A Twist in the Turkish Support for the Rohingya Refugees

Against the backdrop of the news reports that Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh and India have shown a token gesture of kindness by sending donations to the earthquake victims in Turkey, Deputy Prime Minister Fikri Isik said Rohingya-Turkish solidarity dates back to the World War I period.

Indeed it is heart-warming to hear the news of Rohingyas, themselves being caged inside barbed wire fences in sub-human existence in Bangladesh, wanted to express their gratitude towards Turkey, and organised donation collections for earthquake victims. Turkey has been a generous supporter of Rohingya genocide survivors in Bangladeshi refugee camps and inside Myanmar.

So far so good.

But a serious empirical problem arises when the senior Turkish politician – no less than the Deputy Prime Minister – sent a tweet, citing a single piece of Ottoman Archival material that the specific link and solidarity existed between Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar – then the British colony of Burma – and the Turks.

As a scholar of Rohingya genocide and more broadly the history and politics of Burma, my old country, I have been among the very few Burmese, scholars and lay public, who have been openly defending the distinct if evolving identity of Rohingya, their bi-national history saddling on present-day Myanmar and Bangladesh and their historical presence in Western Myanmar (then called Arakan or now Rakhine).

Source: Solidarity between Rohingya Muslims and Turks dates back to WWI, deputy PM says | Daily Sabah

Naturally, I took a close look at the archived document which DPM Isik was basing his “Rohingya-Turk tie” tweet on. It was a letter dated July 28 1913 signed by Ahmed Mawla Dawood, the head of Ottoman Relief Fund based in the then British colonial capital of Rangoon and addressed to His Highness Prince Hilmi Parsha, the Grand Vizier in Constantinople (now Istanbul), to congratulate the Ottoman’s military victory over the Bulgarian-Serbian joint occupation of the Ottoman city in western Turkey called Adrianople [today Edirne] – formerly Adrianople or Hadrianople.

Ahmed Mawla Dawood, the letter’s author, wrote, “I beg to confirm my cable of even date advising dispatch of a remittance by cable today an equivalent of ‎£1,391 …” before proceeding to “congratulat (e) your Highness and the members of your Cabinet and all my Turkish Co-religionists for the marvelous and magnificent fete of reoccupying Adrianople and some of the lost territory and thus restoring the Prestige of the Ottoman Empire.” The donations were meant for the relief of “the Turks injured, the widows and orphans of the martyrs” during the second Balkan War against the Ottoman Empire.

The prime ministerial tweet and the accompanying stories – in the Turkish state news agency Anadolu and its Southeast Asian outlet Daly Sabah – prove deeply problematic. For empirically the original tweet was empirically (that is, factually) incorrect.

First, "mussulmans" simply means "Muslims" or Mohamadens or followers of Mohammad (as in Buddhists, or followers of Buddha). The colonial capital of British Burma, Rangoon, was 60% people of Indian origin in those years.

There was the British-subsidised mass-labour migration by the hundreds of thousands, from the Indian sub-continent to the peninsula British Burma. By 1886, the British annexed what was known as “lower” (lowlands of Burma) into its pre-existing British Indian administration. Indians of all faiths and castes had flocked to the new colonial economic frontier.

Indian Muslims – and the pre-existing Muslims of pre-colonial Burma – were lumped together under the umbrella identity of “Muslims” or “mussulmans”.

The term “mussulmans” refers to any Muslims in colonial Burma, in Rangoon or in Arakan or Rakhine state, or anywhere else throughout Burma then. To construe the Mussulmans this side” as exclusively or specifically “Rohingya” was simply gross mis-reading of the letter.

Secondly, the letter itself is deeply morally problematic. It paints an unflattering, or rather regressive, image of the Muslims of the colonial Burma, living as the colonised subjects in the British Empire, Muslims of Burma sending donations for the wounded and dead Ottoman soldiers, “the Martyrs”, in the military campaign against the peoples of the Balkans, also colonised subjects in the Ottoman Empire, and congratulating one of the highest leaders of that empire in 1913.

Even judging the standards of the time, not today’s, what kind of the Oppressed/Colonised would support and congratulate another Coloniser, on account of a shared faith of Islam,on the latter's military victories over the pro-freedom colonised Peoples of the Balkans, the Bulgarians and Southern Slavic peoples who were subjugated by the Muslim rulers of the Ottoman Empire for over 500 years?

By 1905, there was already an awakening of anti-imperialist sentiments in the cosmopolitan city of Rangoon as evidenced when the Buddhist and other subject populations began to challenge the British colonial regime.

In colonial Burma, the anti-British imperialist agitation began within 10 years after the violent "pacification" was completed in the highlands in the 1890’s. In the lowlands, high school students in Rangoon and Buddhist organisations began their culturalist opposition of the colonial rule which they saw was unmistakably Christian in character.

This rise of culturalist anti-Imperialism coincided with Japan's military defeat of Tsarist Russia in 1905. After the Soviet Revolution of 1917, anti-imperialist activism began to take on progressive characteristics such as labour rights, class analyses which transcended race and face.

