First They Erased Our Name Read online

  Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Epigraph

  Map

  1 The ogre of Burma is born

  2 Grandma’s stories

  3 The highlanders

  4 ‘Mum, don’t leave me’

  5 Nature’s school

  6 The frontier of happiness

  7 Buddha’s tax

  8 Minor escapades

  9 The homecoming

  10 The captain’s toilets

  11 My kingdom

  12 The criminals

  13 Operation Pyi Thaya (Clean and Beautiful Nation)

  14 Ethnic cleansing

  15 The path of the innocents

  16 The trespassers

  17 The army’s urinals

  18 The undesirables

  19 The taste of salt

  20 The tree’s memory

  21 Pandemonium

  22 Routine

  23 The young woman

  24 Thwarting apartheid

  25 Love and flight

  26 The big departure

  27 My new identity

  28 The riches of the Rohingya

  29 United

  30 The pamphlets

  31 Checkpoints

  32 The spy

  33 Waking up in hell

  34 I must survive

  35 Goodbye, professor

  36 Black moon over the Mekong

  37 Angels in the city

  38 Escape

  39 The rickety bridge

  40 Kuala Lumpur, ten men in the night

  41 Malaysia: my new home

  42 From one hell to another

  43 Whistleblowers

  44 Christmas Island

  45 The death of a people

  Afterword

  Recommended Reading

  Tributes and acknowledgements

  First, They Erased Our Name

  Habiburahman, known as Habib, is a Rohingya. Born in 1979 in Burma (now Myanmar), he escaped torture, persecution, and detention in his country, fleeing first to neighbouring countries in Southeast Asia, where he faced further discrimination and violence, and then, in December 2009, to Australia, by boat. Habib spent 32 months in detention centres before being released. He now lives in Melbourne. Today, he remains stateless, unable to benefit from his full human rights. Habib founded the Australian Burmese Rohingya Organization (ABRO) to advocate for his people back in Myanmar and for his community. He is also a translator and social worker, the casual support service co-ordinator at Refugees, Survivors and Ex-Detainees (RISE), and the secretary of the international Rohingya organisation Arakan Rohingya National Organisation (ARNO), based in the UK. In 2019, he was made a Refugee Ambassador in Australia. The hardship and the human rights violation Habib has faced have made him both a spokesperson for his people and a target for detractors of the Rohingya cause.

  Sophie Ansel is a French journalist, author, and director, who lived in South Asia for several years. It was during a five-month stay in Myanmar that she first encountered the Rohingya people and heard of their plight. She returned to the country several times, and also visited the refugee communities in neighbouring countries like Thailand and Malaysia, where she met Habib in 2006. Habib helped Sophie to better understand the persecution faced by the Rohingya, and she has been advocating for their cause since 2011. When the Myanmar government accelerated the genocide of the Rohingya in June 2012, while Habib was detained in Australia, she helped him to write his story, and the story of his people.

  Andrea Reece is a translator of novels, short stories, and works of non-fiction from French and Spanish.

  Scribe Publications

  18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

  2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

  3754 Pleasant Ave, Suite 100, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55409 USA

  First published in English by Scribe in 2019

  Originally published in French as D’abord, ils ont effacé notre nom © Editions de la Martinière, une marque de la société EDLM, Paris, 2018

  This edition published by special arrangement with EDLM in conjunction with their duly appointed agent 2 Seas Literary Agency

  Text copyright © Habiburahman and Sophie Ansel 2018

  Translation copyright © Andrea Reece 2019

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

  This book is a true story based on the author’s best recollections. Some names and places have been changed for reasons of security and privacy.

  The moral rights of the authors and translator have been asserted.

  9781925849110 (Australian edition)

  9781912854035 (UK edition)

  9781947534858 (US edition)

  9781925693720 (e-book)

  Catalogue records for this book are available from the National Library of Australia and the British Library.

  scribepublications.com.au

  scribepublications.co.uk

  scribepublications.com

  To the Rohingya,

  To the memory of those whose blood continues to flow

  into the soil of Arakan.

  To all the weary stateless people who have fled and still roam

  the oceans, jungles, and highways of the world,

  hoping to survive.

  To you, the reader, may you tell our story,

  which has been stifled by propaganda, racism, fascism,

  and deadly hatred.

  May the truth one day be known and a light shone

  on our tragedy, the hidden history of Burma.

  To my family, to my father and my mother,

  To tolerance and peace,

  To life and love.

  This book is not only my story.

  It is the chronicle of a genocide.

  1

  The ogre of Burma is born

  The dictator U Ne Win has presided over a reign of terror in Burma for decades. In 1982, he has a new project. He is planning to redefine national identity and fabricate an enemy to fuel fear. A new law comes into force. Henceforth, to retain Burmese citizenship, you must belong to one of the 135 recognised ethnic groups, which form part of eight ‘national races’. The Rohingya are not among them. With a stroke of the pen, our ethnic group officially disappears. The announcement falls like a thunderbolt on more than a million Rohingya who live in Arakan State, our ancestral land in western Burma. The brainwashing starts. Rumours and alarm spread insidiously from village to village. From now on, the word ‘Rohingya’ is prohibited. It no longer exists. We no longer exist.

