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Rakhine State Conflict Analysis
By James Fennell MBE — University of Birmingham, School of Government and Society, Emeritus, August 2012
Between independence in 1948 and the coup d’état of 1962 there was a significant Muslim insurgency in Rakhine state, while most Muslims failed to achieve citizenship. During military rule force was used to contain the ethnopolitical genie in Rakhine in an ill-fitting bottle – at least partially – but in 2010 the bottle was uncorked once more in Rakhine state, and maybe Burma more widely, with the onset of elections. It was the issuing of voter registration cards to Muslims which may well have created expectations that Muslims would be given full citizenship in due course, a process that alarmed “Rakhine” people and emboldened Muslims. These heightened tensions were probably the real trigger for violence in 2012.
And the issuing of these cards may have been part of a broader government strategy to ensure that “Rakhine” ethnic secessionists did not gain a majority in a state with important oil and gas resources. Whatever the causes, conflict in Rakhine in state has not been checked, and unless the ethnic foundations of Myanmar/Burma politics are diluted, Rakhine may yet become a harbinger of future racially motivated conflict across the country if the greater expectations of economic and political representation that all ethnicities will demand from the reform process are not met equitably.
The key conflict implications of these rules of the game for Myanmar/Burmaare:
- Ethnopolitics is concerned with a spatial hierarchy of controlled access, to limit the territorial expansion of rival peoples – especially to urban areas and areas which have access to resources;
- Focuses political concerns on controlling demographic expansion; and
- Thus controlled access, ruralisation, expulsions, denial of citizenship, expulsions and ultimately pogroms or even genocide become useful options for political action.
This analysis suggests that the creation of a political platform around promoting the idea of a universal de-ethicized set of citizenship rights and freedoms is urgently required. Bringing together the myriad separate peace processes under this banner could be an excellent start point, and one which the international community and programmes such as Pyoe Pin could help catalyze. A single overarching peace ‘umbrella’ under which the same rights and freedoms form the basis for each individual peace process could help both build longer term stability between ethnicities, and more importantly, create a broader Myanmar/Burma citizenship platform that can eventually take the place of the current patchwork of fragmented ethnic groups, and form the context in which parliamentary democracy might prove a more effective system for embracing political choice and competition.
Yet even in the context of concerted government, opposition and international will to bring about change, escaping its ethnopolitical past will be a difficult task for Burma/Myanmar. Ultimately government policy will need to place new emphasis on providing access to the universal benefits of the state. A focus on universal citizen benefits such as social insurance provision – perhaps learning from models elsewhere in Southeast Asia – and equality before the law may be good places to begin.
