Seeing Myanmar’s Rohingya people anew

Photojournalist Greg Constantine’s project, Ek Khaale (“Once upon a time” in the Rohingya language), presents vivid proof of the Rohingya community’s belonging in Myanmar. By collaborating with Rohingya individuals globally, Constantine has unearthed rare historical and cultural materials, curating them into an online exhibition. The project uses a striking digital medium to open a portal into a heritage almost annihilated by decades of systematic persecution. “Even while subjected to violence and displacement, Rohingya hid and preserved documentation of their families’ heritage and historical connection to Arakan,” writes Constantine, using an older, alternative name for Myanmar’s Rakhine State.His work, and the efforts at preservation that it records, underscore the human urge to protect what is most precious during times of crisis. Before beginning Ek Khaale in early 2021, Constantine had spent over 15 years documenting the Rohingya experience for international media outlets. With this project, he aimed to add something new to the conversation and challenge narratives that define the community by victimhood alone. An assemblage of photographs, many captured by Rohingya people themselves, alongside official documents, archival data, and handwritten letters, together form a picture of the Rohingya community that has long been absent from public view. “When these things are seen, their understanding of the Rohingya will be awakened,” a Rohingya elder is quoted as saying. The story of Myanmar’s Rohingya, a community denied citizenship, targeted by genocidal violence in 2017, and now caught in the crossfire between the junta and the Arakan Army, is told via a visual medium. This approach is in tune with the creativity that Myanmar’s Generation Z have shown, and become famous for, in response to the 2021 military coup, which also harnesses the image as a language of resistance. Salvaging evidence from the ashes, one chapter of Ek Khaale shows a video in which piles of documents covered with inky stamps and Burmese script fill the screen. A hand sifts through these papers, which are scorched at the edges and have been carried from Rakhine State to a Bangladeshi refugee camp, irreplaceable proof of connections to Myanmar almost lost to fire. The remains of one family’s documents after a fire in a refugee camp in Bangladesh in March 2023. The documents date back over 80 years (Greg Constantine/Ek Khaale) Part of the political fabric Counteracting the Myanmar authorities’ denial of the Rohingya people’s origins in Myanmar, Ek Khaale situates the Rohingya within the nation’s history, reclaiming their place in key moments of collective memory. Describing the project as “activating the past in the present context”, Constantine told Myanmar Now, “I find and identify voices of the past that’ve been totally forgotten about.” “People need to hear some of the things Rohingya were saying, or doing,” he added. Like the Karen, Karenni, and Kachin elsewhere in the country, the Rohingya contributed to the British war effort against the Japanese in World War II. Images of War Service Certificates awarded by the British government tell of the sacrifices made by Rohingya for the Allied cause. The project is a reminder of how Rohingya people fought on the opposite side of the war from many Rakhine Buddhists, who were allied with the Japanese, which contributed to continuing divisions between the communities. The Rohingya were also active participants in the negotiation of Myanmar’s independence, staking their claim to a place in the new nation. After demanding to be recognised as people belonging to Burma, Rohingya representatives were part of the Constituent Assembly in 1947—the body tasked with drafting a constitution for the newly independent country. At the birth of Burma’s self-determination under the 1948 constitution, the Rohingya were recognised as full citizens. “Rohingya had the same citizenship as Aung San did,” said Rohingya elder Aman Ullah, who was interviewed for the project. “We were all citizens of Burma, same as U Nu and the first President of [Burma], Sao Shwe Thaik.” The project uncovers dozens of National Registration Cards contributed by Rohingya individuals. Issued in the 1950s, these documents are treasured evidence of the citizenship that Rohingya people once held—allowing them to earn university degrees, hold government jobs, and vote in national elections. The project not only reveals how Rohingya people once sat in universities and government offices beside colleagues from officially recognised ethnic groups, but also that the Rohingya language could once be heard over the airwaves via state-owned radio broadcast networks alongside the Mon, Pa-O, and Lahu languages. This came to an end in 1965, after just 4 years, “We were very sad when our program was cancelled”, said Irshad Hussein, a Rohingya elder and one of the radio broadcast veterans interviewed by Constantine. “Then, we were all the same. We all had equal rights and enjoyed life. Now, nothing is left,” he added. The first National Registration Cards (NRC) were issued throughout the Union of Burma in the 1950s, and many Rohingya received them. At the time, an NRC card represented Burmese citizenship. In the 1970s, the Burmese government started to confiscate NRC cards from the Rohingya community as a way to slowly erase Rohingya people’s claims to citizenship (Greg Constantine/Ek Khaale) Resistance Importantly, the project also presents key historical moments of Rohingya resistance, recounting how the Rohingya opposed the creation of an Arakan state, a proposal put forth by Rakhine leaders and considered by the U Nu government in the 1950s. As well as advocating safeguards to protect the rights of Muslims in the proposed Arakan constitution, many Rohingya people expressed a preference for remaining under the jurisdiction of Burma’s central government, then based in Yangon. Later, in parallel with other ethnic groups in Myanmar—then still called Burma—the Rohingya organised to resist the military regime’s oppression. Rohingya publications from 1978 document Rohingya people’s denunciation of the atrocities committed by the Ne Win government. From the historic year of 1988, images show Rohingya students joining nationwide pro-democracy demonstrations in Yangon. Rohingya liberation groups from the 1970s through the early 2000s published their own magazines and journals. The publications served as a voice from the Rohingya people addressing the international community. Magazines included historical pieces, analysis of current events in Burma, and in-depth updates on the persecution of the Rohingya community throughout these decades (Greg Constantine/Ek Khaale) The face of the Rohingya In the final and most intimate chapter of the project, the viewer encounters Rohingya families and individuals up close, defying hostile attitudes towards the community by speaking directly to their humanity. Genocide scholar Rhiannon Neilsen, an assistant professor at the City University of New York, warns of the dangers of dehumanizing rhetoric: “Narratives of dehumanization have enabled decades of systematic, violent oppression of the Rohingya, culminating in the 2017 genocide,” Nielsen said. “By powerfully foregrounding the lives of individuals, the Ek Khaale project helps resist the toxic political arc of Rohingya people as less-than or inhuman,” she added. Throughout Ek Khaale, photographs depict Rohingya people in positions that would be inaccessible to them now. Following a wave of targeted violence in Rakhine State in 2012, Rohingya people were banned from access to higher education at Sittwe University as part of a broader crackdown that also restricted their freedom of movement and access to healthcare. The resonance of these more recent events makes seeing young Rohingya people, including students of engineering, medicine, law and mathematics, as well as Rohingya judges, doctors, police officers, and teachers, all the more poignant. Countering perceptions of Rohingya people as ‘other’ or as perpetual victims, black and white photos from across the decades show wide-eyed infants, young people beside their cars and bicycles, and men and women in traditional Burmese dress, at wedding celebrations, on trips to the beach, or in clothes showing hints of 1970s fashions. “These photographs compress time in a powerful, human way,” Constantine said. “It’s almost as if the gaze of the people in those photographs is asking us to see them and the Rohingya community with solidarity, in a universal kind of way.” The project as a whole positions the Rohingya alongside other ethnic groups in a multicultural Myanmar, sharing in a common struggle for justice. This resurrection of Rohingya history comes at a critical juncture, as Myanmar under the military regime burns, a new vision of the country may have a chance of emerging from the flames.

Seeing Myanmar’s Rohingya people anew

As the Rohingya minority continues to face some of the deadliest violence in an ongoing civil war, a photographer illuminates how their experiences and place in Myanmar society have changed over the decades

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