- May 2024

The Rohingya people face the threat of loss of their own ethnic identity. A new digital archive offers a means of preserving documents and other material related to Rohingya cultural heritage, but this innovative project is also fraught with challenges.
The Rohingya people have indigenous roots to their land of Arakan, now called Rakhine State, in Myanmar. Since Myanmar became independent in 1948, the Rohingya have been subject to a series of persecutory measures by the authorities, leading later to exile and dispossession of citizenship. One of the forms of persecution has been restrictions on the expression of cultural practices. As a result of these restrictions and low literacy levels in the population, there has been a lack of Rohingya culture-preserving and promoting institutions. The International Court of Justice is currently hearing a case that accuses Myanmar of genocide for its persecution of the Rohingya, and a key part of this has been the attempt to delegitimise the Rohingya ethnic identity by Myanmar authorities by asserting that the Rohingya are Bengali, without roots to the land of Arakan, and a fictionalised ethnic group.
Since the last major exodus from their homeland in 2017, a majority of the estimated three to four million Rohingya live scattered across the region, either as earlier settled communities in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, or large refugee migrant populations in Bangladesh and Malaysia. A large number of displaced Rohingya remain stateless and without legal documentation.
As generations have passed since the first expulsions in the 1970s, many of the Rohingya communities report that their members face assimilatory pressures to adapt to their host societies. This has resulted in signs of cultural erosion, which include loss of Rohingya language, customs and traditions in favour of those of the host community. A more subtle loss is that of cultural memory, specifically the communal historical awareness of Rohingya roots in their ancestral homeland of Arakan.
Efforts to digitally preserve Rohingya culture and history
In recent years several initiatives have been launched to address the wider collective identity crisis gripping the Rohingya community. For example, in 2021, IOM launched the Rohingya Cultural Memory Centre in Cox’s Bazar to showcase and share aspects of Rohingya ancestry and tradition with the surrounding community.
Unsurprisingly, given the scattered regional population, low literacy levels and lack of physical resources, many of the grassroots initiatives look towards digital means to promote Rohingya culture. This includes the setting up of online Rohingya media and news channels to report on the conflict in Rakhine State. The script of the Rohingya language has been standardised and converted into a digital format and accepted within the Unicode Standard (the global coding system that turns written script into digital characters and numbers).
Recognising that aspects of the Rohingya cultural crisis required further attention, the Rohingya Historical Archive or R-Archive was launched in 2021 to identify and archive various documents and other media of ancestral value to the Rohingya people. It was launched by the Rohingya Project, a grassroots organisation focused on using technology to address issues of statelessness for the Rohingya diaspora. The idea behind the R-Archive was that many documents and items relating to the connection of the people with their homeland were scattered, and their loss could jeopardise the people’s future in terms of their communal memory. The R-Archive therefore is intended to serve as a community archive for the scattered Rohingya, a resource on Rohingya heritage for researchers and also provide evidentiary support in future legal proceedings towards accountability of crimes against these people. This initiative was funded through a catalyst grant provided by the Roddenberry Foundation and was executed in partnership with the tech company Arweave.
The R-Archive engaged Rohingya field officers based in Bangladesh, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia in the collection process within their communities. In the pilot phase, over 100 documents considered important to Rohingya heritage, such as old land deeds in Arakan, banned identity documents issued by Myanmar and family photographs, were scanned, with the consent and recorded testimonies of the document owners, and uploaded with encryption in a private web-based storage system.
The backend of the system, called the Blockweave (developed by Arweave), is a decentralised data storage protocol similar to a traditional Blockchain but allowing more cost-efficient scalability, typically in the range of three to eight dollars per GB at the time of creation of the archive (without subscription fees). This system was considered suitable for this project because of the anticipation of further storage needs given the larger memory size required for scanned files and audio-visual material as the scope of the R-Archive expands. Traditional blockchain systems often involve higher fees for on-chain uploads, particularly with higher file sizes. Blockweave, on the other hand, employs a unique consensus mechanism that decreases consensus requirements for hashing as the data in the system increases, reducing overall long-term storage costs.
