Myanmar's Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and the Making of a Muslim ‘Other’ 9781350297951, 9781786995773

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Numerous people helped, from near and afar, with the research and writing of this book. The characters featured in these pages, who form the backbone of the story I’ve tried to tell, were often approached in roadside teashops or at the doorways of their homes, unaware they would be drawn into a conversation of a deeply personal, and sometimes painful, nature. But all were generous with their time and thoughts, and I owe a great debt to them. Friends and colleagues offered valuable feedback on structure and content, and plugged important gaps in my reading of the events documented in these pages. In particular I am grateful to Carlos Sardiña Galache, Matthew Schissler, Aung Tun, Elliott Prasse-Freeman, Sai Latt, Matthew Walton, Maung Zarni, Charlie Campbell, Taylor O’Connor, Charles Petrie and Pierre Péron for their input on key, and complex, topics. At Zed Books, Kim Walker and Paul French provided useful advice on drafts, and patiently postponed the deadline more than once. Chris Lewa has, since I first began exploring this issue, kindly provided invaluable material and information, and I am lucky to have been able to bounce ideas around with the team at the International State Crime Initiative – Penny Green, Thomas McManus and Alicia de la Cour-Venning – whose own research has been vital to informing my own. Some of the content of this book, particularly in chapters 5, 7 and 8, drew on reporting I had undertaken for TIME, Los vi i

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Angeles Review of Books, The Irrawaddy and ucanews.com. I am grateful for their permission to rework the material in here. Elsewhere, firsthand accounts I collected of the violence and its aftermath were furnished with information from reports published by Human Rights Watch, Fortify Rights, Amnesty International and Physicians for Human Rights, all of which have carried out important research into the events of recent years. The research I undertook in Bangladesh would not have been possible without a generous grant from the American Jewish World Service, for which I am grateful. BRAC, or the Bangladesh Rehabilitation Assistance Committee, kindly helped with access to Kutupalong camp. Many thanks to those in Yangon and elsewhere in the country who gave crucial contributions to this book that cannot be acknowledged in its pages – Sophia Naing, Harry Myo Lin, U Soe Oo and Saw Nang in particular. In Yangon, Sam Aung Moon provided important translations, often sitting patiently through inordinately long interviews. Ali Fowle has been endlessly helpful over the years, somehow weathering my incessant pestering, while Joseph Allchin has provided a wealth of thoughts and ideas for me to mine. I am also grateful to the staff at the Democratic Voice of Burma, which I joined as a young journalist in 2009 and, in time, came to learn a great deal from colleagues there, many of whom had fled from the very same system of oppression and the horrors it brought that I would report on in the years afterwards. My experience there provided a foundation for all that followed. vi i i

Acknowledgements

Yetike and KH have been vital to my understanding of Myanmar, and have sacrificed a great deal of their time to translate, to guide, to support, to provide an intellectual crutch … it goes on. Their grasp of the murky politics of their country has greatly strengthened my own, and without their generosity and friendship this book would have been that much harder to complete. Friends and family across the world have provided muchneeded support and a welcome distraction throughout, and I owe a great debt to them all. Above all else, my mother and father, Kristin Wade and Malcolm Andrews, were present throughout this book, providing support and offering the finest advice on drafts. Words cannot express how grateful I am for this and everything else they have done.

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For my mother and father, whose love and support underpins all this

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This book draws on research undertaken over a number of trips to Myanmar and Bangladesh between 2012 and 2018 to report on the violence and its aftermath. Some lasted weeks, others months. Care has been taken to change the names of characters who requested it, or who I felt could not be safely identified. Close surveillance of the population has continued well into the era of civilian rule, and brings with it often horrendous consequences for those considered to have slandered the military, the government, and now even the monkhood. I have also mostly opted to use Myanmar over Burma. Although it was the military that arbitrarily made the switch in 1989, Myanmar has become the name most commonly used by those inside the country. To maintain consistency, I have also used the current names for states and divisions, rather than those introduced by the British but also dropped in 1989. As such, Yangon refers to Rangoon, Rakhine State refers to the old Arakan State, and Kayin State to Karen State. The majority Bamar ethnic group had once been known as the Burman. I have opted to use Bamar, but its old incarnation appears in quotes throughout this book.

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PROLOGUE

Some villagers likened the sound of the gunfire to rainfall. The patter-patter, the short bursts, the sense of not knowing where it might land or how heavily it would fall. And then the rising panic as the scattered bursts became a constant barrage, the volume building and moving closer like the way a distant monsoon front rides in across the fields, soon to wash over everything. Others described it as like the sound of ten, then a hundred, then a thousand sewing machines jumping into life, the rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat multiplying at speed, creating a wall of noise that encircled the village and rose higher with each minute that passed. It was all they could hear, see and think, and it sent people running back inside buildings or running in whichever direction was forward. Those already inside their homes quickly dropped to the floor, behind walls and doors, watching through gaps as dozens, then hundreds outside screamed frenziedly through the streets. Mothers carrying babies were pitched violently forward, their figures splaying on the ground and rolling or skidding as if some invisible force had struck them sharp in the back. Anyone caught in the open took flight through the alleyways and into ponds and bushes, the gunfire deafening and unending, this quiet farming village convulsing in the mid-afternoon light. 1

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Several men, still idly making their way back to their homes after a prayer gathering, had seen the soldiers before they heard the noise. To the west of Chut Pyin they had moved quietly in file along a raised bank that split two paddy fields, pausing before turning to face the houses. Another line flanked the east, and many more waited on the road north. It was the sheer number of troops, hundreds of them filling the surrounding fields, that sent the first villagers into a panicked state. None had seen this before. And before they could find cover, the first soldiers entered and the rainfall began. The attack had started around two o’clock in the afternoon on a Sunday, 27 August 2017. For five hours the soldiers worked their way through the streets and from house to house. Those who remained hiding inside the compounds of their buildings waited for the frenzy to pass, but the soldiers were methodical. Rohingya men were pulled into front yards, laid on the ground next to their children and executed; women were taken into outhouses, tied with rope and visited by gangs of troops. They shot at anything that moved and threw gasoline onto the roofs of buildings and lit them one by one, blanketing the village in a smoke so thick that it cast an eerie darkness and allowed villagers to momentarily disappear back into the haze. Groups of men, women and children were dragged to the primary school in the north-east corner and forced into different rooms or thrown down beneath a tree in the yard, their hands and feet bound, before being shot. At the southern end of the village ten people threw themselves into a pond and sank their heads and bodies under the surface until their breath ran out and they were forced back up. In the foliage at the edge of the pond they found large 2

P rologue

taro leaves and placed them over their faces, craning upwards so that just their noses and mouths were above water, and they remained there silent for several hours. For the two days prior, across a finger of land 100 kilometres wide and 200 long, battalions of Myanmar soldiers had gone from one Rohingya village to the next, on occasion moving by night and encircling villages as they slept. Their methods varied: there might be a warning in advance, a window of time in which inhabitants could flee; other times it was the gunfire that first announced the coming turmoil. Those who made it out from Chut Pyin that night of 27 August found themselves joining many thousands of other Rohingya already moving towards Bangladesh, the first wave in an exodus of refugees that, all told, was faster and more concentrated than any since the Rwanda genocide of 1994. By the middle of September, more than 300,000 had crossed the border; by 1 October, five weeks after the military opened fire on the first villages, the number passed half a million. At the very tip of south-eastern Bangladesh, just below the town of Teknaf, Rohingya alighted from fishing boats that had carried them over the Naf River from the Myanmar side and walked, exhausted, up a crumbling raised concourse, once a narrow road that had long since been eroded by storm damage. Some had bullet wounds loosely bound in cloth; others carried babies born days before as they fled across the mountain range.

Two weeks into the violence, when I arrived in Bangladesh, upwards of 15,000 Rohingya were crossing each day. But even 3

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seeing the exodus close up, so much was still unfathomable – the scale of it all, the condition of those arriving, bent over and beaten as if they had walked through a storm; the imagining one had to do, for that was all one could do, of the horrors that had propelled this flight. Testimony was being collected from new arrivals and day by day a picture of the events was forming, but the geography of the violence kept changing. Behind each mass of people that came, another soon followed; deep into Myanmar, more waves of Rohingya were heading for the border, a sixty kilometre front of people moving westwards, passing by villages that had met the same fate as theirs, driven forward by the ever-present fear of being attacked once again. Every day, stories from different clusters of villages meant that the radius of analysis needed to be widened further. How many villages had been hit, and how thorough had the military’s cleansing been? The smoke from burning villages that I could see from the Bangladesh side of the river – was that where the violence had been particularly severe? Or could it be that, behind the wall of mountains, the billowing grey-black towers were even more numerous? Chut Pyin hadn’t been the only village to be targeted in such a fashion. In time it became clear that similar patterns of violence had played out elsewhere in western Myanmar, often on the same day and by troops from the same battalions. The military had a long record of civilian atrocities, not just in the blighted north of Rakhine state, where this campaign was underway, but throughout the mountainous border regions of Myanmar. Yet this was different. The intensity of the violence had not been seen before, and the rallying cries that accompa4

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nied it, from both the civilian government and a vocal segment of the population, elevated the military to defenders of the country against a scheming, interloping Muslim minority. The local dynamics were different too. Across northern Rakhine State, villagers from the Rakhine ethnicity who often lived in houses a stone’s throw from the soon-to-be dead or displaced Rohingya had assisted the soldiers, directing them through the streets and helping to cut down whomever of their neighbours escaped the bullets. This wasn’t the first wave of violence to strike western Myanmar upon the country’s transition from outright military rule, but it was far and away the deadliest, and it linked in discomfiting ways to the democratic opening: to the greater space for free expression, the jockeying for power among an emergent political elite, and the newfound agency being exercised by communities long denied that. And what about democracy itself, a term so synonymous with the movements for change that have come and gone in Myanmar? Perhaps the growing calls for the expulsion of a minority group signalled that democracy mightn’t have necessarily been viewed as a step in the direction of equality for all, but rather the pursuit of an ideal nation, arbitrarily defined but so delicate a conception that any obstacles in the way of it needed removing. Rohingya were seen as intruders who would open the door to a deeper Muslim penetration of Buddhist society there. In time, they would undermine the delicate position of communities that claimed the country as their own. The testimony that emerged from Bangladesh in the weeks after the exodus began – of summary execution of Rohingya children, mass 5

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rapes of women by soldiers – was met with jeering from inside Myanmar. Voices of dissent against the violence were silenced, and the civilian government of Aung San Suu Kyi, that once mighty democratic force, closed ranks behind the military. How had it come to this?

In Chut Pyin, as night fell on 27 August, the shooting began to fade and the people in the pond waited for a signal that it was safe to move. Lying there as the darkness crept in, one of the men heard from nearby a familiar voice call out: “Oh father, please come out if you are hiding somewhere.” He paused, silent, and the call came again. Removing the taro leaf from his face he climbed up the bank of the pond, followed by the nine others. The village was mostly ash and flame, and the smoke was still so thick it mixed with the darkness and disoriented them. At a distance they saw the outlines of people moving south through the village. Understanding they were not soldiers they approached them and began to walk. The group left the southern limits, skirting a larger pond where four bodies lay along one of the banks, and passed through the clumps of trees out into the paddy fields. They thought they were the only survivors but up in front of them, somewhere in the darkening fields, they could make out the bodies of men, women and children, once prone but now stirring to life and rising up from the ground, having narrowly avoided death by feigning it. Those who made it out from Chut Pyin soon gathered inside the homes of a nearby Rohingya village, Ah Htet Nan 6

P rologue

Yar. The survivors from the pond peeled off from one another and sought out relatives. Inside his house, under low light so as not to attract soldiers, a village medic was already going to work on the wounded. Later that night, small teams of men used the cover of darkness to track back across the fields to Chut Pyin, where structures still burned brightly. They brought back the injured, but the bodies of many men, women and children that lay charred or bleeding and motionless in the streets and inside houses were left. To the west of the village, at a distance of no more than 500 metres, the flat plain upon which the surrounding fields criss-cross like a patchwork rises suddenly into a long, north– south snaking mountain range. Unbeknownst to the teams that returned to Chut Pyin that night, another mass of bodies lay there. As the advance group of soldiers had gone to work on the village that afternoon, a second line waited on the road running along the foot of the mountain. Those who had fled west at the sound of gunfire in the hope of finding sanctuary somewhere on the forested slopes were intercepted and killed. Having split from his group upon arrival at Ah Htet Nan Yar, the man who had been first to climb out of the pond went to look for his son, whose voice he had heard hours earlier while lying in the water. On the road just north of the village he found him alone, waiting for other family members to arrive. They walked back to the village and on the way the father gave thanks to his son, but he returned a blank look. He had fled Chut Pyin not long into the massacre and had not been near the pond where his father hid. It wasn’t he who had called out. The man knew his senses had been confused but he had 7

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been certain of that voice and its owner. He later asked others from the group. They had heard it too, not only once, but twice, coming through the darkness, giving them confidence to move. But quickly the man came to believe his son, and he came to believe that in the hell of that afternoon he had been helped by another hand. And like so many of the villagers who avoided death by a sliver of time or good fortune, he thanked Allah for sending a signal through the smoke and darkness that it was safe to leave. Sometime after midnight, sure that the soldiers were no longer nearby, many of the villagers grouped together in Ah Htet Nan Yar and began to make for the mountains. Over several days they crossed the range, sleeping out in the open, before descending the other side to the flat ground of the coastal plain below, where they passed other blackened, ghostly villages now emptied of their inhabitants. Upon reaching the banks of the Naf River they cut a line north to a site on the river’s edge, where thousands of others who had fled their villages were gathered. There they waited for two days for boats to carry them over to the south-easternmost tip of Bangladesh, where a camp was spreading at lightning speed across the cleared hillsides. Once across, they could look back to Myanmar. Boats were tacking back and forth between shores, and beyond them, in the distance, columns of smoke climbed upwards from still burning villages, mapping point by point the sites of the August killings onto the sky.

8

1

A POPULAR MASSACRE WHEN NEIGHBOUR TURNS ON NEIGHBOUR

Ahmed’s memory of the meeting that took place five days before the attack on Chut Pyin is punctuated with the severe, uncompromising voice of the man who warned that trouble would soon come. The twenty-five-year-old had been mazhi, or community leader, of the village for two years, and it was he who was asked to gather Rohingya elders together on the morning of 22 August and bring them to the same primary school that would later serve as the main execution ground during the massacre. I had sought Ahmed out upon visiting the sprawling, city-sized Kutupalong camp in Bangladesh for a second time, nearly a year after the attack. He lived in a hut on a hillside in the Thangkali district of the camp, where those who made it out from Chut Pyin had been rehoused. Their shelters were small, but not cramped – they had arrived with very little, and accumulated only what the market in the camp offered: plastic stools, mats, cooking equipment. The floors of the huts were concrete and the walls made of latticed wooden panels covered in tarpaulin. In the hot season they roasted, and during the monsoon months the rain battered down on the overhead sheeting, providing a loud background drumbeat to life in the camp. 11

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Ahmed would sit cross-legged on the floor, his eyes soft and his voice low and measured. He had a warm but diffident air about him. Although elected by his own villagers several years before to serve as the voice of the Rohingya community in Chut Pyin, there had been, he now explained, limits to his authority there. Chut Pyin is effectively split into two villages: from the air the Rohingya quarter looks like a fattened figure of eight, and at its north-east edge, across a narrow field, lies the Rakhine quarter. Near to the primary school is a small police post. Soldiers would regularly visit Rohingya houses, and on becoming mazhi, it had been Ahmed’s job to negotiate the transactions that took place. The arriving troops, often young and brash, might order villagers to help break rocks for a new road, or to hand over cattle as part of the off-the-books taxation system they were told guarded them from further abuse. When they did, there was little Ahmed could do; all he could tell the bereft villagers was that the community would come together and buy them a new cow. That morning of 22 August, Ahmed had taken a phone call from the village administrator, a Rakhine man who lived in a house a ten-minute walk across the field from his. As long as Ahmed had been mazhi the two had interacted on a near daily basis, in person as much as over the phone. The relationship wasn’t easy – Rohingya villagers regularly complained that the administrator extorted money from them, or threatened them with violence; sometimes even that he had taken part in violence himself. But in the two months prior to the August attack it had worsened, and his posturing towards Ahmed and 12

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the other villagers, aggressive and obdurate, suggested a deepening animosity. The conversation over the telephone that morning was no less discomfiting. He and the other elders were to gather shortly before midday at the primary school where a meeting would be held. That was all. The mazhi stopped by several houses and repeated the summons, and late in the morning they walked together along the track towards the school. It wasn’t that a meeting in and of itself was unusual. Township officials, military or police regularly came to the village and gathered both Rohingya and Rakhine elders together. Sometimes the discussion was informal, but mostly the tone was antagonistic and the agenda hostile. Rohingya might be reminded that under law they were allowed no more than two children, and that officials suspected them to be producing more. Their wives needed to stop giving birth, the men would be told. If a structure was built or repaired without permission, perhaps the roof of a house damaged in a storm, then Rohingya would be threatened with arrest. Sometimes, even, they might be taken straight from the meeting to the police station, only returning weeks or months later. This was routine behaviour, in place for as long as the villagers could remember, and it had produced a perverse normality in which Rohingya had almost every aspect of their life closely monitored by nearby authorities. But Ahmed and the others soon knew that the meeting that morning would be different. Ahead of them on the track were groups of soldiers, waiting and watching. They walked past and entered the main hallway of the school. Inside was a 13

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high-ranking police chief, flanked by other junior police officers that Ahmed recognised, and a military chief he hadn’t seen before. Next to them was the Rakhine village administrator. Through his interactions over the years Ahmed had come to know by face the various army officers that were stationed nearby, but the military chief and his men had come from further afield, from Sagaing Division to the north-east of Rakhine State. For several years officials of all stripes had been coming to Chut Pyin with an offer that, as time went by, increasingly became a demand, irrefusable and ever more threatening. In late 2015, the Myanmar government began pushing so-called National Verification Cards on Rohingya. Accepting these would ostensibly kick-start the process for applying for citizenship, without which Rohingya had long existed at the fringes of Myanmar society. Soon, the tight restrictions Rohingya faced on their movement and their access to public services would be lifted, so they were told, and the quarantinelike conditions they lived under would ease. The chief had been clear from the start that this would again be the topic of discussion, but his unsparing tone showed the young mahzi that there was a new urgency to the ultimatum. From time to time in previous meetings, Rohingya might question, even contest, a demand. It would only be done cautiously, and when being spoken to by a figure of authority they were familiar with. But no one in the audience that day said a word. The military chief stood behind a table and began. “Now I’m telling you that you need to listen to what I’m saying. The government sent us here to implement certain things. The 14

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issue is that you are not from this country; you are here illegally, and you need to follow what we say.” The chief continued: “There is a plan to give you the card. If you continue to reject it, we will do our best to kill everyone here; we will burn your village to ash. It’s not a big deal for us to do it – we’ve done it elsewhere before when people didn’t listen to what we told them.” The villagers were gathered in front of him in silence. “No one asked any questions”, Ahmed said. “We just listened to what he said. They had used aggressive language before but this was different.” It had been for one particular reason that Rohingya had consistently refused to accept the cards. Officials were initially demanding they register as Bengali. Yet to do so, Rohingya countered, would amount to acquiescence in their own ostracisation from society – an acceptance that, as a popular view in Myanmar held, they were not indigenous to Myanmar, but had crossed over en masse from Bangladesh and settled illegally. Even after the order to include mention of ethnicity and religion on the card was dropped, they still refused, for the government might be up to its old tricks. In times past their identification documents had been confiscated by officials on the promise that new ones would arrive, but they never did. Rather than be incorporated further into Myanmar society, their position as the years passed had become ever more precarious. How could they be sure that this time it would be different? All Ahmed could say at the end of the meeting was that he would discuss the order with his village. The military chief told him to respond by the end of the following day. Ahmed left the 15

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hall feeling dark, and overcome, he said, by a powerful sense that all was not right. The next morning he brought villagers together and outlined the demand. Still they refused. He told of the trouble that would come – not the specific nature of it, for that had not been made clear, but rather that when the warning had been given, there was something of a finality to it that Ahmed hadn’t heard before. The young man knew his role was to act as the community’s voice, not its counterweight, and later he telephoned the Rakhine village administrator and told him their response. The voice at the other end warned that they should leave the country or be killed. “Don’t you remember that?”, it barked. But their decision was final, and both hung up. Little did Ahmed know that, five days later, as the soldiers moved into the village and began firing, it would be the administrator directing them through the streets of Chut Pyin, calling out the hiding places of Rohingya and instructing troops where to shoot.

The first attacks on Rohingya villages in northern Rakhine State took place two days before Chut Pyin was hit, and for long afterwards the military claimed its operation was merely reactionary. I had been in London when, on the morning of 25 August 2017, news reports started to come through of an assault on police outposts in northern Rakhine State by a Rohingya militant group. Some thirty were struck in a coordinated move by groups of men carrying sticks, machetes and homemade explosives. Fourteen security personnel were 16

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killed and, as the armed men disappeared into the forests or villages of the region, the army began its sweep. The Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) had first come to public attention the previous October, when a similar assault on security targets was met with a campaign of violence by the military that forced more than 65,000 Rohingya into Bangladesh, and that foreshadowed what would come, with a far greater intensity, the following year. It was led by Rohingya émigrés raised in Saudi Arabia, and had been formed under the banner of al-Yaqin, or Faith Movement, in the wake of violence between Rakhine and Rohingya in 2012 that forced tens of thousands of Rohingya into camps or left them confined within their villages. The group, whose senior command was rumoured to have received training in Pakistan, quietly drew on familial contacts and local imams in Bangladesh and Rakhine State to cultivate a network of foot soldiers in the rural farming villages of the north, where Rohingya are a majority in a state otherwise dominated by ethnic Rakhine Buddhists. As the military drew its dragnet across that pocket of Rakhine State after the October 2016 attacks, arrests were made and interrogations began. State-run media claimed alliances had been made between ARSA and foreign terrorist networks. Its leaders had posed as refugees, the New Light of Myanmar newspaper claimed, and set up base in Bangladesh, where they courted jihadist groups. After releasing a number of videos and taking to social media to refute the terrorist allegations, ARSA then disappeared from view. Months passed and no one seemed to know 17

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the whereabouts of its leadership, nor the extent to which it was still active, save for the periodic disappearances of government informants among Rohingya in the villages and the discovery of training camps in the mountains. But then it struck again in August 2017, and the exodus began. Several weeks into the military’s campaign, as tens of thousands still poured into Bangladesh and villages continued to burn, the UN warned that a “textbook case of ethnic cleansing” was underway. But inside Myanmar an altogether different version of events was developing. The military held fast to a line soon echoed by the Aung San Suu Kyi-led government, that this was a precision clearance operation intended to rout “terrorists” belonging to ARSA. The insurgent group repeatedly claimed to have only political goals – the conferring of citizenship and equal rights on the stateless Rohingya; freedom to practise their Islamic beliefs – but it was an unknown entity, formed quietly and sanctioned by clerics in Pakistan and elsewhere. Its murky composition and intent fed an increasingly popular counter-narrative inside Myanmar that saw ARSA, and the broader Rohingya population, as the principal aggressors, backed by dark elements in the Muslim world. Both military and government officials claimed that it had been the militants who were burning Rohingya villages in a bid to frame the army as chiefly responsible for the violence, and that Rohingya who fled were fabricating tales of atrocities. The military may have had a history of brutality towards minority groups, but not in this instance, so it went: Rohingya were conspiring to tarnish the country’s image and to cultivate international support for their grab at citizenship. 18

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In the sweep, Rohingya men and boys were pulled from their villages, accused of assisting the group, and taken to military bases and tortured. The Facebook page of Myanmar’s military chief Min Aung Hlaing was quickly populated with posts warning of this new threat and proclaiming the need for a swift and sharp deterrence, and it became obvious that ARSA offered something the military had long wanted: a common enemy. Min Aung Hlaing beseeched the public to get behind his men, but the threat, as he saw it, wasn’t just from the fitful band of villagers-cum-guerrillas led by an elusive senior command; rather, the broader “Bengali issue”, he said, had become a “national cause and we need to be united in establishing the truth.”1 ARSA may have been emblematic of what Rakhine, and many others in Myanmar, had long feared: an empowered Rohingya minority that could exploit the political transition to gain a stronger foothold in the country, and thereby begin to usurp the position of indigenous Buddhist communities. But their strategic value to the military didn’t go unnoticed. It found that any dissent against its so-called “clearance operation”, which was forcing thousands to flee every day, was quickly rounded upon by a vocal cross-section of the public inside Myanmar. In the twisted logic of a state that saw ethnic or religious identity as the chief indicator of where loyalties might lie, every Rohingya was a conspirator, and therefore criticism of the military’s razing of civilian villages was tantamount to support for terrorists. The accounts given by fleeing Rohingya were widely dismissed as fiction – sob stories designed to elicit international sympathy for a conniving Bengali 19

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immigrant community. The UN reported “mass rapes” of Rohingya women by soldiers; Suu Kyi’s office countered by claiming Rohingya women were trading in “fake news”. UN Special Rapporteur Yanghee Lee said six months after it began that the military’s campaign bore the “hallmarks of genocide”. Public opinion remained unbowed.

