In 1824, Arakan became a British colony and later the British occupied entire Burma and put it under British-India in 1885. However, Burma was separated from India in 1937 and granted ‘Home Rule. Meanwhile, the Burmese people organized anti-British movement and during the World War II collaborated with the fascist Japanese imperial army to drive the British out of Burma. The Japanese occupation created an administrative vacuum in Arakan following the withdrawal of British troops to Bengal. Bo Yan Aung, Commander of Burma Independence Army (BIA), posted at Bassein, organized some Rakhine ultra-nationalists to sow the seeds of communal discord in Arakan. The result was that the century-old peace and harmony among the two major ethnic groups were ripped apart paving the way for the Burman to create Burmese hegemony over Arakan.

It was the beginning of disunity among the Arakanese people when the two major groups took opposite positions. The Rohingya Muslims continued to collaborate with the British while the Rakhine Buddhists aligned themselves with the Japanese fascist occupation forces. It was, perhaps, a turning point in history because without the Rohingyas, as some analysts have opined, the British would have difficulty in retaking Arakan. The Muslims of Arakan thought that the British would duly protect their rights as an ethnic race at the time of granting Burma’s independence. Such an expectation, however, was not met. In fact, subsequent political developments that took place in pre-independence period undermined the Rohingya entity in their homeland of Arakan.

The Rohingya Muslims felt betrayed and were dismayed to find them ignored in shaping the future Burma. On the other hand, the ultra-na-tionalists from the Rakhine ethnic race conspired with the Thakhin party to further marginalize and exclude the Muslims from the Burmese politics.

What the Rohingya Muslims thought was only a euphoria. The widening mutual mistrust between the Rohingya and Rakhine communities plus the racial hatred and prejudice held by the Burmese Thakhin party pushed the Rohingya out of Burma’s political arena. The Union Treaty, a precondition from the British colonial government for granting the independence, was signed at Panglong on 12th February 1947 at the initiative of General Aung San where representatives of all the ethnic nationalities of Burma were supposed to participate. But, unfortunately Rohingya were unable to attend this historical event. at the same time the Rakhine nationalist leaders who could not realize the importance of peaceful co-existence with their sister community for the better future of Arakan, started targeting Rohingya by all sorts of discriminations.

The Rohingya people felt that their future in independent Burma without any political rights and freedom was in jeopardy. Their leaders decided that there was no way out for a viable solution except approaching the leading politicians who were spearheading independence struggle of the Indian sub-continent and requested them to intervene for the welfare of Muslims in Arakan. In order to ensure their fundamental rights, they campaigned for autonomy of Muslim majority areas of north Arakan and to incorporate it constitutionally within independent Burma. Unfortunately, such a legitimate demand was grossly misinterpreted by the Burmese leaders who falsely claimed that the Rohingyas were more Bengalis than the Arakanese in spirit. As a result, the general masses of Arakan failed to realize the ulterior motive and ultimate design of the Burmese Thakhin leaders, which was to put a strong and permanent grip over Arakan by dividing the two ethnic groups. The Thakhin leaders thought that they could gradually get rid of Rakhine-Buddhists either through assimilation or through extermination. History has proven that the Burmese Thakhin leaders were insincere while persuading the Rakhine leaders.

Events unfolded in subsequent years, which were quite appalling. The Burmese armed forces carried out combing operations in Arakan in which hundreds of Muslim villages were torched and thousands of unarmed civilians were whimsically killed, triggering massive refugee exodus to erstwhile East Pakistan (currently Bangladesh). By branding the Rohingya as illegal Bengali immigrants, thousands of Rohingyas were put behind the bar for indefinite periods. Even to this very date, Arakanese Muslims that were arrested during Ne Win’s care-taker period in 1960 continue to be detained in various jails of Burma and are more likely to die there as they could not be repatriated to any country.

It is, thus, not difficult to understand why the Rohingya felt that they need to take arms to free themselves from the clutches of Burmese racial and religious discrimination. Hence, Rohingya armed resistance movement was born since the early days of Burma’s independence which the successive ruling regimes with all its might and tactics have failed to contain. The armed struggle led by Rohingya gained popularity in their local areas, and part of north Arakan had been virtually under their control. Military operations to contain the insurgency in Muslim area claimed life and property of many Muslims, but could not deter the ever increasing Rohingya armed factions from gaining strength and foothold.

