by David Eimer
One kilo of squid sells for 4,500 kyat (£2.50) on the island. Nor are the Salone able to supplement their income by hunting for pearls as they once did. ‘The government says we can’t take the pearls anymore. There are pearl farms now,’ said Ta Aye, one hand waving dismissively out to sea. She wanted her children to study rather than fish. ‘If they are educated, they will have better lives.’ Ta Aye was looking straight at me, almost daring me to ask what would become of the Salone. She knew the fate that awaited her people. ‘There will be fewer of us in the future. It is too hard a life for us now.’
Ta Aye missed the old ways, though, as did the other women. ‘We prefer to stay on our boats. That’s how we lived when I was young, before we stayed on the islands. Now, our culture is disappearing. Young people don’t know how to build a kabang anymore.’ And despite being married to a Bamar man, Ta Aye and the others were uncomfortable living alongside the mainlanders. ‘We’re not very friendly with the Burmese. But I can’t say what I think of them,’ she told me. ‘I live on the island and there may be trouble if I say what I think.’
Salone canoes were heading out of the bay when we left Jar Lann, the kids on board waving. Sea Gypsy set a course south-west through the Investigator Channel, gliding across a wave-free sea. We were on the far west of the archipelago now, close to the maritime frontier with India. A hundred and twenty miles farther west were the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Indian territory even though they are much closer to Burma than India.
Our destination was Boulder Bay Island. Its horseshoe-shaped bay was the prettiest I’d seen anywhere on the voyage, a vast crescent of a beach backed by thick forest, the white sand so soft and powdery that my feet sank ankle-deep into it. The sea was perfectly clear and I could stare down from the deck of Sea Gypsy and watch striped bannerfish mingling with yellow and blue emperors. Beneath them was the silvery flash of torpedo-like barracuda nosing around.
But when I went snorkelling on the other side of the island, I found only a graveyard. The reef had been dynamited, the coral splintered into bone-like ash-white fragments, as if some underwater ritual slaughter had taken place and the butchered skeletons were all that remained. Nature had been overwhelmed here, most likely by the Salone, the people who once lived so close to it, as they fight to survive. Their paradise was gone forever, and soon they would be, too.
11
Hiding in Plain Sight
Noor is as rare as one of the dwindling number of tigers that stalk the Tenasserim Hills, someone as little seen as the handful of freshwater dolphins which survive in the Ayeyarwady River. The son of a Rohingya Muslim father and a Rakhine Buddhist mother, he is a supremely scarce combination of ethnicities. ‘There are very few people like me,’ Noor told me with a proud smile over a cup of tea in Mingalar Taung Nyunt, a township north of Yangon’s main railway station.
Rakhine State, which lies south of Chin State in the west of Burma, has been home to both the Rakhine people and the Rohingya for centuries, shared by Buddhists and Muslims who went to school and worked together but hardly ever married each other. The south of the state, a shallow curve of coastline that kisses the Bay of Bengal, has always been dominated by the Rakhine. In the north, the Rohingya were traditionally the majority in the areas close to the Naf River, which divides northern Rakhine State from Bangladesh.
Maungdaw, a town on the Naf River, was 80 per cent Rohingya when Noor was growing up there. But his dad’s family, like most Rohingya, hail originally from what was once known as Bengal, the region which is now Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal. Noor’s ancestors migrated first to Mrauk U, the ancient capital of the Rakhine kingdom, before his great-great-grandfather moved the family to a village outside Maungdaw. ‘My father’s family has been living in Rakhine since 1819 and we have the documents to prove it,’ said Noor.
Significant numbers of Rohingya came to Rakhine State – formerly called Arakan – in the colonial era. But Rohingya and Rakhine have been moving across the Naf River in both directions for hundreds of years. Muslims were present in Mrauk U by the fifteenth century, building mosques alongside the pagodas. And Arakan, which was its own independent state until 1784, had a history of commerce with the Arab world stretching back a millennium. Merchants from the Middle East settled in Arakan and some Rohingya claim ancestry from them.
