Rohingya Goes Global

Article Journal of Asian and African Studies, No.95, 2018 Rohingya Goes Global Arakan Rohingya National Organization (ARNO) and the Making of Refugees CHAN, Ying-kit Current scholarly consensus holds that the Rohingya were not identified as a specific group in British India and that the post-independence Myanmar military government, which assumed power in 1962, added its own historically and politically charged interpretation. Nevertheless, we are far less informed about the ways in which the Rohingya perceive their own predicament and characterize the issues they encounter as refugees marginalized by an oppressive regime and neglected by the global community. This study examines the Arakan Rohingya National Organization (ARNO), which uses familiar, universal allegories as a strategy to appeal to a global audience and generate sympathy and support for Rohingya refugees. As the ARNO seeks to reach out to the international community through its website and the narrative of victimization, its objectives have become more modest and have evolved from its previous calls for armed resistance and outright secession to its current appeals for coexistence and reconciliation with the Rakhine Buddhists. 1. Introduction 2. The Rohingya in Burma/Myanmar 3. Geopoliticizing the Rohingya 4. Appealing to the International Community 5. Conclusion 1 Introduction In December 2012, amid waves of aggression and violence involving Buddhists and Muslims in the Rakhine state of Myanmar, forty Myanmar survivors of a shipwreck off the Myanmar coast, in which 160 others were reportedly drowned, were denied entry to Singapore amid media reports that they were stateless Muslim Rohingya fleeing ethnic violence in Rakhine (Straits Times, 13 December 2012). The Bangladesh-flagged ship was sailing to Malaysia, a predominantly Muslim nation that has a substantial Rohingya population. Malaysia took in the shipwreck survivors, who had been stranded on the open sea for days (Straits Times, 18 December 2012). Singapore netizens and human rights groups reacted strongly to the authorities decision to send away the survivors. On Global Voices, an online international community of bloggers who report on blogs and citizen media from around the world, some Singaporeans seemed disappointed with their government. It was wrong to turn Keywords: ARNO, Myanmar, refugees, Rohingya, world opinion

140 Journal of Asian and African Studies No 95 [the Rohingya] away as they were in need of food and medical help. Concerned about their nation s image as a result of the incident, many asked, How would we want ships to treat Singaporeans stranded at sea? In this era of increasing global interaction, world opinion is relevant to individuals worldwide. Although world opinion is rarely global, it does transcend national borders and is composed of the public in the countries concerned, especially those in developed nations such as Singapore. Activists mobilization of world opinion and their concern about conditions affecting people elsewhere are designed to press corporations, national governments, international organizations and other powerful institutions to change their behavior in line with what are assumed to be equitable standards for people anywhere else (Stearns 2005: 7). Since the 1970s, the Rohingya people in Myanmar have been fleeing persecution by the military government and the Buddhist majority to neighboring Bangladesh and Southeast Asia. In 1951, the United Nations defined the refugee as a person who, owing to a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of that country (UNHCR 1951). However, the perception of fear and persecution is subjective, and the definition leaves the distinction between immigrants and refugees ambiguous. The intuitive dichotomy is that immigration is an economic form of migration, while the flight of refugees is political. Scholars have suggested that refugee is a bureaucratic label applied for political motives and not a sociological category defining discrete behaviors and groups (Zetter 1991). The Muslims in Mandalay, Rangoon, Lashio and Moulmein have citizenship status. They do not face the same challenges as the Rohingya, who are disenfranchised by the Myanmar military and the Buddhist majority. A lacuna in studies on the Rohingya is the study of the Rohingya institutions devoted to defining the Rohingya as refugees and highlighting their plight to the international community. Building on existing works on refugees in general and on the Rohingya, this article explores the operations of one institution, the Arakan Rohingya National Organization (ARNO), to identify a