Islam and Race in Myanmar: The Racialization of the Rohingya

This mass meeting of the Arakan Mohamedans [Rohingya] of Akyab Township emphatically protests against the latest definition of Arakan Mohamedans by the Deputy Commissioner Akyab as only those who bear Arakanese names or wear Arakanese clothes or adopt Arakanese customs and thereby altering the classification of Arakan Mohamedans to Chittagonians arbitrarily in contravention of census instructions. – “Arakan Mohamedans Protest Against Census Definition” New Burma (28 February 1941)[1]

 

The Bengalis [Rohingya] were not taken into the country by Myanmar, but by the colonialists… They are not the natives. – Commander-in-Chief of Myanmar Defense Services (Tatmadaw) Min Aung Hlaing (2017)[2]

 

The Rohingya crisis is one of the greatest humanitarian catastrophes of the twenty-first century. From 2012 to 2016, Rakhine Buddhist and other extremist nationalist groups carried out a series of pogroms that drove hundreds of thousands of Rohingya out of their homes in Myanmar’s Rakhine State (formerly Arakan). In 2016, encouraged by these grassroots Islamophobic movements and seeking justification through the retaliatory responses from the militant Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), the Myanmar military – Tatmadaw – launched an exhaustive ethnic cleansing campaign that drove approximately 671,000 Rohingya to flee as refugees into neighboring Bangladesh, most of whom remain there to the present day. The UN fact-finding mission on the Rohingya crisis recommended in 2018 that the International Criminal Court investigate the Tatmadaw for genocide and crimes against humanity, and the Gambia has since brought the case before the International Court of Justice. The case is ongoing. Meanwhile, the Rohingya remain the largest stateless population in the world today.[3] But, as the two opening quotes demonstrate, the exclusion of the Rohingya from indigeneity in Myanmar is not merely due to their Islamic identity in a Buddhist-majority country: the academically-unsound insistence that the Rohingya are “Bengalis” reveals a much more deep-seated process of racialization.[4] The first quote, reacting to the first of many attempts to strip the Rohingya of their indigenous identity, highlights how this process of racialization began. The second demonstrates how hegemonic it has become in present-day Myanmar.

MuslimRohingya refugees entering Bangladesh after being driven out of Rakhine State, 2017 | By Zlatica Hoke (VOA) – Screenshot from the source video, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=66794701

In this brief article, I seek to untangle the association between Islam and race in Myanmar. I argue that, due to a British colonial preference for imported Indian labor, Burmese ethnonationalists in the 1930s created a racialized relationship between foreign exploitation, Indian immigration, and the Islamic religion.

“In this brief article, I seek to untangle the association between Islam and race in Myanmar. I argue that, due to a British colonial preference for imported Indian labor, Burmese ethnonationalists in the 1930s created a racialized relationship between foreign exploitation, Indian immigration, and the Islamic religion.”

This racialization came to be solidified in the term kala, which originally meant “foreigner from the west,” but which Burmese ethnonationalists have since transformed into a slur that contains this racial categorization of Islam with South Asian descent.[5] I also make the case that race contains more than just ethnic identity, but a whole panoply of ethnic, religious, social, and political associations. In fact, this combination of ethnic and religious identity with larger social, political, and economic trends clearly reflects the political utility of the kala racialization: to provide a scapegoat for the larger structural tensions in Burmese society. I take such a utilitarian view of the emergence of race from my adherence to cutting-edge critical race literature, particularly the work of Patrick Wolfe, which contends that race does not emerge ‘naturally’ from a popular perception of difference but rather directly from specific political movements that seek to accomplish specific sociopolitical goals.[6] My other published work has laid out this larger process of  “political racialization” between 1930 and 1948.[7] Here, I will zoom in and examine the association between Islam and race in terms of the Rohingya in particular. Other scholars have done excellent work on examining the history of the exclusion of the Rohingya from Myanmar society, but none have laid out why Burmese ethnonationalists insist on this connection between the Rohingya’s majority Islamic religion and their supposedly foreign, Indian origins.[8] In short, I argue that Burmese ethnonationalists originally came to consider the Rohingya as Indian foreigners precisely because they were Muslim.