But while Noor, his sister and mother all have the pink identity cards which identify people as nationals of Burma, his father doesn’t. ‘He is Rohingya, so he isn’t considered to be a citizen. It’s ridiculous, when you think about how long his family have been in the country,’ said Noor. In recent decades, though, all Rohingya, even those with identity cards and passports, have come to be regarded as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.
‘If you’re a Muslim from Rakhine, you’re really from Bangladesh. If you’re a Muslim from Yangon, you’re really from India,’ one Rohingya woman told me. But unlike people of Indian heritage the Rohingya are officially stateless, a result of the junta changing Burma’s citizenship laws in 1982. Since then, only people from an ethnic group recognised by the state, and who can prove that their ancestors were present in the country before 1823, are eligible to be citizens. And the Rohingya are not considered to be an indigenous minority.
Burma’s border with Bangladesh was only demarcated in 1985. It has always been porous, prime territory for smugglers and anyone seeking to cross. There is no question that some Rohingya did arrive illegally in the past. But northern Rakhine State, where farmers and fishermen eke out a subsistence living in an intensely malarial region prone to flooding in the monsoon season, is no longer a desirable destination for would-be migrants. ‘Why would anyone come? Bangladesh is doing better. It’s much more developed on the other side of the border,’ said Noor.
So unattractive is northern Rakhine that in the 1990s the generals offered criminals early release from prison if they would move there, as well as trying to entice Yangon’s shanty-town dwellers to relocate. The idea was to settle Buddhists in an area with a majority Rohingya population. Those who agreed to swap jail for northern Rakhine State received not only a house and land but free food rations for the first year, as long as they stayed for a minimum of three years. Around fifty villages were built for the convict pioneers. But after the three years were up, almost everyone who could leave did so.
Until very recently northern Rakhine was a little-known pocket of Burma, while the Rohingya were barely thought of by most people outside of the state, mentioned only in crude propaganda that portrayed them as Muslim trespassers from Bangladesh. ‘I don’t think I heard the word Rohingya until 2012,’ my friend Tim told me. ‘If we referred to them at all we called them Bengali Muslims. In Burmese “Rohingya” means “Arakanese People” and that’s why most Bamar people can’t accept the use of that word.’
Now, though, everyone in Burma and the rest of the world is aware of the Rohingya. Since 2016 a campaign of Tatmadaw-led terror has pushed an estimated 700,000 Rohingya across the frontier into Bangladesh, where they have joined another 300,000 who fled previous attacks. The 400,000 Rohingya thought to remain in Rakhine State are confined in their villages and camps for the internally displaced, with a few thousand penned in a ghetto in the Rakhine capital of Sittwe.
It is a humanitarian tragedy on an enormous scale, one that Bangladesh is in no position to cope with. But the aftershocks from the violence have had a disastrous impact inside Burma, too, and not just for the Rohingya. The nation’s and Aung San Suu Kyi’s reputations have taken a battering that they will struggle to recover from. And the actions of the army in Rakhine State have exposed the deep flaws in the country’s political system, just two years after the election that was supposed to herald a democratic future for Burma.
Under the 2008 constitution the military retain jurisdiction over border affairs and security, which has allowed the Tatmadaw a free hand in Rakhine State. Daw Suu has said nothing about the army’s assault on the Rohingya, her only role being to take the globa
l blame for the brutality. ‘I am very sad that she is so silent on this,’ Noor said. ‘We know she can’t control the military. But she is a Nobel Peace Prize winner and she shouldn’t protect the military, even if she can’t do anything for us.’
Sympathy for the plight of the Rohingya is in short supply in Burma, though. There are no votes to be earned or moral high ground to be won by standing up for them. Decades of stigmatisation, a slow-burning persecution, mean that just to use the name ‘Rohingya’ is enough to provoke a fight with the country’s nationalists. And the violence that began in October 2016 was prompted by a militant Muslim group, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), ambushing police posts near Maungdaw.
That attack, and further ones in August 2017, gave the Tatmadaw the excuse to sweep through northern Rakhine on an ethnic cleansing crusade, raping and killing, burning and looting, driving the Rohingya out of their villages so they could only flee across the Naf River to Bangladesh. With the United Nations, aid agencies and media almost entirely excluded from the region, the government and military claim the Rohingya left of their own volition, having first decided to raze their own homes to the ground. It is an implausible argument, one voiced initially by the Muslim-hater and Mandalay monk U Wirathu.