Rohingya perspective on the refugees from Rakhine. The article derives information from ARNO publications and websites to explain the ways in which the ARNO deploys universal allegories as a strategy to relate its cause to issues that appeal to a global audience, trying to influence world opinion in favor of the Rohingya refugees. In her monograph on the Eritrean nation as a network of digital communications and cross-border relationships, Victoria Bernal has developed the concept of infopolitics to address the way power relations, embedded in the circulation of knowledge and the management of information, can be exercised through control over authorization, censorship, circulation and the media (Bernal 2014). While Bernal describes how the internet has allowed both expatriate and ordinary Eritreans to question state discourse and create alternative narratives and social networks, I explore how ARNO, also beyond the

Chan, Ying-kit: Rohingya Goes Global 141 control of political authorities and the state or commercial censorship of mass media, has tried to reinforce the global public s negative impression of the Myanmar military (the new civilian government which emerged after the 2011 national elections still remains under the control of military leaders to some measure). In the ARNO s attempts to improve public relations, its aims have become modest, from its previous calls for outright secession and armed resistance to current appeals for reconciliation and coexistence with the Rakhine Buddhists, in order to render its appeal more acceptable to moderate sympathizers. The ARNO s shift in objectives has been in tandem with developments in Myanmar the call for secession or secessionism has already been abandoned by the ethnic minorities and their armed groups, even though they remain unhappy with the Myanmar government and its armed forces policies and strategies. 2 The Rohingya in Burma/Myanmar Rohingya is a controversial term in Myanmar. Although they call themselves Rohingya, a term also used by the United Nations, the Myanmar government and the overwhelming population of Myanmar call them illegal Bengali migrants from neighboring Bangladesh. The Rohingya are not included among the 135 ethnic groups in Myanmar recognized by the government. According to the 1982 citizenship law, there are three categories of citizenship: citizen, associate citizen and naturalized citizen. Citizens are descendants of residents who lived in Burma prior to 1823 or whose parents were both citizens. Associate citizens are those who acquired citizenship through the 1948 Union Citizenship Act. Naturalized citizens are those who lived in Burma before 4 January 1948 and applied for citizenship after 1982. The origins of Rohingya Muslims are also a controversial subject. Some claim that Rohingyas have lived in Myanmar for centuries and that they are descendants of Muslim Arabs, Moors, Persians, Turks and Mughal migrants. Others claim that Rohingyas are Bengali Muslims from Bangladesh. Muslims outside the Rakhine State are not considered Rohingya (Kipgen 2013: 299 300). At Burma s independence in 1948, the Rohingya faced little discrimination. Recognized as an indigenous ethnic group, they enjoyed nationality status like the Kachin, Karen, Kayah, Mon, Rakhine and Shan did. They also received a degree of constitutional guarantee of their freedom, rights and political representation in Burma. In the 1951 national elections, four members of parliament were elected from Muslimdominated constituencies of northern Arakan. The Arakani Muslims at the time began to defend their ethnic distinctiveness and adopted the term Rohingya. The Burma Broadcasting Service made Rohingya-language broadcasts during the 1950s, using the name Rohingya. National leaders from the democratic period before Ne Win s (1911 2002) coup in 1962 all used the name Rohingya in public. However, for some scholars, Rohingya in its current spelling cannot be traced in print media before 1960. It became popular after 1995 in English-language reports on the humanitarian crisis in northern Arakan (Leider 2016: 153 155). Rohingya-Rakhine relations, however, were contentious from the start, fueled

