A PEOPLE'S STRUGGLE AGAINST THE ISLAMIC INVASION

This article was triggered by the recent tectonic realignment of the immigrant Bengali separatist movement, having organized as Arakan Rohingya Union (ARU) on the agreed principles of an indivisible Arakan State, Peaceful Co-existence, Democracy and Human Rights, and Federalism, under the sponsorship of the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation and Euro-Burma Organization. Seemingly, there is not much of efficacy in the reorientation of the factious movement. To rid the divisive-spirited alien Bengalis of the secessionist mindset is the least likely of all possible outcomes: Having the Rohingya tag dangled around is the attestation. Nevertheless, it serves as a reminder that the misguided jihadist secessionist movement, which has all along been languishing, now verges on being a failed cause.

INTRODUCTION

History is replete with episodes of peoples who resisted colonization of their homeland. The Rakhaings or Arakanese are no exception, who have struggled to defend their ancestral land in different periods of foreign occupation spanning over two centuries since they lost sovereignty in 1785. The Rakhaing land ( Arakan ), which has become a constituent state of Myanmar (Burma), is now confronted with the prospect of being overrun by the alien Bengali Muslims, the vast majority of them were imported by the Imperialist British from the Chittagong District of adjacent East Bengal, currently Bangladesh, coupled with the post independent illegal migrants. Goaded by the Islamic separatist movement of British India, the ethnically homogeneous and abysmally bigoted Chittagonian Bengalis rose in rebellion in 1948 against the host country, under the banner of jihadist Mujtahids (closely identified with the Mujahadins) who demanded for a free Islamic state within the Rakhaing state slated to be set up in the Muslim infested area adjoining to their former homeland, the very Muslim nation whereto they pledged to accede. Having foundered in the campaign the radical profile of the movement was palliated to alter public perception and espoused in the 1970s, consequent upon the Bangladesh independence, a precarious political agenda ostensibly on the social platform that played on the card of "Rohingya", the ostensible race who were initially claimed as hybrids of shipwrecked Arabs, an ethnological fraud devised in the 1950s, only to be supplanted subsequently by an equally fabulous claim to being the descendants of Levanter merchants; but none of the claims was proven its veracity.

THE TERM ROHINGYA AND THE FALLOUT

The name "Rohingya" in the Bengali vernacular is the people of Roshang/Rohang*, the land of Rakhaing, like Latinos are natives or inhabitants of Latin America who, however, do not necessarily belong to any particular group or race of South America. The Bengali immigrants, who were beset by identity crisis, belied the term and dubbed themselves "Rohingya" with the sinister scheme to obfuscate the Bengali ethnicity in order to forge the status of the alien Bengalis into one of the ethnic minorities in the hope of a good chance to legalize them as bona fide citizens of Myanmar, hence overcoming the hurdle of being ineligible for the free Islamic state.

Needless to say, the fraudulent term "Rohingya" drew a storm of disproval from all indigenous peoples regardless of race, creed or political orientation, challenging the validity of the name for what it was claimed to represent. The wrong use of a name or being known by a different name does not make a people change their ethnicity. A Dutchman is known as Hollander or native of the Netherlands, the Japanese as Nippon, the Spanish in America as Latinos, the Rakhaings as Arakanese to the West and Maughs (smearing racial slur) to the Bengalis. Likewise, the alien Bengalis are known as Kula (foreigner) to the Rakhaings and Chittagonians to the British colonialists, but their ethnicity does not change just because they are known by different names or by adopting the misnomer "Rohingya"'. The name "Rohingya" was not recognized by all Bengali immigrants, even among the Islamist separatists. A faction of the movement called themselves, the Itihadul Mozahadin of Arakan.