Origins and British Classifications

The debate around the Rohingya’s origins emerges, like so many others, from the clumsy drawing of Eurocolonial boundaries that often split historically-unified communities. These communities then need to ‘prove’ their belonging in post-colonial nation-states that most commonly define themselves by ethnoreligious majorities. Arakan is no exception. From 1429 to 1785 CE, the Kingdom of Mrauk-U ruled the region, and its borders sometimes extended far to the north of the Naf river, including much of what is today the Chittagong district in Bangladesh. Therefore, Arakan’s culture and population were far closer to India than to Burma for most of its history. The majority of its inhabitants were of Sino-Tibetan descent, called themselves “Rakhines” (thus “Rakhine State” today), and were majority Buddhist. Another prominent group, made up of a mix of descendants of Arab, Iranian, Turkish, and Pathan settlers with Chittagonians and Rakhines, was a majority-Muslim community that called itself “Rohingya” after the historical Arabic names of the region: Rohang, Rosango-Dhess, or Rekkhapura.[9] When the Bamar Konbaung dynasty conquered Arakan in 1785, the Buddhist Rakhines and a Zomia-based group, the Chin, put up a sustained rebellion to Bamar rule. Some of the Rohingya surely joined their countrymen in the rebellion, but many others fled north with fellow Arakanese refugees to Chittagong. These refugees only returned after the British conquest of Arakan in 1824. The return of the Rohingya with the British in 1826 is commonly cited by Buddhist extremists today as ‘proof’ that the group was made up of Chittagonian migrants rather than a group indigenous to Arakan.[10]

“It is telling, then, that the British themselves primarily viewed the Rohingya as Arakanese. In their censuses, they referred to the Rakhines as “Arakanese” and to the Rohingya as “Arakan Mohamedans,” a group they distinguished from Chittagonian Muslim migrants by ethnicity and Rakhine Buddhists by religion.”

It is telling, then, that the British themselves primarily viewed the Rohingya as Arakanese. In their censuses, they referred to the Rakhines as “Arakanese” and to the Rohingya as “Arakan Mohamedans,” a group they distinguished from Chittagonian Muslim migrants by ethnicity and Rakhine Buddhists by religion. The 1931 census numbered “Arakan Mohamedans” in the Akyab district as 48,320 (51,615 including the other Arakan districts). Scholars can assume that this number is likely much too low because, depending on the census official, many Rohingya were likely identified as either Rakhines (Arakanese) or as Chittagonians depending on their visible ethnic appearance, dress, or religious identification. Prior to a need for modern nationalistic identifications, Rohingya likely self-reported as Arakanese.[11] And unlike Indian migrants, who usually lived in separate immigrant communities, the Rakhines and Rohingya were not socially distinct before the 1930s: they lived in communities together as friends, family, neighbors, and countrymen.[12] So what changed?

Partition and Amplification of Indo- and Islamophobia

In 1930, the British Indian Statutory Commission arrived in Burma to assess the province’s progress toward self-government. Since Burma had previously been administered as part of British India, it had the secondary goal of determining whether to partition Burma from India. The pending decision was enough to split Burmese politics into two primary camps: the anti-Separationists and the Separationists. Whether or not this move was an intentional “divide-and-rule” policy by the British, it still had the effect of creating an organized and articulate Burmese ethnonationalist movement under the Separationist banner that viewed Indian immigration and the demographic dilution of indigenous Burmese Buddhists as the country’s foremost problem.[13] With very little input from the Burmese themselves, the British ultimately decided to side with partition, and in exchange, offered the same constitutional advances that they offered to the rest of India: an elected, indigenous Ministry that effectively ran the day-to-day government, aside from reserved powers retained by the British Governor.[14] 

…These changes, ratified in the Government of Burma Act of 1935 and put into effect in 1937, effectively brought the anti-Indian and anti-Muslim ethnonationalist movement to the forefront of Burmese politics.”

These changes, ratified in the Government of Burma Act of 1935 and put into effect in 1937, effectively brought the anti-Indian and anti-Muslim ethnonationalist movement to the forefront of Burmese politics. This occurred due to two primary triggers. First, since Burma was now formally a separate polity from India, the issue of Indian immigration could be taken up in the legislature as a matter of sovereignty and border control. Second, and more importantly, the introduction of (tentative) democracy amplified ethnonationalist concerns about the indigenous Burmese being demographically overwhelmed by Indians. In reality, the Indian population (numbering 1 million out of a total population of 14.6 million in 1931) had no prospect of overwhelming the indigenous Burmese in any district except for Rangoon, where their numbers were most concentrated. The real, material socioeconomic concern for the majority of the Burmese in the 1930s was the collapse of the colonial rice monocrop agribusiness economy. The global Great Depression caused an immediate 40% drop in global rice price, which led to the mass foreclosure of small peasant proprietors across the Irrawaddy-Sittang delta in the early 1930s. Much like the contemporary sharecropping crisis in the United States, Burmese farmers (a majority of the population) found themselves reduced from small landholders to indebted and impoverished tenant farmers.[15]