142 Journal of Asian and African Studies No 95 by memories of the 1942 massacre of Buddhists by Muslims in Rakhine and the 1950s Mujahid jihad rebellion. Myanmar s prosecution of the Rohingya began in the 1970s. Ne Win restructured citizenship laws to exclude the Rohingya categorically, following the nominal unification of insurgent groups and a global economic crisis that hindered economic growth. Another economic crisis in the late 1980s and early 1990s resulted in a wave of expulsions of Rohingya from Myanmar to Bangladesh, as the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), which seized power from Ne Win in 1988, sought to emphasize ethnic politics. Ne Win s nationalization of private property and wealth had also caused a mass exodus of the Chinese population and all other communities described as Kala, which included Christian, Hindu and Sikh communities, but the Rohingya suffered the hardest hit (Robinne 2016: 349). The Myanmar government had argued that the nation-building project was threatened by foreign and non-buddhist elements. The foreign Rohingya fulfilled both criteria, and their vilification offered a common ground to draw the Bamars and other non-rohingya ethnic groups together and justify their discrimination (de Mersan 2016: 47). 3 Geopoliticizing the Rohingya There was nothing inevitable about the emergence of the Rohingya as refugees after the Second World War. While the Rohingya s plight was the legacy of a colonial past, it was also the product of the geopolitics of the second half of the twentieth century. Although tensions between the central government and the Rohingya intensified after Burma s independence, culminating in an armed Rohingya rebellion against the Myanmar government in 1950, the rebellion had been contained four years later when Myanmar persuaded the Pakistani government to stop providing weapons to the Rohingya Mujahids (Oberoi 2006: 173). Without military and political support from Pakistan, the Rohingya accepted the government s promises to give them political rights and treat them like other nationalities (Razzaq and Haque 1995: 16). Burma was the leading exporter of rice in Asia during the 1950s, and Arakan enjoyed economic and industrial development, which benefited both Buddhists and Muslims (Chan 2005: 412). However, in the late 1950s, signs of strain on the economy appeared. Ill-advised policies caused industrial growth to stagnate, while a fall in the international price of rice resulted in a decline in international terms of trade. In his plan for Myanmar socialism, Ne Win reorganized all economic and trading institutions and forced farmers to sell rice to the government at lower prices (Razzaq and Haque 1995: 18). He also transferred private assets into state ownership in the form of public corporations (Chan 2005: 413). In the 1960s, Britain, the great power with the closest historical connection to South Asia, was winding down its military presence east of Suez, unable to afford its vast military deployment in the region stretching from Aden to Malacca because of the sterling crisis and the late-1960s currency devaluation (Raghavan 2013: 162 163). In the 1970s, India and Pakistan fought the Bangladesh Liberation War, which created Bangladesh from East

Chan, Ying-kit: Rohingya Goes Global 143 Pakistan in 1971. As a result of the war, Muslim leaders in Rakhine received arms and ammunition across the border. In 1972, a congress for Rohingya parties was held at the border and called for Rohingya National Liberation (Chan 2005: 413). Some Rohingya began small-scale guerrilla operations in Rakhine. Nevertheless, save for the Myanmar government s Naga Min Operation (1978), which was aimed at expelling these Rohingya insurgents, not much happened in Rakhine. Faced with the influx of Rohingya fleeing military operations, the Bangladeshi government requested the United Nations (UN) to establish 13 refugee camps along the Bangladeshi-Myanmar border. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) formally categorized the Rohingya as refugees. Although most refugees were repatriated, 15,000 settled in Bangladesh, and those who returned to Arakan suffered further persecution due to regime change (1988), flawed elections (1990) and international sanctions. In the 1990s, another 250,000 Rohingya escaped to Bangladesh (Charney 2009: 148 169, Pittaway 2008: 87). The UNHCR opened 21 camps to house the new refugees. Although the Bangladeshi government aimed to ensure voluntary repatriation of the refugees, the UNHCR had few resources to conduct the repatriation and could not do much to initiate the process on sovereign territory (Loescher et al. 2008: 3). Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh lived in horrific conditions that are both an indictment of the international community s inability to protect refugees and a recruiting ground for terrorists (Larkin 2007: 32). When they resisted repatriation, Bangladesh restricted food rations. Refugees reported beatings and killings and the withdrawal of all basic services (Pittaway 2008: 87). The Bangladeshi repatriation of the Rohingya also violated the UN principle of nonrefoulement No contracting state shall expel or return (refouler) a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion or nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion (UNHCR 1951). As conditions in the camps deteriorated, UNHCR soured its relations with Bangladesh by trying to force the latter to allow Rohingya refugees born in Bangladesh to acquire citizenship at birth (UNHCR 2011: 2 3). UNHCR is the only international organization with a specific mandate to protect refugees and to find solutions to their plight. However, it is unable to pursue its mandate independently. UNHCR is linked to a range of stakeholders including donor and refugee-hosting states, other UN agencies and NGOs (Loescher et al. 2008: 73). In the face of refugee abuse by both Bangladesh and Myanmar, the UNHCR sought to keep control and establish protection criteria for the evacuation, but this was all that the organization could do (Long 2013: 466). UNHCR was incapable of controlling the content of refugee settlement schemes, and its capacity to influence or pursue local integration schemes was contingent on the kind of resources at its disposal (Goodwin- Gill 2008: 22). Its solvency relies on the generosity of donor states, which are primarily the United States and the European nation-states. Nevertheless, the democratization of

144 Journal of Asian and African Studies No 95 Myanmar after the 2011 national elections has made its government more acceptable to the West, which has become willing to gloss over the issue and cooperate with the new government formed by the National League for Democracy (NLD), a party led by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. Her release from house arrest in November 2010 had already prompted the lifting of most international sanctions imposed against Myanmar since the late 1980s, when Aung San Suu Kyi was first detained. Western powers have also begun to drop their opposition to Myanmar in international financial organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (Egreteau and Robinne 2016: 2 3). At the regional level, ASEAN had been aware of the Rohingya s plight since the 1990s. However, ASEAN s general failure to address the Rohingya issue has adversely affected its image as a defender of the international human rights conventions (Parnini 2013: 289). Beyond ASEAN, Myanmar also seems poised to juggle diplomatically between China and the United States, as well as between China and India. Its geostrategic importance suggests that all parties understand that any slight blunder would tip the balance in favor of their opponent (Katanyuu 2006: 845). Overlooked in assessing Myanmar s importance in international affairs is its large Muslim population. In 1963, drawing on the Mujahideen tradition, the Rohingya Independence Force (RIF) was created to protest Ne Win s military coup and resist the increasingly authoritarian Myanmar government. The objective of the RIF was to create a Rohingya autonomous state under the Union of Burma. In 1969, the name of RIF was changed to RIA (Rohingya Independent Army). In 1973, inspired by the rise of pan-islamic movements elsewhere in the world, the RIA renamed itself the Rohingya Patriotic Front (RPF). After 1978, the RPF split into several factions, one of which founded the Rohingya Solidarity Organization (RSO). In 1986, the Arakan Rohingya Islamic Front (ARIF) separated from the RSO. In 1995, the RSO and the ARIF merged to become the Rohingya National Alliance (Selth 2004: 112 113). The alliance was short-lived, and bitter rivalry in the RSO ensued. The RSO was reportedly linked to global Muslim extremist organizations, receiving financial assistance and terrorist training from various militant groups based in Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia (Selth 2004: 114 116). However, living in poverty under the previous military regime and having a strong sense of community, the Rohingya were largely isolated from the influence of global jihadi and Islamic extremist groups. Rohingya leaders argued that existing Islamist groups, which promoted their own version of global jihad, were using the Rohingya issue to serve their own interests and attacking outposts in Rakhine in the Rohingya s name without any involvement of the Rohingya (Brennan and O Hara 2015). In the 1990s, Rohingya expatriates, intellectuals and politicians convened to discuss these problems that threatened Rohingya unity and devise guidelines for feasible cooperation among all parties. After some discussion, all Rohingya organizations were officially dissolved and merged into a single representative organization, the Arakan Rohingya National Organization (ARNO). A new Central Committee was

