The Assault on the Rohingya Is Not Only about Religion — It’s Also about Land
Sep 24, 2017
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Saskia Sassen
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Religion and ethnicity have been the major focus in local and international news coverage of the persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar. Such persecution is part of a long and cruel history suffered by the Rohingya people. But there are limitations to this explanation for the current phase of that long-standing violence. Two recent developments make me question whether religion gives us the full picture of what is happening now.
The first is the Myanmar government’s 2016 decision to include a relatively significant 3 million acres of Rakhine rural land in the national list of land allocations for “economic development.” Before this, according to government documents, Rakhine was only in the list for a mere 17,000 acres allocated in 2012. In Myanmar, the government’s language of “economic development” describes allocations of land that the military has de facto control over and have been selling to Burmese and foreign firms for the past 20 years. But Rakhine, a forgotten poor area at the margins of the country, had not really been part of such allocations. To some extent, the international, almost exclusive focus on religion has overshadowed the vast land grabs that have affected millions of people in Myanmar over the years, and now also the Rohingya.