’t do anything as I was severely bleeding. It was my fortune that they didn’t kill me but my physical condition seemed almost dying! They left my house leaving my wife gang-­ raped, my father dead, my mother senseless, and my one kid dead. My wife also severely bleeding. Later, I took care of everyone and gave primary treatment by myself with the first-aid I had at my home available. The following night, we left the place and joined others to march towards the border of Bangladesh. My mother, my wife, and my one kid were with me and we joined others who had more or less similar experiences. We suffered most to cross the border because we did not know about the path to the border. Therefore, we had to borrow a pathfinder by giving money. He took us to the border. We were frightened at that time. We walked around three nights since we couldn’t walk in the daytime. We had to suffer from food since we didn’t have any chance to buy or bring food on the way. We drank water from waterfalls which were good enough. At the Bangladesh border, we did not face many difficulties as there were thousands of Rohingya people waiting to cross the Bangladesh border. At first, the BGB did not let us enter easily. They kept us waiting till night. At night, they opened the gate and we entered. The whole time either we hid in the jungle or mountain. They did not take us all at once. They took by group and each group contained 10–20 persons. We finally were able to enter Bangladesh and took shelter in the Balukhali refugee camp in Ukhia. My wife is still traumatized. My mother is not mentally stable until now. What the Myanmar military did to my family and my life, I will never forget. The degree of brutality was so intense that it will hunt me for the rest of my life. [The narrative was recorded in September 2017 at Balukhali Refugee camp, Ukhia]

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Case-Two: Dilbahar Jala (55) I used to live in Buthidaung township. My husband died many years ago. I was not capable of doing anything for my livelihood. I had three boys and one girl. All of them are married. My daughter was also living with us with her husband and children. I had many grandchildren. When my husband died, I could not bury him according to Islamic ritual properly because we were not in a situation to argue with police, the local authority, or the local Mogh people. They occupied most of the places around our house and we could not make a grave for my husband. In our area, there was no common graveyard for Muslims. We buried my husband in the jungle. We also had to pay for this. My three sons were daily labourers by profession. With their income, our family was managed well and we were leading a decent life. But to provide unexpected and unpredictable money to the local authority of the Borma government became difficult for us. Once the local authority demanded a big amount of money, but we were not able to pay. In consequence of our refusal to meet their demands, they took my daughter from our house and kept her in a Mogh’s house. They tortured her daily without any reason and played with her ‘ijjat’. They did not let my daughter come back home and kept her in the Mogh’s house for a year. At the beginning of the second year, my daughter committed suicide. My sons and I went to that Mogh’s house and begged for my daughter’s dead body. At that time, they demanded money. After paying a handsome amount of money, they finally handed over the dead body of my daughter. When I saw the dead body, I noticed many marks of torture. I did burst into tears. Her hand, leg, and back were all the same containing many signs of torture. All this happened because we could not pay the many as per their demand. From this incident, we did not want to stay at that place anymore. Every week they continually beat my son and attacked my house. They did not find anything but they did that again and again. I did not bear that anymore. Even they had beaten me seven-eight times with gun butt, solid iron, and log etc. They beat till the blood came out. This was our lives were continuing in our locality. But, the August 2017 attack changed everything and we finally had to leave our place. It was on the 27th of August, a group of military soldiers entered our house and lined up my three sons. Without further discussion, they shot

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them all and all fell to death in a few minutes. My grandchildren started crying loudly in fear. Then military soldiers opened fire on all of them. My seven grandchildren died in the brush fire. One of three daughters in law also died in the brush fire. It was a horrible scenario for me to watch dying my sons, my grandchildren, and my daughter in law in front of my eyes. The ground of my house became red-blooded. My brain was not working properly. I became so shocked that I couldn’t even cry. I couldn’t express my feelings as it held a combination of my anger, pains, shock, and puzzle. My remaining two daughters in law were crying holding their children’s dead bodies. They were lamenting and weeping to lie down on the floor with their children. The military looted all that we had at home and left the house. The whole house became a red-blooded graveyard. The following day, I left the place with my two daughters in law and alive three grandchildren. We had a map in hand which was drawn by my eldest son on the 25th because we were planning to leave Borma for Bangladesh. He drew the map across the border but unfortunately, he couldn’t come with us. We went out at night following my son’s map. In the path, we saw some other Rohingyas running towards the Bangladesh border. They did seek help from us to take them with us and we did so. It took four days to reach the Myanmar border. When we reached the border, it was morning. We did not take a risk to be seen while we were passing the border. At night time, we went through an unchecked space of border to enter Bangladesh. On this side, we saw there were a huge amount of Rohingya people like us waiting to cross the border. We thought now this was the end. But by the grace of Allah, they (BGB) let us in. They saw us in suffering. Our clothes were very heavy for the mud. In this old age, I could not walk. The BGB personnel gave me and my son’s wife some pieces of clothes. They washed us, fed us, and sheltered us. They took us to this place (Ukhia) and gave us bamboo, tarpaulin, plastic to build a house. We even do not know where our final destination will be. I am now living under a plastic tent along Kutupalong with my two daughters in law and three grandchildren. I have lost everything in Buthidaung. They killed my daughter, my three sons, one daughter in law, and my seven grandchildren. All were killed in front of my eyes. I can’t sleep at night as their blooded dead bodies are still stuck to my eyeballs. The cruelty and

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brutality I witnessed can’t be removed from my eyes, my memories, and my life forever. [The narrative was recorded in September 2017 at the Kutupalong Refugee camp, Ukhia]

Case-Three: Sayed Amir (32) I used to live in a small village in Maungdaw town in the Rakhine state. I was an Arabic teacher by profession and taught in Moktob.12 But, only teaching at Moktob was not enough to earn to run my family and hence I used to cultivate and grow crops in my land. I had around 15–16 Kani13 of land which I borrowed from others. I used to produce about 90 aari14 paddies from that land yearly. I was basically from a lower-middle-class background family. I had three children. My parents were living with me. So, we were eight members in our family. As an Arabic teacher of a local Moktob, the villagers paid due respect to me and I was living with a kind dignity among other Rohingyas. Though we were living under extreme military oppression and local Mogh’s various types of exploitation, we tried our best to adjust to the situations for the sake of survival. Soon after the military crackdown started, we were attacked as the very first line of target. They seemed seriously furious. On the 25th of August, 2017, a group of military personnel enter our house by force while we all were sleeping. They broke the main door of our house. They started vandalizing whatever they found in front of them. My father first came forward to talk to me, but they started beating him. I came forward to rescue my father, but they also started beating me as well. My three kids were crying. They took both my mother and my wife to two rooms and started torturing me. Then they were ganged raped by the military soldiers. My father was severely injured and in a couple of minutes, he fell to death. My mother was also hit by a military gun and died after being raped. My wife became senseless and was severely bleeding. I was also lying down on  Moktob means a school of Arabic teaching. Teachers are popularly known as Hujur (Arabic teacher) and students are known as madrasas chatra (students of religious educational institutions). Sometimes, Arabic education is offered at the local mosque in the morning and evening. 13  Kani is a unit of measurement which is popularly used to measure land area. 14  Aari is also another unit of measurement which is popularly used to measure the amount of paddy. 12

