Epilogue to the Rohingya Question

Dr. Habib Siddiqui

In today’s Myanmar denials of the Muslim heritage and culture, their dexterous roles in the independent Arakan (today’s Rakhine state) under the Mrauk-U dynasty (1430-1784) have become staples of a toxic Myanmarism that is criminal, divisive and murderous. Not only are the Muslims killed and their women raped, and their homes, businesses, schools, shrines and mosques destroyed, even the towns and villages bearing Muslim names are changed to Rakhine names to erase their Muslim root. 
No less problematic are the attitudes of and roles played by some of the pseudo-scholars and academics who like Julius Streicher of the Hitler’s Nazi era are selling the poison pills of racism, ultra-nationalism and bigotry to deny the Rohingya people their basic human rights as rightful citizens in Myanmar enjoying equality. Puffed up in obnoxious arrogance and a criminal vision of a race-and-religion-purified Rakhine state minus the Muslims, they twist and distort facts, and deny the existence of the Rohingya people before the British moved into Burma.
As if suffering from a serious case of selective amnesia, these Buddhist zealots and their agents – purporting sometimes to be researchers – forget to educate their cadre that the Arakanese Muslims were probably a majority in the last years of independent Arakan before Bodawpaya’s invasion.[i] Rather than explaining what had happened to those Arakanese Muslims of the pre-Bodawpaya era, they manufacture ludicrous theories about Muslim influx. [ii] By so doing, they try to deceive others and create an environment of intolerance against the Rohingya Muslims.
As I have noted elsewhere, the authors of this revisionist history to deny citizenship rights are some of the Rakhine ultra-racists and pseudo-scholars like (late) Aye Kyaw and Aye Chan, who, interestingly, did not and do not have any bites of conscience to become naturalized citizens in the USA.[iii] In our world there are hardly such dastardly examples of moral bankruptcy by academics! The sad fact is their willful distortions of facts and their absolutely evil thesis about the so-called (Rohingya) Influx Virus has been accepted as a Rakhine ‘Mein Kampf’ and interpreted as a green signal to exterminate the Rohingya and other Muslim minorities in a frontier territory that is anything but homogeneous.
Since June of this year, in a very premeditated manner with full support of the government forces, the local politicians and monks, towns after towns and villages after villages with Muslim population have simply been burned down and Muslims butchered to death, while the racist Rakhine Buddhists gave a hero’s welcome to Aye Chan as their savior.[iv] Government denies that it’s an ethnic cleansing campaign. In October, 2012, exasperated by Myanmar denialism, Human Rights Watch had to publish a satellite photo showing most of the Muslim quarter of a sizable town, Kyak Pyu, burned to the ground.[v]
In his evaluation of the treatment of the Rohingya people inside Myanmar, Professor William Schabas, the former president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, says: "When you see measures preventing births, trying to deny the identity of the people, hoping to see that they really are eventually, that they no longer exist; denying their history, denying the legitimacy of their right to live where they live, these are all warning signs that mean it's not frivolous to envisage the use of the term genocide."
In my cautious evaluation of the case, I have also reached the same conclusion.[vi] I am sure Daniel Jonah Goldhagen would also agree. And there are many other scholars and individuals who concur that what the Rohingyas are facing today is a genocidal campaign to eliminate them from Myanmar. As I have noted earlier,[vii] this eliminationist campaign has become a national project with willing participation from top to bottom with closing of ranks among local and national governments, pro and anti-government Buddhist monks, junta apologists and pro-democracy activists, President Thein Sein and Aung San Suu Kyi.[viii] They are all united to deny the apparently undeniable fact that an old fashioned genocidal program is taking place against Rohingya minority and other Muslims.