As the Burmese leadership began to realize that there was no justification of sustaining heavy casualty in the military assaults against the Muslims of Arakan who had valid reasons to take up arms against the state, it offered an olive branch for a negotiated settlement with the Rohingya. The government of U Nu in 1959 in its peace initiative declared the Rohingya as an ethnic race as par with other indigenous races like Burman, Shan, Kachin, Karen, Kaya, with substantial autonomy in Muslim majority areas of Arakan. In return, Muslim underground parties from north Arakan agreed to give up their armed struggle.

No sooner the elected government of U Nu had lost power to the Military dictatorial rule in a coup d’état, staged by General Ne Win, then chief of the Armed Forces, all positive steps towards union spirit were carefully curtailed. The Rohingya, who were just beginning to share ethnic rights, were the hardest hit as the military regime was quick to revoke the rights and privileges of the Rohingyas that were restored by the democratic government. In this process, the ethnic Rohingyas were officially removed from the list of Burma’s ethnic groups and the junta stopped broadcasting Rohingya language which was being regularly aired from the “Indigenous Minority Programme” of the Burma Broadcasting Service twice weekly since May 15, 1961. All Rohingya organizations including Rangoon Universities’ Rohingya Student Association were declared banned. During Ne Win’s rule various restrictive measures were imposed on ethnic Rohingya. And their population figures were distorted showing them as a much smaller community.

The State-controlled media started carrying fabricated story that Muslims from neighboring country (Bangladesh) have been entering into Arakan illegally. Contrary to what has been alleged, there has always been an out-flow of Muslims from Arakan, for a plethora of reasons, e.g., Burma’s economy that took a nosedive coupled with genocidal pogroms, excessive human rights abuses, unemployment, political repression, and extreme poverty. Religiously, the Rohingyas were targeted as victims as the junta went on confiscating Muslim trust (Waqf) land, closing mosques, turning graveyards to Buddhist model villages, etc.

Meanwhile, junta’s machination to divide the two major races of Arakan had been gearing up by deputing some sycophants and myriad of minions from Rakhine community to carrying out eviction, confiscation and loot, and plundering Muslim properties. Harassment, extortion and hurting the religious sentiment of Muslims have been made directly by such Rakhine nationals, further deepening the wound of racial hatred and at times triggering communal violence between the two races. What the Rakhine Arakanese, sadly, failed to understand was the blueprint of the Burmese military strategy which is to prolong the Bamar colonial rule in Arakan, and a ‘divide and rule’ policy for perpetual tightening of the power grip.

To make matter worse, the leaders of Burma Independence Army (BIA) had the tradition of playing racial card since pre-independence period. Anti-Indian prejudice was the core element of that intrigue. In 1930 and during the 2nd World War, the leading BIA commanders were the driving force behind the forced exodus of nearly half a million Indians who had come with the British. It was the BIA that sowed the seed of communal riot of 1942 in Arakan between the Buddhists and the Muslims, and it was also the remnants of the BIA that drove out the ‘foreigners’ (mostly non-Buddhist people), following the 1962-military take-over. After successful ‘cleanup’ of the Indians, the regime took up the second phase, which is to get rid of Rohingya Muslims who resemble the Bengalis and speak a dialect with the accent of Chittagonians.

As such, the Rohingyas have been openly abused, thrown into detention camps, tortured, and killed while their children were deprived of basic amenities including rights to proper education and healthcare in a systematic and planned way, resulting in increase of illiteracy in the coming generation and higher mortality rate in children. In this way, the ruling military regime under the Ne Win dictatorship had not only controlled the Rohingya population growth and infant mortality rates but it also disenfranchised them and robbed them of their identity and personality. Despair became the lot for the future generation. At the same time, uncivilized black laws have been framed to strip the Rohingyas of their legitimate rights and freedom. False and concocted propaganda war has also been launched to hoodwink the international community and to mislead the entire Burmese population.

For Rohingya Muslims, the aforesaid criminal policies and programs of the ruling junta were the clear signs that they were bound to ceaseless racial and religious persecution in Arakan. The growing fear of insecurity and extreme hardship compelled the Rohingya people to realize that all the approaches through junta’s administrative and political doors have been closed and that the only option left to restore their usurped rights and freedom was to launch a resistance movement that is better planned, prepared, and stronger than what their predecessors had done before the fall of U Nu government. With this in mind, the Rohingya intellectuals, students and youths organized a mass awareness program of their plight vis-à-vis their rights as an indigenous race and planned future course of action.

