Ek Khaale (Once Upon A Time)
by Greg Constantine
Visual Restoration Project/Multimedia Project, 2024 [www.ekkhaale.org]
Debates over Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim minority have often been vexed by charged emotion, exaggeration, accusation, invective and the wielding of history as a weapon. The American photojournalist Greg Constantine has taken a dramatically different approach to documenting the lives of the Rohingya, away from the violent apartheid this community has endured for decades and subject to volumes of horrific human rights reporting since 2012. An industry of reporting, some of it exploitative and at times invasive, especially around sexual violence, has paradoxically tended to obscure the depth of identity of the Rohingya in Myanmar before they became a globalized tragedy.
“Ek Khaale” (“Once Upon a Time” in Rohingya dialect) is an innovative and arresting online book, utilizing a range of materials laid out like a tapestry of time, “a project about resistance and the reclamation of a community’s identity” according to Constantine. Family shots, portraits, school class photos, baby pictures, holiday snaps, passports, letters, maps, newspaper clippings, cables, notebooks, Burma Gazettes, a plethora of National Registration Cards, laws, constitutional provisions, land ownership papers, tax receipts, voter registration cards, government issued Good Service Certificates, and so much more. This is humanitarian history.
Chapter 2, “They Did Not Deny Us”, provides firm evidence of the long presence in present day Rakhine State by Muslim communities, including Rohingya people, going back centuries. This history has been a vexatious flashpoint in Rakhine State for centuries. British colonialism has a great deal to do with this. Unchecked migration from India, throughout Lower Burma, but also from Chittagong, blurred lines of identity and fueled enmity from the ethnic Arakanese community. But the 1931 Census, with all its attendant shortcomings as a colonial undertaking, remarked that “(i)n parts of Akyab district, Indians [Muslims] are so numerous that they should perhaps be regarded as indigenous. This also applies to the Chinese in the Northern Shan States.” But intercommunal relations were also exacerbated by a series of massacres during World War II with the Muslim communities siding with the British during the war setting historical grievances that have festered for 80 years.
This chapter also showcases the first Rohingya Members of Parliament, including Sultan Ahmed from Maungdaw and M.A. Gaffar from Buthidaung, elected to the Constituent Assembly in 1947, and again into national parliament in 1951. Sultan Ahmed was president of the Jamaat-e-Ulema Party, in coalition with the ruling Anti-Fascist Freedom People’s League (AFPFL), and served in parliament from 1951 to 1962. His wife, Daw Aye Nyunt (Zura Begum) was elected to parliament in 1951 as a member of the AFPFL, one of the first two female members of Burma’s national assembly, and served until 1956.
These figures have often been cited as incontrovertible evidence of political participation by Rohingya over many years. These would also include the four Rohingya elected in the 1990 election, amongst them U Kyaw Min (Shamsul Anwarul) of the Democracy and Human Rights Party (DHRP), imprisoned in 1992 with his family, including his daughter, prominent Rohingya rights activist Wai Wai Nu. The military controlled Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) tapped U Shwe Maung to run in Buthidaung in the tainted 2010 election, where he served until 2015. He was eventually hounded out of the country, and now lives in Texas.
Post-World War II tensions between Muslim and Rakhine communities continued to fuel violence, exacerbated by the creation of a Mujahid insurgency. Rohingya leaders were adamantly opposed to the creation of a separate Arakan State, which the U Nu administration was considering. A key historical marker of belonging is in the Burma Broadcasting Service (BBS) having a “Rohinja” language news segment (along with Lahu and Pa-O) every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.
Irshad Hussein, one of the original Rohingya broadcasters, was tracked down by Constantine in the refugee camps of Cox’s Bazaar after he fled in the mass ethnic cleansing campaign of 2017. “Ek Khaale” contains a powerful portrait of Irshad, before he passed away, aged 108, in 2021. He told Constantine in 2018, “(o)nce a week I would recite the Koran on the radio and then tell the news in the Rohingya language. The Rohingya language program on Burma Broadcasting started in 1961 but was then canceled in 1965. We were very sad when our program was canceled. Then, we all were the same. We all had equal rights and enjoyed life. Now, nothing is left.”