  I am three years old and am effectively erased from existence. I become a foreigner to my neighbours: they believe that we are Bengali invaders who have entered their country illegally and now threaten to overrun it. They call us kalars, a pejorative term expressing scorn and disgust for dark-skinned ethnic groups. In a different time and place, under different circumstances, kalar would have meant wog or nigger. The word is like a slap in the face; it undermines us more with each passing day. An outlandish tale takes root by firesides in thatched huts across Burma. They say that because of our physical appearance we are evil ogres from a faraway land, more animal than human. This image persists, haunting the thoughts of adults and the nightmares of children. r />
  I am three years old and will have to grow up with the hostility of others. I am already an outlaw in my own country, an outlaw in the world. I am three years old, and don’t yet know that I am stateless. A tyrant leant over my cradle and traced a destiny for me that will be hard to avoid: I will either be a fugitive or I won’t exist at all.

  2

  Grandma’s stories

  1984

  In the candlelit glow of the hut, I half open my eyes through heavy eyelids and see Grandma’s wrinkled and kindly face. Her features are blurred by the steam from the pot that she is stirring. The smell of rice and the crackling fire rouse me from my torpor. Grandma comes over and sits down cross-legged on the large grass mat that covers the mud floor. She wraps her arms around me and mops my burning forehead with a wet cloth scented with herbs that Dad has gathered in the forest. Next to her, Mum hums a barely audible tune as she rocks my little sister Nojum who is latched firmly on to her breast. Grandma lifts a spoonful of broth to my mouth. I close my eyes again, exhausted by illness. Her voice resonates like a distant echo: ‘Keep going, little Habib. Drink this down and it’ll make you strong again. A slight fever like this isn’t going to finish you off. Be brave, my little one.’

  Her words continue uninterrupted, barely distinguishable from the ambient noise. I don’t know whether she is talking to me, Mum or Dad, or to the tormented figures from another time and place who live on in the depths of her memory. Fleeing, endlessly roaming, shrieking and screaming for help. The ghosts of our family and of our people who perished, decapitated by swords or burnt to death. This is where my fear of fire started: back then, the flames were always populated by Grandma’s wailing ghosts.

  She nuzzles into the hollow of my neck — a sign of infinite affection — and her voice pulls me back from sleep, into the story of our cursed people.

  ‘Beyond the Kaladan River, there are far greater dangers than a touch of malaria, my little one. You’re going to get better very quickly, and soon you’ll be big enough to help your dad in his shop. You’re safe here. Our village is still a peaceful oasis in this desert of hatred. They won’t come looking for us here.’

  She sighs. That drawn-out sigh that punctuates her often tedious tales. Never-ending stories that are always accompanied by a moral lesson and prayers to God, a burdensome chore that she drums into us on a daily basis when all my brother Babuli and I want to do is play.

  Grandma’s entire past is in her head, far removed from us, and it has the unfortunate habit of interrupting our giggling fits and spoiling our games. On this June evening just before the onset of the rainy season, I am too weak to break free and run off tittering with Babuli to our hideout behind the chicken coop, so I let myself be tenderly rocked to the melody of Grandma’s husky voice and the gentle rhythmic movement of her shoulders. I watch as she drifts away. Her eyes cloud over and her gaze is fixed somewhere in the distance. Even before she opens her mouth, I know that the images in her head are back.

  ‘A long time ago, Habib, the world was vast and infinite. Men and women travelled slowly, keeping time with nature and God as they searched for peaceful and fertile lands. Entire peoples boarded huge ships and crossed oceans. Sailors invoked the clemency of nature by offering up a small gem each day that was swallowed by the waves and deposited on the ocean bed. This is how our ancestors arrived safe and sound in the Kingdom of Rohang, which we now call Arakan. It is this land of plenty, blessed by God, which gave rise to the Rohingya, a peaceful tribe of fishermen and farmers.’

  As if seeking his approval, Grandma turns towards Dad, who is busy scratching letters and figures into a notebook with yellowing pages. She continues her story: ‘Our history has become both a lie and a crime in the eyes of the dictatorship. Their hatred and racism have turned us into foreigners who must be crushed.’

  She squashes her nose into my cheek, inhales deeply, then places a clean cloth on my forehead, which is beaded with sweat.

  ‘Your memory is all you will have to keep our history alive, Habib. So listen to me carefully, because your grandmother won’t be here forever.’

  I’m familiar with the history of the Rohingya. It’s a nightmarish saga that Grandma recounts every evening.

  ‘All I have to bequeath to you now are my words, my little man. We have been plundered of all our wealth. I was young, the same age as your mother, when they came and attacked our village, a few miles from here. They wanted to kill the Muslim kalars, they said. They stormed our homes and invaded neighbouring villages. They overran the whole state. Swords swished through the air. Heads rolled. Women experienced torture that only they can know. Caught in a trap, some preferred to jump into the water and drown themselves rather than fall into the repulsive criminal hands of these men. We left our fields, goats, oxen, and hens. For days we fled through the forest along the border. This was in 1942.’