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the floor. My three children were crying and lamenting. When I enabled to stand somehow, I started nursing my wife and my three children. The same night we planned to leave the locality but my wife and I were not able to walk as we were physically not fit enough to walk. Even we couldn’t get out the second night because we were not physically fit to walk for miles. Also, we didn’t have any scopes to receive primary medical treatment since the situation didn’t leave any space. We waited for two days and took preparation to leave for Bangladesh. By the time, we came to know that the Borma military started killing people, raping girls and women, and burning house after house. We also learned that if anyone tried to resist them, they slaughtered them brutally. They killed even three/four years old children. They threw them to the fire and burn them alive. They threw them into the air and shoot them. They forced people to stay inside the home and then they set fire to the house. They burnt the whole neighbourhood. Going from one house to another, they locked the door from the outside and set fire to the whole house. This type of incident compelled us to get away from our place. This type of military attack forced many people to flee to save their lives. It took us seven days to reach this camp in Bangladesh. It took six days to reach the bank of the river (doijjar par) on foot from my neighbourhood. We had to cross ‘mura’ (mountain) barefoot and also walked through one impossible armpit mud but we had to do it anyway. My wife took one child on her shoulder and I took the remaining two. To cross the river, the boatmen took 25,000 Taka each. I was not capable to give the money and instead of the fare, I had to give them my wife’s ornaments like earrings. While we crossed the NAF river, we faced Bangladeshi police and the BGB but they were very sympathetic. At that moment I told them I used to live here for a couple of years. I went back to bring my family. Then they let us enter. For the first time, while we entered Bangladesh, some imams helped us by giving money coming to our camp till the relief arrived. Right now, we are staying in the Kutupalong refugee camp but the living condition is not good enough as we arranged this kind of housing for our cattle in our country literally. But, it is undeniable that our lives are far safer in Bangladesh than in Borma. My wife is still seriously traumatized. She can’t walk properly. She can’t remember anything properly. She has now a continuous headache. My three kids are also traumatized. They

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can’t forget what they witnessed in Rakhine inside our house. My whole family will carry the experience of brutality and atrocity as long as we remain alive. [Interview was taken in September 2017 at the Kutupalong Refugee camp, Ukhia]

Case-Four: Jurul Haq (28) I lived in ‘naishapuri’ located in Maungdaw. I used to work in other’s land for crop cultivation as a day labourer. This varies from season to season. In some seasons, I worked for paddy and in some seasons, I worked for other crops like potato, tomato, cabbage etc. Most of the time I worked in the paddy field. My income was daily. Sometimes I earned 10,000 or sometimes I earned 5000 Burmese Kyat in a day. I used to lead my life from hand to mouth. However, I was not unhappy since many Rohingyas were living poorer than me. But, I had to leave Myanmar due to unbearable brutal torture. The Borma military killed all my family members including my parents, my wife, and my two children. They all were brutally killed in front of me, but I couldn’t do anything to save them. I was also severely injured. Having witnessed all around me dying I became senseless. The Borma military thought I was also dead. After killing everyone, they looted our house and set fire to it. Feeling the heat of the fire, I woke up and got out of the house with serious hardship. I saw that my all-family members burnt along with my house. As Muslims, they didn’t receive a minimum funeral ritual according to Islamic principles. I couldn’t do anything for them. I escaped the situation and joined the march with other Rohingya who was running to cross the border. Myanmar military did not let us even say our prayers five times a day. They did not let us go to the mosque. We had to give ‘ajan’ five times a day according to Islamic rules, but they did not allow us to do that most of the time. They locked the mosque so many times so that none could enter there. They did not allow us to practice our religion with freedom and choice. Many Rohingya believe that it was worthless if a Muslim could not say his/her prayer at the right time. We were used to listening to other people calling us ‘Roainga’ but Mogh people used to call us ‘bangali’. There was a difference in ‘Mog para’ and ‘Rohingya para’. Their

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houses were built with tin but ours were made of ‘om phatar chani’ (tree leaves). Where their houses were built as multi-storied ones, Rohingya houses were built with tin-roof. None of us was supposed to moderate one’s house in our village. The Mogh people did not let us do that, particularly in our locality. We had to give money to the government officials and local people to build a house. Their house looked good. If a Rohingya wanted to change his/her fence, he/she had to pay money, but Mogh people did not have to. Always in every aspect of our lives, we experienced a kind of preferential treatment and firm discrimination. When they were calling us ‘Al-Yakin’, some of us wanted to resist. Most of the time, the Borma military used to arrest us accusing us of being ‘Al-Yakin’, the Arabic name of ARSA. To be honest, most of the Rohingyas did not even know what ‘Al-Yakin’ means, who they are, and how they used to do it. They trapped us by giving a weapon of local Moghs and branded us as ‘terrorists’ and then they killed us in the name of counter-insurgency. They took us to the crop field, pinioned us with a rope, and forced us to look at the sun directly. They stroked directly in the throat. They did the same thing with my brother. He had a shop in the town. They took everything from the shop and took him to the mountain and we did not see him again. We did not even know whether he is alive or not. The Borma military cut 11 people at a time from my village taking them in the field. Those who lived near the border could flee but the others who lived in the villages far from the border couldn’t save themselves. Our neighbour who lived aside from my house had eight members. None of them is alive now. The military dug a hole and put all the dead bodies there at a time. When we got ourselves out, we hid in a mountain for a few hours. After that, we went to another mountain through ‘para’ (colony). We rested there for another day. When it became darker the following day, we again set off to the border. In that way, it took four days to reach the border. We were not seen by the military at night. We were at least 40–50 people. When babies cried for any purpose, we held their mouths with hands to silence them. Even we put a cloth to their mouth so that they could not scream. Our lives were in horrible danger. There were some gaps in the wire of the border. We took some clothing from our house and we used them there. We put the cloth in the gap and kept one person to hold the gap tightly. When one passed through, another person held that gap. We

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also found a passage under a bridge. The bridge was used by the Borma military. But at that time there was no one. In Bangladesh, we heard that Rohingya could enter through this path. But, when we tried, we were caught and the BGB (Border Guard Bangladesh) held us back. They did not let us in. We cried for help shouting very loudly. People were dying in front of their eyes. We told them that if they did not let us get in, then shoot us. It was far better to die in a Muslim’s hand rather than at the hands of a Mogh person. The BGB gradually started taking some in and kept some waiting. We put our clothes on the spike and passed the border. We crossed the border at night. I am now living in the Kutupalong refugee camp, Ukhia. The Borma military killed my parents in front of me but I couldn’t do anything as a son. Borma military killed my wife and two children, I couldn’t save them as a husband and father. How painful it is can’t be explained in words. I can’t forget the scene as I watched hundreds of Rohingyas’ dead bodies lying down both sides of the road that we were walking through. It’s horrible to explain. [The narrative was recorded in September 2017 at the Kutupalong Refugee camp, Ukhia]

