• DOI:10.1080/0163660X.2018.1519356
• Corpus ID: 158775505

Rohingya: Victims of a Great Game East

@article{Fair2018RohingyaVO,
  title={Rohingya: Victims of a Great Game East},
  author={C. Christine Fair},
  journal={The Washington Quarterly},
  year={2018},
  volume={41},
  pages={63 - 85}
}

• C. C. Fair
• Published 3 July 2018
• Political Science
• The Washington Quarterly

In the vulnerable southeastern Bangladeshi city, Cox’s Bazar, an estimated 1 million Rohingyas languish in spartan refugee camps following brutal ethnic cleansing from their homes in Rakhine, a state over the border in western Myanmar (see Figure 1). This was not the first—nor likely to be the last—catastrophe to fall upon the Rohingya, but it has been the most devastating since anti-Rohingya violence in the country began escalating in the early 1990s. Since independence from the British in 1948, the Rakhine state has generally been neglected by Myanmar’s capital, Naypyidaw, affecting the state’s Buddhists, Muslims (not all of whom are Rohingya), Christians, animists and others. There is a long-standing belief among the Buddhist majority that Muslims seek to undermine Myanmar’s Theraveda Buddhist identity, stemming from fears of Rohingya Muslims in particular, but increasingly toward all Muslims in Myanmar generally. Myanmar’s extremist clergy, called Sangha, and their followers are joined by counterparts in Sri Lanka and Thailand who also espouse conspiratorial canards of Muslims weaponizing their fertility and male virility to achieve numerical, social, religious and cultural dominance in these countries, and thus eradicate Theraveda Buddhism in those nations. Buoyed by the support from key international partners, Myanmar has both downplayed the extent of the alleged atrocities and justified the actions it admits to taking against the Rohingya by insisting that even ordinary Rohingya are coconspirators with the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), which launched several high-profile insurgent attacks against security forces based in Rakhine in October 2016, August 2017, and most recently in January 2018. Myanmar contends, with