The 1988 Rohingya Extermination Blueprint

By Haikal Mansor

RB Analysis

January 10, 2017

The 1988 Rohingya Extermination Plan was first proposed by Col. Thar Kyaw who was an ethnic Rakhine and the first chairman of National Unity Party (NUP), a proxy party of Burmese military and former Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP) formed to compete against National League for Democracy NLD during the 1990 general election.

The plan was adopted by the Burmese junta’s State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) in 1988 and continued under State Peace and Development Council (SPDC). 

The successive military regime has carried out the 11-point extermination blueprint against Rohingya Muslim minority.

1. The Muslims (Rohingya) are not to be provided with citizenship cards by identifying them as insurgents

2. To reduce the population growth of the Rohingyas by gradual imposition of restrictions on their marriages and by application of all possible methods of oppression and suppression against them

3. To strive for the increase in Buddhist population to be more than the number of Muslim people by way of establishing Natala villages in Arakan (Rakhine State) with Buddhist settlers from different townships and from out of the country

4. To allow them temporary moment from village to village and township to township only with Form 4, and to totally ban them travelling to Sittwe, the Capital of Arakan State

5. To forbid higher studies (university education) to the Rohingyas

6. No Muslim is to be appointed in government services

7. To forbid them from ownership of lands, shops and buildings. Any such properties under their existing ownership must be confiscated for distribution among the Buddhists. All their economic activities must be stopped.

8. To ban construction, renovation, repair and roofing of the mosques, Islamic religious schools and dwelling houses of the Rohingyas 

9. To try secretly to convert the Muslims into Buddhism

10. Whenever there is a case between Rakhine and Muslim the court shall give verdict in favour of Rakhine when the case is between Muslim themselves, the court shall favour the rich against the poor Muslim so that the latter leaves the country with frustration

11. Mass killing of the Muslim is to be avoided in order not to invite the attention of the Muslim countries.

Since its inception, the blueprint is a driving force for the military regime, Thein Sein’s quasi-civilian government and even Aung San Suu Kyi led NLD government in persecution of Rohingya.

The ongoing “clearance operations” in northern Maungdaw is an example of deep-rooted decades-long extermination campaign against the marginalized Rohingya. 

The blueprint still remains one of many institutionalized policies largely instrumented against the entire community.