One of Noor’s aunt’s lost her home in the violence, burned down by the soldiers. ‘She hasn’t got anything now, just the clothes she was wearing when she escaped to my cousin’s house in Maungdaw,’ said Noor. ‘Four people were killed when the army came to my village. Almost everyone has left for Bangladesh now. The people who have stayed can’t do anything. They can’t leave the village.’
A slight 33-year-old with a greasy, orange-streaked fringe stuck to his forehead, sideburns and a wardrobe of skinny jeans and loud shirts, Noor identifies himself as Rohingya, despite his Rakhine mother, and was raised as a Muslim, although he told me he attended the mosque rarely. He is gay, too, and rather flamboyant about it for a country where same-sex relationships are still illegal and few people are openly out. But Noor wasn’t worried about any potential official inquiries into his private life. He was far more nervous about what the authorities might do if he was known to be discussing the government’s treatment of the Rohingya with a foreigner.
Growing up in Maungdaw, Noor claimed that there was little tension between the Rohingya and the much smaller Rakhine community. ‘There were no problems when I was at school. I knew a lot of Rakhine Buddhists. I’d speak Rakhine with them and the Rohingya language at home,’ he stated. Rohingya, while related to Bengali and Chittagonian, the language spoken in southern Bangladesh, is a separate tongue of its own.
Attending university in Sittwe was Noor’s introduction to the antipathy many Rakhine have for the Rohingya. ‘I had a place at Yangon University, but I couldn’t go because at that time I didn’t have an identity card. So I went to Sittwe University to study law,’ he said. ‘It was a real contrast from Maungdaw. There had been some conflict between Rohingya and Rakhine in Sittwe the year before I started, so a lot of Rakhine parents told their children not to mix with the Rohingya.’
All Rohingya are now barred from Burma’s universities, but even in 2001 they were a small minority and easy targets. ‘We didn’t sit next to the Rakhine in lectures. We couldn’t hang out on Strand Road in the evening like the other students because people would try and attack us. And on the bus if a Rohingya had a seat and Buddhist didn’t, we had to stand up and give up our seat,’ recalled Noor quietly, his eyes downcast. ‘The discrimination you experience makes you discriminate in your heart. If you’re treated like a dog, you start to hate.’
I asked why he thought there was such animosity towards the Rohingya and his answer came in a jumbled flow of reasons accompanied by nervous hand waving. ‘I blame the government. The local government officials treated us the worst. They’re not well educated, they think Muslims are their servants. And the Rakhine are really Buddhist and the Rohingya are very Muslim. Both peoples are too religious. And Rakhine and Rohingya look so different. And there’s a lack of jobs in Rakhine State. People have time to think about politics and to look for someone to blame.’
Without an identity card, Noor wasn’t eligible to receive a degree certificate when he graduated. ‘That’s when my family started thinking about leaving. It was too hard for us in Rakhine,’ Noor said. ‘My mother couldn’t tolerate the fact that I couldn’t even get my degree certificate. She donated a jeep to an official, it cost ten million kyat [£5,300], so that my sister and I could get our identity cards. They gave me my degree then. We moved to Yangon after that.’
They are not alone. Estimates of the number of Rohingya living in Yangon vary; some say up to 200,000 are resident, with many carrying identity cards describing them as Indian Muslims or, in a few cases, even as Buddhists. Shahida is one of the Rohingya hiding in plain sight from the authorities. ‘You can get permission to come to Yangon if you pay a bribe to immigration, four million kyat [£2,125],’ she told me.
Some Rohingya then move on to China or Thailand via Shan State. Ruili, a border town in Yunnan Province and a node in the jade trade, has a significant Rohingya population. Others head to Mong La, an infamous hub of criminality in Shan State, from where there are long-established people-smuggling routes to Thailand. Once in Thailand, most travel farther south to Malaysia or fly to the Middle East. But many Rohingya choose to remain in Yangon, unwilling to leave Burma while they still have relatives in Rakhine State.