Case-Five: Mahmuda Khatun (43) I was living in a village in Maungdaw town. I used to work in ‘goda’ (fish project) and also did work as a daily labourer. Usually, Rohingya women don’t work outside the home but I was working and it was an exception in our Rohingya society. It is not because that Rohingya women didn’t want to work outside the house, but they didn’t feel safe due to military and local mogs’ behaviour. I had a husband and four children. Two sons were like youths and that’s was the big tension for us. My husband also worked with me in ‘goda’ and my young children worked in the harvest field. My elder son’s wedding ceremony was supposed to be held in September 2017. But alas! we had to flee our country and take shelter in Bangladesh. We were at least happy with our limited income in our own country. But we did not know why all this began and happened to us. We didn’t know anything about what’s happened between some Rohingya youths and the Borma military, but we became the ultimate victims of the conflict. The Borma military killed almost everyone in my family

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without any mercy. They killed my brother in front of my mother because he was young and trying to resist. The Borma military killed my father, my brother, and his whole family (wife and two kids). Only my mother was alive and she didn’t know why she was spared. The military thought he might join the ARSA to take revenge against the Myanmar military. My brother was killed by a machete. They tied his hands and legs in a single rope. One military gibed him with a gun knife, one was continuously beating with a rod, and one was cutting his leg, wrist, and beheaded. My father was killed almost in the same way. My mother was explaining to me the cruel scenario she witnessed. My mother was tearing up while describing the cruelty of the Borma military. She came to our house on the 28th of August. And the brutal killing of my father, brother, and his family took place on the 26th of August. The mother stated that they were smoking in one hand and chopped flesh with another hand like they were in a festive mood of killing. After killing my father and brother, they gang-raped my brother’s wife and killed her afterwards. My brother had two years son. While his mother was being raped, he was crying loudly. One of the soldiers immediately shot him to shut him up. Two years old child became stopped forever! We were speechless and became so scared that we couldn’t even make sounds while crying. We could not cry, we could not scream, we could not see. Then we decided to leave the place for Bangladesh. My husband and I with my two sons and two children took preparation to leave. We also prepared my mother to leave with us. On the 29th of August, we planned to leave. Suddenly the Borma limitary with some local Moghs attacked our house. I became so scared and started hiding with my two children. My husband and my two sons were caught and lined up. Then they were brutally killed by a brush fire. I watched them dying and lying down on the floor. The floor became completely blooded. My mother became senseless and got a serious heart attack. She was already under serious mental stress but she couldn’t bear any more watching this event at my house. Then the military looted my house. They wanted to rape me but I was saved because it was a menstruation period for me. My two children, one boy of six years and one girl of five years were crying and holding me strongly. The Borma military left my house. I was so shocked to see the bloodied dead bodies of my husband and my sons. My mother’s dead

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body is lying down beside them. I didn’t spend any single moment and hence left the place immediately to save the lives of my little son and daughter. We crossed the border with the other Rohingyas while they were fleeing Myanmar. I had no idea where we should go after such a brutal disaster happened in my life. At first, we got ourselves out of the village. Then we went to a relative’s house located in another village. There I saw the same situation and they were also taking preparation to leave for Bangladesh. I joined my relatives to flee at any cost. One night we ran through the jungle and reached the Myanmar border. The border was not so far from the village. So, it did not take much time. We reached the Myanmar border and we found a relative who helped us to get through to Bangladesh. He knew a path. There was a little canal which we crossed by swimming. After crossing the river, we saw another jungle. It was a borderland between Bangladesh and Myanmar. After we got ourselves out of the jungle, we saw the Bangladesh border for the first time. In the jungle, we had to cross many mounts covered with staccato bush. Even if we heard any sound, we did hide in that bush thinking of the military presence. We were frightened. Bangladesh border was huge and it was not as easy as we thought. Some parts of the border were fenced with barbed wire. We were worried at that time and thought that it was probably a dead end. But, once a BGB person saw us, we thought we would be caught and death was confirmed. But, he saved us and helped us get into Bangladesh. He showed us the way how we should go to get in. We followed him to find the path and found thousands of people like us. We joined them and we are nowhere. The Borma military took my everything away leaving me alone with two helpless children. How will I spend my remaining life? How will I bring my two children up? Where will I go then? I don’t see any light. My life has become a permanent back. [Interview was taken in September 2017 at the Balukhali Refugee camp, Ukhia]

Case-Six: Nojimul Haq (32) I was living in Maungdaw township. I passed BA in 2012. I had a shop in a local bazar (a small marketplace). My village’s name was ‘neishafuri’. I had a clothes shop which was situated nearby a college. So, most of the

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customers of my shop were college students. I behaved with them well so that they could come to visit my shop continuously and this was not taken well by the other Mogh shop keeper as they were not doing business like me. Though I did a very limited profit, I had to give a big amount of extortion to Mogh college students. They used to come to shop and take some clothes without paying money to me. In the beginning, I tried to challenge their illegal dealing, but it returned with severe physical abuse, merciless beating, and inhuman torture. Even, my shop remained closed for five months in 2015. So, I learned that if I wanted to survive, I would have to compromise with the system and the torture of the local Mog and authority. There were eight members in my family. I had my parents, two sisters, my wife, and two small children. My father and I were the only earning persons. We had to work hard despite my father’s aged life. My mother and father did not want to send their daughters to work because of the local Moghs. They were always worried about me and my sisters. Because they always heard about the killing and raping incidents from everywhere. In August 2017, the Borma military started killing the innocent Rohingyas, raping the girls and women, and torched house after house in different Rohingya localities. My neighbourhood was seriously attacked on the 26th of August. My parents and I became so scared that we didn’t dare to get out of our house. I closed my shop even on the 25th of August after I came to know about the military crackdown. When the intensity of killing went beyond the limit, then we decided to flee. Because of the business, I had an equilibrium relationship with the local Mogh. I bought things for my business from the local Moghs. I always tried to keep my trading fare. So, I expected a kind of brotherly behaviour from the Borma military and the local Moghs. Before the huge genocide started, many Moghs knew me very well. But on the 26th of August, it was horrible to say. They attacked us in the evening and randomly fired on everyone. My parents and my two sisters were killed on the spot. I was also bullet-hit but fell on the floor. I was seriously bleeding and at one point I became senseless. My wife was hiding under the bed with my two kids. The military ransacked our house and took all valuables away whatever they found. When they left, my wife came out of the bed and woke me up. She gave to me a primary medical treatment and I became better than

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before. Then I with my two children and my wife left the place. It was so terrible to see my parents’ and sisters’ dead bodies lying down on the floor. I couldn’t do anything for them. Even I couldn’t arrange a funeral ritual according to Muslim principles what they deserve. But I couldn’t do anything for my parents and my sisters. It is really painful to talk about. We joined other Rohingyas who were rushed to the Bangladesh border. Everyone had more or less a similar experience. I did not know how many days were exactly taken for us to come to the border. We did not even know which paths were be taken to reach the border. There were hundreds of people who were fleeing their own country. We just followed and went with the flow. We let off our fate to almighty. At one point we noticed that the Borma military was coming from a distance and began firing. Then we started running keeping faith in Allah. In the crowd, we became separated and lost each other. We did not know where I was and where my family was. We were just running. I lost hope of getting my family again. We crossed the Myanmar border with thousands of Rohingya people. But, we met each other again in the Bangladesh refugee camp. We were allocated to stay in the Kutupalong refugee camp in Bangladesh. Here, we received adequate support to get settled down. I still fear memorizing those events I witnessed on the 26th of August 2017. [Interview was taken in September 2017 at the Kutupalong Refugee camp, Ukhia]