Chan, Ying-kit: Rohingya Goes Global 145 formed with Nurul Islam, the leader of ARIF, who had earned a law degree from Rangoon University in the 1970s, as its president. Another prominent leader of ARNO is Mohammed Yunus, the leader of RSO and a medical doctor who had operated from Chittagong before the Bangladeshi government pressured him to relocate to London, where he and Islam still reside. On 28 November 1998, a declaration of the merger of the all-rohingya organization was signed and circulated. ARNO leaders are based in London, and their operations in Bangladesh and Myanmar have largely ceased (Lintner 2016). Initially an armed self-determination movement, the group seeks to protect the rights of the Rohingya and to establish an autonomous state of Arakan in Myanmar. However, frustration over the failure to make inroads has radicalized a part of the ARNO membership, with some believed to have links with Al Qaeda and Taliban (Singh 2007: 42 43). This has prompted speculation that ARNO is engaged in terrorist activities, an allegation that it has been trying to quell. ARNO is numerically small, with an active membership of several thousand at most. While an irritant to the Myanmar government, it does not pose any significant military and political threat (Fealy 2009: 169). In Rakhine, Muslim insurgent groups have waged an intermittent low-intensity guerilla war against Myanmar s security forces. They call for freedom of worship, guarantees against religious persecution and the same economic and political rights for Muslims and the Rohingya as for all other communities in Myanmar. They remain fractious and fragmented, and ARNO has denied any association with them (Selth 2004: 113). In the 2000s, when the United States launched its war on terror after the September 11 attacks, ARNO leaders, having considered negative reports of militarism and terrorism in Western media outlets, decided to drop armed resistance and instead brought the plight of the Rohingya to the global community through its website. 4 Appealing to the International Community Beyond its fight for the right of selfdetermination of Rohingya within the Myanmar federation and for peaceful coexistence with the Rakhine people, ARNO professes its desire to build a welfare society on the ideas of equality, liberty, democracy, human rights and freedom for all peoples ; to support a treaty banning land mines; to support the rights of Rohingya women; and to preserve the environment for future, sustainable, appropriate, clean and beneficial development for the common people. The organization claims to maintain close relations with Amnesty International, Asia Watch, Burma Campaign U.K. and other human rights and humanitarian organizations in Asia, Europe and the United States. ARNO has declared that it is not part of any struggle outside Burma and [is] committed as a community within the Arakan to rebuild the State [of Arakan], appealing to the international community for a permanent solution [to] the Rohingya problem (ARNO website). Relating the Rohingya to global politics is a discourse in which humanitarian principles appeal urgently for international action (Nyers 2006: 26). The argument moves beyond

146 Journal of Asian and African Studies No 95 immediate aid and safety in the current emergency, speaking to broader liberal aspirations to defend human dignity (Long 2013: 472). ARNO deplores the absence in Myanmar of democracy and human rights, which it perceives as universal aspirations (Goodhart 2008: 395 396). The Rohingya predicament is a disjuncture, a gap between, on the one hand, the principle that a state or a people should determine its own future and, on the other, the constraints of the global economy, international organizations, regional and global institutions, international law and military alliances, which operate to shape and limit the options of nation-states. It is this disjuncture that ARNO seeks to address and publicize to a global audience (Held 1995: 99). The ARNO website (www.rohingya. org) is the predominant internet link for the Rohingya diaspora. It describes how the Rohingya have coexisted with the Rakhine in northern Arakan for centuries and posts favorable news related to the Rohingya published in Western media outlets. Another important function of the website is to debunk myths, such as that the Rohingya settled in Myanmar in the British era; ARNO argues that the Rohingya are an indigenous people of Arakan. As Jacques P. Leider suggests, Rohingya writers generally trivialize the inflow