Statelessness and Minority Rights in Burma
Early this past June, at least seventy-seven people died in Burma’s remote Rakhine State of injuries sustained in tit-for-tat skirmishes between members of the country’s Buddhist majority (who are believed to have benefited from Burmese state sponsorship) and the Rohingya Muslim minority.
The violence is believed to have begun with the rape and murder of a Buddhist woman by three young Rohingya men; in retaliation, a Buddhist mob attacked a bus carrying Rohingya pilgrims, killing ten. By the time the worst of the violence subsided, more than 2,500 houses had burned to the ground, about 30,000 people had been displaced from their homes, and several hundred families had attempted to flee across the border into southern Bangladesh. This border cuts across the Naf River delta and in some places is most easily crossed by water; the Bangladeshi authorities are said to have repelled the refugees’ boats, leaving them floating in the river without food, water or medical assistance.
This apparent disregard for international humanitarian obligation looks somewhat less inexplicable when placed in historical context. Poor, crowded Bangladesh already harbors some 300,000 Rohingya, many of whom came to the country in 1978 and in 1991, fleeing earlier spasms of intercommunal violence in Burma. Large Rohingya refugee communities also exist in India, in Thailand and in Malaysia. Only about 750,000-800,000 Rohingya still live in the Burmese homeland established by their forefathers – and more are leaving every day.
The tragedy of the Rohingya in Burma is several centuries old, but we can begin by looking at it through a relatively new lens: that of the legal and political situation of the community since the promulgation of Burma’s 1982 constitution, which denies Burmese citizenship to the Rohingya community. Formally, they’re stateless; they have no legal nationality. Rohingya children are born into no country, belong to no nation, and receive the protection of no government.
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The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees puts the number of stateless people in the world at about 12 million and notes that they face a unique constellation of vulnerabilities, including an often total lack of access to health care, education and other social resources, the absence of mechanisms to guarantee the security of their land and property, and the relative ease with which, as people with no legal existence, they can be trafficked, abused and exploited.
Statelessness is an old problem. The demarcation of borders has always been an imperfect process, and there have always been, among the founders of new states and the writers of new constitutions, those who choose to grant citizenship on the basis of jus sanguinis (the right of blood) rather than jus soli (the right of soil). International law has grappled with the issue for decades; the first UN Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons was adopted in 1954 and has remained in force since 1960. 74 countries have acceded to the 1954 Convention, and 47 to the complementary Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness adopted in 1961. The 1954 treaty provided the international community with the definition of statelessness that has served as the basis of all subsequent legal approaches to the problem. A stateless person is simply “a person who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law.” According to the treaty, such a person should possess, within the territory where he or she lives, the same rights to religion and education that the territory grants to its recognized citizens, and the same rights to employment, association and housing that the territory grants to its other resident non-citizens. Despite the narrowness of the treaty’s wording, 119 states have chosen not to sign it, and are therefore under no obligation to enforce its provisions.
According to Mark Manly, who heads the statelessness unit at the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, statelessness generally happens in one of three ways. Citizens of some countries can lose their nationality after years abroad; in this way many migrants find themselves stranded without legal status, ineligible to apply for nationality in their new countries and no longer in possession of the status into which they were born. Another problem lies in the chaos of state succession. “When new states emerge,” Mr. Manly wrote in an email, “they have often failed to ensure that everyone who has a link such as residence in the territory ends up with a nationality. We continue to deal, for example, with cases which originate with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and are currently working to ensure that people do not become stateless as a result of the independence of South Sudan.” Outdated, exclusive nationality laws are responsible for millions of new cases a year: twenty-six countries do not recognize the equal rights of mothers and fathers to pass nationality on to their children, while the share of the global stateless population represented by children as a group continues to rise. “In any given year,” Mr. Manly wrote, “poorly drafted nationality laws mean that the largest number of new cases of statelessness are those of children who are left stateless because their parents were stateless.”
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In Burma, the Rohingya are generally referred to as “Bengalis” and treated as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. They are said to have darker skin than the ethnic Burmese majority, and they speak their own language, a Bengali-Assamese dialect distinct from the Tibeto-Burman language spoken by Burma’s Buddhist majority. They are so despised that they are barely considered to be legitimate possessors of potential rights; even the leaders of Burma’s pro-democracy movement have publicly equivocated when asked whether the Rohingya should be granted citizenship.
In an email, Moshahida Sultana, a professor at the University of Dhaka who has interviewed Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, described the patterns of devastation wrought in Rohingya communities by Burmese security forces. She told me that mosques have been burned, property looted, men, women, and children killed. Refugees have fled “to escape brutal violence, rape, murder, confiscation of land, forced labor, and forced eviction.” Professor Sultana emphasized the role of Burmese state coercion in the exploitation and marginalization of the Rohingya, noting that the status of the community in Burma has been a subject of violent contestation since the country achieved its independence in 1948.
“In 1974,” she wrote, “the Muslims in northern Rakhine State received foreign registration cards instead of National Registration Cards.” Major ethnic cleansing operations carried out by Burmese state security forces in 1978 and 1992 displaced hundreds of thousands of people. Despite the long history of Muslim settlement in Burma, she writes, “the statelessness of Rohingyas is a result of long cultural marginalization…Their statelessness has nothing to do with the Muslims’ inability to assimilate into Burmese society. It is a state-supported systematic process of annihilation through which Rohingyas are made stateless.” The psychological impact of such marginalization is enormous and falls disproportionately on the youngest members of the community. “Rohingya children usually grow up experiencing psychological trauma, insecurity, and fear…The experiences of physical torture, the memories of having close relatives tortured, and the shock of broken dreams have made them different people…”
Greg Constantine, a photojournalist who works with stateless communities all over the world, told me that “for anyone who knows the issue of statelessness, the Rohingya represent probably the extreme end of this issue.” They are mired in desperate poverty, the alleviation of which not one of the region’s governments yet considers to be its responsibility. Their access to international aid is sharply restricted, and in most places they live in camps, crowded together in dangerous conditions, without prospect of economic advancement or political acknowledgement of any kind. Despite abundant evidence of official participation in violence against the Rohingya and other minority communities, Western leaders praise the Burmese government’s moves toward democracy and rush to lift the harshest of their economic and political sanctions on the country.
The Rohingya are no one’s priority: in government files and in national statutes, they do not exist. They can petition for no redress for their losses. Their deaths will go unrecorded. Their roads can be ripped up, the roofs over their heads can be burned, their fleeing children can be left to drown, and no government records, in Burma or in Bangladesh, in Thailand or in Malaysia, will show that any of it ever happened to real people.
Charlotte Storch is a sophomore in Pierson College.