What makes the term" Rohingya" objectionable is its intent. The motif which was reflexively trumped up as the excuse for the separatist movement was infused with the supremacist Islamism and thus compatible with Nazism and Zionism, having presented itself a synergic ideology incorporating the political Islamism and biological racism laying emphasis on self-identification of Muslims as a political polity. Hence, what is Nazism to the free society of the West, or Zionism to the Muslim world, the concept of "Rohingya" is to the people of Myanmar. The Rakhaings are the most vocal, who raised stern objection to the name since it was made the subject of option on the demand to bifurcate their ancestral land in favour of the Islamic state.

THE ASSAULT ON RAKHAINGS

Simmering frustration stemmed from the failure to pretend to be different from what they really are, given the stiff resistance across the nation, set off the Bengali separatists to decry the Rakhaings who were held accountable for the setback. It is unbecoming of the elements of arrogance to pass rude remarks and characterization of the Rakhaings in the calumnious terms. The Bengali Muslims have been inherently influenced by race-bias and their comments on the Rakhaings are pertinent. They seem to be consumed only with personal attacks rather than addressing the substance of the issue. Perhaps, they are in anguish from want of legal grounds. The worst still is the threat of violence and deadly retribution other than the human rights violations. The abusive remarks and hateful language proved by themselves a deranged attempt on the part of the Bengali netizens to intimidate and silence the Rakhaings who insistently rejected the farcical claims in their vigorous efforts to defend their homeland against the Islamic incursion.

Adding insult to injury is the condescending manners of apologists in the West who were driven by self-obsession. It is fallibility of judgement to patronize the Rakhaings who are being robbed of their land by the illegal immigrant Bengali Muslims. Dabbling in the Rohingya mania, the panderers in the West, out of sheer political motives, made scathing remarks to the point of deriding the ethnic nationalities, particularly the Rakhaings, for the staunch opposition to the term "Rohingya", notwithstanding the fact that it only explains the visceral appeal of patriotism and the national solidarity against the Islamic aggression. It is the unity in defence against the danger foisted upon the national security and territorial integrity. Democracy movement and opposition to a regime or political entity is one thing, but devotion to the cause of safeguarding the sovereignty and commitment to the general principles of primary loyalty to the nation is another. No self-respect individual, whichever ethnic nationality he belongs to, will connive with pugnacious Chittagonian separatists who, with the support and guidance of external patrons, committed acts of subversion directed to seizing part of the Union territory, which is the tribal land of some other ethnic group. In the West, let alone the unity within one nation, but different nations were united in the wake of Nazi invasion and Communist dominance; and the Muslims all over the world, who stoked fires of jihad, ganged up together to wage battles against infidels.

CONCERNED-ABOUT-BENGALIS WESTERNERS

Beating the Bengali drum the self-obsessive Western liberals made the argument which contained in the briefing paper of Euro-Burma Organization that, "Rakhaings have demanded the name 'Rohingya' be dropped. While the concern over the use of the name is understandable and must be taken into account, it remains a fact that in a free society people can call themselves by any name they wish."¹  But, it is also a fact that some names are objectionable for the intent, like the name Nazi which remains an anathema to the free society of theirs.

Portended also in the pedagogic allocution is that "The more Arakanese Muslims are excluded and marginalized in Arakan, the more likely they are to ask for a separate state. They will not ask a state if they can co-exist as equal in Arakan state."²  This biased mantra does not lead to the end of Bengali problem.  The facts of history lend discountenance to the wisecrack. It's only meant to argue that the disease is the cure: Just embrace them as an ethnic minority accepting the false identity of "Rohingya"; simply ignore their aspiration for self-identification of Muslims as a group which should have a political place in the Union and a special territory in the land of Rakhaing; and merely co-operate with them in their quest for the fulfillment of Islamic inspiration. It apparently is sort of admonition the ardent supporters had in common with the alien Bengali separatists intended to reproof the Rakhaings, and for that matter other ethnic nationalities as well, for their resistance against the Islamic aggression.

