WELCOME TO THE ROHINGYA CULTURE
Rohingya people are a predominantly Muslim community living in Rakhine state in Burma. The Rohingya community has a long history and glorious past. Like many indigenous ethnic nationalities living along Burmese borders, Rohingya people possess a frontier culture distinct from the rest of other Burmese people. Historically, they have had connections with the high cultures of Bengal, Persia and Arabia. Their sublime civilization was a gift to the people of the independent, ancient kingdom of Arakan. The heyday of Arakan began with the development of this Muslim civilization. For centuries, Arakan prospered through international trade which brought in new ideas and learning to the region, and a flourishing civilization created the most cosmopolitan court in Burmese history.
However, successive Burmese regimes dehumanized the Rohingya community in their official propaganda and depicted them as amoral or dangerous to society. Officials falsified history and presented justifications for why the entire community, including the elderly, women, and children, must be viewed as foreign and unworthy of human rights. The government has always tried to deny and to reject the Rohingya community not only as one of the country’s indigenous peoples but also their citizenship rights.
Series of armed operations, coupled with frequent state-sanctioned riots, have been engineered one after another, resulting in the massive drive of Rohingyas from their homeland of Arakan. As a result, since 1948, about 4 million Rohingyas have been expelled or have had to flee their ancestral homeland, the most recent being the major exodus of more than one million Rohingyas to neighboring Bangladesh in 2017. There are also a few Christian and Hindu communities in the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh.
At the hands of successive Burmese military regimes, the Rohingya population of Arakan has experienced forcible dispossession of their population and expulsion from their homeland by means of murder, torture, arbitrary arrest and detention, executions, rape and sexual assault, military and paramilitary attacks on civilians, robbery and extortion, destruction of cultural and religious buildings and monuments, destruction of homes, confinement of civilians in camps, and purposeful starvation.