The Burmese Labyrinth. Carlos Sardiña Galache
wanted me to condemn one community or the other’, when nobody had asked her to take sides between the two communities. Then she adopted an equidistant position, saying that ‘both communities have suffered human rights violations, and have also violated human rights. And human rights have been grossly mishandled in the Rakhine by the government for many decades.’9 She was reducing the issue to a problem of intercommunal violence poorly handled by the military junta. As on so many other occasions, she insisted on the necessity to uphold the ‘rule of law’ to solve the problem. But the most telling passage of the interview was when she was first asked about the issue, when she replied: ‘Of course we are concerned. I think in many ways the situation has been mishandled. For years I have been insisting, and the National League for Democracy also, that we have to do something about the porous border with Bangladesh because it is going to lead some day or the other to grave problems.’ Framing the issue as a problem of illegal immigration, she echoed the sentiments of Win Tin; but she expressed herself more obliquely.
After the riots in June 2012, intercommunal relations steadily deteriorated in Arakan, as a result of a campaign of virulent anti-Muslim propaganda voiced by local Buddhist monks’ associations and the RNDP. Several organizations had distributed pamphlets among the Rakhine population warning them of the danger posed by the ‘Bengali invaders’, and calling them to avoid any interactions with their Rohingya neighbours. A statement released on 9 July by the monks’ association of Mrauk-U, the ancient capital of the Arakanese kingdom, read:
The Arakanese people must understand that Bengalis want to destroy the land of Arakan, are eating Arakan rice and plan to exterminate Arakanese people and use their money to buy weapons to kill Arakanese people. For this reason and from today, no Arakanese should sell any goods to Bengalis, hire Bengalis as workers, provide any food to Bengalis and have any dealings with them, as they are cruel by nature.10
Such calls were heeded by many in the Rakhine population, often with chilling zeal. In some parts of the state, those Rakhine who were discovered dealing with the Rohingya were publicly humiliated, and their pictures posted in Facebook. A picture dated in August, supposedly taken in Myebon, showed a man with his hands tied being paraded in the town with a placard hanging around his neck with a sign reading: ‘I am a traitor and a slave of Kalar’ – a derogatory term often used to refer to people of South Asian origin.11
The central government was doing very little to improve intercommunal relations in the state. In late August, Thein Sein sent a report to the country’s parliament that was leaked to Agence France-Press. It read: ‘Political parties, some monks and some individuals are increasing the ethnic hatred. They even approach and lobby both the domestic and overseas [Rakhine] community … [Rakhine] people are continuously thinking to terrorise the Bengali Muslims living across the country.’12 But the government did not take any measures to stop or counter such hate speech. The report may have been accurate, but it was also self-serving, as it contributed to the larger narrative of a primeval intercommunal hatred between the two communities that the government was striving to control, but could not eliminate. It also suppressed the role that the central government was playing in stoking those hatreds.
During the violence in June, Zaw Htay, the director of the president’s office, had posted on Facebook: ‘It is heard that Rohingya terrorists of the so-called Rohingya Solidarity Organization [ARNO] are crossing the border and getting into the country with the weapons. That is Rohingyas from other countries are coming into the country. Since our Military has got the news in advance, we will eradicate them until the end! I believe we are already doing it.’13 None of it was true. ARNO, a Rohingya armed group that had operated from Bangladesh in the nineties and had been inactive for decades, never made any incursion into Arakan, and no armed Rohingya crossed from Bangladesh. But the Facebook post served to confirm the fears of a terrorist assault expressed by the Buddhist monks I had interviewed in my first visit to Sittwe.
The narrative of an intractable intercommunal conflict and a government trying its best to solve it was convenient not only for the Thein Sein administration, but also for Western countries trying to establish relations with Burma. The United States was at the forefront of initiatives to end the isolation of Burma, as part of its ‘pivot to Asia’, designed to counterbalance China’s growing power in the region. After her visit in December 2011, Hillary Clinton claimed some credit for nurturing ‘flickers of progress into a real opening’ in the country.14
Then, in November 2012, Barack Obama became the first US president to visit the country, in a brief trip to Rangoon during which he gave his blessings to the transition. He gave a speech at Rangoon University, a traditional hotbed of student protests since colonial times. He defended the Rohingya, saying that they ‘hold themselves – hold within themselves the same dignity as you do, and I do’. But he also praised ‘the government’s commitment to address the issues of injustice and accountability, and humanitarian access and citizenship’.15
There was no reason to believe that the government had any serious intention to address such issues. On the contrary, its policies had contributed to worsening the situation in Arakan. At the very least, they had failed to prevent a second wave of violence only three weeks before Obama’s visit; but the US president refused to call out the Burmese government on this score.
The strict segregation of the two communities imposed after the riots in June had the stated purpose of preventing further violence, but had the perverse effect of making the rumours of nefarious Muslim plots seem more credible to the Rakhine. In many areas of the state ignorance grew within each community about the other; with intercommunal interactions reduced to a minimum, or even completely nonexistent in some areas, it had become more difficult to see the members of the other community as human individuals. On the contrary, they were feared as part of an undifferentiated mass.
Then, in late October, violence exploded throughout the state once again. On this occasion, it spread more widely than in June, encompassing several townships in central Arakan that had been spared in the past. The violence unfolded as a series of attacks on Muslim villages and quarters in nine of the seventeen townships in the state.16 By all accounts, the violence was mostly carried out by Rakhine mobs against Muslims. Moreover, this time there was a much higher level of coordination and organization than in June.17
The violence unfolded in various ways, depending on the location, but a common pattern would emerge in later investigations: a Rakhine mob would gather around a Muslim village or quarter and, after shouting insults and threats, attack it by throwing Molotov cocktails and jinglees (small arrows made with bicycle spikes and launched with slingshots). Many witnesses, both Muslim and Rakhine, reported that they could not recognize most of the attackers, indicating they had been taken from other areas. As in June, the police stood aside, or participated actively in the attacks against the Muslims. When the riots finished, many Muslim settlements had been razed to the ground again; an indeterminate number of people (mostly Muslims) had been killed, including around seventy in a single incident in Mrauk-U; and approximately 30,000 had been displaced from their houses, most of them Muslims.
I travelled to Arakan for the second time shortly after the October riots. On that occasion, I was able to travel to Kyaukpyu, on Ramree Island, with the Wan Lark Foundation, a local organization delivering donations to Rakhine people displaced by the violence. On the edge of the town lies the Muslim quarter, East Pikesake, which had been turned into a devastated landscape of debris and burnt trees, with the ashes of arson still covering the roads and what was left of the houses.18 The destruction was almost completely limited to the Muslim quarter, with only a few houses beyond its margins destroyed.
Local Rakhine witnesses alleged that the Muslims had initiated the attack, so I asked them why only Muslim houses had been burnt. They replied that the Muslims had torched their own homes before fleeing in boats. That night, in the hostel where we stayed, a young member of the organization proudly showed me a video of Rakhine people of all ages training with sticks to the tune of a patriotic song. ‘We have to protect ourselves’, said an older member, visibly embarrassed that I had been allowed to see those images. Then he changed his tune, somewhat contradicting himself: ‘But this is just for show, it’s not real training.’
In the