THE SAGA OF A DREAMLAND

The illegal immigrant Bengali Muslims of the Rakhaing state (Arakan) in Myanmar rose in rebellion for North Arakan Free Muslim state in 1948, and the abortive outcome has compelled them to live with the sentimental fantasy of the Muslim freehold ever since. The recent political reforms that took place in Myanmar stirred hope among the Bengali separatists who mused over the prospect of their fantasy, and obviously invoked the self-idolized Muslim academics to cautiously tone down the inflammatory rhetoric, who otherwise chronically fomented enmity with the government, having notoriously bent on dwelling upon moral bankruptcy, engaging in the hate speech and name-callings.

On the other hand, behind the scenes, the glimmer of hope, however, evoked an emotional debate that played out across the immigrant Bengali community over the remonstrance against the Anti-Rohingya Union (ARU) for the contentious principles, particularly "indivisible Arakan state", which literally meant the abandonment of the dream of Islamic freehold.  Following a much heated discussion, a decision was reached by a near consensus to uphold the delusive desideratum of dreamland, only to be entangled in a violent quarrel over the question of representation on a Citizen Advisory Committee being deputed to make a prepositional assessment with regard to the Islamic secessionist movement. At the insistence of Dr. Ali Butcher Islam, a professor emeritus, the matter was settled resorting to a compromise and the committee was formed with a representative each from the Bengali Refugee Organization of the United Kingdom (BROUK), the Anti-Rohingya Netizens Organization (ARNO), the Rohingya Sufi Organization (RSO) and the Bengali Refugee Association of North America (BRANA). It goes without saying that Dr. Ali Butcher Islam appointed himself Chair-man of the committee, who made public the white paper:-

FLICKERING HOPE: Hoping for an Islamic freehold is an unrealistic wish and unattainable goal, which we did not achieve in the past seventy years. It was an epic failure; perhaps the timely reminder of the end of the centuries-long aspiration. Nevertheless, by a curious twist of events, our jihadist separatist movement seemed to have limped back to a hopeful future, after having gone through the greater part of our miserable life. Given the much-heralded democratic reforms undertaken by the infidels whom we called the beasts, the light of our fabulous freehold is now presumably at the end of the tunnel, which we never hoped would have happened.  Yet we should not let ourselves thrown into the wildest excitement by the optimism of rickety future. Perhaps, the irony of fate might have played an unfair trick upon us, the alien Bengali separatists.  It is not crystal clear that the evil of non-citizenship issue, which ironically originated from the British colonial rule, would come to an end. We never know when our dream will come true. It might not be in our lifetime or never. Maybe there is just the tunnel, but no light; hence we shall not at any time be legalized as bona fide citizens paving the way for recognition of our fake ethnicity, which in turn without question is the essential prerequisite to the Islamic dreamland.  However, nothing must lead our efforts astray.

ELEMENT OF PROXY: Our goal is to have us, the illegal immigrant Bengalis, recognized as an ethnic group with the constitutional right to a free Islamic freehold. In order to achieve our objective attempts were made to bring the separatist movement into the vortex of international politics having duped ourselves in the precedent of Kosovo. On that account we made desperate efforts to boost political influence, through the powerful Islamic lobbyists, using various sources at different levels, such as the heretical apologists and publicists, the liberal media, the accommodating NGOs, the regional and United Nations organizations as well as the Western governmental and law making institutions, one after another in the flight of fancy that the latter was more influential than the former. Unfortunately, after all these unproductive efforts we finally ended up with hypocritical and controversial Muslim patrons, whom we thought most authoritative believing in their ludicrous illuminism.

