Minority
Rohingya Muslims who have long alleged persecution by the Buddhists in Myanmar,
say Buddhist families from Bangladesh are now being resettled on their land.
Buddhist families from Bangladesh are quietly
crossing the border into Myanmar, where local Rakhine Buddhist groups and
government agencies are helping them resettle. The move has created pressure on
the minority Rohingya Muslims, who have long alleged persecution by the
Buddhists to leave.
Muslim
Rohingyas, who are not recognized by the state, allege that the Buddhists and
the Myanmar government are attempting to throw them out of their villages and
take away their land.
“The
Buddhists from Bangladesh are being resettled around Rakhine’s Rohingya
villages to create more pressure on the local minority community,” says
Bangladesh-based Rohingya rights activist Khin Maung Lay.
“Their men joined local Buddhists in some of recent attacks in which Rohingya villages were set ablaze. More Buddhists there means an increased threat of communal tension and violence against the Rohingyas because the Buddhists are now openly saying that they don’t want to see any Muslim around them.”
Buddhist exodus from the genocides
in Bangladesh?
2012 Buddhists-cleansing in Bangladesh. |
Win
Myaing, a government spokesman of Rakhine state in Myanmar, says that after
September’s anti-Buddhist attack, several ethnic Burmese Buddhist tribes living
in Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tract and other areas far from where the
clashes originated sent “distress signals” through friends and relatives,
seeking help from government agencies and monasteries in Myanmar.
“They
all said that their lives were under threat in Bangladesh and they wanted to
move to safety. We assured them in a return message that we would accommodate
them as much as possible. In the past six months a few hundred Buddhist
families have crossed over to Myanmar,” Mr. Myaing said to local media. “We are
guessing that more Buddhists will leave Bangladesh in the coming months, and we
will try our best to resettle them here and provide aid.”
The
Bangladesh government halted the anti-Buddhist violence within days after it
erupted last year, and provided sufficient aid and protection to the victim
Buddhists, according to Buddist monks and other eyewitnesses.
“The
Muslim mobs were planning more attacks. But the government immediately deployed
police and paramilitary forces around vulnerable Buddhist villages and halted
further attacks,” says Karunashri Thera, a Buddist monk from the Cox’s Bazar
district of Bangladesh, the port town where the clashes started. “Buddhists
were happy with government action after the Muslim attack on Buddhist villages.
The government also provided aid to rebuild the Buddhist houses and temples.”
Burmese army trucks transporting Bangladeshi Buddhists. |
“Not a
single Bangladeshi Buddhist family has left Bangladesh for Myanmar, so far,
following the attack in September. We got very good support from our government
after the Muslim mobs vandalized our villages. We don’t feel unsafe now,” says
Mr. Barua, who is a government college teacher. “I don’t think that the
departure of the Burmese tribes from Bangladesh was triggered by last year’s
anti-Buddhist violence.”
Exiled returnees?
Buddhist-cleansing in Bangladesh. |
“The
general elections in 2010 in Myanmar signaled that the country was on a path to
democratization, so the exiled Burmese leaders began returning home from
Bangladesh,” says local journalist Mohammad Nurul Islam who is known as an
expert on the Bangladesh-Myanmar issues. “They were soon followed by some of
their Burmese ethnic tribal and ethnic Burman supporters who had been living in
Bangladesh as refugees.”
Now,
says Mr. Islam, these refugees who lived in poor conditions for decades hope to
build a better life in the Rohingya villages in Myanmar, with the help of local
government authorities and monasteries.
Mr.
Islam says it’s significant that people from local Buddhist tribes had begun
migrating to Myanmar after the deadly Muslim-Buddhist conflict broke out in
Buddhist-majority country last May.
After
the September anti-Buddhist attack in Bangladesh, local government authorities
in Myanmar made an announcement in newspapers (in Rakhine state) that Buddhists
were facing attacks in Bangladesh and that local Buddhists should provide as
much help to resettle fellow Buddhists if they crossed into the Rakhine
state.
Muslim houses burning in Arakan (2012). |
Rakhine
State, one of seven states in Myanmar, is situated on Myanmar’s western coast.
Like many parts of Myanmar it has a diverse ethnic population, but Rahkine make
up the majority of the 3.1 million population. The stateless, Muslim-minority
Rohingyas occupy the northernmost region of the state that borders Bangladesh.
Although
Rohingyas have lived in Myanmar’s Arakan state for many decadess, the
Buddhist-dominated society there identifies the ethnic minority as “illegal
immigrants” from Bangladesh, and the Burmese military government stripped the
Rohingyas of their citizenship in 1982. Stateless Rohingyas have migrated to
Bangladesh, Malaysia, and other countries. In Bangladesh there are 400,000
Rohingyas, who are mostly living as illegal refugees.
Model villages
Islamic genocides in Chittagong Hill Tracts are the reason Buddhists are fleeing Bangladesh. |
Sources
inside Myanmar say that those who are coming from Bangladesh – the Burmese and
the Bangladeshi Buddhists – are being allocated houses in the model village,
alongside Buddhist settlers from other parts of the country.
Local
pro-government newspapers are regularly reporting on the arrival of the
Buddhists from Bangladesh and their resettlement in Rakhine. An unnamed
government official helping with the resettlement process told local media that
each Buddhist family arriving from Bangladesh was being given 2 acres of
farmland, along with a home in Maungdaw or Sittwe.
“They
are from our fellow ethnic groups. We have to help them. The just-arrived
families are being kept at Baho Buddhist monastery (in Maungdaw) for few days
before they are allocated homes and farm-lands in the model villages,” the
official said. “We have already resettled 3,000 to 4,000 Buddhists in Maungdaw
in the past few months.”
Fleeing to India
Muslims do not want to COEXIST with Buddhists, period. |
Mohammad
Zubair, a Muslim who fled his home in Maungdaw, a town in Rakhine State,
earlier this year for India, recently arrived with 18 other Rohingyas. He says
the Buddhists from Bangladesh were being resettled in his town as part of a
government-sponsored plan to “balance the population between Buddhists and
Muslims” making it increasingly difficult to survive as a Muslim there.
Mr.
Zubair says that since the unrest last year, local Buddhists kept him from
accessing his land, let alone cultivating it. Many Rohingya families were
nearly starving, he says. “We decided to flee Myanmar to save my family from
starvation and death.”
“Government
officers openly say, ‘alongside 600,000 Muslims there are only 20,000 Buddhists
... we must resettle some tens of thousands of Buddhists in this area so that
the Buddhists don’t face any threat from Muslims here.’ They are taking the
Rohingya’s farmlands and giving them to those Buddhists who are coming from
Bangladesh,” says Zubair who, along with his wife and three children, landed in
Hyderabad last month.
“We the
Rohingya Muslims have lived in Myanmar for decades. Yet they say that we are
illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. But they are welcoming those Bangladeshi
illegal immigrants to Myanmar just because they are their fellow Buddhists,”
says Mr. Kyaw Thein adding that he was afraid of what might come next. ”They
are inviting more of those Bangladeshi Buddhists just to outnumber us in this
region, use them as extra manpower during attack on us and crush us further."
Related posts at following links:
Buddhist Exodus from Bangladesh
Genocide of Buddhists In Bangladesh
1942 Genocide of Yakhine Buddhists in Maungdaw District
Rioting Bengali-Muslims (so-called Rohingyas) in Arakan. |
Related posts at following links:
Buddhist Exodus from Bangladesh
Genocide of Buddhists In Bangladesh
1942 Genocide of Yakhine Buddhists in Maungdaw District