The Rohingyas - The forsaken people

Natasha Shahid in The Friday Times

Who are the Rohingya people and why does everyone disown them? Natasha Shahid attempts to answer these questions 

Outsiders in their own country

“The Rohingya come from Burma, but for many years have fled repression there to Bangladesh, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. […] Primarily because the Burmerse government denies them citizenship, most are stateless.” – David Mathieson,Perilous Plight: Burma’s Rohingya Take to the Seas


Of the approximately two million Rohingya alive today, 800,000 live in Burma, 200,000 in Bangladesh, 50,000 in Malaysia and around 500,000 live scattered over the Middle East, where they went looking for work. But can the Rohingya call any of these countries their home? Their treatment by the two proposed countries of their origin – Burma and Bangladesh – does not suggest so: while one has a majority tied up in refugee camps, the other is bent upon killing them to the last man. What did the Rohingya do to deserve this fate?





Rakhine, the state where most of the Rohingya community is settled

History of the Rohingya People

The origins of the Rohingya people are disputed. Followers of Islam and belonging to the Indo-Aryan stock, they themselves say that they are natives of Rakhine, the south-western Burmese state which shares its northern border with Bangladesh. Others suggest that they are of Bengali origins, and that their language is a derivative of the Bengali language. Alistair D. B. Cook suggests that their movement originated in the Middle East, and brought them to Rakhine after crossing the rest of South Asia.

Whatever their origins, most scholars agree that the Rohingya have been residents of Burma since around the 15th century AD. Archaeological evidence reportedly suggests that the Rohingya have lived in the country since the times of the Kingdom of Mrauk U (1425 AD – 1785 AD). And yet the Burmese government insists that they are not one of their “historical ethnic groups”: the major reason behind their persecution at the hands of the Burmese authorities.



One of the many boats floating on the Indian Ocean, with no country willing to let it anchor

What did the Rohingya do to deserve this fate?

Under British rule, Bengalis were encouraged to repopulate the fertile region of Arakan (now Rakhine), and the boundaries between Bengal and Arakan were removed. So, in all practicality, Bengal and Arakan became a single state making it easier for the Bengali people – who were majority Muslims – to travel to and from Arakan. This migratory trend resumed at the time of the Bangladesh Liberation Movement in 1971, when many Bengalis fled their country and settled in Arakan, instead. The Burmese government insists that most of the people who form the Rohingya community today belong to this stock: another reason behind their attempts to expel the community from the country.

During the Second World War, Japan successfully captured Burma but the British fought the Japanese invading forces on Burmese soil. After the Japanese were ousted, Burma’s Rohingya formed a political party – Arakan Muslim League – which started a political movement to be absorbed into East Pakistan at the time of the Partition of India. The party sent a request to Mohammad Ali Jinnah, himself, in May 1946 to include Arakan in his partition plan. Jinnah turned the request down, replying that he could not intrude in Burmese affairs.

Apparently Jinnah’s rejection led the Rohingya to abandon their political cause, not seeing any use in pursuing it. They decided to take up arms, instead. The target of this armed movement, termed by the Rohingya as a jihad, was at first the separation of the Mayu region in the north of Arakan – where most of their population resided – and its annexation with East Pakistan. When the Burmese government refused to cater to these demands, the Rohingya mujahideen declared jihad on their own government. There was a time when these armed rebels controlled almost all of northern Arakan, forcing the non-Rohingya inhabitants of the state to flee their homes.

This jihadist movement continued for about a decade before the Rohingya rebels finally laid arms between 1957 and 1961, primarily as a result of a military operation initiated to crush the uprising. This is when the displacement of the Rohingya began, which continues to this day.





Another abandoned boat


The Rohingya’s Current Status

After being crushed by the Burmese government in the 1960s, the Rohingya rebellion re-immerged at the time of the East Pakistani separatist movement. At the moment, it is believed to be receiving aid from Islamic terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda and the Tehrik-i-Taliban, and even from some countries, including Pakistan.

