The blood-drenched Arakan is being tormented decades after decades in a terrible death throe which has germinated from the grim showbiz of the Reign of Terror of the military rulers. The people of Arakan who had been once living in peace and perfect amity, have to witness many often recurrent phenomenon of communal violence, social anarchy and widespread unrest goaded by the despotic military rulers where the voice of peace and communal harmony is a far cry.
Once upon a time, Arakan was known as a land of the plenty with a vast fertile agricultural land, which literally can be called the "Rice Bowl of Asia". Geographically, Arakan is a picturesque and narrow mountainous strip of land of about 40,000 square kilometers between the Arakan Yoma mountainous range and the Bay of Bengal stretching north to the south along the coastal line. It is naturally separated from the mainland Burma by the Arakan Yoma mountain range. It is inhabited by many communities like the Rohingyas, Rakhines, Chakmas, Hindus, Christians, Mros, Khumis, Kamens and some hill tribes. Once, all these communities had been living in peace and perfect amity. But with the annexation of Arakan with Burma in 1784, this land of peace and plenty has turned into a "trouble conglomerate" of distressed human beings because of state-sponsored ethnic, racial and communal violence.
Today, Arakan is a land of restlessness, antagonism, discrimination, persecution, anarchy and disappointment. The peace-loving people are passing their life in utmost grief and distress, fear and frustration. They are victims of systemic oppression, socio-economic and political exploitation and horrendous conspiracies of the military rulers. And it is the most terrifyingly fact that the havocs of the communal violence have been pushing thousands of innocent men, women and children towards annihilation.
As history speaks, Arakan was once an independent sovereign state for many centuries. It was closely linked culturally as well as politically with Bengal (now Bangladesh) because of its geographical location from where both Hinduism and Buddhism spread in the region. Although, Hinduism did not sustain for a long period until the region came into close contact with Muslim Arab traders who introduced Islam to the local people as early as the 7th century. From time to time, many of them have gotten permanently settled in the region. Later, their influence spread fast throughout the region and in the succeeding centuries, it reached such a scale that their role was considered to be the predominant factor in the ascension to the throne. That's why, in 1406, King Narameikhla, a Buddhist, assumed the Muslim name Sulaiman Shah and subsequently became a Muslim.
It is worth mentioning here that after King Sulaiman Shah was defeated by the Burman invaders, he took refuge under the Muslim ruler of Bengal, Nasiruddin Shah. [Just pause for a moment to reflect on this epoch-making event. Why would a Buddhist ruler seek refuge in a Muslim-run territory while there were other Buddhist-run territories in the neighborhood?] Later, he was restored to the throne in 1430 by the troop of the Bengal Sultan. Subsequently, he became a tributary of the Sultan and this led to a strong cultural interaction between Arakan and Muslim Bengal.
The successors of Narameikhla not only adopted Muslim titles, but also inscribed the "Kalima-La ilaha illallah" in their coins and some of them became Muslims.
Nevertheless, the murky history of the enslaved Arakan begins with the annexation of Arakan with Burma in 1784 by the Burman invader King Bodawphaya. And soon after that Arakan was again annexed to the territory of the British-India during the time span of 1824-26 after a war with Burma. Northern Arakan was in fact part of the province of Bengal under British India , and the current border was only fixed when Burma became a separate British colony in 1937.
In 1942, there was an administrative vacuum in Arakan, during the war with Japan when Allied Forces retreated from Arakan leaving huge arms at the hands of some Rakhine communalists who turned those arms against their Rohingya Muslim neighbors, massacring tens of thousands of innocent Rohingyas mostly in eastern Arakan where the Rakhines were in majority. As a tit for tat regrettably some Rohingya Muslim extremists caused heavy casualty to the life and property of innocent civilian Rakhines in the western Arakan where the Rohingyas are majority.
Unfortunately, this grim genocidal tragedy remained unnoticed and thus slipped away from the world history almost unrecorded because of the pre-occupation of the international community with the World War II. At that time, nearly 50,000 Arakanese people from Rskhine and Rohingya communities fled from Arakan to Bangladesh to escape the massacre, many of whom went as far as to Rangpur district (in north-west corner) of Bangladesh seeking shelter in the refugee camps. The war brought in its wake famine and human miseries in Bengal affecting many of those refugees.
However, since the independence in 1948, expulsion of the Rohingyas from their motherland, Arakan, became almost a permanent feature of the country. By the end of 1950 and in September of 1964, almost 33,000 and 5,000 Rohingya refugees, respectively, crossed to Bangladesh. The Operation Dragon King (Nagaminh) of 1978 was the biggest operation against the Rohingyas when about 300,000 innocent Rohingyas were uprooted and forcibly pushed into Bangladesh. The last Pogrom of 1991/92 is another horrendous notch on the long scale of man-made tragedies when Rohingyas were indiscriminately massacred by thousands and again about 300,000 Rohingyas fled to Bangladesh trekking along the hazardous jungles and crossing the roaring rivers.
Today, 1.5 million Rohingyas have been living as undocumented refugees in different countries of the world like Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, etc.
By Ahmedur Rahman Farooq
Chairman, The Council for Restoration of Democracy in Burma (CRDB)
Email: arahman678@yahoo.com