Many outsiders are simply perplexed by the role of Myanmar’s so-called Buddhist Talibans, i.e., the militant Buddhist monks.[ix] For years, Buddhism has skipped the kind of scrutiny that is commonly reserved for other religions. People in the West have held a romantic view about Buddhism, imagining, rather mistakenly, that it is a non-violent religion. Forgotten in that make-belief is centuries of Buddhist violence against others from one part of Asia to another, where millions were killed ruthlessly.[x] While compassion is considered central to Buddhist faith, the sad fact is most Buddhists have been failing on this yardstick since the days of Emperor Ashoka. Worse yet, most of them are unaware of their racism and bigotry. And a study of the history of Buddhist Burma is sufficient to reveal that it has been a hellish den of prejudice and intolerance for more than a millennium.[xi]
In the context of Bangladesh and Arakan, for centuries the southern Bengal (today’s Bangladesh) was ravaged and devastated by Buddhist terrorism when hundreds of thousands of Bengali Muslims and Hindus were forcibly abducted, their palms pierced and enslaved to work inside Arakan.[xii] It is not difficult to guess how many Bengalis were killed and women raped by those marauding Buddhist Maghs (Rakhines). Many of those abducted did not even make it alive at the end of their abduction. And the greatest tragedy is while the descendants of former slaves from Africa to the Americas have been recognized as citizens in those territories of their captivity, the descendants of those Bengalis enslaved in Arakan and Burma continue to be denied their rights to citizenship. We hardly have a parallel of that travesty of fairness and justice in our time!
To some historians, the worsening of Muslim-Buddhist relationship originated in 1942 when Japan occupied Burma. But the truth is: it is much older. As Charney has rightly noted, Muslim-Buddhist relationship took a downward trend since Shah Shuja’s visit to Arakan in 1660 when he was betrayed by the Arakanese ruler and killed. Some of the latter rulers, encouraged by monks, tried a Buddhicization of the kingdom. By the end of the 18th century some groups in Arakanese Buddhist society had begun to call for social exclusion (apartheid) on the basis of popular religious affiliation.[xiii]
With Bodawpaya’s annexation of Arakan in 1784, the relationship simply worsened. From 1787, the “Rakhine Arei-taw-poun” (popularly known as the “Danra-waddy Arei-taw-poun”) composed by a Buddhist missionary (known as sasana-pru or ‘propagator of religion’) monk based in San-twei, emerged as a highly pro-Buddhist and anti-Muslim epic. Among other things, it cast aspersions on Muslims and warned Arakanese kings that the ‘dangers’ of the Muslims posed to the ‘Arakanese’ way of life. “The Arakanese are Maramas (Burmans), the text suggested. In the 19th century, these sentiments began to influence the popular notions of group identification,” Charney noted.[xiv]
Many of the today’s Buddhist monks in Myanmar are spiritual students of that 18th century highly chauvinist Rakhine monk. It is no accident that they are the greatest backers of expulsion and exclusion, and have been the catalysts within the broader society inciting intolerance against and providing moral justification for extermination of Muslims. [xv] Within the Buddhist society they have always played a major role, since every Buddhist male must embrace monkhood at least once in his lifetime. It would be naïve to assume that extremist Buddhist monk Wirathu, who heads the Burmese monks and is leading the crusade, is an exception in the racist Burmese society. He spent more than 10 years in jail for his direct involvement in clashes between Buddhists and Muslims in 2001 in the city of Mandalay. He was released late last year as part of the new government's round of amnesties, and soon visited by Aung Thaung, a man known to be close to former dictator Than Shwe.[xvi] So, with the racist monks holding the leash, and ties with the government, it is highly unlikely that Buddhist violence against the minority Muslims, esp. the Rohingya will stop anytime soon.
Is there a way out of these Buddhist acts of inhumanity which are soiling the image of Buddhism? Can our generation tolerate another genocide?
The sad reality is prejudice dies hard. For the Buddhists in Myanmar, esp. in the Rakhine state, it would take years of de-programming to shun old myths and prejudices about the ‘other’ peoples, esp. the Rohingyas who have no less of a claim to citizenship than them. However, the government can accelerate this process of learning, if it is sincere about moving forward. It must also rein on the racist elements so that they cannot have an abrasive effect on racial-religious relationships. It must learn like many others in our world who have learned through their bitter experiences that racism and bigotry are not acceptable in our world which is increasingly becoming globalized and diverse. The sooner the better!