Many Muslims of Rangoon contributed to the growth of socialist and other progressive ideas in the political classes in colonial Burma in the early decades of 1920’s and 1930’s.

The collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which was initially triggered by the rebellion in the Balkans, produced, as a by-product, the Armenian Genocide of 1913-1915. The Armenian Christians were painted amongst the mainstream Ottoman Turkish population as “spies and supporters” of anti-Ottoman forces such as France and the United Kingdom, for the collapsing Muslim Empire based in Istanbul.

If the head of the Turkish Relief Fund in Rangoon who composed the letter was informed about the Ottomans’ specific military victories in the mid-1913 he surely would have known the brewing troubles for the Armenian Christians in the heartland of the Ottoman Empire. Still, his solidarity was clearly, and disturbingly, with the Ottoman or Turkish perpetrators of the atrocities against the local Christian populations.

The Armenian Genocide which gathered pace in 1914 was what originally precipitated the conceptual thinking of Rafael Lemkin, the young Polish-Jewish man from the present-day Ukraine, about large-scale destruction of populations (because of their racial, ethnic, religious, political or national identities).

Lamkin’s concern about group destruction predates the rise of Nazism and the horrific Holocaust or Nazi genocide.

Incidentally, you would lose your Turkish friends and colleagues if you make any mention of the atrocities against Armenians by the Turks during the last years of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.

By the same token, if you call the state of Israel by its legal name, that is, apartheid state, and calls out on the officially Jewish State’s genocidal policies and deeds, you will likely end up not having Israeli or even Jewish friend at best, and you make yourself vulnerable to be condemned as “antisemitic”, or “cancelled”.

Kneejerk nationalist denial of one's own group's racial crimes abound. I stopped counting the number of times I have been cancelled by my own fellow Buddhist Burmese, for calling them and their cultist leader Aung San Suu Kyi, now in jail herself, for their collaboration and cheer-leading with the genocidal military regime in Myanmar.

On their part, the fear of imperialist British in the latter years of the Empire was centred on how the Raj could collapse as the result of the Muslims within its British Empire, specifically on the Indian subcontinent. It was the Muslims who ruled the vast Indian sub-Continent of India for nearly 700 years before the Moguls' reign was ended by the proto-type of a modern corporation, the English East India Company.

The Turkish deputy Prime minister's gross distortions of the word "Muslims" in Rangoon in 1913, as if to say that Muslims of Rangoon were Rohingya, and they were in solidarity with Turks fighting to keep the colonised peoples in the Balkans within the bondage of the Ottoman Empire, is both morally repugnant and empirically false.

Turkey is undergoing a value transformation, for worse, with Islamicist nationalism being promoted by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The clearest example is the Erdoğan regime, re-converting the UNESCO World Heritage monument Hagia Sophia, (in Turkish Ayasofya, Latin Sancta Sophia, [a church from AD 600 till AD 1500] to a mosque in 2020, undermining the monument's multi civilisational heritage.

The updated entry on Hagia Sophia in the Encyclopaedia Britannica reads, “Islamic prayers were held shortly after the announcement with curtains partially concealing the building’s Christian imagery.”

The Turkish Deputy Prime Minister's tweets and the ensuing article in the Turkey-affiliated media outlet must be seen in the same vein as today's Turkish attempt to revive Islamic Imperialism of the deceased Ottoman Empire.

As for the Rohingya as much as I stand with them in their uphill quest for equal rights and restoration of their citizenship in our shared country of birth, I must say I am deeply troubled by the near-total absence of any progressive, egalitarian thoughts or absence of political and intellectual integrity amongst its diasporic elite, including those award-winners and celebrated Rohingya rights activists, whom we see in television news and global events. Tragically, these globe-trotting elite in the diaspora shape the Rohingya public opinion in refugee camps and inside Myanmar.

There is a tendency, rather unwise, to assign, unquestioningly, moral weight and virtues to those who are in wretched conditions. Oppression must be confronted on its own account. However, automatically elevating the Oppressed to a morally superior plain, refugees or survivors of genocide, has proven to be unhelpful.

Some such as the late Elie Wiesel, the famed Auschwitz survivor, had used his voice to support Israel, for instance, not in support of Palestinians, the victims of Israel’s decades of semi-genocidal policies towards the latter.

In her videotaped special address to the Free Rohingya Coalition conference held at Barnard College/Columbia University in New York several years ago, the highly respected Professor Angela Davis of the University of California has rightly pointed on the pathetic phenomenon of the formerly Oppressed morphing into the Oppressor themselves.

She gave Israel and Aung San Suu Kyi as disturbing examples. Moral standing among individuals and populations ought to be earned, not automatically assigned on account of their past or present oppression.

Maung Zarni is a Burmese educator, academic, and human rights activist.He is noted for his opposition to the violence in Rakhine State and Rohingya refugee crisis Views expressed here are his own.