Professor Michael Charney, SOAS, on Identities and Histories of Rakhine and Rohingya

Source maungzarni, 19 March

Berlin Conference on Genocide 26 February 2018

A State Myth of "National Race" and the Tatmadaw's War on the Rohingya and other

Myanmar Ethnic Groups"

Michael W. Charney

(SOAS, the University of London)

                                                                       ---Presentation version (no footnotes)--- 

Introduction

The Rohingya Genocide is as confusing as it is complex. 

There is a fog that obscures what is happening on the ground in historical perspective because just so much is happening in real time.

Parties which seek to prevent another great human tragedy have little time to scamper around for the data and  the situation gets viewed almost knee jerk from whichever side one is in, in debates concerning human rights issues and national sovereignty issues, whether one is concerned with development or political rights, or on the side religious freedom or religious hatred.

It is no surprise that Islamophobes in the West and Bamar ethno - nationalists have found common cause with each other. .

And the Myanmar state, both the civil government and the Tatmadaw, have actively taken advantage of this confusion to accomplish two things, and, as I speak here in Berlin in a museum dedicated to the Holocaust... 

I point out that the Nazis fought both a war on the Jews AND used the war on the Jews to fight a war on German liberalism. 

I would similarly argue that it is CRUCIAL to unders tand that as with the Holocaust, the Myanmar state is fighting a war against the Rohingya as it is again beginning to do with other ethnic groups as outsiders, on the one hand, but also a war on emerging Myanmar liberalism on the other.

What is happening right now is about the Rohingya, but not only about the Rohingya. The state and the army have very adeptly blinded the Bamar population and many of the ethnic minorities to the eradication of liberalism within the country with the willing support of ASSK and her NLD party.

There are many other scholars here better versed in genocide studies than I, what I intend to talkabout instead is how states in Myanmar have actively using scholars and history both in the past and today to  obscure the truth and suppor t state programme s that have worked against the Rohingya.

I. A Buddhicized Past 

In the fifteenth century, the Kingdoms of Ava and Pegu tried to establish cultural hegemony over the Indo-Aryan kingdom of Rakhine, importing kings and queens, courtiers,Buddhist monks, and Burmese -speaking settlers.

The Rakhine ruler who ousted these foreign invaders, established a religiously hybrid court, a sultanate, but in addition to permitting Buddhist immigration and European migrants from abroad,also raided Ben gal and brought to Rakhine thousands of Bengali Muslim every year. 

Many of these were planted in the Kaladan River areas close to the concentrations of Muslims in Rakhine today where they grew rice and still grow rice until the recent crisis.

We do not find a lot of pre- 18th century tensions between the Buddhist and Muslim populations.

The physical geography and climate favored approaches to living and ruling, interacting, and community building, social mentalities that were flexible and inclusive, that favored the emergence of ethnically and religiously diverse communities.

But this diversity was soon obscured by an Invasion from the Irrawaddy Valley.

When it conquered Rakhine in 1784, the Myanmar court tried to produce histories that made Rakhine h istorically a part of greater Myanmar.

Myanmar Buddhism was introduced, court literature and local Buddha mages were brought back to the Irrawaddy Valley and so too were tens of thousands of Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists.

Rakhine Buddhists and Muslims both fled to British Bengal, the Buddhists settling in the area that became a big refugee camp, which became known as Cox's Bazaar.

Absent court literature, Buddhist monks from Rakhine rewrote from memory and produced new chronicles in opposition to Myanmar rule, but in doing so created a Rakhine history only from their particular point of view, not purposely leaving the Rohingya voice out, but not including it either.

This might have been balanced out with Rohingya voices if not for another accident of history, the replacement of Myanmar rule with British rule in 1824. 

II. A British Colonial Past 

The British believed that communities having one native language, one native race, and one native religion.

Despite or rather because of its huge diversity, the British decided that they would split Rakhine in two — the northern half which had a heavier concentration of Muslim and Bengali -speakers would be administered by Bengal and eventually become part of Bangladesh after independence and the southern part, closer to the An pass and the heavier concentration of Buddhists and Burmese - speakers would be (re) joined to Myanmar. 