Myanmar's generals no longer to blame for Rohingya attacks

Sholto Byrnes

The National

December 18, 2012

Too often the spotlight of international attention alights on a particular situation only after years have passed. The barbarous excesses of the Assads, both father and son, against their own people, for instance, were well-known for decades. So too, with the Muslim Rohingya of Rakhine state in western Myanmar, a community that has suffered under various rulers, varying from the unsympathetic to the brutal to the criminally apathetic - which is the most charitable description of the current government's attitude towards violence against the Rohingya. 

This has been the state of affairs since the original kingdom of Arakan, as the region was historically known, was annexed by the present-day state of Myanmar in the late 18th century. 

The world is now taking notice of their plight - 100,000 people displaced, villages torched and scores dead since the rape of a Buddhist woman in May sparked the latest rounds of violence. The attention is because of the opening of Myanmar, both in its political and civil society spheres. 

The country was until recently seen entirely in black and white terms. One of the many charges laid against the military regime that took power in 1962 - which only relinquished control (in name only, some would argue) when a former general, Thein Sein, became president in 2011 - was its continuing persecution of Myanmar's many ethnic minorities, particularly in the border regions. The list of atrocities the army stands accused of runs from systematic rape to forcing locals to clear fields of landmines by walking across them. 

A Myanmar that has begun the process of democratisation and is loosening the grip of one of the world's most notorious police states has been embraced by western nations, but perhaps precipitously. With Aung San Suu Kyi free, able to stand for election and at last accept her Nobel Peace Prize in person, all would be well, seemed to be the view. One of the most admired women on the planet would surely usher her country into the community of nations as a peaceful, liberal, enlightened state, living in harmony with its neighbours and internally with the mosaic of ethnic groups. 

But the clarity of "good" and "evil" has given way to the shades of grey that colour most political landscapes. Ms Suu Kyi has been notably unforthcoming about the aggression inflicted on the Rohingya, and the injustice that a community dating back centuries has been denied citizenship since 1974 by Myanmar. Officials routinely declare Rohingya to be Bengali immigrants. 

Ms Suu Kyi is a politician now and has to take note of the realities, which include the prejudices of her fellow Burmese against the non-Burmese who make up 30 per cent of the population. While she has mouthed platitudes about "people getting along with each other", the spokesman for her party, the National League for Democracy, was more direct. "The Rohingya are not our citizens," said Nyan Win in June, a position he has since maintained. 

There is a lazy, sentimental western stereotype that Buddhists are peaceful people with a somewhat otherworldly predilection for constant meditation. But of course, they are quite capable of inflicting violence, as both the Muslim minority in neighbouring Thailand's south and Rohingya in Myanmar know all too well. 

Myanmar is an example of a state whose boundaries are more fixed in international law than they ever were historically. The Shan States in the north-east, for instance, may have paid allegiance to the Burmese throne, but their princes enjoyed considerable autonomy and, according to the country's post-independence constitution, had the right to secede from the Union of Myanmar after 10 years (General Ne Win's 1962 coup put paid to that). 

Geographically isolated by the mountain range that cuts it off from the rest of Myanmar, Arakan had been home to a Muslim community since at least the 16th century. While their numbers were undoubtedly swelled by those who crossed over the relatively porous border with Bengal, their language and identity were and are distinct. 

The 1931 census recorded 130,000 Muslims in the area and there are now about 800,000 Rohingyas in Rakhine State, as it was renamed in 1989. They are not troublesome immigrants, but a persecuted ethnic group in a country where the majority has never accorded equal status to the many minorities. 

