In the morning of Aug 25, 2017, a group of militants belonging to the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) unco-ordinatedly attacked police and border guards in northern Arakan (Rakhine) state, killing at least 12 officers. The Myanmar Armed Forces, known as the Tatmadaw, retaliated by launching a military counter-insurgency campaign in order to capture the perpetrators who attacked the border garrisons.
Burmese Labyrinth: A History Of The Rohingya Tragedy
By Carlos Sardiña Galache
Verso
293pp
I'm a dove on the street of Yangon,
jailed in the cage of inhumanity.I'm the water flowing in Mayu river,
missing my partner -- Air.
I'm a human in the universe,
denied the most basic rights.
I'm someone I'm afraid of.
Zaki Ovais, Someone I'm Afraid Of
In the morning of Aug 25, 2017, a group of militants belonging to the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) unco-ordinatedly attacked police and border guards in northern Arakan (Rakhine) state, killing at least 12 officers. The Myanmar Armed Forces, known as the Tatmadaw, retaliated by launching a military counter-insurgency campaign in order to capture the perpetrators who attacked the border garrisons.
It was a campaign that did not separate the militants from the civilians. Murders, rapes, prosecutions without proper investigation. Villagers' homes were burned to the ground.
This sparked a tremendous exodus in which entire communities of Rohingya fled Burma on foot through dense and mountainous forest, and crossed the Naf River, which marked the border of southeastern Bangladesh and western Myanmar, into Bangladesh. Today, over 900,000 Rohingya are living in Bangladesh, most of them in the densely populated Kutupalong-Balukhali expansion complex, the largest refugee camp in the world.
Although two-and-a-half years have passed since this mass exodus from Myanmar took place, the plight of the Rohingya people remains as desolate as ever. And whereas this massive forced migration was unprecedented in the eyes of the international community, this was not the first time the Rohingya have been discarded from their native land in the west of Myanmar. In terms of records in literature and media, we have accumulated analyses of the extent to which the Rohingya have been suffering. But the root causes of their struggles over successive waves of violence and persecution in their country have long been insufficiently analysed and understood.
Burmese Labyrinth: A History Of The Rohingya Tragedy by Carlos Sardiña Galache attempts to provide a comprehensive understanding of this issue in the context of conflicting nationalism inside Myanmar.
Sardiña Galache is a Spanish journalist based in Bangkok and has been reporting on ethnic conflicts in Myanmar since 2012. From his experience on the field, he uses a first-hand ethnographic approach, coupled with historical research which put "the rim" (Arakan state) at the centre of narratives. Sardiña Galache begins by pointing to the limitations of the 2008 Constitution of Myanmar in the aspect of inclusion. The constitution divided Myanmar into seven "regions" -- the home of the ethnic majority in central Myanmar, and seven "states" in the periphery, where most ethnic minorities reside, further maginalising people in the periphery from the already very heterogeneous state of Myanmar.
In Arakan, centre of the Rohingya crisis, the state is separated from central Myanmar, north to south, by the Arakan Mountains, or Rakhine Yoma. It's the second poorest state in the country, and plagued by ethno-nationalist conflicts between armed groups and those in authority. The most active Buddhist nationalist group is the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party (RNDP) who have attempted to secede from the central Myanmar state since independence.
The junta permitted some ethnic groups to run for election in 2010. Both the RNDP and Rohingya voted, to the resentment of the former. The ramifications of the vote, if anything, re-emphasised the conflict between the two main communities, Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims, but it shed light to a more complex issue.
The Rakhine resented that the Rohingya had a political voice at a transitional period of country into democracy. They lamented that their place was trapped between the Myanmarese and the "Bengali" (Rohingya), an old canard that suggests the latter came from foreign shores. Here, we can see the triangular conflicts between the Rakhine, the Myanmarese and the Rohingya. Whereas the first two generally avoid conflict with each other, the last is a common target of their united discrimination and hatred. It's a tri-partisan relationship in which one "feeds the resentment against the other". And as the transition into democracy progressed, these tri-conflicts worsened. They manifested themselves in "the intercommunal violence in Arakan… Burman ethno-nationalism that seemed to permeate every stratum of society; and the ambiguous, and sometimes explicitly racist, position taken by the pro-democracy camp".
In defence of the Rohingya's place in Arakan, Sardiña Galache writes that their record of settlement can be found prior to the age of the British Raj in the writing of Francis Buchanan in 1799. Under British rule, they returned to then Burma to become the subject of British dominion. In World War II, during a brief stint of Japanese intrusion, they became part of the Union of Burma which gained independence in 1948. Changes imposed on them by various rulers paid little attention to the fact that moving borders means a new chapter of life in which they had to confront new neighbours and those who came to live beside them.
Then, the census, an essential emblem of colonialism, assailed them. It further exacerbated the "minorities issue", often leading to complicated identity issues, discontent and endurance. The Rohingya are a tragic anomaly. Post-independent Myanmar has been intolerant of them and finally refused to acknowledge them as citizens in toto. In a Buddhist country, in which the Muslims account for only 5% of its total 53 million population, insufficient efforts have been made to provide the rights which the Rohingya need. The Rohingya communities who fled Myanmar suffered and endured discrimination, racism,and economic inequality in their own land. Until now, the law protecting legal rights of minority groups virtually excludes the Rohingya.
Socially, the term Rohingya has never been part of the Myanmar vocabulary. The Myanmar majority, Rakhine nationalists, ethno-religious Buddhist monks, and pro-democracy activists -- the 88 Generation included -- have never accepted the use of the term. As a result, the Rohingya are described anachronistically as "Bengali immigrants", and therefore treated as those of external origin.
Sardiña Galache pulls no punches on his assessment of the leadership of the National League of Democracy (NLD) and its charismatic leader, Aung San Suu Kyi. Although Suu Kyi could not become president because the constitution forbids her, by 2016, through the role of "state counsellor", she was de facto the leader of Myanmar. Uncertain in both ideology and political philosophy, Suu Kyi and the NLD focused on a vague concept of "national reconciliation", suggesting that she and her pro-democracy party members and the military had growing entente, without being further antagonisting to each other. The ethnic conflicts in the periphery were sidelined and viewed as part of the NLD's struggle for democracy, ignoring ethnic peoples' plights, problems, needs and agendas.
Suu Kyi and some NLD members who were interviewed by Sardiña Galache were willing to answer his questions as long as they didn't go too far and touch upon the sensitive issue of the Rohingya. In other words, they failed to deliver an alternative policy on the issue of ethnic conflicts, unable to come up with a strategy to include ethnic minorities into the "nation" of Myanmar. Suu Kyi and the Tatmadaw, in this light, were no different in their respective positions in solving the long overdue ethnic issues inside Myanmar. And as Sardiña Galeche argues, Suu Kyi isn't keen to exercise her considerable moral authority to set a tangible agenda along this line.
Burmese Labyrinth isn't a book for light reading. But once you pull all the threads together, one begins to sense that this is a meticulously researched book, not only on the Rohingya, but Myanmar itself. For his theory of competing ethno-nationalism and religions, Sardiña Galache has found the way in which we should question and review the Myanmar issue in light of ethnic fragilities and the consequence which may entail.
Toward the end, he argues that the unity of Myanmar is not to be found in the state ideology of "national race" or "national unity" as propagated by the Tatmadaw or Suu Kyi. Only in acknowledging the plights and fights of the ethnic minorities that constitute the country, can Myanmar be freed of its labyrinth of broken dreams.
