Zaw “Dark Ball” vs. Rohingya Rights: Same Policy, Different Governments
In Myanmar’s political lexicon, nicknames often reveal public sentiment more vividly than official titles. Major-General Zaw Min Tun, the junta’s Deputy Minister of Information and notorious military spokesperson, has been mockingly dubbed “ဇော်မဲလုံး” (“Zaw Dark Ball”) by the people—a reference to his dark complexion and rounded appearance. Zaw Min Tun leads the regime’s propaganda machinery, formerly as head of the Tatmadaw’s “Truth and Information Unit” and now as the primary spokesperson for the post-coup State Administrative Council (SAC).
On the other side of the political spectrum, Win Myat Aye, a former Minister for Social Welfare under the NLD, now serves as a minister in the National Unity Government (NUG). Superficially, this might appear as a stark contrast: one figure speaking for the generals, the other representing the exiled democratic movement.
Yet, when it comes to the treatment of the Rohingya, the policies across successive governments—including the military regimes, the NLD, and even today’s NUG—have followed the same exclusionary trajectory.
The Common Thread: Systematic Disenfranchisement
For decades, Myanmar authorities have stripped the Rohingya of their rights through bureaucratic manipulation. The National Registration Cards (NRCs), once held by Rohingya citizens, were systematically confiscated. Instead, they were forced to accept the White Cards, temporary documents inferior even to the Green Permanent Resident (PR) cards.
This was not simply an administrative reshuffle—it was a calculated effort to erase Rohingya citizenship claims. The White Cards carried no guarantee of nationality. Worse, Rohingya were ordered to “apply” for citizenship anew, required to produce documentation and proof that many had long been denied by the state itself.
Continuity in Discrimination
The military governments institutionalized this policy. The Arakan Army (AA), despite its ethno-nationalist rhetoric, also pursues exclusionary practices in Rakhine State. The NLD government under Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, far from reversing this injustice, deepened it under the guise of “citizenship verification.”
Today, even the NUG—while calling for federal democracy and ethnic equality—remains hesitant to recognize Rohingya citizenship fully. The rhetoric may differ, but the underlying policy remains a shameful continuity.
Conclusion
Whether voiced by “Zaw Dark Ball” on the junta’s podium or carefully framed by civilian leaders in the NUG, the message to the Rohingya has remained essentially the same: exclusion, conditional recognition, and the burden of proof placed on the persecuted.
The tragedy of Myanmar’s politics is not only that the military and civilian leaders clash, but that on the Rohingya question, they quietly converge.
Translated, extended and edited from…
မေမြို့သား ကိုအာမတ်
မူရင်းပိုစ့်ပိုင်ရှင်ကိုခရက်ဒစ်ပေးပါသည်
ရိုဟင်ဂျာအမျိုးသားက သူ့ရဲ့တရားဝင်ထုတ်ယူကိုင်ဆောင်ထားတဲ့ အမျိုးသားမှတ်ပုံတင်ကဒ်ပြားကိုထုတ်ပြီး ဒီကဒ်လက်ရှိရှိနေပါလျက် NVC card ထုတ်ယူပြီးနိုင်ငံသားပြန်လျောက်ထားဖို့ဘာအကြောင်းကြောင့်လိုအပ်တာလည်းလို့မေးမြန်းစဉ်မှာ
ဝင်းမြတ်အေးက ကက်ကက်လန် ခါးခါးသီးသီး ဒီကဒ်ပြားကအာဏာရှင်ဦးနေဝင်းခေတ်ကထုတ်ပေးခဲ့တာမို့တရားမဝင်တော့ဘူးလို့ပြန်ပက်နေခိုက်ရိုက်ယူထားတဲ့ပုံပါ။
ရိုဟင်ဂျာအမျိုးသားရဲ့တန်ပြန်အမေးကြောင့်ဝင်းမြတ်အေးတယောက်အာစေးမိသွားခဲ့ရပါတယ်။
သူ့ရဲ့တန်ပြန်မေးခွန်းကတော့
နေဝင်းထုတ်ပေးတဲ့ကဒ်ကတရားမဝင်တော့ဘူးဆိုရင်နေဝင်းပြဌါန်းခဲ့တဲ့ ၁၉၈၂ နှစ်ခုနှစ် apartheid law ကတော့ဘာလို့အခုထိတရားဝင်နေရတာလည်းလို့မေးခဲ့တာပါ။
ဝန်ကြီးအဖြစ်နဲ့သွားခဲ့တဲ့ဝင်းမြတ်အေးတကောင် ခွေးကကြီးလှည်းတက်နင်းခံလိုက်ရသလိုဖြစ်သွားလိုက်ပုံများ ဇော်မဲလုံးလို အာ့ ကျ ကျ ရယ်လို့တောင်မမြည်တွန်နိုင်ရှာဖြစ်သွားခဲ့ရတဲ့မှတ်တမ်းဝင်ဓါတ်ပုံတပုံပါ။
Photo Credit:Wiki Myanmar.