The socialist left, led by Dr. Ba Maw and his Sinyetha (“Poor Man’s”) party, offered a comprehensive program of actually mitigating this crisis: tenant protections, rent controls, and state land-purchase schemes to reclaim land from foreign creditors.[16] Meanwhile, the ethnonationalist right, led by U Saw and his Myochit (“Love of Race”) party, depicted the crisis as an Indian invasion of Burmese society. This nascent fascist movement, which would come to be known as Galon-Fascism, combined material socioeconomic concerns with social, cultural, and demographic fears around the replacement of the indigenous Burmese with Indians and the Buddhist religion with Islam. It was U Saw’s Galon-Fascist movement that came to redefine the term kala as a slur that encapsulated this scapegoated enemy. The term came to imply both the Indian “race” and the Islamic religion.[17] This association primarily spread through the ethnonationalist press, specifically U Saw’s private newspaper Thuriya (“Sun”), the New Light of Burma, and others. In a typical article from New Light of Burma, Sayadaw (Buddhist abbot) U Paduma wrote,

Burma is a Buddhist country. Peoples professing other religions come to Burma, the country of the Buddhist, without hindrance… they have been eating the flesh and sucking the life-blood of the Burmese… seducing Burmese Buddhist women to become their wives, causing dissension in order to create such communities as Dobama Muslim [We Burmese Muslim.][18]

In 1938, the ethnonationalist press, led by U Saw’s Thuriya, instigated the first countrywide Indo- and Islamophobic pogrom.[19] The movement’s political goals included banning Indian immigration and “Burmanizing” the workforce. For their part, the British found it much easier to work with the ethnonationalist right than with the socialist left, since their larger political and economic goals in the region were much more opposed to the latter than the former. Therefore, even though British officials knew U Saw had caused the pogrom of 1938, they ultimately ushered U Saw into the Premiership in September 1940.[20] During his tenure, U Saw managed to carry out a significant portion of his program, imprisoning much of his leftist opposition under the pretense of wartime necessity and negotiating his signature immigration ban, the Indo-Burma Immigration Agreement, in 1941.[21]

Racializing the Rohingya

Arakan was central to U Saw’s power base, and Rakhine ethnonationalists served as the Burma-wide Galon-Fascist movement’s single greatest support group. Why? Because Arakan was the most demographically-contested region in all of Burma. The presence of the indigenous Rohingya – as well as other smaller indigenous Muslim groups like the Kaman – made for a far more significant Muslim population in Arakan than in any other division in colonial Burma. This reality was compounded by the fact that the actual Indian migrants to Akyab district were far more homogenously Muslim than in any other district, being almost entirely (92%) Bengali and Chittagonian Muslims. Indeed, while the total Muslim population of Burma amounted to less than 4% overall, it made up 38% of the population in the Akyab district. Buddhists numbered at only 53%, a relatively tenuous lead compared to most of the country.[22] These concerns encouraged Rakhine-Buddhist nationalists to emphasize an Islamic invasion from India. The Bamar Galon-Fascists’ desire to ally with the Rakhine movement provides insight into why Islam – rather than Hinduism, Sikhism, or any other Indian religion – was their chosen religious scapegoat. The alliance between Bamar nationalists and Rakhine nationalists became possible precisely because both chose to make Islamophobia central to their respective political platforms.[23]

…As a result, Rakhine nationalists began the process of redefining the Rohingya Muslims as Indian invaders. The opening salvo of this process took place leading up to the 1941 census when the Deputy Commissioner of Akyab, a Rakhine nationalist named U Kyaw Khine, changed the classification of “Arakan Mohamedans” to “only those who bear Arakanese [Rakhine] names or wear Arakanese clothes or adopt Arakanese customs.