Democracy in itself is not going to be enough. Indeed, it can perpetuate majoritarian attitudes by sealing them with the approval of the ballot box. If Ms Suu Kyi is to a fulfil her potential as a politician, both she and her party must lead the way in changing not just the system of government but the attitudes of Burmese towards non-Burmese, and of Buddhists towards those of other religions. 

For decades, the country's woes could be blamed entirely on the generals. As they slip into the shadows, however, it is time for the new Myanmar to prove it is worthy of the international community's friendship. Recognising the Rohingya as citizens and extending to them the protection of the state would be a good start. 

Sholto Byrnes is editor of Think, the quarterly international magazine of Qatar Foundation, and a contributing editor of the New Statesman

Sleepless in Sittwe but dreaming of peace

The Chaung Refugee Camp in Sittwe (Photo - Nirupama Subramanian ) 

Vivian Tan

UNHCR

December 18, 2012

SITTWE, Myanmar – Six months ago, 55-year-old Misho was contemplating an early retirement. Today, all she wants is a roof over her head. She is one of the tens of thousands of people whose lives were uprooted when inter-communal violence broke out in western Myanmar's Rakhine state in June. 

"I was cooking in the afternoon when people started shouting 'Fire! Fire!'" she recalls of that fateful day. "I ran out without slippers and cut my feet in a field that had broken glass. We spent the night in a mosque. I thought I was going to die of fright." 

Overnight, the Muslim widow lost her eight-year job as a cook and cleaner with a local Rakhine family. She also lost the food stall she ran on the side, and the egg-laying chickens she raised. Her worldly possessions now consist of a blanket and sleeping mat, while home is a tent she shares with her daughter in The Chaung camp on the outskirts of the state capital, Sittwe. 

"It's cold at night and I don't have an extra set of clothes," Misho says, before acknowledging, "We were lucky to come here early, because later there was no more space." 

Recent arrivals include those who fled renewed unrest in October as well as displaced people who had been living with host families that could no longer sustain them. Those who don't fit into existing camps have been erecting makeshift shelters by the side of the road. 

As the lead organization for protection, shelter, camp coordination and camp management under the inter-agency response to this emergency, UNHCR has been working with the government to find suitable land to set up tents for these groups. 

"The first priority is to make sure there is shelter for everyone," said Maeve Murphy, who heads UNHCR's office in Sittwe. "And as camps are being set up, we work with the authorities to try and make sure they adhere to international standards, particularly from the shelter perspective." 

In addition to the tented camps around Sittwe, UNHCR is also building 263 temporary shelters this year using bamboo walls and corrugated iron roofs. Each longhouse-style shelter can accommodate eight families. 

Kyaw Hla, 58, is the camp administrator at Hpwe Yar Kone camp and lives in a government-built longhouse with 20 of his family members. While the shelter is adequate, other services are lacking in this location 45 minutes' drive from Sittwe. He wishes food rations could be distributed closer to the camp 

and laments the fact that his family has not eaten meat or fish since June. 

The women in this camp say they need proper bathing areas, hygiene materials, and cooking pots which they're using communally at the moment. 

Noting that some staff working for NGOs are hesitant to work in certain locations amid continuing communal tensions, UNHCR's Murphy said, "We're continually advocating for better water sources, more sanitation facilities with individual bathing houses for women and for mobile clinics to provide health care." 

In another longhouse-style camp called Ma Gyi Myaing, the basic services are in place but 61-year-old Ngine Saw Htet is still losing sleep. He mourns over his charred house, where only four pillars remain, and the loss of his battery-charging shop that drew both Muslim and indigenous Rakhine customers. 

"The first 10 days I couldn't sleep," he said with furrowed brows. "Now I'm slowly recovering, but I still feel afraid when it's quiet. And I worry about the future. I have no job, no income. With no financial support, I cannot start a business. My family is fully dependent on assistance." 

