The Rohingya Muslims’ Crisis in the Rakhine State of Myanmar: ‘Recognition as Toleration’ and ‘Religious Toleration’

Title: The Rohingya Muslims’ Crisis in the Rakhine State of Myanmar: ‘Recognition as Toleration’ and ‘Religious Toleration’ Abstract: The inhuman annihilation of the Rohingya people from the Rakhine state by the Myanmar military and the Buddhist majority, which is supported by the Myanmar government as they watched the massacre silently, could be considered as genocide. Ashley Kinseth claims: “in terms of rate of escalation, this is the greatest mass exodus - and has the makings to become the most significant humanitarian catastrophe - since the 1994 Rwandan genocide, when over 800,000 Hutus and moderate Tutsis were slaughtered.” The main reason of this massacre, as claimed by the Myanmar state officials, was an “armed attack by a Rohingya group, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, against more than 20 Myanmar police stations and an army base on Aug 25, 2017” (Beyrer and Kamarulzaman 1570), “killing 12 members of Myanmar’s security forces” (Gibbens). But there are other issues, such as political, religious, economic, ethnic, etc., which actually motivate the Myanmar military and the Buddhists (the majority religious group in Myanmar) to kill and dislocate the Rohingya from their Rakhine state. The paper examines the current Rohingya Muslims’ crisis in Myanmar while investigating the Buddhist Burmese’s underlying religious discourses in displacing the Rohingya from the Rakhine state. In doing so, this paper analyzes the current massacre in relation to Anna E. Galeotti’s theory on ‘toleration as recognition’ and Locke’s ‘theory on toleration,’ particularly in regards what Locke has forwarded as ‘religious toleration’ in his canonical Letters to figure out the suitability of either of them for a possible solution to the crisis