Bangladesh is a small country in South Asia bordered nearly entirely by India and partially by Myanmar. If you have heard anything about Bangladesh, it most likely has something to do with either of those facts because the most densely populated country on Earth has been sheltering 1.1 million Rohingya refugees in a 5 square mile refugee camp threatened by instability, lack of resources, and elephant migration patterns. For reference: 100,000 Syrians in 2015 sought refuge in the EU, kicking off a crisis, a populist surge, and, arguably, Brexit. Furthermore, the EU on average has a population density of 117 people per square kilometer. Bangladesh, in comparison, has a density of 1240 people per square kilometer, more than 10 times that of the EU.
Compounding the issue, Bangladesh will lose up to 20% of its territory if sea levels rise 3 feet, a conservative estimate of the change by 2100; It is a country with 160 million people, 63% of whom are employed in an agriculture sector that will be hit hardest by territory loss. Furthermore, the presence of the Rohingya in Bangladesh was always meant to be temporary — but petitions to the Myanmar government to repatriot the refugees have been going unanswered.
Myanmar
The Rohingya have been called the most persecuted minority in the world by the UN. Their story starts in the Rakhine state of Myanmar, then called Burma. Burma, which has been a Buddhist state from the 1040s, has a strong Buddhist identity, tied very directly to their concept of a Burmese ethnicity. During colonialism, when the British Raj encouraged immigration from India into Burma, Indian laborers began displacing native Burmese farmers, stoking ethnic tensions. (It did not help that the British began calling the native Burmese “lazy” for this reason.) They had also removed the dual system of the Burmese monarchy and a clergy of monks, called the Sangha. The British stripped the Buddhist identity from the country and attempted to replace it with secular and Christian institutions alike. Buddhism was criticised repeatedly in those missionary schools, which were often the only option in an area. As a result, the once politically powerful monks of Burma were relegated to the sides.
Monks led the independence movements from the British, and, after a shaky independence from Britain post World War 2, characterized by a fractured democracy, a 1962 coup d’etat from the General Ne Win led to totalitarian military rule in Burma. This experiment in socialism combined Soviet-style central planning with Buddhist ideals, driving Burma into poverty while enriching the ruling class. Students on August 8, 1988 protested in what is now known as the 8888 Uprising, which agitated for a democratic election; when the opposition party won 81% of the seats, however, the military junta placed opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest, where she would remain until 2010.
In 2007, the Saffron Revolution began, advocating for free elections and democracy. It was led by thousands of Buddhist monks — hence saffron, like the robes of monks — which was crushed later in that year. However, it reestablished monks as powerful political players in Myanmar yet again, and when Suu Kyi was elected in 2011, she warned the US that Myanmar did not make significant reforms. Today, 25% of seats in Myanmar’s congress are still held by the military junta, as per their constitution. The 969 Movement, an anti-Muslim Buddhist-nationalist movement, has been endorsed by the former dictatorship and Suu Kyi’s opposition party alike. Their goal is to restore Myanmar as a Buddhist nation, and to remove what they perceive as outsiders from their country. In 2012, the 969 movement gave birth to Ma Ba Tha (in English: Association for the Protection of Race and Religion), a Buddhist splinter group with intentions of removing Muslim influence from the country. They have incited mass riots, including one in 2014 that resulted in the deaths of 400 people, and successfully gotten four anti-Muslim laws passed.
The name Myanmar is not recognized by the US or the UK. Both countries continue to refer to the country as Burma, which, while referring to the ethnic Burmese majority, is considered the favored term of Suu Kyi’s opposition party, while the military were the first to rename Burma to Myanmar in 1989. For the sake of clarity in this article, and since almost all media outlets regardless of national origin refer to the country this way, the name Myanmar will be used from this point on.
The historiography of Myanmar’s independence is one entrenched in Buddhist nationalism. Its leaders and main figures were all Buddhists, and 88% of the population practices Theravada Buddhism. The same way that various European nations in the 1880s chose to unify and define themselves through shared history, ancestry, or language, Myanmar chose religion. Of course, this has resulted in several problems — or else we wouldn’t be talking about Buddhism in Myanmar today.
The Rohingya
The Myanmar government and census insists on using the term Bengali as opposed to Rohingya, a word choice that the Rohingya say erases their identity. The term Bengali refers to an ethnic group primarily concentrated in the Bengal region, which today consists of the Indian state of West Bengal and the country of Bangladesh.