Over in The Chaung tented camp, Misho shares the same concerns. "I spend most of my time here praying," she says. "I pray that I can go home as soon as possible, that I can have a safe and proper house, that I can work again. I pray for peace with the Rakhine people, to live peacefully with my neighbours."

Police Extorted A Rohingya Shopkeeper, Maung Daw

On 13 Dec 2012, at 3:00PM, Win Htay Oo, a police vice corporal went to a Rohingya shopkeeper Mohamed Solam s/o Kasim (27Yr) hailed from Nyaung Chaung village tract while he was selling his own shop (Shop no: 3C-13) in Maung Daw Municipal Market where the police threatened the shopkeeper saying that he is included in the FIR list recently released by Maung Daw court. He was also told to pay money 200,000Ks otherwise he would be arrested and sentenced for long imprisonment. The police extorted 100,000Ks from Solam.

  The FIR lists was released for those who were involved in fuelling on creating the 8 June 2012 riot by Maung Daw court but most of the innocents Rohingyas who do not know anything about riot are included in this list. Due to this list many innocent Rohingyas were tortured, some were even killed and were hidden and some were sentenced for 10 or more year’s imprisonments. Polices have been threatening and extorting money from Rohingyas showing their imitated FIR list in Maung Daw and Buthidaung townships since it had been released. They have extorted even those Rohingyas who had been away from the towns for days with legal movement permission before 8 June 2012 riot begun.

BANGLADESH: NGO ban hurting undocumented Rohingya

A hut of plastic and twigs erected by an increasing number of undocumented Rohingya refugees at the Kutupalong makeshift site outside of Cox's Bazar (Photo - © David Swanson/IRIN) 

Some 40,000 undocumented Rohingya refugees are being adversely affected by a government ban four months ago on NGOs working at two makeshift sites in southeastern Bangladesh. 

“If we get some rice, we eat. Otherwise, we don’t eat,” Anowara Begum, an undocumented Rohingya refugee and 40-year-old mother-of-four at the Leda makeshift camp outside Nayapara, one of two makeshift sites outside two official government camps for Rohingya refugees told IRIN. 

"Since the NGOs stopped coming our kids don't get medicine. They don't get treated for what they need. They don't get the food they need," Sokeya Begum, 39, another undocumented Rohingya, said.

In August, Bangladeshi authorities ordered three NGOs - Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), Action Against Hunger and Muslim Aid UK – to stop the formal delivery of humanitarian services, including health care and food to undocumented Rohingya refugees, saying such services would encourage more to flee to Bangladesh.

According to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), there are more than 200,000 Rohingyas in Bangladesh, of whom only 30,000 are documented and living in two government camps assisted by the agency. 

Some 12,000 documented refugees live at the Kutupalong camp in Cox’s Bazar District, with another nearly 18,000 further south at Nayapara - both within 2km of Myanmar. 

Documented refugees are provided food rations by the World Food Programme (WFP), along with shelter assistance, non-food items, water/sanitation services, vocational training and supplementary feeding for malnourished refugees by UNHCR. 

However, most Rohingya - a mainly Muslim ethnic group who fled persecution en masse to Bangladesh from Myanmar’s neighbouring Rakhine State years earlier - are undocumented. 

UNHCR has not been permitted to register newly arriving Rohingya since mid-1992. 

Only those who are documented receive regular assistance, while those who are undocumented are largely dependent on a handful of international NGOs who until recently were allowed to work in the area. 

Poor living conditions

Prior to the government ban, conditions in the makeshift camps were described by Physicians for Human Rights as “among the worst they had ever seen”.

Most people outside the Kutupalong camp are housed in ramshackle huts made of twigs and plastic sheeting, denied food aid, and live beside open sewers, the Boston-based group says.

In its most recent survey, MSF found that global acute malnutrition, one of the basic indicators for assessing the severity of a humanitarian crisis, was as high as 27 percent at the Kutupalong makeshift camp, where an estimated 20,000 unregistered refugees live - almost double the emergency threshold of 15 percent set by the World Health Organization.