The Bengali supporters evidently heaped much blame on the indigenous Buddhist Rakhaings who were accused of excluding the alien Bengali Muslims, while they failed to deal with the root cause which led to the strained relationship and political rancor between the two communities. In reality the alleged exclusion or marginalization of the alien Muslims was a natural consequence of the perfidy that fired up their imagination for setting up a free Islamic state, having it curved out of the Rakhaing land. To phrase it differently, the separatist movement of immigrant Bengalis was not resulted from the exclusion and marginalization as prejudicially concluded on the basis of false accusation of inequity to justify their inexcusable Islamist revolt, but it was the other way round. The alien Bengali Muslims, who portrayed themselves as victims, have been agitating for the acquisition of the Rakhaing land since the British time after they had met with Muhammed Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League of British India and architect of Pakistan nation, at the meeting of the League which was held at Lahore in March 1940.  Driven by the inflammatory rhetoric of Jinnah that Muslims, "must have their homelands, their territory and their state"³, the Bengali separatist movement, an offshoot of the nationalist movement of the Muslim League, learned from the Pakistan Independence and grew from it.

One should not overlook the fact that the so-called Rohnigya Bengalis are foreigners, having them arbitrarily imported by the reigning colonialists without the consent and at the expense of indigenous people. They have no legal claim to the land or entitled to a state for themselves like the Muslims in British India who are native converts and thus had the rights to a territory of their own as mandated by the government of British India. Besides, the divisive alien Bengalis had never been part of the national struggle for independence from the British colonialists; on the contrary they collaborated with the occupying masters in the dream of a separate state. The combination of foreign origin, anti-nationalist movement and separatist campaign bred conflict between the native Buddhist Rakhaings and alien Bengali Muslims who looked always towards their co-religionists abroad. Accordingly, there is no legitimate reason to complain about the exclusion or marginalization which was fueled by nativism and deep distrust in the subversive immigrant Bengali Muslims. The complaint is only an attempt to blame others in order to excuse from their own misdeeds. Nor there exists the question of irredentist aspiration as conjured up without any ground whatsoever.

One other self-complacent remark is that "The historical authenticity of a name is not also an issue,"⁴. It is just a superficial approach to the Rohingya problem. The authenticity of the name was claimed in relevance to history. But, history does not bear out the term being in existence. Either during the era of Rakhaing monarchy or Burmese domination or in the records of Imperialist British Administration, there was never documented the existence of a group of Muslims duped as " Rohingya", fraudulently claimed to be the hybrid race of Arab castaways or genetically connected with the merchants from the Levant. Nonexistence of so-called "Rohingya" in Arakan is evident given the records of the Imperialist British. The 1906 Akyab District Gazetteer states:

Indigenous Races: - Arakanese (239,649), Burmese (35,751), Kamis (11,95), Mros (10,074), Chins(9,415),Diangnets (3,412),Chaungthas(247)and Thets(232).     

Non-Indigenous Races: - British(209), Eurasians(158), Chinese(4390), Shaikhs (152,074), Saiyyads (1,254), Pathans (126), Zairbadis (108), other Muslims (1,325), Sudras (6,016), Kayasths (2,888), Uriyas (625), Brahmans (398), Chatris (377), Dhobis (263), Waddars (233), Nats (226), Burua Maghs (165), Chettis (164), Doms (143), Malas (142), Marabans (125), Banias (114) and other Hindus Castes (2,104).⁵

Obviously, the alleged "Rohingya" race was not mentioned in either of the two categories above, nor was it featured in the 1947 constitution, whereupon the independent nation of Burma was established, or its successors a clause honouring the immigrant Bengali Muslims as an ethnic minority or the name "Rohingya" as their designation.

