Remembering When They Belonged

In elementary school, Ayub identified himself on official forms as “Mohammed Ayub and a Rohingya.” By the time he reached middle school, Burmese authorities had ordered students to write “Bengali” instead of “Rohingya.” That change classified Rohingya as immigrants from Bangladesh instead of Burmese citizens.

The 56-year-old has held on to his old documents in order to prove that the Rohingya were once citizens and belonged.

“They refused us admission to school when we refused to identify ourselves as ‘Bengali,’’ recalls Ayub. He was born and raised in the village of Maung Nu in Burma.

Ayub’s life mirrors the trajectory of many Rohingya. Their identities, rights, and resources have been dependent upon the Burmese government’s definition of citizenship. With that comes access to education, jobs, health care, and freedom from persecution.

“You can’t plant and grow a tree overnight,” he says, referring to the generations of his family impacted by what’s happened. “It takes years to grow after planting.”

New Restrictions

Ayub is desperate to prove that his government used to recognize his people as “legitimate.”

“Both of my parents have [National Registration Cards]. So do I,” he says. “This is the evidence that we are the citizens of the country.” The government once issued those cards to everyone in Burma, regardless of race or religion.

Things changed as Ayub grew up. He points to family members who served in government and public service jobs until the early 1980s when authorities stopped hiring Rohingya. When the government confiscated their identification cards, many Rohingya kept them in secret. They were holding onto their only proof of Burmese citizenship.

From the 1980s on, the government ordered Rohingya to write “Bengali” as their ethnic name. The government would no longer allow them to call themselves Rohingya.

After that, the restrictions came quicker. Travel limitations meant they now had far less access to health care, education, and job opportunities. The list kept expanding. Soon jobs were seized. After 2012, Rohingya were not permitted to attend Sittwe University. Travel was restricted even further. A nightly curfew was put into place. Rohingya could no longer gather for prayers because no more than a few people could meet in public.

Authorities restricted almost every element of daily life to make the Rohingya as miserable as possible. Then came the violence.

Documenting Genocide

Ayub waited for the military to leave before making his way out of the forest. As the smoke rose up from their homes, he returned to the scenes of slaughter.

“I visited all these places, risking my life, and made a list of the people who were killed and how they were killed,” Ayub says. “I made all these lists not just to keep for my records but to show to the world in order to get justice.”

“They destroyed our religion by killing our religious scholars; our education by killing our teachers; and our economy by killing our businessmen and traders.”

Ayub joined other survivors on the long journey to Bangladesh.

Sitting in a makeshift hut in a refugee camp, Ayub shakes his head. He thinks about how the Burmese authorities worked so hard for so many years to erase the Rohingya community from Burma.

“It will take us a hundred years to get back the life we had been living since our forefathers,” Ayub says.

Photos: Greg Constantine