Robert Anderson to Publish Work on the Rohingya Crisis

By Robert Anderson, SFU’s School of Communication

There have been many waves of coerced migration from Arakan districts of Myanmar into Bengal since 1800. Some of those migrants returned to the Arakan/Rakhine, a few remained permanently in Bengal/Bangladesh. During the recent 2017 mass exodus, about 250,000 self-identifying Rohingya people remained in place in northern Rakhine. Although a number of those who stayed may have now also decided to depart, it is estimated that at least 200,000 Rohingya still remained in Myanmar through the recent crisis years. Most importantly, there were important internal distinctions among them in north Arakan, namely the Mro, Thet, Kamei/Kaman [Muslims], Daignet, Maramgyi, Chin, Hindus: each of them trace back to very old indigenous communities. Outsiders with intentions to understand the Rohingya communities know too little about this significant and relatively stable portion of that population, their relation to land, to labour, and resources in Myanmar. So a colleague at UBC M.Q. Zaman and I decided to edit a multi-author book about Rohingya communities in the northern Arakan/Rakhine coast, and in their various diaspora settlements in many countries. We also have a third editor, a Rohingya expert living in Winnipeg. We begin in 1760, when pressures built up between the Arakan king and princes and landlords, and the Burmese king in Mandalay; those pressures lead to the Burma king's Army’s violent occupation in 1784-86. As a consequence the town known as Cox’s Bazaar, now among the world’s largest refugee settlements, was formed in 1800-1802 in Bengal with 25,000 temporary fearful inhabitants. With distinguished contributors, our book, (with the kind assistance of the David Lam Centre), will be published by Springer Nature, and its working title is Faces of the Rohingya Crisis.