Phayre produced the first histories of Rakhine and Myanmar during the 1830s and 1840s and used sources for the region's history exclusively from Rakhine Buddhist informants and their summaries of Rakhine Buddhist histories. 

Phayre was thus innocently or purposefully blinded to the fact that Rakhine had been at least since the 15th century a Muslim and a Buddhist land, with a Muslim and a Buddhist court, and that historically, Burmese -speaking Theravada Buddhists from the Irrawaddy Valley were migrating into Rakhine at the same time as Muslim, Bengali -speakers. 

In his writings, Rakhine became an essentially a Theravada Buddhist, Burmese -speaking land. 

Later, in1862, when Rakhine became part of British Burma (and later the Union of Myanmar upon independence), it declined into an impoverished neglected periphery of an Irrawaddy based state, its population impoverished where it had once been wealthy, and Muslims and Buddhists began to compete for pieces of an ever shrinking economic pie. 

During this period, Rakhine and the Rohingya with it became absorbed into a new myth, created by Bamar nationalists in response to colonial rule, but also informed by Phayre's ethno-racial histories, the Myth of 1824.

In general, the myth held that British altered the system against the Bamar Buddhists, who were the indigenous population, located since time immemorial within the boundaries of the Myanmar kingdom and the modern Myanmar state. 

The myth of 1824 was that the British introduced colonial rule into Rakhine and removed the obstacles to foreigners coming into the country and invited in thousands of Bengali Muslims who the British believed were better workers than the indigenous Buddhists.

This created the first major Muslim populations in the region, led to Muslims overrunning northern Rakhine, forcing the indigenous Buddhists out.

By extension, as each part of Myanmar was acquired by the British, Indian immigration continued with legal controls.

The foreigner Indians, including the Muslim Bengalis, and the foreigner Chinese remained loyal to their homelands, retained their foreign cultures and religions, and sent their money when they could back home. 

 III.Rohingya and Independent Myanmar to 1962

The Myth of 1824 did not get voiced a great deal in the 1950s. 

Under the semi -liberal rule by U Nu and the AFPFL,  the emphasis was on national solidarity through ethnic union, not Bamar ethnic chauvinism or racialism. 

Because the Rohingya had stood up against separatist Muslims from Bengal, they were praised as a national group in the mid - 1950s by a grateful U Nu. 

But this feeling shifted in 1962 with the takeover by a poorly - educated military group led by Ne Win. 

This military introduced into state policy the idea of Taingyintha, the 135 national races (Cheeseman).

 The Myanmar military ethos is geared around the idea that Myanmar is not just of the Bamars, but of the Bamars and an assortment of ethnic minorities who pay tribute to the Myanmar ruler.

When that hierarchy is not maintained politically, it was the military that restored it, maintained it, ensured it. 

Without this hierarchy there is no order and the Bamars are faced with annihilation.

This concept picked up speed in the post -independence period in particular from its prominence in Revolutionary Council thinking from 1964 and was pushed into school texts and other government publications from 1990.

The Taingyintha idea became the foundation for the 1982 Citizenship laws. 

According to the 1982 citizenship laws of three categories of citizenship, the first, regular citizenship, was only open to those who from the military's perspective was a member of an indigenous ethnic group (instead of ethnic group, they term this race) or not and these identifications were made according to the traditional hierarchical ethnic imaginary of the Myanmar kingdom. 

Key to the Taingyintha idea was that any group that was not indigenous and was foreign was a threat to national solidarity. 

At a time when the country was facing armed insurgencies throughout half the country by "native race" ethnic minorities, Indians and Chinese had to be suppressed and forced to indigenize or leave. 

Conveniently, there was no authoritative list of what these 135 Taingyintha specifically were, it was usually used as a legitimizing phrase to explain why one or another group, the Chinese or Indians, were not included.

In combination, the Myth of 1824 and the Citizenship laws of 1982 have had a disproportionate impact on the Rohingya. 

The Myth of 1824 portrayed the Rohingyas as non -indigenous and as Indians.

And the 1982 Citizenship laws established three different categories of citizenship— if you were a member of one of the national races you were a citizen even if you did not have papers, if you werenot, you had to have papers showing that you had been in Myanmar in 1948.