The recently accelerated attempts of the Burmese government at the genocide and expulsion of the Rohingya people has brought the country into the international spotlight – for all the wrong reasons. The persecution of the Rohingya, especially under the nationalist, pan-Buddhist military rule (1962-2011) has had terrible repercussions for the community. General Ne Win, the first military ruler of Burma who assumed control of the country in 1962, expelled Muslims – all Muslims, not just the Rohingya – from the army, and in 1982, under a new citizenship law, the Rohingya were declared as non-nationals.

It didn’t stop with the government: Burma’s citizens – mostly Theravada Buddhists – had an equal share in victimizing the Rohingya people. It was the Buddhist monks who initiated an anti-Muslim movement in 2001, in which pamphlets like Myo Pyauk Hmar Soe Kyauk Sa Yar (“The Fear of Losing One’s Race”) were distributed in the common public. In the same year, 200 Muslims were killed and 11 mosques were burnt down by common Burmese citizens. It is said that this movement was in retaliation to the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in March, 2001 by the Taliban. The claim is very likely true, as the Burmese government brought down two mosques – Han Tha Mosque and Taungoo Railway Station Mosque – on the demands of angry Buddhist monks, who wanted to “avenge” the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas.

Clearly Muslims aren’t the only ones who are over-sensitive about their religion.

Since 2012, there have been repeated anti-Muslim riots in Rakhine and elsewhere in Burma that have claimed the lives of hundreds of Muslims. An anti-Muslim riot can be sparked in Burma for a reason as little as a Facebook photograph, or for no reason at all – it’s like a haystack simply waiting to catch fire.




Verbal abuse: a member of the Burmese bureaucracy once termed the Rohingya “ugly as ogres”

Exodus

With the state of their lives in Burma, the Rohingya Muslims have no option but to leave their home country – if they can call it that. But where would they go? At the moment, they don’t seem to care. The Rohingya are fleeing Rakhine by the boatful whenever they can, even though they know their journeys do not have any destination. Many have fled to Bangladesh, where they are being kept in refugee camps. Many have managed to make it to the Middle East and Japan, while some have even reportedly made it to Karachi. These are the lucky ones.

The unlucky ones? They are stranded mid-sea with nowhere to go. We can only imagine what the state of their lives in their native country must have been for them to rather float endlessly in the middle of salty waters with no food to eat and no water to drink.

The Need for Roots brought home the modern era's disconnection with the past and the loss of community

Having recently moved to a Himalayan village, I felt Simone Weil's focus on uprootedness spoke directly to me

• 
• • Pankaj Mishra
  • The Guardian, Sunday 18 August 2013 15.02 BST

An idol of the Hindu god Ganesh. ‘A rare European thinker who was as curious about Hindu and Buddhist traditions as about the Cathars, Weil despised colonialism as well as nationalism.’ Photograph: Sanjeev Gupta/EPA

There has rarely been a day since I first read The Need for Roots, nearly two decades ago, that I haven't thought of Simone Weil – one of my earliest heroines along with Hannah Arendt and Rosa Luxemburg. It was the title that initially attracted me more than the contents. Having recently moved to a Himalayan village after a peripatetic life in the plains, I had begun to feel rooted for the first time, connected to a stable community which, living off the land, neither poor nor rich, and low rather than upper caste, was marked above all by dignity – remarkable in a country where villages had become synonymous with destitution. And when Weil asserted that the central event of the modern era was uprootedness – the disconnection from the past and the loss of community – she seemed to speak directly to my experience.

The range of her admirers – from TS Eliot to Albert Camus – attest to the difficulty of describing Weil. She was a bourgeois Jewish intellectual from France who, in a viciously antisemitic climate, rejected both Judaism and Zionism. A youthful Marxist who fought on the Republican side in the Spanish civil war she, after an immersion in the "icy pandemonium of industrial life", came to believe that "it is not religion but revolution which is the opium of the people". A devoted Hellenist, she despised the Roman empire, implicating it with an oppressive tradition of the authoritarian state in Europe that culminated in Nazi Germany.

A rare European thinker who was as curious about Hindu and Buddhist traditions as about the Cathars, Weil despised colonialism as well as nationalism. "When one takes upon oneself, as France did in 1789, the function of thinking on behalf of the world, of defining justice for the world, one may not become an owner of human flesh and blood." She possessed an ironic view of historians – how they buttress the ideological claims of the hyper-power of the day: "If Germany, thanks to Hitler and his successors, were to enslave the European nations and destroy most of the treasures of their past, future historians would certainly pronounce that she had civilised Europe."

