By Ishaan Tharoor

Washington Post

February 13, 2015

In 2009, Burma's then consul general in Hong Kong sent a letter to local newspapers and fellow diplomats posted in the Chinese territory. It was addressing concerns over the treatment of refugees from Burma's Rohingya population, a Bengali-speaking Muslim minority long marginalized in the country. Incidents of shipwrecked boats bearing half-starved, desperate Rohingya from Burma had won wider attention in the region.

Ye Myint Aung, the Burmese envoy in Hong Kong, hoped to dissuade others from feeling sympathy for the Rohingya. His method for doing this was by revealing his shocking racism. The Rohingya, he said, "are as ugly as ogres," and do not share the "fair and soft" skin of other Burmese ethnic groups.

Therefore, the Burmese consul general concluded, "Rohingya are neither Myanmar people nor Myanmar’s ethnic group," using the other name for Burma while trotting out his government's long-standing contention that the Rohingya are interlopers in Burma and don't deserve citizenship rights.

More than half a decade has past since then and the situation in Burma has changed for the better. The country has opened up. The secretive, dictatorial military junta that once held sway has allowed the advent of a fledgling, albeit heavily curtailed democracy. Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi was freed from decades of house arrest and is now a main leader of the opposition.

But the miserable condition of the Rohingya, a forgotten, stateless people, persists. The U.N. deems them "one of the most persecuted minorities in the world." There are some 1.3 million Rohingya, the majority of whom live in Burma's Rakhine state, on the western border with Bangladesh and India, and struggle to access basic state services. As WorldViews reported last year, around 140,000 Rohinigya eke out a squalid existence in ramshackle camps, displaced by ethnic and sectarian strife in 2013 and neglected by the Burmese government.

Recent U.N. calls on the Burmese government to grant the Rohingya full citizenship rights, including a General Assembly resolution passed in December, have been received with hostility. Angry anti-Rohingya marches this week persuaded the government to scrap tentative plans to give Rohingya carrying temporary documents the right to vote in an upcoming referendum.

Much of the ire is fanned by a hard-core of nationalist Buddhist monks. Certain groups play an outsize role in fanning sentiment against the Rohingya, whom they like to characterize as "Bengali" illegal immigrants rather than a distinct Burmese ethnic group. (Never mind that many generations of Rohingya have lived on what's Burmese soil.)

Ashin Wirathu, a Buddhist cleric notorious for his xenophobic rhetoric, even earned a spot on the cover of TIME magazine's International edition, with the cover line: "The Face of Buddhist Terror." The saffron-clad Wirathu dubs himself the "Burmese Bin Laden," and indulges in frenzied, un-monk-like speeches calling for tough action on Muslims. He raises the fear of forced conversions and terrorism. Last year, he addressed a gathering of nationalist monks in Sri Lanka, another nation with a Buddhist majority, warning of "a jihad against Buddhist monks."

But critics say Wirathu and his ilk, more often than not, are the ones inciting mob violence against Burma's Muslims, including non-Rohingya Muslims. Hundreds have died in recent years amid riots and tit-for-tat attacks.

It's a worrying development in a diverse nation that's just emerging from the straight-jacket of authoritarian rule. Perhaps the most depressing indication of the Rohingya's plight is the relative silence of Suu Kyi, a global icon for democracy and human rights. The Nobel laureate, in keeping with Burmese government policy, refuses to even say the word "Rohingya" — which in Burma's polarized context would be an act of recognizing the community's rights, let alone its very existence.

Ishaan Tharoor writes about foreign affairs for The Washington Post. He previously was a senior editor at TIME, based first in Hong Kong and later in New York.

By Rachel Harvey

IRIN

January 24, 2015

By Zin Linn

Asian Tribune

December 31, 2014 

Citizens of Burma or Myanmar remain skeptical of political transformation under the existing President Thein Sein’s regime that claims itself as a reformist government. The reason is that the regime just changes its clothes rather than its undemocratic mind-set. People believe country’s sovereignty has been dishonored by the Chinese state-owned Wanbao Company hiring Myanmar police as a tool.

Recently on 22 December 2014, a village-woman, Daw Khin Win, 56, was lethally shot by police as villagers made an effort to avert a land seizure in the vicinity of the Letpadaung copper mining project as stated by media reports. Daw Khin Win joined a crowd of around sixty villagers trying to prevent Chinese company’s attempting to put up a fence in the neighborhood of disputed farmlands. Daw Khin Win was killed on the spot as police opened fire at the protesters following villagers hit back the police and Chinese workers. Several other villagers were also injured, private media said.

Looking back into the past, the government has unveiled its true character during the crackdown on the peaceful anti-copper mine protesters including several Buddhist monks in November 2012. On November 29, 2012, in Monywa, Sagaing Division, riot police brutally run over six protest camps at the Letpadaung copper mine, arrested an indefinite number of protesters, and injured at least 100, including many with severe burns.

The worst was that the riot police have used inflammable bombs while they raided the camps where monks peacefully slept at early hours of the full-moon day. The regime used riot police equipped with harmful weapons, although there was no situation of riot or disorder in those sites where monks recited Mitta Sutra. Actually, the anti-copper mine protesters were just exposing their citizens' rights that the mine has severely damaged their livelihoods, environments and cultural heritages without sympathy.

The controversial copper mine in Sarlingyi Township in Monywa District is being accused of widespread land confiscations and environmental degradation, including mountain top abolition. The Lapadaungtaung copper mine project is jointly run by the military-owned UMEHL and China's Wanbao Mining Limited, a subsidiary of the Chinese arms manufacturer NORINCO.

During the protests against the Letpadaung copper-mine, the riot police are responsible for breaching common human rights abuses including arbitrary arrests, illegal detentions, and inhumane treatment that allow running free inflammable bombs into the crowd, as said by witnesses who joined the protest. That kind of act is more than an ordinary rights abuse. It's a violation of crime against humanity since nearly a hundred monks have been suffering severe burns all over their bodies.

Meanwhile, Notification No. 92/2012 appeared on the president's office website on 1 December 2012. The announcement said the President had set up a 30-member "Investigation Commission" chaired by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi to look into whether copper mining should be continued and to find out the true situation about the recent containing of protest in Letpadaungtaung Copper Mining Project in Salingyi Township.

But, two days after the Notification No. 92/2012 prepared the 30-member commission, president's office released additional Notification No. 95/2012 on 3 December that the commission has been cut up to 16 members without stating any reasons for the cutback of the body. The closing date for the commission's report has also been postponed by a month, to 31 January, 2013.

The U-turn in the Presidential Notification No. 95/2012 dated 3 December is the latest inconsistency of government statements on the topic of the controversial Monywa copper mine tragedy. However, the 16-member commission has no authority to investigate unlawful crackdown done by the riot police equipped with harmful weapons and inflammable bombs.

A comment is scattering in the public that inquiry commissions have been frequently set up in this country. However, the government doesn't regularly scrutinize how the commissions do their duties and compile practical findings. That means people do not trust the work of such commission. People believe the commission’s findings were exploited by the military-owned UMEHL and China's Wanbao Mining Limited, a subsidiary of the Chinese arms manufacturer NORINCO.

In contrast, people were disturbed by the information when the President assigns their charismatic leader Aung San Suu Ky as commission chair. As they distrust the quasi-civilian regime practicing the old repressive conducts upon the citizens by abusing the law, people scared that Burma's Nobel laureate might perhaps be exploited by the immoral authorities.

Despite much talk about needed economic reform, President failed to mention the corruption and unprofessional conduct of officials from UMEHL and MEC. Without officially recognizing the well embedded corrupt practices in society, there can be no means to adequately address the issue.

The country’s citizens are very poor not because the country has no resources, but because the country’s leaders, including the current semi-elected government, refuses to acknowledge the extent of corruption and wealth amassed by the select few.

Without changing the functions and ownership of the military-run extra-large businesses, the President’s reform process will be of little real benefit to the general population. As foreign investment increases, the same military affiliated businesses and crony associates will be the biggest beneficiaries, not the average citizens.

According to the Democratic Voice of Burma, local villagers and activists have been calling for the shutting down of the Latpadaung Copper Mine, a joint-venture between the military-owned Union of Myanmar Economic Holdings and Wanbao, a subsidiary to a Chinese arms manufacturer, which they claim is responsible for the confiscation of about 7,800 acres of farmland in total and has displaced farmers from 66 villages.

If President Thein Sein thinks himself of a true reformist, he should give sufficient authority to the copper-mine commission chaired by Aung San Suu Kyi along the lines of the international values in order to settle down the crisis before tragic situation took place.

