Rohingya people
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The Rohingya are a minority Muslim ethnic group in Northern Rakhine State, Western Myanmar.
Although classified as "Bengali Muslims" by the Myanmar government and denied recognition as an official ethnic group, the Rohingyas have a distinct dialect and culture. They speak a Rohingya_language dialect in the Arakan region of Burma. This is mixed with words from the Urdu, Hindi and Arabic languages, although some words from the Bamar and English are also included. Islam is particularly important to the Rohingya. There are mosques and religious schools in every quarter and village; traditionally the men pray in congregation and women pray at home. It is common for elderly Rohingya men to grow beards, and for the women to wear the hijab. The Rohingya population is mostly concentrated in three northern townships of Rakhine State: Maungdaw, Buthidaung and Rathedaung.
The origin of the Rohingya is the subject of much dispute. The Rohingya claim that they are the true natives of Arakan, who converted to Islam centuries ago, and that far from being a “Bengali Moslem minority”, the Rohingya were formerly the majority community in Arakan.
In the 1940s and especially immediately after Burmese independence in 1948, brewing tensions between the Arakanese Buddhist Magh and the Muslim Rohingya resulted in the exodus of a large number of Rohingyas to Chittagong in Bangladesh. The Burmese government claimed that the Rohingyas were relatively recent migrants from Bengal, and therefore, did not include them among the indigenous groups qualifying for citizenship under the Burmese constitution. The U Nu regime let loose a reign of terror on the Rohingyas accusing them of having questionable nationality. Subsequent waves of hundred of thousands of Rohingya refugees have indundated Bangladesh in the 1960s, 1980s and 1990s, sparking major international crises.
It is estimated that since Burmese independence in 1948 approximately 1.5 million Rohingya are in exile. They mostly live in Bangladesh, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. A small number of Rohingyas are in the UAE, Thailand and Malaysia.
Rohingya activists claim that the Burmese government's objective is to turn Muslim Arakan into a Burmanised Buddhist region by reducing the Muslims into insignificant or manageable minority. As a result, presently, more than one fourth of the total acreage of arable land has been reduced to jungle. The government has started a massive reclamation of these confiscated Muslim lands for settlement of Rakhine Buddhists from both inside and outside Arakan. Constructing pagodas and monasteries, particularly on the site of demolished Islamic structures with a view to changing the face of Arakan and give it a Buddhist’s appearance is also taking place.