Among the half million Rohingya refugees who have come to Bangladesh, only a handful of them are Hindus. In their statements to many journalists and authorities, these people have described suffering horrors of slaughter and arson just like their Muslim neighbours.

In particular, Rohingya refugees from the Hindu neighbourhood of Fakirabazar in Maungdaw, described how masked assailants clad in black had shot and stabbed people and dumped the bodies in holes in the ground.

Over the last week and a half, however, some of the statements have begun to change. The Hindus, who are mostly gathered in a separate camp in Ukhiya, Cox’s Bazar, have started to blame “militant Muslims” for attacks on the Hindus.

Last week, a group of Rohingya women told AFP they were Hindus, brought forcibly to the Kutupalong refugee camp in Bangladesh by a group of men and told to convert to Islam.

A reporter from Indian news magazine India Today also found a woman from this group. She claimed to have been forced to perform namaz and wear a burqa.
Reuters reports that in late August, a group of Hindu Rohingya women had told them it was Rakhine Buddhists who attacked them. But later on, three of them changed their statements to say the attackers were Rohingya Muslims, who brought them here and told them to blame the Buddhists.

The Myanmar government on September 27 announced it had found a mass grave of Hindus near Fakirabazar, where at least 45 corpses of local Hindus were buried. A group of local and foreign journalists were flown to the spot by the Myanmar army and shown decomposing skeletal bodies laid out in rows on a field outside the village, as distraught relatives wailed nearby.
 

Aerial view of a burned Rohingya village near Maungdaw, north of Rakhine state, Myanmar September 27, 2017. Photo: REUTERS

Rohingya killing Rohingya?

The Myanmar Army blamed the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) for this slaughter. Journalists have no access to Rakhine state outside of these official visits and cannot verify any of the official claims.

The same day, the Rakhine state government urged Hindu refugees who fled to Bangladesh to return, promising they will be cared for in Sittwe, according to reports in Myanmar media.

This correspondent visited the camp of Rohingya Hindus in Ukhiya and found them sheltered in a chicken farm and makeshift houses beside a Hindu temple. The majority of them were from the villages of Chikanchhari, Fakirabazar and Balibazar in Maungdaw.

The refugees said they had fled to save their lives from a group of people clad in black, whom they called “Kala Party” (Black Party). They believed these people were Rohingya Muslims.

“Muslim terrorists have become desperate and started resenting the Hindus who have citizenship in Myanmar,” said Puja Mallik, a young Hindu woman whose husband was killed by the masked men clad in black on August 25.

“The government is willing to give Muslims second class green citizenship card like ours, they do not want that. They demand the first class red citizenship cards that the Moghs [Rakhine] have,” she said.

The Myanmar has three tiers of citizenship, and the green card is for “naturalised citizens,” essentially immigrants.

A number of Hindu refugees while arriving in Bangladesh had told the media that they had lost their fathers and husbands at the hands of Myanmar army for their reluctance to partake in Muslim killing in Rakhine.
 

Expectant mother Anika Dhar, 18, escaped to Bangladesh and found shelter at Kutupalong’s Hindu camp with 77 other families. Her husband Milon was shot dead by the Myanmar army on August 27. The photo was taken on September 19, 2017. Photo: Mahmud Hossain Opu/Dhaka Tribune

Cox’s Bazar Correspondent for New Age Mohammad Nurul Islam said: “They arrived in Bangladesh with the Muslim refugees and told us that the Buddhists had attacked them. We have audio records of their speeches.”

“Myanmar military and Buddhists killed my husband for not participating in killing and ousting Rohingya Muslims,” Anika Dhar, a pregnant Hindu housewife, had told the Daily New Age in late August.

She also told a senior journalist with the Reuters Television that she had taken shelter in a Muslim village after her husband was killed and came to Bangladesh with them.

Another woman, Padma Bala, who arrived in Bangladesh on August 30, told the same journalist: “The Moghs [Rakhine] are cutting us up.” The Reuters journalist is still in possession of the audio recording.

Many Rohingya Hindus have said they received support from Muslim neighbours in escaping the army’s persecution.

“The Kala Party with arms, bombs and lethal weapons confined us to our houses for five consecutive days. We managed to escape the confinement with a Muslim neighbour’s help,” Arimahan Rudra told the Dhaka Tribune.

According to him there were 607 Hindus in the camp.

What do Rohingya Muslims say?

