Myanmar violence true to form by bunn nagara A man walks out from a destroyed mosque that was burnt down in recent violence at Thapyuchai village, outside of Thandwe, in Arakan State, Oct. 3, 2013. (Photo: Soe Zeya Tun / Reuters) Despite much-vaunted reforms, much of Myanmar including spaces occupied by its minorities remains unchanged . JUST when everything in a steadily reforming Myanmar seemed to be falling neatly into place, just about everything in the country’s western Rakhine state abruptly fell apart. The on-going mob violence there against Rakhine’s Rohingya community remains out of control. And when mistaken as an inter-communal Buddhist-Muslim conflict, it becomes that much more intractable. That at least is the common perception of the “sectarian clashes” constructed by the mainstream international media. There are just two problems: it is largely a misperception, and it is one that aggravates the violence. It is tempting to save time by avoiding serious analysis, instead giving difficult situations a shorthand description or label. In the process the situation is oversimplified and distorted. But there is no denying that the situation in Rakhine is bad, with no likely solution in sight. The government, the military and civil society groups all seem helpless as one gang after another destroys neighbourhoods almost at will. The dispute over the origins of Rakhine’s largely Muslim Rohingya people is an old one. Repression against them and their subsequent resistance are newer, however. Rohingya history in Rakhine (the former Arakan) state is poorly documented and highly disputed. Their presence ranges between some seven decades and more than 5,000 years, with a Muslim community resident in the area for millennia. The Rohingya community today is ethnically, linguistically and physically different from other communities in Rakhine. Persecution of the Rohingyas provokes the community’s self-defence mechanism, further alienating and distinguishing them from other communities in Myanmar. Despite all indications to the contrary, the religious dimension to the conflict is only secondary. But as the conflict deepens, ethnic division increasingly threatens to become a primary concern. The Rohingyas now cower in fear in their own land. Recent reports tell of families forced into the shadows, hiding from fellow Myanmars in Rakhine whom they used to know. A particular attack on a Rohingya village by a motorcycle mob of hundreds was particularly vicious. The attackers assured the villagers they would be safe as only the mosques were targeted – then the families stayed back only to see their homes firebombed. The conflict in Rakhine is essentially between Myanmar’s centre (ethnic majority, largely Buddhist) and its periphery (ethnic minority, here largely Muslim). It also says something about the quality of Myanmar society, or the lack of it. The centre of Myanmar society has shown little tolerance, and even less acceptance, of the country’s minorities. It appears to have abandoned its compassionate and non-violent Buddhist roots. Myanmar’s long-established struggles against providing space for its minorities is a national given. The problem is accentuated when the minorities on the margins are considerably poorer and less educated, so there is also a class dimension to it. Sometimes an ideological dimension is also evident. The Karen insurgency, for example, is often cast as a right-wing struggle against a semblance of a socialist Myanmar, so its Christian identity is underplayed. Other rebel groups are based around certain ethnicities: the Chin, Shan, Kachin and Kayah, all of which with their foe in the Myanmar state preside over many bitter grievances. Together, they contribute to the world’s longest-running civil war(s). If the Rohingyas in Rakhine are the most repressed of Myanmar’s minorities, it may be because they are also the least militant in fighting against the state. The UN has rated the Rohingyas as among the world’s most persecuted minorities. And since the Rohingyas are little characterised by political ideology, their religious identity seems to loom larger – particularly as a point of departure from the Buddhist majority nation. But all ideological and religious identity aside, the Rohingyas’ plight is a direct result of Myanmar’s imperialist pretensions on a powerless “other” at the margins. To entrench the element of ethnic division further, the physical differences between Rohingyas and the more Mongoloid Myanmars are emphasised: complexion and features, besides language and religion. Notwithstanding the rhetoric of Naypyidaw, Rohingyas had been living in Rakhine for generations before Burma pounced on the territory to claim it as its own. The state had wanted only the resources of the land, not the people that came with it. The official line is simply that the Rohingyas are non-Myanmars undeserving of citizenship, a ruthless stand that condemns an entire community to statelessness and vulnerability indefinitely. If previous governments had made a mistake in not recognising Rohingyas as Myanmars before, the present government can easily undo that error. But it has persistently refused to do so. How the state treats the Rohingya community must surely be a litmus test of Myanmar’s claims of political reform. If Myanmar society not only acquiesces in but also colludes in repression or mob violence against an entire community in its midst, how real are its reforms anyway? President Thein Sein should be under pressure to prove that his government works beyond Yangon and Naypyidaw. But so far, he is only said to be seen to be touring the affected regions, after the latest round of violence and before the next. > Bunn Nagara is a Senior Analyst at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies (ISIS) Malaysia. The views expressed are entirely the writer’s own.
Posted on: Sun, 06 Oct 2013 09:24:58 +0000
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