Freed of the popular intellectual's obligation to boost national or imperial egos, she could point out something that was obvious to many Asian sufferers of European colonialism: the shocking nature of Nazi racism lay, she wrote, "in the application by Germany to the European continent, and the white race, generally, of colonial methods of conquest and domination".

In The Need for Roots she distilled everything she had learned from her intellectual struggles with the ideologies of socialism and liberalism, her experience of working-class conditions and the plight of the Vietnamese in France.

In different ways, Marx, Nietzsche and Max Weber had described how human relationships had shifted dramatically in societies built around commerce, industrial capitalism and the colonisation of vast tracts of the world. Life had lost its old moorings in a world where technology greatly enhanced the power of large abstract entities, such as the state and nationalism. Weil brought a different intensity to this sober diagnosis of the human condition.

Uprootedness was a sickness of the soul, a spiritual malaise, but with far-reaching political consequences that left no one unaffected. As Weil wrote: "Hitler would be inconceivable without modern technique and the existence of millions of uprooted men."

Material affluence and political stability in recent decades has rendered less toxic the extensive deracination that began in Europe in the 19th century. Today, it is people from countries such as India, Iran and Egypt who will immediately recognise Weil's insight that the modern promise of individual development, which was realised through the destruction of old bonds, can leave people dangerously adrift and vulnerable to demagogues.

As the years passed in my village, I witnessed poorly educated young men leaving to seek the greater comforts and liberations of big cities. I would see them on my visits to Delhi. Working in sweatshops and living in equally degrading conditions, the promise of the modern world had turned sour for them. These were the men whose disaffection had traditionally seeded militant ideologies or random violence against those weaker than them.

Recent history shows that the social turmoil provoked by large-scale uprootings helps authoritarians more than progressives. In any case, revolution was both undesirable and unrealisable, since technology and industry were unstoppable. What, then, could be done?

Weil aimed at the rehumanisation of the workplace and, by extension, the larger society. As she put it somewhat melodramatically, a civilisation that did not recognise the spiritual nature of work was doomed.

This was not all abstract speculation. Policymakers can draw much from The Need for Roots: such clear prescriptions as that employers ought to provide an adequate vocational training for their employees, education should be compulsory and publicly funded, and include technical as well as elementary education.

But her most original move was to abandon the language of rights – the claims of possessive individuals against others that had provided political philosophy with its syntax since Hobbes and Locke. Instead, she talked of needs, duties and obligations as the basis of a good society – something that would be immediately familiar to Buddhist philosophers but remains marginal in the western tradition of political theory.

As she wrote, "If you say to someone who has ears to hear: 'What you are doing to me is not just', you may touch and awaken at its source the spirit of attention and love. But it is not the same with words like 'I have the right' … or 'you have no right to … ' They evoke a latent war and awaken the spirit of contention. To place the notion of rights at the centre of social conflicts is to inhibit any possible impulse of charity on both sides."

As she saw it, the original advocacy of rights had served the expansion of commerce and a contract-based society in western Europe. But a free and rooted society ought to consist of a web of moral obligations. We have the right to ignore them, but we ought to be actually obliged not to let other people starve, or to let them lapse into destitution.

It should be noted that Weil was not a liberal. For her, there can be no such thing as absolute freedom of expression at a time when "journalism becomes indistinguishable from organised lying", and its consumers don't have the time or leisure to sift truth from falsehood. "There ought to be," she wrote, looking ahead to the age of Leveson, special courts to monitor communications network that are "guilty of too frequent a distortion of the truth".

Indeed, what makes The Need for Roots particularly pertinent today is its critique of the ethic of liberalism that had originally emerged to serve the needs of a commercial society – individuals with highly self-regarding conceptions of their rights. As Weil saw, and we recognise very well in 2013, the extension of the marketplace into the realm of values has severely constrained our moral imagination.

