Myanmar and Migrations

For the past millennium, the region of what is today Myanmar (Burma), has witnessed the movement of populations. Many of these migrations have wildly changed the demographics of the area, which is located at the crossroads of Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and China.

The origin of the ethnic groups of Myanmar is especially important in the light of the current violence in Rakhine state against the ethnic Rohingyas, who are mostly Muslim, with a Hindu minority. The latest round of violence began on August 25 when Rohingya militants attacked around 30 police and army posts near the border with Bangladesh, leading to the deaths of 12 officers. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya have since fled violence in the coastal state of Rakhine (Arakan) perpetrated mainly by the Tatmadaw (as the Myanmar armed forces are known) and ethnic Rakhine Buddhist villagers. The violence is allegedly in response to attacks on security forces by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), which may have some connections with jihadists in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and may operate out of camps in Bangladesh. According to the Myanmar government, ARSA is a terrorist organization, an allegation that may have some truth to it, as the group is led by Rohingya who have trained abroad in places like Pakistan. ARSA’s leader is Ata Ullah, who was born in Pakistan and raised in Saudi Arabia.

The Rohingya language, ethnic characteristics, and culture are related to those found in the neighboring Bengal region, comprising the Indian state of West Bengal and the country of Bangladesh. This has led to a claim, widely believed in Myanmar, that the Rohingya are illegal immigrants from Bengal, who migrated in waves to Rakhine, first during the British Raj (Burma was a province of British India until 1937), and then during Bangladesh’s war of independence from Pakistan. The Rohingya language is closely related to the Chittagonian language or dialect of southeast Bangladesh, which is similar but not necessarily mutually intelligible with Bengali.   The common position in Myanmar is that the Rohingya came with the British from Chittagong in the 19th century, and are thus not indigenous at all to the region. The Rohingya, on the other hand, claim they have been in Arakan since the 8th century, but the presence of a few Arab and Persian traders is unlikely to be the genesis of the community. However, it is likely that the community dates back in part to at least the 15th century, when the Sultanate of Bengal became the overlord state of Rakhine for a time.

The reality of the situation is more complicated, and partially so because the boundaries between Bengal and Rakhine have always been changing. Furthermore, the Rakhine people, who form a closely related branch of the ethnically dominant Bamar (Burmese) people, are latecomers to Rakhine. The earliest inhabitants of Myanmar were the Mon (related to the modern Khmer), founders of the ancient Buddhist state of  Dvaravati, and the Pyu, who formed many city-states along the upper Irrawaddy river. In the 9th century, Bamar (Burmese), who were related to Tibetans, from the neighboring kingdom of Nanzhao based in Yunnan, began attacking the Pyu-states. This led to the conquest and migration of the Bamar into today’s Myanmar. The native inhabitants were gradually assimilated or displaced. A latter branch of this migration founded the Rakhine kingdom of Mrauk-U in 1430 with help from the Sultanate of Bengal.

The last Burmese dynasty, the Konbaung Dynasty (1752-1885), was notably expansionist, spreading Burmese culture and language throughout the region, displacing and assimilating the dominant Mon population of Lower Burma, sacking and destroying the Thai kingdom of Ayutthaya in 1767, depopulating Rakhine (Arakan) during its conquest of that region in 1785 (this might have lead to an increase in the proportion of the Rohingya population there, as many Rakhine died), and devastating Assam during its brief conquest of that kingdom between 1821-1825. This brought the Burmese to the borders of British Bengal and triggered the gradual British conquest of Burma, completed by 1885.

While migrations from the north and east changed Myanmar’s demographics, other people were entering the region from the west. Physiologically South Asian populations speaking Indo-Aryan languages (the family that includes Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, Nepali, Marathi, Gujarati, Assamese, and so on) have been expanding south and east from the Punjab region since the Iron Age. By the time of the Maurya Empire (320-185 BCE), this movement had reached Bengal. Although there were several subsequent Hindu and Buddhist empires in Bengal during the medieval period, such as the Palas and Senas, there was little population movement eastward toward what is today northeast India and Myanmar due to the heavily forested and hilly nature of the terrain.

In 1204 CE, a Turkic Muslim adventurer conquered Bengal, inaugurating the Islamization of the region, though there were some trade contacts with Arab and Persian merchants before. It is difficult to determine where Bengal ended and Rakhine began historically speaking, and where the boundary of their respective populations and language groups lay. The Sultanate of Bengal helped found the Mrauk-U kingdom in 1430, and many South Asian Muslims lived in what is today’s Rohingya area of northern Rakhine, but some Rakhine also live in southeastern Bangladesh. The exact boundaries between Bengal and Rakhine were drawn later by the British, and as such, it would be anachronistic to argue that some population or the other lived in Rakhine forever, or immigrated there later, or were included in Rakhine because of a quirk of how borders were drawn in the 19th century.

What is known is that at some point, what is today’s northern Rakhine and eastern Bengal, including the city of Chittagong, came under the control of Mrauk-U, before being conquered by the Mughal governor of Bengal under the reign of the Emperor Aurangzeb, Shaista Khan, in 1666. The boundary of the Mughal Empire extended to the Kaladan river, which includes parts of Rakhine now inhabited by Rohingya. The boundary became meaningless after the British conquest of the region, and there was some migration to the region from British India. Definitely many Indians migrated to big cities, such as Rangoon (Yangon). But it is unclear if the demographic balance between Muslims and Buddhists in northern Rakhine was altered in this period.

In any case, it ought not to matter who was an original inhabitant of Myanmar or not. When the country became independent in 1948, all people within its borders should have become citizens of the new country, as had happened in neighboring India. Instead, by emphasizing ethnic criteria for full political participation, Myanmar has faced constant strife among its ethnic minorities, and not just the Rohingya; the Shan, Kachin, Kokang (ethnic Han), and others have been fighting the central government of Myanmar for many years. Some combination of development and partial autonomy could have done a lot to alleviate the Rohingya issue, including the understandable fear of demographic replacement by the Buddhist Rakhine people. Instead, a bloody cycle of violence, hate, and displacement beckons. Perhaps the goal of ARSA is to provoke the creation of another Kosovo; thus, the opposite of what the Buddhist Rakhine intended would end up occurring, with a Muslim majority ruling over a Buddhist minority in what was supposed to be a “pure Buddhist land.”