  Dad finally looks up from his notebook and interrupts Grandma’s flow: ‘Mother, don’t you think that he’s too young to understand all that? You’re going to traumatise him.’

  Grandma falls silent, but the floodgates of her heart have opened. She won’t leave it there.

  She picks up a thanaka stick and vigorously grates the bark on the kyauk pyin*. After a few minutes, she extracts a cool yellow paste and gently applies it to my burning face. Out of the corner of my eye, I catch a glimpse of Babuli’s silhouette. He is playing with stones on the mud floor. My desire to join him gives me renewed energy. I turn my head and stretch my arm towards him as I try in vain to escape Grandma’s tight embrace. The malaria has drained me of all my strength. Sweat pours off me. Grandma keeps mopping. I give in.

  [* A flat circular stone.]

  ‘My son, who knows how long we have before we are chased away again?’ Grandma starts up again, her words directed at Dad. ‘What kind of luck have I had? My life has been defined by the loss of my loved ones. How many pogroms will there be before we are all annihilated? They took my father, they threw my husband in prison. God knows what they made him endure before he died. The Kaladan River runs red with our blood. God protect you for as long as possible. Your children must prepare themselves for the worst.’

  Grandma shudders. She loosens her grip. My body slides into the gap between her legs and is caught by her flowery longyi*. A warm tear splashes onto my cheek from above as my head rolls back onto her knees. She recovers her composure, hugs me to her chest, and gives me a long, searching look. My father, immersed again in his notebook, is no longer listening.

  [* Traditional Burmese dress consisting of a calf-length piece of fabric tied around the waist.]

  Undeterred, she carries on telling me the secret and unwritten history of the Rohingya. After my grandfather’s arrest in 1967, the massacres began again in earnest. The Rohingya had no choice but to flee to Bangladesh. They lived there in appalling and inhumane conditions until the first signs of a lull appeared in Burma. One of my uncles was too traumatised to ever return and chose exile in the Arab states with hundreds of thousands of other refugees. He was never seen again.

  Once our people had left the country, it was difficult to return and reclaim what was rightfully ours. The authorities had robbed my family of everything, but my grandparents and my father had carefully conserved our title deeds. Arakan was the only possible place they could settle and find food and water, the only place they could hope to have a life.

  In 1969, after a year roaming Bangladesh, suffering greatly, my family returned with a handful of other Rohingya to Biramno, their native village in a remote part of Kyauktaw Township. All their animals had been stolen, of course, but my grandmother hoped to be able to farm our land again. Unfortunately, it had been confiscated and redistributed. My father bravely approached the local authorities to claim what rightfully belonged to the family. He brandished the title deeds with great conviction. They arrested and tortured him. He wrote to the federal government, which eventually conceded
half of our original land. When others who coveted the land heard what had happened, the local authorities issued orders for my father to be killed. He had no choice but to flee once again with my mother. They took refuge in neighbouring Chin State. That is where I was born, in this remote and tolerant village by the Kaladan River, where different minorities live more or less in harmony. I was still in my mother’s belly when the army chiefs launched another massive cleansing operation in 1978. They called it Operation Nagamin (Dragon King).

  Grandma mutters. Her lips tremble and her eyes shine.

  ‘They arrested hundreds of Rohingya and forced them onto makeshift boats. The boats were escorted to the middle of Sittwe Bay and sunk. Men, women, and children, all engulfed by the water. Then came the rapes, massacres, and imprisonments in Buthidaung and Maungdaw. The central government sent more boats to Kyauktaw, where I lived. The soldiers and extremists continued the house-to-house raids.’

  Grandma says nothing for a few long minutes and then starts softly singing sad gentle words, accompanied by the crackling of the fire: ‘The Dragon King will carry you off. Poor people, poor Rohingya …’

  She rallies, and strokes my cheeks with the back of her dry, beat-up old hands.

  ‘You are adorable, my little Habib. I love you so much. But the Burmese regime find your lovely ebony skin, your thick head of hair, and your beautiful dark eyebrows offensive. They see you as too black. Too Muslim. Too Negro. Too different. A parasite, like the rest of us. They prefer to confine us to tiny spaces, ghettos where they can control and trample us underfoot, reduce us to slavery, humiliate us, and spill our blood. They are orchestrating our disappearance and we can do nothing to stop them.’

  Some Rohingya who lived in the smaller, more remote villages were warned about the Dragon King operations. My grandmother had just enough time to bundle up her most precious belongings, gather together her personal documents, and dig a deep hole under her hut in which to hide her life’s savings: gold jewellery that she could not take with her. She chased her livestock into the woods and took a boat upriver, as far away as possible from the Arakanese militia. Those who refused to leave their homes were slaughtered or arrested and tortured. The extremists looted whatever they could. Hundreds of Rohingya were left dead. Thousands were imprisoned. Maybe more. Who knows? Who will ever care? Who will record the truth of such horrors? She fled for seven days until she arrived here and was taken in by my father. Months later, when she finally dared return to her home, she had lost her land, her livestock, and her gold. In barely three months, the countryside had been emptied of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya who were reduced to roaming Bangladesh in indescribable conditions. Fleeing. Always fleeing.