The nomenclature of phony Rohingya is much equivocal and varied as dubbed at the will of writers. To some pragmatic writers the term is Muslims of South Asian descent, Bengali Muslims or Arakan Muslims. It is indisputable fact that the immigrant Bengali leaders who fathered the Islamist separatist movement named themselves Arakan Muslims as stated in the manifesto, “Charter of Demands of Arakan Muslims”. Despite being disputed on the validity of the term "Rohingya", the same name was arbitrarily legitimized by the pandering Westerners to identify the alien Bengali Muslims in question. Here is an example contained in the report of Irish Center for Human Rights:

"Reference to the Muslims of North Arakan as "the Rohingyas" continues to be a somewhat contentious in Burma. Arakan was formerly known as Rohang/Roshang/Raham. The Rohingya name identifies the Muslims of Arakan as natives of Rohang or of Arakan. Hence Rohingya is synonymous with "Arakanese" or "Rakhine".

The ethnic majority Rakhine fundamentally rejects any suggestion that Rohingya should be considered an ethnic group with bona fide historical roots in the region; indeed the Rakhines contend that they only encountered the word "Rohingya" in the 1950s during the time of Mujihid movement. A similar view is held by the Araknese Muslims resident outside of Maungdaw, Buthidaung and Rathedaung townships, who did not support the independence and irredentist claims made by the Rohingyas on a number of occasions since Burmese Independence in1948. The Rohongya community reject the argument that the term " Rohingya" was invented in the 1950s and contend that this is an ancient term that was used much before the Burmese Independence. However, it is evident that the Muslim residents in North Arakan who preferred to be designated "Rohingya" as opposed to "Burmese Muslim" have developed a culture and language (a mixture of Chittagonian, Burmese, Hindi and English) which is absolutely unique to the region. It is felt that the term "Rohingya" is a legitimate identification for this group and will be used throughout the report."⁶

To those who take a role to set the politically correct liberalist agenda the truth is of no value if it does not suit with their own preconceived notions and self-interests. They should not venture their volition on others in violation of their own principles. They are apparently beaten by the filthy tricks of Bengali Muslims and self-delusive heretics. The term Arakanese or Rakhaings is historically applied to the indigenous Mongoloid Buddhists only, not the alien Bengali Muslims; for that reason the so-called Rohingya are no Arakanese, nor do they have claim to being Rakhaings. "Literally, embodiment of Rakhaing is an ethno-religious affiliation: Ethnicity is Mongoloid and religion is Buddhism. Neither race or faith alone constitutes the unique breed of Rakhaing."⁷  In other words, the Arakanese or Rakhaings are Buddhists and the fictitious Rohingya are Muslims each group belongs to a different ethnicity and culture. "Rohingya", therefore, is not synonymous with Arakanese or Rakhaing. To suggest the two distinct races of different faith and culture being synonymous with each other is the most inscrutable logical conclusion given the irony of reality that the Protestant Irish cannot be accepted as symbolic substitute for the Catholic Irish, albeit both belong to the same race and share the same culture. This is not just a delusion but also the profound ignorance of the historical truth, with an arrogant disregard of ethics.

C.E. Lucas Phillips, a Brigadier General in the British Fourteenth Army, who fought on the Arakan front during the Second World War, clarifies the ethnicity, language, religion and national origin of the fictional Rohingya.

"Arakan is a province of Burma that has a character all its own." ⁸"The two main strains of the population, mutually hostile, divided by race, language and religion, were of Muslim and Buddhist persuasions respectively. The Buddhists, to whom the term 'Arakanese' was in these parts specially applied, belong to a tribe or strain known as Maugh or Mughs.⁹ " " The Muslims had their origin in the district of Chittagong, in the Bengal province of British India, and all the Muslims, whether natives of Arakan for generations or recent immigrants, were known as Chittagonians, or in the British forces as 'CF'..... A bewildering babel of language was spoken by these people. The Arakanese spoke a dialect of Burmese, but the Chttagonian stuck to the Bengali of their homeland, but, if educated, spoke Urdu as well." ¹⁰

