The Rohingyas of Myanmar and the Biopolitics of Hunger (original) (raw)
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The State against the Rohingya: Root Causes of the Expulsion of Rohingya from Myanmar
Politics, Religion & Ideology, 2021
The Rohingya crisis of Myanmar is a longstanding geopolitical predicament that has remained unresolved for 42 years, since 1978. Many of the stateless, and now stranded, Rohingya have been driven out of Myanmar to take refuge in other countries or forced to live in internally displaced persons (IDP) camps within the state of Rakhine. ARSA (Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army) attacks became an automatic excuse for genocidal activities against Rohingyas at the hands of the Myanmar government. ARSA attacks and communal violence in Rakhine both served the Myanmar government’s objective, providing justification for acts of violent retaliation. This paper examines root causes of Rohingya exile and displacement. The researcher collected data from 20 expert participants in Bangladesh and 71 displaced Rohingya victims living in the Kutupalong Rohingya Refugee Camp within Bangladesh. These data indicate the interaction of various factors, including historical legacy of conflict, religious dissension, racism, lack of social integration of Rohingyas into the mainstream Burmese community, geo-economic factors, discriminatory state policy and conflict politics of ARSA, all of which contribute to what has become the Rohingya crisis. The paper discusses theoretical and practical implications of these interacting influences.
2017
The hidden genocide of Rohingyas in Myanmar: raising voices from villages and camps in the Rakhine State. This is a piece I have originally published in Italian for Eastonline, an Italian magazine of global news and geopolitics. While it does not talk about risk or disaster issues, we perfectly know ethnic and religious discrimination dramatically increases risk vulnerability, together with the marginalization in social, economic, and cultural life of a country. Rohingyas are among the most vulnerable people in the world, and we should continue to talk about them. All pictures and interviews are mine (December 2016). Over one million of Rohingyas, a Burmese Muslim group living since centuries in Myanmar, suffer from 1948 (year of independence from the British crown) of discrimination and political delegitimization. Since decades, all the alternated governments including that of the criticized Aung San Suu Kyi, a former Nobel Prize for Peace shouldered by the armed forces and Buddhist monks, have considered Rohingyas as illegal Bengali immigrants from Bangladesh. These governments have perpetrated a "hidden genocide" through the systematic violation of citizenship and mobility rights, mass killings, arbitrary arrests, rapes, destruction and confiscation of villages. The reasons are not exclusively religious, also residing in the grabbing of Rohingyas'land to promote economic and industrial revitalization of the country, and in the need of a militarily control on the Rakhine State, in which the largest part of Rohingyas live. After the assaults and violence by the Buddhist population in 2012, the Rohingyas fled their villages. Currently, 120,000Rohingyas live in 36 camps IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons), while 280,000 still live into villages. Rohingyas experience lack of food, water, and medical assistance. Several national and international NGOs provide humanitarian assistance to IDPs camps and villages around Sittwe (the capital of Rakhine), such as the Sittwe Program and Development Organization, who delivers food to 900 families (about 4,000 people) on behalf of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Arkar, 24, from Yangon, is the coordinator of this NGO and brings me in the area where Rohingyas are confined, located 20minutes driving far from Sittwe (according to request by the NGO, the names of people and of the NGO have been changed, while the names of villages have been omitted).
The Rohingya: Displacement, deprivation, and policy
2019
Food security in Central Asia continues to be largely shaped by international commodity markets and developments in the region's major trading partners. Nevertheless, recent political events in the region had a positive impact on overall economic development as well as on food and nutrition security by stimulating intraregional trade and integration.
Ethno-political Conflict: The Rohingya Vulnerability in Myanmar
This study has been conducted to find out the root causes and consequences of ethnic conflict regarding especially the Rohingya minority in Myanmar. As Rohingya crisis in Myanmar is a contemporary and crucial issue not only in South and Southeast Asia but also in the world; that is why, it has been selected as a research topic. This study is conducted in qualitative approach. In this study, secondary sources have been used for data collection which is based on content analysis. Text books, journal articles, reports of government and non-government organizations, television and newspaper reports are the main sources of data. In this study it has been found that the Rohingya people are considered as the world's least wanted groups. They are the world's most persecuted minorities. About 43 percent of the Rohingyas are still refugees and of them 87 percent are deprived from basic needs. The main objectives of the study are: (i) to examine the root causes of ethnic conflict; (ii) to analyze the current humanitarian vulnerability of the Rohingyas. Rohingya conflict begins with mainly the denial of separate identities and rejection of their citizenship. A large number of Rohingyas are now stateless refugees who are too much vulnerable. The study will reveal the current vulnerable conditions of the Rohingyas. The findings of the study may help the different global organizations of human rights in policy supports for the Rohingyas.
