SUMMARY

The RPF (Rohingya Patriotic Front) was a separatist rebel group that fought an intrastate armed conflict over territory against the Government of Myanmar (Burma) in the 1970s. The primary goal of the RPF was to establish an autonomous region for the Rohingya people in Myanmar’s Rakhine state (at the time called Arakan state). The group thus claimed to represent the highly suppressed Rohingya, a Muslim minority ethnic group that was discriminated against by both the Myanma government and Myanmar’s Buddhist majority population.

Muhammad Jafar Habib, a graduate of Rangoon University, created the RPF in 1974; the group was a continuation of a Muslim insurgency in Rakhine state that had begun already in the 1940s (for more on this, see Myanmar (Burma): Arakan). The first group to launch a Muslim insurgency in Rakhine, the Mujahid Party, had disintegrated already in the 1950s. In 1962, the Rohingya Independence Force (RIF) was created in an attempt to revive the Muslim struggle; however, also the RIF was unsuccessful. When the Government of Myanmar (Burma) rejected the bid for an autonomous Muslim state in Rakhine, as well as for citizenship for the Muslim population living there, the RIF reimagined itself as the RPF under Habib’s leadership.

The RPF drew much inspiration from various pan-Islamist movement, and it promoted what was described as a relatively moderate nationalist agenda. Unlike contemporary rebel groups that claimed to represent Rakhine state’s majority ethnic group, the Rakhines, the RPF did not demand autonomy for the entire state, just the northern parts inhabited by the Rohingya. The group most likely had less than 100 fighters, and operated from a camp inside Bangladesh, just across the border from Rakhine. The RPF had ceased all it activities by the late 1980s.

There were several splits within the RPF, the most significant one being the creation of the RSO in 1982, when the group’s most militant members broke away to create their own armed group. Following the disintegration of the RPF in the 1980s, some of its members joined with defectors from RSO to create the Arakan Rohingya Islamic Front (ARIF), a moderate Rohingya faction led by Nurul Islam.

Habib on several occasions attempted to attract external support from the international Muslim community; these efforts were largely unsuccessful.