An ‘un-imagined community’: the entangled genealogy of an exclusivist nationalism in Myanmar and the Rohingya refugee crisis

ABSTRACT

The Rohingya are one of the most persecuted religious ethnic minorities of the contemporary world. They have been persecuted in Myanmar since the post-coup military regime came to power in 1962. What explains this brutal pursuit of violence against a minority? In answering this question, I trace the genealogy and the ethnogenesis of the Rohingya in Myanmar in a longue durée through an analysis of extant data, both historical and contemporary, and I supplement it with an ethnographic study I conducted in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. I argue that the emergence of the Rohingya identity is constitutively related with the state-formation, war conquest, and power shifts in Myanmar during precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial times. I demonstrate how the post-coup state of Myanmar – in association with the religious civil society, led by a section of the majoritarian Theravada Buddhist Bamars – provoked religious and exclusivist nationalism and constructed the ‘Rohingya Muslims’ as the enemy ‘Other’. I demonstrate also how the democratization of Myanmar ironically exacerbated the problem. The Rohingya themselves – once alienated and un-imagined from the national space – embraced this identity of victimhood to design their resilient and oppositional disposition against an exclusivist state, which further politicized and reified the identity.

KEYWORDS:

• Rohingya
• Rakhine/Arakan
• ethnogenesis
• identity
• Myanmar
• genealogy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I use ‘Arakan’ and ‘Rakhine’ interchangeably according to the temporal phase that I am explaining.

2 The official name of the armed forces in Myanmar that consists of army, navy, and the air force.

3 Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA; earlier known as Harakah Al-Yaqin meaning faith movement).

4 In remembrance of the refugees who fled Vietnam after the war in 1975 on boats, mostly in 1978 and 1979; the phenomenon continued till the 1990s.

5 The fieldwork was conducted by me over a period of 3 weeks in May 2018, in various unregistered refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar district of Bangladesh. For this paper, which is mainly based on secondary data, I have used the fieldwork data sparsely, only in places where required. I do not belong to the Rohingya community, so my access to the community space, my vision, and my voice is that of an outsider.

6 Like the Kaman Muslims, who live in the Ramree Island of Rakhine.

7 Transcript of Speech by Deputy Commander-in-Chief Brigadier General Aung Gyi, Myanmar Ahlin Newspaper, 8 July 1961, at 5–6, in personal collection of Zarni and Cowley (2014).

8 Transcript of speech by Prime Minister U Nu, Lessons from the Religious Conflict for the State in Myanmar (radio address to the nation) (25 September 1954), in personal collection of Zarni and Cowley (2014)

9 Transcript of Speech by Deputy Commander-in-Chief Brigadier General Aung Gyi, in the personal collection of Zarni and Cowley (2014).

10 Interview with a Rohingya woman, Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, 8 May 2018.

11 Interview with a Rohingya man, Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, 8 May 2018.