Case-Seven: Ali Ahmed (50) I used to live in Maungdaw town with my family. I was a daily labourer there by profession. My wife helped me sometimes. I had four daughters. I was leading my life what the income that I earned. My wife did some homestead forestry which provided some vegetables for our daily menu. My income was always the same because sometimes I couldn’t manage work. Therefore, it was a very difficult task for me to lead a decent life with my single income. But, we were happy with the income I had though not enough. Out of four daughters, only one got married to a farmer in a nearby village. The remaining three were teenagers. Following the attack on the 25th of August in 2017, we came to know that the Borma military

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cut the Rohingya people into pieces and they took Hindu people to dump them into ‘Khal’ (canal). Some dead bodies were buried under the bridge. My two young brothers were abducted and their dead bodies were not discovered until now. The most horrible news was for us that the Borma military and local Moghs were raping Rohingya girls and women on a random basis. I had three daughters and a wife at home. I became so scared thinking of their safety. My house was attacked in the evening on the 29th of August in which night we were getting prepared to leave the village. They broke the main door and started vandalizing the whole house. They tried to find the valuables but couldn’t find anything. They took me out of the house and tied me up with a coconut tree in the yard. They beat me so severely that my many bones seemed broken. My head was bleeding. Then, they started raping my three daughters and my wife simultaneously by a group of soldiers and some local Moghs. My daughters were crying and lamenting but received no mercy from the Borma military and local Moghs. After an hour the group of gang-rapists came out of the house. They locked the main door and then they set fire to the house. My house was burning and my daughters with their mother were burnt alive inside the house. I was crying, shouting, and lamenting but could do anything to save my family. The whole night I was tied up with the coconut tree. The next day morning, one of the neighbours came and untied me up. I was given food and water. I saw that my house turned into ashes. My three daughters and my wife were disappeared in ashes right in front of my eyes. At night, I started my journey towards Bangladesh. I went through many ‘para’ (colony); suppose from ‘A’ para to ‘B’ para and then from ‘B’ para to ‘C’ para. In this way, I with many other Rohingyas reached once a ‘ghat’ (where boats were tied). It is very horrible to describe how the people were crazy to cross the border just to save the lives of remaining family members because many of them had already lost their near and dear ones like me. We could not find anything to eat. We eat raw rice because we could not stand in a place for so long. When we asked a ‘ghaiteiyya’ (boatman) to take us to their boat to cross the river, then he demanded 100,000 Kyat for each person. I told them where I would get that amount of money at that crucial time. He told either give the money or die in the hand of Moghs. He demanded to give the

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jewellery that many girls and women Rohingya had at that moment. Finding no other alternative way, we requested the girls and women in our team to give their jewellery. All girls and women had said nothing but given their jewellery. It was unbearable to see some faces who sacrificed their jewellery. When we reached the border, we saw the Myanmar military and we were frightened. We saw them at the river line. In town, some military cut or shoot us. In borderland, some military let us pass after taking money. The border military was not killing if one could give some money. If one could not give them money, the Borma military killed him. At the Bangladesh border, a soft corner was working for us among the BGB soldiers. They thought that the Rohingya already suffered a lot; so, it would not be good to give them suffering anymore. They took us in and gave us a place temporally to live. They gave food and water. From Teknaf, we got into a local transport to come to the camp where I live now. When more Rohingya kept coming to this country, many organizations came forward to provide food, clothes, and other daily essentials. I am now living in the Kutupalong refugee camp but I am still traumatized as I can’t forget the horrible experience my wife and three daughters did go through. My eyes can’t remove the burning flame of the fire from their eyeballs because the flame was burning my daughters and wife. I am indeed alive physically but mentally I am a dead person. [Interview was taken in September 2017 at the Kutupalong Refugee camp, Ukhia]

7.3 Conclusion According to subhuman theory, people need to have gone through five fundamental experiences what I wrote at the beginning of the chapter: The experiences are (1) atrocious living conditions, (2) illegal objects in the legal framework, (3) homeless at home and nowhere to go, (4) free license to be killed, raped, and burnt, and (5) a life worthy of extinction. The narratives illustrated here conspicuously unfold that the Rohingya people were living in the Rakhine state which was extremely atrocious because the Myanmar security forces and some local Rakhine

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fundamentalists created an ‘atrocious living condition’ that forced Rohingya people to flee Myanmar. It corresponds to the first criteria. Rohingya people were quite often reminded that they were illegal people as they were not conferred citizenship in the framework Citizenship Law enacted in 1983. Therefore, the way they were treated as if they were “illegal objects in the legal framework” of Myanmar state. Myanmar doesn’t recognize the Rohingya as its citizens and Bangladesh doesn’t accept them even as refugees as if they belong to nowhere and have no place to go. Their vulnerable positions as such correspond to feature three of the subhuman theory. The seven cases presented here provide some very powerful narratives of killing, raping, and burning which reconfirm that the way the Myanmar security executed these crimes as if they had free license to kill, rape, and burn the Rohingya people. It qualifies as point four. Finally, the narratives of the first-hand eyewitnesses indicate that the Rohingya people were treated as if their lives are worthy of extinction. So, the way the Rohingya people were dealt with as if they are not human beings but lesser than them what I called subhuman life. This is the fundamental of subhuman theory.

8 Conclusion: The Rohingya in the Transition—Atrocious Past, Critical Present, and an Uncertain Future

8.1 Introduction The book in its various chapters has presented some very powerful cases of genocidal attacks, violence against women and girls, the severity of brutality, and the intensity of atrocity perpetrated by the Myanmar security forces against the civilian Rohingyas. Most of the cases being presented here unfold the terrible scenario of genocide, ethnocide, domicide, ethnic cleansing, and the crimes against humanity that took place in 2017 in the Rakhine state in Myanmar. Following the deadly campaign of the clearance operation, more than 750,000 Rohingyas fled to Bangladesh and the remaining Rohingyas living in the Rakhine state have been in constant fear of similar attacks at any time. Now, the question is: what’s the next as far as the Rohingya people’s lives are concerned? It seems the Rohingya people are in a state of transition because they are not stable anywhere in the world; particularly in Myanmar, Bangladesh, India, and Southeast Asian countries though they are relatively in a better living condition in the Western Countries as asylum seekers. Considering the broader implications and experience, at present, the Rohingya people are one of the most vulnerable groups of people in the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 N. Uddin, Voices of the Rohingya People, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90816-4_8

