A History of Minority Persecution in Myanmar Dan Crowley CW: Rape, violence, references to disturbing images Myanmar is a majority Burmese-Buddhist nation, with a population of ethnically Muslim Rohingyas
in
persecution
its
northern
against
the
Rakhine
province.
Rohingyas
by
The
1970s
president
saw
Ne
the
Win,
onset
most
of
concerted
notably
through
‘Operation Dragon King’ (ODK) in 1978 which sought to expel Rohingyas from Rakhine. This forced removal stemmed from deep-seated historical divisions in Myanmar that were
inflamed
by
British
colonization,
the
Japanese
occupation,
and
the
Burmese
independence movement. As the objects of this persecution, the Rohingya people of Myanmar and the diaspora have and continue to experience immense physical and emotional trauma,
Historical Divisions and Collective Memory There
exists
a
deep-rooted
history
of
ethnic
tensions
in
Myanmar.
Discriminatory
citizenship laws were enforced against the Rohingya people as a result of beliefs that their inhabitance of Rakhine did not pre-date British colonialism. Case in point was President Ne Win’s 1982 Citizenship Law, which extended citizenship only to those whose ancestors had lived in Myanmar in the ‘period anterior to… 1823 A.D.’ This law was intended to redress historical wrongs, rather than contemporary wrongs. As Ne Win explained in a speech in October 1982:
‘If this law must be explained, what has happened in the past must necessarily be recalled… those foreigners who had settled in Burma at the time of independence have become a problem. We made these… laws to solve this problem.’
The historical belief that non-Burmese minorities were ‘immigrants’ was the central motivating factor behind the law, as evidenced by Win’s frequent historical references to the ‘remote past… in the aftermath of the first Anglo-Burmese war’, ‘the period between
1824
and
the
time
we
regained
independence’,
and
the
‘time
independence’ itself, in 1948.
While Ne Win was a pivotal figure in the persecution of Rohingyas, field research
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