Bright and passionate with an unblinking gaze, gold bracelets dangling on her wrists, Shahida grew up in Sittwe. Unlike northern Rakhine, the Rohingya were always a minority in Sittwe, making up around a quarter of the population. Shahida had also been prevented from attending Yangon University, even though she has an identity card, and was also refused permission to study for a postgraduate degree. ‘Muslims aren’t allowed to do a master’s,’ she sighed. Like Noor, she’d made me promise not to use her real name.
Shahida left Sittwe in 2013, a year after the persecution of the Rohingya had begun to make global headlines. The alleged rape and murder of a Buddhist woman by Rohingya men in May 2012 triggered a wave of tit-for-tat violence across Rakhine State in the following months. Rakhine mobs set fire to all but two of Sittwe’s Muslim neighbourhoods, despite a heavy army presence. ‘It was like a nightmare. I thought I would be killed,’ remembered Shahida. Two of her uncles died in the clashes and more than 100,000 Rohingya were herded into camps outside Sittwe.
Around four thousand Rohingya remain in Sittwe now, confined to a small area surrounded by police posts, with no one allowed in or out unless they have official permission. For a year after the 2012 rioting Shahida lived with her family in the ghetto. ‘It felt like being locked up. We weren’t able to leave the neighbourhood. We mostly stayed in the house. My sister went crazy, she couldn’t handle it. A Rakhine family we knew supplied us with groceries, for double the normal price,’ said Shahida.
Life has improved since they came to Yangon, swapping a large house for a cramped apartment. ‘Yangon was so bright after spending so long hiding in the house,’ she said. But Shahida is conscious that her family were able to leave only because they have money. ‘The people in the camps outside Sittwe, they can’t afford to pay a bribe to get out,’ she said. She feels unwelcome in Yangon, too. ‘Some of the other Muslims here say, “You’re causing trouble for us.” Living as a Rohingya is stressful and depressing, because I don’t think things will change for us.’
Like Noor, Shahida believes the authorities have deliberately escalated the tensions between the Rakhine and the Rohingya. ‘The fuel is always there. It just needs a spark and the army likes to provide it,’ she said grimly. ‘I think the Rakhine were incited to riot in 2012. Monks were distributing pamphlets saying, “Bengalis will steal your land. You need to protect your race and religion.” I feel sorry for the Rakhine. They are just as poor as us and are being manipulated by the army and the monks.’
The Second World War was the first time the
Rohingya and Rakhine squared off against each other in significant numbers. The British recruited the Rohingya to fight for them, the Rakhine sided with the Japanese and both indulged in sectarian violence. But there is a long and strong tradition of radical Buddhism in Rakhine, with local clerics prominent in the campaign for independence from Britain. Today, monks form some of the recruits to the increasingly active Arakan Army, the Rakhine separatist militia.
For the Rakhine, like the Bamar, identity is tied to religion. To be Rakhine is to be Buddhist. That would be an asset to the military, once they initiated the process of detaching the Rohingya from the rest of the country after Ne Win’s 1962 coup. Prior to that, the Rohingya were regarded as part of Burma’s fabric. A number were elected as MPs in the 1950s and one served as Minister of Health under the then prime minister U Nu. In the 1961 census they were listed as ‘Rohingya’ rather than ‘Bengali’.
During the junta period, though, life got progressively harder for the Rohingya, as the generals looked for scapegoats to distract people from protests, the economic malaise and to justify the heavy army presence in the borderlands. The authorities started registering the Rohingya as foreigners rather than locals. In 1978 the first major exodus took place, when around 200,000 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh saying they had been driven out of their homes by soldiers, although most would return over the next few years.
Soon the junta began to claim that Islamic insurgents were crossing from Bangladesh to link up with Rohingya separatists already present in Rakhine. There is a history of extremist Rohingya organisations based in Bangladesh, but they carried out few attacks in Burma. That might change in the future, with so many young, angry and dispossessed Rohingya men now in refugee camps in Bangladesh. But there is little evidence that ARSA, the group who ambushed the police in Maungdaw in 2016 and 2017, have any significant capability or local support.