The government must provide more transparency and accountability on Letpadaungtaung Copper Mine Project as Chinese company begins dishonoring Burma’s sovereignty. Besides, the killing of a village-woman in this December 2014, during anti-copper mine protest, looks as if Burma started closing down the democratic reform.

By Zin Linn

Asian Tribune

December 1, 2014

The people of Burma have been wishing for a peaceful and flourishing country since the 1948 independence achievement. But unfortunately, the nation’s independence hero General Aung San was assassinated a year ahead of independence. As a result, civil wars throughout the country occurred in the midst of the self-government offered by the British colonial rule.

In fact, General Aung San and the leaders of Chin, Kachin and Shan ethnic groups had guaranteed a genuine federal union of Burma by signing the Panglong Agreement on 12 February, 1947. The historic agreement accepted the representatives of ethnic states to administer their own affairs in areas of economy, judiciary, education, and customs and so on.

However, ten years after independence, Burma was fallen into the hands of military dictators and became a least developed country (LDC) in line with the United Nations’ indicators of the lowest socioeconomic development and the lowest Human Development Index ratings of all countries in the world. In 1988, instability over economic mismanagement and political oppression by the military-backed socialist government led to widespread pro-democracy uprising all over the country known as the 8888 Uprising.

Security forces shot down thousands of protesters, and General Saw Maung launched a coup under the name of the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC). In 1989, SLORC declared martial law after widespread protests. SLORC changed the country's official name from the "Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma" to the "Union of Myanmar" in 1989.

In May 1990, the junta held free elections for the first time since 1962 and Aung San Suu Kyi’s the National League for Democracy (NLD) won 392 out of a total 489 seats or above 80 percent of the seats. However, the military junta refused to transfer of power and continued to rule the country as SLORC until 1997, and then ruled as the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) before its dissolution in March 2011.

Burma’s existing junta-made Constitution, approved in a May 2008 referendum, is conflict-ridden since it was set by way of one-sided endorsed principles. It says the military commander-in-chief can take sovereign power if the country is in a risky situation.

Ethnic-based political parties in Burma (Myanmar) and ethnic rebel groups negotiating nationwide ceasefire agreements with the government after decades of military conflict have called for amendments that allow self-determination for ethnic citizens.

People do not forget that the new charter itself emerged in the course of a charade referendum (May 2008) mockingly held after a week of the Nargis cyclone that caused more than 138,000 deaths and left millions homeless. The bill was ratified by the parliament in January 2011. The biggest flaw in the constitution is the privileged 25 percent of the seats in the parliament are set aside for soldiers who are basically appointed to the legislative body by the commander-in-chief. Unless this is amended, it is difficult to see true democratic reform in the country.

An ethnic outcry said that a nationwide ceasefire agreement without adequate guarantees of political dialogue and monitoring mechanisms is unacceptable. There is a constant demand from the country’s ethnic groups to enjoy equal political, social and economic rights. The Constitution must guarantee the rights of self-determination and of equal representation for every ethnic group in the Parliament.

Recently on 18 November, Lower house Speaker Shwe Mann said the country’s constitution cannot be amended ahead of 2015 elections. It means a clause in the charter barring opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi from becoming president may not review until 2015 general election is over. But, House Speaker’s announcement was challenge by Aung San Suu Kyi’s party saying he had no power to make such judgment. Shwe Mann is also head of the ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) and who declared to contest for the presidency in 2015 polls.

Coincidently, the United States has pressed for more changes in Burma, where political and economic reforms initiated two years ago seem to have stalled. In addition, during his second Burma-trip in mid-November, Obama has told President Thein Sein that the next 2015 election needs to be fair, inclusive and transparent.

But, Burma’s political scenario in last quarter of 2014 seems more complicated than ever because there will be do-or-die struggles between the ‘pro-2008 Constitution faction’ and ‘anti-2008 Constitution parties’ that is basically connected with the presidential selection in 2015. In addition, there are many more challengers for the presidency office; with rumours putting sitting President U Thein Sein, Lower House Speaker U Thura Shwe Mann, and the military chief Sen. Gen. Min Aung Hlaing as the front-runners.

In such a tough time, government army’s artillery shell killed 23 cadets at a training centre on the outer reaches of Laiza, the Kachin Independence Army capital on China –Burma border on 19 November 2014. It was the deadliest hit since a ceasefire agreement in 2011, General Gun Maw, the KIA's second-in-command said. Gun Maw said government's artillery attacks were warning of pressure towards the KIA to sign a ceasefire agreement without promise of political talks and to put off the elections.

Speaking while on a trip to Australia in last year November, Burmese opposition leader and democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi told an audience at the Sydney Opera House that the country had still not “successfully taken the path to reform” because the military-written 2008 constitution bars the country from becoming a democracy.

Burma’s main opposition NLD party led by Aung San Suu Kyi has called, during recent nationwide campaign, for public support for her party’s proposal to ratify constitutional reform particularly for Article 436. Aung San Suu Kyi has called again and again that Article 436 barred to amend every article of the 2008 Constitution. It says every amendment proposal must be approved by 75 percent of representatives in both houses of parliament. As the military holds 25 percent of all seats, it effectively holds veto power over the Constitution, she says.

Aung San Suu Kyi has affirmed her readiness to run for president if the Constitution is amended to allow her to do so. Suu Kyi said it is her duty as leader of her National League for Democracy to be willing to take the executive office if that is what the people want. She said a clause in the constitution effectively barring her from the job is one of several clauses her party seeks to change.

Burma’s seemingly civilian government headed by President Thein Sein has declared itself as a reformist administration since it took power in March 2011. Finally, it has to meet head-on major challenge in order to show its true mind-set concerning constitutional revision which has been calling by various oppositions.

By Guy Horton

Democratic Voice of Burma

November 19, 2014

Last year, when I was in Ma Ja Yang in Northern Kachin State, Burmese fighter bombers, at the height of the peace process, had just flown low over the nearby IDP camp. Two terrified children dug themselves into an earth bank for refuge. In heavy rains the bank collapsed and they suffocated to death: two unrecorded deaths in a sixty year old war involving, arguably, the deaths of millions. But this year these two children may have surfaced, along with millions of others, in the most unlikeliest of places: the government’s 2014 census. Burma’s population, it turns out, is about nine million below what was expected. These two children, and nine million others, are not there. No one is commenting on this. No one is asking why. The most significant and extraordinary information to have come out of the country for decades, identifying 20 percent of Burma’s expected population is “Missing,” is disregarded.

This figure cannot be explained away by the flawed methodology of the census, which, albeit inadvertently, exacerbated the intimidation, persecution and dehumanisation by the Rohingya. It is the result itself which needs to be examined. The census may in fact have come up with an inconvenient Truth: millions of people may be missing in Myanmar who were expected to be alive based on the perfectly modest realistic estimates of the 1983 census which predicted an annual 2 percent growth rate.

Exculpatory explanations for some of the missing millions can, admittedly, be made. Many people were simply not counted, including the Rohingya and some Kachin; so called economic migrants, in reality often refugees escaping persecution, were, by their very nature, out of the country; others were inaccessible; AIDS and drug addiction have probably substantially contributed to many premature deaths; one hundred and thirty thousand perished during Cyclone Nargis and its aftermath; cultural practices, such as celibacy and monasticism, may have lowered birthrates; the1983 census may itself have been flawed. Finally, the global media’s failure to expose decades long destruction may have contributed to the disregard of the result: people slowly dying over decades do not fit the media’s 24 news cycle, especially when most victims have disappeared in remote jungle mountainous terrain far from journalists and diplomats. These factors, amongst others, may help explain away some of the missing millions and the disregard of the result: they do not, however, fully account for millions of missing people.

The elephant in the room is government policy. Widespread, systematic human rights violations, i.e. crimes against humanity, have been identified and condemned by successive UN Special Rapporteurs and General Assembly Resolutions since 1992. The country was specifically placed on the UN Genocide Watch list back in 2005 and, I understand, still remains so. The outgoing UN Special Rapporteur, Tomas Ojea-Quintana, affirmed “Elements of genocide” apply as recently as June 2014. Genocide, we should remind ourselves, involves the physical “Destruction of ethnic, racial, religious or national groups in whole or,” significantly, “In part.” If even a small fraction of these millions of missing people have disappeared due to government policies, the Genocide Convention would apply.

The decades long systematic violations targeting mostly ethnic civilians with destruction need to be seen in their historical context. UN condemnations have been explicit and specific. Special Rapporteur, Rajsoomer Lallah QC in 1998, condemned widespread, systematic violations, including “The killing of women and children,” as:

“The result of policy taken at the highest level entailing legal and political responsibility.” (Situation of Human Rights Myanmar, para. 59, Report to the UN Economic and Social Council, July, 1998.)