The political situation remained turbulent particularly in the north Arakan and elsewhere. There was great frustration over junta’s isolationist policy followed by economic bankruptcy. The successive military regimes, as a legacy of phobia to Rohingya, carried out several combing operations in the name of apprehending illegal Bengalis from across neighboring Bangladesh and cracking down anti-state armed elements. Whenever such joint military and immigration checks took place, the outcome was the outflow of several thousand Rohingyas. Many of those who risked remaining in their hearth and homes were thrown into jails after being beaten severely. As already hinted above, there are hundreds of Rohingya Muslims that were arrested during the Ne Win era that are still languishing in jails of Burma on charges that don’t deserve life term punishment.

Since Burma’s independence, the Rohingya of Arakan have been experiencing military excesses under one pretext or another. They are depicted as ‘insurgents’, if found in the jungle and are ‘smugglers’ when found fishing in the river. With various invented allegations, the innocent Rohingya had to kneel down and get beaten up, while their loved ones were raped in front of them, and ancestral homeland confiscated. Such abuses became so routine that none was willing to go through such a torment and torture.

Thus, when the Burmese security forces went wild and were ruthless, the uprooted Rohingyas made their way to Bangladesh and other parts of the world. Unspecified number of Rohingya left Arakan in between 1949 and 1977 but the largest exodus was first recorded in early 1978 as the ruling junta carried a joint military and immigration operation code named ‘Nagamin’in north Arakan. Nearly 300,000 Rohingya were forced to take shelter in Bangladesh and later repatriated back home with no viable solution to their problem. In 1991-92, the junta once again forced the Rohingya to flee Arakan en masse when nearly a quarter million of them had taken refuge along the border of Bangladesh. After hectic parley, the Burmese ruling SLORC (State Law and Order Restoration Council) pledged to accept the sheltered refugees. This time also it was without a political solution. The exodus hence continues.

In order to fit junta’s political agenda to ethnically cleanse the Rohingya, a Citizenship Law of 1982 has been promulgated, which is still in force and received worldwide condemnations because of excessive discrimi- nations. Moreover, the ruling regime, after taking control of state power following 1988 mass uprising and 1990 general election result, took up the task of drafting a constitution as what it called its ‘prime’ task. No Rohingya representative has been invited nor any suggestion taken which is an exclusion of the ethnic Rohingya from future Burma, set-up by the junta. Hence so long as the junta remains in power and until and unless the Draconian laws have been scrapped, human rights abuses in minority areas, in general, and north Arakan, in particular, will continue to rise.

In November 1997, The SLORC renamed itself as State Peace and Devel- opment Council (SPDC) and inducted a few younger army generals into the cabinet. It continued the same policies of the Ne Win regime.

Many politicians, students, democracy activists and innocent people from all walks of life were tortured, detained convicted on unfounded grounds. In north Arakan, the SPDC not only amassed troops but also confiscated landed properties of Muslims to establish cantonments at strategic locations. It unleashed a reign of terror in their bid to make ethnic cleansing and pushed hundreds of Rohingyas out of Arakan. Consequently, a new series of exodus took place in 1996-97 at a time when the government of Bangladesh was anxiously looking forward to promoting large-scale repatriation of Rohingya refugees. The situation was so delicate that the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) with a small number of staff in Arakan could not effectively monitor the on-going repression against Rohingya and unprecedented development of infrastructure of militarily importance in which forced labor was routinely engaged. With a heavy military presence in Arakan and junta’s intransigence on Muslims, the UNHCR has been lagging far behind in ensuring Rohingya Muslims of fair treatment and stopping heavy taxation and routine slave labor.

As can be seen, Arakan has been reduced from an independent state to a mere division under the Burmese. Had unity been intact and common outlook in context of Arakan as a whole and no room for any narrow communalism among the peoples of Arakan, the fate of the Arakanese people would not have been as it is today. Its status would have been glorious.

History has repeatedly shown that once an outsider tasted the territorial gain, he would hardly give it up. We should, therefore, realize that the Burmese are not ready to give up the territorial gain of a region so important strategically and so vital economically. Arakan has always been surplus in agricultural resources in addition to untapped underground wealth. As such, successive ruling regimes always devised a scheme to establish Burmese hegemony and exploit its vast economy. In that process, many Buddhist Rakhines were used as minions and sycophants of the regime against the Muslim Rohingyas fueling mistrust and animosity it. The ‘divide and rule’ policy has so successfully been applied that the Buddhist Rakhines might have felt that Arakan without Muslim Rohingya would be soon of their own. In fact, in the last half a century, the junta could not turn Arakan into a mono-ethnic Rakhine state while, on the contrary, nearly half of Rakhine population have either been assimilated with the Burmese or displaced to other parts of Burma to make a demographic change.