In different villages the violence of 2017 had taken different forms. “At two o’clock I realised something was happening”, Ahmed had said, before recalling, with a strange detachment, how the first bullets ripped through the afternoon quiet. He had been at his sister’s house on the western edge of the village that afternoon to charge his phone, and upon seeing the soldiers in the field just beyond the village perimeter, ran to the southern edge, where more had gathered, and then back inside to a neighbour’s house. In Chut Pyin, villagers had a window of only minutes, if not seconds, in which they could comprehend and process what, from seemingly nowhere, was suddenly upon them. But in other villages, military commanders had arrived with their guns lowered and a notice: vacate the village and leave for Bangladesh. Yours will be next. And in others still, it was clear well in advance that something was happening, but what might ultimately unfold was unclear. One of these was Zay Di Pyin. Two days before Chut Pyin burned, Ahmed had seen smoke rising from this village, three kilometres away across the paddy fields. He knew then that a month-long effort by the Rakhine residents of Zay Di 20

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Pyin to drive out the Rohingya from the village had reached its culmination. The ARSA attacks of October 2016 triggered far more than just the military’s sweep of northern Rakhine State. That campaign was only the more explicit manifestation of a further deterioration, alarming in its speed and trajectory, in more general conditions for Rohingya. It fed an already toxic communal dynamic in the region, and crystallised a longstanding fear among Rakhine, and increasingly the broader Buddhist population in Myanmar, that the million or so Rohingya of western Myanmar posed a distinct security threat that required urgent remedying. In doing so it empowered Rakhine civilians, aided by authorities, to take measures in the months after October 2016 to contain that supposed threat: to confine Rohingya inside their villages, to render them unable to move freely, and to limit, if not sever entirely, life-supporting aid to them. Early in July 2017 a meeting similar to that which Ahmed attended in Chut Pyin had taken place in nearby Zay Di Pyin. This time, members of each of the eighty-four households in the Rohingya quarter, totalling around 600 people, were called to join. There were no military officials present, only staff from the immigration department, the local Rakhine village administrator and, outside the building, a number of Border Guard Police personnel. The tone of the immigration official who led the meeting was less severe this time, but the emphasis was the same: Rohingya would need to accept the National Verification Card; if they refused, they would not be allowed to move from their quarter. 21

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The villagers then left. They had gone through this before and, like the majority of others, had refused. This time would be no different. Although the absence of a physical threat of violence meant they did not experience to the same degree the fear that had washed over the Chut Pyin residents when they heard news of the military chief’s warning, attendees at the Zay Di Pyin meeting were angry. They had been told that they did not belong in Myanmar, that they were “illegals”. And the frequency of these declarations from officials was increasing. It seemed as if something – they didn’t know what – was closing in on them. In times past there had been no explicit borderline between the Rohingya and Rakhine quarters of Zay Di Pyin. The mosque that Rohingya worshipped in lay just inside the Rakhine quarter; Rohingya would shop and sell in the marketplace several streets away, alongside Rakhine traders; Rakhine could walk freely through their neighbourhood to the shrimp pond at the west of the Rohingya quarter where they worked, and northwards to the jetty that poked out into the river. Like many of the villages of Rakhine State, the two communities had once shared the same public services, attended the same schools and markets, and sat in teashops together. But several weeks after the meeting, rumours began to circulate among Rakhine that a villager had gone missing while foraging for food nearby. Security personnel believed him killed, and pinned the blame on ARSA, claiming the group was running training camps in the nearby hills and recruiting Rohingya from the villages. The news filtered down, and on a morning in late July, the Rohingya residents of Zay Di Pyin 22

A popular massacre

watched that borderline finally being drawn. Across every exit route from their quarter a wire fence was erected, penning the Rohingya inside. At the western edge the fence continued along the bank of the shrimp pond, and then curved right and ran parallel to the river. Several hundred Rakhine, led by the village administrator, had aided the effort, and worked from early morning until midday, extending it down the eastern edge and along the southern limit. Soldiers and Border Guard Police visited from time to time. Rohingya inside were too frightened to question any of the Rakhine, so they asked the soldiers what was happening, why were they being trapped like this? Be quiet, they were told. You are a minority here; there’s nothing you can do to stop them. For nearly five weeks they were confined and starved inside their quarter. Rakhine positioned at various points along the other side of the fence kept watch on them round the clock; soldiers periodically visited, checked up on the situation, and left. Night fell and morning rose and still they remained inside. Only once, around three weeks in, was a small group allowed out to buy food from a village two kilometres away. Otherwise they ate leaves from taro plants sprouting from the ground and foraged for other edible vegetation. They drank from the pond or puddles and they felled a tree and scooped the wood out of the remaining trunk to form a bowl, and inside it pounded rice husks. Back in early August 2017, several weeks after the fence went up, I began to hear rumours that Rohingya were trapped inside their village, unable to leave, and that they had been there for weeks and were struggling to get food in. That was all, and 23

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I knew little of what was really happening. Later I met with four villagers who had been inside the neighbourhood when the fence came up, and gradually a story unfolded of how the two communities had fissured so completely that one came to imprison the other. If Chut Pyin had been a monitory example of the military’s sharp and unbridled savagery, then Zay Di Pyin revealed another force of darkness at work in Rakhine State. Shamshu Naher had lived with her family in a house at the eastern edge of the quarter that bordered the home of a Rakhine policeman. All that separated them was a loosely worked bamboo fence. They could see into each other’s yards, and would often speak over the fence. As a preschool teacher in the village, she had taught children from the Rakhine community in the days when they were still schooled together. When speaking of her life before the barricade went up, Shamshu was always keen to stress that things had once been good between her and her neighbours. That seemed to be a necessary preface to what might follow. She listed the mutual gestures that over the years had signalled a developing friendship with the family next door: that once a chicken of hers had gone through the bamboo fence and was killed, and they replaced it without her asking; that they used to give her leftover curry from their dinner, either brought directly to her front door or passed over the fence. Their children played with her younger brother. Tensions between Rakhine and Rohingya in Zay Di Pyin had begun to develop after a wave of violence between the two communities elsewhere in the state in 2012, but this bond had stayed strong. Even when the dynamic worsened and some Rakhine began to block food assistance to 24

A popular massacre

Rohingya in the village, she would quietly give money to this neighbouring family and they would bring her rice. That began to change after ARSA struck in October 2016. A state-wide curfew for Rohingya meant she was no longer allowed to work at night. The mosque that lay just inside the Rakhine quarter was burned – by whom she didn’t know. She heard rumours that a meeting had taken place among the Rakhine community several weeks after the attack where it was agreed that anyone caught talking to Rohingya would be fined. Conversations then stopped with her neighbours. The severing of the relationship wasn’t explicit, and there was no final exchange to mark its end. Instead, she recalled, their faces darkened whenever they saw her in the street or over the bamboo fence, and they would say nothing and turn away. Adults from the Rohingya quarter were no longer able to visit the market in the Rakhine neighbourhood, so they sent their children instead. Then one day rocks were hurled at the children, so they stopped going too. As the months passed the two communities retreated further into themselves. Soldiers normally visited Zay Di Pyin once every week or two, but by June 2017, they were coming two or three times a day. During the periods before harvest, Rohingya had relied on food aid from international relief groups to supplement what meagre crop stores they had left over, but a number of their Rakhine neighbours tried to block deliveries. By late June, Rakhine from houses nearby had stopped entering their quarter altogether. Rocks were thrown into the streets and children could no longer play out in the open. 25

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Ten days before the fence was erected, the mosque was torched again. Then the rumours of the missing Rakhine villager reached Shamshu. The body had been found some way upriver, apparently bludgeoned. Three Rohingya who worked as helpers inside the homes of Rakhine in another quarter of Zay Di Pyin were then killed. Shamshu began to notice peculiar goings on at night. The women and children of the family next door would leave at nightfall, when men would arrive. They carried long knives and rifles. In the morning they would swap back, and the following evening the same would happen. This went on night after night. She grew fearful and so moved to the other side of the quarter. She saw soldiers drinking with Rakhine villagers at night – unusual, given the resentment the Rakhine community had long held towards the soldiers in the area. Then the wire fence came up. Shamshu later returned to her house, and on occasion she would catch sight of the neighbours. Her memories of their reaction to her after the confinement began came through in fleeting vignettes: the policeman pointing and laughing through the fence; the wife turning her back upon sighting her and closing the front door to the house. When the fence was torn down on 25 August and the attacks began, with Rakhine men from nearby houses, soldiers and Border Guard Police streaming in from the eastern edge and opening fire, Shamshu and others ran west towards the shrimp pond. She had seen her neighbours from time to time up until that day, but they had given no signal, no warning, of what would soon come. Nine villagers were gunned down. The remaining were able to open a gap through the wire and throw 26

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themselves into the pond. All but two boys, nine and two, made it across, and on the other side they began running south, back to the village where several people had been allowed a week or so earlier to buy food from the market. Later that day, Ahmed looked across from Chut Pyin to see the smoke rising above Zay Di Pyin. It was then that an image began to arrange itself in his mind of what form the military chief’s threat three days earlier might take.

By early September 2017 the young mahzi had made it to Bangladesh and soon began to seek out others from Chut Pyin. While the majority had left from Ah Htet Nan Yar the night of the attack, a small group stayed behind for more than a week. They had seen the military take family members from Chut Pyin, still alive, and felt there might be a chance they would return. But towards the end of the week, the smell from what they came to understand was rotting corpses began to carry over on the wind from Chut Pyin. With no sign that the arrested villagers would return, they too left Ah Htet Nan Yar for the mountains. Several days later, the military came and burned that village too. The clearance of the hills around Kutupalong had been rapid, and the camp that before had been home to Rohingya who had fled prior military campaigns quickly swelled. Refugees who had slept in the open by the roadside upon arrival the previous year had long since been housed. A short walk westwards from Ahmed’s hut in Thangkali were the shelters in which Shamshu and others from Zay Di Pyin lived, 27

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almost as if the communities had been sliced out from their plots of land in Rakhine State and replanted over the border in something approaching their original forms. Ahmed had retained his title as mahzi, and served as a point-man for this reorganised community of villagers. He was seldom inside his hut when I arrived each morning at Thangkali, and I would wait in the shade of a small shop awning several doors up, hemmed in on either side by tightly packed two-room structures. There had been dirt roads running between the hills where Thangkali was built but new ones now branched out like thousands of tiny arteries and wound their way through the hut-covered hills. The busy camp often had the feel of an ant nest, its thoroughfares teeming with people laden with building materials or food running back and forth. Several times an hour lorries stacked too high with bamboo would roar along the potholed mud roads and into the camp’s main arrival point, where waiting men and boys would climb up and feed the long bamboo poles down to whomever stood below. Although Ahmed and other elders were still trying to determine the fate of the fifty-nine people arrested, they had what they felt was a clear index of the dead. Inside his hut one afternoon he offered me a pile of papers. At the top of the first page, in English, was written, “Killed people on 27/8/2017 (Chut Pyin/Rathidaung)”. The names and details were listed in a table below, and I sat and began reading. At the top was a Shanameya, father’s name Matason, aged twenty-four; next, Saulamotollah, daughter of Kalumeya, aged thirty-three. The pile was thick, thirty or so pages, ten names to a page. Further 28

A popular massacre

down, Robiullah, thirteen, then Zainap, aged three. Deeper into the pile, Saday Kuraman, aged two; Aleya Motollah, “1 ½”; Fataymakatu, “8m” – eight months. And then there was Reay Na Begum, “7m”. Above that last name I saw Reay Zu Wen, twenty, Reay Na Begum’s father. He was shot and, with his seven-month-old daughter, killed, as he carried her running through the village that afternoon. Of a population in Chut Pyin of some 1,400 before the violence, 358 had been killed. More than 100 of those were under five. Yet Chut Pyin wasn’t unusual. From numerous other villages came stories of young children being targeted – not swept up in the violence so much as picked out and dispatched. On 30 August, three days after Chut Pyin burned, the village of Min Gyi, known among Rohingya as Tula Toli, experienced one of the bloodiest massacres of August. By some estimates, more than 750 people were killed there and, like other villages, once its survivors reached Bangladesh they began to draw up a list of the dead. On one of these, shown to me by a village elder in another district of the camp, were the names of seven children ranging in age from five months to eleven years. A column running down the middle of the page, headed “Kinds of Crime”, gave a brief synopsis of the cause of death. In it, next to the entries for the five girls and two boys, it noted: “Killed by throwing to river”. I took a photo of the page, and the elder began looking through his phone. After several minutes he shuffled beside me and we began watching a video. At its end I asked him to play it again. The notes I made while watching it a second time go as follows: “Video of babies washing up on side of river next to mud. People around crying + 29

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screaming ‘Oh bazi, oh bazi’ – ‘Oh father, oh father!’ Children also standing around and watching. One man walks up to a child lying on his back and puts his hand on his stomach.” The list showed that four of the children found on the mud bank downriver from Tula Toli were from the same family. Having first escaped into a cemetery near the river’s edge on sighting the soldiers, the elder had crossed the river and hid behind a thicket of trees on the far side. From there he could see back across to the eastern edge of the village, where a group of soldiers began picking up young children separated from their parents and throwing them into the river. Behind them hundreds of troops continued to fire on villagers, and women from the village who had been separated from the men and grouped together in one spot close to the river were then taken in batches by soldiers to a row of houses that hadn’t been burned. None of the villagers who escaped from Min Gyi are certain of what went on inside the houses, but those like the elder who were watching from afar knew that the women did not emerge, and will have been inside when those houses were later set on fire. The accounts from Rohingya across northern Rakhine State came together in the subsequent months to form a hellish tapestry. In Min Gyi, in Chut Pyin, in Zay Di Pyin, and in hundreds of other villages, their testimony was crossreferenced over and again by journalists and investigators and triangulated with satellite imagery of razed villages. The occasional clips of camera phone footage that Rohingya had managed to catch while fleeing made visible what could otherwise only be imagined. For a brief moment in 2017, Myanmar 30

A popular massacre

was thrust under the world’s spotlight, and the military’s barbarous excesses made front pages. An audience following from afar such a descent into darkness naturally hungers for a full measure of the violence, a sense of its extremities. It can seem gratuitous, but if 100 children or more were killed in Chut Pyin or elsewhere then we want to know why, and how – to understand the individual or collective mental state that produced and then rationalised such an act. Why kill children? What ends can that possibly serve? Two months into the exodus of Rohingya, a team from Médecins Sans Frontières launched a series of mortality surveys in six areas of the Kutupalong camp where the arrivals since August had been housed. They drew conservative estimates of 6,700 people killed “due to violence” in the first month alone, but cautioned that the figure could be closer to 10,000.2 Among those thousands were 780 children under five, most of them shot or burned, a number beaten to death. One couldn’t help but notice what then didn’t happen. The reports of the killing of children that came out in October 2017 prompted no visible shift in public opinion inside Myanmar. Rather, the cries of fabrication persisted and the volume of scorn directed towards the fleeing Rohingya grew louder. Every published piece of testimony seemed to intensify this, and a gaping divide opened up between narratives of the violence as told by Rohingya and reported on by journalists, and the version of events that gained traction inside the country. The longstanding belief that Rohingya were foreigners making bogus claims to being indigenous animated a second conviction, that Rohingya were manufacturing a crisis in order to 31

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dupe sympathetic governments into backing their claims to equal rights. They were not victims, but masters of deceit; the outflow after August was part of a “plot”, government spokesperson Zaw Htay warned, to “mislead” the international community into believing “that there is mass migration”.3 The mounting body of testimony, and the consistent patterns emerging within it, didn’t counterweigh that version of events. Rather, it was used as evidence that the collective scheming of Rohingya was even more thorough and well-organised than first thought. The military’s work in Rakhine State came to be seen not as an act of aggression, in the way that similar scorched earth tactics against minorities elsewhere in the country had, but as a necessary means to defend the nation against an expansionist Islamic front. A second corollary then emerged: the apparent alignment between a supposedly reformist government, championed by a democracy icon, and a seemingly widespread view that, whatever did happen, the Rohingya deserved it. After the August campaign began, world leaders busily decried what they saw as indiscriminate violence in the north of the state, but inside the country a very different view had taken hold. Could the military’s assault really be indiscriminate if it was the entire group that had been set up as a threat to the nation? The idea of the individual Rohingya as an autonomous being had long before given way to a conviction that they forever acted in the service of a bogus identity, and whatever project – citizenship, political rights, conquest and Islamisation – it had been created to pursue. 32

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In the months after the violence began, Ahmed and other community leaders told visitors to the camp in Bangladesh of the meetings they’d had with the military days before the attacks began, each one ending with a stark warning. Researchers were able to form a sense of the patterns of violence, and came to know which battalions were involved, and how the duties had been divided up. It became evident that thousands of soldiers had been deployed across northern Rakhine State long before ARSA struck, as if waiting for an excuse to move in and begin the cleansing. And within hours of its beginning, we listened as the military’s propaganda machine spun into action. But in the coverage of the developing catastrophe, the background work of civilians was often left unexplored. A military is distinguished by the expectation that it will, under certain circumstances, use force, whether legitimately or not. Yet the motivations of civilians who partake in mass atrocities are always far more complex. They do not have that violent mandate and nor, on the whole, is the average farmer, market trader or teacher conditioned into desiring its use. To mock a starving neighbour, as the husband and wife next door to Shamshu had, surely requires that conditioning – and even more so when the violence is at close quarters, as the Chut Pyin villagers found. Communities in western Myanmar that grew up alongside, studied and traded with their eventual victims took on active roles in the attacks, going to work with a venom equal to that of soldiers. Village leaders directed troops to hiding women and children; Rakhine who had long held the freely abusive military in deep disdain actively assisted it. Even far outside of the zone of violence, in areas of 33

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the country with no Rohingya presence, the campaign drew vocal civilian support. I’d understood enough of the mechanics of ethnic cleansing and genocide to know that while such a campaign might announce itself with a frenzy of killing, it begins quietly, long before, and not with an act but with a concept – that these people are not one of us. If that idea takes root then anything can grow. In the process, and with the right kind of information coming into a community, particular actions taken by a few can trigger fundamental shifts in how one understands their surrounding environment, and the people that populate it. Ahmed would recount not only the scenes of carnage he and the villagers fled from, but what had come earlier; not just in the weeks and months before it all began, but in the preceding years. He reflected bitterly on the devious politicking of the old military junta that meant he was born stateless, and he detailed the suffocating control measures for Rohingya that were enacted in the decades after his birth. There was a steady accumulation of injustices, and a gradual tightening of the freedom Rohingya had to move, to work, to worship. It all went on behind the veil of a hermetic military dictatorship, when few eyes were turned on Myanmar. But then the transition away from dictatorial rule began. If you talk with Rohingya for long enough it becomes clear that there is a before and after, a particular point in the recent past when their already tenuous condition worsened further. I had visited Rakhine State a number of times after the transition began, travelling between towns and villages in the centre of the state and into the remote north, where foreigners 34

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have always required special permits to access. There had been a sharp rupturing in relations between the Buddhist and Muslim communities of western Myanmar in 2012, five years before the military closed in on Rohingya villages, and it had been evident then that floating fears about the fragility of this changing society were coalescing into something potentially lethal. The boundaries between different identity groups, whether ethnic or religious, seemed to be sharpening, and not just in Rakhine State, but across Myanmar. “We worked in each other’s villages. We stayed over at theirs, like family”, Ahmed said of the time before, when the narrow squares of paddy field that separated the two quarters of Chut Pyin hadn’t felt like such a lethal divide. “But then came more restrictions, and our friendships changed. There were no more visits to their houses and teashops. We were always under fear, in a way that we hadn’t felt before.”

35

2

THE FIRST WAVE WIDENING THE COMMUNAL DIVIDE

In Sittwe, on the western coast of Myanmar, fifty kilometres south of Chut Pyin, there is a road that runs out of the town centre, bound towards the vast blue of the Bay of Bengal. On either side the road is lined with buildings, one or two storeys high, some made of brick, others wood – teashops, houses, barbers. But the road then hits a straight, and the buildings abruptly stop. In their place come fields – scrubby, and dotted with small wooden huts. They are oddly spaced apart, as if built in haste and not to last. From the road, you can look south between the dwellings to a distant line of trees that mark the neighbourhood limit. The area is called Nasi, but it bears little resemblance to the Nasi of old. The wooden huts, occupied by squatters and interspersed among unkempt bush, have replaced what used to be clusters of houses and shops connected by narrow lanes and alleyways. There had been eleven sub-quarters here – some housed Buddhists, some Muslims; others were mixed. In the centre, beside the road, sat a high school where students from all over Nasi would study together. On the morning of 12 June 2012, Ko Myat had been in his village ten kilometres north of Sittwe. The forty-threeyear-old was, like the majority of men in Par Da Lek, a 39

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long-time fisherman in the nearby tributaries that feed into the Bay of Bengal. He had divorced from his wife several years before, and now lived alone in a stilted wooden house towards the back of the village, past the market and the dusty pitch where children would always play football. As far back as he knew the village had always belonged to Buddhist Rakhine, but Rohingya would come here to trade. They too fished in the nearby creeks, and would move from one village market to another each day until the morning’s catch was sold. But by the second week of June that year, the usual rhythms of life in the village were being disturbed. Talk had swept through Par Da Lek of fits of violence underway not so far away. These weren’t newspaper reports, but rumours that passed from mouth to mouth. They said that Rakhine were being attacked in their homes. It was the Rohingya. Par Da Lek hadn’t seen any of this violence, but nonetheless there were strange rumblings in the village. Over the two days prior to 12 June 2012, men had been shuttled on buses to downtown Sittwe. Ko Myat would watch them go in wave after wave. They were goaded onto the buses and away, he said, by the village administrator, the chief authority there. For those two days he had stood at the entrance to the village, where the road rises up on a bank above the busy marketplace. Buses would come and go; the men who stood there waiting empty-handed would be given weapons – sticks and machetes – before climbing aboard. The village was six miles from the nearest Muslim community and he hadn’t worried about similar running battles 40

The first wave

erupting closer to home. But where these men were heading, the fighting had been particularly fierce. On 12 June, after finishing lunch, he went to the village entrance and volunteered to go. A monastery in Sittwe would offer food to participants later that day, he was told. Ko Myat had been unable to count the numbers of villagers who had departed in the days before, but he soon understood the scale of the wider operation. Upon arriving at Nasi quarter that afternoon, he saw other buses that had ferried Rakhine into Sittwe from villages elsewhere in the area parked near that straight section of road, like tourist coaches waiting outside a site of natural beauty. On either side, the smoke from burning homes climbed in narrow towers into the sky. He remembers a light drizzle falling that day as all around him the embers of razed houses glowed. The smoke had blanketed the landscape in a surreal haze. “It was like a movie”, he recalls. Only three days before, Nasi had been home to several hundred families; by the time Ko Myat arrived, the majority had fled, and many structures had been levelled, leaving him with little else to do. Even so, the men aboard the buses who had encouraged him and other villagers on had divided his bus into two teams, one to steal into the quarter and torch the remaining houses and another to amass at exit points, armed and under orders to attack anyone who escaped. He joined the second group, and remained on the roadside for several hours while others carried flaming torches inside the quarter and held them to any buildings still standing. He felt tense, anxious. Five hours passed. He saw little physical violence, he said, save for the fires started by the mob. 41

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“Our group was standing on the road but most of the Muslims who were still inside Nasi stayed there. They were too scared to come out.” Upon hearing a signal later that afternoon, the two teams withdrew from the area and boarded one of the waiting buses. It wound its way back through the Sittwe outskirts before heading north. Twenty minutes later, they were back at the entrance to the village. Behind them, Nasi quarter lay in ruins.

I first met Ko Myat in late 2015, three years after that first wave of violence between Rakhine and Rohingya. We sat together on the deck of his house in Par Da Lek and spoke for several hours about the events of June 2012. Immediately after the attacks, the two communities in and around Sittwe broke off interaction. In Sittwe town, the residents of Nasi and other quarters housing Muslims, whether Rohingya or other minority Muslim groups, were either herded into displacement camps that sprang up along the coast or confined within the two remaining neighbourhoods, Aung Mingalar and Bumay, that hadn’t been razed. Police checkpoints erected at the entrances to these neighbourhoods ensured that, thereafter, they would not be able to leave. In villages to the north of Sittwe, contact between Buddhists and Muslims was largely stopped. Those fellow fishermen whom Ko Myat would see arriving at the village each day to trade at the market ceased coming, and across this township and beyond, the two communities retreated within themselves. The change in the social dynamic of Sittwe and its surrounds had been radical, and even in faraway towns and villages where 42

The first wave

no violence had taken place, relations between communities underwent a profound shift. Where interaction had once been commonplace, it was now severed. The violence of early June 2012 was the first major wave of conflict between Buddhists and Muslims to strike Myanmar as it transitioned away from military rule. In October that year, a second wave occurred, beginning on the morning of 22 October with orchestrated mob attacks on Muslim communities in nine townships across Rakhine State. Like June, these attacks focused predominantly on the Rohingya, but other Muslim minorities in western Myanmar, like the Kaman, were targeted too. Once again, there was a stunning efficiency to the work: entire Muslim quarters in several towns were emptied and levelled by groups of armed men who arrived by truck or on boats, fuelled by a conviction that had intensified after the June violence that Muslims were growing in number, diluting the concentration of the Buddhist population and overwhelming their resources. Around the same time Ko Myat boarded the bus and made for Sittwe, I was over on the other side of the country, holed up in a hotel in Laiza on Myanmar’s north-eastern border with China. It was the headquarters of the Kachin Independence Army, one of a number of ethnic armed groups that had been fighting the military on and off for nearly half a century. I had already been working on Myanmar for several years, and those were the conflicts I was used to reporting, and thought I understood. Within them was a seemingly clear delineation between actors and their loyalties: the ethnic armed group and its constituency on one side, the Myanmar army on the 43

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other, and in between a scattering of allies of each. These conflicts, long-running and often brutal, had been romanticised by the foreign press as a battle of good versus evil, a “just war” being fought by rebels against a derided junta. And with the overwhelming majority of the population of Myanmar having long held a deep disdain for the military that had ruled them for half a century, there was little doubt where the broad support of the public lay: no one wished for military success in the borderlands. But the violence that erupted in Rakhine State as the transition began didn’t fit that neat, if overly simplified, plotline of bad military versus good citizenry. Instead this was the first of a number of local contestations over who did and did not belong in a country that was undergoing great upheaval. From 2012 onwards, the violence jumped from village to town to city, from the western coast of Myanmar to the mountains of the north-east, before eventually returning to northern Rakhine State five years later. The dynamics and nature of the violence differed as time went on. Unlike the first outbreak in Rakhine State in 2012, where ethnicity was a major cleavage, the Buddhist-on-Muslim unrest that began in central Myanmar the following year often saw communities from the same ethnicity that had experienced no prior conflict pitted against one another. In the tumult of the transition, broader demarcations of “us” and “them”, outsiders and sons of the soil, were forming. Vocal agitators within the lay and Buddhist clergy saw the Muslims of Myanmar - not only Rohingya, but other communities too – as outsiders bent on bringing the nation, and its majority Buddhist belief system, to ruin. 44

The first wave

As I sat with Ko Myat on the deck of his house, he considered the motive for his participation. He was a timid, hesitant man. He spoke little, and rarely made eye contact. When I pictured him outside Nasi quarter scoping the lanes and alleyways for any fleeing Rohingya, his face didn’t wear the expression of a determined killer. Rather, it was timorous, frightened even. But when he outlined the rationale for boarding the bus that afternoon several years earlier he did so with a quiet conviction. As a Rakhine Buddhist, he felt threatened by the Muslims who lived in the state. “If I don’t protect my race then it will disappear”, he believed. These outsiders had come here to take over the land that ethnic Rakhine had inhabited for centuries. The stirrings of democratic change in Myanmar might level the playing field, allowing communities who had long felt disenfranchised by the military to assert greater claims to the nation. These particular Muslims might take advantage of this, and if they did, Buddhists would suffer, as they had elsewhere in the world – in Malaysia, in Indonesia – where Islam had taken root. We spoke for a while about the details of the Nasi attack and the broader anxieties he felt. But the violence of 2012 had come on so suddenly, and I asked him if he could locate a particular trigger. There had been an incident in late May of that year, he explained, that not just for Ko Myat but for many Rakhine I spoke with in the years afterwards fed latent anxieties about the intentions of the Muslims living among them. “It started because Muslims attacked a Buddhist”, he said. The catalyst was the rape and murder of twenty-sixyear-old Ma Thida Htwe. The young Rakhine seamstress 45

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had been walking home from work in Kyaungnimaw village on Ramree Island, a hundred miles south of Sittwe, when, according to police reports, she was gang-raped and her throat slit. It was the evening of 28 May 2012, and her contorted body was left in long grass under a rain tree by the side of the road leading into her village. Three men, identified variously in state media as “Bengali Muslim” or “Islam followers”, were arrested two days later, found guilty of the attack and sentenced to jail. But then, on 3 June, a bus carrying Muslims through the town of Taungup, east of Ramree Island, was set upon by some 300 Rakhine, many wielding wooden poles. Ten passengers were dragged off the bus and beaten to death. Why the perpetrators had targeted that bus was never made clear. The men deemed guilty of Ma Thida Htwe’s murder were already in police custody. Moreover, those on the bus were not Rohingya. They were Muslim missionaries, from Magwe Division, from Ayeyarwady Division – none of them from Rakhine State. It appeared to be a random revenge attack on Muslims, one that, in conjunction with the rape and murder of the seamstress, would have a catastrophic effect on relations between Buddhists and Muslims across the state. Five days later, Rohingya mobs in Maungdaw in northern Rakhine State finished their Friday morning prayers and attacked Buddhist properties across the town and in outlying villages. Shortly afterwards, Nasi quarter burned. So it had begun with a rape and murder. But in the days after Ma Thida Htwe’s body was found on the roadside that evening in the middle of 2012, information began to circulate on leaflets and DVDs and in local and state media that framed 46

The first wave

it not as an act isolated from the broader pre-violence dynamic between Rakhine and Rohingya, but as a direct expression of all that was dangerous in it. That particular attack would carry huge symbolic weight among Rakhine – rape is the act that, perhaps above all else, signals a bid for conquest of one group by another, and this interpretation would become a driving force in the mayhem that followed, both then and years later. For Ko Myat, his decision to board the bus that afternoon in June 2012 and head to Nasi quarter had in large part resulted from the linking of an event that occurred a hundred miles away to the broader fate of his entire race. He wouldn’t be alone in doing this. When violence between Buddhists and Muslims later spread beyond Rakhine State, into areas of the country where historic relations between the two religious communities had been more harmonious, small incidents came to be indicative of a much larger campaign being waged by Muslims. Suddenly, with the smallest disturbance, communities were injected with a palpable enmity towards their neighbours that hadn’t been so present before. I found this intriguing. Some people spoke of their fears as if they were dormant, and always susceptible to activation. At particular moments in Myanmar’s not so distant past, that dread of the consequences of its most cherished belief system coming under attack was, to many, very present and very real. Perhaps the attacks being carried out against Muslims in response to these incidents were echoes of a deeply uncertain past, one that I’d learn about only as time went on. But to others, that apprehension seemed to have arisen rather more recently. The military that took power in 1962, ending 47

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the brief spell of parliamentary democracy that the country enjoyed following independence in 1948, had used these fears of the break-up of the nation as a principal tool in its efforts to cultivate loyalty among a resentful population. It knew how to manufacture communal violence that appeared, from a distance, spontaneous, and that warranted the presence of the military as protector. Perhaps this needed to be factored into understandings of what unfolded after 2012. But there was a bitter irony to the violence that took hold in the early years of the transition, and that provided a lethal foundation for what would eventually erupt in 2017. Ko Myat and his fellow villagers who descended on Nasi quarter during those days of June 2012, turning an entire neighbourhood to rubble and sending thousands fleeing to camps, were exercising a newfound agency that arrived with the commencement of the passage to civilian rule. For some, old scores, given greater urgency in the clear light of day, were being settled. For others, heightened anxieties brought about by the political changes and everything they carried needed addressing. But the military, in its apparent retreat from power, seemed to have passed a torch onto the masses of people who had spent so many years opposing its mercurial rule. Its deft manipulation of lines of difference among and between the myriad communities in Myanmar had seemed to bleed into the new landscape, empowering civilians to take up where it had left off. As the transition advanced and the violence crossed the mountain range separating Rakhine State from central Myanmar, monks and their legions of followers began to preach the same message of national unity, or ethno48

The first wave

religious uniformity, that their jailers of old had done. Under their watch, the new Myanmar would be a nation of one religion, one blood. The razed neighbourhoods and the segregation of Buddhists and Muslims, physical and psychological, after 2012 were the immediate results of this vision. But the how and why – the mental processes undergone to turn neighbours into enemies, the political machinations that gave rise to the killings and everything that followed – would in the years after the transition began only gradually come into view.