of migrants during the colonial period; deny the later migratory movements; define their community as the sole successors of the old, culturally assimilated Muslim community of Arakan; and emphasize cultural differences with the Muslims of Chittagong (Leider 2016: 161). The website also encourages its readers to get involved by volunteering their expertise and time, although it does not make clear what form of help ARNO is hoping to receive. Remittances sent by the Rohingya working abroad contribute to ARNO s finances (UNHCR 2011: 23). ARNO issues press releases on its website, condemning the Myanmar military s anti-muslim propaganda and organized killings of the Muslims and requesting help from the United Nations to protect the helpless Rohingya, investigate atrocities and bring perpetrators to justice. The website is designed to reach a global audience and is accessible in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. On the site, ARNO seeks to clarify its political stance, dispel misconceptions and gain support from the international community. The forum page invites non-rohingya to discuss the Rohingya issue. ARNO emphasizes its altruistic aim of achieving for the Rohingya a peaceful coexistence with the Arakani Buddhists in the state of Rakhine and with all other peoples in Arakan as well as in the whole of [Myanmar]. It does not make its appeals based on ethnic and religious homogeneity, choosing to mobilize transnational forces around the universal aspiration to democracy and human rights. In explaining the ongoing conflict between the Rohingya and Arakani Buddhists, ARNO claims that the segregation of the Rohingya from the Arakanese is Myanmar s attempt to divide and rule the state of Rakhine and that atrocities against the Rohingya have been committed by security forces. The website features reports on Rohingya leaders meetings with famous Western diplomats and uploaded footage of academic conferences and public demonstrations that denounce the human

Chan, Ying-kit: Rohingya Goes Global 147 rights record of Myanmar. ARNO s reports reinforce the perception that its activities and ideas of championing democracy and human rights for the Rohingya are endorsed by state leaders around the world. ARNO has achieved a degree of success in its strategy to receive support through peaceful means. The messages in the Myanmar script on the discussion board attest that the Rohingya have been regular contributors to and readers of the ARNO website. ARNO understands that it needs to play to a global audience dominated by Western categories and concerns (Bernal 2004: 17). It is a testament to the importance of swaying world opinion. World opinion is a special form of public opinion, capturing public interest from the wider audience beyond national boundaries and raising a measurable degree of public passion on issues of universal concern. Influencing world opinion involves both relationships with international organizations and efforts to organize associations or conferences, which the ARNO has been doing to appear respectable in the eyes of the global public (Stearns 2005: 7 11). With media technology, the capacity to rouse public opinion has improved as that opinion itself has become global, and ARNO has alerted world opinion to the plight of the Rohingya, for which the global public could be induced to feel responsible despite the geographical distance. Global opinion tends to demand a stop to crimes against humanity, and governments of the leading nations of the world become the targets of this political firestorm, which in turn creates political tension in the international political organizations that are most concerned with matters of peace and security (Campbell 2001: 31). By embarrassing the Myanmar military, ARNO offers leverage to Western governments hoping for an improvement in Myanmar s human rights record (Stearns 2005: 191 213). 5 Conclusion Myanmar s ability to resolve the Rohingya issue is limited because of the political arrangements and distribution of power after 2015, when the NLD won the general elections to form the incumbent Myanmar government, which does not control the military. In Rakhine, the military has direct and indisputable control of defense services and the three key ministries of importance border patrol, police and military and is under no parliamentary oversight. NLD leaders themselves have also painted the Rohingya as armed groups and terrorists to elicit counter-terrorism support from other nations such as the United States (Brennan and O Hara 2015). The Myanmar government has declared the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) insurgents who had attacked police posts and an army base in Rakhine on 25 August 2017 as terrorists and regards them as a threat to Myanmar s peace and stability (Edroos 2017). Geopolitical considerations and the failure of major international organizations to resolve the Rohingya issue have turned the Rohingya into refugees facing a serious humanitarian crisis. Turning to history, however, the departure of the British did not inevitably lead to the repression of the Rohingya. Unanticipated turns of events Ne Win s coup, the Bangladesh Liberation War and pan-islamic movements of the 1980s have relegated the Rohingya to