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world. They are now at the stage of transition since they live with an extreme form of uncertainty due to their non-citizenship and statelessness1 identity, thereby belonging to no state in the legal framework. Therefore, their living conditions are somewhat ‘not to up to the mark’ as a group of human beings deserve in this world. Particularly the Rohingya living in Myanmar and Bangladesh are in the most vulnerable conditions than those living in other countries. This chapter provides a comprehensive picture of current Rohingya situations in both Myanmar and Bangladesh to portray the Rohingya in transition. It is imperative to know where the Rohingya people stand in Bangladesh in terms of local integration, repatriation, and resettlement on the one hand. It is equally important, on the other hand, to understand the state of Rohingyas in Myanmar in terms of bringing them back to their place of birth and the questions of conferring citizenship, ensuring social safety, and promising human dignity. It is also important to know the conditions of the remaining Rohingya living in the Rakhine state because their living condition will pave the way or delay the process of the repatriation process. The chapter also discusses the trials of Myanmar in different international courts (the ICC, the ICJ, and Argentina) to understand whether such legal trials could contribute anything substantial to resolving the Rohingya crisis and accelerate the repatriation process or is simply an internationally organized human rights activism. It also presents the changing public discourse in Bangladesh regarding Rohingya presence as well as their repatriation and resettlement. Besides, this chapter touches upon the roles of the international community and the AID industry whether they are supporting Bangladesh to sustain or solve the problem. Furthermore, the chapter attempts to sum up what the Rohingya people want as the potential solution to the Rohingya crisis because sometimes solutions could come up from the bottom instead of applying a top-down approach. Finally, it presents some predictions of the Rohingya crisis based on the decade-long experience of Rohingya research analysing the atrocious  Though the Rohingya people don’t own the ‘stateless people’ because they believe that they have their state and it is Myanmar. They claim that they are borne and brought up in Burma/Myanmar and their ancestors were also borne and brought up in Myanmar. They are ‘the sons of the soils’ (people of the land) of Burma/Myanmar. 1

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past, critical present, and uncertain future of the Rohingya people in transition.

8.2 The Future of Rohingya in Bangladesh The Rohingya refugees now live in the 34 temporary refugee camps located in Ukhia and Teknaf in Bangladesh. Bhasan Char is considered the 35th camp on the list. Based on my long-year ethnographic fieldwork, I have noticed that more than 1 million Rohingya refugees see no certain future because Bangladesh doesn’t want them to stay in its land for a longer period on the one hand. Myanmar on the other hand does not want them to return to Myanmar. Two repatriation attempts were made in 2018 and 2019 but failed because Rohingya people found no convincing reason to go back to the Rakhine state. Myanmar did not take any tangible preparation for and make trustworthy promises to the Rohingya population living in Bangladesh which could motivate them to decide to take part in the repatriation process. It was popularly projected that no single Rohingya agreed to go back, but why Rohingya became reluctant to return to their ‘homeland’ and ‘motherland’ was not unfolded in the voice of Rohingya. Besides, the Myanmar military took over the state power on the 1st of February 2021 which further put the remaining hopes of the Rohingya refugees to return to their homeland into prolonged uncertainty. Given the context, the future of Rohingya seems extremely uncertain which is making many seriously frustrated. This sort of uncertainty is pushing many Rohingyas to get out of the camps and take risks to migrate to another country illegally. Many Bangladeshi people believe that Rohingya will never go back to Myanmar and will try to socially integrate with the due course if they are allowed to stay in Bangladesh for a longer period. Many Rohingyas also believe that there is little scope for them to go back to Myanmar since Bangladesh is a better living place for them in comparison to Myanmar. Many Rohingyas in discussion with me during my fieldwork time and again expressed their feelings that “if we die in Bangladesh, we believe we will receive a minimum funeral ritual according to the Islamic principles what we don’t hope to receive in the Rakhine state.” But the most important point is

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that Bangladesh will not be willing to host them for a longer period. Therefore, the future of Rohingya is very complex and uncertain. But, one cruel reality is confirmed that the Rohingya crisis will not be going to resolve very soon.

8.3 The Future of Repatriation To redress the Rohingya crisis, from day one Bangladesh is working on the policy of repatriation. There are three standard and globally accepted models of the resolution to the refugee crisis: local/social integration, voluntary repatriation, and third-country resettlement. When the first batch of Rohingya, about 250,000, migrated to Bangladesh in 1978 and the second phase, about 200,000, came in 1991–1992, more or less 360,000 Rohingya were repatriated to Myanmar under a triparty agreement but many of them returned to Bangladesh in many illegal ways. Many of them were socially locally integrated in Bangladesh through building affinal relations and getting settled down with trade and business in partnership with many local Bengalis. A good number of them illegally managed Bangladeshi passports and migrated to the middle eastern countries. Many of them took political asylum in many southeast Asian and Western countries. But now the relations between the host community and the Rohingya refugees has been transformed drastically since the local community feel that massive Rohingya presence is largely responsible for many crises they now face in their everyday life. So, the probability of further social-local integration finds no potential future. The third-­ country resettlement policy was also taken in 2006 and it continued until 2010. Under the third-country resettlement scheme, about 1997 Rohingya were sent out to many countries including the United States of America, Canada, Sweden, Ireland, Australia, the Netherlands, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Norway. But it didn’t work out finally and the entire third-country settlement project was halted in 2010 forever. So, the only option left for Bangladesh is to execute the repatriation process of three standard models. Bangladesh completed the first repatriation in the period from 1992 to 2005. At that time, about 236,000 Rohingyas were repatriated but many of them returned to Bangladesh in different

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illegal ways what I informed in the earlier section. Following the 2017 influx, Bangladesh again initiated the repatriation process and signed a repatriation agreement with Myanmar in November 2017. Both the countries formed a joint task force to oversee the process of repatriation process in December 2017. In January 2018, a physical arrangement agreement was signed between the states under which Myanmar was supposed to take all kinds of preparation to start the repatriation process. There was also a condition that all verified Rohingya will be repatriated within two years from the beginning of the first batch of repatriation. According to the plan of action, the first repatriation attempt was made on November 15, 2018, and the second repatriation was made on August 22, 2019, but both failed. Since then, no repatriation attempt was made. From March 2020, the deadly Coronavirus pandemic emerged in the world which made everything under lockdown and shutdown of many forms across the world. As a result, no dialogue started to resume the repatriation process. In January 2021, a high-profile Myanmar delegation visited Bangladesh and promised to resume the repatriation process, but the newly elected government in Myanmar was ousted by the Military on February 01, 2021. Since then, we have seen no sign of movement regarding the resumption of the halted repatriation process. So, the future of the repatriation process also sees no bright light very soon.

8.4 Trial of Myanmar for Committing Genocide It is widely known that Myanmar is under trial at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for committing genocide against Rohingya in the Rakhine state in 2017 accused by Gambia. In November 2019, three cases were filed against Myanmar: a case of genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) filed by Gambia, a case of “deportation” filed at the International Criminal Court (ICC), and a case of genocide at an Argentine Court for committing genocide accused by the Latin American Human Rights Organizations. Since Myanmar is not a member state of the ICC, Myanmar categorically denied allegations against them and

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constantly ignored the ICC. But Myanmar attended the ICJ hearing officially and defended Myanmar’s position by a high-profile delegation headed by Aung Sung Suu Kyi, the then state councillor of Myanmar. Myanmar had to attend it because Myanmar is one of the signatory states of the UN Genocide convention under which the ICJ functions as the world court of the UN. The ICJ gave an interim order to Myanmar to preserve all forms of genocidal evidence in the Rakhine state, protecting the remaining Rohingya living in Rakhine from any sort of potential genocidal attack, and provide reports to the ICU every six months about what Myanmar would have taken so far as per the order of the ICJ. The trial of Myanmar for committing genocide against the Rohingya was hailed across the world because a strong sense of sympathy emerged in favour of Rohingya following the deadly campaign being taken place in 2017. Probably, it will take years for the ICJ to come up with a verdict, but whether the verdict will help Rohingya to get out of the crisis and suffering in Bangladesh is the fundamental question. The trial of Myanmar at the ICJ, the ICC, and Argentina’s court was a good move as it would bring some international shame and stigma for Myanmar, but whether such legal trials could really contribute anything substantial to resolve the Rohingya crisis and accelerate the repatriation process or it is simply an internationally organized human rights activism is unclear. I think based on my long years’ engagement with the Rohingya research that the trial of Myanmar at the ICJ will bring nothing important to change the scenario on the ground. So, the future of the Rohingya crisis finds no immediate solution.