It was asserted that the term" Rohingya" was legitimate identification for the Chittagonian Bengalis from the Maungdaw, Buthidaung and Rathidaung area** taking into account the unique culture and language (a mixture of Chittagonian, Burmese, Hindi and English). In the modern world most languages are not without loan words from others as cultural traits passed from one people to another. The Chittagonian dialect of fictional Rohingya of Bengali strain makes no difference either. Hindi, the Indian vernacular, spread influence into social system of the Indian sub-Continent. They might have adapted to some Burmese words of the land they migrated and conformed to the English usages of the British Raj, the official language of the region. English language is the best example with loans from different parts of the world, the British Indian Empire in particular. A couple of stripes on the Celtic lion do not transform it to a Bengal tiger. The absorption of a few foreign words under cultural and geographical circumstances does not make the said Chittagonian dialect unique in order to warrant a determinant factor to legitimate their ethnic identity as "Rohingya", being different from the Chittagonian Bengalis in the adjacent land. It is obviously untenable logic, posing a vexed question as to the notion.

Faulty reasoning is also the presumptuous presentment that the Bengalis in question have developed an absolutely unique culture. Evidently, the apologists seemed to have badly been engrossed in the Chittagonian Bengali propaganda. The Bengali separatist movement was dedicated to the Islamic nationalism and self-identification of Muslims as a group with their religion and culture intact. The Bengali Muslim separatists, who strictly adhered to the Islamic dogma are adamantly opposed to the local culture like the rest of Muslims. Case in point is the dysfunctional multiculturalism of the West where the Muslim immigrants doggedly clung to the Islamic culture. The cultural traits of fictive Rohingya are in affinity with their Chittagonian brethren next door, who belong to the same ethnicity, profess the same faith, speak the same dialect and remain wedded to the same tradition, social customs, dietary law and habit of dressing and housing. Such being the case, one is led to wonder out loud how the Bengalis in question should have developed an absolutely unique culture separate from what that flourished in their former homeland across the border where their genesis appertains. The corollary: The cultural mores of the Irish in Northern Ireland, with the exception of the religious denomination to some extent, are regarded not being otherwise from their brethren in Ireland.

The Bengali separatists, like the al-Qaeda, used the European apologists and publicists to achieve their political objective. Having exhausted the unproductive efforts courting the European middlemen, they found a potential medium for propaganda in the venue of the United States Congress, and particularly in the person of Rep. Christopher Smith (R) from New Jersey, which is home of a large Muslim community, wherein two of the 9/11 hijackers spent some time prior to the catastrophic attacks. Following a visit to the US Congress of a Mujtahid-turned-Rohingya delegation organized by the Christian Solidarity Worldwide, a resolution apparently in the name of social equality and human rights of the minority races in Myanmar was introduced by Congressman Smith on September 29, 2010.  In reality the resolution, which was verbatim repeating of the statement previously published by the Bengali Islamist separatists, was by all means in the language of emphatic bias towards and to the sole interest of the Islamist separatists. Predictably, the resolution never reached the floor. Repulsive as is the purpose, the unsettling issue of the ethnic minorities was unwarrantedly exploited by the Multahid-turned-Rohingya separatists to meet their own ends, making use of the good offices of the US law makers. The pity is that Mr. Smith & Co. was just one instant, who were used as the so-called Rohingya should use any weighty politician who would be parroting their manufactured propaganda, and the government chancelleries which would be useful to them; on this account the United Nations Organizations is not to the contrary, which was exploited to cultivate the purported "Rohingya" that incarnated the whim of Bengali secessionist movement anew, having hankered after the non-Bengali identity.