No further surveys have been made since the ban took effect. 

In June, the Bangladeshi authorities effectively closed the door to Rohingya fleeing communal violence in Rakhine State in June and October which left dozens dead and thousands of homes destroyed. 

"We are not interested in more people coming to Bangladesh," Foreign Minister Dipu Moni told reporters at the time, noting that Bangladesh was already a densely populated country and could not afford a fresh influx.

Government figures suggest 200,000-500,000 undocumented Rohingya live in villages and towns outside the camps, many of them in Cox’s Bazar, Bandarban and Chittagong.

UNHCR has repeatedly called on Dhaka to lift the ban, but more than four months on it remains in place, leaving aid workers reluctant to comment on the record. 

“The situation here is very bad, it’s horrific,” Shahina Akter, a local nutrition volunteer who asked that her organization not be identified, citing issues of severe malnutrition.

“Because of the ban, it’s harder for us to help the Rohingya,” another aid worker who asked not to be identified, confirmed.

Phil Rees: Ask Me Anything on Myanmar

Al Jazeera
December 16, 2012

Filmmaker Phil Rees will be on Reddit answering your questions about 'The Hidden Genocide'.

Do you have questions about the Muslim Rohingya in Myanmar?

Then log onto reddit.com from 2100GMT on Sunday to join the chat with film maker Phil Rees.

Phil Rees' film 'The Hidden Genocide' is a story of a people fleeing the land where they were born, of a people deprived of citizenship in their homeland. It is the story of the Rohingya of western Myanmar, whose very existence as a people is denied.

"When you see measures preventing births, trying to deny the identity of the people, hoping to see that they really are eventually, that they no longer exist; denying their history, denying the legitimacy of their right to live where they live, these are all warning signs that mean it's not frivolous to envisage the use of the term genocide," said Professor William Schabas, the former president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars.

Phil Rees is a Welsh writer, reporter and documentary maker who has specialised in international relations. 

He has covered Asia, the Middle East, Africa and the Americas during a 30-year career in journalism. He reported from Myanmar in 1991 and lived in southeast Asia for seven years.

He has won a dozen international awards, including two from Britain's Royal Television Society. For nine years he was a BBC foreign correspondent and senior producer on the BBC's flagship global affairs programme.

Greg Constantine: photographing Burma’s ‘Nowhere People’

KÜBRA GÖKÇE
Weekly Zaman
December 10, 2012

‘Stateless people are some of the most forgotten people in the world today. Statelessness is a complex issue that many people in the world today don’t even know exists. Many people can’t even fathom that a government would intentionally deny an entire group of people citizenship, that governments would use citizenship as a tool and in some cases a weapon to exclude and marginalise’

Greg Constantine is an award-winning photojournalist from the United States who is currently based in Southeast Asia. Since beginning his career as a photographer, he has worked on numerous projects, including “Moments from Modern Day Edo” (about Tokyo), “A Matter of Exposure” (about North Korean Refugees) and “The Road to Re-Entry” (about formerly incarcerated women in Watts, Los Angeles).

For the past six years, he has been working on a long-term project titled “Nowhere People”, which documents the impact that statelessness and the denial of citizenship has on ethnic minority groups around the world. He especially focuses on the struggles of the Rohingya minority ethnic group in Burma, who have been stripped of legal citizenship by the government and whose situation he describes as one of the “darkest and most dire”. With an aim to highlight the issue of global statelessness, his work has been widely published and exhibited in many countries, including Bangladesh, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Japan, Switzerland, Ukraine, Hong Kong and Kenya.

In an interview with Weekly Zaman, Greg Constantine speaks about “Nowhere People” and explains how the project today serves as a reminder of the existence of the millions of stateless people who he describes as “the most forgotten people in the world today”.

I’d like to ask about your personal history before we talk about your project. Can you tell us a little about yourself and how you got into photography?

