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Reworking the Colonial-Era Indian Peril: Myanmar’s State-Directed Persecution of Rohingyas and Other Muslims
Dr. Maung Zarni — a longtime Burmese human rights activist and Natalie Brinham — is an Economic and Social Research Council PhD student in law at Queen Mary University of London.
“[Buddhist] Brother, you might already have heard of the news about the Buddhist mob in Rakhine lynching a group of Rohingyas in broad daylight… Out of fear and despair, I have looked at different possibilities of going to work in Malaysia or trying the visa lottery to the United States. But the truth is I don’t really have any prospect for leaving my birthplace. I am stuck here.” — a Burmese Muslim resident, 7 July 2017.
Myanmar’s widely hailed transition from military dictatorship to a Chinese model of great commercial opening and calibrated political liberalization— “discipline flourishing democracy,” as the generals call it—has had one unintended consequence for the country’s military-controlled government: ugly things have been exposed. Suddenly, the dark secrets of this predominantly Buddhist nation of 51 million people with diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds have been laid bare. The world now has access to hitherto-closed-off sites of religious and ethnic persecution via international media such as CNN, BBC, wire news agencies, and so on. First, the world witnessed the eruption of two large bouts of violence in 2012 between Rohingya Muslims and Buddhist Rakhine communities in the western coastal region of the country. Within a year, there were incidents of organized violence against Muslims in about one dozen towns and neighborhoods across the country. Burmese social media sites were littered with various hues of genocidal comments, articles, analyses, and updates, and remain so to date. Many openly call for the slaughter of all Muslims (or Kular, in Burmese), while others are more specific about the type of Muslims that should be killed: the phrase “kill all illegal Bengalis,” a popular racist reference to Rohingyas, indicates that they belong in former East Bengal (Bangladesh) and not in Buddhist Myanmar.
The Myanmar military has held a 50-year firm grip on what Louis Althusser called “Ideological State Apparatuses” (e.g., education systems, religious institutions, community groups, and information ministries). They have consistently andfalsely told the domestic public that there is no such ethnic group as the Rohingya and that they are Muslim interlopers from neighboring Bangladesh who only came to Rakhine as colonial era farm laborers after the First Anglo-Burmese War of 1824. Typically, when confronted with the irrefutable primary historical evidence dating back to 1799 and official documentation from the Ministry of Defense validating the Rohingyas’ claim of historical and official belonging to both pre-colonial and post-colonial Myanmar, even the educated class of Burmese—Buddhist clergy, technocrats, journalists, writers, human rights activists, not to mention diplomats and pro-democracy ex-military officers— refuse to accept the truth.
In the public’s eyes, the growth and presumably continuing inflow of these “illegal” Muslim migrants threatens to replace the dwindling Rakhine Buddhist majority of this western region of the country. Therefore, they need to be shipped out of the country. Neither the public nor the political and military leaders are keen to restore their full citizenship rights. This state-manufactured myth about Rohingyas as unwanted Bengali migrants, both from the colonial era and contemporaneously, has taken root in the popular Burmese mind. However, the military leaders who have long maintained a tight military and administrative grip on the predominantly Rohingya region of Northern Rakhine know for a fact that there is no inflow of migrants, legal or illegal, from Bangladesh—as clearly stated by the ex-Brigadier Khin Yi, who served as the Minister of Immigration under President Thein Sein (2011–15).
In his book Our Country’s ‘Western Gate Problem,’ ex-military intelligence chief Khin Nyunt—considered Myanmar’s most powerful military leader while in office—opened his introduction to the book with the patently false assertion that “the pre-colonial Rakhine State of Myanmar had never had any Muslim presence.” He then went on to explicitly link Islam with the wars, violence, and terrorism in the Middle East, insinuating that the presence of Muslim Rohingyas—Bengali in his racist reference—spells deep trouble for Myanmar.