On-the-ground challenges in digital preservation
Many of the obstacles faced in the digital preservation of Rohingya culture lie in the precarious security situations faced by the various diaspora and refugee communities. Rohingya refugees who are living as undocumented migrants try to keep a low profile away from the authorities. It can be difficult to find document owners and get their agreement to have documents preserved. Personal family documents preserved from Myanmar are an incredibly sensitive matter and the owners have real concerns that these records could be tracked back to them.
On top of this, Rohingya field officers and others involved in Rohingya cultural promotion activities have reported low levels of awareness of the need for cultural preservation and the possibility of intergenerational cultural loss. In the opinion of Dr. Qutub Shah, a Rohingya activist and teacher who is leading the project of translating the Rohingya translation of the Quran for the first time, it is a matter of preferring survival to preserving identity[i]. Immediate survival needs such as livelihoods and healthcare are paramount, and cultural preservation is seen as a more ‘elite’ endeavour. In host countries where sentiments towards the Rohingya have moved from solidarity to animosity, self-identification and promotion of Rohingya collective identity can be perceived as contrary to their group interests.
This sensitivity towards online exposure is slightly more acutely felt by the older generation of Rohingya, many of whom have directly witnessed the full frontal attack on Rohingya identity in Myanmar and carry the legacy of this persecution. Yet it is precisely this generation that possesses the communal memory of direct experience with their homeland that is increasingly being lost. Younger Rohingya have shown a propensity to use digital platforms, particularly YouTube, in cultural promotion programmes, though in times of increased scrutiny by host societies towards migrant communities such activities may also be curtailed.
While low literacy levels are an obstacle towards a deeper understanding of the need for digital preservation of culture, there is generally a high level of mobile access in most settled Rohingya communities and sharing of Rohingya-based media and news content. In particular circumstances though, notably in Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, restrictions on internet access have been imposed, further complicating efforts at coordinating preservation work. In Cox’s Bazar’s camps, where many relevant documents may still be found, security conditions have deteriorated, and those Rohingya involved in preservation work have to take extra precautions in case other members of the community suspect they have ulterior motives for asking for this information.
Lastly, digital preservation can be fraught with further concerns for the Rohingya, chiefly over the perception of the possibility of potential leakage or misuse of their personal data. While certain concerns of centralised data access and data security can be addressed by Blockchain systems, in particular through Blockweave which offers a more immutable decentralised transaction system to share the data among miners, there are concerns over the option of deletion of uploaded data that Rohingya users feel could potentially put the users at risk, and protocol and best practices in this regard may be prohibitive for more sensitive personal information.
The problem, as described by Dr. Anne Gilliland, Professor of Information Studies at UCLA and advisor to the ongoing R-Archive, is that while it is critical to protect the security and privacy of individuals giving data in such preservation work, at times certain safety measures taken may inadvertently compromise the evidentiary quality of the data taken[ii]. The task involves juggling “competing rights”, prioritising immediate individual rights and the need for informed consent while remaining cognisant of the existential risk to an entire community of data not being shared.
Conclusion
Based on the experience with the R-Archive, a significant amount of attention needs to be paid towards educating communities about the importance of their own cultural legacy, while respecting the fears and restraints they face in tough host societies. A focus on ‘safer’ cultural preservation formats focused on intangible cultural resources, such as oral storytelling, with broad community resonance may be a more pragmatic route. Respecting the community’s perceived priorities must take precedence, while allowing them to appreciate the importance of an enterprise that seeks to retain key aspects of their collective identity. We also recommend trying to access existing digitised major archives from institutions where some of the data concerning the Rohingya has already been stored or has recently been declassified and simply needs to be searched for and identified.
Saqib Sheikh
Project Director, Rohingya Project & Doctoral Researcher, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
saqibmun001@ntu.edu.sg
Muhammad Noor
Managing Director, Rohingya Project
noor@rohingyaproject.com