Chapter 3, “The Forgotten”, tells the often neglected history of the British-raised “V Force.” The Rohingya, or “Mussulman Arakanese” as documents referred to them, were critical in supplying the British with on the ground intelligence during World War II as part of V Force during the critical Arakan Campaign: “The Eyes of the Fourteenth Army” as one press article called them. Constantine displays the rare book Burmese Outpost by one of the V Force commanders, British Army officer Anthony Irwin. Similar British- and American-raised levies also operated in Karen, Karenni and Kachin areas, many of them now seen as precursors of today’s special forces. Olla Meah, a former V Force operator, was issued a National Registration Card (NRC) with the number 00025: he was quite probably the 25th person in the country to receive an identity card after independence. V Force were a significant part of the British effort to clear the Japanese from Maungdaw and Buthidaung, and the pivotal role of the 1944 “Battle of the Admin Box” just north of Buthidaung town.
The contentious issue of citizenship and belonging is addressed throughout the “Ek Khaale” project, but Chapter 4, “A New Nation” reminds us of how the 1947 Constitution was a better guarantee of all citizens’ rights than what came much later. It also shows how much trust many Rohingya elites had in the new country of Burma and its strong constitutional rights. Waji Ullah, a V Force veteran who went on to study in Calcutta, wrote to his former commanding officer Captain Irwin that “(i)n Burma and in many other places all the people are rioting and demonstrating for freedom. But in fact I do not agree with the demonstrators and rioters. I am all for the constitution. I want the constitution to be an honest master.”
The deterioration of Rohingya rights is clearly outlined in Chapter 5, “We Were All Citizens”, as the 1949 Residents of Burma Registration Act led to the issuing of NRCs, which many Rohingya were given, only to have them withdrawn in a form of bureaucratic marginalization and state violence from 1978 onwards. Squabbling historians and screeching activists have their own multiple perspectives on these issues, but nothing is more striking than the scores of old NRCs arrayed in “Ek Khaale”, weathered by age, dog eared, stamped, with vivid official photos, and scored by official handwriting. Irrefutable proof that the Union of Burma considered the holders to be citizens.
As one Rohingya elder told Constantine, “(t)he world didn’t see how they have systematically destroyed our legal documents and other evidence. The world just saw the physical attacks on us. So, they are trying to deceive the world by saying, ‘(t)he Rohingya are not from here’. What they did to us with the pen harmed us more than their physical attacks did. It’s like destroying the roots of a tree.”
But it is also important to remember all the many “unofficial minorities” in Myanmar who have their cultural and political history redacted, reduced, or erased. This was a process that was prevalent during the long years of military rule, but actually accelerated during the National League for Democracy (NLD) administration. It is also, controversially, a system of stigmatization and marginalization continued by the anti-junta revolutionary forces despite promises of reform on issues of citizenship.
NRCs were not the only official documentary proof of belonging; there was so much more. Chapter 6, “Evidence of Existence” profiles individuals and the paper trail of the life they left behind. Salai Ahmad was a village headman in Akyab (Sittwe) district, and Constantine has arrayed the key documents in his life: his and his family members’ NRCs, the official appointment of headman certificate, a family list and two voter registration cards from 1978 and 1981. Ula Mea was a policeman who fought against the Mujahid insurgents, leaving behind his police ID, Police Good Service Certificates, police do’s and don’ts pamphlet, and his pension book. Other upstanding members of the community including doctors are also represented. Ending this chapter are photos of a pile of charred papers, partially destroyed by a fire in the Balukhali refugee camp in March 2023, after being carried from Rakhine State following the ethnic cleansing of 2017.
It is more than a pity here that Constantine has not included documentary evidence of any Rohingya women: they remain mostly silent subjects of photographs (Daw Aye Nyunt is mentioned in passing, not profiled). This is unacceptable for a project that is designed to evidence acknowledgement for a whole community when half of that society is marginalized. “Ek Khaale” is lamentably limited because of this and Constantine should work to remedy it.
Chapter 7, “Resistance”, in this reviewer’s opinion, is the most compelling of the project. It outlines the roots of so much inter-communal tensions between the Rohingya and Rakhine communities. Many Rakhine leaders in the 1950s sought to achieve statehood for Arakan (or Rakhine), a move the U Nu government initially entertained but which alarmed many Rohingya leaders. Statehood wouldn’t be granted until 1974 during the Burma Socialist Program Party (BSPP) rule, although the short lived Mayu Frontier District was a more acceptable arrangement to the Rohingya.