The green card citizenship makes the Hindus more privileged than the Muslims. They can study in colleges and universities, they can get jobs and medical treatment from government hospitals, they can travel freely, at least in theory, and they can vote.

On the other hand, Rohingya Muslims demand full-fledged citizenship, acknowledgement as Rohingya, and removal of state-sponsored restrictions; demands that are unlikely to be ever fulfilled.

Many Rohingya Muslims think this is Myanmar’s long-term plan, a classic divide and rule strategy, to create anger and hatred between the two religious groups among the Rohingya.
 

Hashu Mia, a Muslim refugee from Fakirabazar village. Photo: Mahadi Al Hasnat/Dhaka Tribune

“We, the Hindus and Muslims, have been living together more than a hundred years in our village. The differences in our religious faiths did not create any trouble,” said Hashu Mia, a Muslim refugee from Fakirabazar village, now in Kutupalong.

“After coming to Bangladesh, I met one of my Hindu neighbours in Kutupalong bazar last week. He was the first to recognise me here. He embraced me tightly and we cried,” he said.

However, some Rohingya Muslims say some members of the Hindu community had sided with the army and Rakhine militia since the violence erupted.

“The Hindus are collaborating with the army and Moghs in Muslim killing. They helped them in looting and torching Muslim houses as they know the localities well,” said Abdus Salam, another Rohingya refugee from Fakirabazar.

“The relation between Hindus and Muslims has significantly deteriorated over a month,” he told the Dhaka Tribune.

Manufacturing a divide

The Rohingya insurgent group ARSA has strongly denounced the allegations brought by the Myanmar army.

“ARSA categorically denies that any of its member of combatants perpetrated murder, sexual violence, or forcible recruitment in the village of Fakirabazar, Riktapur and Chikonchhari in Maungdaw on or about 25 August 2017,” the statement issued on Wednesday said.

Who then, killed the Rohingya Hindus in the Rakhine state?

Rohingya refugees say that since ARSA’s attack, the Myanmar army started a deadly crackdown and killed hundreds of villagers regardless of their religious identities.

“The army is playing a game. The Buddhists and government agents attacked the Hindu villages so that they can justify the military crackdown targeted on Muslim eradication,” Mohammad Ayes, who enrolled himself in ARSA in August, told the Dhaka Tribune.

Mohammad Ayes, who joined ARSA a few days before the insurgent attacks, said the government used the conflict between the Hindus and Muslims, and take side of the Hindus as they were working for them.

Ayes argued that since the ARSA combatants do not have any dress code, they do not need to hide their identity with black masks.

“Whoever uses masks, it means they want to hide their identities and commit atrocities. It is a conspiracy against the Rohingya Muslims to prove that what the army is doing is legal and necessary,”

“If Hindus were really attacked by the Muslims, would they not be afraid to escape with the Muslims to get shelter in Bangladesh?” he asked.

Ayes alleged that since the Rohingya Hindus already had Myanmar citizenship and the government had urged them to return, they were blaming Muslims to express their loyalty towards the government.

Another ARSA member who claimed to be a Jimmadar (commander) told the Dhaka Tribune through a messaging app that the corpses the Myanmar army found could be any Rohingya.

“Now they are showing those bodies and forcing the Hindu people to cry in front of the bodies and say that those corpses were their relatives,” he said.
“UN bodies and others are trying to enter Rakhine state to investigate what atrocities were done by the military. So they buried the bodies of Rohingya. If any investigation is carried out the military will be accused for sure. So to destroy the evidence they are posing Muslim bodies as Hindu bodies,” the militant said.

‘We want to go to India’

Asked why they had come to Bangladesh instead of moving further inland, Bhuban Pal, a refugee in the Hindu camp, said that they perceived all Muslims to be against them and had moved to Bangladesh because it was closer.

“One of our community leaders, Nirmal Dhar, told us we would be safe here and he would arrange our return soon,” he added.

Several refugees, when asked whether they had heard about Rakhine state government’s invitation to the Hindus to return and stay in Sittwe, said they did not feel safe in Myanmar and wanted to go to India.
 

A Hindu refugee camp built inside a chicken coop.  Photo: Mahadi Al Hasnat/Dhaka Tribune

“I would feel at peace in India. In Myanmar we will never feel safe,” one woman told the Dhaka Tribune.

India issued a prompt response when Myanmar army announced its finding of mass graves, calling on the country’s government to bring to justice perpetrators of the crime.