This made only the Rohingya and other officially non -nationals peculiarly vulnerable to registration abuse.

In 1978, in the run-up to the enactment of the 1982 law military operations, the Nagamin operations, were run at the border to sweep out undocumented aliens.

This caused the first major exodus of the Rohingya out of the country, a quarter of a million and many who had documentation saw these replaced with a new card.

When the military replaced the BSPP government in 1988, it required a change of documentation again, in which government officers denied registration to many Rohingya.

In any case, the junta at the time reified a line of thinking about Rakhine that could be traced back in one way or another to Phayre's work in the 1830s. 

Buddhist Rakhine were Rakhine, but Muslim Rakhine, the Rohingya were not.

The idea that the Rohingya are not part of the 135 national races, like others, is very significant because it makes the Rohingya part of the legacies of British colonialism and omething that can and should be dealt with as part of the last steps of achieving complete independence. 

It is the reason Myanmar authorities would not permit Rohingya children to attend schools of any kind, except for madrasas, so they could learn the Koran and nothing else.

 It is why the Bangladeshi government has had to provide basic training in different skills to Rohingya refugees because so many are functionally illiterate and lack skills of any kind to use to support themselves economically.

But it is the act of trying to correct these poorly founded claims, claiming Rohingya to be a national race, that makes Buddhist Rakhine and others upset.

The underlying tension then that has caused the explosion is a very old one, two hundred years in the making because of colonial -era orientalist misunderstandings of the region's history. 

British colonial administration and scholarship encouraged not just Rakhine Buddhist hostility to Muslims during the colonial period.

The Rohingya are just as much a Taingyintha as anyone else or or are not just as much as no one else is.

Conclusion 

In conclusion, I wish to draw your attention to the fact that how we understand Rakhine, the Rohingya, and Myanmar ethnicities today is the result of numerous phases of successive states and non -state actors responding to policies of those states shaping the historical record for political purpose.

The Rohingya have been negatively and peculiarly impacted by these efforts because of historical accidents that placed them on the wrong side of the border.

The Rohingya did not cross the border, the border crossed them. 

With military rule the Myanmar state has increasingly tried to integrate Burmese - speaking Buddhists in Rakhine with the national Bamar ethnic group.

 In fact, one way to view the problems we see now in northern Rakhine is that these anti -Rohingya pogroms are the last thrusts of full, lowland state integration — the Myanmar military is literally pushing Bamar civilization up the hills (Scott) . 

The Myanmar state is now fully integrating its frontier, non - state spaces into the body politic and with it the national language, the national faith, and the national culture. 

Pushing out the Rohingya who they see as not belonging. 

But what happened in the historiography of the Rohingyas was also reinforced by the impact of area studies on the scholars who studied Myanmar. 

With independence from 194 8, Myanmar was a country not a colony and everyone domestically and abroad who studied Rakhine and the religious problems there was trained to view Rakhine as an eternally Theravada Buddhist land.

This is why you will find a number of scholars who adamantly deny the existence of the Rohingya in the historical past — they have been trained to only read the country by a Bamar Buddhist register.

But this a historical legacy has caused them to introduce a new era of untruths, writing histories that try to erase the Rohingya and their history as merely being incorrect data rather than as people with a historical narrative that challenges their own.

This a historical legacy has also led colonial -era and Rakhine and Bamar archaeologists since to reconstruct religious buildings in ways that obscured a Muslim presence, to rely upon only Rakhine Buddhist texts as the only acceptable historical sources, and to consider references to Rakhine as a Muslim society or some eclectic mixture of different religious groups as a misunderstanding by European traders. 

Rather than kicking out in a sense the Rakhine Buddhists from this region, I am merely inviting the Rohingya back into their own history, which they shared in an intimate way with the Rakhine Buddhists, before the divisions that were introduced by a series of states that were interested in how best to control power rather than reflect in a fair way, the peoples who had historically been part of Myanmar.

