Ban on Marriages, Another Yoke on Rohingya Muslims

Marwaan Macan-Markar BANGKOK, Dec 6 (IPS) - In Burma's remote west, young men and women are subject to a form of discrimination, considered harsh, even for the military regime in this country. They are banned from getting married. The victims are young adults from the ethnic Muslim-Rohingya community that is concentrated in the hilly Arakan state which shares a border with Bangladesh.

Those who dared violate this ban are subject to heavy penalties, according to human rights researchers and Rohingya political leaders and journalists IPS spoke with. ''We know of at least five couples who were arrested and jailed this year for getting married without permission from the local authorities,'' says Chris Lewa, lead researcher in 'The Arakan Project', an independent group monitoring human rights violations in the area. ''No marriage permission has been granted to a Rohingya since March 2005.'' One 25-year-old Rohingya man was ''beaten and tortured'' by the Burmese border police in the area, known by its local acronym NaSaKa, for marrying an 18-year-old Muslim woman. But, even before the enforcement of the ban on marriages, this year, military authorities had in place a veritable obstacle course that deterred any Rohingya from plans to get married. Prospective brides and grooms had to get permission from four different authorities, including the NaSaKa and immigration authorities. ''Getting this permission could take one or two years,'' says Fayas Ahamed, editor of the 'Kaladan Press Network', a web-based news outlet on Rohingya affairs, produced in the Bangladeshi port city of Chittagong. ''And one had to pay bribes at each point.'' Consequently, the backlog of marriages, delayed and denied in the Arakan state, runs into thousands, Ahamed estimates. ''Since the beginning of 2004, there are at least 10,000 marriage applications pending with authorities''. Such a policy is only one in a series of hardships imposed on the Rohingyas by Rangoon's junta, known officially as the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC). Other restrictions, such as severe limits to stop food items being moved into the Arakan region and a harsh travel ban on the Rohingyas, have prompted community leaders to accuse Rangoon of ''ethnic cleansing''.

''The Rohingyas are being forced to live as if in a concentration camp,'' Nurul Islam, president of the Arakan Rohingya National Organisation, an umbrella group for Rohingya political and separatist organisations, told IPS. ''The SPDC's philosophy is to make life so difficult for the Rohingyas that they will flee to Bangladesh.'' Not only are the current travel restrictions ''more oppressive'' than before, they are also ''far worse'' than what the SPDC has imposed across other parts of Burma, says Islam, who has been forced into exile for his political activities. ''Now you cannot move from one village to another, even a five-mile distance, without getting a pass.

Rohingyas need passes for even day trips to go to health clinics.'' According to Lewa, poverty-stricken villagers have been forced by local authorities to pay for travel passes to collect food aid distributed by the World Food Programme (WFP). ''One pregnant woman was raped in south Maundaw on her way to collect her food package.'' The Rohingyas, largely rice farmers and labourers, are presently facing a ''food crisis'' due to a poor rice harvest and restrictions on the movement of food, said Lewa. ''The NaSaKa and the military (have banned) rice trade within and beyond the area (the northern Arakan state) and even between villages.'' In August, following a visit to Burma, the head of the WFP revealed how restrictions on food distribution had led to ''serious'' malnourishment among children in the country's border regions. Only a fifth of the 5,500 metric tons of rice that the WFP had purchased for the hungry in the Arakan state had been distributed, James Morris, the head of the U.N. food relief agency, told reporters recently. Any trading of food commodities or movement of people in that area requires permits, Hakan Tongul, WFP's deputy country director in Burma, confirmed in an e-mail interview from Rangoon. ''Each lorry requires a permit and this takes time, sometimes weeks to obtain, since the system of permits is highly centralised à (and) if the commander is absent from the office then the permit will not be signed for a long time.'' Such continuing violations are happening three years after Human Rights Watch (HRW), the New York-based lobby, appealed to the United Nations to include the sufferings of the Muslims in the Arakan State to the list of torments endured by other ethnic communities in Burma, at the hands of Rangoon's junta. ''Violence against Rohingya Muslims in Arakan is a way of life,'' HRW declared in the July 2002 report. ''As opposed to other parts of Burma, in Arakan, the violence against Muslims is carried out systematically by the Burmese army.''

The SPDC's hostility towards this largest concentration of Muslims in Burma was amply clear in the early 1990s, when it stripped Rohingyas of citizenship by stating that they do not belong to the 135 national races that Rangoon recognises as Burmese. It was a policy that was in keeping with the denial of Rohingya rights that came into force shortly after the military coup of 1962. Official discrimination and occasional riots against the Muslims have forced tens of thousands of Rohingyas to flee their homes for the safety of neighbouring countries over the past decades. Bangladesh, Pakistan and India are home to some 300,000 Rohingyas displaced by the abuse and violence, while others have found refuge in Malaysia and Saudi Arabia. ''The tragedy of the Rohingyas is the work of the SPDC, nothing more,'' says Ahamed. ''They are gradually trying to suffocate us.'' (END/2005)