As a result, Rakhine nationalists began the process of redefining the Rohingya Muslims as Indian invaders. The opening salvo of this process took place leading up to the 1941 census when the Deputy Commissioner of Akyab, a Rakhine nationalist named U Kyaw Khine, changed the classification of “Arakan Mohamedans” to “only those who bear Arakanese [Rakhine] names or wear Arakanese clothes or adopt Arakanese customs.” Any other Muslims in Akyab were to be recorded as “Chittagonians.” To protest this challenge to their indigeneity, the Rohingya held a mass meeting at Maracan’s Mosque in Bumay village, just outside of Akyab. In their resolutions, they noted their “grave concern” at the reclassification of Muslims who “have permanently settled in this District from time immemorial” as Chittagonian migrants despite their “definite and bona fide assertion to the contrary.” Their pleas went entirely ignored, not only by the British state but also by the press, with the left-leaning New Burma being the only newspaper to publish their resolutions.[24] The recategorization remained in the census of 1941.[25]

This reclassification was the first of many such attempts to depict the Rohingya as kala and to erase their indigeneity. The Rohingyas’ continued racialization was not inevitable, but it did continue to be politically useful for those in power long after the end of British colonial rule. During the Japanese occupation, an “us vs. them” mentality in the Arakanese Civil War between the Rakhines and the Indians physically pushed the Rohingya away from their countrymen as pogroms caused Buddhists to flee to the south of Arakan and Muslims to flee to the north.[26] The division of Buddhists and Muslims only intensified after independence when Indian mujahideen sought to annex the northern part of Arakan to East Pakistan. Again, the Rohingya were caught in the middle.[27] Since the Tatmadaw established its junta in 1962, it has maintained its legitimacy by fighting endless wars against ethnic insurgencies in Myanmar’s peripheries.[28] Repressing and disenfranchising the Rohingya served the same purpose for the Tatmadaw’s junta as it did for U Saw’s Galon-Fascist movement. It won the loyalty of Rakhine nationalists, as well as Buddhist nationalists as a whole, by ‘protecting’ the normative indigenous people and their religion from ‘Indian Muslim foreigners.’

The Tatmadaw’s methodology has clearly been successful in maintaining its grip on power. On February 1st, 2021, a coup ended another of Myanmar’s brief returns to democracy and re-established the junta. Resistance movements have since broken out throughout the country. As I have argued in this paper, part of the process of undermining the junta’s power must be to undermine the racialized scapegoats on which its ethnonationalist base derives its strength. Race pulls its strength from any social or cultural identities that can be politically salient, and unfortunately for the Rohingya, the Islamic faith has been one of those identities in Myanmar. It does not have to be.

On June 3rd, the National Unity Government – the parallel government set up by MPs who were democratically elected in November 2020 – became the first mainstream political movement since independence to embrace the Rohingya people as a national minority. In a three-page statement, it proposes a return of Rohingya refugees from Bangladesh and promises that, “everyone in the Union has full enjoyment of fundamental human rights.”[29]

It is this path that will ultimately undermine the junta’s power, create a space for the stateless Rohingya, and potentially lead to the process of reconciliation.


Dr. Matthew Bowser is Assistant Professor of Asian History at Alabama A&M University. His research focuses on decolonization in Southeast Asia, examining the intersections of race, nationalism, capitalism, and imperialism in the process of achieving independence from colonial rule. He received his PhD in Modern World History from Northeastern University in May 2020. This summer he is in the process of completing his first book, Containing Decolonization: Fascism and the Politics of Race in Late Colonial Burma, which will be reviewed at Cornell University Press. He has also published several articles on his research, including “Partners in Empire? Co-Colonialism and the Rise of Anti-Indian Nationalism in Burma” in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History and “‘Buddhism Has Been Insulted, Take Immediate Steps:’ Burmese Fascism and the Origins of Burmese Islamophobia” in the Journal of Modern Asian Studies.


*Cover image: AFP- Buddhist monks participate in anti-Muslim protests in Sittwe, Rakhine State. July 2016.


**The author presented a version of this essay during the AVACGIS Annual Conference 2022 | Race and Islam: Global Histories, Contemporary Legacies | March 23 – 24, 2022.


[1] “Arakan Mohamedans Protest Against Census Definition: They Resent Classification as Chittagonians” New Burma (28 February 1941).

[2] Robert Birsel and Wa Lone, “Myanmar army chief says Rohingya Muslims ‘not natives,’ numbers fleeing exaggerated” Reuters (12 October 2017). https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya/myanmar-army-chief-says-rohingya-muslims-not-natives-numbers-fleeing-exaggerated-idUSKBN1CH0I6  (accessed 4 January 2022).