Turnbull lends Suu Kyi a blind helping hand

Source atimes, 20 March

Myanmar leader's visit to Australia was warm and cordial despite rising consensus her government is guilty of crimes against humanity

By David Scott Mathieson

Australia's Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull shakes hands with Myanmar's State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, March 19, 2018. Photo: AAP via Reuters/Mick Tsikas

Myanmar State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi's first visit to a Western country since a security operation campaign in her country drove over 700,000 Rohingya Muslims into Bangladesh came over the weekend in Sydney for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean)-Australia Summit.

She was on safe, if not unsullied, ground following months of international condemnation from Washington, London and recently in Geneva from United Nations human rights investigators.

Domestic and international human rights groups urged Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to prioritize rights promotion during the Summit, a justified call given the deteriorating rights records of almost all members of the regional grouping, especially Myanmar, Cambodia and the Philippines.

Yet Australia has long pursued a sotto voce approach to rights promotion in Myanmar, eschewing strong language and favoring quiet engagement to raise issues of concern – unlike the United States and United Kingdom, which regularly release critical statements on armed conflict in the north, the long-standing repression of Rohingya Muslims, and renewed intimidation of the media and civil society.

As Suu Kyi landed in Australia, a group of five lawyers led by Alison Battisson of the law firm Human Rights for All lodged a private application in a Melbourne court to have the State Counsellor arrested for crimes against humanity pursuant to Australia's obligations as a signatory to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Myanmar's State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, March 19, 2018. Photo: AAP via Reuters/Mick Tsikas

Australia's Attorney General, Christian Porter, quickly nixed the initiative, saying that Suu Kyi "has complete immunity, including from being served with court documents because under customary international law, heads of state, heads of government and ministers of foreign affairs are immune from foreign criminal proceedings and are inviolable – they cannot be arrested, detained, or served with court proceedings."

There were expected demonstrations against Suu Kyi by Rohingya living in Australia (complete with posters depicting her with an Adolf Hitler moustache), but the government treated her with the ceremony and pomp of a head of state, including an artillery salute, military honor guard, and a visit to the parliament building.

Her attendance at the Lowy Institute policy think-tank in Sydney was cancelled citing ill-health, although she may have wished to avoid questions from the audience. She paid a visit to her former aide and prominent National League for Democracy stalwart U Win Htein instead, retired now in Australia (or banished in disgrace following a scandal over his son's lavish wedding in the capitol Naypyidaw in January).

The legal gambit may have had laudable popular appeal domestically as Suu Kyi has been castigated for her studied refusal to condemn or even acknowledge the scale of the Rohingya crisis, but it had almost zero chance of success and missed the ultimate command responsibility for the security operation, which rests squarely with the commander in chief of the Myanmar military, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing.

That relationship, with the general and the military institution, is important to Australian interests. Balancing military ties and seeking a more constructive relationship with Suu Kyi in the wake of the Rakhine crisis has been a high wire act for Turnbull's government, particularly in an environment of intense domestic pressure to blame everything on Suu Kyi.

But it's a balance Australia has long pursued in Southeast Asia. Indeed, Australia has played a standard middle power role in Myanmar's democratic transition, emphasizing engagement and commercial interests while moderating its human rights criticism.

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, in a speech several days before the Summit, mentioned human rights only once (in relation to human trafficking, a major concern for Canberra's regional engagement), and emphasized instead the "international rules-based order…. that network of alliances and treaties and conventions and norms, underpinned by international law."

Bishop went on to say, "Undoubtedly, Australia has been a beneficiary…But it is under strain, it is under challenge.  There are states who cherry-pick what parts of the rules-based order they are prepared to adhere to and the parts they are not. They see some short-term interest in challenging that rules-based order…We believe that Asean is uniquely placed to continue to promote the international rules-based order."

Australia's Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull walks behind Myanmar's State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi during the Australia-Asean Summit, Sydney, Australia, March 17, 2018. Photo: Reuters/David Gray

This echoes Australia's 2017 White Paper on Foreign Policy, which had a small section on human rights promotion and more broadly emphasized trade and engagement. The document should have given pause to any expectation that Turnbull's government would exert overt pressure on Suu Kyi during the Summit.

In a region where human rights is increasingly cast as Western pressure masquerading as moralizing, the "international rules-based order" is coded terminology for getting along with the neighbors, not championing fundamental freedoms.