The only thing that the Buddhist Rakhines in Arakan got was the branding of their state as the Rakhine State with Rakhine as an indigenous ethnic race of Burma as defined in the 1974 Constitution under Ne Win’s socialist era. Here again as a machination, there has been no mention of ethnic Rohingya. On the other hand, changes of name from Akyab to Sittwe, Arakan to Rakhine, etc., have been made both to distort the real history and to give false hope to the Rakhines. Some Rakhines were posted in the administration of Arakan only to carry the orders from the center. It was nothing short of domination of Arakan by the chauvinist Burmans, in the service of the autocratic regimes. The ruling SPDC which abolished the 1974 Constitution ultimately unmasked its true policy against the Arakanese people as severe human rights violations were committed in Rakhine territories.

In November 2010, the SPDC held a sham general election in which it won overwhelmingly because Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) had boycotted the election. Then, a quasi-civilian government was formed where Thein Sein changed his uniform to become the President.

During Thein Sein’s tenure, severe restrictions were put on Rohingya and a governing system of so-called Regional Administration with unprecedented laws was setup in northern Arakan. National Identity Cards, held by Rohingya, were replaced with White Cards, which were soon seized to exchange for the so-called National Verification Cards (NVC). Rohingya were deprived of voting and contesting rights in the 2015 general elections.

On 8 June 2012, more than a dozen Rohingya were killed in Maungdaw for staging a demonstration against the mass killing of 10 Muslim saints in Taungop after spreading a conspiratorial anti-Muslim propaganda of rape and killing of a Rakhine minor girl. After that, sectarian violence spread like a wild fire all across Arakan in which more than 100 Muslims were lynched to death, and more than 120,000 Muslims in Sittwe, Minbya, Punnagyunt, Kyauktaw, Pauktaw, Rambree, Kyaukpyu, Myebon, Mrauk-U and parts of Rathedaung were displaced to internal displaced camps after their homes and businesses were torched and utterly destroyed. In this violence, the army and other security forces were fully involved beside local Buddhist assailants and radical monks. The army and police were also playing a role in targeting Rohingyas through mass arrests and inhumane abuses. The government called the violence as communal riots. President Thein Sein told the UNHCR chief Mr. António Guterres that his regime would be glad to resettle up to 1,000,000 Rohingya to a third county, if the UN would help.

Attacks on Muslim houses and Mosques became a regular phenomenon throughout Myanmar. Muslims were burnt alive and chopped into pieces, and females were killed after gang rape and children were thrown into fire.

In January 2014, again a deadly wave of attacks was perpetrated against the Rohingya in Du Chi Yar Dan village of southern Maungdaw Township jointly by local Buddhist extremists and security forces in which more than 60 Rohingya were killed, and scores were injured seriously by gunshots, and attacks by knives and machetes. Hundreds of Rohingya fled to escape the atrocities to Bangladesh. The Myanmar government released fabricated reports that were full of false allegations against Rohingya while the independent media were prevented from visiting the area.

The Rohingya people have been described as “amongst the world least wanted” and “one of the world’s most persecuted minorities” by the UN. Beside severe restrictions put on their travel, work, education, and healthcare, they were also denied essential services and means of supports for their mere survival. Their arable lands were confiscated to distribute to Buddhist settlers who had migrated there from Bangladesh and other parts of Myanmar. In the testimonies of those Rohingya who fled to escape persecutions mentioned that women had been gang raped, men were killed, houses were torched, and young children were thrown into burning houses. Boats carrying Rohingya on the Naf River were often gunned down by the Myanmar military.

In November 2015, NLD formed the government and Suu Kyi became the State Counselor, where the Ministry of Home Affairs, Ministry of Defense and Ministry of Border Affairs were kept not under the government administration but under the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces. Following the attack of three border posts by an armed Rohingya group

on 9th October 2016, the military began a major crackdown in the villages of northern Maungdaw. In the initial operation, dozens of people were killed, and many Rohingyas were arrested. Casualties increased as the crackdown continued. Arbitrary arrest, extrajudicial killings, gang rapes, brutalities against civilians, and looting were carried out. Media reports stated that hundreds of Rohingya people had been killed by December 2016, and about 100,000 had fled Myanmar to take shelter in the nearby areas of Bangladesh.

In late November, satellite images released by Human Rights Watch showed that about 1,250 Rohingya houses in five villages burned down by security forces. The media and human rights groups said that military used helicopter gunships frequently to shoot and kill villagers. Consequently, the exact figures of civilian casualties remain unknown as the region was depicted as an “information black hole”.