[3] “Rohingya Crisis,” Human Rights Watch. https://www.hrw.org/tag/rohingya-crisis  (accessed 13 February 2020); Marzuki Darusman et al., “Myanmar: Tatmadaw leaders must be investigated for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes – UN Report,” United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner (Geneva: 27 August 2018). https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=23475 (accessed 19 September 2018); “Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (The Gambia v. Myanmar)” International Court of Justice (2021). https://www.icj-cij.org/en/case/178 (accessed 5 January 2022).

[4] In this article, I define “racialization” as the political process of creating, defining, and reifying a group of people as a “race” with specific, inherent characteristics and a set of built-in ethnoreligious associations.

[5] Kala is a term that is roughly regarded as the Burmese equivalent of ‘South Asian descent,’ but the etymologically-contested nature and elusive origin of the term makes it untranslatable into English or other European languages. The meaning of the term has changed over time, especially through the rise of Indophobia in the colonial period when it began to be used in a derogatory way. My assertion is that the ethnonationalist movement of the 1930s reshaped the term to mark out a racial-religious Other, utilizing both Indophobia and Islamophobia to create a seemingly homogenous scapegoat. Usage remains contested today, but it has since manifested this derogatory racialized usage in the Indophobic and Islamophobic resurgence of the 1980s onward. See: Renaud Egreteau, “Burmese Indians in Contemporary Burma: Heritage, Influence, and Perceptions since 1988,Asian Ethnicity 12 (2011): 33-54.

[6] In Traces of History, Wolfe specifically argues that we can examine the specific racializations of the Aboriginal Australian, the American Indian, and the Black American, etc., and discern when and where these stereotypes arose and why they arose. For example, the contrast between the transmissibility of “blood” between the American Indian and the Black American: for American Indians, whom American settlers wanted to assimilate, blood is diluted through miscegenation and one must have a certain amount of “blood quantum” to qualify for indigenous rights, while for Black Americans, the “one-drop rule” applies and any amount of African blood makes one “Black” to better reinforce segregation and economic dependence. Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (London: Verso, 2016), 9.

[7] I am currently in the process of publishing a book on this topic, Containing Decolonization: Fascism and the Politics of Race in Late Colonial Burma, with Cornell University Press.

[8] Azeem Ibrahim, The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide (New Delhi: Speaking Tiger Publishing, 2017); Francis Wade, Myanmar’s Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and the Making of a Muslim ‘Other’ (London: Zed Books, 2017); Melissa Crouch, ed. Islam and the State in Myanmar: Muslim-Buddhist Relations and the Politics of Belonging (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Moshe Yegar, The Muslims of Burma: A Study of a Minority Group (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1972).

[9] Early Portuguese observers verify this presence by referring to a population of Muslim “Rooinga” in the region. Mohammad Mohibullah Siddiquee, ed. The Rohingyas of Arakan: History and Heritage (Chittagong: Ali Publishing House, 2014), 14-17, 25-36.

[10] Yegar, The Muslims of Burma, 18-25.

[11] Government of Burma, Census of India (Vol XI: Burma), Part I: Report (Rangoon: Superintendent, Government

Printing and Stationery, 1933), 230-231. IOR/V/15/146. There were almost certainly Buddhist Rohingya as well as Muslim, and the British almost certainly would have classified Buddhist Rohingya as “Arakanese [Rakhine] Buddhist.”

[12] U Kyaw Min writes of this camaraderie, in contrast to political rhetoric, existing as late as the “Long March” in 1942. U Kyaw Min, The Burma We Love (Calcutta: Bharati Bhavan, 1945), 4-6.

[13] The Separation League, Memorandum Submitted to the Indian Statutory Commission by The Separation League (Rangoon: The National Printing Works, 1929), 4, in Government of the United Kingdom, Indian Statutory Commission, Burma Memoranda (1929). IOR/Q/13/1/7, E-Bur-988.

[14] Government of the United Kingdom, Government of Burma Act (1935). IOR/V/8/226. It was incredibly clear, even to the British, following the landslide victory of anti-Separationists in the 1932 Legislative Council elections, that anti-Separation was the more popular camp, but the British ignored their demands: Government of Burma, Election on Separation Issue (9 November 1932), 1. IOR/M/1/1.