Australia was elected after a two-year campaign to serve a three-year term on the 15-body UN's Human Rights Council (HRC), running from 2018 to 2020. This is despite widespread international criticism over Australia's policies towards asylum seekers (including the Rohingya) and treatment of its own indigenous people.

Australia was thus a desultory co-sponsor of the March 2017 HRC resolution that mandated a fact-finding mission (FFM) to investigate possible crimes against humanity and war crimes perpetrated in Myanmar following the violence in Rakhine state in October 2016, and which has since grown into a major investigation into state violence in both Rakhine and war-wracked regions of northern Kachin and Shan states since 2011.

Suu Kyi's government blocked an investigation even before the hellish violence unleashed by Myanmar's security forces following attacks from Rohingya militants last August 25, 2017.

Rohingya Muslims wait to cross the border to Bangladesh in a temporary camp outside Maungdaw, northern Rakhine state, Myanmar November 12, 2017. Photo: Reuters

A depressing irony is that one of the three international experts leading the FFM is former Australian Human Rights Commissioner Christopher Sidoti, who participated in the Australian government's human rights training program with Myanmar's rights-abusing military government between 1999-2003.

The FFM's head, former Indonesian Attorney General Marzuki Darusman, presenting in Geneva at the HRC in mid-March, just days before Suu Kyi flew to Sydney, condemned the Myanmar government's culture of official denial over the scale of reported atrocities perpetrated by security forces in Rakhine state.

But Canberra has broader interests in Myanmar to pursue, as the Summit goals and White Paper made clear on closer reading, and are all outlined in the Sydney Declaration signed at the end of the Asean meeting.

Regional business interests and strategic realities such as maritime security, smuggling and violent extremism loom larger (although the Declaration does have a paragraph dedicated to promoting human rights and respect for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights).

The Memorandum of Understanding between Asean and Australia on Cooperation to Counter International Terrorism was a key part of the Summit, forging closer ties between regional states on counterterrorism intelligence-sharing and cooperation.

Myanmar border guard police force patrol near the Myanmar-Bangladeshi border outside Maungdaw, northern Rakhine state, Myanmar, November 12, 2017. Photo: Reuters/Wa Lone

The unclear and not present danger with this approach in regards Myanmar is that collective action could endorse Naypyidaw's evolving narrative of anti-terrorism as justification for the violent campaign against the Rohingya, a hysterically inflated threat the Myanmar government is using to appeal for international support, and to which Australia could subscribe and relegate human rights concerns as secondary to regional counterterrorism priorities.

There should be no doubt that Islamic violent extremism is a real challenge in Southeast Asia and for Australia. Nearby Indonesia and the Philippines are clear examples, and there are legitimate fears that losses by Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in the Middle East could result in a mass migration of jihadi fighters to the region.

But inflating the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) attacks in Myanmar to the ranks of international jihadism risks endorsing the mass crimes committed by Myanmar's security forces, and the cynical opportunism of the civilian and military government exaggerating the terrorist threat.

Australia would be wise to balance its counterterrorism engagement with Myanmar's security forces with increased support for civil society on countering violent extremism programs to understand from where the tensions really arise.

It is the sphere of limited military engagement where Australia's moral hazards, and its effective approach to engagement with Myanmar, lie.

Canberra made clear in late 2017 that it would continue its modest engagement of A$398,000 (US$306,000), including funds for workshops on disaster relief, English language training, professional standards, and UN peacekeeping with the Myanmar military, or Tatmadaw.

Myanmar military commander-in-chief, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing on February 3, 2018. Photo: Reuters/Lynn Bo Bo

Myanmar troops will also be observers at the Australia-Thailand Pirap Jabiru peacekeeping exercise, as they were for part of the US-Thailand Cobra Gold exercises, the region's largest joint maneuvers. (Canberra continues to impose an arms embargo on Myanmar due to its record of rights abuses.)

The military engagement strategy has been a long-term goal, as outlined as early as 2012 by the former Australian defense attaché to Thailand and Myanmar who now heads the Australian National University's Strategic and Defense Studies Center, Professor John Blaxland.