BENGALI STRATEGY

In a twist of propaganda the Bengali separatists transformed the illegal Bengali immigration issue into instigated refugee crisis and the resistance against Islamization into religious persecution and racial discrimination in order to legitimate their separatist movement peddling, through the help of advocacy groups around the world, extravagant claims of oppression against the Muslims and the Islamic faith. They played on the stereotype of religious persecution laying emphasis on the prejudice against Buddhist religion, which induced the Western panderers, who treated the Muslim problems as byproduct of Buddhism, to play politics smearing freedom of religion. The Buddhist religion is the faith of many ethnic minorities who are in conflict with the co-religionist Burmese majority. The fault line in Myanmar is racial acrimony rather than religious persecution. The national origin coupled with ethnic identity is the heart of the Rohingya problem. Antonio Graceffo rightly made the assessment: 

"They (Rohingya the author met) made comments like, the Buddhists did this to us, the Buddhists did that to us. But I know from my own experience, the Burmese government hates all of the ethnic minorities. They do horrible things to them equally. They persecute Christians and other Buddhist alike. It is not because of religion but because of race. In Arakan State, the area where these men come from, there are basically only two types of peoples, Rohingya and the government/military people. And the government/military people just happen to be Buddhists. So the only experience these people ever had with Buddhists was of being mistreated and repressed by the Burmese government." ¹¹

The predisposed liberals, who indulged in the massively exaggerated Bengali propaganda, overzealously conflated all issues related to the Muslims with religious persecution, racial discrimination and human rights violations while conveniently overlooked the inexorable realities that the Bengali Muslim problems were attributable to their own accreditations, namely, the rebellion against the host country, the illegitimacy of which was evidenced by a lack of support from countries around the world even from many Islamic nations; and their connection with the global network of terrorist organizations affiliated to the al-Qaeda  and Taliban, whereupon they were excoriated internationally, including Saudi Arabia. Compounded as well are such factors as the political turmoil, social retardation and economic volatility nationwide. The economic downturn prompted the younger generations of many races, not only the fictitious Rohingya, to venture on perilous journeys by sea or by land in search of a better life in the neighbouring countries.

Historically, the greater numbers of alleged Rohingya are illiterate, who are rural peasants and manual workers. They have never been well off in the Bengali over-swarmed area, which is afflicted by economic stagnation. As a matter of fact the misguided separatist movement was largely the intellectual brainchild of the ambitious, influent and affluent non-Dravidian urbanites with little contact among the bulk of the rural Dravidian stock. The political manipulation of the separatist movement was not about to alleviate the level of abject poverty of the rural Dravidian mass, nor to address the enormous social gap between the wealthy non-Dravidian oppidans and the agrestic poor proletariat who unfortunately had to bear the brunt of the consequences of misadventure, while the wrangling, power-mongering elite leadership class found for themselves the privileged life overseas. 

CONCLUSION

The Rakhaings are not insensitive about the plight of destitute Bengali Muslims, who became victims of the ill-fated Islamist secessionist movement, or they condone violations of human rights by any means or in any form anywhere in the land. The alien Bengalis were not alone who were subjected to such abuses but others too, the Rakhaings inclusive. The apologists in the West wistfully put emphasis on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which, however, was regrettably the consequence but not the cause of the Second World War of Imperial Powers. Hundreds of years prior to and immediately after its adoption on December 10, 1948 the servile people of so-called Third World lived in subhuman conditions under raw colonialism in their own lands. Ironically, the European hypocrites, notwithstanding their gory past, who made them seen as the champions of human rights, failed to come to the aid of the Roma in their own backyard who are the most discriminated peoples depriving of citizenship and personal identification documents required for social services and other benefits. Nevertheless, there was an outpouring of outcry over the situation of so-called Rohingya, in stark contrast to the deafening silence from the same advocacy groups about the human rights violations, including pogroms, inflicted on the non-Muslim ethnic minorities of the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh, which happened to be the hub of Mujtahid-turned-Rohingya secessionist operation. The lack of response to the abuses inflicted on the non-Muslim peoples revealed much about the inconsistency of the self-proclaimed human rights activists. The human rights issue is a noble purpose to pursue, but if misled conscientiously or unconscientiously it might just be the opposite, leading to the probability of bringing misunderstanding upon the objective and integrity of the pursuers.