“We have conveyed our concerns about the affected people to Myanmar. The affected families should be given appropriate compensation,” Raveesh Kumar, the Indian External affairs Ministry spokesperson, told the press.
 

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The Myanmar government have urged Hindu refugees who fled to Bangladesh to return, promising they will be cared for in Sittwe, Frontier Myanmar reports.

An estimated 500 Hindus crossed over to refugee camps in Bangladesh in the weeks since the August 25 attacks on police posts in Maungdaw by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA).
U Bu Hla Shwe, Coordinator of the Danyawady IDP (Internally Displaced People) camp in Sittwe on behalf of the Rakhine State government, told Frontier on Tuesday that most of the Hindus across the border are from Ohtein village in Maungdaw Township, and had fled the day after the initial attacks last month.

A further eight Hindu women were from Ye Bauk Kyar village, around 15km south of the Bangladeshi border, whose inhabitants authorities previously believed had all been killed.

Tension between Myanmar’s majority Buddhists and the Rohingya, most of whom are denied citizenship, has exploded several times over the past few years as old enmities, and Buddhist nationalism, surfaced with the end of decades of harsh military rule.

There has been an exodus of Rohingya from Myanmar’s Rakhine state since August 25, when attacks by ARSA triggered a military crackdown that the United Nations has branded “ethnic cleansing”.

Courtesy: Dhaka Tribune
 

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The greatest test of our humanity. Photo Credit: MAHMUD HOSSAIN OPU/Dhaka Tribune

 

On August 26 of this year, Myanmar launched a fresh campaign of violence in its western Rakhine province that killed over thousand Rohingya civilians and displaced a staggering quarter million to neighbouring Bangladesh in barely two weeks.

Myanmar forces unleashed such carnage in response to sudden attacks carried out on August 25 by the self-styled Rohingya insurgent group Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA). ARSA’s coordinated attacks on 24 police posts left 11 security personnel dead.

No state would tolerate attacks on its security personnel. But to punish an entire community is never an acceptable response to aggression by a few.
To turn those acts of aggression into a pretext for ethnic cleansing is to commit crimes against humanity.

In an acute irony of history, today it has fallen on Bangladesh — and Sheikh Mujib’s daughter, Sheikh Hasina, Prime Minister now of Bangladesh — to give shelter to a people as desperate as we ourselves were in 1971.

Many nations are rightly wary of non-state armed actors in the post-9/11 world order. However, it is important to remember that not all armed groups — especially those that fight only members of security forces who have a record of mass civilian killings — are “extremists” or part of international terrorist conspiracies.

Let us be clear at the outset in saying that neither Bangladesh — nor Dhaka Tribune — supports ARSA, nor do we condone its violent attacks. Indeed, the state of Bangladesh does not support separatist groups anywhere, least of all among its neighbours.

But unfortunately Myanmar’s allies China and India have been all-too ready to go along with Myanmar’s demonstrably partial narrative. And so Bangladesh is compelled to stand apart on this issue, and also feeling the full brunt of Myanmar’s persecution of Rohingyas — a far greater crime than ARSA’s ill-conceived adventure last month.

Myanmar’s policy towards the Rohingyas is to clear them out entirely from their homeland, Rakhine province. It is possibly the most openly stated and diligently carried out ethnic purge of recent times. Thanks to this policy, Bangladesh has had to play host to Rohingya refugees in small numbers as far back as the late ’70s,and in substantial numbers since the early ’90s, numbering up to half a million at times.

The attacks today show signs of a new intensity. Reports of military and police personnel, at times with machete-wielding civilian militias in tow, are burning villages, hacking children and shooting unarmed civilians. Bodies are floating up the Naf River bordering Myanmar and Bangladesh. Fleeing refugees have had their legs blown off by landmines laid by the Myanmar army on their side of the border.

In the middle of such carnage, Narendra Modi, prime minister of India, went ahead with a pre-scheduled state visit to Myanmar, where he expressed full solidarity with the Myanmar state in their fight against “extremist violence.” But he said nothing about the killing of civilians. He stressed the importance of “unity and territorial integrity,” perhaps channelling Indian anxiety about their own separatists. But that may not be the only reason behind his distinctly one-sided statement.

China and India have their own complex set of relationships in this region. India right now is shaken from its recent confrontation with China over the Doklam plateau in Bhutan. In the past decade, India has also tried to cultivate Myanmar, which fell into China’s orbit during its long sojourn as a pariah state.