Systematic and widespread violations, inflicted for decades have inevitably caused the deaths of many people; the two aforementioned children died as a consequence of the Burma army’s military attack.

We need to reflect on nine million missing people: the number is about the same as the population of Sweden. It is about one and a half times the number of Jews who perished in the Holocaust. It is nearly twice the number who died as a result of Stalin’s inflicted famine in the Ukraine. In Burma nearly one in five people is not alive who was expected to be alive based upon a modest estimate of the two per cent population growth rate. Despite its significance, the news does not chime with the media’s brave new world: “Burma Unbound”, “Burma booming”, the “Mandela-like transition.” The figure is met instead with silence.

A connection between systematic, widespread human rights violations and possible missing millions exists, however. Martin Smith, generally regarded as a leading authority on Burma’s ethnic peoples, identified a dramatic “Slump in birth rates” back in 1990, opining:

“The birth rates of most minority races (and not just the Mons and the Karens) have inexplicably slumped.” (“Burma, Insurgency and the Politics of Ethnicity,” page 38, Zed Books, 1991)

We should note his use of the word “Slump,” i.e. a sudden and dramatic fall.

This “slump” in birth rates, moreover, has been accompanied by some outright “Collapses in population” as identified by Amnesty International:

“In some areas complete collapse in ethnic populations has occurred, such as in Kunhing Township in Shan State where a 70 percent drop in population was recorded.” (“Atrocities in Shan State”, Amnesty International, 1998.)

Smith estimated 10,000 dying a year for four decades back in 1990 which would make 400,000. Extrapolated forward to 2014 the figure would approach 550,000, a figure which would be unlikely to include the hundreds of thousands who have died indirectly from denial of shelter, food and medicines, nor would it include the hundreds of thousands of Rohingya forced to flee, and often die, in the Indian Ocean and elsewhere. The Transnational Institute cited a figure of 600,000 casualties in 2005.

“The true death toll,” Smith wrote, quoting former SLORC Chairman General Saw Maung vack in the 1980′s, “Would reach as high as millions”. (“Burma”, Zed Books, 1990 ed. p.101)

Specific evidence of widespread destruction has been documented, often graphically, in Karen, Karenni, Chin, Kachin, Shan, Mon, Delta, Karen, Rohingya areas over the decades. Mass forced location of the Bamar population, we should remember, was also inflicted in lowland Burma during the 1990′s.

These “slumps in birth rates”, and local “collapses in population,” contrast with earlier “Prolific high birth rates of ethnic peoples” identified in the unique, in depth, detailed bench mark study carried out just before Burma’s civil war began by W.D. Hackett. He explains

“The minorities . . . are more prolific than the Burman population and increasing at a very rapid rate.” (The Pao People of Shan State, p. 3, W.D. Hackett, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Cornell, 1953.)

Although Smith does state the slump in birth rates as being “Inexplicable,” observation of what has been inflicted in conflict areas; analyses of infant and maternal mortality rates documented by, amongst others, the Mae Tao Clinic; detailed mapping of widespread, systematic destruction in eastern, western, northern regions and the Delta, including satellite imagery, and numerous reports, demonstrate the destruction must have inevitably resulted in the deaths of large numbers of people.

Moreover, these “collapses in population” and “slumps in birth rates” is certain to be greatest in so called ethnic areas. If the full regional breakdown of the results of the 2014 census is ever revealed, it will probably confirm this. Latest reports, however, indicae this information is not being released indicative of a cover up.

We need to ask, however, what government strategies have contributed to the slump in birth rates and much lower than expected population figure. The central strategy outlined by Smith is known as the Four Cuts strategy which is explicitly intended to destroy the civilian base of resistance. Ethnic civilians are thus the target.

The first circle: killing

Successive military juntas, and the current hybrid civilian/military successor, have been killing and causing deaths for decades.

In January 2013 I was in Kachin State. A young boy, sitting on a wall, described to me how soldiers had come to his mother’s kitchen and shot her while he looked on from the edge of a sugar cane field. An old man sobbed hysterically next to him: he had just described his daughter bayoneted to death through the left breast. Nearby two small boys had dug themselves into a mud wall to hide from fighter bombers. It collapsed and suffocated them to death. These small boys, the old man’s daughter and the boy’s mother are part of Myanmar’s missing millions. In this case they died as a result of a systematic onslaught- not “Ethnic conflict”- by the Burma army. This attack occurred just after President Thein Sein had formally announced a ceasefire on prime time television, supported by a vote of the whole lower house, and dutifully echoed by the global media and Ban Ki Moon.

Along “The ceasefire line” human wave attacks were carried out on Kachin positions involving tens of thousands of troops, helicopter gun ships and fighter bombers. Jane’s Intelligence reportedly estimated five thousand Burmese troops and one thousand Kachin were killed. (That’s double the number estimated killed in the 1988 student uprising.) These deaths predictably remain disregarded, downplayed, understated or denied. They don’t fit the narrative of democratic transition, or the assumptions of top down, urban, Burman centred journalists, politicians and diplomats whose views have been co-opted by the rhetoric of “Transition”. (Needless to say young Burmese conscripts, forced to fight and die are also victims and just as deserving of our compassion, as ethnic victims.)

Let’s rewind to the autumn of 2000 when I was in the mountainous areas of Karen State. Four women were brought into our encampment who had just been forced to watch their husbands being beheaded in front of them. Nearby in a burning village two toddlers had been thrown into the flames. Their dying screams were heard in the surrounding hills for minutes. An old lady, unable to move, burnt to death silently. In a nearby village a Baptist pastor was beaten for three days, his Bible shredded and then beheaded. I could go on.

These people were murdered by the Burmese army. This has been going on for decades, and is still going on. These dead are part of the missing nine million.

These killings include not just individuals, but massacres such as in the Delta in September 2001 and Dooplaya district. Karen State in May 2002 (“Dying Alive,” Images Asia, 2005)

The second circle : cyclone Nargis 

About 130,000 people, more than the victims of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, died in the Delta as a result of Cyclone Nargis. Many of these deaths resulted from the Junta’s criminal negligence failing to warn the population and impeding relief efforts. We can infer that the population of the Delta would now be higher if the government had carried out its responsibilities effectively.

The third circle: sexual violence

If systematic killing is the first circle, denial of aid the second circle, widespread, systematic rape and sexual violence represents the third. The UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights, Rajsoomer Lallah QC, condemned it as being a “Regular, routine feature” and “The result of policy” as far back as 1998. It has been condemned in most UN reports. This form of targeted violence of women undermines birth rates because, amongst other things, it often destroys women’s desire and ability to marry and have children.

The fourth circle : indirect destruction 

This encompasses those subjected to slow, indirect violence, defined in the Rome Statute as: “The deliberate deprivation of resources indispensable for survival, such as food, medical services, or systematic expulsion from homes.”(Rome Statute, Genocide, Article 6c).

Burning people out of their homes, like the 3,600 villages documented by the Thai Burma Border Consortium in eastern Burma, or what has been inflicted in Rohingya and Kachin areas recently, leads, indirectly, to death because people lack shelter or basic services. I remember the gloves of a back pack medic being destroyed in order, presumably, so that babies could not be born hygienically and die as result. I recall a report of a man shot through the leg for carrying antibiotics in 2005.The denial and destruction of medical services and supplies, deprivation of clean water and food, often inevitably results in death. (The Rohingya are particularly victimised by this slow motion, low intensity form of genocide.) Very many people have died prematurely and unnecessarily over the decades as a result of these deliberately inflicted conditions. Maternal and infant mortality rates in particular, documented by the Mae Tao Clinic and others, resulting from these conditions have been some of the highest in the world. We should note that two hundred and fifty thousand people, a quarter of a million, have been terrorised out of their homes since “the democratic transition” began and “Peace” broke out.

The fifth circle : persecution

In the fifth circle there are the millions who over the decades have been forced to flee persecution, i.e. the denial of their fundamental rights Many of those in the refugee camps, or those fleeing into the Indian Ocean, or into China, India, Malaysia etc., are not economic migrants, but victims of systematic Persecution. In the case of the Rohingya, as the former Special UN Rapporteur asserted, the conditions they are escaping include “Elements of genocide.”

The sixth circle : enforced migration

In the sixth circle we do admittedly find very many economic migrants working in foreign countries. Many of these have, however, not really made free choices but have had to escape the extreme poverty resulting from government policies which have failed to provide people with, amongst other things, adequate medical and educational services.

The seventh circle : general poverty

Here are the great majority of the Burmese people who are mired in the poverty resulting from governmental negligence. Such conditions can lead people to put off, or not marry, or have smaller families than they otherwise would have had, which leads, in turn, to a probable reduction in birth rates.