8.5 T  he Issue of Bhasan Char and the Discourse of Relocation Bhasan Char has become a recent issue in the domain of discussion about the Rohingya crisis. The Government of Bangladesh (GoB) has prepared Bhasan Char without any contribution from any donor counties and any consultation with the UN bodies. Therefore, there was no involvement of the UN bodies in the entire project. The GoB has prepared Bhasan Char

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with all sorts of facilities following the international standard of refugee living.2 But the Rohingya refugees living in Ukhia and Teknaf showed serious reservations about their relocation to Bhasan Char though gradually the ice of their reluctance started melting and many Rohingyas agreed to move to Bhasan Char voluntarily. There is a popular discourse regarding the Bhasan Char that it is a new island that emerged only 20 years ago. There was no evidence and experience of human settlement on this island. It is a completely isolated island disconnected from the mainland. The most important issue is that Rohingya refugees think that any standard flood and tidal surge could easily wash them away from the island. This discourse was heavily fuelled by the UN bodies and some international human rights organizations. Right from the beginning, they started raising concerns that coercively relocating the Rohingya to Bhasan Char is a clear violation of human rights. Besides, the UN bodies and some international human rights organizations said time and again that Bhasan Char is not ready for human settlement.3 The states of the European Union also declared that they don’t have any relation with this relocation process, but they are deeply concerned about what is happening in Bhasan Char. These sorts of reservations from the UN bodies and the international organizations also influenced the existing reluctance among the Rohingya refugee about the relocation process. Despite their repeated objections, the Bangladesh government began the relocation process in December 2019 and continued until the pandemic started in March 2020. By the time, about 18,000 Rohingya have been relocated to Bhasan Char. Though the UN bodies didn’t take part in the relocation process at the beginning, very recently a UN delegation visited Bhasan Char and expressed their satisfaction with the overall preparation to help and serve the migrated Rohingya. Finally, the UN has agreed to involve in the management of Bhasan Char. This is a very good move. But the central point of discussion is how the relocation of some Rohingya refugees to Bhasan  See Uddin, Nasir. 2021. “Rohingya Relocation to Bhasan Char: Myths and Realities” in Nasir Uddin (ed.), The Rohingya Crisis: Human Rights Issues, Policy Concerns and Burden Sharing, pp. 362–382. Delhi: Sage Publication. 3  See for detail, Islam, Didarul & Siddika, Ayesha. 2021. “Implications of the Rohingya Relocation from Cox’s Bazar to Bhasan Char, Bangladesh.” International Migration Review, available at: https:// journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01979183211064829 (Accessed on January 1, 2022). 2

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Char will change anything substantial on the ground! Many think that the relocation process could hamper the repatriation process, but I don’t agree with this type of essentialist framework. Because if repatriation starts, if it happens, the Rohingya who live in the Ukhia and Teknaf would be given the priority and those who live in Bhasan Char may join later. So, the Rohingya relocation to Bhasan Char has hardly any relation to the delay of the repatriation process.

8.6 T  he Changing Public Discourse About Rohingya Presence When the first batch of Rohingya migrated to Bangladesh in 1978 and even the second batch came in 1991–1992, the local people received them very warmly for two reasons: a strong sense of Muslim brotherhood and the deep feelings for the close neighbourhood.4 At that time, the local people in Ukhia and Teknaf felt that Muslims in Arakan/Rakhine were in serious crisis, and as Muslims, it was their sacred duty to stand by them and they did so. The local people helped them get in and supported them with food, clothes, and shelter. Also, a kind of fellow feeling for the people in deadly crisis in the close neighbourhood worked as a supporting sentiment among the local people. However, over some time, the relationship between the host community and the Rohingya refugee has been drastically transformed. The latest influx in 2017 has hugely intensified the trend of declining relations between the host community and the Rohingya refugees. It is also factually true that the presence of more than 1 million Rohingya refugees has critically impacted the local ecological settings, infrastructure, local job market, law and order situation, and political sphere of the region. Though dialogue takes place at the ministerial levels between Bangladesh and Myanmar to redress the Rohingya crisis, the local people have to bear the cost the most. Besides, the international aid organizations have been supporting the refugees with huge  See Uddin, Nasir. 2012. “Of Hosting and Hurting: Crises in Co-existence with Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh.” In Nasir Uddin (ed.), To Host or To Hurt: Counter-Narratives on Rohingya Refugee Issue in Bangladesh, 83–98. Dhaka: Institute of Culture and Development Research (ICDR). 4

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aid but keeping the host community away from their due portion as per the rules of the United Nations. This kind of discussion has engulfed the country and it has turned into a public discourse against the Rohingya presence in Bangladesh. People across the country quite often talk about that “how long Bangladesh will have to bear the burden of the Rohingya,” “when they will go back to Myanmar,” “they are the responsible for many forms of social crimes in Bangladesh,” and so on. People again express their frustration that “the Rohingya will never go back to Myanmar. Bangladesh will have to bear this burden forever.” This kind of changing public discourse in Bangladesh regarding Rohingya presence as well as their repatriation process and resettlement potentials is also becoming a big concern in the broader spectrum of the Rohingya crisis. There are a few incidents recorded about the conflict and clash, though not so violent yet, between the local people and the Rohingya refugees which show some alarming symptoms for the future of relationships between the ‘hosts’ and ‘guests’.

8.7 G  rowing Infights and Increasing Cases of Killing in the Rohingya Camps Since the Rohingya came to Bangladesh particularly after 2017, there was always a piece of news in the media that there are a few groups in Rohingya camps who are involved in deadly infights. These groups are involved in infights merely to establish their dominance and control over the camps and some internal illegal monitoring activities. According to media reports, more than 100 Rohingya refugees died of infights in different camps and many more became seriously injured during the last four years. On September 29, 2021, the renowned Rohingya leader Mr. Mohibullah was assassinated by other Rohingya conflicting factions. Mohibullah killing drew huge international attention as the local and global media covered this news with commendable importance. Following this sensational killing, there was another killing incident that took place in the camp leaving six people dead and some others injured. Even in the first week of October 2020, at least seven Rohingyas were killed amid

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infights between and among the conflicting factions being active in the Rohingya camps. Recently infights and killings between and among the Rohingya have alarmingly been increased. This sort of infight is helping build a negative image of the Rohingya before the general Bangladeshi and the international community. There is a popular trend in Bangladesh to project the Rohingya refugee camps as a hub of illegal activities, Yabba trades, arms factories, drug factories, and militant activities which is rather fuelling the changing public discourse against the Rohingya refugees. Many local Bengalis time and again expressed their anger while I was doing fieldwork saying that “they are refugees, we gave shelter to them, and they are our guests. But, armed fights between and among the Rohingyas is pushing the local law and order situation to a serious concern. They are our guests and they should not do anything harmful to the local community. But, they are doing whatever they want forgetting everything regarding their position without paying minimum respect to the host community.” But I would say based on my long-term experience that very few Rohingya are involved in infights and violent activities in the camp. Of course, I agree with the sentiment of the local people and have full respect for their emotions. But, at the same time, it is factually true that a very insignificant number of Rohingyas might involve in various forms of illegal trade and activities. The number could be 2000 or 3000 but the entire camp and more than 1 million Rohingya people living in the camp should not be wholesale-branded with a negative connotation. Even I observed in the camp, majority of Rohingya refugees are fed up with the activities of various groups and sub-groups in the camp. So, we cannot brand and blame all for the few!