Armed resistance was almost inevitable, as it was in so many parts of Burma when the army was “making enemies” throughout the country. The Rohingya Patriotic Front (RPF) was formed in 1973, followed a decade later by a splinter group, the Rohingya Solidarity Organization (RSO), and then another group the Arakan Rohingya Islamic Front (ARIF). Taking up arms against the central Bamar state likely didn’t cause the Rohingya to be slowly stripped of their rights—it was a legacy of colonialism and intercommunal tensions and the racism of General Ne Win—but Operation Naga Min in 1978 and the forced expulsion campaign in 1991 made it clear that Myanmar no longer saw the once accepted Rohingya as welcome. Not even Rohingya students protesting in Rangoon (Yangon) during the uprising of 1988 could be remembered.
It’s one of those paradoxes of Myanmar’s civil wars that armed resistance against a common enemy often leads to violent atomization after a period of strained solidarity. In another period of “multicolored insurgencies” in Myanmar’s past, the April 1986 Bulletin of the Karen National Union (KNU) carried a press release from the Rohingya Patriotic Front which was titled “RPF Condemns Burmese Union Day Moot” and declared the RPF stood “side by side” with other Shan, Pa-O, Karen, Kachin, Lahu, Mon and Zomi “rebellion groups” to fight the Ne Win dictatorship. Rohingya armed resistance may have been small and militarily of little impact, but there is no denying they were part of the revolution in the past.
Yet there is a pall of dread reading this chapter in late-2024, as Rohingya men take up arms, many voluntarily, some press-ganged into service, alongside the Myanmar military to fight the Arakan Army (AA) and the never fully dissolved but now resurgent RSO in Maungdaw, as the resistance forces seek to expel the SAC (State Administration Council–the junta’s formal name) from all of Rakhine State. Another chapter of fear, hatred and mistrust between all the communities of Rakhine is inevitable.
Anyone who has ever worked with the Rohingya know that many, certainly from Sittwe, once had extensive access to higher education. Chapter 8, “Teachers and Students”, presents a series of class photos of educators and students from the community as they studied in Arakan, Rangoon and Pathien to become teachers, doctors, engineers and administrators. There is something intangibly authoritative about class photos that supersedes certificates. They speak to belonging. I’m probably not the only neurotic who dreaded missing school the day photos were taken, as if my exclusion from the class photo would invalidate me.
The photos showing so many Rohingya students and their ethnically diverse classmates have a hopeful quality to them, as if they were the final days of a once proud education system being decayed by the isolationist Burmese Way to Socialism. The presence of women is again glaringly obvious: the Rangoon University Arakanese Muslim Students Association of 1961-62 had three women out of 15 members, and the 1967-68 Rangoon University Rohingya Students had an all-male contingent of 26. Many more women from the community attended Sittwe University until they were banned in 2012 (this was quietly reversed two years ago).
The final chapter, Community Album, is an evocative way to conclude “Ek Khaale”. From the 1960s to 2012, these are family and friend snaps, with loads of photos that can only have been taken in the 1970s by a Pentax, Minolta or possibly a Kodak, or at a studio around Sule Pagaoda in Rangoon—great shots of a Datsun and a suave looking bloke with sunglasses leaning on a vintage car, hamming it up at Bogkyoke Aung San Park wearing some groovy bell bottoms, even groovier htameins and longyis, gatherings at weddings, graduations and official police portraits, some splendid bob cuts on stylish women, and groups of smiling people on the beach in Sittwe.
As one of the people Constantine interviewed asserts, “(w)hen we recall our past, we remember ourselves as modern people, embraced by our country despite the discrimination. Attitudes toward the Rohingya have changed, but when you reflect on the past, we didn’t see ourselves as different. We were just like everyone else, no different from our neighbors. When you look at these old photos, do you say, That looks like the Rohingya? No. Because we looked just like everyone else. We were just like everyone else in the country.”
Constantine has a long history documenting the lives of Rohingya. His 2012 book Exiled to Nowhere appeared just months before the communal violence that swept through central and northern Rakhine cleaved the communities apart, and sent 120,000 Rohingya into confinement camps outside Sittwe. The stark black and white imagery in that volume shows Rohingya in Bangladesh and Myanmar existing in almost stone age deprivation. “Ek Khaale” adds another layer of irrefutable evidence to the Rohingya persecution.
To call “Ek Khaale” a scrapbook or a social palimpsest would be a disservice: It is a forensic archive of Rohingya identity and belonging, a collection of ephemera which has a combined strength when collated by someone as sensitive and skilled as Constantine. Even the most ruthless denialist will have a difficult time maintaining the dehumanizing tropes of the Rohingya being an artificial modern invention. The power of “Ek Khaale” comes from the undeniable dignity it reveals through the Rohingya’s past lives.
David Scott Mathieson is an independent analyst working on conflict, humanitarian and human rights issues on Myanmar.