[15] Government of Burma, Report of the Burma Land and Agriculture (U Pu) Committee 1937-39. (Rangoon, Superintendent, Government Printing and Stationery, 1939). IOR/V/26/312/4. An excellent recent study: Ian Brown, Burma’s Economy in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

[16] Ba Maw, Breakthrough in Burma: Memoirs of a Revolution, 1939-1946 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 15; Amar Lahiri, “Prime Minister Ba Maw of Burma,” Contemporary Japan: A Review of East Asiatic Affairs XI (1943), 1611-1625, in U Kyaw Min, et al., Adhipati Dokta Bha Mo (1893-1977). (Yangon: Pancagam Ca Pe, 2013), 201-212.

[17] Ng Thein Pe, “Indo-Burma Conflict” in Government of India, Department of Education, Health and Lands, Land and Overseas Section. Burma – Anti-Indian Riots. 1938. NAI 92-1/38 (Confidential).

[18] U Paduma, “Bama Thway,” New Light of Burma (25 July 1938).

[19] I cover this pogrom in my article: Matthew J. Bowser, “‘Buddhism Has Been Insulted, Take Immediate Steps:’ Burmese Fascism and the Origins of Burmese Islamophobia, 1936-1938Journal of Modern Asian Studies 55, 4 (2021): 1112-1150.

[20] British opinion on U Saw vs. his rivals can be found in: Government of the United Kingdom, Burma Office, Visit of Premier U Saw to UK: Invitation and Biographical Notes 31 Jul-21 Oct 1941 (1942). IOR/M/3/1113; U Saw lays out his policy and programme in his opening speech as Premier: BHRP, Vol. 8: August-September 1940 (1940), 1351. IOR/V/9/4098-4099.

[21] C.S. Stewart, “Review of Recent Activities of Premier U Saw” in Burma Office, Visit of Premier U Saw to UK, 21-22; Government of Burma, Public and Judicial Department, Indian Immigration into Burma: Indo-Burma Immigration Agreement, 1941 (June 1941-July 1947), 348-349. IOR/L/PJ/8/214.

[22] Burma, Census of India (Vol XI: Burma), Part II: Tables, 241-255. 186,327 Chittagonians had permanently settled in Akyab by 1931, which was 88.3% of the 210,990 Indians living in Akyab district; when combined with the broader category of “Bengalis” (an additional 15,586), this percentage increased to 92%. Only 16,685 (8%) settled Indians in Akyab were Hindu, while 194,305 (92%) were Muslim.

[23] This alliance of the Rakhine nationalists to U Saw’s movement can be observed mostly clearly in the Burmese House of Representatives. See, for example: Government of Burma, Burma Legislature, Proceedings of the First House of Representatives (BHRP), Vol. 1: February-March 1937 (1937), 397. IOR/V/9/4087; BHRP, Vol. 3: February 1938 (1938), 350-370, 877-913, 1100-1155. IOR/V/9/4089; BHRP, Vol. 4: August-September 1938 (1938), 112-161, 191-232. IOR/V/9/4090.

[24] “Arakan Mohamedans Protest Against Census Definition: They Resent Classification as Chittagonians” New Burma (28 February 1941).

[25] Government of Burma, Census of Burma 1941, Provisional Tables (1941). IOR/V/15/226.

[26] Rakhine sources are summarized in Saya Khaing Myo Saung, The Bad Colonial Heritage of Arakan and the Expansion of the Bengali Muslims of Chittagong (In Myanmar) (Tokyo: Arakan Rakkhita Group, 2012); Muslim sources are summarized in Moshe Yegar, The Muslims of Burma.

[27] Central Arakanese Muslim Refugee Organization, “Resolutions of the Meeting Dated 22/12/49” (1949) in Government of the United Kingdom, Foreign Office, Situation in Arakan (1950). FO 371/83115.

[28] Ardeth Maung Thawnghmung, Behind the Teak Curtain: Authoritarianism, Agricultural Policies and Political Legitimacy in Rural Burma/Myanmar (London: Kegan Paul, 2004), 3-4, 19-24.

[29] Angshuman Choudhury, “Why the National Unity Government’s Statement on Myanmar’s Rohingya Is Important” The Diplomat (9 June 2021). https://thediplomat.com/2021/06/why-the-national-unity-governments-statement-on-myanmars-rohingya-is-important/ (accessed 20 July 2021).