Blaxland has resisted calls from rights campaigners for Australia to disengage with the Tatmadaw, arguing "(c)utting off those ties is like cutting off your nose to spite your face…It's actually unhelpful because this is the only venue for engagement with the Burmese military on issues relating to human rights."

Blaxland has a point, and it's instructive to compare the far more modest military ties the United Kingdom had with the Tatmadaw, which were severed when five Myanmar officers at UK defense establishments were sent home (it was Suu Kyi who wanted more defense ties with Britain back in 2013), with the Tatmadaw stating "We will never again send trainees to Britain."

Protesters hold placards and chant slogans during a demonstration against Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi in Sydney, Australia, March 17, 2018. Reuters/David Gray

But the fact is that lecturing Suu Kyi on military abuses in Rakhine and elsewhere in the country is ineffectual for two reasons: First, she has no control over the military or security forces perpetrating the violence, so all insistence she put a stop to the carnage will necessarily fall on deaf ears.

Second, Suu Kyi has stated repeatedly, publically and privately, that she sees the events of Rakhine state very differently from the rest of the world, and is firmly committed to a process of effectively covering up the military operation that drove 700,000 refugees across the border to Bangladesh and the surreal performance of supposedly preparing for their eventual return.

Canberra calculated that calibrating their engagement with Suu Kyi, including during her trips to Sydney and Canberra, was part of a normalizing, not moralizing, procedure aimed at promoting wider interests.

It was a notably warm reception she was unlikely to receive in Europe or North America as accusations of ethnic cleansing and genocide stain her country's once vaunted democratic transition.

David Scott Mathieson is a Yangon-based independent analyst

More Than 43,000 Rohingya Parents Are Reported Missing. Experts Fear They Are Dead

Source times, 7 March

Watch Video : More Than 43,000 Rohingya Parents Are Reported Missing. Experts Fear They Are Dead

The numbers far exceed previous estimates and the Myanmar government's official death toll

More than 43,000 Rohingya parents have been reported lost, presumed dead in the six months since Myanmar's military unleashed a crackdown last August, according to a new report. These figures provide the latest indication that even by conservative estimates the number of Muslim Rohingya killed in the crisis far exceeds the Myanmar government's official count of 400.

Based on surveys of refugees who fled Myanmar for neighboring Bangladesh, 28,300 Rohingya children have lost at least one parent, while an additional 7,700 children reported having lost both parents, according to the ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR), citing data from the Bangladeshi government. That puts the number of "lost" parents at 43,700.

"These numbers cover Rohingya children whose parents are currently not with them because they were killed, or presumably killed and their whereabouts are unknown," Oren Samet, a research and advocacy director at APHR, tells TIME.

While there are no reliable totals for how many people have been killed in what the U.N. has labelled an "ethnic cleansing" campaign,Doctors Without Borders estimated 6,700 Rohingya deaths in the first month of violence alone.

Matthew Smith of Fortify Rights says the number of "lost" parents begins to reveal the scale of the ongoing atrocities.

Read more: Reprisals, Rape, and Children Burned Alive: Burma's Rohingya Speak of Genocidal Terror

"Given what we've documented from eyewitnesses and survivors from areas targeted by the army and other state security forces, it's likely that a significant portion of lost parents were killed," Smith says. "There were massacres and mass killings in all three affected townships since August, and in 2016 as well."

In February, the Associated Press detailed evidence of at least five mass graves in one location near the epicenter of the violence, Gu Dar Pyin. At that single Rohingya village, survivors estimated a death toll as high as the government's tally for the full crisis.

"The Myanmar government's estimate of 400 deaths is a bad joke, and continues their practice of using their own 'investigations' as cover-ups … to rebut the need for more independent investigations into the atrocities," says Phil Robertson, Deputy Asia Director for Human Rights Watch.

Since Aug. 25, more than 671,000 Rohingya have fled from Myanmar into overcrowded camps in Bangladesh, many bearing bullet wounds and evidence of widespread sexualized violence. Of those, around 60% are children, many of them without their parents.

Children have described witnessing their relatives' murders before military and vigilante raids set their villages ablaze.