In conclusion, decades long State inflicted violence and deliberate deprivation of the necessities for life must have resulted in at least hundreds of thousands, and if former SLORC Chairman General Saw Maung was right “Millions”, of premature deaths. The numerical qualifying criteria of what comprises the attempted destruction of a part of a people to justify a charge of genocide is: “substantial”.

Those two young children should not have died, nor should hundreds of thousands, and possibly millions, be allowed to disappear into a vortex of complicit silence. A Truth Commission should be set up to find out what has really happened. Perpetrators should be held to account.

Guy Horton has worked on Burma and its border areas since 1998. His 2005 report, “Dying Alive” and supporting video footage, received worldwide coverage and contributed to the submission of Burma to the UN Security Council in January 2007. As a result of the report, the UN Committee on the Prevention of Genocide carried out an investigation and placed Burma/Myanmar on the Genocide Watch list.

Since 2005 Guy Horton has focussed on establishing a coalition of governments, funders, institutions and leading international lawyers with the aim of getting the violations investigated and analysed so that impunity can be addressed. He is currently a researcher at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

He was short-listed for the post of UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Myanmar 2014. He can be contacted at: ghrtn7@gmail.com

By Maung Zarni

November 14, 2014

WASHINGTON - United States President Barack Obama will be in Myanmar this week for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit. Unlike his state visit in November 2012, Obama is said to be acutely aware that the upcoming stopover cannot be used as a platform to congratulate himself as "Myanmar as a success story" for his foreign policy. 

This is because Obama's Myanmar policy honeymoon has already turned into what New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof calls "a global nightmare". Uncharacteristically, opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi has recently told the international media that the US government is "overly optimistic" about reforms in her country and challenges anyone to prove her wrong. 

On the home front, Obama's Democrats lost control of the Senate in mid-term elections held on November 4, underscoring Obama's lame duck position. Still, he may be tempted to continue to talk up his administration's supposed successful contributions to Myanmar's "opening" and justify his administration's plan to stay the course of unconditional, if unstrategic, engagement. 

Against this background, Obama and his advisors would do well to take a deep breath, go back to the policy drawing board, and confront the some of the crucial stumbling blocks in Myanmar's much ballyhooed "democratic transition". So far they have instead gone on the defensive about their failing engagement with Myanmar's clique of supposed "reformers", including President and ex-general Thein Sein. 

The emerging reality in Myanmar needs to be appreciated, however inconvenient or unpalatable for Washington: that the generals' top-down reforms are hardly about public welfare or advancement of human rights and civil liberties, but rather about the military and its leaders realigning their strategic interests, personal and institutional, with powerful external players, including the US, European Union and international financial institutions like the World Bank. 

In Obama's lingo, the generals' reforms may best be understood as a military strategy of "re-balancing", as opposed to democratizing Burmese politics and devolving the unitary power structure of the state to give the country's ethnic minorities a fair share of power. 

Not surprisingly, the reforms have spectacularly failed to live up to the media hype and international policy discussions, which were fueled in the first place by the military's psychological warfare program and its proxy "Myanmar Peace Center, as well as their friends and allies in Rangoon's foreign diplomatic circles, including the Norwegian, British and US embassies. 

Reforms, including the freeing of political prisoners, allowing jailed dissidents including Suu Kyi to sit in the military-controlled parliament, media liberalization, economic privatization and the pursuit of ceasefire negotiations with the country's ethnic armed resistance movements, have all been touted by Thein Sein's international supporters as "extraordinary" and "unthinkable only several years ago". Under closer scrutiny, however, they all are now clearly more form than substance. 

Both the quasi-civilian parliament and President Thein Sein's administration have opposed categorically any push for amending the anti-democratic constitution devised by and for the military leadership, witnessed in the 25% parliamentary seats automatically allotted to the Ministry of Defense and the clause that bars Suu Kyi and any able Burmese with foreign spouses or offspring from holding the country's highest office. 

The discourse that Myanmar is now home to one of Southeast Asia's freest media has been punctured by the stories of the army torturing to death Ko Par Gyi, the former-Aung San Suu Kyi-bodyguard-cum-freelance journalist and the jailing of three Burmese journalists who uncovered part of the military's secret weapons program, with alleged involvement of North Korean experts, using British colonial-era 1923 Official Secrets Act. 

Thein Sein's speeches are peppered with buzzwords such as "good governance", "inclusiveness" and "tolerance", but stand in sharp contrast with his government's ranking at the bottom of Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index. 

It was under his presidential watch that the military broke its 14-year-old written ceasefire agreement with the Kachin Independence Organization in June 2011, thus re-igniting conflict in the country's strategic and resource rich northern and eastern regions bordering on India and China. Nor has he done anything substantive or significant to curb the hate speech and violence directed against the country's estimated 4-5 million Muslims. 

Indeed, Myanmar's reforms are not simply backsliding. Rather, they hold little or no prospect for bringing about genuine and substantive changes, without which neither peace nor prosperity is conceivable. Not in a country with the world's longest political and ethnic strife and pervasive absolute poverty. 

Obama needs to understand that the intransigence of Thein Sein's government - not the economic or personal interests of the ethnic minority leaders and their armed resistance organizations - is damaging the prospects of a nationwide ceasefire on which political solutions and lasting inter-ethnic peace will have to be built. 

Bleak peace prospects Despite the millions of euros and dollars spent in "peace support initiatives" by the likes of Norway, Japan and the European Union, the prospects for peace, stability and development, especially in the border regions of Kachin, Shan, Karenni, Karen, Mon and Wa communities, remains bleak. The absence of any progress in the pursuit of peace by Thein Sein and his deputies is in spite of the United Nations and neighboring China's involvement in the ceasefire negotiations. 

How can there be a nationwide ceasefire, let alone lasting peace, when the most powerful stakeholder - the military's leadership - rejects both equality among the country's diverse ethnic and religious communities and the federalist political vision those groups maintain is the only viable and pragmatic way forward in a country with about two dozen armed ethnic movements? 

Whoever is in the driver's seat and whatever form the new politics and administration may assume, the military remains wedded to its deeply internalized corporate vision of a unitary state where the armed forces and the officer corps doggedly play the simultaneous roles of referee, coach, and player in national politics. 

Besides the military's unitary vision for the state, the ruling generals and top ex-generals possess deep commercial interests in conflict zones which will necessarily be diminished if the state's administrative and political power is devolved to ethnic groups. For instance, many ranking generals and ex-generals have ties to the hundreds of mining companies in the multi-billion dollar jade industry at Hpar-Khant in Kachin State. Ironically, these jade mining companies pay both the Kachin Independence Organization and army, filling both sides' war chests in the process. 

For their part, the ethnic minority armed groups have tired of government ceasefire negotiators who have proven to be unable or disempowered to honor past agreements. For instance, in September this year all sides reached an initial agreement on the federalist nature of a new national polity and amendments to the military's 2008 Constitution as the basis for a nationwide ceasefire deal to be signed by all armed groups, including the central government's Armed Forces. 

A month later, the government's military representatives walked into the negotiation rooms and informed the leaders of the ethnic armed groups that the September deal was off. They then presented new conditions for a national ceasefire, which included keeping the 2008 Constitution intact and subordinating the ethnic minority armed groups under the government's central command as "border guard forces". 

Washington needs to be clear-eyed about the fact that Myanmar's government is still committing widespread crimes against humanity and other mass atrocities, particularly against both Rohingya Muslims and other ethnic minorities such as the Shans and Kachins. 

Last week, Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic released the findings of its three-year study of "war crimes" committed by three serving generals in eastern Myanmar, including a powerful minister in President Thein Sein's government. 

In the last two-and-a-half years, there has been an alarming and sustained rise in violence, death and destruction against Rohingyas in western Myanmar - so much so that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, one of the foremost leading institutions dealing with cases of global mass atrocities, recently issued a clarion call to stop the unfolding genocide in Myanmar. 

At a Harvard University conference held last week on the worsening plight of the Rohingyas, Nobel Prize laureate Amartya Sen weighed in on the subject by framing Myanmar's persecution of over 1 million Rohingyas as a "slow genocide" unfolding over nearly 40 years, a far more sinister process of state-sponsored intentional destruction of a people than the Holocaust, Rwanda's genocide or the Khmer Rouge's mass atrocities in Cambodia. 

Notwithstanding legal and policy debates over the terminologies of the atrocities, including slow genocide, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, or just plain war crimes, it is unmistakable that large scale mass atrocities are being committed against various ethnic and religious minorities by both official government troops and non-state actors such as the country's ultra-racist monks and Nazi-inspired ethnic Rakhine extremists. 

