Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Myanmar has two primary paranoias: that it will be overrun by China and that it will be overwhelmed by Bangladesh’s 160 million Muslims and those within their own territory. Many Burmese Buddhists—like anti-immigrationists in Europe and the United States—contend that Muslims don’t assimilate. In Burma, the complaints are that they keep their wealth to themselves (though most are impecunious), engage in moneylending, and, worst, take several wives to build an eventual majority that might sweep away the Buddhists. The Burmese do not like darker-skinned people, so racism comes into play as well. Racism is acceptable at almost every level of society in Myanmar. For example, in 2009, Myanmar’s consul general in Hong Kong wrote to his whole staff that the Rohingyas’ dark complexions made them “ugly as ogres,” unlike the “fair and soft” Burmese.

Muslim descendants of Bengali settlers—many of whose families have lived in Burma for over a century—mostly live in Rakhine State. Although they identify themselves as Rohingya, they are referred to as Bengalis by nationalists who would label them foreigners. “The Burmese don’t understand that this attitude, rather than saving them, will ruin their society, their reputation, and their ability to develop,” Mitchell said. “They would say that the issue over Rohingyas and Muslims is an issue of national identity. And I say, ‘You’re right. What kind of country are you going to be? Are you going to be one based on lawlessness and violence against a whole category of people because you distrust them, or are you going to respect due process, humanist values, all the things that we thought you were fighting for?’ ”

Myanmar is extremely religious, and most young men serve time as monks. Wealth is concentrated ostentatiously in the pagodas. The fear that Buddhism is in danger permeates the culture. Many consider Myanmar and Sri Lanka the last two bastions of Theravada Buddhism in a world dominated by Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. According to this narrative, although Buddhism was born in India, invader Muslims destroyed its classical context, uprooting the faith from its homeland. (Many Buddhists did, in fact, flee Mughal India for Tibet.) As Thant Myint-U explained, “The Burmese self-identity is rooted in the idea that this is a bastion of the true religion and nowhere else in the world is.”

The Burmese state now known as Rakhine was known as Arakan as recently as 1989. Once an ancient and powerful coastal empire, Arakan had counted Muslims among its inhabitants since at least the seventeenth century. It was then conquered by the Bamar, the dominant Buddhist ethnicity for whom Burma was named, in 1784. It was sparsely populated at the time of the British conquest forty years later, consisting primarily of forests and marshes. The British granted plots to settlers to clear, importing Bengali immigrants to labor there. After this first modern Muslim migration into the region, northern Arakan became predominately Muslim. The early twentieth century witnessed a growing sense among Buddhist Burmese that British colonizers and Chinese and Bengali immigrants were thriving across the colonial state while they were being exploited. During the 1920s, a new wave of arrivals shifted the demographics further. Two million Indians a year immigrated to Rangoon, the globe’s largest current population shift; the capital was 80 percent Indian by the end of the decade. Since many resident Indians had fought for the British against Burmese independence groups, nationalists asserted that anyone except the ethnic Bamar, or Burmese, was a foreigner, even if born in Myanmar.

After the 1947 partition of India, a separatist group of Muslim guerrilla fighters seeking union with Pakistan drove many Buddhists from the north of Burma, stoking outrage. Their uprising was put down fairly quickly, and since the mid-1950s no further Muslim insurgencies have occurred. Many Burmese allege that the Rohingyas have links with al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups; in fact, some Rohingyas did fight with the mujahideen in Afghanistan against the USSR during the 1980s, and for the Taliban later on, though in negligible numbers. Although descended from Bengalis, most Rohingyas have no claim to Bangladeshi citizenship; although born in Myanmar, they remain without a country as long as Myanmar classifies them as aliens. Without national identification cards, they have no access to education and live in unrelenting poverty. Since the recent liberalization began, some of the 2 million Buddhists living in Rakhine have subjected the nearly as numerous Rohingyas to pogroms, setting fire to neighborhoods, villages, and mosques in broad daylight.