8.8 Conclusion Truly speaking, there is no conclusion about the Rohingya crisis at this stage. The Rohingya people did go through a horrible genocidal experience that still exists in their everyday existence. Many Rohingyas lost their dear and near ones while many lost their land, homes, wealth, poultry, livestock, and material properties. Many Rohingyas personally experienced physical tortures while many eyewitnessed their family members

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being shot dead and burnt alive. Many Rohingya women are still carrying the traumatized experience of being raped and sexual abuses. Many Rohingya are still carrying the legacy of genocide in their body since many were bullet hit and seriously injured forever. So, in many respects, the Rohingyas living in 34 Rohingya refugee camps in Ukhia and Teknaf are carrying the memory, experience, and legacy of genocide being taken place in 2017  in the Rakhine state. Rohingya people want justice but who will bring Myanmar to book is known to none. Rohingya people want to return to their ‘homeland’ but they don’t know who will bring them back. Many scholars, donors, policy planners, UN bodies, and the international community are prescribing different kinds of solutions to the Rohingya crisis but hardly anyone has tried to know what Rohingya people think of resolving their problem. The solution should not always come from the top because sometimes the bottom-up approach could be more effective than the top-down. Based on my decade-long experience of researching Rohingya people, many times on many occasions during my fieldwork many Rohingya expressed their thinking of resolving the Rohingya crisis. They want to go back to the Rakhine state if three needs are met: legal recognition (by conferring citizenship to them), social safety (initially by deploying UN peace troops for time being), and human dignity (democratization of Myanmar to establish an inclusive society for different culture, ethnicity, and faiths). They expressed their feelings in their way but I have articulated it academically. Now, the question is: who will bell the cat?

Glossary

The name of a refugee camp in Ukhia/ name of an area located in Ukhia Lineage bari  Home beyai  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 bhai  Brother Bormaya  People from Burma or the people who have migrated from Burma Borma  Burma/Myanmar burqa  A particular kind of over-cloth that Muslim women usually wear for maintaining purdah, a principle of the Islamic dress code chash  Cultivation ghor  House gorom  Heat haak  Rights hafezi  Master of the Quran who can recite it by heart from the beginning to the end ichha  Desire Imam  Religious Head of a Mosque who leads the five-time namaj januar  Animals jaat/jatee  Nation jibon  Life Balukhali  bangsha 

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 N. Uddin, Voices of the Rohingya People, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90816-4

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186 Glossary

Friday prayer A category of Muslims living in Myanmar kani  A traditional scale of land measurement kopal  Fate kular  Foreigner Kutupalong  The name of a refugee camp in Ukhia or a name of a place located in Ukhia Leda  The name of a makeshift camp for Rohingya refugees Magrib  A prayer that Muslims say at sunset majhi  The leader of a Rohingya refugee camp manush  Human being maulavi  The imam of a mosque Mogh  Name given to Rakhine Buddhists by the Rohingyas moktob  School for Islamic education, like a madrasa mulluk  State niamot  Blessing nioti  Destiny o-manush  Bad people who are unlike a human being panta-vat  Water-rice parishad  Council purdah  Veil Samaj  A kind of social organization that works as an agency of social control and exercises an informal judicial system in rural Bangladesh. Taal  The name of a makeshift camp for Rohingya refugees upazila  Sub-district vumi-putra  Son of the soil jummah 

Kamanchi 

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Index1

A

Agamben, Giorgio, 91, 103 Ahmed, Imtiaz, 31, 32 Akhanda, Mahfuzur Rahman, 36 Amnesty International (AI), 20, 49, 92 Arakanese Muslim, 10, 61, 68 Arakan kings, 36n21 Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), 22, 54, 54n1, 75, 134, 164, 166 Arakan state, 9, 10, 59–63, 66, 67, 69 Arendt, Hannah, 69n67, 85n22 Asad, Talal, 95 Asylum seekers, 16, 17, 21, 29, 40, 153, 154, 173

Atrocious living conditions, 19, 37, 40, 41, 82, 91, 154, 155, 171, 172 Atrocities, vii, 2, 5, 20–24, 39, 40, 42, 45, 47–50, 53–77, 84, 90, 94, 121, 130, 131, 143, 145, 153–155, 163, 173 B

Balukhali, 50, 86, 105, 106, 106n1 Balukhali Rohingya refugee camp, viii, 106, 120–122, 145, 148, 158, 167 Bamars, 2, 67

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 N. Uddin, Voices of the Rohingya People, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90816-4

201

202 Index

Bangladesh, vii, viii, 1–4, 1n1, 2n3, 6–8, 7n16, 11, 12, 15, 17, 19–21, 23, 24, 28–30, 32–34, 36–42, 44–47, 49, 50, 52, 53, 55, 56, 58, 67, 69–71, 73–75, 79–103, 114, 115, 117, 118, 120–123, 125, 130, 131, 135, 136, 138, 139, 141–145, 147, 148, 158, 160, 162, 165–167, 169–182 Bangladesh–Myanmar bilateral relations, 47 Bangladesh-Myanmar border, 160, 167 Bare life, 21, 99, 103 Bengal–Arakan relations, 9, 36 Bengalis–Rohingyas violent clashes, 20, 46 Bodawpaya, King, 67 Border, vii, 1, 1n1, 2, 5, 7, 12, 20, 21, 23, 28, 30, 34, 49, 50, 54, 70, 71, 73–75, 80, 85, 86, 88, 89, 91–94, 97, 102, 106, 114, 117–120, 122, 125, 131, 135, 136, 138, 139, 141, 142, 144, 145, 147, 152, 153, 156, 158, 160, 163–165, 167, 169–171 Brass, Paul, 44 Buchanan, Francis, 57, 64, 65 Burma/Myanmar, 3, 9, 32, 36, 56, 174n1 Butler, Judith, 81, 91

Classic representation of state, 96, 98 Cox’s Bazar, 1n1, 2, 6–8, 44, 48, 70, 74, 76, 83, 83n14, 86, 87, 90, 93, 145 Crabtree, Kristy, 47n64 Crime against humanity, 109 Cultural pluralism, 110 D