What is little known beyond the well-publicized periodic waves of violence—both vertical (state-directed acts of violence) and horizontal (locally organized communal violence)—against Rohingyas as members of an ethno-religious group is the demographic engineering in which the military governments have been engaged over decades since Operation Crow (Kyi Gan Sit Hsin Yay) in 1966. Since the country’s independence, the Burmese military has viewed western Burma’s Muslim population through a national security lens, as they were the borderlands Muslim community with bicultural ties to both the adjacent East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and the western Burmese region of Arakan, or Rakhine. Further, Rohingyas also waged a short-lived armed secessionist movement, thereby accentuating the military’s security concerns. However, this secessionist revolt was not unique to the Rohingyas. Virtually all ethnic borderlands peoples, including Arakanese Buddhists (now popularly referred to as Rakhine), saddling long and porous borders of Burma—with China, India, Thailand, Laos, and East Pakistan—staged armed revolts against the majority Burmese rule from the center at various points in the post-independence period. But because Rohingyas are the only Muslim community in Burma with their own geographic pocket next to Bangladesh, their record of secessionist attempts continues to inform the military’s policies towards the Rohingya population.
According to ex-General Khin Nyunt, the former head of the Directorate of Defense Intelligence Services (military intelligence), the military has two major demographic objectives: first, to double the country’s total population (up to 100 million) because of the country’s geographic position sandwiched between India and China, and second, to radically (read: unnaturally) change the Muslim (Rohingya, ethnic) character of the Northern Rakhine State. In pursuit of this twofold goal, the military has done three things. Firstly, they have turned a blind eye to the fact that ethnic Han Chinese from the neighboring Yunnan state of Southern China have entered and settled throughout upper regions of Myanmar. Secondly, they have subjected the population to a “campaign of terror” under the disguise of “immigration checks,” the direct result of which is the drastic reduction of the number of Rohingyas from Rakhine as hundreds of thousands periodically flee western Myanmar for Bangladesh and other refugee-receiving countries amid the instant illegalization of the great majority who choose to remain inside Myanmar. Thirdly, they have established Buddhist settlements where the military and local authorities implement the scheme of state-directed transmigration of Buddhists.
The government facilitates the transporting and resettling of different Buddhist populations composed of retired Myanmar civil servant families, Myanmar criminal convicts with Buddhist backgrounds, Bangladeshi-born Buddhist Rakhines, and other non-Muslim groups who were settled in the region when the two adjacent regions of East Bengal and Western Burma were joined under the rule of a single monarch.
Obviously, increasing Myanmar’s population (specifically of non-Muslims) was a strategic goal of the military leaders as early as the 1990s. Several years ago, ex-General Thein Sein’s government granted blanket citizenship status to about 80,000 Han Chinese living in the Eastern Shan state pocket near the Yunnan Chinese border. The government even created a new ethnic category, “Mon Yaung Myanmar,” and announced to the public that the newly minted citizens were to be referred to as such while the military—and now the administration of Aung San Suu Kyi—continued to maintain the official stance that Rohingyas did not belong in Myanmar. It is the religious identity of Rohingyas that ultimately accounts for this sharp contrast in Myanmar’s official treatment of non-Muslim migrants from China or of those from the Sino-Burmese borderlands, and of Rohingyas from the Burmese-Bangladesh borderlands.
In the midst of the two bouts of horizontally organized violence in June and October 2012 during which Rohingya communities bore the overwhelming human costs, a decorated Burmese brigadier general who was stationed in Rakhine asked a Burmese author pointedly: “What can we do, brother, they [Rohingyas] are too many? We can’t kill them all.” Indeed, Myanmar military leaders, the architects and implementers of this religion-based demographic engineering, know they cannot kill all Rohingyas. But they have resorted to various strategies of destruction of Rohingya communities on an ethnoreligious level. The most deplorable human conditions, where life essentials such as food and access to basic medicine are deprived or restricted, are the direct outcome of central policies regarding Rohingyas. Indeed, Myanmar’s exceptionally hostile treatment of Rohingyas as a group oscillates between acts of ethnic cleansing and slow genocide. How can it be otherwise when Rohingyas have been kept like “chickens in a vast cage” awaiting their time of death and destruction, on land or high sea, as a young Rohingya put it in a personal Facebook message to us, after he and a group of Rohingya Internally Displaced People (IDPs) met with the visiting UN Special Rapporteur Yanghee Lee on 12 July? Alas, a century after the perceived Indian threat to colonial Burma’s future—the “Indian Penetration” or “Indian Peril”—stirred the Buddhists’ imagination, post-independence Myanmar is engaged in the act of transference, this time targeting Rohingyas as caged chickens, potential agents of foreign jihadists.