I’m from the US and started my career as a photographer about eight years ago. I work primarily on long-term, self-assigned projects. My first project focused on North Korean refugees, many of which were children who were stateless. After living in Tokyo and then Los Angeles, I moved to Southeast Asia in late 2005 to begin work on my project “Nowhere People”.

Your work “Nowhere People” has been exhibited in several key cities around the world and also came to London’s Royal Albert Hall last November. Can you tell us about “Nowhere People”?

Originally, “Nowhere People” was going to be about one to two years long and focus primarily on stateless communities in Asia. I self-funded the project from 2006 to the end of 2008 because it was next to impossible to find anyone willing to provide funding. Slowly, the project started to receive attention. My work on statelessness in Asia was featured in a huge photo spread in the International Herald Tribune and the New York Times as well as some other really important regional magazines, which I think are crucial to the success of this project reaching important audiences.

After about one-and-a-half years of working on the project, it became clear to me that this was a global issue, so I decided to expand my project beyond Asia. I’ve collaborated with the UNHCR [the UN Refugee Agency] three times since 2008 [in Kenya, Ukraine and the Ivory Coast]. The UNHCR played a very important role in helping me to expand the project. Since then, I’ve managed to continue the project through grants. In late 2010, the UNHCR and UPS sponsored a large travelling exhibition of my “Nowhere People” project, and it is this exhibition that has travelled to all these key cities around the world.

What drew you to the issue of statelessness?

For one, no other photographer had really dedicated any length of time specifically on this issue. It really was uncharted territory, which was an opportunity for me. I also felt the issue of statelessness and the denial of citizenship touched on many themes that are fundamental to the way we live today -- that are fundamental to the way societies are administered, function and operate. Statelessness, and particularly the deliberate denial of citizenship by a state or people in power, challenges many of our definitions of identity. It exposes the power of the state over who belongs and who does not belong. It challenges the principles of an open and democratic society. It also challenges the fundamentals of who has the right to have human rights, if that makes any sense.

Besides all of this, history is a huge element of the issue of statelessness. To understand why many people are actually stateless, you need to understand how they became stateless; you need to learn the history, understand the history and, unfortunately, many of these histories are forgotten. ...

Stateless people are some of the most forgotten people in the world today. Statelessness is a complex issue that many people in the world today don’t even know exists. Many people can’t even fathom that a government would intentionally deny an entire group of people citizenship, that governments would use citizenship as a tool and in some cases a weapon -- like in Burma -- to exclude and marginalize people. So, I’ve been motivated to help shed light on the plight of many of these communities and also try to expose their stories to a wider audience. 

You focused in particular on the issue of the Rohingya from Burma. Who are the Rohingya and why did you decide to write a book about them?

The Rohingya are a Muslim minority group who have lived in the Rakhine State -- or historically known as Arakan -- in western Burma for generations. Today, they primarily live in the isolated townships of North Rakhine. They have been one of the most oppressed minority groups in the world for a very long time. Over the past 40 years, successive Burmese governments have claimed that the Rohingya are not from Burma but are migrants from Bangladesh and, even though during British colonial times there was a migration of people from the Indian subcontinent into Burma, the Muslim community [in] Rakhine have lived in Rakhine for centuries. Still, the Burmese authorities have done just about all that they can to exclude the Rohingya community from belonging to Burma. The Rohingya are denied most social, civil and economic rights and have been subjected to any number of human rights abuses. Rohingya have fled the abuse in Burma for decades. In 1978, 250,000 Rohingya fled Burma after a crackdown by Burmese authorities and the same thing happened again in 1991, when another 250,000 fled a crackdown. Right now, it is estimated that up to 300,000 Rohingya live in Bangladesh, most as unrecognised refugees.