49

3

SONS OF WHOSE SOIL?

BRITAIN AND THE BIRTH OF A FRACTURED NATION

More than a millennium before the camps sprang up along the Rakhine State coastline in 2012, its beaches had providing a landing point for some of the first Muslims to arrive in the territory known today as Myanmar. They came in boats, as traders from India and Persia who set up a string of small colonies along the western and southern coastlines. These settlers may not have intended to stay, but the laws of nature and the technologies of seafaring in the ninth century were against them. The monsoons that whip in across the Bay of Bengal around May each year effectively trapped many of these early arrivals, and so they remained, married and provided among the first evidence of Islam in Myanmar.1 At the time the coastal kingdom of Arakan, loosely correlating with today’s Rakhine State, was independent from Myanmar, and by and large looked to the Muslim kingdoms to the west for trade. The lengthy Rakhine Yoma mountain range running north to south along its eastern flank had prevented the development of close ties with the kingdoms of the Bamar majority, but that began to change with the mass migration of the peoples of the Ayeyarwady Valley into the coastal region around the eleventh century. This new community intermingled with the population already settled there and came to 53

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form the bulk of the Rakhine ethnicity. For much of the past millennium, they lived among the Muslim descendants of the Persian and Indian traders, and governors encouraged courtship between the men and women of the various religious communities. But the arrival of the early Muslim settlers coincided with a period of rapid Islamic expansionism eastwards, into kingdoms of Asia that had hitherto been predominantly Hindu or Buddhist. The chronicles of travellers who in the late ninth century ventured through southern China towards the mountainous northern frontiers also note the presence of Muslims there, at around the same time trading posts were being set up on the western coast.2 Gradually these people spread inwards. The early kings of Myanmar launched routine slave-raiding campaigns on Muslim villages in the periphery, resettling captives in the interior and, over the centuries, widening the network of inland Muslim communities. That was all before Buddhism became the de facto state religion of the country, and long before religion became the point of violent division it has come to be in recent years. Myanmar’s past is coloured by stories of conquest, but there are few tales of large-scale violence being perpetrated predominantly along lines of faith. The conflicts of yesteryear were projects of territorial defence and expansion that drew on the manpower of whatever communities lived under the purview of the kings executing them, largely regardless of their ethnic or religious identity. But in the late nineteenth century, a major demographic shift began, slowly, to impinge on the religious dynamic in what 54

Sons of whose soil?

was then known as Burma. The country fell in its entirety to the British in 1885, and the western border separating it from India – at the time controlled by Britain – was done away with. Burma came under the authority of the Bengal Presidency, whose rule at one point extended as far as Peshawar to the west and Singapore to the east. The colonial power encouraged a free inflow of Indians from Bengal and beyond, as it had done in Sri Lanka, Malaysia and elsewhere, planting the seeds for communal tensions well into the future. This immigrant workforce took up jobs at every rung of the economic ladder: day labourers, office clerks, civil servants and soldiers, but also money lenders, who began to play an authoritative role in the provision of finance to locals. A number settled in the country’s west, moving freely back and forth across the erased border as the changing seasons dictated work patterns. Others moved further towards Rangoon and the paddy fields of the delta, and by the early 1930s, as anti-colonial movements were mobilising with vigour against the British, more than half the population of the capital was Indian, both Muslim and Hindu. Bamar, the majority ethnic group, grew increasingly aggrieved at their minority status: by 1931, there were 212,000 Indians in Rangoon alone, nearly double of the number of Bamar,3 and commentators at the time noted how they felt the capital had developed the feel of an Indian city. At a time when the global recession of the 1930s was hitting the already indebted rice farmers of the delta, more than half of the arable land there was controlled by “non-resident landlords”, the majority Indian. This compounded the feeling that not only were livelihoods being drained by foreigners, but that 55

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the actual land of Burma was being lost, and with it not just the economic worth it carried, but the emotional attachments Bamar had to it. The targets of the resentment that fuelled those nationalist movements began, over the course of the 1920s and 1930s, to widen to include the country’s Muslims, particularly the new arrivals from the subcontinent. Hindus were spared much of the ire, for they were considered better able to assimilate, but local Buddhist women who married Muslim men often converted, and raised their children as Muslims. They were seen to be diluting the bloodline. Yet there was a second catalyst for the anger that began to be directed at them: these new communities were seen as stooges of the British – an additional foreign presence that might, if left unchecked, eat away at the Buddhist values that for so long had provided a bedrock for Burmese society.

From the beginning, religion meant a great deal to the country’s rulers. The attempts to consolidate something approaching a national identity arguably began a millennium ago with the ascension to the throne of King Anawratha, a late convert to Buddhism who used the scriptures to help achieve what had eluded all rulers before him: the uniting of the disparate peoples of the Ayeyarwady Valley, that long, snaking north–south backbone of the country, into one functioning, governable kingdom. They would form the basis of the Bagan Empire, the country’s first, and one that provided an arena in which the majority Bamar ethnicity could begin to organise 56

Sons of whose soil?

into a dominant force. These were the originals, so it went – the Bamar and the Buddhist; the first of the real Myanmar. Such a close fusion of religion and national identity has two broad effects: it provides a sense of unity and security in times of war and conquest and lends a moral justness to the defence of borders, but it also narrows the spectrum of identities that people can express and still rightly claim membership of the nation. The frequency with which scholars of Myanmar attribute the consolidation of the Ayeyarwady Valley communities in the twelfth century to the beginnings of the country’s modern history speaks to the widespread belief, heavily reinforced by the junta after it took power in 1962, that Myanmar is and always was a Bamar Buddhist country – that to be Bamar, and therefore a true son of the soil, means to be Buddhist, and that a threat to one was a threat to the other. Despite all the anxieties that seemed to rise to the surface upon the start of the transition from military rule after 2011, a visitor to the country wouldn’t be mistaken in thinking that Buddhism’s run over the nearly one thousand years since Anawratha took the throne remains unbroken. Official tallies put close to 90 per cent of the country as Buddhist: not only the majority Bamar, but other ethnic groupings too. The tens of thousands of golden pagodas that dot the cities, the plains and the mountains illuminate the degree to which it is, in all but law, the national religion. Yet while it may be of central importance to a large chunk of the population today, its position has at key points in the country’s recent history appeared threatened by foreign influences. To its most devoted followers, these influences had a profound effect on the 57

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breakdown and reconfiguration of a national identity, a process that the violence of recent years has shown is still in motion. When the forces of the East India Company moved to take Upper Burma in 1885, having already conquered the rest of country in successive stages since 1824, a battalion of troops was sent to the Royal Palace in Mandalay where King Thibaw sat. Thibaw had been the last in a line of kings that had ruled the country since the reign of Anawratha, but the British knew that any hope of achieving pre-eminence in Burma would be realised only by dispatching him and removing would-be challengers to their rule. After his dethroning on 28 November 1885 and his hurried exit from the Royal Palace, he was shipped along with his family to the port city of Ratnagiri on India’s western coast, where he lived out his days a recluse in a residence built for him by the British. His fall, and the final end of monarchical rule, were to have dramatic consequences for the long-term viability of the colonial project, but it also impacted on a local dynamic little understood by the British at the time. Unlike the kings and queens of Western nations whose powers, although more or less total, were largely administrative, Myanmar’s rulers enjoyed an added quasi-spiritual dimension. Up until Anawratha’s reign in the eleventh century, the territory played host to a number of religions, including Hindu and Theravada Buddhist sects, as well as the worship of nat spirits, an indigenous form of animism. None were dominant, nor is it clear that their followers sought to make them so. This changed with Anawratha’s arrival on the throne. Like the Indian kings who took up the word of the Buddha in the first millennium 58

Sons of whose soil?

bc, he considered himself a bodhisattva on the path to Awakening, and sought to institutionalise Buddhism as the de facto state religion of his empire. Pali, the language of the Buddhist scriptures, had a strong influence on the Old Burmese that developed in that area from the twelfth century onwards. Anawratha ordained himself, and all kings thereafter, as the chief preserver of Buddhist law, and made special provisions for the order of monks, the Sangha, so that it came to rely on the monarchy for protection. Kings would support the Sangha and settle any problems within it by royal decree,4 and in return the monks endowed the monarchy with the legitimacy that only a body as revered as the clergy could muster. As the monks encouraged loyalty to the state, one historian noted, so “the Order became the conscience of the government, ensuring that it ruled, at least to some extent, in accordance with Buddhist ethical principles”.5 What the British hadn’t banked on when it rode its cavalry towards the Royal Palace in 1885 was the profound effect that the severing of that symbiosis between the monarchy and the Buddhist clergy would have. Not only was a bullish foreign power now calling the shots, but the sacrosanct belief system that unified those in Burma living under the king had been threatened.

Today a visitor to Mandalay can cross one of the four bridges spanning the moat in the city’s downtown and wander through the grounds of the Royal Palace where King Thibaw sat. Much of it was rebuilt from the ruins of a bombing campaign during 59

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World War Two, and artefacts from the Konbaung Dynasty, of which Thibaw was the final incarnation, are on display. It remains a site of immense cosmological import to Buddhists in Myanmar. But following the removal of the king, parts of it were transformed by the British into an Anglican chapel and the Upper Burma Club, where colonial officers would play snooker and waltz into the night. Thereafter, the British showed little interest in investing time and energy in keeping the Buddhist order onside. Despite warnings from British administrators that “the extinction of the monarchy left the nation … without a religion”,6 colonial administrators had largely failed to comprehend the fact that Myanmar’s points of power were not independent of one another, but instead comprised a mutually enforcing network of authorities, both religious and political, that would all be weakened considerably without the support of one another. Decades later, the effects of this rupture were to be Britain’s undoing. The decision by the British to terminate 800 years of kingship and, in the eyes of the Buddhist nationalist groups that gradually began to mobilise, trigger the gradual retreat of Buddhism from its central place in society, did little to endear many in the country to its rule. Over time, monastic schools lessened in number and influence, while funds were channelled instead to Christian missionary schools, those same institutions that were seen as an additional threat to Buddhism in a period of rapid modernisation for the country. Religious-nationalist groups, like the Young Men’s Buddhist Association, that were at the forefront of the first major wave of independence agitation in the 1920s sought as much to drive 60

Sons of whose soil?

Britain out as to bring Buddhism back in, thereby galvanising what came to be a parallel campaign for independence – that of a Buddhist revival that provided a second axis of solidarity within the movement. In the eyes of these movements, the British had colonised not just the administrative apparatus of the country but also the mental and spiritual space of its citizens by displacing their devotion to Buddhism with the more mundane concerns of a modernising society. It was the monks who had perhaps first seen the potential for this development: dressed in their robes, they had led bands of armed rebels in attacks on British troops in Upper Burma shortly after King Thibaw’s fall. For centuries, as Donald Eugene Smith notes in Religion and Politics in Burma, the monk was held aloft as a leading moral force in society, but that had changed with the arrival of the British. There was no place for him in the new western-oriented social hierarchy, his educational functions were assumed by other agencies, an unknown foreign language prevented him from understanding what was going on, and westernized Burmese laymen increasingly regarded him as irrelevant to modern life.7

A day before Ko Myat armed himself and took the bus to Sittwe from his home in Par Da Lek village, a video was uploaded to YouTube entitled “Disappearance of the Race is a Thing to Fear”. On the screen a flaming skull sat against a jet-black background. A distant voice read the words of a 61

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lengthy sermon given by a monk in the late 1990s that detailed the threat posed by Muslims to Myanmar. “My lay followers, do not be complacent about protecting our race from extinction”, it began. The Muslims are “relentlessly working to swallow up Burma’s ethnic populations”, and swallow up Buddhism too. Our people of Burma are not very aware of this. Our ethnic people are kind hearted and hospitable. They treat everyone as their close friends, very trusting. The Muslims know this very well. They take advantage by marrying ethnic women and persuading them to practise their religion.

Yet Muslims hadn’t always been the pariah community they seemed by 2012 to have become. Although Buddhism had long ago become the dominant religion, followers of Islam were present in successive royal courts from the time of King Anawratha onwards. These rulers knew the value in keeping the country’s various religious communities onside, and in doing so they cultivated a degree of communal harmony that would be unfamiliar to those watching the country today. It was in the coastal region of today’s Rakhine State, an independent kingdom until it was annexed in the late eighteenth century, that the presence of Islam would come to be despised the most. Yet the Rakhine kings of old patronised the religion as much as their counterparts had done in the centre. Mosques were built in the ancient Rakhine capital of Mrauk U, and the Kaman, the Muslim minority group that was eventually swept up in the first wave of violence in 2012 alongside the Rohingya, 62

Sons of whose soil?

descended from a unit of archers that provided a key pillar of defence in the predominantly Buddhist court of Mrauk U from the seventeenth century onwards. Under the rein of King Pagan in the mid-nineteenth century, a Muslim served as governor of Amarapura, the old capital, while U Razak, a prominent Muslim politician of the pre-independence period, was killed alongside General Aung San when the independence hero was assassinated in 1947. Although they were never significant political movers and shakers, Muslims had once been close to the centres of power in Myanmar. Yet the sentiment contained in “Disappearance of the Race is a Thing to Fear” wasn’t altogether new. As nationalist fury built in the 1920s and 1930s, it began to fix on those communities that were considered imports of the colonial power, and which had helped aid the departure of Buddhism from its central place in society. Chinese immigration during the colonial period had also been a major point of contention for locals, who felt they were being dispossessed of their businesses, but the arrival of this immigrant community hadn’t been encouraged by the British as much as the Indians had. Colonial authorities believed Indians to be hard workers, loyal to the authorities that oversaw them, and as the border with India was done away with towards the end of the nineteenth century, they came over in droves. As they grew in number, their economic muscle and their favouring by the British meant they were seen by the local population to have displaced locals from their work in their tens of thousands. Grievances among the local communities of Rangoon only intensified as colonial rule dragged on and a feeling hardened 63

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that they were being subordinated to foreigners. In time, even Muslim communities that could trace their roots back centuries suddenly came to be lumped together with the more recent arrivals, and all they stood for as threats to the “traditional” order that the early kings had crafted. Perhaps the clearest instance of this shift came on 26 July 1938, as anti-colonial sentiment was reaching its crescendo. As the sun burned through the afternoon sky, crowds began to collect inside the perimeter of Shwedagon Pagoda in Rangoon, the country’s most revered totem to the Buddha. They arrived first in small groups, but as the afternoon wore on the numbers built. By early evening close to ten thousand people had amassed there. Various speakers, some of them monks, others political leaders, took to an elevated platform and, one by one, launched a tirade against a Muslim man writing under the pseudonym Maung Shwe Hpi. Until several weeks before the writer had been known only to a small number of Muslim intellectuals in the capital. Seven years earlier, he had penned a response to a pamphlet issued by a Buddhist that criticised Islamic teachings. Maung Shwe Hpi’s offering had, according to those who later rounded on him, deliberately disparaged the Buddha. Around a thousand copies of his response were circulated, and garnered little attention. Then, in 1936, another print run saw an additional 2,500 copies distributed, but still it gained little traction. It was only in July 1938 that people began to take notice. First it caught the attention of staff at The Sun newspaper. An article dated 19 July called for “drastic action” to be taken against him,8 while on the same day the New Light of Burma decried it as “an insult to the Burmese nation as a 64

Sons of whose soil?

whole”.9 Significant page space was given over to polemics focusing on the insult to Buddha inherent in the text, meaning that the crowds who had arrived at Shwedagon Pagoda that afternoon already incensed were primed for what they were about to hear. On the platform, speakers had only to explain over and again what Maung Shwe Hpi’s writing symbolised for the situation to turn violent. As the sun dipped in the sky, the audience made for the Muslim marketplace of Surti Bazar in downtown Rangoon, chanting anti-Muslim slogans along the way. Battalions of police, among them Muslims installed by the British, tried to disperse them. In the process, two monks were hurt. The next day, attacks on Muslim communities erupted across the city. The carnage was fuelled in part by the way the injuries to the monks were framed in the morning newspapers. They were not a localised incident, but instead were symptomatic of a broad and violent hostility towards Buddhists among Muslims. Fast forward nearly a century, and that same framing would goad on the mobs that attacked Nasi and other Muslim neighbourhoods across the country after 2012. But the rioters of the late 1930s were propelled by a second force. Towards the end of the preceding day, as the speeches at Shwedagon had come to an end, a resolution was passed. It warned that unless police tracked down and arrested Maung Shwe Hpi, “steps will be taken to treat the Muslims as enemy No. 1 who insult the Buddhist community and their religion, and to bring about the extermination of the Muslims and the extinction of their religion and language”.10 65

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The idea that Myanmar could only survive as a nation if foreign influences were purged and Buddhism returned to centre stage characterised much of nationalist thinking throughout the twentieth century. The popular anti-colonial rallying cry of the 1920s and 1930s, “Amyo, Batha, Thathana!”, that declared the need to protect the race and the nation, the majority language and religion, and the Sa¯sana, the teachings of the Buddha, signalled the three pivots on which Burmese society revolved, each as inviolable as the other. One of the leading secular anti-colonial organisations, the We Burman Association, founded in 1930 and later headed by General Aung San, printed the cry on pamphlets circulated around Rangoon and other major cities. But the most visible figureheads in the independence movement remained Bamar, and while other ethnicities were involved in the broader quest for independence, and leaders of various creeds rose to seniority in the post-independence government, theirs would be a marginal presence in the new political landscape. Partly in response to the campaigns of agitation led by predominantly Bamar figures, the British had drafted soldiers from the Karen, the Kachin and other smaller ethnicities into their army, as well as Muslims, and awarded them positions above those of Bamar. They were seen as more trustworthy than these other dissenters who had led the charge against British rule. But that ill-thought-out policy of the British backfired in more ways than one. Not only were the flames of resentment towards them further fanned, but the independence movement of the 1920s and 1930s developed an ethnic and religious chauvinism towards non-Bamar and non66

Sons of whose soil?

Buddhist that would carry well into the post-independence era, splitting the country along multiple lines and paving the way for decades of conflict between different identity groups. The rallying cry of “Amyo, Batha, Thathana!” spoke to a desire to cleanse the country of corrosive foreign influence. But the linking of those three elements into a singular vision of society meant that conceptions of who truly belonged were greatly narrowed, thereby enlarging the pool of those who did not. That carried well into the future: just as the independence movement had known those three pivots to have been threatened by the British and its immigrant workforce more than a century ago, the nationalist agitators who turned their eyes to the Muslim population upon the start of the transition believed them now to be threatened by Islam. The imams and their followers were the new colonisers, doing in their own way what had nearly been achieved by the imperial power long before. As the violence of the transition evolved after 2012, it often seemed as if history was repeating itself. The waves of attacks that first began in Rakhine State, before erupting in central Myanmar, seemed to echo that of 1938 – an attempt to avenge and correct the apparent weakening of Buddhism and the theft of land and resources by people considered not quite Burmese. However, not all was as straightforward as it first appeared. In the months after the first Rohingya quarters were torched in Rakhine State in 2012 I wrote of the historic streak of Islamophobia coursing through Myanmar society, that the violence of today was merely the latest eruption of longdormant tensions. With hindsight that appeared too simplistic. Anxieties, if they are latent, can be awakened, giving the 67

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illusion that the conflicts of today are the natural progression of historic enmities. But they can also be manufactured, or appear as the logical response to new circumstances, and new dynamics between people who had lived among one another for as long as they could remember. In the years after 2012 I met Buddhists, young and old, as well as Muslims, whose sense of foreboding about that Other seemed very new. Fed by stories from the past, fears were activated so that old friends suddenly took on sinister qualities that turned them into enemies – for some, of such malicious intent that the use of violence seemed morally just. Looking back on the Myanmar of the twentieth century, however, good relations between Buddhists and Muslims have been the norm, and violence an aberration. What had caused those aberrations? And how, in the years after the transition began, had such wide fissures opened? There had, from afar, seemed to be unity in opposition to the junta, but suddenly, as the junta began to step back, that crumbled. There did however appear to be one clear similarity between the Myanmar of the early twentieth century and the country of today. The notion of ethnic and religious superiority promoted by the Bamar Buddhist nationalists of the independence movement was seized upon by the military when it took power in 1962. The British, eager to administer as effectively as possible such a diverse population, had already created its own ill-fated taxonomy of ethnic groups, hardening boundaries between communities that previously had been more fluid, and preparing the ground for conflict well into the future. All it took was a paranoid clique of 68

Sons of whose soil?

generals to further manipulate lines of difference so that it could sell to the population the idea that Myanmar was still, long after the British left, infested with internal enemies. The quest for national unity became one of national uniformity, with the military seeking to assimilate vast swathes of the population into the Bamar Buddhist core – all the better to create a nation of one voice, one blood. But those who could never conform to the vision of the ideal society suffered their own particular fate. They were too different, and too threatening, to ever truly belong, and in time were pushed further towards the edges of society.

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4

THE ART OF BELONGING A PECULIAR TRANSACTION IN YANGON

Not so long ago, a visitor to an immigration office in Myanmar will have encountered a signboard on the wall, its inscription rendered in bold lettering, that warned of a particular peril facing the country: “The Earth will not swallow a race to extinction but another race will.” It had become the slogan of the Ministry of Immigration during the long years of military rule, when the country retreated inwards, walling itself off from the outside world. Like much of the rhetoric of that age, it was abrupt and deliberately stark, and the message it contained was simple: save for strong borders and the vigilant offices of the state, the country would be overrun by outsiders. In time, the national race might cease to exist. I only learnt of the slogan some time after the signboards had begun, bit by bit, to be taken down. As the transition advanced, these remnants of military rule, though still present, appeared less frequently. Yet with hindsight, there seemed an eerie prescience to the slogan, a warning of what might, with the right forces awakened, happen when those vigilant offices came under new management and the society around them began to shift. The military may have stepped back, but the violence of 2012 and thereafter showed that the fears it encouraged did not depart with the men in green. 73

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The junta that ruled Myanmar in the decades before the transition began did so with a particular vision in mind, taken from a motto used by the independence movement: “One voice, one blood, one nation.” On giant red billboards planted at intersections of busy roads it spoke of the “People’s Desire”, imploring loyal subjects to “Crush all internal and external destructive elements as the common enemy”. They implied that there was an undercurrent of existential anxiety running throughout the population, common to all the people. Or perhaps, where that anxiety wasn’t present, it could be cultivated. Fear has always been a powerful unifier, and if the authors of these slogans could sell the idea that a threat to the nation lurked just beyond its borders, or perhaps even within them, then the project to bring disparate peoples under one flag might bear fruit. The socialist programme launched by General Ne Win, who took power in a coup in 1962, ending a brief period of parliamentary rule that began upon independence, sought to capture the energy of the anti-colonial movement: it would rid the country of foreign contaminants, and make the people of Myanmar, and not foreign powers, chief deciders of the country’s fate. When the State Law and Order Restoration Council took the reins from Ne Win in 1988, it carried this further, pitching itself not so much as a nation builder but a nation restorer. As Myanmar retreated deeper into isolation, the new clique of generals promised to return the country to its supposed pre-colonial glory, when a Buddhist order thrived, untainted by outside influence, and all subjects of the king enjoyed an abiding sense of national unity. The billboards and 74

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signboards had a particular bluntness to them, warning of the dangers of cultural diversity, but other texts were more lyrical. They evoked a fanciful picture of what had been, and what, with some work, could yet be. One passage in Minye Kaungbon, a booklet issued in the mid-1990s by the State Law and Order Restoration Council, began: Moving about in the manner of whirlpools, racial groups have assimilated to a large extent and just as one major [one] was about to emerge, Myanmar fell under imperialist rule. Some currents of water that had not yet completely assimilated with others were prevented from reaching the journey’s end and were left half way.

The British sabotaged that project, so the story went, and drove a deep wedge between the different racial and religious groups of the country. They spread false tales of differences in race and in culture as if they were merely defending minority rights … Let all national groups have complete faith, trust and love among themselves. They are blood-brothers and let them be united just like water is united and indivisible.1

But the sense of purity and homogeneity the military vowed to return to Myanmar of course never existed. King Anawratha may have achieved a degree of unity of the valley peoples that none before him had managed, but after the fall of his dynasty, 75

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the country’s centre was embroiled in centuries of conflict between rival kingdoms, as the power of the Bamar kingdoms waxed and waned greatly. There was, however, some truth to the accusations. Myanmar has always been a nation of innumerable porous and interchangeable identity groups, each with divergent loyalties. Yet Britain imported its obsession with racial classification, one that had been used to such deleterious effect in its colonies elsewhere in the world. Boundaries were drawn between peoples that hadn’t previously seen themselves as quite so discrete and, over time, the human landscape in Myanmar began to change. Once fluid notions of ethnicity calcified into hard distinctions between groups. Myanmar emerged from colonial rule with an emboldened sense of diversity, but it was of a sort that was imposed, rather than having developed organically. The colonial administration’s carving up of the population meant that allegiances, and all that came with them – competition and conflict – were directed along ethnic lines, and for a military elite consisting almost solely of the Bamar Buddhist majority that sought to control every inch of the land, this posed a particular problem. It would be the job of the military to construct from this mosaic of groups a single identity and bring together those currents of water as they headed towards the journey’s end. What began as the dictatorship matured was an attempt to assimilate different identity groups into the majority sphere, and to banish those that would never conform to the ideal nation. In doing so, the dangers posed by other races, internal or external, to the “national race” would lessen, and the sense 76

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of unity and harmony that had been so disrupted by foreign rule would be finally returned to the country. Or so the logic went. It is from this starting point, of illuminating the broader processes of statecraft in Myanmar over the past half century that have affected all communities, not just Muslims, that the violence of the transition is perhaps best understood. The mobs that began visiting Muslim neighbourhoods in 2012 may have done so long after these processes had started, but they signalled that the project of national unification was by no means finished.

One evening in Yangon I had dinner with a friend on the northern edge of Inya Lake. A stone’s throw from the restaurant sat the compound where Ne Win had lived out his final days. From the roadside you can peer across a spit of water and, through a clump of trees that rises up from the lip of the lake, see snatches of what had once been the former general’s house-cum-prison. He was confined there in March 2002, twelve years after he resigned from office. Several months before, the new regime, formed of members of his inner circle that took power after his departure, had got wind of his involvement in an alleged plot crafted by his son-in-law and grandsons to overthrow the then junta leader Than Shwe and return the family to power. The former general would die there nine months later, a recluse in a home that, walled off from the life going on outside the compound, mirrored the isolation he had forced on Myanmar. 77

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The friend I met that evening had been eighteen when Ne Win died. Save for a small obituary in the state-run New Light of Myanmar newspaper, the death had gone largely unannounced in the media. Perhaps the new clique of generals saw the indignity of an unmarked death as an appropriate posthumous punishment for his treason; perhaps they feared his death might stimulate some sort of response from the populace. Either way, as his time in office passed, he came to be an immensely unpopular leader. His paranoiac superstition and fear of usurpation made him a highly erratic ruler, prone to irrational decisions that verged on the maniacal. Twice in the 1980s he demonetised the Myanmar currency in a bid to exorcise from it number combinations he felt would bring bad luck, in a stroke wiping out the already meagre savings of millions. Hla Hla moved to Yangon from a small village in Mon State to the south-east at the age of four. It was 1988, the year of the nationwide uprising that, although eventually put down by the military, would be followed by Ne Win’s resignation. After a speech that included the infamous warning to student protestors – “If the army shoots … it shoots to hit” – he was followed by a string of short-lived successors, before a coup in September marked the beginning of the era of the State Law and Order Restoration Council and the eventual rise to power of Senior General Than Shwe, Myanmar’s last outright dictator. Hla Hla had come to Yangon with her mother and father, leaving her extended family – cousins, aunts, uncles – behind in their village just south of the Mon capital, Mawlamyine. “In the summer holidays I would return to the village and I loved it there”, she recalled. It was a remote location, made all the more 78

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so by the woefully under-maintained roads that wound their way through the border regions. “Thirty-five cousins were there; the whole village was full of my kind. But in Yangon I felt lonely. I couldn’t make any friends.” In the four decades between independence and Hla Hla’s arrival in Yangon, the dynamic between the dominant Bamar ethnic bloc and the minority groups scattered around the country’s periphery had changed. Shortly before Myanmar became an independent nation in 1948, several of the ethnic groups residing in the border regions were guaranteed the freedom to secede from Myanmar, and others, although not all, were to be granted self-determination and rights equal to those of the Bamar. But those promises were gradually withdrawn, first by the post-independence civilian government of U Nu, and then by the dictatorship that arrived with Ne Win in 1962. As it became increasingly evident that selfdetermination would not be granted, ethnic rebellions intensified in the country’s periphery, and the military responded in kind. Despite Myanmar having no real external enemies, the army grew to become the country’s best resourced institution, channelling much of its energy into putting down the revolts and launching a decades-long effort to subvert the status of ethnic minorities and suppress the markers of their cultural identity: their language, their freedom to practise their religions or celebrate their National Day. Hla Hla hailed from one of these minorities, but one with a particularly proud heritage whose decline had embittered its leaders all the more. At various points over the past millennium the Mon kingdom had covered vast territory in southern 79

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Myanmar and into Thailand. Its contact with Theravada Buddhist schools in Sri Lanka had provided a transmission line for Buddhism to enter Myanmar, and it was through the influence of a Mon monk, Shin Arahan, that King Anawratha had converted in the eleventh century, paving the way for Buddhism’s eventual pre-eminence. There were lengthy periods in which the Mon had enjoyed great prestige, but as the Bamar sphere expanded, the Mon were gradually reduced to a minority, in both size and clout. The Mon Freedom League had formed the year prior to independence, and launched its own revolt shortly after the British departed. And when the military came to power, all Mon – like ethnic minority groups the country over – were considered potential saboteurs of the nation-building project. After the family had settled in a suburb in northern Yangon, Hla Hla was enrolled at school. It wasn’t an easy induction into life in the then capital. The school was populated mainly with Bamar children from northern Yangon, and she found it difficult to integrate. “They all made fun of me because I’m not Bamar. My Mon accent was quite strong and people laughed at it”, she remembered. At the age of ten, she was taken by her parents to the local immigration office to apply for a National Registration Card. The small laminated card is obligatory for all citizens – proof that you belong in Myanmar. “When the time came to get my identity card my mum wasn’t sure what to do”, Hla Hla recalled. Her mother knew that ethnicity had become a chief determinant of one’s fortunes, and either granted or denied freedoms at a time in Myanmar when freedom was a prized 80

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asset, to be snatched at any opportunity. Like religion, it was stamped on the ID card. For the military, it provided an indicator of the bearer’s supposed allegiances, and thus put any non-Bamar at an immediate disadvantage. The violent identity politics of the age, codified on ID cards, meant that minorities were deemed worthy of a level of surveillance far beyond that of the majority group. “If you go travelling somewhere the police will ask where you register and what race you are and that’s the problem”, she said. I didn’t change my ID because of social pressure, but because of the way the government tried to control and discriminate and separate people. So although we are Mon, when we moved to Yangon my mother said, “‘No, we must be Bamar Buddhist because this is the highest identity we can get”.