In Washington, a typical American confidence about how to facilitate and support Myanmar's transition from an outright military dictatorship to a more benign entity has given way to policy confusion, uncertainty and defensiveness. As Obama's government ponders why and how the top-down reforms it previously strongly endorsed but now recognize have stalled, it would do well to review the four biggest challenges to engaging Thein Sein's essentially military-led government. 

Needless to say, there is no possibility of the US reversing its current unconditional engagement policy and support for the "reformist" clique in Naypyidaw, who are believed to regularly congregate in Thein Sein's office. 

However, if US policy is to advance its hidden and official policy objectives, including the severing of Myanmar's ties with North Korea, promotion of democracy, freedom and human rights, and economic liberalization, as well as counterbalancing China's influence and role in the country, Washington's engagement needs to be strategically re-calibrated during Obama's visit. 

Tough talking points

First, Obama should make it clear to Thein Sein that as chairman of Myanmar's National Defense and Security Council, the country's de facto ruling body, he must reign in and stop immediately the Armed Forces' continuing war crimes against the Shan and Kachin ethnic minorities. Any claims that Thein Sein, an ex-general and Prime Minister under the former ruling junta, does not control the military's Central Command should be diplomatically refuted as disingenuous. 

Second, the US should put a moratorium on any and all military-to-military engagements between the Pentagon and the Myanmar state security sector, including workshops and training programs in human rights and civil-military relations. 

The Pentagon, with its own atrocious record of human-rights violations in the name of the "global war on terror" is neither the most obvious choice for the task nor best equipped for the job. Leave that to some other credible organizations such as Asian Human Rights Commission, Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic or the Global Minorities Alliance. 

Third, the Obama Administration, represented US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power, the Pulitzer Prize winning expert on genocides and the author of A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, should entertain the idea of punitive measures against Myanmar's genocidaires, including against top-ranking government officials as well as communal Rakhine leaders. 

If Washington is not prepared to push for UN Security Council authorization for the referral of Myanmar's genocidal military leaders and ex-leaders, including the "reformist" Thein Sein, it should at the least call for the revision of the racist 1982 Citizenship Act, which serves the legal justification for Rohingya persecution. 

It should also consider curbing its present ambassador in Rangoon, Derek Mitchell, who reliable sources say is pressuring Rohingya leaders and community elders to accept Thein Sein government's official erasure of the former's voluntary ethnic identity and adopt the government-imposed label "Bengali" - a term that effectively indicates that Rohingyas do not belong in Myanmar. 

In a move widely popular with the public, the US Treasury recently blacklisted ex-Brigadier Aung Thaung, chair of the Finance Committee for the military's ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party and a very powerful confidante of the now officially retired despot Senior General Than Shwe, on the grounds he has been directly involved in recent violent campaigns against Myanmar's Muslims. The Obama Administration should also propose and lead similar punitive moves using established global justice mechanisms such as the International Criminal Court or Responsibility to Protect (R2P). 

Fourth and finally, as a point of departure from its current policy of unwavering support for Thein Sein's government (and its "less-corrupt" super-ministers and "cleaner" cronies), Washington needs to realign its long-term strategic interests, both commercial and strategic, with those of the public, including farmers, laborers, ethnic and religious minorities and genuine - as opposed to proxy - opposition parties. 

The US's short-sighted preference for supporting elite-led quasi-transitional processes in the Middle East and former Soviet Union has already boomeranged. The sustained popularity of Vladimir Putin in Russia and the widespread and palpable hatred of the US on the Arab Street spring to mind. Washington should recognize that Myanmar's persecuted and oppressed ethnic and religious minorities - not only the Rohingyas but also the Kachin, Mon, Shan, Karen and others - would like to see a more decisively pro-democratic and pro-human rights US policy and practice in Myanmar. 

The country's various oppressed constituencies are intensely resentful of both meek, mild and ineffectual UN officials and China's narrow interests and slanted policies in favor of their common oppressor in Naypyidaw. They still hold out hope that the US's involvement and pressure on the country's current military leaders will eventually bring genuine democratic reforms and an end to decades of internal conflict. For that to happen, Obama must change his previous tact of unconditional engagement, beginning with a strong message to Naypyidaw that current trends and practices will be met with renewed punitive measures. 

Maung Zarni is a lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and co-author with Alice Cowley of The Slow Burning Genocide of Myanmar's Rohingya in the Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal (University of Washington Law School, Spring 2014).

This analysis article was originally published on Asia Times.

"... ex-military officers and their active-duty brethren retain complete monopoly control over the entire change process, reforms or not. In the new era of democratic transition, these men, in skirts or in green shirts, continue to hold all levers of state power at all levels of administration, including “people’s bicameral parliament”, judiciary, foreign affairs and finance, besides their legitimate domain, namely state security apparatuses. And it is they – not collaborating dissidents or the developmental technocrats – who determine the reforms’ nature, scope, priorities and pace."

Reforms in Myanmar: Hype and Realities

By IRIN

November 8, 2014

As the number of ethnic Rohingya Muslims fleeing Myanmar hits record levels, the prospects for a lasting settlement of the crisis in Myanmar's Rakhine State look bleak.

Chris Lewa, the director of The Arakan Project, a research and advocacy group which monitors Rakhine State, told IRIN the number of Rohingyas that have fled western Myanmar since 2012 has now topped 100,000.

"We have been monitoring these exits for years, and this is the most we had ever seen," she said, adding that in late October up to 900 left in a single day. Lewa attributes the surge to multiple factors. "The last sailing season [period of calm water for boat departures] was just before the census, and many of them felt confident because the government had promised they could self-identify as Rohingya," she said. "Then the rains started, the census didn't count them, and they settled into another wet summer in the camps."

Push factors include squalid camp conditions, a history of restricted movement,de facto statelessness, and empty gestures from the authorities to resolve the situation.

"We are caged like animals here," Muhammad Uslan, who has lived in a camp outside Sittwe (Rakhine State's capital) since July 2012, told IRIN. "We cannot work or go to the town to buy things. Our young people grow up knowing they will never be able to go to university."

Rakhine Buddhists, much like Myanmar's other ethnic minorities, feel marginalized by a history of restrictions imposed by the central ethnic Burman government, which ruled with an iron fist until reforms began in 2010. According to an October 2014 report by the International Crisis Group (ICG), "decades of Rakhine [Buddhist] anger at their treatment at the hands of Burman-dominated regime have not gone away - but they have begun to morph." Much of the ethnic Rakhine anxiety as they assert themselves in increasingly open political space, has been directed at the minority ethnic Rohingya.

Two bouts of communal violence between Buddhist ethnic Rakhines and Muslim Rohingyas in June and October 2012 killed 176 and destroyed more than 10,000 homes and buildings. The government moved some 140,000 Muslims into camps, where most remain today. Communal tensions continue to fester.

Not just a humanitarian crisis

The most recent bulletin from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said access to health care for those in the camps remains a "major challenge", and the UN World Food Programme announced in October that without US$37 million more in assistance, rice distribution in the camps, where nearly all residents rely on food aid, would be interrupted from December onwards.

However, analysts caution, humanitarian action is only one part of the solution. According to ICG, "ultimately, ways must be found to ease [Buddhist] Rakhine fears, while protecting the rights of Muslim communities." However, the report warned, "any plan that meets international concerns may not be able to satisfy local demands."

An October 2014 report by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) says the Myanmar government "has abdicated its leadership responsibilities, passively standing on the sidelines" as aid workers fled in March 2014 after Buddhist mobs targeted their offices.

However, ICG cautioned: "The situation in Rakhine State should not be seen as a simple humanitarian emergency." According to ICG, "a humanitarian response is essential, but such interventions are only one component of addressing a situation to which there are no easy solutions and which is likely to take many years to resolve in an effective and sustainable way."

Stephen Morrison, senior vice-president at CSIS and co-author of their report explained: "It is an exceptionally treacherous territory. There is no simple short-term answer." According to Morrison, interventions in Rakhine State need to "address the legitimate dire needs of the Rohingya and the legitimate sense of marginality of the host [Buddhist Rakhine] community."

Irrational fears?

Economic issues and demography underlie the tensions. Rakhine State is Myanmar's second poorest region: a popular Rakhine Buddhist fear is that Muslims are pouring over the border from Bangladesh (which currently hosts up to 500,000 Rohingyas who have fled Myanmar) and that they might soon become a majority in the state. 

Tufts University economist David Dapice said the facts do not suggest this fear is warranted: "Levels of living in Bangladesh, even among the bottom quarter, are better than the average levels in Rakhine and more Bangladeshi kids are healthy, go to school, and get clean water or electricity. Would you move to a place to be worse off?"

