A Savage Dreamland by David Eimer

Author:David Eimer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

11

Hiding in Plain Sight

Noor is as rare as one of the dwindling number of tigers that stalk the Tenasserim Hills, someone as little seen as the handful of freshwater dolphins which survive in the Ayeyarwady River. The son of a Rohingya Muslim father and a Rakhine Buddhist mother, he is a supremely scarce combination of ethnicities. ‘There are very few people like me,’ Noor told me with a proud smile over a cup of tea in Mingalar Taung Nyunt, a township north of Yangon’s main railway station.

Rakhine State, which lies south of Chin State in the west of Burma, has been home to both the Rakhine people and the Rohingya for centuries, shared by Buddhists and Muslims who went to school and worked together but hardly ever married each other. The south of the state, a shallow curve of coastline that kisses the Bay of Bengal, has always been dominated by the Rakhine. In the north, the Rohingya were traditionally the majority in the areas close to the Naf River, which divides northern Rakhine State from Bangladesh.

Maungdaw, a town on the Naf River, was 80 per cent Rohingya when Noor was growing up there. But his dad’s family, like most Rohingya, hail originally from what was once known as Bengal, the region which is now Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal. Noor’s ancestors migrated first to Mrauk U, the ancient capital of the Rakhine kingdom, before his great-great-grandfather moved the family to a village outside Maungdaw. ‘My father’s family has been living in Rakhine since 1819 and we have the documents to prove it,’ said Noor.

Significant numbers of Rohingya came to Rakhine State – formerly called Arakan – in the colonial era. But Rohingya and Rakhine have been moving across the Naf River in both directions for hundreds of years. Muslims were present in Mrauk U by the fifteenth century, building mosques alongside the pagodas. And Arakan, which was its own independent state until 1784, had a history of commerce with the Arab world stretching back a millennium. Merchants from the Middle East settled in Arakan and some Rohingya claim ancestry from them.

But while Noor, his sister and mother all have the pink identity cards which identify people as nationals of Burma, his father doesn’t. ‘He is Rohingya, so he isn’t considered to be a citizen. It’s ridiculous, when you think about how long his family have been in the country,’ said Noor. In recent decades, though, all Rohingya, even those with identity cards and passports, have come to be regarded as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.

‘If you’re a Muslim from Rakhine, you’re really from Bangladesh. If you’re a Muslim from Yangon, you’re really from India,’ one Rohingya woman told me. But unlike people of Indian heritage the Rohingya are officially stateless, a result of the junta changing Burma’s citizenship laws in 1982. Since then, only people from an ethnic group recognised by the state, and who can prove that their ancestors were present in the country before 1823, are eligible to be citizens.

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