When the British arrived in the early nineteenth century they knew virtually nothing of the rich and complex tapestry of cultural norms and belief systems that made up the territory they sought control of. At the time of Britain’s early incursions into Lower Burma in the first quarter of the century, the Konbaung Dynasty ruled over much of the lowland territory, and as far to the west as Bengal and Assam. To the north and east, in the mountainous borderlands that ringed the territory, lay a patchwork of microstates that remained largely independent of the central kingdoms. While the kings would dispatch 81

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their armies into the mountains to round up slaves and to levy taxes on upland populations, they were never subject to direct rule. Their communities were too remote to be of much economic or strategic value and their land too rugged for the farming techniques that had developed on the flat terrain below them. Unlike the townspeople of the central plains who had intermingled for centuries, these “hill people” had developed their own economic and political systems in comparative isolation, both from the lowlanders and from one another, making their incorporation into mainland societies all the more difficult. In the Myanmar of that age there were ethnic groups, so to speak, and each looked to longstanding distinctions that extended back well before colonial rule. Texts from the pre-modern era speak of Mon or Shan, and they note their different customs, dress and language – those features that comprise the identifying cultural “material” of ethnicity. But rulers of the time also understood that these distinctions were not hard and fast, and nor did they necessarily determine allegiances. Instead, boundaries between groups in the pre-colonial era were porous, and subject to shifting political loyalties. The distinguishing features of the two major lowland ethnicities, the Mon and Bamar, could be swapped back and forth at will: ponytails would be adjusted, dress would be changed, and a Mon could become a Bamar if it meant that the marauding armies of one kingdom would spare them.2 There is a rich archive of stories that illuminate this. A time traveller sent back to the court of Ava in 1740 may have been surprised to see battalions of the Mon king, Smin Dhaw, 82

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who had launched a final bid to expand his power, being led by ethnic Bamar, only to be repelled by Mon soldiers fighting on the behest of the ruler of the kingdom of Ava, himself a Bamar3 – a scene that would be entirely alien to watchers of Myanmar today. While ethnicity still carried great significance as a marker of identity, if one could “become” another, perhaps by changing clothes or switching loyalties, then it brought into question a claim so often repeated by the exclusionary nationalists of today: that members of each group were defined by innate characteristics that had remained unchanged across millennia and that established members of one as the natural ruler of the country, the master race, and all others as secondary citizens, or worse. Somewhere in between the battles of Ava and the conflicts in modern-day Myanmar, this had come to be, and it meant a politicisation of ethnicity that locked groups in a state of perpetual competition, and often violent conflict, with one another. Much of this was owed to the British. At the time of their arrival in Myanmar, the science of racial classification was popular in Europe. It was a science that sought order and coherence where there appeared none, and tried to replicate the hierarchical social relations that were common to Western societies. At its core was the belief that groups of people could be defined along biological lines, and that these then determined behaviour and, thus, social status. But it was also used to categorise people for more functional purposes. Unlike the Mon or Bamar defectors of the pre-colonial period who could alter their identity when circumstances demanded it, 83

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this science emphasised that different ethnicities, or “races”, as the British then referred to them, were fixed in time, the boundaries between them yielding not to external events. It ignored the pre-existing nuances in relations between groups, yet it would make the job of administrating foreign lands that much easier. Although woefully uneducated as to the complex dynamics between the different communities of Myanmar, enumerators were dispatched by the British into the hills to conduct censuses of the population, encountering what political scientist James C. Scott describes as “a baroque complexity that all but defeated their mania for classificatory order”.4 Yet still they were classified: groups became groups because of the languages they spoke, and sometimes because of their geographical location. The more salient pre-existing allegiances based on kinship, or even political and economic opportunism, were largely ignored. This artificial construction and ordering of communities was necessary because of the way the colonial power had divided Myanmar into two territories: Burma proper, the central region that was governed by Bamar under the auspices of the British, and the mountainous frontier areas of Kayah (Karenni), Kachin and Chin. The latter contained many different sub-groups, all of which developed in comparative isolation. Over time, broad umbrella groups evolved as communities that had before considered themselves rather more discrete now came to see themselves as part of a greater whole.5 The British had, in effect, “ethnicised” the landscape in Myanmar by greatly politicising ethnicity, and relations that had once traversed these moving identity lines began to stiffen. 84

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It echoed the work undertaken by European powers in Africa long before. “To control a people’s culture is to control their tools of self-definition in relationship to others”, the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o once observed of the effects of colonial divide-and-rule policies there.6 In Myanmar, as in European-administered countries the world over in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ethnicity became the major cleavage between, and an instrument of exclusion of, different groups. This re-engineering of the landscape was to have a toxic effect on relations between the centre of Myanmar and its periphery after colonial rule ended. By codifying these newly drawn boundaries, what distinctions did exist soon hardened into divisions. The national identity that had started to coalesce around Bamar Buddhism during the independence movement of the 1920s and 1930s took a more rigid form after the British departed, when the legacy of its classification began to play out in violent forms. It fed the idea, so amplified by the junta, that ethnicity was an unassailable point of difference, and that Others – whether ethnic, racial or religious – were necessarily threatening to the Bamar Buddhist majority.

“We were so scared that they would find out we were Mon”, Hla Hla said of the first visit to immigration. “When we went there they looked at me and asked, ‘Where are you from?’ I said Yangon. ‘Where were you born?’ I said Mawlamyine. ‘Are you Mon?’ No.” 85

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The grilling was to last several hours. She remembers the careful instructions detailed to her beforehand, to ensure no clues were given as to her origins. “My mum had told me not to say anything. I was so scared. It was like sitting in an interview – am I going to fail or pass?” By that age, Hla Hla had mastered how to speak in an accent redolent of cosmopolitan Yangon. It was partly a conscious effort, to stem the bullying at school, and partly strategic. “I got comments and corrections back from friends and picked up the accent that way. I had to adapt to the flow of how they speak Burmese.” But she still felt side-lined at school. Her teachers would call her “Mon Ma” or “Mon girl”. “They would say to others, ‘Let’s ask Mon Ma to do it’, and I’d have to go and buy food for them.” But her parents also knew that in order to present a compelling case to immigration officials that she was indeed Bamar and not Mon they would need to take additional measures. Were she to continue as a Mon, then the discrimination would persist; not just in school, but afterwards – her career might suffer, and she would come under undue attention from authorities. What followed was a complete rewriting of her family tree, going back generations. “When you go to the immigration they look at you and if you don’t look Burmese they say ‘No. You can’t be Burmese – you look Karen, or Mon. Are you Karen? Show me your family tree’.” The document she would eventually produce was a lie. It had erased her complex ancestry: a father who was “half Muslim”, a grandfather who was Chinese Mon. “We paid and 86

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completely made it up – we Burmanised names completely.” The local authorities in her village were friends, and a bribe to them meant they could alter the ID cards of everyone in her family. The process effectively homogenised her identity, bracketing her into a category, that of Bamar Buddhist, that spoke little to her true lineage. But more changes to her character lay ahead. I asked Hla Hla how exactly people made fun of her at school. Was the underlying belief in the science of racial classification introduced by the British – that ethnicity determined behaviour, and therefore that it should have a bearing on social status – alive in Myanmar during Hla Hla’s early years? It seemed so. “Me being dark. Also the way I sit and walk. The way you dress, the way you hold yourself and behave. You have to be a city girl, not like in the village”, she replied. Hla Hla eventually got the ID card and became, in the eyes of officialdom, a Bamar. She was able to convince the immigration officials that she belonged to this group, even though she didn’t. It took some work – the changing of her accent, her posture, the rewriting of her family tree. But it wasn’t a wholly lived experience. “We still think we belong to where we come from”, she said. “We feel we migrated into Yangon and away from our town. But the food we still eat, and the traditions we still keep. We do not forget about it. This is us.” Yet the changes she did have to make, those that showed to immigration officials in Yangon her apparently true orientation, were essentially cosmetic. She hadn’t needed to transform anything innate within her, regardless of the fact that the country’s rulers have built the whole discourse of identity and 87

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belonging in Myanmar on the idea that ethnicity runs in the veins, and is therefore a key determinant of the character of the people – their goodness, or their wicked ways – that it seeks to rule over.

Another development occurred shortly after Hla Hla’s birth. In the early 1990s, the regime began to vigorously peddle the idea that within the borders of Myanmar lived precisely 135 distinct “national races”, or taingyintha, who were indigenous to the country. This provided the foundation for the discourse of belonging, but it had been a volatile discourse. The British had counted, or indeed created, 139 ethnic groups in its 1931 census, based largely on the languages they spoke; when General Ne Win ordered a fresh census in 1973, it found there to be five more. The numbers were in continual flux, and shortly after the State Law and Order Restoration took power, it was set at 135. But at no point was clear evidence provided for the source for that number. By utilising a trick of the light that illuminates histories of ethnicity, the regime was able to lock in a taxonomy of ethnic groups that had little basis in reality. Implicit in the indexing of discrete groups was the belief that they, unlike others who were excluded, were composed of fixed bodies of people that had existed unbroken for centuries, or longer, and could be defined consistently across time. But all identity groups are the product of human mobilisation, and their boundaries, as Hla Hla and countless others showed, are not permanently set. Rather than degrees of construction – that some groups 88

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are natural and others artificial – there are instead degrees of chronology. Some came together earlier than others, but none rose up as one from the earth. Yet the intent of the national races discourse was to sell this idea of primordialism and to clean up the country after the mess and divisions left by the British. Any false claimants to the nation were weeded out, thereby denying them a place in that vaunted index. Moreover, it echoed one of the great fictions of nationalism: the idea that there could ever be “one nation”, in the sense of a contiguous grouping of people, in Myanmar or any other country; that all within a country’s borders share a set of commonalities outside of their mere membership of the national community that unites them together. Some communities in Myanmar’s periphery have as much, if not more, in common with populations in neighbouring countries than they do with their fellow “nationals”, for the borderline pays little respect to the lineages of people who long before settled in the regions through which it was drawn. There, family lines still cut across that divider, and the cultural markers of those populations – the customs, the dialect – were largely unbroken by it. For all its shakiness, the discourse of “national races” became perhaps the most powerful political tool in the regime’s armoury. After Ne Win had come to power in 1962 and launched his ideological crusade under the banner of the “Burmese Way to Socialism”, industry was nationalised across the country. The resulting capital, he claimed, would be redistributed to all indigenous communities. Despite the fact that Ne Win himself was a kabyer, of mixed Chinese and Bamar ancestry, his paeans to the pure Myanmar of old belied a 89

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deeply ingrained xenophobia that drew a sharp line between those he considered native to Myanmar, and those who were deemed foreign. Hundreds of thousands of Indians and Chinese were forced out of the country in the mid-1960s and their businesses returned to their supposedly rightful owners. Those who remained were issued with Foreign Registration Certificates, and when the general unveiled a new constitution in 1974, all holders of FRCs were required to hand them in and await a new one. When the first set of National Registration Cards were issued in 1952, they hadn’t included details of the holder’s ethnicity or religion. This meant that all who could prove a family presence in the country going back two generations, or who had lived in the country for eight years prior to independence, were granted citizenship, regardless of their group identity. Thirty years later, when Ne Win announced the new Citizenship Act of 1982, that changed, and before long ethnicity was flagged on the cards. Yet the military government, it later became clear, would ignore the law it crafted. After 1982, people were refused citizenship on account of their not being among the national races. When the junta later began peddling the idea of precisely 135 groups, the criteria was constricted further. The merits of individual claims, perhaps that one had an ancestry stretching back generations in Myanmar, mattered little unless the entire ethnicity the claimant subscribed to was certified indigenous. The index became such a prominent decider of who was and was not native to the country that it, and not the legal criteria for citizenship, came to determine the make-up of the national community.7 90

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The most visible victims of this were the Rohingya. Under British rule, before ethnicity became the touchstone for membership of the nation, many who now identify as Rohingya were likely bracketed under different designators: as native “Rakhine Muslims”, or as “Chittagonian Muslims” who arrived during the time of the British, following a migratory route that long predated the drawing of borders. Both categories were included in British censuses but later dropped by Ne Win. Why they disappeared is unclear: perhaps Ne Win was unable to countenance having an indigenous ethnonym like Rakhine alongside a “foreign” religion; perhaps he believed that allowing “Chittagonian” to remain on census lists legitimised claims for recognition by outsiders. But because the group was not deemed to be one of the national races, so too would its members be absented from the nation. In 1989, as their security grew increasingly imperilled, immigration officers went among Rohingya communities in Rakhine State demanding they turn in the Foreign Registration Cards they had also been given in the mid-1970s and await a new Citizenship Scrutiny Card. But those who still argued for a Rohingya identity, or who the government considered to be in the country illegally, were not given ID cards, and were refused re-registration. From that point on, the legal status of anyone who subscribed to the Rohingya identity began to crumble. It appeared that they too had been lumped in with the Indians as foreigners, introduced by the British Empire, whose loyalty to the nation was in doubt. Their ethnicity was considered to be an artificial creation, in contrast to the supposedly “natural” ethnic groups they shared the western state with. It 91

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was created in order to give these supposed Bengali interlopers a claim to citizenship and, so it went, a platform on which to begin the Islamisation of Myanmar. Over time, the Rohingya would become that type of race warned of in the immigration slogan, one that, through the spread of their sinister ideas and their irreconcilable differences, would swallow the Myanmar people in their entirety. As a result, anyone who identified as Rohingya was, bit by bit, pushed to the edges of the map, even those who laid claim to deep roots in the country. But it wasn’t only they who were affected by the turn of events in 1982. Their denial of a place in society would manifest in the most insidious form, leaving them stateless, beyond the scope of law and justice, the object of widespread resentment. But tiers of belonging were created that impacted on large sections of the population all over the country: “full citizens” looked down on “associate citizens”, who in turn held a place of privilege, limited as it was, over “naturalised citizens”. Bamar formed the bulk of the first category. Their ancestry in Myanmar prior to 1823, the year before Britain’s arrival, when the country’s demographic make-up underwent a profound shift, was never questioned. They were granted full political rights, albeit greatly curtailed in that era, but other minority groups fared worse. To gain full citizenship required the presentation of ID cards and a knowledge of procedures, but for populations embroiled in conflict or who didn’t speak the mother tongue, these were often not issued, and so many in the ethnic states became associate citizens.8 “This is not because we hate them”, Ne Win stated in 1982, shortly after the law was announced. “If we were to 92

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allow them to get into positions where they can decide the destiny of the State and if they were to betray us we would be in trouble.”9 They weren’t Bamar, and were therefore untrustworthy – that was clear to the general. And with it, the distinction between the civilised Bamar centre and the unruly border peoples, amplified first by the British and then reinforced by the military, again came to determine the fortunes of millions.

The antagonism between the centre and periphery in Myanmar had been a slow-burning development. Armed conflict along ethnic lines began in 1949. The Kayin, known by the British as Karen, had provided vital military manpower for the colonial government, and in return was promised an independent state after it left. But as it became clear upon independence that this would not be granted, small-scale uprisings began in Kayin State, soon coalescing into a broad armed resistance movement. By the beginning of 1949 Kayin insurgents had taken several towns in central Myanmar and the delta region, and in response, soldiers from that ethnic group were purged from the military’s ranks. The Karen National Union, formed in the hills of Kayin State close to the border with Thailand, then declared war on the government. Others soon followed. As negotiations for independence got underway and a new constitution was drawn up, General Aung San had resisted pressure from within his party to make Buddhism the state religion. The father of the independence movement feared that it would stir anger among the significant 93

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portion of the non-Buddhist populace at a time when national harmony was a key priority. At the hour of Myanmar’s independence in January 1948, with the by then deceased Aung San having stood firm during discussions the year before, it remained a secular state. But by the mid-1950s, the issue had become hot. In May 1956 three Sangha organisations threatened mass protests unless Buddhism was elevated to the state religion. Prime Minister U Nu, then in his eighth year of the premiership, responded in an address to elder monks that he was anxious to meet their demands. Yet he worried that it might only worsen the already bitter grievances held by ethnic minorities, among them sizeable non-Buddhist communities, towards a government that was showing clear signs of reneging on its pledges of self-determination for minority groups. But U Nu pushed ahead. He was known to be a committed Buddhist; one writer claimed his administration “could not be distinguished from one long Buddhist ceremony”,10 and he entered the monkhood for a brief spell in the mid-1950s. As he toured the country in the build-up to elections in 1960, monks campaigned in his favour, taking to villages and towns to rally support for his party. Two months later, U Nu formed a special commission to gauge public opinion on making Buddhism the state religion. It canvassed communities of the four major religious groups – Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and Christianity, as well as animism – but gave disproportionate voice to Buddhists. However, when it travelled to the northern­most state of Kachin, the train carrying the commission into the state capital Myitkyina was attacked 94

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by rock-throwing protestors and forced to turn back. These were the first salvos in a popular revolt that the following year would crystallise into the Kachin armed rebellion. Also denied self-determination and the accompanying guarantees for respect of their cultural practices, the Kachin, a sizeable proportion of whom were Christian, understood that if Buddhism were to become the state religion in a country populated by multiple faith groups then it would codify the predominance of those who subscribed to Buddhism. The result would be to further push ethnic and religious minorities to the periphery. Buddhism never did make it that far. U Nu managed to pass a watered-down bill in 1961, but he was ousted the following year by Ne Win. While the general, who would rule for the next twenty-six years, understood the power that the faith held over the majority population, he believed that church and state should remain separate, and so it was revoked. Instead Ne Win embarked on a different strategy of unification. U Nu’s manoeuvrings, undertaken in the wake of the mess left by the British, whose rule laid waste to social structures and redrew lines of authority and allegiance, had pushed non-Bamar Buddhists further away. This weakened what potential there was for the government to rule over the entirety of Myanmar. Instead, under the general’s watch, minority groups would be drawn closer towards the centre, coercively assimilated into the majority. Doing so, he believed, would cultivate a loyalty within them that would serve to hold the country together in these volatile times. Over and again he affirmed the ethnic hierarchy that had come to be in Myanmar, 95

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with Bamar as the true heirs to the land, and all others, whether indigenous or not, as threats to the master ethnicity. “Today you can see that even people of pure blood are being disloyal to the race and country but are being loyal to others”, he said in a speech in 1979. If people of pure blood act this way, we must carefully watch people of mixed blood. Some people are of pure blood, pure Burmese heritage and descendants of genuine citizens. Karen, Kachin and so forth, are of genuine pure blood. But we must consider whether these people are completely for our race, our Burmese people: and our country, our Burma.1

Under the general’s logic, there was an obstacle in the way of unity – that of diversity. And as the many different ethnic rebellions showed, that diversity was the source of a violence that would gradually eat away at the nation, threatening the realisation of a pure Myanmar. Hla Hla had been one of these obstacles. And when she came to Yangon, a transaction of sorts occurred: she would give them her identity and in return be granted a degree of agency she would otherwise be denied as a non-Bamar. That was the transformation she must undergo to develop loyalty to the nation. Elsewhere the process of assimilation – of pulling people into the Bamar Buddhist sphere, and doing away with those who resisted – took on different, more explicit forms: the teaching of ethnic minority languages in schools was replaced by Bamar language classes; non-Buddhists were coerced into 96

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converting to the majority faith, while Buddhist communities were planted in regions populated by Christians and Muslims, becoming pawns in large-scale social engineering projects; ethnic minority women were forced to marry Bamar soldiers deployed to the border regions, thereby diluting the concentration of their own communities. Accompanying those projects were campaigns of violence, led by the military, that had as their ultimate goal the eradication of these differences, whether by exclusion from society through mass flight to other countries, or by the killing of those considered different. But Hla Hla’s was a peculiar transaction, for at its core lay a seeming contradiction: with those adjustments she was able to become part of the master ethnicity, even though the conversation surrounding identity in Myanmar since the dawn of military rule emphasised the contiguity and timelessness of ethnic categories – that Bamar was an entity unto itself, purer than all others and the pivot around which the nation revolved, and always had. There were other people, whom we’ll meet later, that underwent such wholesale shifts in their outward identity that they were pitched from the far fringes of society right into the core: Rohingya who “became” Rakhine, Muslims who “became” Buddhists. Or, for one man, both. It seemed to be the only way they could become members of a society in which the criteria for belonging had narrowed so greatly. Yet the experience of those who underwent this transformation seemed to indicate that, rather than each of us standing as one singular identity, we are composites of different characteristics, loyalties and attachments that are modified greatly 97

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over time, and that link us to others in many different and interchangeable ways. When particular identity labels bring power and prestige, individuals often cleave tighter to them. But for others, like Hla Hla or anyone who comes from a subordinated group, there is often a compulsion to morph from one to another. Rather than this providing evidence of an innate superiority in the master ethnicity, it shows that outward identities have less of a bearing on our inner nature than some might like to think, and that similarities – as the old dictum goes – are more powerful than differences. Yet for the nationalist project to succeed in distinguishing those who belong from those who do not, it requires differences to be emphasised in ways that make them appear threatening, and those cross-cutting ties to be obfuscated entirely. The most barbaric crimes of the past century have been, above all else, expressions of common hatred for people considered to be different to us, and whose difference runs so deep that the only way to exorcise it is to banish it from this world. That can happen only when the common ground is obliterated and the dynamics between groups rewritten entirely. The rape and murder of Ma Thida Htwe on 28 May 2012 provided a catalyst to drive this process forward – not just between the Buddhists and Muslim communities of Rakhine State but, gradually, in other parts of the country too. When newspapers and social media began to identify the culprits by their ethnicity and religion, it made victims of individuals who had no link to the assailants whatsoever, but who, by dint of their identity, were considered participants in a broader project of conquest that the death of the seamstress signalled was now underway. 98

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US AND THEM MAKING IDENTITIES, MANIPULATING DIVIDES

The construction of an identity is often done by antithesis – I am what you are not. When, in the wake of the first wave of violence to hit western Myanmar as the transition began, Rakhine and Rohingya retreated sharply to within their own communities, the process of differentiation took on a new force. It seemed natural that any fear of a collective identity being weakened would be met with vigorous efforts to refine and assert that identity. But as relations quickly worsened after 2012, the psychological polarisation that followed gathered an altogether new momentum, setting in motion a break-up of the local society whose consequences would be both profound and lasting. That process hadn’t begun with the violence of June that year, however. Rather, a hardened notion of what it meant to “be Rakhine” had been in the making long before, as the inhabitants of the state faced off against three successive colonising powers: the pre-colonial kings of the mainland territory, the British, and the Bamar-dominated military. For the Buddhist population, who claimed with the greatest vigour to be the rightful owners of the state, this unrelenting colonisation drive fuelled a siege mentality that eventually came to be directed at Muslims. Today, Rakhine Buddhists of all stripes often 1 01

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speak of being “caught between Islamisation and Burmanisation” – the drive to stamp a Bamar, or Burman, identity on ethnic minority groups. Yet while the conflict with Muslims, and Rohingya in particular, may have dominated the news coming out of Myanmar in recent years, the manoeuvrings of different political powers long before were instrumental in planting the seeds for the violence and fuelling the separation of an “us” from a “them” – a clearly defined in-group ranged against multiple out-groups, with Rakhine primed to see any perceived outsiders as threatening. So forceful did the separation become that whatever shared sense of victimhood might have developed between the different communities of the western state under the dictatorship was quickly forgotten. As the transition away from military rule advanced, nationalist Rakhine leaders amplified the looming threat of further subordination, this time to Islam, and in the process created a narrative that centred on the need purify the Rakhine identity and finally rid their land of any foreign presence. It was a powerful narrative, for it drew on a centuries-old campaign to suppress the identity and autonomy of Rakhine, thereby giving their present-day condition a painful historical backdrop. And it had substantial merit. Long before Islam became the dominant threat in the Rakhine imagination, the independence of the Rakhine people, and their freedom to follow their own customs and traditions, was snatched from them. Their once mighty kingdom, encompassing much of present-day eastern Bangladesh as well as the western flank of Myanmar, was annexed by a king who sat on a throne hundreds of miles away and ruled with little regard for the traditional 1 02

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norms of his new subjects. They came to be managed by his people, under his strictures. Yet the power of this new and remote authority, projected from afar, had a curious effect, for it began to erode the tradition of inclusivity that had once been a marker of Rakhine culture. For much of the past millennium the busy trade along the western shores meant that the Rakhine kingdom was populated by a large and transient immigrant community. In the centuries that followed the migration there of communities from the Ayeyarwady Valley, and before its annexation by King Bodawpaya in 1784, the kings of Rakhine had been compelled to cultivate an inclusive attitude towards their subjects on account of the myriad different religious and ethnic communities that lived there. The early Persian and Indian seafarers who arrived from the ninth century onwards were small in number and had made only a minor impact on local society, but this began to change around the fifteenth century. Bengali kings that ruled territories to the west of Rakhine had helped several of their Rakhine counterparts retain the throne against the manoeuvring of rivals. The Rakhine king, Saw Mon Narameikhla, fled to Bengal in the early fifteenth century following attacks by Bamar armies from the east, and spent twenty-four years under the protection of the Sultan of Bengal. When he returned to establish the city of Mrauk U, he built mosques alongside the pagodas that dotted in their hundreds the hills surrounding the city. For two centuries after, Rakhine kings would use Muslim designations for their names and mint coins with Persian inscriptions to make the bountiful trade with westerly kingdoms easier. Despite the region soon bearing the 103

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marks of strong Islamic influence, religious differences didn’t provide the source of violent contestation that they do now. By the early eighteenth century, however, the coastal region had fallen into a state of anarchy, as the many peoples – Christian Portuguese and Dutch traders, Buddhist Siamese mercenaries, Hindu and Muslim Bengali settlers and slaves – that had joined the existing population vied against one another to place in power a ruler who would safeguard their interests.1 The kingdom’s frontiers were greatly weakened, and this allowed King Bodawpaya to make his move. In late 1784 a band of Rakhine ventured to Amarapura near Mandalay, where he then sat, to request his intervention. The Bamar king needed little prompting – he would execute a “just war” that would ensure the return of Buddhism to its central position in Rakhine culture, and remedy the foreign influence that was eroding the cohesion of society there. The invasion he launched brought the Rakhine kingdom under his rule, and used violence of a kind so grisly that it left an indelible mark in the Rakhine imagination. “They united on the west coast, swept the Arakanese royal army out of Ramree Island, and camped along the Dalet River northwest of An, receiving the homage of the surrounding country”, the historian G.E. Harvey wrote of the 1784 invasion. Subsequent fighting took place through the creeks and islands, and the Arakanese came out to offer resistance both on land and sea; but they were outnumbered three to one and never succeeded in seriously checking the Burmese who occupied the capital Mrohaung [Mrauk 1 04

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U] without difficulty, inflicting wanton cruelties on the population, leaving them tied to stakes at low-water mark, or burying them up to their chin in fields which they then proceeded to harrow.2

The routing of the kingdom upended the social order, already weakened by the lengthy internal unrest that preceded Bodawpaya’s invasion, and his soldiers looted its most sacred relics. Among them was the Mahamuni statue. Legend has it that the figure of the Great Sage had been sculpted during the time of the Buddha, who “breathed life upon it” when he visited Rakhine and gave it special powers to protect the kingdom.3 Bodawpaya evidently wanted its guardianship for himself. When his soldiers returned to Amarapura, they brought with them a band of Kaman Muslims – those specially trained archers who had guarded the court of Mrauk U – who trailed behind them sections of the Mahamuni statue, to be reassembled at a temple on the sparse northern fringes of the old city. Nowadays the area is swallowed up by the suburbs of Mandalay, but visitors can still meander their way through the streets south of the moat and, once at the Mahamuni Buddha Temple, behold the onetime protector of the Rakhine kingdom, now fattened by the volumes of gold leaf that devotees – Bamar, Rakhine, Mon – have encased it in over the centuries since.4 When the British eventually departed in the midtwentieth century and the border with India was redrawn, the process of annexing Rakhine and bringing its people under Bamar authority was complete. When Ne Win later began his expansion into the periphery, he appointed only Bamar 1 05

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officials to regional military and administrative postings. If the recipe for a unified Myanmar state required domination by a single ethnicity and religion, then better that members of the superior group serve as the regime’s tentacles in the hinterlands. Non-Bamar or non-Buddhist figures could not be trusted in positions of authority – their kind was deeply antagonistic towards the regime, and would not willingly act in its interests. Ne Win seemed to have borrowed from the blueprints of his predecessor, for Bodawpaya had done something very similar two centuries before when he took control of the Rakhine kingdom and wholly purged it of Rakhine authority. After his invasion, political leaders and military commanders, monks and local officials, were all supplanted by Bodawpaya’s own men, nearly all of them Bamar, and Maha Thammada, the last of the Rakhine kings, was exiled along with his entire court to Amarapura. The effort undertaken by the military after 1962 to expand its control into the ethnic states that ring Myanmar earned the name “Burmanisation” on account of its bid to assert a Bamar identity and authority in these regions. Bodawpaya’s conquest of the eighteenth century was an early incarnation of this: Bamar monks were sent to Rakhine with their Bamar language texts to set up Sangha networks that would bring the practice of Buddhism into their framework, and it centralised Rakhine political institutions under the Bamar royal court.5 Ne Win later followed suit. Where the king had planted officials from his court in positions of power across Rakhine, so did the general appoint Bamar to the vast majority of senior administrative and ministerial posts, not just in Rakhine but 1 06

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all over the country. As Bodawpaya left a garrison of several thousand soldiers in Mrauk U to ensure his authority there remained paramount, so were troops loyal to Ne Win stationed in barracks across the state to monitor civilians and deliver the military’s security objectives. Similar processes have occurred across all ethnic states in Myanmar, in many ways mirroring the colonisation of sacked kingdoms in the centuries prior to British rule. This campaign to remove the collective agency of ethnic Rakhine – and ethnic minorities the country over – has persisted across generations, providing the foundations for a deep-seated fear of subordination to “outsiders”, whoever they may be.

