We should all share the blame for the Rohingya tragedy

My local shop in Yangon was owned by a retired army officer and his wife and guarded by their handsome coal-black dog. When I asked the name of the hound the man smiled and said ‘Kalar’, before enquiring if I knew the meaning of the word. I did. Kalar is a racial slur, employed originally by the Burmese to describe the darker-skinned immigrants from India brought to Burma by the British as cheap labour in the colonial era.

More recently, the word has come to be used as a derogatory reference to Burma’s Muslims, and especially the reviled Rohingya minority in the far western state of Rakhine. The use of the insult has become so pervasive since the persecution of the Rohingya began making global headlines in 2012 that Facebook, by far the most favoured means of communication in Burma, now automatically censors any post that includes the word.

Being called a kalar was a daily de-humanising experience for the Rohingya activist and writer Habiburahman when he was growing up in Rakhine State in the 1980s. He was also known as ‘10 per cent’ to his Buddhist classmates, because the Rohingya were considered to be only part-human. But Habiburahman thought himself lucky to be attending school. Even 30 years ago, the Rohingya were being denied access to education, as well as healthcare.

No one referred to Habiburahman as a Rohingya because his people had lost the right to use that name in 1982. That was the year Burma’s citizenship law was changed by the then ruling junta to exclude the 1.4 million Rohingya from the list of Burma’s 135 officially recognised ethnic groups. The Rohingya have been effectively stateless since then, typed as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, despite the fact that there has been a significant Muslim presence in Rakhine State since at least the 15th century.