It is easy to criticise some Weil's ideas for being too impractical and occasionally draconian. There is something too sanguine about her view of human nature. As a friend scolded her, shortly before she died of self-induced starvation in Kent in 1943 at the age of only 34: "Man is not pure but a 'sinner'. And the sinner must stink a bit, at the least." Perhaps. But you can only marvel, as Orwell did about Gandhi, at how clean a smell she managed to leave behind.

Criticism of Schumacher - if you curtail growth, living standards drop

Schumacher was no radical – if you curtail growth, living standards drop

By suggesting it's better to be economically poorer and spiritually richer, Schumacher ignores links between growth and wellbeing

• 
• • Daniel Ben-Ami
  • guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 16 November 2011 11.30 GMT
  • larger | smaller

Consumer revolution … a customer inspects washing machines at a supermarket in Wuhan, China. Photograph: Darley Shen/Reuters

EF Schumacher's Small is Beautiful is widely viewed as a humanistic and radical tract. Nothing could be further from the truth. Viewed in its proper context it is both profoundly anti-human and deeply conservative.
The central idea in Schumacher's text is that there is a natural limit to economic growth. As he put it: "Economic growth, which viewed from the point of view of economics, physics, chemistry and technology, has no discernible limit, must necessarily run into decisive bottlenecks when viewed from the point of view of the environmental sciences."

Schumacher objected to organising the economy on a large scale precisely because he believed that more prosperity would damage the environment. He correctly understood that small-scale communities cannot produce nearly as much as those operating on a regional or global scale. A modern car, for example, typically relies on components, raw materials and know-how from around the globe. From the perspective of Schumacher's "Buddhist economics", it is better for people to be poorer in economic terms if they can be spiritually richer.

This argument flies against a huge weight of evidence showing that material advance is closely bound up with progress more generally. The past two centuries of modern economic growth have seen huge advances in human welfare along with technological innovation and social advance. Perhaps the most striking single indicator of this improvement is the increase in human life expectancy from about 30 in 1800 to nearly 70 today. Note that this is a global average, so it includes the billions of people who live in poor countries as well as the minority who live in rich ones.

Almost every other measure of wellbeing has increased hugely over the long term, including infant mortality, food consumption and level of education. Most of humanity, even in the developing world, has access to services our ancestors could only have dreamt of, including electricity, clean water, sanitation and mobile phones.

None of the arguments used by Schumacher's followers to counter this narrative of progress are convincing. Greens often side-step the broader case for growth by deriding the accumulation of consumer goods and services. Environmentalist arguments have more than a tinge of elitism, with comfortably middle-class greens scoffing at the masses for wanting flat-screen televisions and foreign holidays. It should also be remembered that some consumer goods, such as washing machines, have directly led to huge improvements in human welfare.

Anti-consumerism reveals more about the narrowness of the green vision than it does about economic growth. Viewing rising prosperity simply in terms of consumer goods is incredibly blinkered. Growth provides the resources for much else including airports, art galleries, hospitals, museums, power stations, railways, roads, schools and universities. Popular prosperity provides the bedrock for much that we value in contemporary society.

Another common green rebuttal to the benefits of growth is to point to the existence of inequality. Of course it is true that there are huge disparities both within countries as well as between the developed and developing world. The key question, however, is how best to tackle the problem. From Schumacher's perspective it is desirable to reduce the living standards of everyone except the poorest of the poor. His is a narrative of shared sacrifice and lower living standards for almost all. The alternative vision, the traditional position of the left, was to argue for plenty for everyone.

Finally, there is the argument about the environment itself. The most popular variant of the idea of a natural limit nowadays is that growth inevitably means runaway climate change. However, there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. There are many forms of energy, including nuclear, that do not emit greenhouse gases. There are also ways to adapt to global warming such as building higher sea walls. Since such measures are expensive it will take more resources to pay for them; which means more economic growth rather than less. If anything the green drive to curb prosperity is likely to undermine our capacity to tackle climate change.
Schumacher's fundamentally conservative argument chimes well with those who want to reconcile us to austerity. It suits those in power for the mass of the population to accept the need to make do with less. Under such circumstances it is no surprise that David Cameron, like his international peers, is keen for us to focus on individual contentment rather than material prosperity.

It is hard to imagine a more anti-human outlook than one advocating a sharp fall in living standards for the bulk of the world's population.