Diversity in All Forms! discussion

Countries/Territories: Burkina Faso, Burma (Myanmar) or Burundi

First, They Erased Our Name a Rohingya speaks by Habiburahman

Oh my goodness, but Rohingyas are absolutely a tenacious group! They have been 'purged' from Myanmar many times for decades, if not maybe almost a century, in periodic ethnic cleansings.

The cruelty of government officials AND the majority of people from Myanmar has become more and more brutal with each cycle of violence against the Rohingyas. Every time they move into another country they aren't wanted there either, and they get treated with disgust and rage, even in another Muslim country like Bangladesh.

What is REALLY going on?

Warfare, strife and ethnic drama has been ongoing in this section of land for millennia! But to the point of more current issues:

From Wikipedia:

In 1982, the citizenship law enacted by the Burmese military junta did not list the Rohingya as one of the 135 "national races" of Burma. This made much of the Rohingya population in Burma stateless in their historical homeland of Arakan. General Ne Win drafted Citizenship Act in 1982, which denied citizenship rights to any community/group that was not listed in a survey conducted by British in 1824. All other ethnic groups were considered aliens to the land or invaders. Eight major ethnicities Arakan, Chin, Kachin, Karen, Kayah, Mon, Shan, and Burmese were broken into 135 small ethnic groups. Groups like Rohingya who do not belong to any of these 135 ethnicities were denied citizenship rights. Taking into account just one survey for defining the history of a group of people is highly problematic. It overlooks the fact that Rohingya were mentioned in records earlier to this survey.

Scholars like Maung Zarni have argued that Burmese military ‘encoded its anti-Indian and anti-Muslim racism in its laws and policies’. He further argues;

“The 1982 Citizenship Act serves as the state’s legal and ideological foundation on which all forms of violence, execution, restrictions, and human rights crimes are justified and committed with state impunity if carried out horizontally by the local ultra-nationalist Rakhine Buddhists.

In light of the on-the-ground link between the legalized removal of citizenship from the Rohingya and the implementation of a permanent set of draconian laws and policies—as opposed to periodic “anti-immigration” operations—amount to the infliction on the Rohingya of conditions of life designed to bring about serious bodily and mental harm and to destroy the group in whole or in part. As such, the illegalization of the Rohingya in Myanmar is an indication of the intent of the State to both remove the Rohingya permanently from their homeland and to destroy the Rohingya as a group.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingy...

The book humanizes the Rohingyas so it is obvious they live like most poor village family folks in Asia and India. But as far as the political situation, what a mess!