Under the ‘Gender Lens’: Rohingya Genocide through Survivors’ Micronarratives

• In Event: Peace, War, and Social Conflict Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Peace, War, and Social Conflict Roundtable #3: Violence and Governance

Abstract

The Rohingyas —an ethnic-religious-linguistic minority group from Rakhine State in Myanmar— represent one of largest refugee populations of current world, with over one million individuals inhabiting in neighboring Bangladesh. Drawing on 85 intensive evidence-based micronarratives from three refugee camps of Cox’s Bazar district and Bhasan Char island in Bangladesh, this paper has explored how the genocidal experiences of Rohingyas were shaped by the social construction of gender. By applying the theoretical insights of Galtung’s violence triangle and Harding’s feminist standpoint epistemology, this analysis has unveiled that before and during the genocidal attacks of 2017, both Rohingya men and women were subjected to direct, structural, and cultural forms of violence. The micronarratives have provided rich material to comprehend how men and women were targeted in gender-differentiated ways. As part of direct violence, men were physically assaulted, tortured, or executed to suspend their socially ascribed roles of community protectors, whereas women were inflicted to abduction, sexual assault and rape to repress their capacity to procreate and sustain daily life. Unlike physical attacks, structural violence was institutionalized in their daily lives long before the actual genocidal attacks took place —through structural exclusions like marriage, childbirth, mobility, education, and livelihood-related restrictions. These exclusions perpetuated economic and social emasculation against men and exposed women to heightened reproductive harms and patriarchal control. Such direct and structural violence was justified through popularizing a gendered allegory of nationhood rooted in the cultural notions of masculinity and femininity. Such as killing Rohingya men and raping Rohingya women were glorified as a sacred duty of the ultra-Buddhist monks and Tatmadaw soldiers to protect their national and religious purity from Rohingya Muslims. This paper calls for a more survivor-centered approach for genocide recognition by foregrounding the micronarratives of the Rohingyas in the terrain of genocide research, human-rights activism, and policy-making.

Authors

• Umme Busra Fateha Sultana, Professor at the Department of Women and Gender Studies, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh

• Tasnim Nowshin Fariha, University of Dhaka