While many of the Rohingya people may look similar on DNA tests to the Bengali currently in Bangladesh, the unique history of the Rohingya separates the two. Bengali Muslim settlements in the Arakan kingdom, which is the modern day Rakhine state, date back to the 1400s, but some Rohingya have been living in Arakan since as long ago as the 800s. In 1748, when Arakan was conquered by the Burmese and became part of Myanmar, both the Arakanese and the Muslim immigrants from Mughal Bengal found themselves to be ethnic minorities in a much larger state. The Burmans persecuted these minorities heavily, forcing many to flee to the Chittagong Division (modern day Bangladesh) in what was then British controlled India. There, the mix of Arakan and Muslim Bengali people began referring to themselves as Rooinga, meaning natives of Arakan. When the British East India Company conquered Burma and began bringing in those aforementioned Indian laborers to farm the Rakhine area, a large amount of those new farmers were Rooinga, who were, in some fashion, being repatriated, while others were Bengali farmers being moved to more fertile lands.
That is the crux of Myanmar’s government’s argument. They see all the Rohingya as immigrants who came over from Bangladesh illegally under British occupation, which emboldens them to revoke citizenship and deport people who have lived on the land since at least the 1800s, to a country that their great-grandparents had immigrated from. In 1977, Myanmar enacted Operation Nagamin, theoretically meant to be a deportation program against illegal immigrants. In the Rakhine state, this became one of the first actions of the military against the Rohingya, leading to about 200,000 Rohingya to flee the country for neighboring Bangladesh.
In the 1990s, there was a similar wave again of Rohingya escaping military violence in Bangladesh. This time, about 270,000 Rohingya fled over the border. While repatriation efforts back to Myanmar were carried out by the Bangladeshi government, the Myanmar government has halted most of the efforts, and most of the Rohingya who have fled today remain stateless and have been temporarily quartered in refugee camps in Bangladesh for years.
Naturally, as some of these camps have existed for decades without progress on repatriation or further aid, the Bangladeshi government has begun to resent a foreign population who must also be allocated a share of the country’s dramatically dwindling resources. The government has cut internet access in the camps, as well as refused to sell SIM cards to anyone without identity verification — ie, refugees.
Part of the issue comes from the unique tensions within Bangladesh itself. The Rohingya are outsiders in Myanmar due to the fact that the country was, in many ways, founded upon Buddhism. The Myanmar nationalism that sparked an independence movement was vanguarded by Theravada monks, so it was natural for later incarnations of Buddhist nationalist movements to weaponize that same conception of the state against the predominantly Muslim Rohingya. However, while Bangladesh is a majority Muslim country, and specifically constitutionally specified to be secular at the time of Operation Nagamin, and while the Rohingya could be considered the same ethnicity as the Bengali, there is still a large difference between the two populations, one that is held particularly dear to the Bangladeshi: language.
Bangladesh declared its independence from Pakistan in 1971, after the order that Urdu, and only Urdu, would be the official language of Pakistan. Bangladesh, as any older Bengali uncle will tell you, is possibly the only country in the world to fight a war of independence over the right to speak their own language. This importance on the language of Bengali is said to bind the nation’s diverse cultures together in an area rife with arbitrary borders drawn by the British.
The Rohingya do not speak Bengali. They speak a language known as Rohingya, which is influenced by Arabic and Urdu, and is not mutually intelligible with Bengali.
However, this isn’t the only time in a nation’s history that a group of immigrants have come en masse to a neighboring country wholly unlike their own.
The Solution
The policies and efforts of the city of Miami, Florida, may offer solutions for Bangladesh’s own integration program.
In the 1950’s and 60’s, Fidel Castro issued an ultimatum: You may be part of this communist experiment, or you may leave. 500,000 Cubans took him up on the offer in the 15 years following the Cuban Revolution, doubling the population of Miami, a city that was majority white and several-generation-American. Florida, as well as the US government, responded by passing a Migration and Refugee Assistance Act, which, most importantly, made it very easy for Cuban refugees to start up businesses or get loans for education. That, combined with cheap housing stock in Downtown Miami, allowed the Cuban population to get settled.
Furthermore, the nation’s first bilingual school opened up in Miami in 1963. Coral Way K-8 was revolutionary specifically because it taught everyone — Cuban immigrants and Florida natives alike — in both Spanish and English. These kinds of bilingual public schools allow for strong integration without sacrificing identity, something both sides of the Rohingya conflict would like to avoid. Today, 70% of Miami residents speak Spanish at home.
Furthermore, regarding their economy, when the population of Miami doubled, nothing happened. Unemployment didn’t go up, because the new immigrants didn’t take any jobs. Rather, especially because they had been given access to loans for business or college, they ended up creating as many jobs as they filled.
Bangladesh is a country that subsists on agriculture. However, the new realities of climate change are making that an impossibility, as fertile land goes under rising sea levels and a massive population is pushed further inland. This refugee crisis could be a crisis for the Bengali government, or it could be the economic revolution the country needs. The only way the country could find out would be to embrace their immigrants and offer them financial opportunities — a win-win for both.