How WWII shaped the crisis in Myanmar

washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/03/10/how-wwii-shaped-crisis-myanmar

The crises of the era laid the groundwork for the persecution of
the Rohingya.

Rohingya Muslim children, who crossed over from Myanmar into Bangladesh, waited
to receive food distributed by a Turkish aid agency at the Thaingkhali refugee camp in
Bangladesh in 2017. (Dar Yasin, File)
By Jayita Sarkar

Jayita Sarkar, an historian by training, is assistant professor at Boston University’s

Pardee School of Global Studies, and the 2018-19 Niehaus Fellow in U.S. foreign policy
and international security at Dartmouth College.

March 10 at 6:00 AM
Last month the United Nations and its partners appealed for $920 million to assist
nearly one million Rohingya refugees now encamped in Bangladesh. These refugees
are fleeing the violence in the northern part of the Rakhine state in Myanmar. That
violence has been perpetrated by the Myanmar military under the pretext that the
Rohingya are not citizens of Myanmar but “resident foreigners” from Bangladesh who
neither speak the Burmese language nor are part of Myanmar’s myriad ethnic
groups.
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The military violence against the Rohingya Muslim minority is an extension of
discriminatory government policies that reached their height in 1982, when the
Rohingya were stripped of their citizenship status under Myanmar’s citizenship act.
This legal loophole has allowed the Myanmar government to pursue relentlessly its
recent repression of the Rohingya.

The virulent attacks on the Rohingya people, who are Muslims with a distinct
language of their own, have surprised outside observers, who remain confounded by
the nature of this violence. But the conflict has deep historical roots. Declassified
records from British archives reveal that the origins of the current plight of the
Rohingya people can be traced to their participation in World War II, notably the
communal violence that broke out between the Muslim Rohingya and the Buddhist
Rakhine communities during and after the war.

Until they understand the World War II origins of the current violence, and the way
that violence is embodied in the Rohingya language itself, members of the
international community will continue to struggle to devise effective policies to
address the contemporary political and humanitarian crisis.

Since the 19th century, northern Arakan (or Rakhine state) had been connected to
British India through the imperial networks of migration, transport and governance.
The British ruled Burma as a part of British India until 1937, when Burma became a
separate British colony. During most of the 19th and early 20th centuries, imperial
administrators encouraged extensive migration of “loyal” Indians to offset the
influence of the “less reliable” Burmese to maintain stable imperial governance.

During World War II, these divided loyalties determined battlefield strategies of the
British in the Allied Burma Campaign. A large number of Rohingya Muslims, who were
mostly uneducated indentured laborers in the rice plantations of present-day
Rakhine, were recruited to fight on the side of the British-led “Fourteenth Army”
against the Japanese forces. The Burmese National Army led by Aung San (the father
of the present-day Myanmar leader, Aung San Suu Kyi) fought on the side of the
Japanese, who promised them independence from British rule.

Communal violence broke out between pro-British Rohingya Muslims and pro-
Japanese Rakhine Buddhists during the war. In 1943, when Rohingya refugees
returned to their villages with British troops, the violence continued between the
Rohingya Muslims and the Rakhine Buddhists. This time it was about retribution for
what happened during the war. In fact, it got so bloody that the British military
administrators decided to mark the town of Akyab as a “protected area” to stop the
return of the Rohingya to their villages to prevent Muslim-Buddhist communal
bloodshed.

British sympathy lay with the Rohingya, who were described in British documents as
“much more hard-working and prolific than the Arakanese,” adding that some were
“great seamen” who “manned about 20% of the British merchant navy during the
war.”

After the war ended in August 1945 with the Japanese surrender, Muslim-Buddhist
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tensions persisted. By 1946, the wartime ammunition dumps that were left behind
became a source of rearmament for both Rohingya Muslim and Rakhine Buddhist
rebels. In August 1947, British India was partitioned on the basis of religion into
Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. The following year, Burma gained
independence from the British Empire amid violent contestations by ethnic minorities
within its borders.

After Burma’s independence from British rule in January 1948, violence erupted again
in Rakhine. According to the documents from the British archives, a large number of
Rohingya rebels were “ex-army men” who attacked “the flanks of regular troops” of
the Burmese military before retiring to the hills and forests.” In response, the
Burmese government armed the Rakhine Buddhist rebels with the goal to resist the
anti-government onslaught of one minority (Rohingya Muslims) with another minority
(Rakhine Buddhists). Thus, one of the earliest blueprints of government support for
violence against the Rohingya was crafted.

The partition of South Asia and the independence of Burma offered two models for
the Rohingya leaders to integrate themselves into the neighboring nation-states.
Their strategy? To make language key to how nationhood would be defined. When
the Rohingya Arakan Mujahed Party campaigned to join the partitioned Muslim-
majority nation-state of Pakistan, it pushed to use the Urdu script. When the
Rohingya Arakanese Muslim Autonomy movement desired autonomy within
independent Burma, it pushed for the adoption of the Burmese script for its
language.

Those language battles mapped onto real-life violence. In 1952, Pakistan engaged in a
violent crackdown on Bengali-speaking students in Dhaka, the capital of East
Pakistan. This transformed the demands for Urdu as the Rohingya language into near
treachery. The spoken form of the Rohingya language, after all, is similar to the
Chittagongian dialect of Bengali. So, how could these separatist rebels adopt Urdu,
the language used by Pakistan, when Urdu-speaking Pakistan was trying to repress
their ethnic compatriots in East Pakistan?

The multiple Rohingya language scripts — Burmese, Urdu, Nagori and Hanifi — testify
to the Rohingya’ struggle to preserve their identity in increasingly violent frontiers of
multiple nation-states. It serves as evidence of their efforts to seek recognition and
refuge across borders and cultures. These ambiguities in language and territoriality
produced in the battlefields of World War II and reproduced in the borderlands of
Myanmar, Pakistan and later Bangladesh continue to haunt their “stateless” identity.
And it enables the Myanmar state to perpetuate the myth that the Rohingya are
merely “Bengali-speaking migrants” and foreigners in their own land.

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Jayita Sarkar Jayita Sarkar, an historian by training, is assistant professor

at Boston University’s Pardee School of Global Studies, and the 2018-19
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Niehaus Fellow in U.S. foreign policy and international security at Dartmouth College.
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