It remains an open question whether our objective will ever be materialized through the Western proxies; courting them has evidently become a tall order in the light of their changing attitudes towards Myanmar, who were intrigued to promote their own interests and clearly circumspect to connive at advancing our illicit movement.  Moreover, there is a bone contention of the integrity of so-called influential Muslim patrons, who prejudiced themselves having flunked their write-ups by inciting a thinly veiled threat of Islamist revolt, in the example of the Arab Spring (which started to germinate democratic changes but evidently grew into Islamist power) no matter how small was the Muslim population in question. Unfortunately, the inflammatory and unscholarly statements only rendered racial tension. We have serious reservations about the effectiveness of ostensibly righteous oration of self-proclaimed moralist Muslims, which were riddled with factual errors and hypocrisy given their own society was embedded in racial discrimination and religious persecution, and the country wherefrom they hailed was entrenched in turbulence. Their credibility was undoubtedly blighted for the sanctimony, and their claim as defenders of human rights was left in tatters.

LYING SPREE: On the other hand, we are exceptionally intellectual and competent lie-savvy.  Look no further than examples of our writings which convey repertories of lies. The duplicity spiraled out of control; theories tossed around multiple origins of ethnicity but one prominent exception of the Bengali ancestry. In order to keep the true identity under wrap, all our drumbeat stories never mentioned one thing about our influx during the British days and thereafter, and also why the British Imperialist Administration recorded us as alien Chittagonian Bengalis and categorized in the religious rather than ethnic grouping. We played the victim of racial discrimination and persecution of Islamic religion, notwithstanding the inexorable criminal acts of perfidy having revolted against the host country in the fulfillment of the Islamic inspiration. We repeated slavish imitation of complaint portraying ourselves as innocent and benevolent despite the fact that we agitated for Arakan, the Moghe land, to become as part of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) as the British left Burma. We never threw a line in the political rhetoric about the illegal immigration and the separatist movement on being afraid lest the fair-minded public should have the opportunity to see the true picture of the issue; otherwise, all the outrageous accusations and outlandish claims would have been execrated. We prided ourselves on being versatile confederates who put in force an organized campaign to spread manufactured accounts of our history and ethnicity and engaged in the malicious slander about the Moghe/Rakhaings (Arakanese) who disputed our stories.  Frankly, what we have been trying to achieve is at the expense of the Moghe, and often than not imposing on them ploy of the wolf in sheep's clothing. We blamed the Moghe for our failure. We accused them as racist conspirators; unfortunately, we amply proved ourselves being no better either. We claimed credit for what we disseminated anti-Moghe rhetoric making them the scapegoat for the doomed Islamic freehold. At the same time we played out absurd tricks in a bid to drive a wedge between the Moghe and Burmese and more insensately negative stereotypes seeking to rouse public resentment against Myanmar by vilifying the Buddhist religion. In a sickening act of deceit we conflated Buddhism and the adherents with genocide but never ever mentioned cowardly about the fact that in the name of our own religion fellow Muslims committed crimes against humanity. We earnestly adhered to the strategy to manipulate the separatist issue in the pretext of holding a belief for democracy in spite of the fact that our faith and democracy were irreconcilable. In the first place, how could we transgress the cardinal tenet about the inferiority of women?  We never believe in the equality of man with woman; and hereby solemnly vow that the divine right of having four spouses will never ever be traded upon with women. Empowerment of women is against the Sharia. It is a sin.

That we are a superb factory of duplicitous inventions is the fact that we fabricated countless versions about our history and ethnicity. Most blatantly we belied the fateful term "Rohingya", which was initially devised as the hybrid race of the Arabs; however, given the valid objection to the term, we subsequently subverted and supplanted it with an equally fabulous claim of various origins that included, the Yemenis, the Afghans, the Persians, the Moors, the Turks, the Moguls, the Chakmas and you name it, only to add fuel to the flames of rejection. In a measure to prove ourselves entirely different from the Bengalis an instant language was created but our tricky ingenuity could hardly forge it being distinct from the Chittagonian dialect. And one other invention, presumably not the last, was a costume as recently displayed in Oslo, Norway, which was made up of such components as the dunce's cap-like headdress with a strip dangling on the side, the grey-hued, the medieval Manchu-styled jacket opening down the front, and a pair of loose trousers, no matter how clumsy the man in that grab looked like the scarecrow.  As a matter of fact, we broke the record of fake inventions, but our accomplishments were not registered in the Guinness World Records book. Is it not discrimination based on the race and religion, which definitely is a criminal act calling for justice before the International Criminal Court for the violation of human rights? 