Read more: Rohingya Refugee Children Are in Desperate Need of Aid, the U.N. Says

"We saw many, many children whose parents were killed and [who] were brought to Cox's Bazar by neighbors or passerby who grabbed them from burning houses," said Charles Santiago, APHR chair and a Malaysian MP.

According to the U.N. refugee agency, at least 5,600 children under 18 have become heads of their households, taking on the role of caregiver for littler siblings.

Previous estimates suggested that more than 2,680 children were separated from their parents, left unaccompanied or orphaned in the vast sprawl of Bangladesh's ballooning, makeshift camps. But the latest figures from Bangladesh suggest the total is much higher.

Human rights organizations have raised alarm about the potential for human trafficking. APHR said this scenario will likely be further exacerbated by the start of monsoon season at the end of this month, and as a highly criticized repatriation plan fails to gain traction.

"I suspect human trafficking will start once the rain begins. People will find ways to leave to Indonesia, Malaysia, wherever they can go," said Santiago.

Former Rohingya MP, Aung Zaw Win, arrested in Myanmar

Source theguarditan, 4 March

Myanmar border guard police officers patrol along a beach near a makeshift camp at the Myanmar-Bangladesh border. Photograph: Hein Htet/EPA

A former Rohingya MP has been arrested in Myanmar, in move that has been condemned as a further escalation of the attacks on the Rohingya community.

Aung Zaw Win, a major property tycoon and former MP for the Union Solidarity and Development party, was arrested at Yangon international airport on Wednesday as he was about to leave on a business trip to Bangkok.

A government statement said he has been accused of financing the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, the Rohingya military group.

Aung Zaw Win remains in custody in Mingaladon police station, near Yangon airport, but despite being held for five days has undergone no questioning.

Rohingya activist Nay Say Lwin said "the government and military [is] sending a signal to all of the Rohingya living and working in Yangon that they are also under threat, that they want to destroy the whole Rohingya community, not just those in Rahkine".

'Everything is gone': satellite images in 

Myanmar show dozens  of Rohingya 

villages bulldozed

Read more    

Since August 2017, thousands of Rohingya have been killed and more than 700,000 fled to neighbouring Bangladesh after a military-led campaign of violence which Yanghee Lee, the UN special rapporteur for human rights in Myanmar, recently said had the "hallmarks of genocide".

Aung Zaw Win is one of the most prominent Rohingya businessmen in Myanmar, with a vast property empire which includes hotels in Yangon and and Naypyidaw, as well as numerous construction companies. He was also MP for Maungdaw in Rahkine until 2015.

Mark Farmaner, director of Burma Campaign UK, said: "It's extremely worrying that he has been arrested like this. This is just how the old military dictatorship acted."

Aung Zaw Win's arrest has come as a surprise to many, for he is well known for his close ties to the military and is a divisive figure among the Rohingya. His involvement in politics was mainly for business purposes and he steered clear of making any political statement regarding the plight of the Rohingya in Myanmar

As an MP he was even among those who pressured the Rohingya community to accept Bengali identity, a proposal which reinforced the idea that they are not native to Myanmar but immigrants from Bangladesh.

Nay Say Lwin said that the timing of the arrest, against the backdrop of the attacks against the Rohingya, was "a clear threat to all the Rohingya in Yangon. That no one is safe from arrest, even if you have big business or are close links to the military."

He said it was "extremely unlikely" that Aung Zaw Win was involved in funding ARSA because "he has never been an activist and as a businessman with billions in property, he would never engage in this kind of activity – he only cared about his business".

Some have controversially suggested that ARSA was in fact a proxy of the Myanmar military, created to give them a legitimate reason to step up their attacks on the Rohingya. "He is the military's man and if he did finance ARSA, it's my view it would only have been because of pressure from them," added Nay Say Lwin.

Another source who preferred to be unnamed for security reasons, echoed the view that "average Rohingya have long distrusted [Aung Zaw Win]. Many believe he's connected to the military, and some believe he was instrumental in fomenting violence in 2012, after which he was rewarded land in Yangon and Naypyidaw.

"Some believe he worked with the military to create and instigate Al Yaqin [ARSA], creating the conditions for a military takedown of all civilians. And now they're taking him down."