Speaking a day after Burma joined the international effort to rescue the Andaman boat people, Mr Ye Htut offered The Independent a longer perspective on a problem that has seen both Burma’s quasi-democratic government and opposition figurehead Aung San Suu Kyi chastised for callous rejection of their own Muslim population. In essence, he located the origin of the issue in the surging movement of other Asians into Burma after it fell under British control in the 1880s.
His comments yesterday will infuriate those who blame Burma for discriminatory policies, which they say make a mockery of the Buddhist faith of 85 per cent of the population. But they help to explain why the impasse over the use of the word “Rohingya” appears so hard to break.
“Some western countries talk about recognising the Rohingya as an ethnic minority,” he said. “But if you look at the historical record, none of the censuses carried out by the British mention Rohingya.” These were censuses, he said, in which Burma’s so-called “national ethnic-minority races” such as the Karen and the Shan were painstakingly logged – all ethnic groups “who were here for many hundreds of years before the British came.”
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The people the rest of the world calls Rohingya, but the Burmese government styles Arakan Muslims or Bengalis, “were settlers under British rule, like many others from British India and others including Chinese and Nepali,” he went on. “If we give the Arakan Muslims ethnic minority status, we would have to do the same for Chinese, Indians, Nepali … According to the constitution, if one ethnic minority is the majority in two connected townships, we have to designate it an autonomous area. Would the Burmese people agree to that in Arakan?”
His comments came after Burma, facing sustained pressure from Asean neighbours and the US, for the first time joined in the rescue effort for boat people adrift in the Andaman Sea.
“Yesterday evening the Burma Navy rescued a boat with 200 people aboard,” he said. “This morning we checked and found that all 200 are coming from Bangladesh. The captain and crew come from southern Burma while the ship’s owner is from Thailand. It was a multinational operation. They waited one month off the Burmese coast. This was the mother ship. They were reached by smaller boats with more people. They waited for the right moment to go to Thailand. The crackdown in Thailand is the reason why they are stuck in the middle.”
Mr Ye Htut claimed that the situation in Arakan state, also known as Rakhine state, had greatly improved since the communal violence and ethnic cleansing of 2012, which left 140,000 Rohingya languishing in squalid camps. “The first project is to stop the cycle of violence between the two communities. In 2012 community relations very bad, but luckily in the past two years many people living in camps have been rehabilitated.”
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Arakan’s underlying problem, he said, was poverty. “It is the second-poorest state in the country, with nearly 46 per cent living below the poverty line. Many people from the state, Muslims and others too, have been going to the south of Thailand and Malaysia to find work, mostly because of the economic situation. That’s why we have started a comprehensive development plan for the state. For the first time since 1948 there is electricity 24 hours a day. We are using the economy as a bridge between the two communities.”
Arakan has a long coastline, offering great potential for trade with India and beyond and tourism development. Little of this has happened, said Mr Ye Htut, “because of the former military government’s closed-door policy”. Now all that was changing, he said, with construction of a special economic zone and the commercial redevelopment of the picturesquely decaying old port and state capital Sittwe.
Another issue that is plaguing the state, he said, is low-quality education and the creation of Islamic madrassas that divide the communities. “In the past, children in the state studied together. But in the 1990s some of the Muslims coming back from Pakistan and Bangladesh brought madrassas and Wahhabi ideas: when Muslim children finish primary school they are ordered to attend Muslim school instead of public school, so there is no connection between the two young generations. We have to create educational opportunities for both communities.”
Mr Ye Htut also offered his own explanation for the much-commented upon silence of Nobel peace prizewinner Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy on the humanitarian tragedy playing out in the Andaman Sea. “In the 1990s, under the military government, the opposition groups in the country and in exile used the Rohingya as yet another issue with which to attack the military government,” he said.
“These are the people who took the Rohingya issue to the UN. That’s why some of the opposition leaders and parties are now very reluctant to comment on this issue: for 20 years they said that the Rohingya should be given ethnic-minority status and the military government was discriminating against them. They bear a lot of responsibility for this.”
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