“It became clear that Amir had lived in an open-air prison”: The history of brutality in a Rohingya refugee’s hometown

Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India, published recently by the journalist and lawyer Suchitra Vijayan, explores the lives of communities living along India’s borders, and through their stories, presents “a critique of the nation state, its violence and the arbitrariness of territorial sovereignty.”

This excerpted section focusses on Amir Hakim, a Rohingya refugee who fled his hometown, Buthidaung, because of Myanmar’s ongoing genocide against the Rohingya. He was held in Assam’s Goalpara District Jail from 2009 onwards, and released in 2020. There are an estimated 40,000 Rohingya refugees in India, living in camps in Jammu, Hyderabad and New Delhi, and over three hundred incarcerated in Indian jails.

Vijayan writes that “Buthidaung Prison, in Amir’s hometown, was full of people arrested and sentenced to up to five years ‘for offenses relating to marriages,’ and for travelling within Rakhine state without proper documents.” 

Amir Hakim wrote the letter on thin, fragile paper, folded many times over, and Imrul Islam smuggled it out of Goalpara District Jail in Assam that also doubled as the detention centre. The letter was a plea, a petition for help to the outside world. Amir is a Rohingya refugee who has been held in Goalpara District Jail since 2009. There are over 300 Rohingya refugees in Indian jails, all of them arrested for illegally entering India. Their crime: fleeing violence and Myanmar’s ongoing genocide against their people, and entering India without legal documents. Since the late 1970s, nearly one million Rohingya are estimated to have fled Myanmar. Various waves of Rohingya refugees have arrived in India, fleeing violence, since then.

When I read Amir’s letter for the first time, I wondered what legal documents he could have possibly carried. Since the 1990s, the only proof of identity that most Rohingya have had was a “white card”’ issued by the Myanmar government that conferred on them neither citizenship nor rights. The only other proof of their partial existence was a “household list” provided by Myanmar authorities as part of the annual census. The census exercise was a bureaucratic “cordon-and-search” operation, done through the list-making and census-taking.

Each year, the exercise was used to harass, intimidate, surveil and threaten communities already living in fear. The household list records only names and dates of birth, not even places of birth. The Rohingya are systematically denied any evidence of their birth in Myanmar, and their undocumentedness is a precursor to their statelessness.

The Burmese state has consistently denied and prevented the Rohingya from obtaining official documentation like the national registration cards that would confer rights and access to public services. Denial of citizenship to the Rohingya has been an official state policy since the country’s 1982 citizenship laws were passed. The plan to erase the Rohingya identity, history and language is integral to the project of creating a vast Buddhist majority in Burma. The Rohingya face forced labour, arbitrary confiscation of property and restrictions on their freedom of movement. They do not have access to schools beyond primary education, since the government reserves secondary education for citizens.

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The word “Rohingya” is used to describe Muslims of the Arakan region, along Myanmar’s borderlands. The first documented reference to Rohingya as native inhabitants of the Arakan region appears in Francis Buchanan’s A Comparative Vocabulary of Some of the Languages Spoken in the Burma Empire, in 1799. While the Rohingya trace their ancestry to initial Arab migration into the region, and archaeologists have dated eighth-century monuments that validate the long history of settlement, the state of Myanmar has claimed that they are “illegal Muslim Bengali migrants.”

On 13 May 2016, approximately five months before the new wave of genocidal violence in Rakhine, Myanmar’s military commander general, Min Aung Hlaing, stated that there were no Rohingya in Myanmar. He labelled the Rohingya as simply “Bengalis,” adding “the term Rohingya does not exist and we will not accept it.” He also stated that the Rohingya “do not have any characteristics of culture in common with the ethnicities of Myanmar,” and went on to say that the current conflict was “fuelled because the Bengalis demanded citizenship.” Since the 1970s, under Myanmar’s military dictatorship, the Rohingya have suffered various rights violations. The first wave of refugees fleeing persecution started arriving in India in 1978, and the majority of the refugees fled from the northern part of Rakhine, from the three townships of Buthidaung, Maungdaw and Rathedaung.

Buthidaung, where Amir is from, has a particular history of brutality. The Burmese Citizenship Act of 1982 laid the foundation for manufacturing the Rohingya community as a class of stateless subjects by denying them citizenship rights. The Rohingya were excluded from the 135 legally recognised ethnic groups that lived in Myanmar prior to British colonisation in 1823. The new law granted citizenship only to those who could prove that their family lived in Myanmar prior to 1823: the year of the first British military campaign on Myanmar that brought with it migrant labourers and businessmen from British India and China. For many families—with mixed ethnicities, multiple maps of belonging and varied routes of migration—the new citizenship laws arbitrarily decided who was a citizen and who was not.

