Open Letter Of Dr.Aye Chan to BBC Burmese

credit to Won Thar Nu

Dear BBC,

I listened to your interview with U Tun Khin, the Chairman of the Rohingya Association of Britain on the morning Burmese program of September 1st, 2010. There are two dimensions in this case. We don't deny these Muslims have faced severe suppressions in the northern Arakan by the Burmese military. However, they are not only ethnic group under brutal oppression of the junta. We are wondering why the world's famous medias are more concerned with Rohingya than other ethnic minorities.

To recognize "Rohingya" as a national indigenous people is a different issue. These people were descendents of the Bengali agricultural laborers in the British colonial period. I have historically proved that. You can read my article in "SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research 3-2." I am ready to debate with any scholar on this topic. They came to live in Arakan State in the colonial period. The Arakanese people welcomed. After the Second World War, they were the majority in that area and before the declaration of independence they demanded the area to be incorporated into East Pakistan that is now Bangladesh. When the Pakistani leaders discouraged their demand they declared Jihad on the Union of Burma. When they lost the jungle war, they created the term "Rohingya," calling for the "Rohingya State" for them. There has never been such an ethnic group in Burmese history.

I agree what the Congressman Smith said that after living for generations these Pakistani, Arabs and Indians became British Citizens. But these immigrants in Britain are not demanding a national territory. They are not demanding a separate ethnic identity, like Scottish, Irish or Welsh. They are not calling for a national area of themselves even in the North Sea. They call themselves British. In 1947 these Chittagonian Bengalis demanded the partition of Arakan into two states. How would the native Arakanese feel if their ancestral land is divided to give away a part to the immigrants? I want to ask BBC and U Tun Khin.

Sincerely,

Aye Chan
Professor of History
Department of International Cultures
Kanda University of International Studies
1-4-1 Wakaba, Mihamaku, Chiba 261-0014
Japan

4 comments:

Thandar Lwin said...

ခက္တယ္ေအ..
ကြန္ ့မန္ ့ေပးခ်င္ရင္ San Htun's
Diary ဆိုတဲ့ Title ၾကီးကို Click လိုက္ပါ။ ကြန္ ့မန္ ့ေပးခ်င္တဲ့ ပို ့စ္အဆံုးမွာ
Posted by san htun at 12 : 45 PM 2 comments ဆိုတာ ရိွပါတယ္။ 2 comments ဆိုတာကို Click လိုက္ရင္ ကြန္ ့မန္ ့ေဘာက္ ေပၚလာမွာ ၿဖစ္မွာတယ္ ။ လာလည္ၾကသူအားလံုးကို ေက်းဇူးတင္ပါတယ္ေနာ့။
ဘယ္ႏွာ့ ခက္ခက္ၾကီး..

ကုိကုိေမာင္(ပန္းရနံ႔) said...

I am with your thought and the fact you mentioned. Thanks for this post.

San San Htun said...

ဟိုတေလာတုန္းက ဘေလာ့ဒီဇိုင္းေၿပာင္းလိုက္တာ ကြန္ ့မန္ ့ေတြ ေပ်ာက္ကုန္လို ့ မမယ္သံေရ..လင့္ခ်ိတ္ထားတဲ့ ပို ့စ္ကိုေတြ ့လို ့လာၾကည့္ရင္ ကြန္ ့မန္ ့ေပးဖို ့ ေပ်ာက္ေနလို ့..

San San Htun said...

Thandar Lwin said...
ခက်တယ်အေ..
ကွန့်မန့်ပေးချင်ရင် San Htun's
Diary ဆိုတဲ့ Title ကြီးကို Click လိုက်ပါ။ ကွန့်မန့်ပေးချင်တဲ့ ပို့စ်အဆုံးမှာ
Posted by san htun at 12 : 45 PM 2 comments ဆိုတာ ရှိပါတယ်။ 2 comments ဆိုတာကို Click လိုက်ရင် ကွန့်မန့်ဘောက် ပေါ်လာမှာ ဖြစ်မှာတယ် ။ လာလည်ကြသူအားလုံးကို ကျေးဇူးတင်ပါတယ်နော့။
ဘယ်နှာ့ ခက်ခက်ကြီး..
June 14, 2012 at 4:08 AM
ကိုကိုမောင်(ပန်းရနံ့) said...
I am with your thought and the fact you mentioned. Thanks for this post.
June 14, 2012 at 5:43 AM
San San Htun said...
ဟိုတလောတုန်းက ဘလော့ဒီဇိုင်းပြောင်းလိုက်တာ ကွန့်မန့်တွေ ပျောက်ကုန်လို့ မမယ်သံရေ..လင့်ချိတ်ထားတဲ့ ပို့စ်ကိုတွေ့လို့လာကြည့်ရင် ကွန့်မန့်ပေးဖို့ ပျောက်နေလို့..
June 14, 2012 at 8:56 PM