Fuelling the gradual polarisation of religious and ethnic communities in western Myanmar was a transformation of the country’s political landscape. As two of the major lowland kingdoms of the territory, Rakhine and Mon, were both annexed to the Bamar-dominated mainland in the later eighteenth century, and as the British moved in and imposed their own designs on this foreign land, borders were drawn in place of porous frontiers. Those frontiers had once shifted regularly, causing communities to “belong” to different territories at different times, or sometimes to none at all.6 Yet over time, what had been somewhat arbitrary boundaries came to be accepted as natural lines of division between nations and the people that inhabited them. Western Myanmar came to know this well. Long before the border separating it from Bangladesh, and before that India, 107

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was finally demarcated in 1985, two-way traffic moved regularly across it. After the Rakhine kingdom was annexed at the close of the eighteenth century, some 200,000 Rakhine, both Buddhist and Muslims, fled west, crossing the same stretch of the Naf River that would provide an escape route again centuries later, to areas of sanctuary in the mountains where they wouldn’t be reached by Bodawpaya’s marauding forces. Later convulsions of violence on either side of the border would cause communities to move back and forth repeatedly. Sometimes they stayed and settled, sometimes not. But by the time it was redrawn after the departure of the British in the middle of the twentieth century, the communities of each country had developed a degree of attachment to their land, as did the peoples of post-colonial societies the world over, that only a modern-day nation state could generate. Long forgotten was the relative ease of movement between the territories of present-day Rakhine State and Bangladesh; anyone who arrived after the establishment of that border was considered alien to the land, and thus a threat to those who claimed it as their own. At around the same time those ethnic Rakhine were fleeing into Bangladesh in the late eighteenth century, a Scottish physician by the name of Francis Buchanan was moving between the communities of Myanmar documenting the various groups that lived there. Under the title A Comparative Vocabulary of Some of the Languages Spoken in the Burma Empire, he produced perhaps one of the most comprehensive studies of the peoples of the region prior to the beginnings of colonial rule. In it, he noted “three dialects, spoken in the Burma Empire, but evidently derived from the language of the 1 08

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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”. The dominant narrative in Myanmar is that Rohingya crossed over during or after colonial rule, exploiting the porosity of the border and the corrupt officials that manned it to engineer a population boom and carve out an independent Muslim state. But Rohingya cite Buchanan’s study, and subsequent references to it in European texts, as evidence of a presence in the region prior to the British conquest of Rakhine in 1826 and the influx of workers from the subcontinent that followed it. They also point to the fact that Rohingya were recognised, at least vocally, by U Nu, and served as members of parliament, and even ministers, in the post-independence government.7 Throughout the 1950s, 1960s and into the 1970s official documents referenced the Rohingya as inhabitants of northern Rakhine State. The blanket denialism that is so pervasive now wasn’t commonplace within the government after independence. The Rohingya could organise politically – the government sanctioned the Rohingya Students Association at Rangoon University – and the group had its own thrice-weekly Rohingya-language radio broadcast. Yet as the regime sought to fix the ethnic landscape of Myanmar with a rigidity that bore little resemblance to the Myanmar of old, groups considered foreign to the country were gradually excluded. The hardening of an exclusive Rakhine Buddhist identity that was fuelled in part by the Burmanisation project, coupled with the removal of the “Rakhine Muslim” category from the index of national races, 1 09

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compelled the Muslims of the state to cleave more tightly to another label, one they claimed had a history in Myanmar going back to at least the late eighteenth century, and one that, at least initially, the government recognised. But its fitful history, absent as it was from British records, provided Ne Win, who pushed the idea of an ethno-religiously “pure” Myanmar harder as time went on, with a pretext to exclude an entire group from the nation. In an environment such as that shaped by the military in Myanmar, where ethnic groupings reified by the colonial power were later cemented as primordial “facts”, the longevity of a particular identity label was seen to determine, quite wrongly, the individual lineages of those who subscribed to it. So fixed have these supposed facts about Myanmar’s ethnic make-up become – that the history of a group name corresponds directly to the history of its adherents – that public opinion grew to be wholly pitched against the notion that anyone within the Rohingya group might have a longstanding presence there. It is a “new” label, and therefore its members must be new. While illegal immigration from Bangladesh did occur throughout military rule, aggravating the siege mentality felt by Rakhine Buddhists, whose predominance in the state had already been threatened by British-engineered immigration, a powerful narrative developed that saw all who identified as Rohingya as interlopers seeking a foothold that would allow them to pursue this final wave of colonisation. Because the Rohingya label is a fabrication, so it goes, then every individual claim to citizenship under it is scrutinised like no other. The logic that, as Rohingya, they simply 110

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cannot belong, underpins their statelessness, but it doesn’t stop at the legal sphere. Instead, it has provided a rationale for denying them even the inalienable human rights that should be conferred regardless of one’s political status. “It seems”, wrote the German political theorist Hannah Arendt, who herself was rendered stateless by the Nazis, “that a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow-man.”8 The architects of Rohingya statelessness would know this too. The alienation of this community from the once-plural society of Rakhine State, and the nation more broadly, and the loss of dignity that accompanied the stripping of their basic rights fuelled a process that, over the decades, has come to see the group dehumanised, ostracised and, finally, set up as legitimate targets of violence. The clique of generals that took Ne Win’s place in the late 1980s continued his push into the country’s periphery, but when it came to the strategies used to manage ethnic minorities they began to chart a somewhat different course. Ambitious new schemes were developed to encourage even more aggressively the systematic weakening of the Rohingya, and shortly after the turn of the decade a project to re-engineer the social landscape of northern Rakhine State took shape. The animosities that began to simmer more intensively caused Buddhists and Muslims there to grow even further apart, and provided kindling for the fire that started years later, when the body of Ma Thida Htwe was discovered beneath the rain tree.

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RULING THE UNRULY SOCIAL ENGINEERING AND THE VILLAGE OF PRISONERS

If you happened to be a common criminal in Myanmar’s prison system in the mid-1990s you may have been approached with a compelling, if unlikely, offer. The wardens of jails in Yangon and elsewhere had begun visiting Buddhist inmates to gauge their interest in a peculiar bargain deal: would they accept early release in exchange for their relocation to a far corner of the country, 350 miles from the former capital? Those who agreed, and many did, would gather their belongings and, within days, be driven to the main port in Yangon, where a hulking freightliner was docked. They would sail west, hugging the coastline for four days until they reached Sittwe on the western coast. And from there, they journeyed further north, slicing through the floodplains of the Mayu River until they reached Buthidaung, in northernmost Rakhine State. In the hills and plains surrounding the town lay a network of newly built model villages developed solely for these new arrivals. The men and women who just days before had been crammed into filthy, overcrowded prison cells were gifted not just a new house, but a cow, a small stipend and promises of monthly food rations: cooking oil, fish paste, beans and rice. The paddy fields that surrounded the villages were theirs to till, and the land theirs to roam. Soon they would be joined 115

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by others: inmates from jails elsewhere in central Myanmar, and homeless families recruited from squatter camps on the outskirts of Yangon. Rakhine from further south in the state would swell the numbers even more. By the late 1980s the regime had grown increasingly concerned that this area of the country was being “lost” to Muslims. There were the descendants of the early Muslim settlers and the captives brought over in their hundreds of thousands from Bengal between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries,1 and there were the labourers who crossed over from India and bore families during the time of the British. But it was those considered to have arrived more recently from Bangladesh who had become the chief drivers of a political and demographic crisis in Rakhine State. The regime’s rescue plan took shape in the elaborate model village scheme, which over the years would see Buddhists, invariably the poor or condemned, shifted out from their hometowns and organised into new communities. They would correct the demographic imbalance, one that was considered proof enough that Islam was gaining strength in Myanmar. Buddhists had by then become a minority in northern Rakhine State, and for the regime, that meant a weakening of its ability to project its power there. So the Buddhist prisoners were brought out of their cells to begin new lives far away. It was an audacious idea, one whose roots are found in a document drawn up in 1988, several years before the first inmates were approached. Circulated around the Ministry for the Progress of Border Areas and National Races, known by its local acronym Na Ta La, was an eleven-point strategy to turn 116

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back the tide against an encroaching Islam. The border between Bangladesh and Rakhine State had long before earned itself the appellation of the “Western Gate”, where a fragile separation between the Muslim and Buddhist worlds had become increasingly imperilled. The plan would stem that danger. Stage three served as a basic blueprint for the resettlement scheme: “To strive for the increase in Buddhist population to be more than the number of Muslim people by way of establishing Natala villages in Arakan with Buddhist settlers from different townships and from out of the country.”2 The directive was authored by one Colonel Tha Kyaw, chairman of the National Unity Party, which was formed that same year from the ashes of Ne Win’s Burma Socialist Programme Party to contest elections scheduled for 1990. Little is known of the colonel, except that he had been Minister for Transport under Ne Win, and that he was an ethnic Rakhine Buddhist. His prescription for taking northern Rakhine State back into Buddhist hands fused more institutional modes of suppression of the Rohingya identity with outright persecutory ones. Were this community to be officially recognised as an ethnic minority of the country, rather than the illegal interlopers many thought them to be, then Myanmar would suddenly have a sizeable Muslim constituency to deal with. They needed containing, and among the strategies listed in the directive was the denial of higher education to Rohingya and a ban on construction, even repair, of mosques and madrasas. But Rohingya would also be persistently referred to as insurgents in order to strengthen justification for their denial of citizenship after 1982, while marriages would be restricted 117

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“and all possible methods of repression and suppression [used] against them … to reduce the population growth”.

The model villages that lie scattered throughout the hills and low-lying plains of northern Rakhine State by and large replicate the nature of the communities that make them up. The prisoners, like the homeless transferred there in the 1990s and 2000s, were sent as groups, and placed in villages designated only for them. If they left within three years of arriving, they would be returned to jail. The regime intended to make these villages permanent fixtures on the landscape; proof that Buddhism was there to stay. Towards the end of one rainy season marked by particularly fierce storms that had swept in from the Bay of Bengal, causing landslides and flooding, a colleague and I went in search of a village of former prisoners. Only one remained. Aung Thar Yar had been settled in 2004, at the foot of a small hill surrounded by paddy fields. The approach was along a heavily rutted road running past a barracks that once housed soldiers of the Na Sa Ka border force. It was formed in 1992 to man Myanmar’s five borders, but its operations in northern Rakhine State, where it enforced control measures on the Rohingya and was regularly accused of brutality towards the community, gained it particular notoriety. Long before you see the village, the eyes are drawn to a small golden pagoda that sits atop a twenty-foot boulder. It is a feature that marks the entrance to many of the Na Ta La villages in the area. Other villages housing former inmates 118

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once existed nearby, but are no longer. Many inhabitants had stuck out the required three-year minimum stay, but once that passage of time had passed, they sold their properties and left. The establishment of the Ministry for the Progress of Border Areas and National Races in 1988 took place after Ne Win’s fall. Yet it indicated that the new clique of generals that regrouped under the State Law and Order Restoration Council had shared their predecessor’s enthusiasm for the national races discourse. Soon after its inception, it began a programme it claimed was geared towards the advancement of recognised ethnic groups. They had, it said, “suffered throughout successive eras the atrocities of local terrorists”.3 The statement was intended to play ethnic minority civilians off against the armed movements that claimed to represent them, as well as the opposition Burma Communist Party whose forces were involved in campaigns against the military across the country. By that stage, rebellions in the border states – the work of these so-called “terrorists” – had been in motion for four decades, and continued to pose the same problem that had hounded the regime since it assumed power in March 1962: how to unify the country in the face of continued obvious resistance towards unification. Behind the rhetoric of national races development, however, lurked a different agenda. The areas targeted for “progress” were those in which the regime’s scope of authority was limited by the presence of communities that were deeply resentful of this national project. Northern Rakhine State may not have been in outright rebellion when the Na Ta La project was first mooted, but its demographic make-up was not one 119

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that favoured either Bamar or Buddhist, and was therefore a point of anxiety for the regime. Just as Hla Hla would reorient herself towards the centre, so to speak – by “becoming” a Bamar and embedding herself firmly in the Bamar-centric Yangon culture – so too would the centre expand out to the periphery. In areas where Buddhism, that millennium-old social glue, had been uprooted and cast to the fringes of local society, it would be replanted. The Buddhist settlers that made the journey to the Muslim-dominated northern Rakhine State would be the necessary demographic corrective; the seeds that, in time, would flower into a meadow and beautify the hills and plains of northern Rakhine State. It was an ambitious attempt at the social re-engineering of the landscape. Around fifty model villages were built between the three towns of Maungdaw, Buthidaung and Rathedaung. In a country known for its stark absence of state welfare, the benefits their inhabitants received – the cows, the food, the money – were unheard of.

It was midday by the time we arrived at the prisoner village, and the groups of men that began to trail us from house to house carried on their breath the sharp whiff of cheap liquor. Beneath the stilted houses, the rains of the morning had collected in fetid pools that teamed with mosquitoes. Fierce winds that arrived with the monsoon that year had barrelled again and again across the land with a force too powerful for the structures of Aung Thar Yar to withstand. Through large holes that had been torn in their latticed wooden walls, 1 20

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bedrooms and kitchens were visible. Despite the damage, their inhabitants remained; no other options were available to them. It was a bleak illustration of the lengths to which the regime went to expand its sphere of influence. The villagers came from prisons in Bago, in Mandalay, from Insein Prison in Yangon; from all across central Myanmar. Others were enticed from their cells in Sittwe and brought up here. The village head, across whose face were etched deep scars, one running just below his left eye, explained that the wardens had approached anyone with less than a five-year sentence. With two years left on his three-year term for army desertion, he signed on. As the mandatory three-year period of stay ended and prisoners sold off their properties here and vacated, the village’s population needed replenishing. This meant that every few years, the process would begin again, with wardens visiting prison cells and dangling in front of their occupants’ eyes the prospect of free housing, and freedom – a home at the foot of that hill, beneath the golden pagoda. So keen was the Ministry to keep this Buddhist presence there that the rules governing who was and was not eligible for relocation to the prisoner village appeared far from hard and fast. One woman who had stood nearby as we spoke to the village head told us later that her husband had been released early from a murder conviction and sent to the village, but for whatever reason was no longer there. Some inhabitants had moved repeatedly back and forth between village and jail. Among them was Kaung Latt. He had been here twice, first in August 2004, upon early release from Myaungmya Prison in the delta, and then again in 2013. 1 21

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“I came here and stayed for some time, but then I was arrested again for robbery and they sent me back to jail, over in Buthidaung. I was given a seven-year sentence.” Two and a half years in, he was offered early release once again on the proviso that he would return to Aung Thar Yar. “I was told that in Rakhine there are so many Muslims so we want to balance that out by sending Buddhists here”, he recalled of the conversation with wardens the second time round. His two children played on the wooden steps of his house as we spoke. During the conversation a young boy, no more than twelve, came past on the dirt road and lingered outside the house. He had a deep gash in his scalp and a swollen eye. A woman nearby said his mother had beaten him with a rock several days before. The patterns of abuse that had taken many of these people to prison had been brought to this village: domestic violence was evidently routine, and the police were called there regularly to break up fights. In the Na Ta La villages, people recalled vague mentions of a “border area ethnicity development” project that they were to be a part of. The prospect of a newly built house and guaranteed food for a year easily bettered the squalid conditions many had endured at home for too long, but the merits of that trade-off soon began to fade. A little over a decade after it was settled many inhabitants of Aye Thar Aung wanted to return to their original homes. The rations had stopped years before and work was difficult to find. These people hadn’t been trained in the arts of paddy farming and had struggled to adapt to new demands, yet knew that they could neither afford the journey 122

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back to their town in central Myanmar nor risk not being able to find work once they arrived. Other villages in the network soon went the way of Aye Thar Aung. Further south, Shwe Yin Aye had been built for the eleventh wave of settlers in 2005, who came largely from Yangon and who, this time around, were gifted two acres of land and a trailer. But as the years passed the original inhabitants left and the village came to be populated by downand-outs – alcoholics and gamblers who brawled into the night, and who found relief from the harshness of life there in a brothel set up in one of the stilted wooden houses, where young women from surrounding villages would service them until dawn came round again. And the malaria had taken person after person, not just in Shwe Yin Aye, but all across this condemned pocket of northern Rakhine State. In one tiny village just outside of Buthidaung we stumbled across the headman lying on his floor beneath thick blankets, shivering violently. We asked for permission to meet with other villagers. He waved us on and remained on the floor. As we spoke with one formerly homeless family in the yard outside their storm-beaten house, an elderly woman emerged from a nearby doorway and struggled across a narrow street pockmarked with oily black puddles. She was likewise covered in blankets and racked with malarial fever, and disappeared inside a neighbouring house. By swamping the area with a new demographic, the regime hoped to exercise greater control over a region where its authority was weak. The only quality required of participants was that they be Buddhist. It mattered little that some were 123

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violent criminals, or that they might hold no sympathy towards the regime’s expansionist aims. Religion, like ethnicity, had long before become a principal barometer in determining, if not allegiance to, then affiliation with, the state, and the recruits would play the role of purifiers of a land being steadily swallowed up by Muslims. These villages, like the Israeli settler enclaves in the West Bank, would become the “facts on the ground” that served as proof that Buddhism was alive and well there.

Some months after visiting the prisoner village I travelled to a suburb of northern Yangon to meet with U Maung Maung Ohn. A retired army general and former head of the Na Sa Ka border force, he had once been Deputy Minister for Border Affairs in Rakhine State before being appointed Chief Minster in 2014, tasked with stabilising the region after the violence of 2012. I wanted to know whether the explanation given to prisoners decades before when they relocated to that corner of the country had chimed with official policy for the area. His answers were always careful and considered. Like many former high-ranking members of the military, he sought to construct an image of the monolithic institution as one that acted only in the interests of the people it ruled for half a century. “It’s about Buddhist, Myanmar citizens”, U Maung Maung Ohn had said of the Na Ta La villages, denying the presence of any ulterior strategic motive for a regime concerned about its grip on the area and its people. “It’s for both Rakhine and Burmese.” Buddhists felt their land was being taken from them, and the events of the late 1940s and 1950s, which would 124

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be recalled by Rakhine over and again to justify what began in 2012, provided historical evidence that this had been in motion for too long. It goes like this. Maungdaw area has belonged to Rakhine State since long ago. And it still does. Even some of the Bengali villages still have Rakhine names and there are many pagodas in their villages. This means that these areas used to be places where Rakhine people once lived.

Yet the Muslim population had grown rapidly, he said, and had begun to take over. The government established the Na Ta La villages to make sure all the Rakhine people are spread all over Rakhine and to make it look like Rakhine people are living densely in their state, otherwise there will be no Rakhine. Instead, Bengali will be everywhere and they will demand their own territory.

The fear that northern Rakhine State was being lost to Muslims hadn’t solely been a ruse to expand regime control to the far edges of the country. It had a historical basis that seemed to underpin many of the anxieties that burst so violently to the surface as the transition got underway. Nearly half a century before Colonel Tha Kyaw drew up his list of strategies to reclaim the land, Rakhine State had been convulsed by fighting between the British army and the Japanese. World War Two 125

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arrived in Myanmar in 1942, and as Japanese forces swept across to Rakhine State, the British organised battalions of Rohingya to counter them. The Japanese in turn sought the support of Rakhine Buddhists, with varying degrees of success. Marshalled by opposing foreign powers, armed mobs from either side inflicted bloody massacres on one another. Sittwe district, then known as Akyab, saw a particularly intense wave of fighting in April 1942 which marked the beginning of a geographical divide between Rakhine and Rohingya, with the Japanese holding de facto control of the mostly Buddhist south and the British holding the Muslim north.4 There the Na Ta La villages would later be built, preceded decades earlier by the movement of tens of thousands of Muslims north as they fled fighting around Sittwe. That migration radically altered the demography of towns like Maungdaw and Buthidaung, but it coincided with an upsurge in the movement of peoples across the border into Rakhine State from what was then India, most likely among them Muslims who had fled west at the onset of war in 1942.5 They brought with them tales of massacres by Rakhine Buddhists in the chaotic aftermath of World War Two, just as Buddhists would later tell of Muslims. “The stories of atrocities told by refugees reaching Maungdaw aroused the wrath of the local Muslims, who vented it on the Buddhist minority in their midst”, wrote Moshe Yegar, an Israeli diplomat posted to Yangon in the 1970s, who conducted several in-depth studies of the history of the Muslim presence in Myanmar. “Soon the Buddhists were streaming in droves from the north as the Muslims were 1 26

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streaming from the south, and Arakan stood divided into two distinct territories, a Muslim and a Buddhist one.”6 Amid the maelstrom that followed World War Two in Myanmar a Muslim insurgency developed in Rakhine State, focused predominantly in the north. Known as the Mujahids, many of its members had been trained by the British during the war to battle the Japanese and their erstwhile Rakhine collaborators. Fearful of the prospect that the British would soon leave Myanmar, and aware that nearby Muslim-majority regions like Chittagong in present-day Bangladesh would soon join East Pakistan, they too demanded the inclusion of northern Rakhine State in the newly formed Muslim nation. Some even called for an entirely independent Muslim country.7 At one point in 1948 the Mujahids held complete control of Buthidaung and Maungdaw, capitalising on the fact that the Myanmar army’s resources were diverted towards tackling the much larger rebellions in the east of the country. Over the subsequent six years the Mujahids struck further south, launching raids on Buddhist villages and levying heavy taxes on both Buddhists and Muslims. The suffering of local populations on both sides was compounded by the actions of government troops deployed to the area towards the end of 1948, who burnt mosques and villages and sent close to 30,000 people fleeing across the border to East Pakistan. Buddhist Rakhine had an additional reason to be fearful of Muslim supremacy in Rakhine State, and this fed a narrative of Rakhine subordination that, by 2012, had become highly combustible. Aggravating the crisis that followed World War Two was an ill-conceived decision by the British to reward the 127

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loyalty of its proxy Rohingya forces by offering all top administrative posts in the north of the state to Muslims, thereby entirely side-lining Rakhine from positions of power. This planted the seeds of a deep resentment among Rakhine, not only towards Muslims but towards any non-Rakhine authority imposing itself on the state. The demands of the Mujahids for independence of the northern district never came close to materialising, for neither the outgoing colonial administration nor the post-independence government saw any reason to let go of it entirely. Additionally, the movement had lacked popular support and manpower, numbering at its peak only around a thousand soldiers. Muslims had suffered too at the hands of the Mujahids,8 but there were also residual loyalties among Muslims to the central state which meant that support for secession was slim. “Many of the Rwangyas, as distinct from the ‘Indian Muslims’, remained loyal to the Burmese Government”,9 R.B. Pearn, a professor at Rangoon University before the Japanese occupation, who later joined the Foreign Office Research Department, where he studied the Mujahid revolt, wrote in 1952. Even so, the events of the late 1940s and early 1950s were to leave a deep and pervasive suspicion towards Rohingya aspirations. These were sharpened by several subsequent attempts, most notably by the Rohingya Patriotic Front in 1974 and its successor, the Rohingya Solidarity Organisation (RSO), to launch armed insurgencies that many Rakhine believed had separatism as their ultimate goal. The RSO, established in 1982 with the stated aim of securing citizenship and greater political rights for Rohingya, had bases in 1 28

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Bangladesh, and carried out cross-border attacks on police and army posts in northern Rakhine State in the 1980s and early 1990s. However, although it greatly exacerbated fears among Rakhine that a militant Rohingya movement would soon turn its guns on them, the RSO never posed much of a security threat, and by the late 1990s it was considered largely defunct. Yet the historical existence of several different armed movements became a reference point for assertions by Rakhine and the regime that Rohingya were seeking to gain a foothold in the north, both through armed mobilisation, and by claiming an indigenous ethnic status. The view that another armed Rohingya uprising was inevitable was reinforced in the years after the 2012 violence, when a number of international terrorist groups, including the Pakistan Taliban and the Islamic State, called upon Rohingya to take up arms against the government. The government too feared that the RSO was mobilising again, perhaps this time with backing from more sinister networks. If terrorist groups prey on aggrieved populations who feel they have little recourse to political expression other than violence, then perhaps they thought the conditions in Rakhine State were ripe for recruitment. When the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) first announced itself on the morning of 9 October 2016, followed by swift claims from the government of its link to terrorists, it seemed those fears had finally been realised. Yet still, the degree of support for armed warfare among Rohingya was always questionable. The population was too vulnerable, and any mobilisation would, it became only too clear, invite the full wrath of the military, as well as local Rakhine. Yet in 129

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the eyes of many in Myanmar, the threat had always lurked. Strict controls, and a strategy to dilute the population using Buddhist settlers, were therefore needed to prevent them from completing the project begun by their alleged forebears, the armed Mujahids, half a century ago.

