TERRORISM DILEMMAS AND DEMOCRACY
to form between Indo-Turkish rulers, Sufi saints and Bengali Hindu elite (Eaton,
1993, pp. 22-70) over the next two centuries.
Simultaneous to shifting religio-cultural identity, Pearn (1944) notes ‘politically and historically Arakan was at various times an independent kingdom
of some extent and power prior to its conquest in 1784-85 by Bodawpaya, son
of Alaungpaya, who founded the last dynasty of kings in Burma proper’. At
the height of their power, Arakanese kings occupied parts of Bengal, including
Chittagong from 1459 to1666 (Farzana, 2011; Bhattacharya, 1927). Thus, geographically separated from Burma ‘proper’ by the Arakan mountains, the region
developed somewhat separately from Burma—a buffer between ‘East Bengal’
and Burma proper (Krishna, 1999; Liang, 1990).
Such an understanding of history casts doubt over the historical accuracy of
purported Burmese dominion over Arakan, especially considering the Burmese
empire’s own hold on Arakan was short lived, with the region falling to British
rule following the first Anglo-Burmese war (Grundy-Warr & Wong, 1997). The
British eventually annexed all of Burma in 1886, when it became the Burma province of the British Indian Raj. However, in the modernist drawing of boundaries
at the time of Indian and Burmese independence from the British, Arakan was
handed over to Burma—its last invader.
Morshed (2001) notes ‘present-day Bangladesh and Burma have interacted
over the centuries and there were well-established trade routes and free movement of peoples before the British era’. This historic process of human movement
across the border was further relaxed following the British annexation of Burma,
allowing uninterrupted migration from the Indian subcontinent into Burma from
1886 onwards, until Indian independence and partition in 1947, and Burmese
independence the following year. Such migration has resulted in both a linguacultural syncretism and the scattering of heterogeneous populations across the
Bangladesh-Myanmar border.
What is also clear from this diverse and contested history of the region, and
perhaps more germane to the core argument of this paper, is that Chittagong and
Cox’s Bazar in present day Bangladesh have long been a safe haven for Arakanese
refugees during times of Burmese invasions, and more controversially a place to
mobilise counter-offensives against invading Burmese armies. The Cox’s Bazar
District itself was named after Hiram Cox, a British officer who organised refuge
for more than 200,000 mostly Muslim Arakanese who fled the region following
the 1784 Burmese invasion (Haksar, 2009, pp110-111).
While Arakanese kingdoms should not be conflated with the claim of a
Rohingya kingdom, nor the manifestations of Arakanese identity with Rohingya nationalist identity, or for that matter historical Arakanese refugees with
that of present day Rohingya, it must certainly add credence to the legitimacy
of the Rohingya to seek refugee status inside Bangladesh. This understanding
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