Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

The conflict triangulates among the Bamars, the Rakhines, and the Rohingyas. The Bamars believe they are the natural rulers of an empire that includes the Rakhines; the Rakhines, mostly Theravada Buddhists, believe they should have dominion over the Rohingyas. The Rakhines, whose ancestral Arakan empire encompassed much of Burma, hate the Bamars almost as much as they do the Rohingyas. Theravada Buddhism, like many ideological doctrines, claims religious and racial superiority, but it was also the basis for the Saffron Revolution, which proposed that the military government had violated the precepts of Buddha sasana, or righteous moral rule. Suu Kyi uses Buddhist rhetoric in her speeches and draws on Buddhist ideals in her quest for democracy. Her politics and her religion are inseparable. In what appears to be an electoral calculation, she has refused to condemn the mistreatment of Rohingyas outright. What would be the place of Muslims in such a vision?

Western aid organizations have tried to help the Rohingyas, but Rakhines have often impeded aid. The Rakhines are poor, and scarce resources do not engender amicable relations. Rakhine State is the second least developed in Myanmar, and many people don’t have access to latrines or clean water. To function at all, global charities have had to assure a kind of parity, even though the Rakhines live freely while the Rohingyas languish in camps.

Though the Rohingyas are experiencing the worst of it, rage against all Muslims has escalated. Most of Yangon’s construction companies are Muslim-owned, and Buddhists have started refusing to hire them. Mandalay, the country’s second-largest city, has seen anti-Muslim riots. When I was in Myanmar, curfews had been imposed in areas of Yangon with sizable Muslim populations. “We had gangs in cars going down the streets near where I live warning the Muslims that they would be killed. People were cowering behind locked doors,” said Lucas Stewart, who works for the British Council in Yangon, and who called the 969 movement “nearly a terrorist organization.”

The Muslims in Myanmar can be divided into four categories. Bamar Muslims settled in the area some twelve hundred years ago; on ancient monuments, historians have found inscriptions to Muslims who served the early kings. Horse traders, artillery soldiers, and mercenaries who arrived in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries assimilated into this group. Second are Chinese Muslims in the northeast, who trace their origins mostly to Yunnan Province and are descended from Turkic settlers from Mongol times onward. Third are those whose nationality changed when Arakan was subsumed into Burma by the British. Fourth are the immigrants from India or Bangladesh over the past two hundred years. “There is ethnic prejudice, and there is religious prejudice from the monkhood,” Thant Myint-U said. “They affect the same people, but for somewhat different reasons.”

Schoolmaster Aye Lwin, who won gold for his country overseas as a volleyball player on Myanmar’s national team, is the leader of the Bamar Muslims. An elegant man, he lives in a pleasant apartment in central Yangon. He believes that the violence in Rakhine State has been incited by entrenched interests that oppose the slackening government control. “There are people behind a screen who are trying to undermine democratization,” he said, “because if there is full-fledged democracy, there will be rule of law. Rule of law will have repercussions on the current ruling class. Crime is happening every day, rapes are happening every day, but these people manipulate it into a religious conflict. They could have nipped the burning of houses in the bud; they could have constrained the hate speech. But nationalism can be used to exhaust people’s energy; it slows down the reform process.”

Misuu Borit pointed out that people in poverty reproduce fastest all over the world, and that while minority population growth was driving majority prejudice, majority prejudice was likewise driving minority population growth. Then a rumor that a Buddhist woman had been raped and murdered by Muslims kindled genocidal episodes. Rape has been used throughout history as an impersonal act of aggression in ethnic, religious, and nationalist wars, and Borit finds it sinister that these cross-ethnic rapes have received so much attention, especially given the “shameful” lack of police interest in rape among the Bamar or the Rohingya. “Someone is cooking something between the Muslims and Buddhists,” she said. “When things spin out of control, the rulers call in the army and say that they are ‘saving the country’ and we are the weaklings. They make that true.”