The Muslims of northern Rakhine State hadn’t been the only population of concern for the regime. As time went on it pushed out into “unaligned” communities elsewhere in the country, using Buddhism as a transmission line to bridge ethnic divides and draw disparate communities closer towards the centre. Where the Na Ta La scheme was intended to weaken rather than assimilate the Rohingya, who long before were judged to be too alien to be incorporated into the nation, other projects sought to actively cultivate an ideological alignment. Above Rakhine State lies Chin State, and if you were to travel north-east from the Na Ta La villages, across the Kaladan River floodplain and up into the Chin mountains, you might stumble across a network of schools unlike the standard educational institutions of central Myanmar. They were designed in the early 1990s for a particular purpose: to serve as laboratories for the cultivation among students of a commitment to the Three Main National Causes established by the State Law and Order Restoration Council when it took power in 1988: “Non-disintegration of the Union; Non-disintegration of national solidarity; Perpetuation of sovereignty.” The students targeted for these schools were not Muslim, but Christian. American missionaries had begun to arrive in 1 30

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the Chin Hills just before the turn of the nineteenth century, and the word of the Bible quickly spread among Chin communities, thereby extending the reach of Christianity beyond the already evangelised eastern and northern regions of Myanmar. The foreign missionary schools had been numerous in Chin State and, even though Ne Win had expelled all overseas missionaries from the country and nationalised Christian schools and hospitals in the mid-1960s, little had then been done to counter their influence. Upon the arrival of the State Law and Order Restoration Council, this began to change. While the Na Ta La villages were being built in northern Rakhine, officials from the same ministry began to develop a network of Na Ta La schools, mostly in ethnic minority states. Where the Christian missionary schools had once provided the locus of village life in the hills, so now would Buddhist institutions of learning. The first was opened in 1994,10 hailed by the government as a way to bring disparate communities closer together through a curriculum that was aimed at building trust between, and understanding of, the different cultures that inhabited Myanmar. The comingling of students, both Buddhist and Christian, under the same roof – for they were boarding schools – was “needed to avoid making habits and behaviours that could lead to racism [or] religiosity”, a government minister later said.11 Those who passed through the Na Ta La schools would then be guaranteed a position in the local government. By 2011, twenty-nine schools had been built across the country, a third of which were in Chin State. But reports quickly began to surface of the forced conversion to Buddhism 131

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of the Christian students who were induced to enrol by the incentives offered: cheap or free education, room and board in a region of Myanmar where nearly three-quarters of the population live below the poverty line12 and where hunger is endemic. In a particularly cruel expression of nature’s freakish ways, a famine strikes Chin State every fifty years, when armies of forest rats, plumped and energised after gorging on the flowering bamboo plant, attack crop fields and grain stocks. The cyclical food crisis that results from this phenomenon drives families deeper into poverty, and makes the prospect of free education and accommodation all the more alluring. Stories abound of army trucks turning up at villages in the Chin Hills that had been struck particularly hard by the famine and coaxing children to go with them to the schools to enrol, only for the children to be forced to shave their heads, wear monks’ robes and learn Buddhist scriptures. “We had to wear robes for nuns; the boys had to wear monks’ robes”, one Christian girl who spent several years at a Na Ta La school in Mindat in southern Chin State told the Chin Human Rights Organisation in 2011.13 Those who resisted conversion were threatened with forced army recruitment. We Christian students received worse treatment than the Buddhists. We were accused of not following the rules and regulations properly. Besides the usual subjects, we had to recite Pali and other Buddhist scriptures. If we couldn’t get it exactly we were beaten by the monks. They slapped me about the face, or beat me with sacks on my legs and back. 1 32

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Monks and Buddhist laymen had been drafted in to teach at the schools under the auspices of the Hill Regions Buddhist Mission. The programme was launched in 1991 when the Ministry of Religious Affairs, having formed its own Department for the Promotion and Propagation of the Sa¯sana – the term used by Buddhists to refer to their faith – began sending teams of Bamar monks loyal to the regime to villages and towns in Chin State. Often accompanied by armed soldiers, they would oversee conversion ceremonies for Christians and help enlist children in the Na Ta La schools, where they also taught. Like the recruits to the Na Ta La village scheme in Rakhine State, agents of the Hill Regions Buddhist Mission would induce mainly the poor and needy into the schools: sons and daughters of parents who, blighted by food shortages, could not provide for their children. One weekend towards the end of 2013 I had taken a night bus from Mandalay to the town of Mindat in southern Chin State. The bus left the city around six o’clock in the evening, on a journey scheduled to take eight hours. But as it approached the foothills in the early hours of the morning, the road seemed to run out and waterways criss-crossed our passage. We eventually made it to Mindat, only 150 kilometres from Mandalay as the crow flies, sixteen hours later. It seemed the “advancement” of the communities in Myanmar’s periphery, pledged by the Ministry for the Development of Border Areas and National Races years before, wasn’t all-encompassing. Except for the soldiers it deployed to battle insurgents and its project to convert Christians to Buddhism, Chin State remained off the radar of the regime, its roads, like its people, entirely neglected. 133

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A man had agreed to meet me one afternoon at a point on the road between Mindat and a village to the town’s northwest. By late 2013, agents of the Hill Regions Buddhist Mission had been recruiting children to Na Ta La schools for more than two decades, and upwards of a thousand were enrolled in Chin State alone at any one time.14 I wanted to know whether there had been wider stigmatisation of Christians as a result of this conversion drive, and if that had filtered into everyday communal interactions in those hills. A dense blanket of cloud hung low over the valleys that day. Elevated above it in the clear December air we could look out from where we sat over an endless horizon of white, beneath which lay his village. On occasions when the cloud broke it appeared far below, a cluster of twenty-eight houses accessible only by the winding, barely paved track that had brought him up here. Mindat was the closest town, but on his motorbike it was still three hours ride away. Naing Ki lived in the village with his wife and four children. Ten years before he had become a Baptist. After years of struggling to find peace of mind – he didn’t say what exactly – he had been convinced that Christianity would bring the serenity he so wanted. However, other villagers, all of them Buddhist, reacted fiercely to his conversion. His father, a “strong Buddhist”, so he remembered, had founded the village in 1989, but died in 2004. So the son built a new house and, in March 2005, brought a pastor in to pray with his family. Then the village leader threw bricks at my house and villagers beat me and my wife. They said you have no right 134

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to stay here. A monk told me that if I converted back to Buddhism then I would be accepted; if not I would never be accepted. But I had already decided to become a Baptist.

The monk, he said, was from a “Buddhist missionary group”, most likely the Hill Regions Buddhist Mission, that had been sent there to counter the work done by Christian missionaries long before. In 1980, Ne Win had created the State Sangha Maha Nayaka Committee, a body comprising monks handpicked by the regime to govern the Sangha in Myanmar. There are an estimated half a million monks in Myanmar, and the monastic community is perhaps greater than the size of the country’s colossal army. Their increasing involvement in oppositional politics during the course of the general’s reign required close attention, so Ne Win felt, for the reverence they held could sway huge numbers of people. Shadowy agents of the regime were rumoured to have donned robes and planted themselves in monasteries across the country, while monastic committees were organised right from the village level to the state level to monitor “misbehaviour” among their fellow monks. It is most likely from this committee and its ancillary networks that the missionary monks sent to Chin State were chosen, for their conviction of the fragility of the Sangha meant they would make for willing watchdogs. Naing Ki’s decision to convert would have far-reaching consequences. The village headman soon struck him off the household registration list, the only means by which someone in Myanmar can prove ownership of their home. He then complained to the township administrator, who ordered the 1 35

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village leader, the same one who had thrown bricks at Naing Ki’s house, to reinstate him. The leader did so, but later showed up on his doorstep. “I can’t take responsibility for any violence that happens to you”, he warned. A subsequent complaint Naing Ki made to the township religious affairs minister was met with similar hostility. “If you do not convert to Buddhism again you will have no future”, he was told. “I will send a letter to higher authorities who will come and remove you from the village.” That may have been an empty threat, for eight years on he remained in the same house he had built on his father’s death. But the local dynamic had changed dramatically, and he and his family had become pariahs. Neighbours blocked him from using the communal water pipes and the vendor in the only shop in the village refused to serve him. Instead he was forced to rely on a nearby household for water, and every few weeks he drove the three hours up that arterial track and along the road to Mindat, from where he carried goods home on his overladen bike. Those were the arrangements that came to be in Naing Ki’s village. I thought about what collective mindset had evolved among his neighbours after his conversion to bring about such hostility. Save for the Bamar monks and laymen sent from central Myanmar to roam the countryside and monitor villages like his, people here were exclusively ethnic Chin. But they evidently considered the preservation of their religious community to surpass concerns about shared ethnicity, that other sphere within which notions of belonging in Myanmar were being contested. The drive to convert Chin to Buddhism 136

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had further accentuated the idea that Christians like Naing Ki were unwelcome guests. Yet he arguably had a right over and above his neighbours to be in the village, for it was his father who founded it. And he belonged in a deeper sense too, for he was a Chin in a village of fellow Chin with whom he had grown up, whose language was his and many of whose customs he too practised. However, by leaving Buddhism, he had in their eyes left the community – not physically, for he chose to remain there, unwanted and outcast, but spiritually, ideologically. That appeared enough to break the contract of belonging and sever whatever linkages should have otherwise remained intact through his conversion: shared kinship, longstanding friendships, a known family tie to the village. These were the sorts of slow-burning effects that postindependence statecraft in Myanmar created. Resentment towards the regime would not reduce; with each push into the ethnic regions, it boiled further. But at the same time communal tensions were triangulated so that even within closeknit villages, in-groups and out-groups formed. Neighbours suddenly became unknown quantities, “foreign” in their own particular way, to be treated with suspicion. Civilians, such as the Chin of Naing Ki’s village whose own ethnic identity had long before put them in the crosshairs of the military, began to pursue in their own ways the objectives of a state of whose methods of manipulation they too had been victims.

General Ne Win’s fall in 1988 appeared to have marked a change in how the strategies of Burmanisation would be carried 137

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forth. As the model villages were being built in the countryside around Buthidaung and Maungdaw they made space for Bamar as well as Rakhine, who were often transplanted into the same villages. Rakhine, as Buddhists, became agents of Bamar expansionism – a curious digression from the methods of statecraft pursued by the regime until then, which had largely been along ethnic and not religious lines, but one that reflected the ability of the military to play on multiple axes of difference. For the Rakhine participants, their fears of Muslim dominance in the state appeared to overwhelm a longstanding concern about increasing regime influence there. Conversely, by using Rakhine to further the interests of the Bamar, the regime showed how the salience of religion could be raised to a point at which it superseded the ethnic dilemma inherent in the project – that Rakhine, another of these treacherous minorities, could act in the service of the Bamar because they had that common ground in the form of Buddhism. However, it also indicated a belief among the generals that the centuries of conquest, first by the kings of the pre-colonial era and then by the regime, had led to a partial mental colonisation of Rakhine themselves. Coupled with their own resentment of the Rohingya, this meant the Rakhine could prove to be useful tools in the nation-building project. For the Rohingya, life in the north of the state grew ever more perilous as Ne Win’s reign ended and the State Law and Order Restoration Council regime took power. Their claims to an indigenous ethnic status had grown in volume as the subject of ethnicity became increasingly salient under the military. But this only inflamed Rakhine further, and emboldened their support for efforts to weaken the Muslim population. 138

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While Colonel Tha Kyaw’s plan for taking control of northern Rakhine State was discussed at length by Military Intelligence after it was submitted in 1988, it was never formally passed, and he faded from view as the State Law and Order Restoration Council consolidated control in the 1990s and later morphed into its successor, the State Peace and Development Council. Yet the proposals were not altogether forgotten. In that wedge of land between the Bangladesh border and the Rakhine Yoma mountain range, Rohingya were increasingly singled out as subjects of close surveillance and tight controls. They had already been the target of a major pogrom in 1978, under the name Operation Nagamin, or King Dragon. Ne Win had ordered immigration officials and soldiers to scrutinise all those living in the border regions of Myanmar to determine who were citizens and who were “foreigners who have filtered into the country illegally”.15 But it mainly focused on Rakhine State, and its principal target was the Rohingya. As the operation got underway in March 1978, word began to spread from one Rohingya village to another that troops had raped and murdered their way through the communities they were meant to be conducting censuses of. Upwards of 200,000 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh and set up in villages and makeshift camps around which Kutupalong grew up. Then, in 1991, long after many had returned, reports began to emerge of a heavy deployment of troops to Maungdaw and Buthidaung townships. Tensions had been building with Bangladesh, prompting the military to reinforce the border, yet it coincided with a bid by the State Law and Order Restoration Council to again check the status of Rohingya there, and the carnage was repeated. 139

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“Before the rains started in May 1991, some 10,000 refugees had already arrived in Bangladesh”, Human Rights Watch reported of the movement of Rohingya that followed. “At the end of the rainy season, in November 1991, the trickle became a flood, and by March 1992 there were over 270,000 refugees scattered in camps along the Cox’s Bazaar – Teknaf road in Bangladesh.” In an eerie foretelling of what would come much later, it continued: “The refugees told of summary execution, rape and other forms of torture which they had witnessed or personally endured at the hands of the military.”16 Many Rohingya who had fled that second pogrom would also later return, moving back across the border and re-establishing their communities in northern Rakhine State. But, as they would find out, the environment they returned to had become increasingly hostile towards them. Bit by bit, as the 1990s wore on, Colonel Tha Kyaw’s vision for the control of this pariah population had begun to be realised. The restrictions on movement began in Sittwe in 1997, and then rippled out across the state. Along the east–west road between Maungdaw and Buthidaung in the north, a series of checkpoints were established where police could inspect the identity papers and travel documents of passing Rohingya. On the side of the road, for all to see, they were pulled from their buses and ordered inside police booths. Should a Rohingya have wanted to leave their village in northern Maungdaw township and visit a relative in Buthidaung, thereby crossing the township line, they would apply at the local immigration office for the permit, paying a fee of anywhere up to eight dollars each time. The form would state the name of the house 1 40

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in Buthidaung they wanted to stay in, and the date they would return home. But permit or not, each checkpoint could be the final point of travel, for failure to pay an additional bribe might see them returned to wherever they came from. They call this “tea money” in Myanmar, the kind that doesn’t make it into the books, and which forms a micro-economy unto itself, offering an additional incentive for the restrictions to remain in place. If for whatever reason they were unable to make it back across the township line by their stated date, another trip to immigration would be required, and the possibility of a larger fine loomed. More tea money, more uncertainty. In 2005, authorities in Maungdaw released an order, approved at the state level, that read: “Starting the date of this regional order, those who have permission to marry must limit the number of children, in order to control the birth rate so that there is enough food and shelter.”17 The Rohingya had long been accused of producing disproportionately high numbers of children and the ruling would stem the supposed threat their reproduction posed to the Buddhist population in the north. But it also provided a pretext for authorities, particularly the Na Sa Ka personnel, who by that point had become the most prominent, and feared, authority in the area, to further invade the private space of Rohingya – to enter their houses and to count their young; to humiliate them inside their own homes. If there was suspicion that a child in a household belonged to another family, perhaps because that family had “swapped” him or her in to make it appear as if they had fewer children, then the mother would be forced to breastfeed the child in front of the visiting authorities.18 141

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Yet the limits on reproductive rates may not have been needed. The regime’s abject, if not wilful, neglect of healthcare in northern Rakhine State in particular seemed to be doing the job for Na Sa Ka. So absent were the vital services of the state that residents of Maungdaw and Buthidaung, where Rohingya are predominant, were forced to share two doctors between 158,000 people. Down in Sittwe, where Buddhists outnumbered Muslims, the figure was 681.19 In Buthidaung, 224 out of 1,000 children, nearly a quarter, were dying before they reached the age of five; in Sittwe, it was seventy-seven.20 One only had to travel eighty-five kilometres to record a threefold increase in infant mortality rates. The country was the same, but the community was different. In the aftermath of the 2012 violence, the Na Ta La project was given a new breath of life. The violence had rippled into Bangladesh, pitting Muslim communities there against Buddhist, many of whom descended from those Rakhine who fled to the Chittagong Hills and settled there upon the annexation of the kingdom in 1784. It was they who, in the years after 2012, began to receive visits from monks and community leaders who had crossed into Bangladesh to coax their ethnic brethren back to the plains surrounding Maungdaw and Buthidaung. There, new Na Ta La villages had been built to accommodate this community. Despite having been absent from the nation for two centuries, and having no lived history in the state, these communities were “reintroduced” to Rakhine State in a bid to further the Buddhist colonisation process. Colonel Tha Kyaw sealed another victory after the violence. As Rohingya became increasingly contained in their 142

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villages further south, so too were they denied leave from the north. The only university in a state long neglected by the central government is in Sittwe, and before the violence the two communities studied there side by side. But with Rohingya blocked from leaving the camps around Sittwe and the ghettos inside of it, and forbidden to board the boat at Buthidaung jetty that once ferried them down to the state capital, their access to higher education was completely severed and another zone of cultural and intellectual exchange eliminated. It was only the Rohingya who suffered this fate. The singling out of one community as the target of far-reaching controls – on their movement, their ability to reproduce, their access to vital services – began to beg the question of whether there was intent on the part of the state towards Rohingya that went beyond mere containment; that it might well be embarking on a strategy to make life so untenable for them that they would have no choice but to flee Myanmar altogether, thereby removing that group from the country once and for all. The suspicion heightened after 2012, as their isolation grew more acute and the dehumanising speech directed at them increased in volume, free of any censorship by the government. This altered the framework within which persecution of the group was now being analysed, and scholars of state crime began to argue that precursors to historic instances of genocide elsewhere in the world were now evident in Myanmar: the isolation and restricting of a target group, their dehumanisation, sporadic fits of violence against them, and the denial of state protections.21 The control measures on the Rohingya expanded and tightened as time went on, and by 2016 eighty-six checkpoints had 1 43

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been set up in northern Rakhine State.22 The routine stop-andsearch of vehicles to check for Rohingya passengers greatly amplified the perception of the group as a security threat. This in turn fed the narrative, made so explicit by their denial of citizenship after 1982, that they were a lesser people. The process of distinguishing them so drastically from other groups in Rakhine State, not only in a religious or ethnic sense, but now legally, criminally, would provide more robust grounds for the violence that eventually erupted in 2012, and mutated thereafter. They weren’t worthy of the same protections afforded to Rakhine, limited as those were, and they became, in the eyes of those who either participated in attacks or supported them from afar, subhuman. They were animals, stripped of the qualities that normally inhibit the use of violence against a fellow human being. It wasn’t that those early killings of 2012 were merely a speedily crafted response to the rape and murder of Ma Thida Htwe in May that year. Participants in the mobs that attacked Rohingya would often point to that incident, remembering the images circulated of the twisted body of the young seamstress lying beneath the tree near her village, violated so brazenly. But the mental processes that allowed for the turn to violence among Rakhine, born of a perception so thoroughly cultivated by the state that the existence of the Rohingya mattered little, had been in the making long before that spark finally brought them to life.

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2012 THE MAKING OF A CATASTROPHE

Eight months before the discovery of Ma Thida Htwe’s body and all that followed, a series of seminars was held by the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party (RNDP), the precursor to today’s Arakan National Party, to discuss what organisers claimed was the appropriation of Rakhine heritage by Rohingya. One had taken place in Sittwe at the beginning of October 2011, and two more in Buthidaung and Maungdaw later that month. Attendants had left the Buthidaung talks “embittered with the feelings that their land and valued heritages are being insulted by those groups of Chittagonian Bengali Muslims with their made up histories of Rohingya”, one participant told journalists.1 The seminars marked the start of an increase in communal tensions in Rakhine State. Then in November, seven months before the mobs struck, a map was circulated online that depicted Rakhine State as the home of the Rohingya. It was precisely the claim that had so angered attendants of the Buthidaung seminar the previous month. The map had been published a year before by the BBC in an article detailing ethnic conflict in Myanmar, but was somehow picked up in the days following the seminars and posted to social media. It sparked outrage among many Rakhine, who called for boycotts 1 47

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of the BBC and threatened protests at the British consulate in Yangon. The source of the anger was clear: the Rohingya must not be portrayed as indigenous to Myanmar. The content of the seminars spoke to the perception, so pervasive among Rakhine and many others in Myanmar, that Rohingya were a newly created ethnic group whose claims to a longstanding presence there were not only bogus, but part of a master plan to wrest control of the region from Buddhists. By no means were these sentiments new. Right around the time the Na Ta La village plan was being formulated in the late 1980s, a so-called Rakhine National Defence and Protection Organisation had written to Saw Maung, an early leader of the State Law and Order Restoration Council, demanding that Rohingya be subjected to a range of restrictions. These included population control, limited access to education and curbs on the construction of mosques. The thirty-page document, sent to the general in October 1988, warned that the threat posed by these “Chittagong Bengalis” was not limited to Myanmar, but extended well beyond its borders. As long as they are allowed to live legally here, they will pursue their grand strategic goal of building the bridge between Bangladesh and Malaysia via Burma and Thailand, and the two countries will be Islamised. If the state is unable to meet [our] demands the western gate of Burma will be broken and the fate of Maungdaw will fall into the hands of the Bengalis, and the danger of Bengalis entering into Burma proper will increase.2

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These had been the same sentiments that prompted Colonel Tha Kyaw to draw up his list of methods to control the Rohingya population in northern Rakhine State. And in the aftermath of the June 2012 violence, after mobs had wrecked Muslim quarters in Sittwe and sent tens of thousands fleeing into camps, Rakhine monastic groups offered similarly alarming solutions for the “Muslim problem” in Myanmar’s west, further raising fears that a bid to purify the land was carefully being spun into motion.

In his book, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger, the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai writes that for extreme violence to occur against ethnically different, but nonetheless neighbouring, groups there must be a confused mixture of high certainty and grave uncertainty within the in-group about the intentions of their neighbours. Who really are these people, they ask, and what do they want with us? The worry this produces is that the ordinary faces of everyday life (with names, practices, and faiths different from one’s own) are in fact masks of everydayness behind which lurk the real identities not of ethnic others but of traitors to the nation conceived as an ethnos.3

This interpretation of the supposedly real intentions of these neighbours, whose seemingly familiar faces hide a deeply hostile rivalry, so often provides the driving force for mass violence, and helps to construe that violence as defensive. 1 49

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Amid the unsettling swirl of messages circulated about those neighbours, “ethnically different groups cumulate little doubts, small grudges, and humble suspicions. With the arrival of larger scripts, of both certainty and uncertainty, these little stories feed into a narrative with an ethnocidal momentum”.4 After the seminars were held across Rakhine State in late 2011, a gradual increase began to occur in material that cast Rohingya in a sinister, subhuman light. In February 2012, a magazine, Piccima Ratwan, was circulated. On its editorial board sat Rakhine monks, police chiefs and government administrators – figures of high authority in the region. The magazine repeatedly referred to Rohingya as terrorists, and warned that the threat they posed was an existential one. It wouldn’t be just Rakhine living close to Rohingya who would feel the wrath of “The Black Tsunami in humble disguise”, as the magazine depicted the group, but the entire Rakhine ethnicity. In one piece, titled “What the Rohingya Is”, the author wrote: “The Bengalis are very deceptive – if necessary, they’d even cut their own body and flesh with knives to exaggerate their stories”.5 Rakhine were not the only source of disparaging material. In early June, soon after the rape and murder of Ma Thida Htwe became public, popular comedian Min Maw Kun branded Rohingya “black-skinned, big-belly, and hairy kalar who marry many Burmese women” in a sitcom directed by one of Myanmar’s best-known directors, Maung Myo Min.6 “Kalar”, a refrain historically used as slang for “foreigner” in Burmese, had increasingly come to be used disparagingly against anyone of dark skin or South Asian features. 150

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Around the same time the magazine began to be circulated, the National League for Democracy was campaigning for by-elections to fill seats that had been vacated by a government reshuffle in early 2012. Their eventual victory in April 2012, taking forty-three of forty-five seats, allowed Myanmar’s main opposition to enter parliament for the first time. The party had won the vote in 1990, nearly two years after it had formed in the dying days of the 1988 uprising, but the military quickly annulled the results. Myanmar wasn’t ready for democracy, it had decided, and another two decades of acutely authoritarian rule followed in which dissidents were jailed in their thousands and armed conflict continued to eat away at populations in the border regions. But the April 2012 by-election victory, which went some way towards diluting the political power of a military that still had a quarter of seats constitutionally reserved for it in the parliament, appeared to many a sure-fire sign that Myanmar was gradually moving away from outright military rule to one that allowed the opposition a role in the country’s political affairs. As the transition moved forward, the vice-like grip the military had kept on media was loosened. In the days of old, publications would require careful vetting by the censor board prior to going on sale. Any newspaper articles considered a threat to national security were often simply cut out of the publication, and whatever was left would be sent straight to the newsstand. Yet while many applauded the freeing up of the media, less visible was any strengthening, or indeed creation, of institutions that could monitor and act upon hateful content. So often with political transitions, progress within one area 151

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outpaces another, often to damaging effect, and as the reports of the rape and murder of Ma Thida Htwe began to leak out of Rakhine State, the media was whipped up into a frenzy of anger directed predominantly at the Rohingya. And there was no one either willing or able to rein it in. On 8 June, mobs of Rohingya attacked Rakhine houses in the villages outside of Maungdaw. There had been a prayer ceremony at a mosque in downtown Maungdaw that morning for the victims of the bus attack on 3 June, when ten Muslims were beaten to death by Buddhist mobs apparently avenging Ma Thida Htwe’s murder. Following heated exchanges with nearby groups of Rakhine on the street outside the Maungdaw mosque, a brawl broke out. Police allegedly shot at Rohingya, who then began stoning Rakhine shops. They moved into the outlying Na Ta La villages, many of which had been built on land confiscated from Rohingya. Hundreds of houses were torched by Rohingya. Amid the chaos, the popular Weekly Eleven journal, run largely by Bamar out of an office in downtown Yangon, reported that Rakhine were killed as a result of “Rohingya terrorist attacks”.7 Later it claimed that the “risk and danger of ethnic cleansing or genocide was possible”,8 referring to the potential for Rohingya to eliminate Rakhine. In the months after that attack, material seemingly designed to mobilise more Rakhine against Rohingya was distributed in greater frequency, produced by local political parties, community groups and monk organisations. At no point did the government condemn the messages being circulated, either on the leaflets or in national media, and the effect they had on transforming a floating sense of fear and resentment 1 52

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of Rohingya into something more concrete and deserving of action soon became clear. In justifying their support for the violence, Rakhine I later spoke with used epithets strikingly similar to those printed beforehand.

Adul Shukur remembers 12 June 2012 well. It was the day Ko Myat had waited on the road running through Nasi, machete in hand, while Rakhine picked their way around the quarter with flaming torches. It was the worst of those two days of violence, yet somehow his house had been spared. In the days before, as violence had spread from Maungdaw down to the villages outside Sittwe, and then into the town itself, Rohingya in Nasi had stopped venturing far from their quarter. Reports were circulating with greater frequency of attacks by both sides. While Rohingya neighbourhoods were being swamped by Rakhine, so too was the converse happening, with Rohingya mobs entering the predominantly Buddhist Min Kan quarter on 10 June and torching several houses. As the days passed, the atmosphere in Sittwe grew increasingly sinister. Normally come evening, people would be sitting on the roadside, talking and playing guitar, but by the evening of 10 June, the streets feeding into Nasi had emptied and the lights in houses were off. Many inside the quarter thought better than to leave their neighbourhood, where people had lived among one another all their lives and where surely they wouldn’t turn against each other. Adul thought that the fighting being reported elsewhere would be quickly resolved, but it wasn’t. On 11 June it hit Nasi, and again the following 153

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day. “Then Nasi burned, and that was the final day of violence. The government then put us into camps.” When I had met him three and a half years later, the fortyfive-year-old was still in a camp. He ran a small business drying and selling fish, and neighbours from Nasi lived in nearby huts. In the wake of the violence, numbers of Rohingya had fled to the village of Thet Kae Pyin, north-west of Sittwe. As they arrived in greater numbers in the months after, a camp grew up around the village for more than five thousand displaced Rohingya who came to live inside cramped wooden huts and tarpaulin shelters provided by international aid agencies. It was outside one hut, in which he lived with his extended family, that we had met. Rakhine had also fled Nasi and initially taken refuge in two factories close to the quarter, before also being sent to separate camps where they stayed for several months, if not longer. Most of the Rohingya who had escaped their homes had remained in the camps there, but growing numbers were leaving on boats, or via overland smuggling routes. For a fee that could reach two thousand dollars, more than double the average annual income in Myanmar, they would buy passage to Thailand or Malaysia, sometimes via traffickers’ camps on the border separating the two countries. In early 2014, dozens of bodies of deceased Rohingya were dug up from shallow forest graves in camps on either side of that border, where they had been held until families could pay a ransom fee. Adul described the hours that followed his flight from Nasi quarter. Once the mobs had cleared out and the arson and machete attacks ceased, he and his neighbours had asked 154

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police to take them to safety. “There were thousands of us leaving, but we didn’t have enough protection. The police only came with us for a bit of the journey.” He and the remaining inhabitants departed the quarter that morning. The roads they took led them to camps that had quickly sprung up along the coastline, and they were choked with people carrying their belongings out from Sittwe. They went first to another camp and stayed for two days, before moving on to Thet Kae Pyin, where they would settle indefinitely. Mohammed Ismail had also grown up in Nasi quarter and knew Adul. The two were now neighbours in Thet Kae Pyin. As a student at the high school in Nasi, he had friends from among all the different ethnic and religious communities that inhabited the quarter. No evidence of that school now exists, nor is there anything to indicate the once plural makeup of the neighbourhood. That was wiped clean by the violence. Like Adul, the young teacher had felt the unfamiliar atmosphere settle upon Sittwe in the days before the mobs arrived at Nasi. Cycling home on the evening of 10 June, Mohammed Ismail saw the empty streets and dark windows of houses, and told friends of the sense of foreboding that had come over him. Only days before, there had been people milling around long past sundown, in the restaurants and teashops of the town. But not anymore. There was a heavy stillness, a sense of apprehension, and it was altogether new to him. He wasn’t the only person to fear the worst. The following morning, on 11 June, the then Rakhine chief minister, Hla Maung Tin, brought community leaders from both sides together in the school and warned of the potential for violence 155

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in Nasi. At the same time, another meeting was taking place across the quarter, and Mohammed Ismail was present. Twenty or so Rakhine and Rohingya leaders had met and pledged that neither side would attack the other. But before the meeting was over, groups of men carrying sticks and machetes had arrived at the fringes of the quarter, and began to move in. Mohammad Ismail recognised some of the men. They had come from a nearby ward. Dozens if not hundreds of others like Ko Myat had been bussed in from further afield. Whether or not community leaders had kept their promise that neither side would engage in violence ultimately mattered little. Mobs from outside who knew no more of their targets than their ethnicity and religion began to attack.