However, assuaging this fear might prove more complicated than analysing it. ICG confirmed the lack of evidence about a Bangladeshi influx, but explained: "What is most important to recognize is the political reality of these strong demographic fears in Rakhine communities."

Segregation hurts economy

Segregation, whether through camps or by restricting movement in majority-Muslim villages, has not been good for the economy. As the internment of Muslims stretched into its first year in 2013, food security indicators across the state dropped. ICG found that some Rakhine business leaders "decry the segregation of Muslims as economic folly".

However, in a September 2014 paper, Dapice explained: "Not all Rakhine people realize how important the Muslim workforce was for the local economy. Now that many [Muslims] are confined to camps or fearful of leaving their villages, wages have risen sharply and some land is not even being farmed due to shortages of labor." 

Aid agencies have called in recent months for increased economic development,including infrastructure to attract investment. But the UK-based corporate risk analysis firm Maplecroft warned in October 2014 of "potential disruption companies face if they are perceived to support minorities," including by hiring foreigners or Muslims.

The Arakan Project's Lewa cautions that aid should be delivered based on need, and not a tool for negotiations: "Using aid projects to negotiate peace with the Rakhines would be a disaster. At the first instance, it's a reward for horrible behavior."

ICG agrees, and further warns that development could also unintentionally appear to make underlying fears come true: "There is also great concern that an economically prosperous Rakhine State. could attract significant numbers of illegal economic migrants from neighbouring Bangladesh, creating further demographic pressure on the Rakhine."

Leaked plan creates waves

The Myanmar government has made some moves that suggest increased attention to the Rakhine crisis. In June, a high-ranking general was appointed the state's chief minister. In October, the government jailed seven men who were involved in lynching 10 Muslims during the June 2012 riots. 

However, a leaked draft of the Rakhine Action Plan, which was meant to chart stability in the state, sparked criticism. Human Rights Watch said it was "nothing less than a blueprint for permanent segregation and statelessness that appears designed to strip the Rohingya of hope and force them to flee the country." 

The first phase of the plan, a pilot citizenship verification programme, ran for several months in an area where a large number of Muslim respondents in the 2014 census agreed to be registered as "Bengali" (instead of "Rohingya" - a term the government, and most Rakhines, reject). However, in October the programme was suspended, reportedly because Rakhine Buddhists had criticized the very notion of some interned Muslims becoming citizens.

Government pushes back

Meanwhile, the government of Myanmar is pushing back strongly on international human rights criticism - including by mentioning the Rakhine crisis and, although not by name, the Rohingya identity question.

U Wunna Maung Lwin, Myanmar's foreign minister, addressing the UN General Assembly on 29 September, said: "Myanmar should no longer remain on the agendas of the Human Rights Council and The Third Committee of the UN General Assembly." Speaking on Rakhine at the Third Committee meeting on 30 October, Myanmar's representative to the UN, U Kyaw Tin, said: "The right of self-identification. should not be at the cost of placing obstacles to finding a durable solution to this issue." 

In advance of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit in Myanmar on 12-14 November, US president Barack Obama phoned the Burmese reformist president, Thein Sein. The US government record of the conversation mentioned "Rohingya"; the Myanmar government's did not. 

Development actors in-country appear to be toeing a more cautious line. For example, the US Agency for International Development has begun designing Myanmar's first ever Demographic and Health Survey. While the majority of DHS questionnaires worldwide contain a question about ethnicity, the Myanmar DHS will not, USAID officials confirmed to IRIN, appearing to heedrecommendations before the 2014 census to nix the ethnicity question altogether. 

Mohammed Uslan, who was moved to a Sittwe camp by police in 2012 under the guise of his own protection from further communal violence, argued: "The government doesn't need to ask the angry Rakhine people if we have rights as Rohingya. They need to govern all of the people like they are in charge."

By Emre Tunç Sakaoğlu

Journal of Turkish Weekly

November 8, 2014

Myanmar’s world-renowned democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi said during a press conference she held on Wednesday, November 5, that her country’s democratic progress has rather stalled since early 2013; therefore the world should not be overly optimistic about the prospect of reform by the current regime.

Aung San Suu Kyi’s remarks, inviting the U.S. and the global community at large to be cautious with regard to their evaluation of the pace of reforms in her country, came right ahead of a two-day state visit to be paid by U.S. President Barack Obama to Myanmar on the occasion of the 9th East Asia Summit to be held next week with the attendance of several world leaders.

The Nobel laureate leader of the National League for Democracy, the main opposition party in Myanmar’s parliament, added during the press conference she gave in Myanmar’s former capital, Yangon, that the remnants of the former military regime, which was nominally dissolved in 2011 after keeping her under house arrest for 15 years, still dominate the political stage and obstruct democratization in Myanmar. 

Last week, Suu Kyi held a historic high-level meeting with her country’s president, Thein Sein, and the military top brass, the results of which she said fell short of expectations. Nevertheless, she remarked that Myanmar made an important start on a path forward, and iterated her willingness to push enthusiastically for further reforms. 

Indeed, Thein Sein, the current President of Myanmar, has been held in high esteem by the international community after he set off to democratize his country, paving the way for the release of hundreds of political opponents imprisoned under the former military regime, and allowing the democratic opposition led by Aung San Suu Kyi to enter the parliament through open elections. 

However, the West’s policies aimed at the promotion of democracy in Myanmar, coupled with efforts to mobilize public opinion pioneered by veteran campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi’s pro-democracy movement, faced severe challenges especially in the past couple of months.

Most importantly, the pseudo-civilian government has been accused of insisting on its violation of minority ethnic and religious groups’ rights, especially those of the Muslim Rohingya community, which is occasionally brutalized by radical Buddhist groups with officials turning a blind eye at best.

The UN also notes signs of regression as far as the government’s human rights record is concerned, pointing at a recent crack-down on the media leading to the jailing of dozens of journalists and peaceful political activists through a spate of high-profile cases which topped the country’s political agenda especially in the last couple of months. 

All that Aung San Suu Kyi can do under current circumstances is to try convincing the military to take steps in line with the people’s expectations. She is still constitutionally barred from running for the presidential elections of 2015, due to a restrictive, junta-drafted clause which is widely acknowledged to be targeting her potential candidacy in particular. 

Making matters worse, the army has an effective veto power over any amendments to the constitution, alongside the power to dissolve the parliament as a whole, with a quarter of all seats in both chambers of the parliament still occupied by un-elected military officials.

By Carlos Sardiña Galache

New Mandala

September 25, 2014

The most controversial aspect of the census recently held in Burma has been the denial of the large Muslim population in Arakan to identify themselves as Rohingya, the term of their choice. The government ban means as many as one million people remain uncounted in Arakan. That is scarcely surprising, as the Burmese government, Rakhine ultra-nationalists and seemingly a majority of the Burmese population have denied for years the existence of the Rohingya identity. According to them, the Rohingya ethnicity is an invention devised by immigrants from Bangladesh to take over the land in Arakan.

Few people have made more effort to deny the claims of ethnicity by the Rohingya than Derek Tonkin, former British ambassador to Thailand and editor of the website Network Myanmar. Mr. Tonkin has reached his conclusions after digging deeply in colonial British archives, where he has not found a single use of the term Rohingya. His command of the British colonial records is nothing less than impressive, but by relying almost solely on these sources he only offers a partial picture, from which I think he draws incorrect conclusions.

The debate on whether the Rohingya ethnicity should be regarded as one of the “national races” or not, assumes – implicitly or explicitly – as its framework of reference the definition to be found in the controversial Citizenship Law passed in 1982. According to this definition, only those ethnic groups which were already in Burma in 1823 qualify as “national races.”

Rather than attempting to defend Rohingya claims, I argue that the notion of “national races” itself, and thus the set of assumptions hitherto determining the terms of the debate, are fundamentally false and do not facilitate any understanding of the history and present social realities of Burma.

This notion has reduced the debate on Rohingya identity to a confrontation between three different historical narratives: what we might call “Rakhine history” and “Burmese History” on the one side (on this point both are basically indistinguishable, albeit there are important divergences in other aspects), as opposed to the “Rohingya history” on the other. As in many other nationalist histories all around the world, these narratives are loaded with myths and distortions. They are also mutually contradictory, making it impossible to find any common ground for all sides involved.

Competing historical narratives

Burmese and Rakhine nationalists often accuse the Rohingya of falsifying their history in order to advance their claims for ethnicity. It is true that Rohingya historians tend to minimize or ignore altogether the importance of the migration of laborers to Arakan from Bengal during colonial times; moreover, some have made claims that are historically incorrect: for instance, Rohingya historians often claim that some Muslim kings ruled Arakan in the 15th century.