Domicide, vii, viii, 2, 17, 20, 22, 46, 49, 50, 55, 102, 105–127, 154, 173 E

Ethnic cleansing, viii, 2, 15, 17, 20, 22, 23, 25, 30, 44, 45, 47–48, 50, 54, 56, 59, 63, 71–77, 82, 92, 102, 105–127, 130, 131, 134, 149, 152, 154, 173 Ethnic composition, 15, 109 Ethnicity of Rohingya, 8–10, 32, 36, 37, 43, 62, 66 Ethnocide, vii, viii, 2, 8, 13, 15–17, 20, 23, 30, 39, 40, 44, 46, 47, 49–51, 105–127, 131, 134, 149, 152, 154, 173 Ethnographic research, viii, 19, 29 Ethnography, viii, 3, 16, 17, 40, 153 Europe, 89, 107, 110 European Union (EU), 179

C

F

Camp people, 17, 40, 153, 154 Chowdhury, Mohammad Ali, 31, 33, 36 Citizenship law, 64, 69

Fate of Rohingyas, 11 Ferguson, James, 95 Forced migrants, 33, 40, 41 Forced repatriation, 177

 Index 

Forcibly displaced Myanmar nationals (FDMN), 6, 20, 56, 122 Foucault, Michel, 82 G

Gender issue, 46 Genocide, vii, viii, 2, 4, 4n7, 6–8, 13–17, 16n43, 20–23, 25, 30, 38, 39, 41, 42, 44, 46–77, 92, 102, 106, 108, 109, 111, 112, 131, 134, 149, 152, 154, 168, 173, 177–178, 183 Green, Penny, 9, 11, 81, 91 Gupta, Akhil, 95 H

Historical background, 9, 13, 22, 39, 55 Hoque, Mahfuzul, 31 Hosting and hurting of refugees, 46n99, 56n6, 68n58, 180n4 Human rights, 4n4, 5, 24, 25, 28, 29, 33, 45, 48, 70, 81, 87, 152, 156, 174, 178, 179 Human rights violations, 16, 32, 41, 54, 83, 87, 97, 132, 133, 179 Human Rights Watch (HRW), 49, 92 Hurting

Influx, vii, 2, 7n16, 12, 19–21, 24, 25, 28, 29, 32, 48, 51, 53, 56, 68–70, 84–86, 177, 180 Inter-ethnic marriages, 46 International Labour Organization (ILO), 8 J

Jaulin, Robert, 108 K

Karim, Abdul, 35, 36, 68, 100, 101 King, 60, 66 Kutupalong, 7n16, 50, 74, 85, 86, 106n1, 115, 117, 126, 130, 136, 139, 142, 145, 151, 160–163, 165, 169, 171 L

Law enforcement agencies, 155 Lee, Ronan, 9, 41 Lemkin, Rapheal, 14, 108 Lewa, Chris, 47n63, 69n65, 84n17 Living conditionality, 47, 162, 174 Local government, 87, 99, 134, 156 Local society, 86 Local state, 95, 96, 98–103 Lorey, Isabell, 81

I

Identity, 4, 8, 9, 15, 20, 21, 29, 30, 30n6, 35, 39, 41, 42, 63, 66, 83–89, 111, 123, 174 Illegal bodies, 155 Indigenous people, 107n2

203

M

Marriages, 46, 46n58, 132, 134, 137, 149 Militant activities of Rohingyas, 97, 182

204 Index

Moghs, 115–119, 121–125, 134, 135, 138, 143, 144, 146, 148, 157, 159, 161, 163–166, 168, 170 Mohibullah, 181 Moon, Mun Shaw (Normikhla), 60 Muslims ‘Others,’ 39, 113 N

Narratives, vii, viii, 2–5, 20–23, 25, 29, 30, 30n6, 39, 40, 46, 48, 50–52, 54, 59, 63, 64, 67, 72, 80, 82, 90–92, 94, 98, 101, 102, 106, 111, 112, 129–149 Nazis, 14, 109, 110 Ne Win, General, 11, 68 Non-citizens/non-citizenship/, 12, 17, 21, 29, 34, 37, 38, 40, 101, 102, 153–155, 174 Non-governmental organizations (NGOs), 8, 29, 30, 37, 87, 123, 142 O

Operation Clean and Beautiful Nation, 12 Operation Dragon, 11 Operation Nagamin, 56 P

Palmer, Victoria, 47n65 People of the soil, 19 Phayre, A.P., 60 Pittaway, Eileen, 46n61 Poole, Deborah, 95

Povinelli, Elizabeth, 82–83, 83n13, 103 Power relations, 95, 132, 133 Precarious life, 81, 82, 91 R

Rahman, Utpala, 46n62 Rakhine Buddhists, 61, 67, 68, 79, 90, 112, 140, 149 Rakhine State, vii, viii, 2, 6, 7, 9, 12, 15, 17, 19, 20, 22, 23, 25, 29, 37–39, 41, 42, 45, 48–50, 53, 55, 56, 59, 67, 71–73, 76, 77, 80–82, 90–92, 105–107, 109, 112, 116, 117, 121, 123, 126, 127, 129n1, 130, 133, 134, 140, 142, 149, 151–153, 157, 161, 171, 173–175, 177, 178, 183 Rangoon University Central Students Union (RUCSU), 10 Rashiduddin, 57 Razzak, Abdur, 31 Refugee camps, viii, 8, 28, 37, 39, 45–48, 50, 70, 86, 105, 106, 106n1, 114, 115, 117, 118, 120–123, 126, 130, 136, 142, 145, 151, 158, 161–163, 165, 167, 169, 171, 175, 182, 183 Relationship between host society and refugees, 28, 87 Repatriation of Rohingya refugees, 28, 48 Rights and entitlements, 32, 51 Rohang, 10, 56–58, 60 Rohingya language, viii, 156n10

 Index 

Rohingya refugees, viii, 7, 7n16, 8, 12, 19, 27–52, 70n68, 84n18, 85n25, 87, 90, 105, 106n1, 130, 175, 176, 179–183, 180n4 Rohingya Solidarity Organization (RSO), 145 Rosaing, 58 Rowshang, 58 S

Sandia, Mohathaing, 60 Shah, Sultan Jalal Uddin Mohammad, 60 Sharma, Aradhana, 95 Siddiquee, Mohibullah, 31, 32, 35n17, 57, 58 Social integration of Rohingya refugees, 33 State crime, 81, 91, 102 Statelessness, 8, 21, 22, 30, 33, 34, 40, 43, 56, 67–71, 84, 174 Stateless people, 17, 20, 21, 33, 69, 84–85, 87, 96, 102, 153, 155, 174n1 Stateness, notions of, 96 Subhuman, 13, 17–19, 23, 24, 40, 41, 70, 88, 99, 103, 151–172 Subhuman life, 152–172 Suu Kyi, 41, 43, 178

205

U

Uddin, Nasir, 31 Ullah, A.K.M. Ahsan, 47n66 Ullah, Habib, 35 United Nations (UN), 12, 13, 22, 29, 38, 40, 40n37, 44, 55, 63, 71, 76, 77, 92, 108, 130, 132, 133, 152, 178, 179, 181, 183 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 8, 12, 70, 84n18, 85–87 United Nations International Children’s Education Fund (UNICEF), 8, 120 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 21 Unregistered Rohingyas, 70, 85, 85n25, 86 V

Vulnerability, 20–24, 40, 54, 79–103, 151, 153, 154 W

Wahra, Gawher Nayeem, 46n60 Walton-Roberts, Margaret, 11n26, 69n66, 94n20, 96n66 Ward, Tony, 81, 91, 102