Yet, as China has cozied up to India’s old ally of Bangladesh, India has felt the need to strengthen its ties with Myanmar as a hedge against China’s regional aspirations. Hence, it may look away as Myanmar conducts atrocities against its own citizens. Meanwhile, China — as per its longstanding policies — doesn’t believe in chiding anyone over matters of human rights.

It’s not everyday that one is called to play the role of saviour. It is the most sacred of duties, and the greatest test of our humanity

Bangladesh fully shares the Indian and Chinese concerns about respecting the “unity and territorial integrity” of states. But to condone the wholesale killing of civilians in the name of fighting insurgents is not tolerable. Western powers, meanwhile, are sounding the right notes, but may no longer be in a position to outweigh the influence of regional heavies.

The West is hardly guiltless in the plight of the Rohingyas. Western powers nurtured Aung Sun Suu Kyi as an icon of liberty back when Myanmar was a pariah coddled by the Russo-Chinese bloc. The West was so anxious to see Suu Kyi anointed a leader that they went along with a charade of democracy arranged by Myanmar’s military junta, ignoring both that there was no real transfer of power taking place and the continuing tendency to commit gross human rights abuses by those powers.

If anything, fronting a figure like Suu Kyi has made it easier and more attractive for the junta to carry on its long-running ethnic purge of the Rohingyas.

If the West had been guilty of folly then, India and China are practicing real politik. India today is playing a role, incidentally, that America played in 1971 when the Nixon administration decided to let Pakistan have its genocide in Bangladesh as a price for access to China. Bangladesh was saved then by a pugnacious India — and leaders like Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founder of Bangladesh, and his iron-willed counterpart across the border, Indira Gandhi. In an acute irony of history, today it has fallen on Bangladesh — and Sheikh Mujib’s daughter, Sheikh Hasina, Prime Minister now of Bangladesh — to give shelter to a people as desperate as we ourselves were in 1971.

To shelter the Rohingyas will not be an easy task for Bangladesh. We are the most densely populated large nation of the world, and we have only recently graduated to lower middle-income status. What’s more, for a long time many Bangladeshis remained wary of the Rohingyas.

Many have argued that camps of destitute people would become a hive of criminal activity and upset the social balance of wherever they settled. What such prognoses get wrong is the causality; it’s not the poor who cause those crimes — they become tools of the criminal, if they are not given adequate protection.

Bangladesh, one of the biggest emigrant nations — both legal and illegal — cannot indulge in the kind of prejudice that they themselves face in many places where they seek a better livelihood. I confess that during a similar episode of violence against Rohingyas back in 2012, I too had argued for keeping a tight border, fearing that an open border would only encourage more persecution. Such considerations were predicated on the world putting pressure on Myanmar to stop its policy of ethnocide.

As we face a new reality today, where Myanmar seems intent not so much on killing a few to chase away the many but to kill as many as they can, there is a sea-change in Bangladeshi public opinion in favour of assisting those fleeing imminent death.

The signal for a new approach came right from the top when Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina called for “humane” treatment at the border. As a result, despite an occasional show of pushing some refugees back by the border guards, the Rohingyas are allowed into Bangladesh by the thousands every day.

At a time when the whole world has abandoned the Rohingyas, I personally no longer see housing them as a burden. Rather, I see it as a privilege. It’s not everyday that one is called to play the role of saviour. It is the most sacred of duties, and the greatest test of our humanity.

Where much bigger countries are unwilling to step up, it is a testament to the resilience and humanity of Bangladesh if we can play host to the Rohingyas — without condescension, without prejudice, without resentment.

Where much bigger countries are unwilling to step up, it is a testament to the resilience and humanity of Bangladesh if we can play host to the Rohingyas — without condescension, without prejudice, without resentment.

Few writers of the twentieth century have captured the terror of the sudden breach of order as well as VS Naipaul. In the bleak but unforgettable opening line to his novel A Bend in the River, he wrote: “The world is what it is. Men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”The government and the people of Myanmar have decided that the Rohingyas are “nothing.”

This is why we must give the Rohingyas shelter. We must help them avoid the cruellest of fates: becoming nothing. No matter how cruel or indifferent the world, no one deserves to become nothing.

K Anis Ahmed is the publisher of the Dhaka Tribune and Bangla Tribune.

Republished with permission of Dhaka Tribune.

 

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