In the light of current rumpus against the threat of Islamic encroachment and home grown jihadists in the West a question is aptly posed for the civil libertarians, who are unwittingly enabling the Islamic secessionism, as to how would they put themselves in a similar situation as imperiled by the grossly amassed alien Bengali separatists, since their world is now pullulated with Muslims who emigrated, not without but with the consent, and in some cases in the interest of host countries.

Given the energetic current of pandering the partisans in the West seemed to have fallen victim to the absurd stories of the Bengali Muslims regarding their unsubstantiated ethnicity, despite the fact that what they claimed did not tally with historical records and official documents. In order to understand the national objection to the term "Rohingya", and thus the roots of Muslim problem itself, one has to be acquainted oneself with works of noted historians other than history tabloids of the Bengali separatists and conjectural accounts of their Western patrons who are keen on quid pro quo. There are many works by the British scholars-cum-administrators who served with the British Colonial Administration in Rakhaing, or Arakan as referred to, who are regarded as undisputed authority on the history of Rakhaing. They had no reason to be bias towards or against the subject peoples, the Rakhaings or the Bengali Muslims who were imported from the adjacent land as part of transmigration that accompanied the British colonial expansion.

Emphatically, the noted historians of unquestionable integrity and fortitude, who belonged to the yesteryear, would not have been cowed or at best terror-stricken by a phantom threat of Islamist jihadists, who yarned for global Islamization, nor would have they pursued the self-protective political stance exploited through escapism and appeasement to the Muslim world, which strived to gain power over the once overweening adversary using state actors who wiggled at the whiff of Crescent Funds.

It is apt to reproduce an excerpt from the writer's own work, "Seeing through the Islamic prism, the West is the West, there is no distinction between nations, all are the same Imperialist racists despite their desperate efforts to prove otherwise. By the same token an infidel is the enemy of Islam regardless of the ostensible pro-Islamic stunt, no matter how hard one might exert oneself to find favour in the eyes of the Muslims" ¹²

NOTES:

*            Through the history the land of Rakhaing, a traditional Buddhist kingdom, was known in different names as described by foreigners in their travel logs, such as Rakhangapura, Racha, Rachim, Rcon, Roshang,Yakhai, Argyre and Arakan.

**            The Rakhaing land, having taken over by the British from the Burmese occupiers, became the Arakan Division in British Burma. It was divided into three districts, namely Akyab, Kyaukpru and Sandoway. Akyab district was where the Bengali immigrants concentrated most, especially in the townships of Maungdaw, Buthidaung and Rathidaung, geographically in the order of proximity to the adjoining Bengali land.

REFERENCES

1.       Euro-Burma Briefing Paper No.2, 2009; THE ROHINGYAS, Bengali Muslims or Arakan Rohingyas?

2.       Ibid;

3.       A.C. Banerjee,ed., Indian Constitutional Documents, Calcutta, A. Mukherjee and  Co.,1946,II, p.408;

4.       Euro-Burma Briefing Paper No.2, 2009;

5.       Burma Gazetteer, Akyab District, R. B. Smart (Deputy Commissioner) Settlement Officer, Akyab, Government Printing, Rangoon, 1917,Volum A, p.84;

6.       Report of Irish Center for Human Rights about Rohingyas, 2010, p.21;

7.       THE RAKHAING, Maung Tha Hla, Buddhist Rakhaing Cultural Association, New York, 2004, p.17;

8.       The Raiders of Arakan, C. E. Lucas Phillips, Heinemann, London, 1971, p.4;

9.       Ibid, p.8;

10.   Ibid, p.9;

11.   Report on Refugee Resettlement, 2010;

12.   ROHINGYA HOAX, Maung Tha Hla, Buddhist Rakhaing Cultural Association, New York, 2009, p.74.

The writer Maung Tha Hla is founding President of the Buddhist Rakhaing Cultural Association of the United States of America, a non-profit organization, founded on July 13, 1996. He is the author of two books which can be accessed in most of the eminent libraries around the world:

1. THE RAKHAING;

2. ROHINGYA HOAX.

Rakhaing Guardian