How did the Rohingya become such a persecuted minority?
We have to take a step back in history during the Second World War. Myanmar, then called Burma, was under British colonial rule. When the Japanese invaded Burma, the majority Buddhist population sided with the Japanese invaders, including current leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s father, General Aung San, who was one of the founding generals of Myanmar. They sided with the Japanese invaders because they believed Japan would be victorious in the war, and they would expel the British colonial masters. The Rohingya minority, on the other hand, stayed loyal to the British, so that when the war was over, and the British were victorious, there was bad blood. The Rohingya was seen as the enemy.
> And those grievances persisted?
> Myanmar became independent in 1948, and the British colonialists left. The country had a relatively peaceful couple of decades until 1962. In 1962, there was a military coup by the army chief of staff General Ne Win. When he came to power, he implemented a program called “The Burmese Road to Socialism.” It’s essentially a communist manifesto. It was a complete and utter economic disaster. So he did what a lot of military dictators do in that situation: tried to find a scapegoat to blame the economic failure on.
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> So the Rohingya became that scapegoat.
> The Rohingya was the minority of choice for this. They’re the largest ethnic minority in Myanmar. They look different. They have different features. They are a different color. They speak a different language. And they have a different religion. They had already been scapegoated as the enemy within, and now [the country] could blame all the ills of society on them.
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> On top of that, General Ne Win did what we see a lot of Middle Eastern dictators do today, in that he donned the cloak of religiosity. When things start going wrong, they start becoming more religious, going to the mosque, be seen praying, et cetera. Ne Win did exactly the same thing. He became much more overtly Buddhist. The military then started fulfilling the obligations of Theravada Buddhism, the Buddhism that Burma follows. He made Buddhism the state religion of Burma. The Buddhist citizens could be loyal citizens, but everybody else was a noncitizen.
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> So Buddhism became somewhat weaponized, as strange as that sounds, during this period?
> One of the questions that gets asked most often is, aren’t Buddhists peaceful people? But the Buddhism they follow in Myanmar, it’s not the Buddhism you and I are familiar with. They don’t recognize the Dalai Lama, for example. Theravada Buddhism is actually very militant. They believe all other ideologies and religions have to be kept in check, and have to be suppressed in order for Buddhism to thrive.
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> How did this elevation of Buddhism in the military play out in practice?
> The military passed a number of laws, including the 1974 Emergency Immigration Act, and all the Rohingya were stripped of their citizenship. That was followed by the 1982 Citizenship Law, which said all Rohingya are actually foreigners; they’re actually all illegal immigrants who have come from Bangladesh, and they should all go back to Bangladesh.
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> Go back to Bangladesh?
> This is the most common narrative. It’s been repeated so often in Myanmar that it’s actually accepted now as fact. Bizarrely, they put a date on it: They say in March 1942, the term Rohingya was manufactured by these illegal immigrants from Bangladesh to give themselves a false identity, and that before 1942, the term Rohingya did not exist. Which is patently false.
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> One of the things I said in my book is that I went to the Indian National Archives in New Delhi, and I dug up documents from the British colonial period, some of them dating back to 1799, 1826, and 1824, which is when the British had done a census of that whole region. It clearly states that one in three souls in that region are “Musulmans” of Rohingya origin. The term existed back in 1799. So this idea that it’s a manufactured term, and these people are illegal, is false. The historical record shows they’ve been there for centuries.
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> But the monks and the military pushed this paranoid narrative that the Rohingya came here to destroy the Buddhist heritage. Today, you have some extremist groups and other religious Buddhist groups that are calling for the Rohingya to be eliminated.
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