So often in the wake of ethnic violence, any pre-existing divisions are dramatically sharpened, making the prospect of further violence build with each attack. As communities withdraw into separate physical and mental enclaves, stories begin to circulate about the exact meaning of the violence that just occurred: who was aggressor and who was defender, and what price would be paid if the battle was lost. As the smoke still rose from Nasi quarter and other razed neighbourhoods, these stories began to be told with increased urgency and venom. The breaking of relations between Rohingya and Rakhine may have reduced the immediate threat of violence, but that quick, sharp severance in interaction meant the stories could develop, and darken, without any countervailing information to correct them. 156

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By 13 June, the violence had largely ceased. It had lasted only four days, but even in that short space of time, the social dynamics of the town were completely transformed. As the dust settled on Sittwe and the two communities moved further apart, government officials began to add their own input. Hmuu Zaw, the then director of the President’s Office, was one of these. “It is heard that Rohingya Terrorists of the so-called Rohingya Solidarity Organisation are crossing the border and getting into the country with the weapons”, he warned on his Facebook page. “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!”9 There was indeed violence committed by the Rohingya, and it left numbers of Rakhine dead and many more sent fleeing from their burning homes. It was often executed with the same brutality as the Rohingya themselves experienced – close-quarter machete attacks, the torching of houses. But only their violence was construed as terrorism. That charge spoke to the enduring perception that they were outsiders intent on violently usurping the position of Rakhine. That fear of a reversal in status has been a principal driving factor in instances of mass violence along ethno-religious or racial lines the world over, and it had now come to bear on western Myanmar. Rakhine regularly spoke to this fear that a much larger Muslim campaign was underway in Myanmar, connected to events elsewhere. One man I’d met by the side of a road just north of Sittwe that connected a string of Rakhine villages to a Rohingya village, Thandawli, had viewed the violence of 2012 157

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through that lens. During the attacks, as rumours had passed from one Rakhine village to another that Rohingya were mobilising inside Thandawli, the fields that separated the two communities were transformed into a battleground. Rakhine in their hundreds armed themselves and, via the mobile phones of the administrators of each village in that tract, coordinated to march en masse across the fields. At a midpoint between the villages they met with Rohingya, and there the two communities engaged one another in a frenzied battle. The man, who was in his fifties, had joined the hundreds of Rakhine who crossed the field, accompanied by his teenage boys. But as the crowds up ahead came into view he understood that the fight would be a bloody one, and so he took his sons and turned back in the direction of his home. Until that day, he explained, relations between Buddhists and Muslims here had been very different. “Before the conflict, when we knew each other, we were good. We often went there and they also came here”, he said. But as he spoke he became more animated. “What happened to our country?”, he exclaimed. “They are trying to swallow the world. They are animals, they are not human beings.” The conversation had clearly stirred something inside him, and as it proceeded he became increasingly agitated, for the most part looking not at me but out across the road as he spoke. “The problem is with the Muslims of Rakhine state. When they declare Jihad, they help each other. And when they meet Rakhine, they cut their neck and kill them. It was their God that ordered this.” This persistent framing of the violence as terrorism driven by religious zealotry took on a new force after June 2012. 158

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Both sides had committed horrendous acts, but perhaps the use of that label by Rakhine was a defensive mechanism, a way to assign evil to the acts of the rival, and in doing so paint equivalent actions as morally justified. These were the “larger scripts” that Appadurai spoke of, and bit by bit they would be incorporated into local understandings of the conflict. They would begin, in the minds of Rakhine, to significantly reshape its character and implications. By raising the spectre of terrorism, opponents of the Rohingya could connect the events playing out on home soil to a broader conspiracy existing beyond Myanmar’s borders, one fuelled by images that began to circulate on social media of the September 2001 attacks on New York and the destruction by the Taliban of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan the same year. Unless checked, so it went, there was the potential for similar carnage to be wreaked on Myanmar. This changed the parameters of the conflict, elevating it above the local level on which it was playing out to a global one. And in doing so, the ramifications for Rakhine of any loss of their territory were greatly heightened, thereby inviting the prospect of a response proportionate to that threat.

“We will take care of our own ethnic nationalities”, President Thein Sein had said exactly one month after Nasi burned. “But Rohingyas who came to Burma illegally are not of our ethnic nationalities and we cannot accept them here.” The solution, he said, would be for the UN to settle them in camps that they would then manage, relieving the government of any 1 59

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responsibility. “If there are countries that would accept them, they could be sent there.”10 The sense that a campaign might be in the making to altogether drive Rohingya out from Myanmar intensified in the weeks that followed the June violence. A monk’s association in Mrauk U released a statement soon after Thein Sein’s that offered a stark solution to the problem. 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.1

Three months later, as the threat grew louder and louder, violence once again swept Rakhine State. I arrived in Sittwe at the end of October that year, a week or so after attacks had taken place in nine townships spread across 250 kilometres of the state. The first wave occurred early on the morning of 22 October in the towns of Mrauk U and Minbya, and grew in intensity in the days after. In and around Mrauk U, groups of Rakhine carrying spears, machetes and flaming torches had descended on six villages, and they spared few houses. In Kyaukphyu, they arrived in fleets of boats, as they had in Pauktaw. In the days after 23 October they set about razing the Muslim quarters of both towns, home to Rohingya and, 160

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more predominantly, Kaman Muslims. Those who escaped from Pauktaw were brought in longtail boats down the thirtykilometre stretch of river to Sittwe. They alighted on the shoreline west of the state capital and walked inland, carrying their belongings across the low ground to a spot within view of the beach. The place was named Ohne Daw Gyi, or Coconut Garden, and in better times one might have sat looking out to sea as that big orange ball of a sun sank below the Bay of Bengal horizon, cutting through the clusters of palm trees that earned the area its name and bathing the landscape in a rich glow. But Ohne Daw Gyi became a refugee camp, and its population swelled as the days passed. By the time I and two colleagues had arrived there in late October 2012, having walked from downtown Sittwe to a still-inhabited Rohingya village where we hitched rides on motorbikes, some eighty makeshift shelters had been set up. The structures were flimsy – wooden poles loosely bound together with twine, over which rags of fabric were draped for cover. Families of ten and more huddled beneath, and as the evening set in, large pots for cooking rice were placed over open fires. By October Sittwe had become entirely segregated. Nasi had long since been emptied, and the only Rohingya communities still in the town were confined to two quarters, Bumay and Aung Mingalar. Rakhine mobs had entered Aung Mingalar in June 2012, the day before the violence had taken hold in Nasi. Inhabitants I spoke with upon arriving several months later described how civilians had been accompanied by riot police, and fanned out as they moved inside the quarter. Armed police quickly set up at the entrances to both, and it 161

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was with them that I had needed to negotiate access. Families in Aung Mingalar were struggling to bring food and medicine in. No one could walk to the market in Sittwe any longer. Police allowed limited provisions to pass through the checkpoints, but it had to all intents and purposes become a barricaded ghetto. Long after the violence a visitor to the quarters would still be approached by a policeman at one of the entrances and asked to produce permits for access. Whoever enters and leaves is closely monitored, and the heavy pall that hung over the neighbourhood in 2012 remained for years afterwards. When I visited for a second time in late 2015, three and a half years on from the violence, a man in his twenties explained that the only occasions on which he had left the quarter since June 2012 were to go to the refugee camps, usually for medical treatment. There were many more like him: prisoners inside their own neighbourhood. On my first trip to Aung Mingalar shortly after the attack, I’d puzzled over the scant evidence of destruction that police and Rakhine had reportedly left in their wake. Even if structures had been levelled in the way they had been elsewhere, there would still be clear indications they had once existed – building foundations, damaged walls and the stumps of supporting pillars. A man took me to a spot where the concrete base of a building remained, rubble scattered nearby. Here, he said, the police had opened fire on Rohingya, and bullet holes had peppered the wall of the building. But soon after the violence, bulldozers had been sent in to erase all traces. Other accounts of police violence emerged from the June 2012 attacks, fuelling speculation of official complicity 1 62

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in what unfolded in Rakhine State that year. They would also circulate in the violence that came the following year, in towns in central Myanmar where security forces were caught on camera standing and watching inert as Buddhist mobs attacked Muslims. By then it was clear that both Rakhine political parties and the military had little intention of safeguarding the lives of Rohingya, for they had long been denied even the meagre protections afforded to others, but the accounts of police actually participating in attacks further sharpened suspicions of a higher hand in the violence. No smoking gun ever materialised that directly linked the mobs on the ground to whatever ambitions the government or military held towards Rohingya. Yet beyond just a matter of the long-held disdain for this Muslim minority, there seemed to be a rationale behind the violence that lent support to the idea that it was strategically useful amid the changing political landscape. This became more apparent when violence erupted in central Myanmar the following year.

Sittwe was by and large spared the second wave of violence in October. But it did become a thoroughfare for victims of attacks elsewhere in the state who would pass through the town en route to hospital or the camps along the coast. News of the violence that engulfed towns and villages up- or downriver passed from community to community. Pre-empting the arrival of mobs, families would gather their belongings and leave their homes, later converging on safer ground outside of the state capital. 163

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One afternoon in early November 2012, I had stood at the jetty on the Sakrokeya Creek, to the north of downtown Sittwe. In towns and villages to the north and east, fits of violence were continuing. As I waited, a clunking two-tiered public boat, one that would normally be laden with groceries and commuters travelling between Sittwe and elsewhere in the state, came into view further down the creek and slowly made its way towards the jetty. On the lower deck was a Rakhine man whose arms and lower abdomen were covered in burns. The forty-five-year-old had been brought in from the town of Myebon. His house had been torched by Rohingya the day before, and he wasn’t able to escape the flames in time. His burns had been covered only in cling film and a local ointment, and he was carried off the boat and into a waiting taxi that took him to Sittwe hospital, his face contorted in agony. The riverine route he’d been transported down had for centuries provided passage for communities and traders moving between the various towns and villages of the state, but in 2012, it developed a new use. Sixty kilometres upriver from Sittwe lies Mrauk U, and by late October that year, unconfirmed reports were coming through that bodies of Rohingya had been dumped in mass graves outside the town, after fierce fighting erupted in surrounding villages. Rakhine in their hundreds who had been attacked, or who feared attack, took to boats and made their way to Sittwe, where they would be kept at a safe distance from Rohingya. As the reports of mass graves came through I petitioned the Rakhine chief minister’s office to grant me a permit to travel from Sittwe to Mrauk U. Authorities were reluctant to permit journalists to board the 164

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boats heading north to the sites of violence, but after a week of requests it was eventually granted. I left on a speedboat early one morning, riding down the Sakrokeya Creek and into the mouth of the Kaladan River. Three hours later, towards the end of the journey, as we closed in on the ancient kingdom, the waterway narrowed and the flat rice fields either side began to rise. Through the tall grass that ran the length of the banks, the hundreds of ancient pagodas that dot the tree-covered hillsides slowly came into view. The panorama that gradually opened up would have been the same that greeted those who plied that river centuries before. It was an eerie sensation – the quiet and beautiful approach to a scene of great turmoil. We disembarked at the jetty and walked into Mrauk U. A stillness hung over the town that day and the streets had more or less emptied. A rickshaw took us to one of the many monasteries that over the days before had become refuges for Rakhine who had fled their outlying villages. They slept side by side on the floors, next to whatever belongings they were able to carry. One monastery held Rakhine families from a cluster of villages south of Mrauk U who had escaped the violence that began there on 23 October. One teenage boy recounted how, as he and his family had left their village upon the arrival of armed Rohingya, he had caught sight of his fifteen-year-old friend lying on the ground, blood running from a machete wound just below the neckline. But it was from inhabitants of one these villages, Yan Thei, that word had spread of a massacre of around seventy Rohingya on that same day in October. A small number of riot police had been deployed to the village the day before, evidently privy to 165

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information that it might be targeted. Soon after dawn that morning, mobs of Rakhine armed with spears, machetes and Molotov cocktails gathered outside the village. Witnesses later told how riot police had disarmed the Rohingya villagers as the mobs approached.12 They then fired into the air in an attempt to disperse the crowds, but that failed. The armed Rakhine breached the thin police line and set about attacking homes and those who tried to flee. The riot police retreated to a safe distance as flames engulfed the houses of Yan Thei, and returned two hours later. A number of the villagers that were able to escape later told investigators that police then opened fire on the Rohingya that remained.13 Similar stories were to emerge from across the nine townships targeted in that wave of violence in late October 2012, and they created a ripple effect that uprooted communities and pushed them further towards the camps along the coastline. By November, more than 100,000 people, the vast majority Rohingya, but also Rakhine and to a lesser extent Kaman, had been displaced. It seemed natural that the two communities would initially be separated, with Rakhine given their own sites, at a safe distance from where Rohingya and Kaman were placed. They would remain apart until tensions had eased, and they could once again live side by side. Or so it went. At the time the talk from the government centred on the need to stabilise the region. President Thein Sein had announced a state of emergency on 10 June, but that hadn’t stopped the October violence. If anything, the conflict of June 2012 had torn open divides even further, driving a far deeper antagonism between the two communities and raising 166

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levels of distrust to a point at which the slightest spark could mobilise groups to attack. Segregation appeared to be the sole guarantor that communities could not reach one another in the event of another trigger. But the measure also sought to placate Rakhine who had come to view the camps and ghettos as the rightful place for Rohingya: confined spaces where they could be watched over for signs of mobilisation, and from where they might eventually decide to leave the country altogether, their lives in Myanmar no longer worth the added burden they now carried. The effort to limit the movement of Rohingya was enthusiastically backed by high-level political powers in the state. The Rakhine Nationalities Development Party had said in late June that year, prior to President Thein Sein’s statement requesting UN help in resettling the community, that Rohingya should be deported to a third country and that all other ethnic groups should collaborate to prevent “Bengali trespassing”.14 This position continued long afterwards. Dr Aye Maung, head of the party, later told me that he was happy with the current situation, of Rakhine remaining in Sittwe town and Rohingya in the camps. Inside those perimeters they had freedom to move around, he said. “It’s good. There have been terrorist attacks, and if people live together they will be afraid.” Back in 2012, he had looked to another country for a model of how Myanmar should respond to the Rohingya. “We need to have a policy; an exclusive one, for these people and figure out how to defend this region – they will be repeatedly invading our territory … We need to be like Israel.”15 But as time passed, the likelihood that Rakhine would accept Rohingya as neighbours 1 67

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once again lessened. It could take twenty or thirty years before the two groups could live together again, he believed. High walls, both real and figurative, were being built between the two groups, and these would rise as the months passed and increasingly sinister “solutions” to the problem were issued by Rakhine nationalists. Several weeks into the state of emergency in the middle of 2012, a group of Rakhine monks met at the Myo Ma Pavilion in Rathedaung, due north of Sittwe. It was early in the afternoon of 5 July, three and a half months before the October violence, and they spoke for several hours. At the meeting’s close later that day, a statement had been drawn up commanding Rakhine to cease all contact with the “Bengali kalar”. They were no longer to be employed as they had been in the ports and harbours of the state, on the farms and in the rice mills and brick kilns. They would not be allowed on boats, ferries and motorbikes, and nor should Rakhine trade with them.16 Several days later, a letter was circulated, signed by the “Group of Wuntharnu Ethnic People”, warning that international NGOs supplying aid to displaced Rohingya had “watered poisonous plants”.17 These were the calls that had presaged the events of October 2012. The force of the propaganda, and its unremitting circulation – not just in leaflets and statements, but in domestic media of all stripes, state-owned and private – left little mental space within the Buddhist communities of Rakhine State to consider the Rohingya as anything but menacing. That image had become a staple of the Rakhine imagination and, it soon became evident, was embedded in the minds of a significant cross-section of the wider population of Myanmar. 168

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Four days before violence again swept the state, another group of monks convened at the Dakaung Monastery in Sittwe, under the banner of the All-Arakanese Monks’ Solidarity Conference. In a statement, they reaffirmed their commitment to keeping Rakhine and Rohingya separate, but added an additional point: “To expose sympathisers of Bengali Kalars as national traitors along with photos and spread the information to every township.”18 The “sympathisers” would be those Rakhine who continued to assist, even interact with, Rohingya. This had continued on a small scale after June 2012, with numbers of Rakhine discreetly helping to get food and medicine into Aung Mingalar quarter. But they were now considered disloyal, and would need weeding out. There were echoes of Rwanda in 1994, when Hutu “moderates” were targeted by Hutu Power fanatics solely on the grounds that they had aided Tutsis to flee to safety, and in doing so, betrayed their own people. Frightening similarities were beginning to show between Rakhine State and other sites of mass violence elsewhere in the world: the ghettos, the witch-hunts, the Othering and the isolating of rival groups. The tensions continued to mount, and on 21 October 2012 a Rakhine man in Mrauk U was caught selling rice to a Muslim customer. A group of fellow Rakhine descended on his stall with clubs and beat him to death. The following day, a Rohingya husband in a nearby village struck his wife on the face after an argument inside their home. Rakhine neighbours got wind of the news and quickly surrounded the house. Soon after, Mrauk U erupted. 169

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But far away on the other side of the country, something ominous had begun to stir. On the banks of the Thanlyin River, which courses through Kayin State between limestone mountains whose walls rise up in steep verticals from the river plain, lies the town of Hpa-an. Kayin State is predominantly Buddhist, but has a sizeable Christian population. Less significant, population-wise, is the Muslim community. But four days before the call had gone out in Rakhine State to expose any moderates aiding the Rohingya, Ashin Kawi Daza, the head abbot of the Mae Baung Monastery in Hpa-an, circulated a statement that carried a similar warning: Buddhists should not lease land or property to Muslims, and nor should they shop in Muslim stores or marry Muslims.19 There were no Rohingya in Hpa-an – only Bamar and Kayin Muslims. But, so it seemed, what had begun several months earlier as a localised conflict between two ethnic groups in the westernmost state of Myanmar was beginning to be echoed hundreds of miles away. Several weeks after the abbot released his statement, four men climbed on their motorbikes in Kyondo, a sub-township of Kawkareik in Kayin State and, shortly before midnight, rode past a mosque. They threw two grenades. One landed inside, and the other hit an outside wall and fell to the ground before exploding. Within an hour, two more grenades were thrown at another mosque elsewhere in the township. It was the first time mosques had been attacked there, residents later said. As the communities moved further apart in Rakhine State, instances of violence lessened. By the end of October, with the violence having ceased, the President’s Office declared that the situation had become “almost normal”.20 But that 1 70

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normality was a state in which communities were segregated along religious lines, for Kaman now populated the same camps that Rohingya did, and where checkpoints ensured that Muslims in and around Sittwe could not leave their camp or neighbourhood limits. It had indeed calmed, but what kind of calm was this? It would be another eight months before violence again hit the state. On 30 June 2013, reports of the rape of a Buddhist woman by two Kaman Muslim men in Thandwe, south of Sittwe, galvanised the mobs once again, and four Muslim homes were destroyed. It struck the town again in October that year. A Kaman man argued with a Buddhist taxi driver over parking spaces. Word then spread that a Muslim had insulted a Buddhist, and the attacks resumed. In a village outside of Thandwe, men burst into a house where a ninety-four-year-old Kaman woman was resting in her bed. With machetes, they hacked her to death. Her daughter had managed to flee, but returned to find the elderly woman with fatal wounds to her stomach, neck and head. In the following days, mobs razed more than seventy Muslim houses across Thandwe and in nearby villages before the army moved in. The houses belonged to Kaman. There were no Rohingya involved, indicating perhaps that the rationale behind the violence had moved on from one of defending the country against illegal invaders, and towards a general assault on the Muslim community. Kaman were citizens of Myanmar, and accepted as indigenous to Rakhine State. But they were Muslims, and had quickly become as reviled as the Rohingya. Among those arrested in the following weeks for participation in the Thandwe violence 1 71

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was the local chairman of the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party. But in the meantime, the violence had moved beyond Rakhine State to towns in central Myanmar, many of which hadn’t before known such communal hostility. First there were small incidents, like the mosque attack in Kawkareik, but these grew bigger. In March 2013, three Muslim quarters in Meikhtila, just south of Mandalay, were entirely levelled. Hundreds of armed men, many unrecognisable to residents, flooded the town and sent upwards of 12,000 people, the majority Muslim, fleeing to makeshift camps on the outskirts. There they would remain for months, if not years. Then, in April, Muslim houses in and around Okkan, two hours north of Yangon, were torched, and the following month, mobs struck Lashio, over in the west of the country. The village of Htangone, a hundred or so kilometres north of Mandalay in Myanmar’s dry zone, descended into violence in August 2013, when Buddhist monks led crowds of men towards Muslim houses and the local mosque, turning them to rubble. From a localised conflict in Rakhine State in the west, violence between Buddhists and Muslims had crossed into the centre.

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What had shocked almost as much as the violence of 2012 was the public response to it. Crowds of Rakhine that had stood on the roadside as Mohammed Ismail and hundreds of others carried their belongings from the ruins of Nasi quarter towards the coastline jeered as they passed by, but noises soon began to come from further afield, and from unexpected quarters. Rakhine nationalists evidently hadn’t been alone in their resentment of the Rohingya; prominent voices within the pro-democracy movement appeared to be so too. For so long it had seemed that the major unifying force among the Myanmar public had been opposition to the military. It was the glue that bound together in a show of virtuous accord all who did not benefit from its rule. There were the monks, the student activists, Aung San Suu Kyi and her party comrades; there were the victims of the military’s campaigns in the borderlands and of its extensive surveillance apparatus in the centre, which sent thousands to jail for interminably long periods of their lives. They all seemed to sing in chorus, and in their often peaceful, dignified defiance of the state, it often felt as if the public was as good as the military was bad. Of course that was a superficial reading. Ethnic armies fighting the military took the lives of civilians and turned 1 75

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against one another, making enemies of one-time allies, while the pro-democracy movement was far from a single cohesive unit. But the veil that dictatorial rule casts over a country often obscures nuance. With the junta supposedly in retreat by the middle of 2012, however, it appeared that a new common enemy had arisen. Volatile fault lines came into view that cut across Myanmar society, and at particular moments in 2012 and thereafter it felt as if the constellation of solidarities and enmities that once had seemed so clear and rational was being dramatically reconfigured. The National League for Democracy entered parliament for the first time in April 2012. The first day of that month had been, for the thousands gathered outside the party headquarters and elsewhere as the by-election results came in, a magical one. As the sun dipped in the sky and that familiar pink evening light wrapped itself around the buildings of Yangon, seat after seat fell to the opposition. With each that they won, a screen erected in front of the building on Shwegondaing Road flashed up a new constituency and the crowds roared. It had been fifty years since Ne Win’s coup, giving Myanmar the unhealthy distinction of having one of the twentieth century’s longest running dictatorships. Although the NLD was still a minority in parliament, that seemed about to change. But it wasn’t clear exactly why. The regime hadn’t crum­ bled in the face of mass protest, as seemed to be the trend of that period – in Tunisia, in Libya, in Egypt and, not so long before, in Indonesia. It was a gradual transfer of power, in line 1 76

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with the “seven-step roadmap to democracy” unfurled in 2003 that would ostensibly see the military reduce its political role and pass the reins to a civilian government. No one outside of the junta’s inner circle really knew the reasons for the shift – perhaps it feared regime change, knowing that a deeply unpopular leadership had a limited shelf life. Its increasing reliance on China for economic and political support had also chafed with the nationalistic ambitions of the military, which had given China an almost free run of the country’s resources. A choreographed transition was a deft way for it to lock in its interests and rid itself of the dependence it had on its neighbour, thereby finally allowing the country to re-join a world from which it had retreated half a century before. How it would pan out exactly was difficult to say, but standing outside the NLD headquarters that evening it was impossible, even for the sceptics, to resist the feeling that a significant break in the historical continuum of Myanmar was occurring – the beginnings of a government brought about by popular vote. Yet democracy is in the eye of the beholder. Between the act of freely casting a ballot and the fuller manifestation of equal rights to all, there is a long process of negotiation and compromise that so often becomes the site of battles over what version of the democratic ideal should take hold. In Myanmar, where for half a century political contestation was considered a criminal act, this period was always going to be fraught with conflict. Not only would old forces want to limit the authority of new ones, but the public understood that new avenues for the expression of different desires had begun to open – a freer media and a freer space for protest, and a parliament with a 177

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semblance of an opposition through which different visions for the country’s future might be turned into legislation. When the reactions to the violence of June 2012 began to be aired, it wasn’t merely the extent of anti-Rohingya hostility that surprised at first, but rather that hostility towards the group wasn’t locked to a particular political orientation. There is often a tendency to associate xenophobic sentiment with a far right mentality, but that didn’t seem to hold true for Myanmar in those years. There were people like Ko Ko Gyi, a leading figure in the 1988 uprising against military rule who, for his opposition to the junta, spent more than seventeen years behind bars. He had never drawn the same international attention as Suu Kyi, but inside Myanmar he was known and revered by many as the stoical young man who had been willing to sacrifice so much to bring about a change to the leadership of the country. But as Sittwe was convulsed by violence, he seemed to undergo a transformation of sorts. It was “neighbouring countries” that were fuelling the unrest, he told a journalist. Rakhine had become a minority in the north of the state “despite the fact that the land and water of the area is Arakanese”, and Ko Ko Gyi and his revered 88 Generation activist organisation would not only refuse any recognition of Rohingya as an indigenous group, but would join hands with the Myanmar army to repel these “foreign invaders”.1 His reaction, and that of others who instead of condemning the violence used it as an opportunity to call for the expulsion of Rohingya, seemed completely out of sync with what the pro-democracy movement in Myanmar had once seemed to 1 78

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represent. Ko Ko Gyi’s talk had been of a “democratic” effort to deny Rohingya the rights that other groups in the country were asserting, born of a fear that if this Muslim minority was to be empowered, then all others would suffer. All of a sudden, human rights in Myanmar didn’t appear to be a public good, accessible or applicable to all.2 Instead they were open to select groups whose position would be greatly weakened if additional constituencies were enfranchised. The anxieties that drove this sentiment had become so overwhelming that the military, for so long holders of the monopoly on violence against civilians – and the institution that put Ko Ko Gyi away for nearly two decades – might become protector of those same civilians against a new, even more nefarious force. It seemed to matter little that the restrictions placed on Rohingya in the decades after their denial of citizenship had effectively quarantined them in Rakhine State, subjected to a degree of control that no other group in Myanmar faced. Despite this, they had still become a source of national hysteria. The National League for Democracy too remained conspicuously quiet on the violence towards the Rohingya. While still in opposition Suu Kyi would often take an ambivalent line, arguing that both sides were to blame and thus that singling out the Rakhine mobs would give the impression that they had been chief protagonists. During a trip to India in November 2012, soon after the second wave of violence had ceased, she spoke of a “huge international tragedy” playing out in western Myanmar. “But don’t forget that violence has been committed by both sides”, she continued. “This is why I prefer not to take sides. And, also I want to work toward 179

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reconciliation between these two communities. I am not going to be able to do that if I take sides.”3 By that point, 115,000 people were living in camps outside of Sittwe, the vast majority Rohingya. Displaced Rakhine could move freely between their camps and nearby towns; Rohingya on the other had were forbidden from leaving theirs by armed police stationed at entry points who warned of likely attacks by Rakhine should they venture out. There had been atrocities committed by both sides, and in that Suu Kyi was correct. Yet her reluctance to call out the widely held racism towards Rohingya that had helped to feed the violence hid a more significant problem. As the segregation became ever more deeply entrenched, it grew increasingly apparent that no one in a position of influence was willing to counter the prejudices towards Rohingya, and indeed Muslims more broadly, that were either activated or reinforced by the events of that year. The position of Suu Kyi, known internationally for her non-violent resistance towards a military that had kept her under house arrest for fifteen years, did seem out of character, and for that she drew sharp criticism. Yet at the same time, there was a certain continuity to it. Never had the decades-long suffering of the Rohingya featured on the radar of the pro-democracy movement in Myanmar, and nor was the group included in the calls for equality between ethnicities in a post-junta society. Prior to 2012, theirs had always been a peripheral issue that made headlines only when it became an international point of contention – when Rohingya fled the country on boats, prompting warnings from neighbouring nations that Myanmar’s domestic crises were becoming 180

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regional ones. They were never incorporated into the narrative of the wider struggle of persecuted minorities there. They had no voice, and no presence. It seemed as if they were ghosts: people who lived in Myanmar, but who didn’t quite exist. It seemed probable then that, if left long enough, these prejudices would only grow more volatile, particularly given the absence of any narratives that might help to de-stigmatise the identity of the Rohingya. Suu Kyi was often accused of harbouring a possible bias of her own, for she was an elite Bamar and thus a beneficiary of the ethnic hierarchy that had formed in Myanmar. But regardless of her own feelings towards the Rohingya and the reasons for her silence, her refusal to call out the toxic nature of the developing discourse around the Rohingya was deeply problematic. Unless the country’s most revered figure gave the crisis a true reading – acknowledging the decades of state-sanctioned debasement of the Rohingya and the effect that this had on the turn to violence among Rakhine – then she and her party might be forced to answer questions about their hand in fuelling the mentality that gave rise to it. Over and again, when questioned on the matter, Suu Kyi pointedly refused to be drawn. She was evasive, never publicly using the name “Rohingya” lest hard-line nationalists viewed that as recognition of the group. After entering parliament following the by-election victory, she quickly developed a reputation for avoiding media, and I was never able to secure an interview with her. When journalists did get the opportunity to press her, she urged the government, at that point run by the military-aligned Union Solidarity and Development 1 81

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Party (USDP), to grant all ethnic minorities equal rights. She knew, however, that Rohingya were not considered an official ethnic minority, and thus was able to project to the international community a sense that she was engaging in the issue while still avoiding the wrath of the sizeable anti-Rohingya lobby in Myanmar. Citizenship laws needed to be “clarified”, she would say. At no point did she call out the prejudicial basis of the citizenship framework in Myanmar, in which entire groups were rendered stateless regardless of the individual histories of those within the group. Given the weight of hostility towards the Rohingya across Myanmar society, her approach might have been a coldly pragmatic one. Defending this despised community ran the risk of casting their indigenous Buddhist rivals, the Rakhine, as the evildoers, and this might prove political suicide for someone eyeing office. The next elections were set for 2015, three years after the violence, and Suu Kyi needed to keep her support base onside. There was talk of her playing the long game, waiting until the transition had moved along to a point at which she felt secure enough to begin to tackle more substantially the ingrained resentment shared by too many people in Myanmar. But this seemed dangerous. With the communities of Rakhine State so fissured by the violence, time might only deepen the divides beyond the point of mending. She, along with many of the activists that had suffered as a result of their resistance to military rule, began, as the transition progressed, to move further into mainstream politics. But as the responses to the spiralling crisis in western Myanmar after 2012 were aired, it became evident that the particular 1 82

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democratic quality many of these figures held to had never really been tested. They had stood against military rule, and had used “democracy” as a powerful sign around which to mobilise a movement, but what exactly they stood for was less clear. I had unthinkingly equated the concept of democracy with the principle of tolerance for all, but in the harsh light of 2012, this seemed woefully misinformed. And the surprise wasn’t reserved only for that movement. When monk groups began to fan the flames of violent chauvinism in Rakhine State, and in time elsewhere in the country, the narrative of Buddhism as inherently peaceful began to stretch at the seams. Foreign commentators who criticised the apartheid system that was developing in Rakhine State, who questioned these appeals to the military and who called out the seeming hypocrisy of this exclusionary strain in the pro-democracy movement were branded neo-colonialists or terrorist sympathisers, and told that this was no business of theirs.