Meanwhile, mirroring the distortions of “Rohingya history,” Rakhine historians tend to minimize, or to ignore altogether, the large numbers of Muslims living in Arakan before colonial times and to emphasize only the influx of Bengali laborers during colonial times. Now some Rakhine go so far as to claim that “illegal immigrants from Bangladesh” have arrived as recently as a few years ago and have continued arriving up to the first wave of sectarian violence in 2012, a highly dubious assertion for which there is no evidence.

On the Burmese side, we find assertions of a history of unity and continuity stretching back for hundreds of years and which was only broken by the traumatic colonial experience. Thus, in 2002, the military ruler, Senior General Than Shwe claimed that “thanks to the unity and farsightedness of our forefathers, our country has existed as a united and firm Union and not as separate small nations for over 2,000 years.”

This extraordinary kind of assertion only makes sense in the context of the state-building project to unify all the ethnic groups under the guardianship of the (Bamar-controlled) Tatmadaw(Burmese military). This has been the ultimate goal for the Burmese state since Ne Win staged his coup d’état in 1962. It is in this context that, at least during the last two decades, the generals have been increasingly trying to present themselves as the heirs of the Burmese kings and their mission as that of restoring some sort of “natural Burmese order” which the British interrupted.

There is no doubt that the British colonization of Burma dealt a highly traumatic blow to every dimension of social order in Burma, from which it has yet to recover. The British dismantled completely all the political institutions and cultural structures that had more or less glued together the society of central Burma and replaced them with others that the Burmese often did not understand or refused because they had been imposed by force by foreign invaders.

But pre-colonial Burma was by no means an era of uniform political order and stability. In fact, the centuries between the first Burmese kingdom which managed to unify this territory, the Pagan dynasty (1057-1287), and the colonial times was a period in which central authority was only gradually asserted, at every point confronting many difficulties and including long periods of anarchy when petty states competed for power.

In any case, before the first Anglo-Burmese war, the domains of the Burmese kingdom were never coterminous with those of the present Burmese state: in large areas, particularly in the hills to the North and East, the grip of the Burmese kings was at best extremely weak. And the Arakanese kingdom was only invaded in 1784, just forty years before it was taken by the British.

It is an anachronism to talk about borders, as we understand them now, in Southeast Asia before the arrival of the colonial powers. As the anthropologist Edmund R. Leachput it more than fifty years ago in his paper, “The Frontiers of ‘Burma’:” pre-colonial Burma was a “wide imprecisely defined frontier region lying between India and China” where “the indigenous political systems which existed prior to the phase of European political expansion were not separated from one another by frontiers in the modern sense and they were not sovereign Nation-States.”

Therefore, it makes little historical sense to classify any ethnic group as a “national race” on the basis that it already inhabited before the colonial period a territory demarcated after the beginning of the period.

Colonial conceptions of ethnicity

What the Burmese, Rakhine and Rohingya historical narratives have in common is an essentialist and racialist conception of ethnic identities as something primordial and fixed in time. Arguably, this is one of the most enduring and deleterious legacies of the British rule in Burma and lies at the heart of the now hegemonic and highly dangerous notion of “national races.”

When the British arrived in Burma, they found a land with a bewildering and confusing (for the external observer) variety of human groups, and where ethnic affiliations were enormously fluid. To make sense of that complex human landscape, they imposed a rigid grid of ethnic classification in which they conflated the mother tongue of the speakers with the category of “tribe” or “race.”

But, as the scholar Victor Lieberman has shown in his paper, “Ethnic Politics in Eighteenth-Century Burma,” ethnicity had virtually no bearing at all as a marker of political loyalty to the different kingdoms which ruled Central Burma during the 17th and 18th centuries. Ethnic distinctions were even more blurred in the “hill areas,” as Edmund R. Leach showed in his classic book Political Systems of Highland Burma. The distinction between Kachin and Shan categories was rather vague, and it was not uncommon for “Kachins” to turn Into “Shan” or vice versa depending on the social systems in which they decided to live, a phenomenon which, according to Leach, “cannot readily be fitted into any ethnographic scheme which, on linguistic grounds, places Kachins and Shans into different ‘racial’ categories.”

But that is exactly what the British did. And the colonial officials held a set of views of ethnicity and race strongly influenced by the social Darwinist prejudices of the time, and they attributed to the different groups personal and innate characteristics: the Karen or Kachin were stereotyped as simple and honest people, included within the “martial races;” the Burmans were devious and childish, not to be trusted, and so on.

On the basis of these spurious classifications, they recruited people to their armies using ethnicity as criteria, and favored some groups over others. They also tended to employ Indians as civil servants, rather than Burmese, because they had more experience with the colonial bureaucratic system and thus were better trained. These policies reinforced, and in some cases generated, ethnic classifications which are still widely accepted in Burma, and animosities that survive to this day.

The anthropologist F. K. Lehman identified the problem more than fifty years ago in his study “Ethnic Categories in Burma and the Theory of Social Systems.” According to him, before the colonial period, “the Burmans had a reasonably correct tacit understanding of the nature of their relations with bordering peoples, tribal and non-tribal,” an understanding which was lost due “to the importation of very explicit European ideas about nations, societies and cultures.”

Lehman suggested that when people identify themselves as members of an ethnic group, they were merely “taking positions in culturally defined systems of intergroup relations,” and that those ethnic categories were “only very indirectly descriptive of the empirical characteristics of substantive groups of people.” Therefore, local or regional groups were “inherently likely to have recourse to more than one ethnic role system and more than one ‘identity’.”

As a consequence of the fluidity of these roles, Lehman Asserted that “we cannot reconstruct any demonstrable discrete ancestral group for some ‘ethnic category’ –no matter whether we define such a possible ancestral group as a discrete dialect group, or as a group with relatively sharp discontinuities from its neighbors.” But this kind of “discrete ancestral groups” is precisely what the notion of “national races” assumes as certain.

Arakan: “The Palestine of the Farther East”

In 1891, the Swiss Pali scholar and archeologist Emil Forchhammer wrote a small book about Arakan in which he described it as the “Palestine of the Farther East,” because, as he put it, Arakanese Buddhism was the inspiration of the Buddhism practiced in the rest of Burma. More than two hundred years later, the comparison has a different resonance: as in Palestine, Arakan is the land of a conflict with some religious undertones between two communities. As in Palestine, the conflict involves a clash of historical narratives. And, as in Palestine, one of the two communities has been stripped of its political rights.

Arakan is separated by a range of mountains from the rest of Burma, making it relatively isolated from the Irrawaddy delta and central Burma. For most of its history, Arakan’s relations with the kingdom of Bengal in the west were just as rich and close as with the Burmese kingdoms in the north, if not more so, thus creating a culture distinct from that of Burma.

As in the rest of Southeast Asia, there were not clear borders between Arakan and Bengal in pre-modern times, the areas of influence of both kingdoms overlapped and were constantly fluctuating. The historian G. E. Harvey wrote in his classic History of Burma that, throughout the Middle Ages, “when Bengal was in the ascendant, some kings sent tribute to Bengal and when the Arakanese were in the ascendant they received tribute from the Ganges delta, ‘The Twelve Towns of Bengal’.” At that time, the Bengali court provided a political model for the Arakanese kingdom, and from the 15th to the 17th century, it was common for the kings to use Muslim/Bengali designations and to issue coins with the kalima, the Muslim profession of faith.

Meanwhile, as Harvey points out, though the geographical isolation of Arakan from Burma “rendered her immune to attack on the east, the resultant peace did not give her unity, because her territory is a long thin strip of coast intersected by hill torrents.”

This fragmentation made the Arakanese kings more tolerant than the Burmese kings to the religious beliefs of the different communities under their rule. In his doctoral dissertation, Where Jambudipa and Islamdom Converged: Religious Change and the Emergence of Buddhist Communalism in Early Modem Arakan (Fifteenth to Nineteenth Centuries), Professor Michael Charney wrote: “In Arakan the royal center was not simply indifferent to promoting one particular religious identity over another, but rather was one of the chief barriers restricting the emergence of a Theravada Buddhist orthodoxy in the Arakan littoral.”

Arakanese kings did not try to establish a “Buddhism kingdom” or centralize the Sangha, as their Burmese counterparts did, but worked through local patron-client networks and tried to present themselves as the patrons of whatever religion was practiced at a local level, be it Buddhism, Islam or even Catholicism in some Portuguese communities in the coast. Charney argues that this prevented for centuries the creation of communal identities based on religious beliefs, Buddhist or Muslim; and that these did not emerge until the late 18th century, and even then only under external influences.

