Rohingya people

The Rohingya are a Muslim ethnic group in Myanmar ( Burma). They live mainly in the northern part of Bangladesh bordering Rakhine State (formerly Arakan ). In Myanmar today about one million Rohingya.

According to the Citizenship Law of 1982, the Rohingya are not considered as one of the 135 indigenous populations and therefore have no claim to the Myanmar citizenship. Due to repression and persecution to live at least a million Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh and other countries of Asia.

History

The origin of the Rohingya is highly controversial. The Rohingya describe themselves as a long time resident population there Rakhaings, who converted to Islam years ago up to 1000. The region since ancient times visited by Arab traders, and some cultural characteristics of the Rohingya seem to support this theory of the origin. The Myanmar government arises, however, on the view that the Rohingya immigrated only recently from Bengal and thus were illegal immigrants from Bangladesh or their descendants.

The Rohingya formed during the British colonial era, the majority of the population in Rakhine State. But in the 1940s, and especially after the independence of Burma there were tensions between the Buddhist Arakanese ( Rakhine ) and the Muslim Rohingya.

See also: History of Burma # independence

Situation of refugees

Particularly serious incidents there were in 1942, 1962, 1978 and 1991. 1978 studied about 200,000 Rohingya refugees in neighboring Bangladesh protection, in 1991 another 250,000.

Although some later returned, but many remained in refugee camps in Cox's Bazar District. It is estimated that walked about one to one and a half million Rohingya in exile since the independence of Burma. They live mainly in Bangladesh ( Chittagong in particular ), Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, a smaller number in the United Arab Emirates, Thailand, and Malaysia. Since 2005, the UNHCR assists in the repatriation of Rohingya from Bangladesh, but reports of human rights abuses in the refugee camps threaten these efforts.

The beginning of 2009 came as Rohingya boat people in the headlines after Thailand had denied a residence permit and about a thousand deported in simple non-motorized boats on the open sea. Around 250 of them were later rescued from the belonging to India 's Andaman and about 200 off the coast of Aceh in Indonesia. About 500 drowned probably. The Myanmar Consul-General in Hong Kong expressed in a letter to the " dear colleague " ( of the Diplomatic Corps ), in which he denied the Rohingya with reference to their dark skin color belonging to Myanmar. He referred to them as " ugly as goblins " in contrast to the lighter-skinned Burmese.

After it came in Rakhine State from June 2012 ethnic riots, the Burmese President Thein expressed his to the High Commissioner for Refugees, the United Nations proposed that the Rohingya should either go in UNHCR camps or leave the country. He also said that the Rohingya " illegal immigrants " and that they would be willing to deport them to any country that she would take.

End of October 2012 it came again to serious unrest.

Situation in Myanmar

The Rohingya are classified by the United Nations as "the most persecuted minority in the world". Rohingya activists accuse the Myanmar government to convert the Rakhine State in a purely Buddhist region and want to make the Muslims to an insignificant or manageable minority. That's why more than a quarter of the total arable land had been left to the jungle. The government had begun to pass confiscated Rohingyaland to Arakanese inside and outside the Rakhine State to the settlement. It is claimed that pagodas and Buddhist monasteries are built mainly in places where earlier Islamic buildings were razed to convert Rakhaings appearance in a Buddhist.

Since the independence of Burma on 4 January 1948, the Rohingya - hitherto been faced with 19 large-scale military operations - under pressure from the regime. These massive military operations led to the death of many Rohingya, to the devastation of their settlements and sanctuaries, as well as the systematic destruction of their infrastructures.

Large military operations were:

List of serious crimes and human rights abuses by the military regime:

Culture

Although they are referred to by the Burmese government as " Bengali Muslims " and their status as a recognized indigenous ethnic group is denied, the Rohingya have their own culture and language.

The language of the Rohingya is close to the Bengali and belongs to the Indo-Aryan languages ​​within the Indo-European language family. Rohingya speaker able to communicate with speakers of Chittagong dialect of Bengali, which is spoken in the nearby South East Bangladesh. The language has many borrowed and foreign words from Urdu, Hindi, Bengali and Arabic, as well as some words from Burmese and English are incorporated. The language was originally written in Arabic script, but there has recently been efforts to write the language in Latin script. The result from this is called Rohingyalisch.

Religion - the majority of Islam - is for the Rohingya of great importance. There are mosques and religious schools in every neighborhood and village.