THE DELUSION:  The plain truth is that the chief obstacle to our efforts to establish the Islamic freehold sprung from the xenophobic and undemocratic Moghe, who resisted Islamic infiltration and did not want to share their land with us. Allah willing, we will make all the Moghe extinct from the Northern Arakan sooner or later; we have no illusion in putting into force the mortal Islamic justice, history stands testament to it. Only to get rid of the Moghe and their land will be our own.  As such, the first priority is to relocate the border security fence from the bank of the Naaf River along with Bangladesh to the bank of the Mayu River, which would not only prevent the Moghe of the Southern part from entering the Islamic domain but also open the flood gate to our brothers from the fatherland since the two territories are to be amalgamated.

In the meanwhile, we should desist from the inherent dissimulation that we were the sister community of the Moghe in the excuse of having common political interest against the Burmese. It is a lie. The two groups, the natives and aliens, have never been on good terms. We loathe the Moghe; our intent has been death and destruction to them. We are just double-dealers, sentimentally interested only for our own but no one else's.  We are Muslims being bound by Islamic faith and should not imitate the Buddhist Moghe or the Burmese, whose habits are all evil. We should not resemble them in any manner, or take their names, or adapt ourselves to their language, let alone their dress and diet, but always hold enmity towards them and their way of life. We should not let the two cultures mingle with each other; no interfaith or intercultural dialogue. The multiculturalism has been a disaster in the West; thanks to brother Muslim immigrants who were seethed with rage against the cultures of adopted lands. We should adopt and strengthen our monolithic culture. Arabization is the only solution to the institutionalization of socio-anthropological mould in order to help us identify with the Arabs so that we might be subordinated to the Arab Monetary Fund; of course, not as a donor so to speak.

We have taken issue with the opponents about the belied term " Rohingya" which was rejected nationwide, who refused to accept the term as the identity of an ethnic minority; thus, our rage against the enemy should by no means be limited to promote anti-Moghe bigotry, but we should also intensify our efforts to wage the campaign of intimidation and silencing of any ethnic nationality or political institution, chiefly the government, which raised objection to our separatist movement.  In this context, we command the leadership of the National League for Democracy: (1) Purge the old guards of the party who, on the strength of personal knowledge of our ethnicity and background, confuted our phony origin and history; (2) Disregard the misleading histories written by the Moghe, which were mere trash and of no account, but abide by our make-up histories, which were authentic and valid; (3)Remember whatever fact the Moghe said was a lie, whatever lie we made was a fact; they were always in the wrong and we were forever in the right, which is our statement of truth, (4) Put on record that we are not foreigners, but just have the fortune of being illegal Bengali immigrants; and (5) Give official recognizance, in return for our self-seeking support pretentiously in the name of democracy, to the belied term "Rohingya", which was the latest guile imputed to dreaming up the Islamic freehold.

REALITY FACTOR: The fever of hysteria broke out among our superb intelligentsia over the fantasy genre, the feasibility of which by fair means or foul is doubtlessly out of the question, yet we have been inherently hypnotized by unrelenting notion of Islamic secessionism, the endemic disease. The situation has been so dire that after three quarters of a century we came to realize our limitations and the infeasibility of our dream. The vexing question is about how our illegal separatist movement might end; the outcome is not just unpredictable but unthinkable. After all we, on our part, have done the stratagem to the best of our ability, but in vain; it is now up to the Allah to fulfill our uncanny aspiration. At the same time we failed to understand why Allah took so long to bless us, the doggedly devout Muslims. Apparently he might have underplayed the purpose and object of our separatist movement, the tenor of which was in fact to implant an Islamic foothold and establish progeny in the area we encroached upon as the first step towards Islamization of the entire Buddhist land. Perhaps, Allah neglected us because he was well aware of the futility of our unlawful movement.  Nevertheless, our objective must never falter; our goal must be achieved with or without the Grace of Allah. 

 

 By Maung Tha Hla

 

Rakhaing Guardian