148 Journal of Asian and African Studies No 95 secondary importance in great-power politics, and the ARNO is a response to the realpolitik of the international system. For ARNO, the internationalization of universal ideas such as democracy and human rights has transformed world opinion into a channel for making political claims for the Rohingya. Shedding its controversial militant past, the ARNO now portrays the Rohingya as defenseless refugees being persecuted by the Myanmar military which has denied that Muslims have lived in Rakhine for centuries even though the scholarly perspective does not support this proposition owing to a lack of evidence for the earliest period (Leider 2016: 162). Perhaps ARNO should move away from a Rohingya-centered perspective to consider the anxieties of the ethnic Rakhine and the more nationalistic Myanmar people, who harbor deep fears of the Muslim population in Rakhine. Such anxieties provide the depth of domestic sensitivities the NLD government must negotiate. Having prioritized and embarked on a peace process for the rest of the country, NLD leaders such as Aung San Suu Kyi are perhaps genuine in attempting to do the same in Rakhine, but they may want to do so slowly and at arm s length for a variety of reasons. Their Rakhine policy is a site of a great power struggle between the military and the NLD government, so the ARNO might actually want to work closely with the NLD government rather than against it because of the dynamic if not unstable nature of Myanmar politics. References ARNO. 2006a. Facts about the Rohingya Muslims of Arakan. Available at: http://www.rohingya. org/portal/index.php/learn-about-rohingya. html (accessed 15 September 2016).. 2006b. Rohingyas Are Not British Era Settlers. Available at: http://www.rohingya. org/portal/index.php/rohingya-library/26- rohingya-history/53-rohingyas-are-not-britishera-settlers.html (accessed 15 September 2016).. 2007. Get Involved. Available at: http:// www.rohingya.org/portal/index.php/getinvolved.html (accessed 14 September 2016).. 2008. Declaration of the Fourth Congress of the Arakan Rohingya National Organization. Available at: http://www.rohingya.org/ portal/index.php/our-appeal.html (accessed 14 September 2016).. 2011. Who We Are? Available at: http:// www.rohingya.org/portal/index.php/whowe-are.html (accessed 15 September 2016).. 2013a. ARNO Condemns the Burning of Photos in Protest Rally in Bangkok. Available at: http://www.rohingya.org/portal/index.php/ arno/arno-press-release/600-arno-condemnsthe-burning-of-photos-in-protest-rally-inbangkok.html (accessed 14 September 2016).. 2013b. Rebuttal to Eleven Media False Report. [Press release]. Available at: http:// www.rohingya.org/portal/index.php/arno/ arno-press-release/610-press-release-rebuttalto-eleven-media-false-report-.html (accessed 14 September 2016).. 2013c. Holocaust Museum Highlights Myanmar s Rohingya. Available at: http:// www.rohingya.org/portal/ (accessed 15 September 2016). Bernal, Victoria. 2014. Nation as Network: Diaspora, Cyberspace, and Citizenship. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.. 2004. Eritrea Goes Global: Reflections on Nationalism in a Transnational Era. Cultural Anthropology, 19: 3 25. Brennan, Elliot & Christopher O Hara. 2015. The Rohingya and Islamic Extremism: A Convenient Myth. The Diplomat. Available at: http://thediplomat.com/2015/06/therohingya-and-islamic-extremism-a-convenientmyth/ (accessed 16 February 2017). Campbell, Kenneth J. 2001. Genocide and the Global Village. New York: Palgrave. Chan, Aye. 2005. The Development of a Muslim Enclave in Arakan (Rakhine) State of Burma (Myanmar). SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research, 3: 396 420. Charney, Michael W. 2009. A History of Modern

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150 Journal of Asian and African Studies No 95 Zetter, Roger. 1991. Labelling Refugees: Forming and Transforming a Bureaucratic Identity. Journal of Refugee Studies, 4: 39 62. Accepted on 14 September 2017