Kawser Chowdhury
Publish: Sunday, 22 June, 2025 12:04
The world loves its convenient fictions. The plight of the Rohingya, those weary, stateless souls penned into the fetid camps of Cox’s Bazar, is too often flattened into a simple tale of ethnic hatred. True, Buddhist nationalism has burned hot in Myanmar for decades. But look closer. Peel back the pieties and platitudes, and you will find something darker at play: the cold, calculating hand of greed, cloaked in the garb of prejudice. And behind it? The long shadow of a rising imperial power, staking its claim in blood and concrete.
For over a thousand years, the Rohingya and their ancestors have tilled the earth, fished the coasts and prayed on the western rim of today’s Myanmar. From the 7th century onward, Arab traders, the Bengal Sultanate and local kingdoms forged a mosaic of cultures in Arakan. The name Rohingya itself, mocked as a modern invention by Myanmar’s rulers, echoes in records as far back as the 18th century. “The Rohingya are as native to Arakan as any other group. The myth of the Rohingya as recent arrivals is a colonial-era construct,” notes Dr Michael Charney of SOAS. And science, that inconvenient witness, tells the same tale: DNA studies place the Rohingya firmly in South Asia’s genetic web, with traces of Arabian blood woven through their veins. A people born of tides and trade, not borderlines drawn by generals.
But facts do not feed the machine of exclusion. Since independence, Myanmar’s state has waged war not just on the Rohingya body, but on their very existence as a people. First came the slurs (Bengali, illegal, invader), then the laws. The notorious 1982 Citizenship Act, that bureaucratic guillotine, sliced the Rohingya out of the nation’s body politic, erasing them with the stroke of a pen. No papers, no rights. No rights, no future. What followed was apartheid in all but name: ghettoization, forced labour, bans on education, marriage and movement.
And what did happen when oppression was not enough? Out came the sword: Operation Dragon King in the 70s, the pogroms of the 90s, the blood-soaked summer of 2012 and the horror of 2017, when Myanmar’s army, with chilling precision, turned Rakhine’s villages into ash and bone. Over 7,00,000 Rohingya were driven into Bangladesh in a matter of weeks, as soldiers, monks and mobs acted out the final solution of Myanmar’s ethnic nationalist dream. “The situation seems a textbook example of ethnic cleansing,” declared Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, then the UN’s human rights chief. The generals called it clearance operations. But let’s stop sugarcoating: this was not just about purifying the body politic. It was about clearing the land.
You see, Rakhine is not just some backwater province. It is a treasure chest of resources: gas fields off its coast, forests rich with teak, fertile plains and rivers teeming with fish. And most crucially, it holds Kyaukphyu— Myanmar’s ticket to the Indian Ocean and China’s dream of a new Silk Road.
This is where the mask truly slips. “We are concerned that the violence and displacements in Rakhine State are being used to clear land for development projects,” warned Fortify Rights in 2019. The 2017 genocide did what bullets alone could not: it cleared the chessboard. The Rohingya’s forced exodus served a dual purpose: satisfying the bloodlust of chauvinist mobs and unlocking the land for mega-projects, free of pesky locals who might resist. The generals fatten their coffers; China tightens its grip on the Bay of Bengal; and the Rohingya are left to rot in stateless limbo, pawns sacrificed in a grander game.
What makes this tragedy so obscene is the collusion of prejudice and profit. Racism made the Rohingya vulnerable. Greed made that vulnerability irresistible. Together, they forged a nightmare where an entire people were erased not just from maps, but from memory because dead men file no land claims, and refugees do not return to ports turned into pipelines. This is not just ethnic cleansing. It is economic cleansing.
And so the camps swell, the aid dwindles, and the world shrugs. “We have no identity, no future, no hope,” says a Rohingya refugee in Cox’s Bazar, speaking for a million lost souls. Until we name both demons—the sword of bigotry and the coin of imperial ambition—the Rohingya’s long night will stretch on, unbroken. Their exile is no accident. It is a business model.
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The writer is a businessman and serves as co-chair of the Bangladesh America Alliance, a US-based advocacy organisation championing stronger bilateral ties and community engagement. He can be reached at kawsarc@gmail.com
