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SPECTRUMSunday and Spectrum Editor: Paul Ruffini Chief Sub-editor: Noel Boivin Copy Editors: Mark Child, James Stover Writers: Carlos Sardia Galache, Luke Hunt Design

Editor: Kritini Upayokin Designers: Nattaya Srisawang, Kanokthip Khunteeraprasert and Piyapan Dissaneewet Photographer: Pornprom Satrabhaya Phone: 02-240-3700

ext 3487 Email: spectrum@bangkokpost.co.th; Cover photo: Surapol Promsaka Na Sakolnakorn

SPECTRUM is edited by Pattnapong Chantranontwong for The Post Publishing PLC, 136 Na Ranong Road, Klong Toey, Bangkok 10110

Fear, loathingand lies inRakhine stateRohingya in the region are confined to designatedareas while all around them monks and authoritiesstoke anti-Muslim sentiment. And this disdain forthe group seems to be receiving the tacit approvalof the majority of Myanmar people — with evenAung San Suu Kyi silentStory and Photos By Carlos Sardia GalacheNEGLECTED: Rohingya at Taungup refugee camp

about 10km from Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine State.

Sittwe, the capital of RakhineState in Western Myanmar,has become a city full of straydogs. Hundreds of them roamthe streets abandoned by theirowners, who were among the

thousands forced to take refuge in campsfor internally displaced people or otherwiserelocate after a murderous wave of sectarianviolence between the Buddhist Rakhinemajority and the Muslim Rohingya minorityerupted in the region two months ago.

The violence started after it was reportedon May 28 that a 26 year-old Buddhistwoman had been raped and killed byMuslim men. Three Muslim men weredetained the following day.

The case lit the fuse for communal vio-lence in the area and on June 3 about 300Buddhists attacked a bus in Taungup, killing10 Muslim men, reportedly in front ofpolicemen and soldiers who did not inter-vene.

It is difficult to determine exactly whathappened next as there were no indepen-dent observers in the area and most peopleinvolved claim to have acted in self-defence,but within one week the state was plungedinto in an orgy of violence that saw bothRakhine and Rohingya mobs torchinghouses and committing horrific acts ofviolence against one another. >>

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‘‘There is no organisation trying to establish a Rohingya

state. We are only looking for ethnicity and to qualify for

citizenship.ABU TAHAY

‘‘The problem are these Rohingya foreigners and we have

to contain them one way or another; something like what

happened in the United States during World War IIU WIN TIN

FOUNDING MEMBER OF NLD

SECURITY STOP: A checkpoint at the entrance of Sittwe set up after the imposition of a night-time curfew.

>> According to a recent report by Human RightsWatch, security forces stood idly by at theoutset of the violence before they began shootingat the Rohingya. At one point the conflict eventhreatened to spread to the rest of the country,prompting the government to declare a stateof emergency in Rakhine State.

Official estimates put the overall death tollat 78, a gross underestimate in the opinion ofseveral human rights groups. Thousands ofRohingya refugees tried to flee to Bangladesh,only to be blocked, and sometimes shot, byBangladeshi security forces. Now there arearound 70,000 displaced people in the region,most of them Rohingya living in villages orcamps around Sittwe, but also Rakhine people,mainly sheltered in Buddhist monastery camps.

AN UNEASY PEACE‘‘The city is now getting back to normal.Everything is peaceful and quiet now,’’ saida local member of Aung San Suu Kyi’s NationalLeague for Democracy party, who, like manyothers in Sittwe, refused to be identified.

His assessment seems correct at first glance.Apart from the curfew imposed by authorities,a sense of normalcy prevails downtown.

However, that impression changes thefurther out one moves. All around the city,vast neighbourhoods were burned ordestroyed during the riots. One of these isNarzi, a Muslim-majority quarter with a popu-lation of 10,000 on the outskirts of Sittwe.After being evacuated by authorities, it nowgives the impression of a city devastated bya natural disaster or war. Its streets are desertedapart from the stray dogs and buildings onhuge swathes of land have been razed to theground by fire.