As for my book, all of the work I have done on the Rohingya over the past six years has been done in Bangladesh. Their situation in Bangladesh, just like in Burma, is fluid. It changes, and I believe their story is one of the most serious cases of human rights abuse in the world today and one of the most extreme cases of protracted statelessness as well. To tell the story of the Rohingya the way I felt it needed to be told required me to spend years on the project. ... The book form permits me to tell the story the right way, the way the story deserves to be told, the way in which I think people will have a much better understanding of how complex and tragic the story of the Rohingya is.

You’ve been photographing the Rohingya Muslims for about six years now. Do you see a change in their situation and have they benefited from the recent reforms in Burma?

In the six years I’ve been photographing the Rohingya in Bangladesh, their situation has not improved at all. And the stories Rohingya have told me who have come out of Burma have not improved at all, either. Their situation has deteriorated. In Burma, the abuse they face at the hands of the Burmese security force, called Nasaka, has gotten worse. Not only have poor Rohingya fled North Rakhine in the past few years, but middle class Rohingya from North Rakhine have fled as well. Restrictions on the right to get married and the complications that come with these restrictions have gotten worse. Land seizure has gotten worse. The inability to travel freely has left Rohingya in North Rakhine destitute, with no other choice but to leave their homeland for Bangladesh. In southern Bangladesh, the Rohingya face growing intolerance, as was evident in the violent crackdown against them in 2012.

Bangladesh is a poor, overpopulated country with limited resources. Yes, this is true, but the neglect the Rohingya have faced in Bangladesh is a huge part of the larger story. And even though people criticise Bangladesh’s response to the Rohingya, one thing everyone needs to keep in mind -- the international community, EU, USA, ASEAN, etc. -- is that the root cause of the plight of the Rohingya rests with the abuse and exclusion they face in Burma. Have the Rohingya benefited from the recent reforms in Burma? Absolutely not. And a lot of other people in Burma have not benefited from the reforms as well, so the big question to many would be how can these reforms be considered legitimate when an enormous percentage of the population in Burma, including 800,000 Rohingya in Rakhine, have not seen much benefit from them?

What makes the Rohingya different from other stateless populations around the world?

For me, since I started my project “Nowhere People”, I’ve documented many groups of people who are stateless but, of all the groups, I think the outlook for the Rohingya has always been the darkest and most dire, specifically because there seems to be so little hope for solution in sight for them. One thing people need to recognise is that most stateless people are not refugees. They have never left the country of their birth but, mostly because of discrimination and intolerance, they are denied citizenship and the right to belong to their country of birth. Statelessness is often inherited from one generation to the next, so, in many places, generations of stateless people exist in their own countries, unrecognised, denied most fundamental rights and unable to belong to the larger fabric of society. The Rohingya is one of the only groups of people in my project who are also refugees. Successive Burmese governments, and specifically the Burmese government force called Nasaka, which is only found in the Rakhine State and nowhere else in Burma, have made life so miserable for the Rohingya, whether it be through abuse, extortion, forced labour, arbitrary land seizure or radical administrative measures like restricting the Rohingya’s ability to travel freely or restricting their ability to get married. They have no choice but to flee Burma to other countries, mostly Bangladesh.

For the billions of people on this planet who do have birth certificates, an ID card, a passport -- can you describe the pain stateless people feel?

The situation for stateless people is different all over the world. Their histories are different and the reasons why they have become stateless and continue to be stateless are different as well. But they do share some commonalities. Probably the biggest pain stateless people feel is this sense of paralysis for not being able to go about their lives like other human beings, this sense of having almost no control over their futures. Yes, stateless people are amazing in their ability to find ways to exist and make it from one day to the next, but, overall, the obstacles that have been built up in front of them are often too much for them to overcome, and I think this gives stateless people an overwhelming sense of helplessness. Being denied the ability to have vital documents, being denied the ability to have or pursue and educations, being denied the ability to own land or be legally employed or travel freely are all obstacles stateless people are faced with every day. More importantly, it is the sense of not belonging that is painful for stateless people. To be born in a place -- the same place as your father and his father -- and be denied the right to actually belong and be recognised by that place is also painful.