It is impossibly rare to possess a hundred-year-old document that establishes one’s familial claims in Myanmar. What papers can people provide to prove their belonging? What document can officially record a family history as proof of citizenship?

Prior to the 1982 citizenship law, Rohingya had access to citizenship in Myanmar, and under the leadership of Prime Minister U Nu, Myanmar’s first government, following independence in 1948, recognised the Rohingya as indigenous to Myanmar. The laws created a racialised Burmese state and introduced castes of citizenship—full citizens, associate citizens, naturalised citizens, and those isolated to be purged from Myanmar’s national, political and ethnic boundaries.

Full citizens were given pink cards, with blue cards identifying associate citizens and green cards indicating naturalised citizens. The Rohingya were not issued any ID cards. In 1995, after sustained advocacy by the UNHCR, the Burmese authorities issued them the Temporary Registration Card (TRC), or the white card. The white card does not mention the person’s place of birth and cannot be used as proof of citizenship.

Rohingya persecution and statelessness was manufactured through these citizenship laws and the institutionalisation of hate. Once the last guarantees of citizenship were annihilated, the Rohingya had no protection left. While the UN Charter specifically stipulates that no person shall be without a state, the Rohingya are the world’s largest group of stateless people.

In 2001, Rohingya were forcibly removed from their ancestral homes, and moved to Maungdaw and Buthidaung districts. Entire Muslim townships in Rakhine state were made “Muslim-free zones.”

Rohingya were not permitted to live in these townships. Mosques and graveyards were destroyed, and their lands confiscated. By 2003, violence against Muslim communities by Buddhist nationalists had increased, resulting in another wave of Rohingya displacement and forced migration. In August 2005, the military junta that ruled created an artificial price hike of rice and other essentials. Transport of rice to the Rohingya-majority area of northern Rakhine was blocked. The Rohingya community was later prohibited from carrying, purchasing or selling rice. In the township of Buthidaung, a pound of rice was sold at four times its price. Many local and international human rights reports from this period, including from the UN Human Rights Office, confirmed this practice, and reported widespread malnutrition and starvation in Rakhine state. Amir would have been no more than fourteen when he endured this.

It was impossible to study, ply a trade or farm their land. Rape, murder and looting became the norm. Everything was taxed—from farming to fishing, collecting firewood to owning animals. There was roof tax, where Rohingya were taxed for merely having a roof over their heads. In addition to these taxes, the military had to be given tributes and bribes to assuage their anger. Even to get married, the Rohingya had to obtain permission from the Nasaka, the Burmese border and immigration forces in northern Rakhine. The process cost between US$ 45 and 65, which most Rohingya could not afford. And the process often took years.

Buthidaung Prison, in Amir’s hometown, was full of people arrested and sentenced to up to five years “for offenses relating to marriages,” and for travelling within Rakhine state without proper documents. While military juntas had complete control over the Rohingya, the state had abandoned them. The schools were neglected and often burnt down during army raids; clean water was seldom available. If people did not die of bullet wounds or torture, they died of malaria, diarrhoea or cholera. Maternal mortality rates were abysmal, and there were just two doctors for 280,000 people in Buthidaung.

As I flipped through UN reports, and tracked down aid workers and rights activists who had worked in Buthidaung in the years and months leading up to Amir’s flight, it became clear that Amir had lived in an open-air prison.

 

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Amir Hakim, like many young boys of his generation, decided to leave Rakhine state. In 2009, he fled after another wave of violence swept through Buthidaung.

India was not a signatory to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol; it does not have a single national legal framework that lays out how refugees must be treated. Instead, over the years, India has applied varying parameters and policies to various refugee groups. About 40,000 Rohingya refugees reside in India, where they are constantly taunted and threatened with deportation. Their future remains uncertain.

In December 2019, India passed a new legislation—the CAA—which gives undocumented immigrants from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh a path to Indian citizenship, but explicitly excludes Muslims, who make up about 15 per cent of the country’s population.

The new citizenship laws will not help Amir. No matter what he and millions of his people have endured, he will always be “illegal.”

In March of 2018, I headed to the Kalindi Kunj Rohingya camp in Delhi that sheltered over forty families. I hoped someone there would be from Buthidaung, and perhaps there would be a way to send some message back home to Amir’s family. Or maybe he already had some family who had found refuge in India. With his name, age and multiple copies of his letter, I went hoping to find something—a clue, a contact or anyone from Buthidaung I might talk to.

But no one there knew or remembered Amir. I was given the numbers of a few other Rohingya refugees living in Jammu. But the calls yielded nothing. In April, just a few months after my visit, a fire gutted the camp, destroying everything, including the documents, homes and possessions of all the forty families.

Excerpted with permission from Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India by Suchitra Vijayan, published by Context, an imprint of Westland Publications.