But the most stark reminder of the violencein Sittwe, a city where Muslims once accountedfor as much as 40% of the population, thesedays there is not a single one to be found onmost of its streets.

According to the official narrative the Myan-

mar government is playing the role of ‘‘agood referee’’ in Rakhine State.

In a report leaked to AFP, President TheinSein stated that ‘‘political parties, some monksand some individuals are increasing the ethnichatred’’ against the Rohingya in Rakhine State.The comments came just one month after hepublicly called for the expulsion of the Rohin-gya from the state.

However, the official view is that securityforces from Yangon are less biased towardsthe Rohingya than their counterparts in Rak-hine State and have been sent there to separateboth communities to prevent further violence.

But the situation on the ground tells adifferent story. Security forces have not merelyseparated the two communities; they haveconfined the Muslim population into specificareas: internally displaced person camps out-side the city and small ghetto-like quartersheavily guarded by the police and army. Andwhile the rest of the population can movefreely, Muslims are confined to their designatedcamp or specified areas.

The conditions are dire in Muslim campslike Tat Kal Pyin. A clutch of buildings in themiddle of an area reserved for the Rohingya,it houses 3,100 people, living in cubicles ofthree square metres for each family. The WorldFood Programme, with the assistance ofdonors and the government of Turkey, suppliesfood for the refugees, but some children thereshow signs of malnutrition.

The Muslim quarters are off-limits forvisitors and journalists, but some residentsthere said by phone that they don’t receiveany aid and, as such, their supplies areexhausted and they are forced to buy foodfrom the police at as much as 10 times itsmarket price. They also claim that they donot have access to medical care because mostRakhine doctors refuse to treat them.

The Myanmar government has notannounced any plans to end the confinementof the Rohingya. Meanwhile, the number of

refugees in Rakhine camps is dwindling asthey return to what is left of their normallives. Many of them believe that the economicimpact of the recent violence will be felt fora long time.

LONGSTANDING SECTARIAN TENSIONSThere is a pervasive siege mentality in theRakhine community and a deeply embeddedfear and hatred of the Rohingya and Muslimsin general in Sittwe, with damning rumoursabout them constantly circulating throughoutthe city.

Some Buddhist monks Spectrum spoke towere keen to spread such rumours.

U Chuzarthar, the abbot of Budawmawmonastery in the city, said that the Muslimcommunity in Rakhine State has beeninfiltrated by al-Qaeda and other extremistforeign organisations.

To prove his point, he showed a VCD fea-turing images of violence and ‘‘Muslim extrem-ists’’, among them a picture of the Thai armydetaining insurgents in southern Thailand.He claimed, however, that it was the Myanmararmy and that nobody was able to trace thesource of the video.

U Pinnyarthami, the abbot of another mon-astery, said that he believed al-Qaeda wasusing international NGOs working in the areaand the United Nations to supply localterrorists with weapons.

His comments were symptomatic of thewidespread distrust among the Rakhinetowards international NGOs and the UN, whothey believe work exclusively for the Rohingyaand neglect the Rakhine people, who alsosuffer in Myanmar’s second poorest state.

Tensions between the two communitieshave been simmering for decades in RakhineState, occasionally boiling over into sporadicepisodes of violence. These episodes haveoften been provoked by the government in abid to divert attention of political problems.

Rakhine natives and large sections of the

rest of the country’s population view theRohingya as illegal immigrants fromBangladesh poised to invade the country andestablish an Islamic state in Rakhine.

Abu Tahay, the head of the political depart-ment for the National Democratic Party forDevelopment, a Rohingya party, denies thisaccusations: ‘‘This is a totally fabricatedaccusation by some racist politicians. Thereis no organisation trying to establish a Rohin-gya state. We are only looking for ethnicityand to qualify for citizenship.’’

At the heart of the problem lies Myanmar’s1982 Citizenship Law, which only grants citi-zenship to those who belong to one of the135 ‘‘historical ethnicities’’ that were in Myan-mar prior to 1823, when the British conqueredthe southern part of the country.

