A group of scholars has chosen “Rohingya” as the Name of the Year for 2017, defying the Myanmar government’s attempts to suppress the use of the name.
The selection was made earlier this month by the American Name Society (ANS), which was founded in 1951 to promote the study of names. The society has selected a Name of the Year since 2004. Winners of previous years include “Aleppo,” “Caitlyn Jenner,” and “Ferguson.”
“The American Name Society vote comes in protest of attempts to suppress the Rohingya name and deny them status as people deserving equal treatment and protection from persecution,” ANS member Dr. Cleveland Evans wrote in the Omaha World-Herald on Jan. 16.
In a statement on this year’s selection, ANS pointed out that “Myanmar’s government has tried to prevent people, including Pope Francis, from using the name Rohingya.”
It also quoted UN rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein as saying: “To strip their name from them is dehumanizing to the point where you begin to believe that anything is possible.”
More than a million Muslim Rohingya who were born in Myanmar are not recognized as citizens. For years, the Myanmar government has maintained an official policy of referring to the Rohingya as “Muslims of Rakhine State,” but in recent months, government officials and statements have referred to the group as “Bengalis” or “extremist Bengali terrorists.”
Since Aug. 2017, more than 680,000 Rohingya have fled to refugee camps in Bangladesh to escape Myanmar’s military operations that are meant to be aimed at Rohingya insurgents but have resulted in killings of civilians, rapes, and burnings of Rohingya homes.
The army’s actions have been described by the UN as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing” and as containing “elements of genocide.”
