Buddhist flags hang limply from bamboo poles at the entrance to Koe Tan Kauk, a “model” village for ethnic Rakhine migrants shuttled north to repopulate an area once dominated by Rohingya Muslims.
The new arrivals are moving to parts of Rakhine state mostly “cleared” of its Rohingya residents, whose villages were bulldozed and reduced to muddy stains on a landscape of lush farmland.
The Rakhine migrants, who come from the poor but relatively stable south, are ─ for now ─ few in number. But they carry great expectations as the pioneers of a donor-led “Rakhinisation” plan to upend the demography of the once majority-Muslim area.
“We were really afraid of those Kalars and didn’t plan to come here,” Chit San Eain, a 28-year-old who has moved with her husband and toddler into a basic hut in Koe Tan Kauk tells AFP, using a pejorative term for Muslims.
“But now that they are no longer here, we have the chance to meet again with our relatives who live up here,” she added, the ruins of a Rohingya settlement lying a few kilometres away.
Nearly 700,000 Rohingya have been driven from northern Rakhine into Bangladesh since August 25 last year by a Myanmar army offensive against Muslim militants.
Another 300,000 Rohingya were pushed out from the south and centre of Rakhine by army campaigns stretching back to the late 1970s.
The UN has branded last year’s military crackdown ethnic cleansing, with a top official saying it carried all the “hallmarks of genocide.” Myanmar vigorously denies the allegations and says refugees are welcome to return.
But so far it has agreed to allow back only 374 of 8,000 refugees whose names have been put forward for the initial phase of repatriation.
Many traumatised Rohingya in Cox’s Bazar camps are also refusing to be repatriated to Rakhine ─ where holding camps and hostile neighbours await them.
In their absence a blizzard of development projects, government and army-sponsored or privately funded, are transforming northern Rakhine.
Taking space vacated by fleeing Rohingya is an old game in a state seen as the frontline of a Buddhist nation’s fight against encroaching Islam.
“The military has been engineering the social landscape of northern Rakhine State so as to dilute the Rohingya population since the early 1990s,” says Francis Wade, author of “Myanmar’s Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and the Making of the Muslim ‘Other’”.
The Muslim minority are denied citizenship and labelled “Bengalis”, outsiders who ─ the logic runs ─ have successfully been pushed back to their country of origin.
In a pattern with echoes of “the Israeli settler project in the West Bank” Buddhist communities then move in, altering the “facts on the ground” gradually rubbing out Muslim rights to the land, he added.
“I’d expect to see more Buddhists settle there over the coming years. And then we’ll forget what the area once was, and that process of erasure will be complete.”
Chit San Ean is the beneficiary of the Ancillary Committee for the Reconstruction of Rakhine National Territory in the Western Frontier (CRR), a private scheme established shortly after the refugee crisis began.
In a zone under a strict army lockdown, the resettlement plan could not fly without military consent.
With Rohingya gone, Myanmar’s ethnic Rakhine seek Muslim-free ‘buffer zone’
