Habib Siddiqui

The Rohingya Identity It has been sometimes argued, especially amongst the anti-Rohingya demagogues, and the numerous suppositions which some biased scholars have made, that since the designation “Rohingya” did not appear in the Baxter Report and some of the papers associated with it in the National Archives and the British Library in the UK, it was an invented term used by the Arakanese Muslims to claim ethnic status in Burma. In so doing, as if suffering from selective amnesia, they forget to state that the term ‘Rakhine’ was not used for the Arakanese Buddhists in many such reports either. Instead, we find the use of the words like ‘Mugs’ (see, e.g., Charles Paton’s work) and ‘Magh’ to refer to the Rakhine Buddhists. The Rohingya Muslims of Arakan were similarly referred as Arakanese Musselmans and Mohamedans. British reports have often mentioned Muslims in various parts of India as Mohamedans, Mahommedans and Musselmans. In some reports, all those terms were used intercha...

Here is a link to a documentary on the Rohingya - the forgotten people. For those of you who are interested to read my speech given at U Penn  a few years ago on the same subject can do so by clicking here .

You can read the Bengali translation of my original article on genocide of the Rohingyas of Burma by Shahbaz Nazrul. Click here to read in Bengali.

You can view Prof. Wakar Uddin's speech at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champagne on the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingyas of Myanmar. To view the video, please, click here .

You can view al-Jazeera's investigative journalism - Hidden Genocide - the  story of a people fleeing the land where they were born - the Muslim Rohingya of Myanmar  by clicking here .

  Seventeen Buddhist leaders from around the world, plus the Dalai Lama in absentia - have issued a statement urging Buddhists in Burma to show mutual respect and compassion to Muslims in the Rakhine State .  In a statement, they wrote: “We are concerned about the growing ethnic violence and the targeting of Muslims in Rakhine State and the violence against Muslims and others across the country.” The statement continued, “The Burmese are a noble people, and Burmese Buddhists carry a long and profound history of upholding the Dharma.” “We wish to reaffirm to the world and to support you in practicing the most fundamental Buddhist principles of non-harming, mutual respect and compassion.” It is good to see that eventually Buddhist leaders are waking up to the ugliness of their religion, as demonstrated by their savage practitioners in Myanmar , esp. the Rakhine state. They are afraid of the tarnishing effect of their romanticized religion in the ...

3. Anti-Indian Riots in British Burma The Burmese history is replete with accusations against the British government of following a policy of divide and rule; deliberately separating the hilly people from the Burmans/Burmese. According to historian Maung Aung, this policy had the full support of the Christian missions, who wanted to convert the hilly people to Christianity. The British government also kept the racial groups further apart by denying military training to the Burmans and Shans, and giving that privilege to Chins, Kachins and Karens. The latter fought alongside the British and Indian forces – drawn mostly from the Gurkha (Nepalese) and Sikh population - in campaign against the guerillas. The Burmese also hated that in the Anglo-Burmese wars, the Indian troops had fought side by side with the British in their regiments The race relationship inside Burma worsened after the First World War, especially, after the Great Depression which made most cultivators poor and...