There is much debate among scholars aboutwhen the Rohingya arrived in Rakhine State,but there is no doubt that they have been therefor generations. In 1820, for example, Britishethnologist Walter Hamilton referred to the‘‘Rooinga’’ as ‘‘the Mahommedans [sic] whohave been long settled in the country’’.

Regardless, the Myanmar government con-tends they arrived much later, making themineligible for full citizenship.

As a stateless people, it is virtually impossiblefor most Rohingya to prove that they or theirancestors were born in Myanmar. They do nothave freedom of movement, cannot marry with-out permission from the authorities and theirreligious freedoms are severely restricted.

THE LADY’S SILENCEThe recent wave of sectarian violence brokejust before Aung San Suu Kyi made her firsttrip to Europe in 24 years.

The Nobel Peace Prize laureate has thusfar avoided taking a clear position on theissue, except to say that she doesn’t know ifthe Rohingya should be considered Myanmarnationals and that ‘‘we are not certain exactlywhat the requirements of citizenship laws

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TAKING SHELTER: Above, Rakhine people at a Buddhist monastery in Sittwe. GHOST TOWN: Above, below and below left; Narzi, a Muslim quarter in Sittwe that was razed during recent violence.

are’’. It is commonly assumed abroad thatMrs Suu Kyi does not want to take a pro-Rohingya stance for fear of alienating votersprior to elections scheduled for 2015.

While Mrs Suu Kyi has remained silent,other members of her party have not.

U Win Tin, a founding member of the NLDand perhaps its second most influential mem-ber, told this reporter in late July that theconflict in Rakhine State was ‘‘created byforeigners, by Bengalis’’. He said the peopleof Myanmar ‘‘cannot regard them as citizens,because they are not our citizens at all, every-one knows here that’’. He said the problemwas that ‘‘they want to claim the land, theywant to claim themselves as a race, they wantto claim to be natives and this is not right’’.

U Win Tin believes that ‘‘we have to keep

our citizenship law very tight’’. He refused tocomment specifically on the 1982 law, butsaid: ‘‘We can worsen the problem if we changethe law now. The problem must be solvedaccording to the law, maybe the 1982 [legis-lation], but if that law is not enough we willhave to change it.’’

He also suggested a solution to the crisis:‘‘The problem are these Rohingya foreignersand wehave tocontain themone wayor another;something like what happened in the UnitedStates during World War II with the Japanese.The US government contained them in campsand after the war they were sent to Japan orthey could apply for citizenship. We can solvethis problem that way.’

‘‘My position is that we must not violate thehuman rights of these people, the Rohingya, or

whatever they are. Once they are inside ourland maybe we have to contain them in oneplace, like a camp, but we must value theirhuman rights.’’

Other NLD members expressed similarsentiments.

Nyo Aye, one of the members of the NLD’sRakhine State commission, said she agreedwith the proposal of President Thein Sein toput Rohingya people in camps managed bythe United Nations High Commissioner forRefugeesuntil theycanbesenttoothercountries.She also stated that the Rohingya "migratedfrom Bangladesh, so they are not our ethnicpeople," and added that ‘‘this conflict is relatedwith foreign Muslim extremists’’.

Some in Myanmar defend the Rohingya.Among them is the famous comedian and

political activist Zarganar, the monk AshinGambari, a leader of the 2007 ‘‘Saffron Revo-lution’’, and Htuu Lou Rae Den, a young Bud-dhist from Yangon who has launched a cam-paign called ‘‘Coexist’’, advocating peace amongBuddhist and Muslim communities in RakhineState and throughout the country.

Nevertheless, such voices are in the minorityin a country where Islamophobia runs deep.And it is likely that much of this anti-Rohingyasentiment stems from a general consensus onethnicity as it pertains to nationhood. As MyoYan Naung Thein, an activist from Yangon anddirector of Bayda Institute, closely linked withthe NLD, put it: ‘‘The military, Aung San SuuKyi, the 88 generation students and the polit-icians, we all share the same opinion aboutnational identity.’’