The perceptions of threats—real or imagined—to a nation are the raison d’être for military institutions the world over. Based on popular, historical, and official discourses about people of Indian ancestry, Myanmar’s most powerful institution, the military, has framed Rohingyas as “a new threat to national security” since 1966. The colonial-era nationalist calls to pass laws protecting Buddhist women from Indian men, who are presumed to be abusive and predatory, have also come to fruition: ex-General Thein Sein’s quasi-civilian government enacted four “National Race” laws, strictly controlling proposals for interfaith marriages between Buddhist women and Muslim men. While the first persecution of Rohingyas began as a state-organized project of national security, leading to a large-scale campaign—which drove out upwards of 270,000 Rohingyas into neighboring Bangladesh in February 1978—the military found it in its strategic interest to involve both the nationalist Rakhines in the region and the Buddhist public at large. The Rakhine population has become consumed by fear and loathing of Rohingyas, who in their view take Rakhine land and threaten the Rakhine Buddhist way of life.
What we call the “double-persecution” of Myanmar’s Muslims and Rohingyas has become a powerful unifying issue among the traditionally distrustful social forces in Burmese society: the ruling military, Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD, the culturally revered Buddhist Order, and the Burmese intelligentsia and culture industry of movie-makers, artists, and others. They share this “global perception of the rise of Muslim power”—as Aung San Suu Kyi put it in her BBC interview in October 2013—and the attendant fear and loathing of Muslims in and outside Myanmar.
At the time of this writing, Aung San Suu Kyi’s spectacular fall from grace has been repeatedly headlined in major news outlets around the world. As 500,000 Rohingyas fled Myanmar into the neighboring Bangladesh in a span of a mere five weeks, her moral and intellectual leadership has crumbled in the eyes of the world community. Following the removal of the Burmese Nobel Laureate’s portrait in the main hall at her old college at Oxford (St. Hugh’s), Oxford City Council and Glasgow City Council have stripped her of the honors they had conferred on her. Though these moves by English and Scottish city councils are symbolic, as BBC World Affairs Editor John Simpson put it, “I think it is perfectly natural to look around for ways of saying ‘we disapprove utterly of what you (the past honoree) are doing.’” Simpson called “extraordinary” Aung San Suu Kyi’s refusal to denounce or even acknowledge “the crimes against humanity” and “ethnic cleansing” which her government and the military are credibly accused of committing.
To the dismay of many of her supporters around the world, Aung San Suu Kyi attempted to explain the violence against both Myanmar Muslims and Rohingyas on Britain’s national flagship radio program by excusing her “generally peaceful” fellow Buddhists. She said, “Fear is not just on the side of the Muslims, but the fear is on the side of the Buddhists as well.” The Myanmar armed forces today, unlike in the past, can boast of being Muslim-free. As a matter of fact, last year the serving Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, the commander-in-chief, added the protection of Buddhism and “Buddhist race” to the existing list of the military’s bounden national duties, besides prevention of the “disintegration of the Union of Myanmar,” the maintenance of “territorial integrity,” and “peace and stability” at home.
What makes the persecution of Rohingyas—as opposed to the persecution of Myanmar Muslims—stand out as a case of potential state-sponsored genocide is not simply the acts as defined in the Genocide Convention of 1948 (and subsequently Article 6 of the Rome Statute), but also the original conception of a genocide put forth persuasively by Raphael Lemkin. As the noted genocide scholar Daniel Feierstein argues, genocide essentially involves both the destruction of the group’s identity by the perpetrators and the imposition of a new group identity on the victims. In the words of Feierstein, “They [victims] don’t exist. They never existed. They will never exist as who they say they are.”
These deplorable conditions on land, coupled with chronic and large scale violence— mostly military-organized and at times communal—have forced hundreds of thousands of Rohingyas to flee their birthplace and homeland, both on foot across the land border into Bangladesh and by boats to not only Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand, but also to places as far-flung as Canada and Australia. As we were completing the final draft of this essay, Myanmar’s Rakhine Commission, chaired by former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, delivered its Final Report entitled “Towards a Peaceful, Fair and Prosperous Future for the People of Rakhine State” to Myanmar State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, who established the commission.68 Even before the report’s ink dried, the Myanmar military launched a scorched-earth campaign against a large segment of the Rohingya population of Northern Rakhine—those who have not been displaced and caged in the IDP camps. The Burmese military has justified this violence by citing the emergence of a group of young Rohingyas who began to fight back against the Burmese military. The military has launched periodic waves of direct killings and destruction of entire village tracts and its neighborhoods.
