Heritage destruction in Myanmar’s Rakhine state: legal and illegal iconoclasm

Abstract

In this article we map heritage destruction in Myanmar's Rakhine state. We outline the historic and contemporary political context in Myanmar explaining the background of the Rohingya Muslim ethnic group and addressing the contribution of religion and political change to anti-Rohingya discrimination and violence in Myanmar. We trace patterns of heritage destruction as legal and/or illegal iconoclasm and specify the key elements of heritage destruction in Rakhine state. Our analysis focusses on the use of heritage destruction in Rakhine state as a tool of genocide, and we suggest that heritage destruction in Myanmar's Rakhine state ought to be understood as part the authorities' policies of genocide against the Rohingya. We conclude the article with a call for UNESCO to act to extend its Unite4Heritage campaign to include the destruction of heritage by state actors.

Picking up the pieces: Transitional justice responses to destruction of tangible cultural heritage

“…74 Indeed, the Myanmarese government's campaign against Rohingya heritage can be understood as a core element of a genocidal policy. 75 Likewise, cultural destruction and socio-economic rights abuses are deeply co-imbricated. The systemic vulnerability that has compelled TJ's economic turn is usually just as visible in cultural violence as in the structural violence that supports unequal distribution of resources and agency.…”

“…5 Examples include damage to, or destruction of, 207 (out of approximately 609) mosques and about 70 Serbian orthodox sites during the Kosovo conflict, 6 the Islamic State's systematic destruction of hundreds of Yezidi shrines, temples, statues and cemeteries in the Sinjar region of Iraq, 7 and the ongoing destruction of sites of Muslim worship in Myanmar's Rakhine State as part of the government's campaign to invalidate the Rohingya as a legitimate national ethnic group. 8 Rare manuscripts, paintings, sculptures, and archaeological findings were also intentionally ruined. This heritage has immense social, symbolic and/or spiritual significance, and these ostensibly lower-key campaigns against cultural heritage are no less significant an aspect of broader attacks on cultural identity and coexistence.…”

Explaining intentional cultural destruction in the Syrian Civil War

“…4 Some events, such as the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, shock audiences worldwide and garner significant scholarly attention (Flood, 2002), but most are much smaller in scale and visibility. ICD has featured prominently in a broad range of modern civil wars and insurgencies: Catholic churches were burned during the Spanish Civil War (Casanova, 2010: 207–210), as were libraries during conflicts in the ex-Yugoslavia (Riedlmayer, 2007), and shrines have been regularly targeted in Iraq (Isakhan, 2020), and mosques razed in Rakhine state (Lee & González Zaradona, 2020), to name a few notable examples.…”