There were Muslims in Arakan as early as the Ninth century but it is likely that their presence was not very strong. It was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the Arakanese and Portuguese communities settled in Southern Bengal (then under the authority of the Arakanese court) started to raid Bengal for slaves and transferring thousands of them to Arakan. The Arakanese kings settled most of these slaves in Northern Arakan, but took the well-educated in Mrauk-U to serve in the court as functionaries.

Before its conquest by the Burmese in 1784, there was already a substantial rural Muslim population in Arakan. “Perhaps up to three-quarters of Danra-waddy’s [northern Arakan, including Sittwe and Mrauk-U] population by the 1770s may have been Muslim,” asserts Charney. Meanwhile, “some Bengali Muslims in Mrauk-U participated in the development of an elite Muslim culture in the royal city, perhaps reflecting their privileged backgrounds in Banga [Southern Bengal].”

It is worth mentioning that the border along the Naf River between the British-controlled Bengal and Arakan did not have the same meaning for the British and the Burmese. If, as Leach pointed out, pre-colonial Burma was a “wide imprecisely defined frontier region lying between India and China,” Arakan was a “frontier region” between Burma and Bengal.

Whatever border there was between Arakan and Bengal, it disappeared completely after the first Anglo-Burmese war (1824-1826), when Arakan passed to British hands. At that time, Charles Paton, the sub-Commissioner of Arakan, estimated that, from a total population of 100,000 people, 60 percent were ‘Mughs’ (Rakhine), 30 percent were ‘Mussalman’ (Muslims) and 10 percent ‘Burmese’. It is clear that those were highly tentative figures, but at the same time it’s impossible to deny that there was a substantial Muslim population in Arakan before the arrival of the British.

It is also undeniable that there was migration of Muslims from Chittagong during colonial times, and that not all of the newcomers were seasonal laborers. This immigration was encouraged by the British, something that was resented by the Buddhist Rakhine population and contributed to reinforce the communal divisions between Muslims and Buddhists in the region. There is no need to repeat here the arguments demonstrating this, the reader can review the article published by Mr. Tonkin to find extensive evidence for that.

The point is that there was a migratory wave of Muslims from Bengal in colonial times that joined an already sizeable Muslim population made up of the descendants of the slaves taken by the Portuguese and the Arakanese during the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Present-day Rohingya are the descendants of both waves of migration, which intermingled to such a degree that now it would be impossible to distinguish who descends from one or the other.

In any case, as Lehman pointed out, it would be impossible “to reconstruct any demonstrable discrete ancestral group” for the people who now have chosen to call themselves Rohingya, as it would be impossible for any other Burmese ethnic group. But that does not imply that the Rohingya ethnicity is not real now. In any case, the Rohingya identity was not “invented” recently out of the blue, as some claim; it had been “gestating,” so to speak, for at least three hundred years, and the term itself was not new.

The “R-word”

The first known record of a very similar word to Rohingya used to refer to the Muslim inhabitants of Arakan is to be found in an article about the languages spoken in the “Burma empire” published by the Scottish physician Francis Buchanan in 1799. He wrote: “I shall now add three dialects, spoken in the Burma Empire, but evidently derived from the language of the Hindu nation. The first is that spoken by the Mohammedans, who have long settled in Arakan, and who call themselves Rooinga, or natives of Arakan.”

It has been argued that Rooinga (or Rohingya) derives from Rohang, the word used in Bengal to refer to Arakan, and thus was just another way to say Arakanese. Michael Charney suggests tentatively that “Rohingya may be a term that had been used by both Hindu and Muslim Bengalis living in Rakhaing [Arakan] since the sixteenth century, either as resident traders in the capital or as war captives resettled in the Kaladan River Valley.” But he is careful to point out that in the past “Rohingya and Rakhaing [Rakhine] were not mutually exclusive ethnonyms. Rakhaing’s topography may have led to Rohingya and Rakhaing emerging as separate versions of the same term in different geographical contexts that came, in the eighteenth century to be associated closely with the predominant religious makeup of the local area concerned.”

The evidence available shows that the term Rohingya was not widely used to describe a distinct ethnic group until the twentieth century. I would argue that the explanation for this is as simple as that there was no reason for the Rohingya to distinguish themselves in such a manner until the rise in Burma of the Bamar and other ethno-nationalisms against British colonialism.

The beginnings of the Burmese nationalist movement were strongly Buddhist in character, and some of the first nationalist leaders were monks. Thus, Burmese nationalism acquired a religious hue from the beginning. On the other hand, the Burmese have always viewed Indians with suspicion, and particularly Muslims. At that time, the general public did not distinguish much between Burmese Muslims and Indian Muslims, so Burmese Muslims felt they needed to distance themselves from Indian Muslims throughout the country.

The tensions between Buddhists and Muslims in Arakan, which had been mounting during colonial times, came to a head in the Second World War. When the British retreated to India and the Japanese advanced in Arakan, the Rakhine Buddhists sided mostly with the Japanese and the Burmese Independence Army of Aung San, while the Muslims were armed by the British; but the conflict soon turned into a civil war between Muslims and Buddhists. When the war ended, the north was mainly Muslim, the south was mainly Buddhist, and the communal divisions reached a point of no return.

Anti-Rohingya discourses often recall the Mujahid insurgency that took place in Arakan during the fifties. As the goal of some of the insurgents was the annexation of northern Arakan by East Pakistan, Rohingya are accused of disloyalty to the Burmese State. But there was scarcely any popular support for the rebellion, and many of its victims were Rohingya. In fact, some Rohingya leaders demanded U Nu to provide them with weapons in several occasions, a demand which was never met.

Meanwhile in Rangoon, Rakhine nationalists were pushing for a separate Arakan State, while Rohingya politicians, wary of their Rakhine neighbors after the Second World War sectarian violence, demanded a separate region in the north for them ruled directly by Rangoon. And during the Parliamentary period (1948-1962) and the first years of Ne Win’s dictatorship, there were not only many Rohingya organizations, both in Arakan and Rangoon, but the government recognized Rohingya as a Burmese ethnic group, as documents compiled by Dr. Zarni show.

It was the government of Ne Win and its military successors who denied Rohingya their rights and began to persecute them, from the mid-seventies until now. And it can be argued that, paradoxically, nothing has done more to reinforce the Rohingya identity than the attempts to suppress it.

Burma and its national identities

There is no historical precedent for an independent political entity for Burma as it exists now, and the different groups that make up the complex ethnic tapestry of Burma were never under the authority of a single government before the arrival of the British. Like many other post-Colonial countries, Burma emerged from British rule as a country deeply divided along ethnic and sectarian lines.

The Bamar was in some ways an underprivileged group during the colonial era but, after turning the tables in the Second World War, since independence it has become the privileged group. As a result of these competing nationalisms and the repeated attempts of the Bamar majority to impose its centralized vision of a Nation-State, the Burmese state has failed to generate a supra-national identity powerful enough to include and transcend the several ethno-nationalisms that awoke during colonial times.

The Rohingya identity is not more “artificial” or “invented” than any other, but the story of its ethnogenesis does not fit easily in the all too narrow concept of “national races” as is currently understood in Burma: ethnic groups which were already fully formed as we know them now in pre-colonial times. Others would also fail the test, because the test itself stems from a misunderstanding of ethnicity and group formation, but it is the political context that has determined that the Rohingya, and the Rohingya alone, should fail it. Their mere existence as a people is a serious challenge to the weak mainstream historical narrative imposed by the military regime.

This, and the Rohingya’s cultural, religious and linguistic differences, has made them expedient scapegoats in the context of a failed process of nation-building. Nothing glues together a divided community more than a common threat, real or imagined, and nothing has united the Rakhine and the Bamar more than identifying the Rohingya as their common enemy. The consequence is a campaign of ethnic cleansing that has been going on for decades. In this situation, it would be very naïve to believe that they are suffering such persecution because they have choose to call themselves Rohingya, a claim for ethnicity that they have as much right to make as any other community in Burma, instead of accepting the designation “Bengalis” enforced by the Burmese regime.

If, as Mr. Derek Tonkin claims, the word Rohingya “is offensive to many Burmese,” that tells us more about those Burmese than about the Rohingya themselves. Burmese define themselves and what it means to be Burmese in the very act of exclusion. What is at stake in the way that the Burmese nation treats and identifies the Rohingya and other Muslim communities is not only the future of those communities, but also the kind of Burma that the Burmese want to build for themselves.

Carlos Sardiña Galache is a freelance journalist based in Bangkok. A longer version of this essay is available here. You can visit his website here.