By Khairul Amin
Chairman
The European Rohingya Council (ERC)
Once again, we are witnessing an attempt to rewrite the history of the Rohingya genocide. A recent report carried by Narinjara News has brought renewed attention to the Myanmar military's narrative portraying the events of 2017 primarily as the consequence of attacks attributed to the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA). As a Rohingya and as Chairman of the European Rohingya Council (ERC), I believe we have a responsibility to challenge this narrative, not by denying that certain events took place, but by questioning their portrayal and placing them within their proper historical and political context.
The events of 25 August 2017 did take place, but their nature and scale should not simply be accepted as they were portrayed by the Myanmar military. Independent accounts and investigations have indicated that many of the Rohingya involved were poorly armed, with knives, sticks and other rudimentary weapons, rather than constituting the kind of heavily armed insurgent force suggested by the military's narrative. Whatever the precise circumstances of those attacks, they cannot explain or justify genocide unleashed against the Rohingya civilian population. More importantly, the slow genocide of Rohingya did not begin on 25 August 2017, but it had been developing through decades of state-sponsored mechanism, exclusion and repeated military operations. It had been developing for decades.
2017 Was Not the Beginning
Long before the world heard the name ARSA, successive governments and military regimes in Myanmar had progressively stripped the Rohingya of their fundamental rights. Our citizenship was taken away. Our freedom of movement was restricted. Access to education and employment was severely limited. Rohingya families faced restrictions affecting marriage and family life. Villages were subjected to repeated military operations, arbitrary arrests, confiscation of property and displacement.
Even our ethnic name became the target of a political campaign. The objective was increasingly clear, separate the Rohingya from the political, social and historical life of Myanmar and ultimately erase our legitimate place in Arakan. Therefore, it is historically indefensible to suggest that the catastrophe of 2017 suddenly emerged because of ARSA.
ARSA may have provided the military with a pretext. It did not create the decades-long persecution that preceded it.
A Long-Prepared Final Phase
In my assessment, what happened in 2017 should be understood as the culmination of a much longer process. The attacks of 25 August gave the Myanmar military the opportunity to launch what became the most devastating phase of that process.
Entire Rohingya communities were attacked. Villages were burned. Men, women and children were killed. Women and girls suffered horrific sexual violence. Hundreds of thousands were driven across the border into Bangladesh. International investigators subsequently found evidence supporting an inference of genocidal intent.
This distinction is fundamental. There is a vast difference between saying that ARSA attacks preceded the military operation and claiming that ARSA was responsible for the destruction and expulsion of the Rohingya population.
No armed attack can justify collective punishment of an entire ethnic people. If members of ARSA committed crimes, they should be held accountable for those crimes. But a child in a burning village was not ARSA. A mother fleeing with her children was not ARSA. An elderly man unable to escape his village was not ARSA. They were civilians.
The Political Dimension
I also believe there was another dimension to the military's calculation. The Rohingya issue had for years been manipulated within Myanmar politics. Anti-Rohingya sentiment had become an extraordinarily powerful political instrument. The crisis also placed Aung San Suu Kyi and her civilian government in an almost impossible position.
Internationally, she was expected to defend human rights and restrain the military. Domestically, powerful nationalist forces demanded precisely the opposite. The military remained constitutionally and institutionally powerful while the international consequences of the atrocities increasingly became associated with the civilian government and with Aung San Suu Kyi personally.
The result was devastating to her international reputation. Whether destroying her political standing was an explicit military objective requires evidence that is not publicly established. But there can be little doubt that the crisis profoundly weakened her international position while demonstrating the limits of civilian authority over the military. History should examine this political dimension carefully.
The Calculation That Went Wrong
There was, however, another calculation that proved profoundly mistaken. The military appears to have believed that removing the Rohingya would resolve one of the central political conflicts in northern Arakan and perhaps strengthen relations with ethnic Rakhine nationalists.
Instead, history moved in another direction. The Rakhine armed movement grew dramatically stronger when expulsion made a vacuum in Arakan. The Arakan Army eventually became one of the Myanmar military's most formidable opponents. The same military that had devastated Rohingya villages found itself fighting an increasingly powerful Rakhine force from the very region from which hundreds of thousands of Rohingya had been expelled.
This is one of the great political ironies of modern Arakan. The Rohingya were treated as though removing us would solve Arakan's problems. But increased problems exponentially.
A Truth Myanmar Still Refuses to Accept
There is an even deeper problem behind this history. Too many people in Myanmar still refuse to accept a simple reality:
The Rohingya are an ethnic people of Arakan.
Calling us “Bengali” thousands of times will not make us Bengali immigrants. Removing the word “Rohingya” from official documents will not erase generations of Rohingya history. Destroying villages cannot destroy identity. A government cannot decide that an ethnic people no longer exist simply because their existence is politically inconvenient.
This refusal to recognize Rohingya identity has been one of the ideological foundations upon which persecution was built.
Before people can be expelled from their homeland, society must first be persuaded that they do not belong there. Before their rights can be removed, society must first be persuaded that those rights were never legitimate. And before their suffering can be ignored, they must first be portrayed as foreigners, intruders or security threats.
That process did not begin with ARSA. It existed long before ARSA.
We Must Stop Rewriting Cause and Consequence
The most dangerous distortion today is the reversal of cause and consequence.
Decades of persecution did not happen because of ARSA.
The denial of Rohingya citizenship did not happen because of ARSA.
The systematic rejection of Rohingya identity did not begin because of ARSA.
Restrictions on Rohingya movement, education and livelihoods did not originate with ARSA.
And the historical campaign to portray Rohingya as foreigners certainly did not begin in August 2017. These policies preceded ARSA. Therefore, ARSA cannot logically be presented as the origin of a persecution that existed long before the organization itself became known.
The Future of Arakan Requires the Truth
Myanmar's military may continue attempting to justify its actions. Anti-Rohingya nationalists may continue refusing to pronounce our name. Political organizations may continue presenting concocted histories in which the Rohingya conveniently disappear. But none of this changes reality that the Rohingya have existed for centuries.
We have survived military operations, displacement, refugee camps, denial of citizenship and systematic attempts to erase our identity. And despite everything that has happened, the future of Arakan will eventually require Rohingya and Rakhine to find a political framework in which both peoples can live with dignity, equality and security.
Neither community is going anywhere. The tragedy of Myanmar's politics has been the repeated belief that one people's future can be secured by destroying another people's rights. 2017 demonstrated where that ideology leads. The lesson should not be forgotten, and history should not be rewritten to make the perpetrators victims and the victims responsible for their own destruction.
The Rohingya genocide cannot be explained away by invoking a conspiracy that the perpetrators themselves instigated. It must be understood within the much longer history of systematic persecution, exclusion and the attempt to erase the Rohingya from Arakan. And there is one universal truth that neither military power nor nationalist propaganda can permanently suppress:
The Rohingya are an ethnic people of Arakan and an integral part of its past, its present and its future.
Chairman
European Rohingya Council (ERC)
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