Refusing Rohingya: Reformulating Ethnicity Amid Blunt Biopolitics
Current Anthropology, 2023
Members of the Rohingya ethnos must navigate the Myanmar state's "blunt biopolitics"-a mode of regulation that neither protects nor intensively knows, but rather uses violence to govern, the populations rather than individuals it takes as its object. As classic resistance is ineffective against the excessive sovereign force activated in blunt biopolitics, Rohingya communities across Asia enact strategies of refusal-what this article theorizes as methods for navigating regimes of biopolitical governmentality. As Rohingya refuse literal erasure to persist as a population, that Rohingya identity has become an amorphous object as members manuever between rejection of and assent to their symbolic effacement. They reformulate the ethnic category's contours, both consciously/ directly (in response to changing dynamics that their refusal has generated) and indirectly: not only as they enter and exit the ethnos, mimicking spatial peregrinations amid mass expulsion, but also in terms of disjunctive affiliations in which people simultaneously inhabit positions of identification with and refusal of "Rohingya." Refusal hence opens up a consideration of the collective refusing subject that acknowledges that it is simultaneously hypostatized (qua collective actor) while also malleable (qua its ever-mutating constituents and self-conceptions).
Rohingya Crisis in Myanmar: Seeking Justice for the " Stateless "
This article argues that Rohingyas in Myanmar have been deliberately excluded by its government. The claims of the government and political leaders that Rohingyas are illegal migrants could no way be justified due to the clear fact that they have been a part of long history of Burma. Due to the exclusionary policies, this population group has been systematically marginalized, persecuted, deprived of basic rights, and abused. Available protection space for Rohingya refugees in the region has become extremely volatile due to the reluctance to sign the 1951 Convention and a lack of national legal frameworks in most southeast Asian countries. Despite political pressure from the international community and local activists groups calling for the government to stop the violence, there is no sign to end the violence.
Law and Statelessness: A Case Study of the Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar
Independent Journal of Burmese Scholarship, 2021
This study deals with the citizenship issues of Rohingya people and looks into the causes of their statelessness. It argues that the 1982 Burma Citizenship Law is crucial to the Rohingya's persecution and their being deprived of Burmese citizenship. There are 135 'national races' in Myanmar which are known as 'citizens' or 'indigenous people'. The government of Myanmar excludes the Rohingya from this list of national races and uses the 1982 Citizenship Law as a weapon against the Rohingya people. Demarcations among citizens, associate citizens, and naturalized citizens are perceptible in the law. Additional restricted norms have been espoused for associate citizens and naturalized citizens. These norms compel Rohingyas to live as stateless people. This article seeks to answer four major questions: (i) What are the factors that led to the establishment of the 1982 Citizenship Law in Myanmar? (ii) How does Myanmar's 1982 Citizenship Law specifically affect Rohingya Muslims? (iii) Are Rohingyas specifically targeted by the government? (iv) Is the 1982 Citizenship Law expanding statelessness? By tackling these complex issues this article provides opportunities to better understand ethnic politics, conflicts and statelessness.
The Dream of the Buddhist-Burmese Nation-State: No Place for the Rohingya Community
Peace and Security Review, 2019
Ethno-religious tensions and sectarian violence has made up a key characteristic in Myanmar ever since its independence. One of the gravest conflicts in the country is, no doubt, the inhumanity directed towards those titled the “most persecuted minority”, i.e. the Muslim Rohingya minority by the dominant Buddhist Rakhines. While historically the violence against the Rohingya minority has been driven because of a variety of reasons by name, the policy followed by the Myanmar government against the people has been to some extent consistent in nature. This paper will focus on the link of Buddhist-Burmese nationalism and the influx of Rohingya refugees all over the world. It will also look at the past historical experiences of oppression against the Rohingya ethnic community, as well as record the ‘Burmanization’ efforts of Myanmar.