It was perhaps the fate of Myanmar that the democratic opening would bring forth division. So violently had notions of identity and belonging been manipulated and thrust to the centre of life under the military that, as it began to step back, those contestations formed a core part of the search for a new Myanmar. While the public had always seemed to reject the regime’s propaganda, the discourse on belonging and the “truths” peddled by the military about the intentions of certain ethnic minorities in the country seemed to carry such force that they were incorporated into present-day 1 83

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understandings of the dynamics between communities. Regardless of whatever paeans to solidarity between different ethnic and religious groups had been voiced in opposition to the military, the subtler day-to-day prejudices that Hla Hla and many others experienced from their peers persisted. So the kindling for the violence may have already been in place, but what the transition did was to allow an opportunity for it to be lit. In Rakhine State, it seemed at first glance that animosities deeply rooted in history but long contained were bursting to the surface, spontaneous and uncontrollable. But soon it became apparent that they were also being stoked, whether overtly or quietly. The seminars held in late 2011 by Rakhine parties had been designed specifically to warn of the Muslim threat, and the leaflets circulated in the aftermath, by monk groups and other activist networks, raised that threat level even further. There were appeals being made to the greatest fears of the Rakhine, yet the remedies offered ran counter to the direction Myanmar appeared to be heading: away from the military’s divisive politics and towards an embrace of the ideals of a democratic state. Rather than entering an age of national healing, deeper divisions were being sown. The Rakhine Nationalities Development Party began like ethnic-oriented parties the world over, which, in seeking to consolidate support during a transition, played the ethnonationalist card. It had formed six months before the first elections in November 2010 and knew that future elections lay ahead. It needed relevance, always the first mission of any new political party, and in Rakhine State the whipping up of local 184

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nationalist sentiment seemed an obvious way to direct support to a party that modelled itself as the only viable defender of the ethnicity, particularly when that group had for so long been denied a political voice. Ethnic Rakhine rightly wanted greater involvement and greater returns from the democratic shift. They had been forced to watch as the state they held strong claims to became a feeding ground for predatory economic interests, local and foreign, whose gains went almost anywhere other than back to its people. By the time of the 2010 elections, poverty levels there were nearly twice the national average,4 a position that belied the abundance of gas and other natural resources that lay under the ground and out to sea but which, at the behest of the junta, had been feasted upon by companies from China, Korea and elsewhere. The transition would be an opportunity to correct this, to bring Rakhine to the table and to begin to rectify some of the damage wrought by state interests in the previous decades. Yet the processes that might allow this to happen would involve a certain levelling of the political statuses of communities there, and here the danger lay, for any democratic opening could also empower Rohingya to assert their own claims to the state. Those fears had played out before. As preparations for the 2010 vote had got underway, the junta’s Electoral Commission announced that anyone holding the Temporary Registration Cards, or “white cards”, could vote. Rakhine politicians accused it of political trickery, for Rohingya had these and would surely vote for the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), which represented the generals who had just enfranchised Rohingya. Prior to the vote, USDP members 185

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toured Rohingya villages in the north of the state, encouraging inhabitants to sign up to the electoral roll. The fears of Rakhine were confirmed when several Rohingya politicians won seats in parliament as representatives of the USDP, which had received strong support from their ethnic constituents. Although Rakhine parties still came out strong in Rakhine State, taking eighteen seats in the state parliament against the USDP’s sixteen, the transaction between the Rohingya and the ruling party that had taken place beforehand warned of what might lie ahead were Rohingya to be further empowered. In November 2012, a month after the second wave of violence hit Rakhine State, the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party ran an editorial in its magazine, the Development Journal. It read: Hitler and Eichmann were the enemy of the Jews, but they were probably heroes to the Germans … In order for a country’s survival, the survival of a race, or in defense of national sovereignty, crimes against humanity or inhuman acts may justifiably be committed … So, if that survival principle or justification is applied or permitted equally (in our Myanmar case) our endeavors to protect our Rakhine race and defend the sovereignty and longevity of the Union of Myanmar cannot be labeled as “crimes against humanity”, or “inhuman” or “in-humane”.5

The passage illuminated the venom that Rakhine State’s largest political party – no longer fringe, but with seats in parliament – held towards Rohingya, and the alarming 186

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measures it considered necessary to deal with this community. But its publication also spoke to another problem, one that was becoming increasingly difficult to negotiate. The magazine had gone out without a whimper: there was no redaction of its content, and no recriminations for the hand that authored it. The government censor board had been done away with several months before its release, meaning that magazines no longer required vetting prior to publication. Although restrictions were being eased across the board as authoritarian rule waned in 2012, there were no functioning institutions in place to contain the rise of dangerous speech and to manage the conflicts that followed it. Rather, as the focus of national rage homed in on the Rohingya in the aftermath of the 2012 violence, the rhetoric was allowed to run free – in party magazines, in online blogs, on Facebook, and in protests that called for international aid groups assisting Rohingya to be ejected from the country. In April that year, Suu Kyi had hosted the first Irrawaddy Literary Festival on the shores of Inya Lake in Yangon, an event that stood as a totem of the progress made over the previous year. Prominent international journalists and authors were flown in, some of whom had spent years on the junta’s blacklist, and although tempered by the knowledge that all this was very new and unpredictable, there was a sense of jubilation at Myanmar’s final emergence from the darkness. Yet it seemed that no one really knew how to manage the space for free expression, or whether it should even be managed. This cut to the core of the democratisation problem: should the forces that inevitably result from liberalisation, and which can 1 87

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aid the opening of a country as much as they can imperil it, be constrained, or should they be allowed to run free? That desire to own one’s destiny, to have a stake in decisions that affect one, to spread ideas freely and to enjoy the freedom to support or resist the ideas of others – these are what authoritarianism denies, and what democracy promises. But as much as they engender an openness and tolerance, they can also have the opposite effect. And as 2012 drew on, the divisive ideologies that had taken hold and played such a pivotal role in the mobilisation of Rakhine mobs seemed to pass over the mountains and find expression among Buddhists in central Myanmar.

One evening in early 2013 I boarded a bus in Yangon and rode through the night to Mawlamyine, the sleepy riverside capital of Mon State. There is a monastery in the town I’d wanted to visit, and an abbot there I’d hoped to meet. In the months between October 2012 and my visit to Mawlamyine, U Wimala had become a household name among those watching the spread of anti-Muslim sentiment beyond Rakhine State. Soon after the second wave of violence the year before, he had ordered a printing company in Mawlam­ yine to produce a batch of stickers, and it was these that had begun to appear on shop fronts and taxi windows not just in this town, but across Myanmar. They provided the most visible indicator of the extent to which the target of antiMuslim sentiment had broadened beyond just the Rohingya, and had coalesced into something approaching an organised movement. The stickers appeared on stalls in Mawlamyine 188

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market, as they did in Yangon, in Mandalay, and in far-flung towns in the border regions. In Myanmar numerals, they bore the numbers 969, set against the backdrop of a chakra wheel and the Buddhist flag, and floating above a podium on which four lions were seated. U Wimala had also grown fearful that Myanmar would follow the same fate as its neighbours in the region and see Buddhism displaced by Islam. The stickers were printed in order to protect Buddhism, he had explained, for the numerals signified the nine attributes of Buddha, the six attributes of his teachings and the nine attributes of the Sangha. It counteracted a similar practice among Muslims, whose shop fronts had long borne the numbers 786 – a sequence that corresponds to the opening phrase of the Qur’an, “Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim”, or “In the name of Allah, the most Merciful, the most Beneficent”. The stickers were distributed freely around the country, and as hard as it was to sympathise with them, it was at first equally difficult to reject them outright. Muslims had theirs too, so the argument went. And there were many for whom the underlying message of the 969 campaign represented not a wild fantasy but a deeply personal anxiety. Not for every bearer of the sign were Muslims evildoers, but for all who sported them, Buddhism was evidently vulnerable enough to warrant protection. Religion had been that most precious of sanctuaries for many in Myanmar before and during military rule, and families invested in it heavily – perhaps more so at certain points than they did healthcare and education.6 Long before it had been imperilled by the British, and the impact 189

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of that had been enough to spur monks into taking up arms. These campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s may have melded neatly with a more politically focused desire for self-rule, but the religious element wasn’t a petty misgiving: for many in Myanmar, their nation stood as that increasingly rare thing in the world – a place where Buddhism had a chance of survival against hostile forces. The monks of the modern age, like U Wimala, would do as their predecessors had done more than a century before, and provide the vanguard of a movement to protect the faith. Five months after the second wave of violence in Rakhine, attacks on Muslims erupted in towns across central Myanmar. They took a similar course: a trigger incident followed quickly by the arrival of mobs that levelled neighbourhoods and sent Muslims fleeing to camps. Other similarities also emerged: the circulation of leaflets beforehand warning of the Muslim threat, except that this threat wasn’t now limited to Rakhine State, and no longer only stemmed from the apparent manoeuvring of Rohingya; rather, the threat was countrywide, and it came from Muslims of other ethnicities too. The narrative that had underpinned the violence in the west of Myanmar seemed to have spread to the centre, indicating that the fate of Myanmar might hinge to a large extent on events in Rakhine State. The Rakhine Yoma mountain range may have once buffered central Myanmar from its vulnerable western flank, providing a barrier against the further encroachment of Islamic cultures into the country. Perhaps the hills would no longer hold. 190

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Meikhtila was the first to go in 2013. A busy trading hub, the town sits at the centre of a web of highways that run north to south and east to west, linking Mandalay to Yangon and connecting the people and markets of far-eastern Shan State to those near the Indian border. Early in the morning of 21 March that year, Sandar had boarded a public bus near her home in Mandalay and rode the two hours to Meikhtila. The young journalist, then a staff reporter for an exiled Myanmar media organisation, carried a bag with a few clothes inside and her video camera, a small handheld device she had owned for several years. The bus she took stopped regularly to pick up passengers and goods bound for Meikhtila. But thirty minutes outside town it had stopped for a final time, and refused to continue. At the side of the road, she and the other passengers were ordered off. Normally it would have taken her direct to the station in the centre of Meikhtila, but that day she and the others disembarked well before the town limits and looked for any waiting motorbike taxis. She found one, bargained a price, and climbed on the back. The bike took off, but after a few minutes pulled over. The driver told her to pick up a bamboo pole and carry it with her. You have dark skin, she heard him say, and you might be mistaken for a Muslim. The pole would indicate that she was Buddhist. In the other hand she had the camera, and her bag was slung over her back. She climbed back on and the bike wove through the backstreets of outer Meikhtila and eventually into the centre. Once inside the town, she understood the driver’s fears. Beginning from the outskirts and carrying through to the 191

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town centre, dozens of shop fronts were destroyed. They were owned by Muslims: the Arabic inscriptions on the signage outside that gave away the identity of their owners had, that morning and the day before, sealed their fate. The damage was an early, but wholly inadequate, indicator of what lay further down the road: the debris, human and structural, of a bout of violence between Buddhists and Muslims on a scale that hadn’t been seen in Myanmar since the carnage of October the previous year in Rakhine State. From behind the row of buildings that lined the main street running into the centre of town from the west, smoke rose up into the sky. It came from Thiri Mingalar quarter. The night before it had been visited by hundreds of men armed with sticks, machetes and flaming torches. Many had been brought into town from outside, residents later said. Few recognised the groups of men that had appeared that evening – they seemed drunk or high, and were unsure of their coordinates, asking directions to neighbourhoods that, hours later, would be burning. A few blocks north of Thiri Mingalar, Mingalar Zayone had also been razed, and further to the west of town, across the large lake around which Meikhtila had grown up, lay another neighbourhood now in ashes. Inside the three quarters, the panorama of destruction was staggering. In the space of an evening’s work, the mobs had turned hundreds of buildings to rubble and sent their inhabitants fleeing to makeshift camps on the outskirts of town. Sandar had been to Meikhtila before. There is a roundabout in the busy heart of town, and the streets that radiate out from it are always choked with cars and people. The market1 92

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place to the south that comes alive with the rising of the sun each morning was shuttered on that day, and the crowds were no longer there. Instead, the only people she saw stalked the streets in groups of four or five, carrying sticks and machetes. She and her driver parked by the side of the road near the roundabout. It was shortly after midday and Sandar’s camera had been rolling for most of the morning. She kept it going as she climbed off the bike, and panned over the street in front of her. “A group of people were just standing at the junction and some guys came along on motorbikes”, she recalled. “Two of the men who were standing there had knives and the rest had sticks. The people on the motorbike stopped next to one of the guys and they spoke for about five or ten minutes.” Their voices didn’t carry far, and she was unable to hear what was being said. But still, she kept the camera rolling. Two days earlier, on 19 March, an argument had broken out in a Muslim-owned jewellery store in downtown Meikhtila. It was over a golden hairpin, bought by a Buddhist couple that had come to the shop from a village outside Meikhtila. The hairpin turned out to be a fake, so they claimed. The couple accused the Muslim owner of defrauding them. Amid heated exchanges, the owner grew angry and struck out. A fight broke out, and then word began to spread that the Buddhist lady had been killed. Outside the shop, crowds of Buddhists quickly gathered. Among them were monks. Within hours the gold shop, and several other Muslim shops either side of it, had been destroyed. Footage that later emerged showed police watching inert as the shops were 1 93

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attacked and as a Muslim person lay injured in the street, onlookers discussing whether to leave him to die.7 Later that day, a group of Muslim men knocked a monk off his bike and beat him as he lay on the road. His body was then set ablaze. He was hospitalised, but later died. The carnage began the following morning. The conversation between the men on the other side of the road came to a sudden end. As she watched, the group moved in on the man on the motorbike. “They started to kill that guy. They just beheaded him, or tried to.” Those holding knives sawed at his throat and he dropped to the ground. He was still moving when they poured gasoline on him and burned the body. One of the group then spotted her filming and ran across the road. He ordered her to delete the footage. She refused, and he threatened to kill her. She and the driver leapt on the bike and sped off, but they were followed. For ten minutes they raced through the streets before eventually managing to shake them off. Sandar made it to a friend’s house and waited there for several hours, and as evening set in, she and her friend rode back into town. They went past the roundabout and the street where the body had been. It was still there, a blackened figure lying on the edge of the pavement. The flames had died but smoke still rose from it, and people made narrow detours as they walked past. The body on the street was one of forty-three victims that were counted after the butchery in Meikhtila had ceased. And butchery it was. When we speak of a fit of violence, we imagine a sudden convulsion of the collective body, one short-lived but 1 94

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so powerful that the scale of devastation it leaves seems far greater than the window of time in which it was achieved. By the afternoon of 22 March 2013, when a state of emergency had been announced, nearly 830 buildings in Meikhtila had been destroyed. A little over two weeks later I walked around the remains of Thiri Mingalar and Mingalar Zayone and understood that the devastation in those quarters was more or less total. Row upon row of houses lay in ruins, and cooking pots, shoes and clothing were left among the rubble. There were pillars and walls still standing, but save for small groups of people who picked among the ruins and cast long stares at any visitor, there was no life in the neighbourhoods. There was talk of how the violence had “spread” from Rakhine State to Meikhtila, like a contagion that moved from one locale to another, emptying Muslim neighbourhoods of their inhabitants. But it wasn’t quite as simple as that, for the dynamic between Buddhist and Muslim communities here was different. Meikhtila hadn’t seen this before, in any form, and there wasn’t the violent cleavage of ethnicity that, alongside religion, had provided another powerful marker of difference between Rakhine and Rohingya in the west of the country. Here, the Buddhist and Muslim communities were both largely Bamar. Meikhtila, as a key centre of trade, thrived on interaction between all who lived in and depended on the town and its busy commerce.

The violence had been particularly fierce in Meikhtila, and it drew in a surprising cast of characters. In one video clip taken 1 95

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of the attack on Mingalar Zayone on 20 March, a Muslim man is seen being brought out of his hiding place in the tall grass that rings the neighbourhood and pushed into a clearing. Once there, he is quickly set upon by two men holding long poles. The first blow is a powerful horizontal one to the back of the neck that sends the man straight to ground. Other attackers run towards him and rain more blows down, one after the other, his legs jerking up into the air with each contact made. It is a vicious scene, more redolent of the actions of the military than of civilians. But then a monk – or at least a man, shavenheaded, dressed in monks’ robes – appears at the right-hand side of the melee. He lands one blow with a pole he is clutching, then two, three, four, five. That scene, and the rhetoric of the monk groups in Rakhine State the previous year, contrasted starkly with the prevailing idea of Buddhism as not just pacifistic, but actively against the use of violence; that its highest authorities had, in their passage from layman to monk, sworn a doctrinal commitment to non-violence. Perhaps to divert from the unthinkable, people questioned whether the man had been a thug dressed in monks’ garb, brought in to give the attack a veneer of “justness” and to mobilise more Buddhists to participate. Yet in the wake of the Rakhine State violence of 2012, the position of a number of vocal monks – not just in Myanmar’s west, but across the country – on the issue of Muslims had become increasingly aggressive. This monk in Meikhtila may have been an extreme example, but he nevertheless reinforced a perception that a prominent cross-section of Myanmar’s monastic community had increasingly begun 196

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to adopt a militant stance towards Muslims that provided fertile ground for violence. The robed figureheads of the 969 movement had used their sermons not to preach peace but to open religious divisions even wider, a process that had intensified in the build-up to the Meikhtila attacks. Although U Wimala had led the early charge, another monk increasingly came to dominate the spotlight. U Wirathu was abbot of the Masoyein Monastery in Mandalay. He had travelled to Meikhtila in December 2012, several months before the violence began, and delivered a sermon in which he implored Buddhists in the town to cut ties with Muslims. “Buy only from our shops. If our money goes to enemies’ hands, it will destroy our whole nationality and religion.” The 969 stickers would indicate which stores were Buddhist-owned, and it soon became apparent that they were being used not as a mere emblem of Buddhism, as a Christian might display a crucifix, but, among some, as part of a boycott campaign of Muslim businesses. “They will use that money to manipulate women, forcefully convert those women into their religion, and the children of them will become enemies of the state”, he continued. “They will destroy the whole nation and religion. When their population grows, they will do the same thing as they did in Rakhine state: invade. They will take over the whole country.”8 In the aftermath of his visit to Meikhtila, leaflets began to be circulated around the town. “We are writing to report you that the Burmese Buddhists have been living under the threat”, began one. It was signed only by “Buddhists who feel helpless”, and addressed to the head of the local Sangha 1 97

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committee there. “According to the above situation, Muslims in Meikhtila, those tiger kalar are wearing their kalar mosque clothes and going around in the town more than before. In that group, there are some stranger kalars who we haven’t seen before.”9 Meikhtila had been the bloodiest instance of mass religious violence in central Myanmar in living memory. But the phenomenon wasn’t altogether new. It had occurred sporadically over the three decades before, at times seeming to correlate with periods of unease for the junta. In July 1988, as resentment towards Ne Win’s rule simmered, attacks on Muslims occurred in Pyay and Taunggyi, with claims that the junta at the time had orchestrated them to divert attention from protests breaking out across the country. There had been similar claims following anti-Chinese riots in the late 1960s and 1970s that coincided with soaring inflation and growing public disquiet. There seemed to be a logic to the claims: splitting communities perceived to be united in their opposition to the military allowed the focus of anger to be redirected horizontally, rather than towards the oppressive military apparatus that had brought these communities close to economic ruin. Confidential government material that was leaked in the aftermath of the Meikhtila violence lent support to the idea that this strategic fomentation of violence had continued into the present era. A letter dated 13 September 2013 that was sent from the General Administration Department to township authorities across the country explained how Muslims from a particular mosque in Yangon had “discussed striving for 198

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the creation of a countrywide communal violence” between Buddhists and Muslims in September and October that year.10 According to the letter, Muslims would provoke Buddhists into violence and then burn their own homes before circulating videos of the violence worldwide. Township authorities should therefore be on high alert and make “necessary preparations … in advance”. The violence never materialised, and the imams of the mosque in Yangon that was mentioned in the letter claimed to know nothing of these plans. Yet it showed how the military might seek to manufacture communal tensions and encourage Buddhists to pre-emptively defend themselves against a threat that wasn’t real. There were other episodes in which the hand of the military was less certain. In 2001, Muslim neighbourhoods in towns across Myanmar, from Rakhine State to Bago Division to Ayeyarwady Division, were struck by mobs. The Taliban in March that year dynamited the Buddhas of Bamiyan, the huge stone figures carved into a cliff face in central Afghanistan a millennium and a half ago, and it sent ripples across the Asian continent and into Myanmar. Groups of armed men led by monks that attacked Muslim properties in the town of Taungoo in May 2001 claimed to have done so in response to the destruction of those sacred figures 3,000 kilometres to the west.11 From one angle it seemed that the fear of Islam that arose so sharply after the September 2001 attacks in New York knew no borders, and provided a basis for acute suspicions towards Muslims to develop in countries unaffected by the events. But again, eyewitnesses in Taungoo and elsewhere reported that police and army had stood by 199

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and watched, drawing suspicions of a higher hand in the violence.12 That year had seen inflation soar and food shortages increase. According to a US State Department Report on religious freedom, it also saw a “sharp increase in the level of anti-Muslim violence” in Myanmar, “some of which the Government may have tacitly supported, contributed to, or even instigated”.13 Perhaps the violence was a way to distract from the growing public disquiet of that year. And there was Kyaukse, U Wirathu’s hometown. In October 2003, at the end of Buddhist Lent, a stone was thrown into a monastery compound where young monks were reciting sutras. Next door to the compound was a mosque, and the finger-pointing that followed quickly became violent. Buddhist monks led a mob that attacked the mosque and nearby Muslim homes. Reports of the violence then spread to Mandalay and caught the ear of a number of politically active monks there. They travelled down to Kyaukse and goaded similar attacks on Muslims, some fatal. The junta arrested and de-robed fortyfour of them, U Wirathu among them. He was to spend the next eight years behind bars. The suspicion among residents of Meikhtila that the violence had been planned in advance was heightened by the arrival of mobs composed of people unfamiliar to locals there. “When I saw them they seemed totally drunk – they had lost their senses”, Sandar said of the men who stalked the streets of the town. Despite their condition, they had still managed to destroy more than 800 houses in less than seventy-two hours, and without inviting intervention from security forces. Vijay Nambiar, UN Special Envoy to Myanmar at the 20 0

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time of the Meikhtila violence, had spoken of a “brutal efficiency” to the killings.14 These weren’t the work of blind rage alone, he suggested, but something more organised. And it wasn’t until the third day of the violence that a state of emergency was announced and police began to take action. Over the two days before then, Sandar had seen only a handful of police on the streets of Meikhtila as the mobs ran amok and the butchery began, and they had done nothing. Groups of men were free to roam the town with sticks and machetes, while the agents of the state tasked with ensuring security stood and watched. In past episodes of unrest – the nationwide anti-junta protests of 1988 and 2007 in particular – police hadn’t been so nonchalant. They fired into crowds, and protestors dropped like flies. But, of course, this wave of unrest hadn’t been directed at the junta. It hadn’t only been the residents of Meikhtila that became the target of mob intimidation. Five months after the attacks there, the UN Special Rapporteur for Myanmar at the time, Tomas Ojea Quintana, visited the town. It was late in the evening of 19 August 2013, and the Argentine lawyer was travelling with a representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He had scheduled visits the following day to Muslim displacement camps on the edge of Meikhtila. That evening he approached the town from the east, in a convoy of vehicles. His vehicle wasn’t marked with the UN logo, but the others were, and authorities there had been warned in advance of his arrival. But as the convoy entered Meikhtila, he grew apprehensive. 20 1

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Something strange started to happen. The representative said there was a problem and we would have to change our schedule. They started to give me unclear information about what the problem was, but it was obvious that at some point they were receiving information that something was wrong.

The representative told him that there had been a demonstration, and the convoy would need to take another route. The details were vague, only adding to his sense of foreboding. “I started to feel somehow nervous because I knew from the reports I’d read what had happened in Meikhtila. I knew how violent it had been.” After the violence in Rakhine State the year before, he had become the target of protests by Rakhine nationalists calling for the UN to cease providing aid to the Rohingya, and his photograph was printed on placards held aloft at demonstrations in Yangon and elsewhere. By the time he made the visit to Meikhtila in August 2013, his face was well known. “We were reaching the entrance to Meikhtila and suddenly the convoy stopped and I started to see people around the convoy, very agitated.” There were 200 of them, he estimated, and they were heading to the van marked with the UN logo. My guess, and something that was confirmed later, was that they thought I was in that van. They started to look inside it – to open and punch doors. Once they realised I wasn’t in there they started to look in other vans. Fortunately when they came to my van and started to punch the doors the convoy began to move slowly. 202

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He remembers seeing one policeman nearby who stood and watched as the mob went from van to van. The government later released a statement claiming that the men who surrounded his vehicle had wanted to hand him a letter, but he wasn’t convinced. When we reached the township office we went into a room, and we started to hear the mob reaching the building. Again I couldn’t see any police so we were really in a very tense situation, with authorities not clear as to what was going on.

That morning Quintana had been in Lashio, in northern Shan State, where attacks on Muslims had taken place in May that year, two months on from Meikhtila. Houses, shops and a Muslim orphanage were torched by mobs that had arrived out of nowhere, again unfamiliar to residents of the town. Among the targets they attacked were local journalists who were attempting to report on the violence. Quintana was granted access to the prison, where the participants arrested in the aftermath were being held. “Those Buddhists in jail I spoke with were hired; they were not from Lashio”, he explained. “They were just workers going from one township to another. People approached them from outside the township, saying ‘Come with me, we will do this and this’. But they wouldn’t say who these people were. They were silent and of course they were frightened.” There had been similar ambiguity about the forces organising the violence in Rakhine State in 2012. When I had asked 203

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Ko Myat for more information on the men aboard his bus who had divided the two teams up once they reached Nasi quarter and who had ordered him to attack any fleeing Muslims, he was equally sparing with the detail. He referred to them only as “the organisers”, and said little else. Perhaps he didn’t know their identity, or perhaps he feared retribution were Rakhine participants to implicate others. This seemed to be the case in Lashio too. Quintana was forced to cancel the meetings he had arranged for the following day with victims of the Meikhtila attacks. That night, after the mob that followed him to the township office had dispersed, he drove on to Mandalay. “The outcome was that I couldn’t get first-hand information on what happened in Meikhtila and then report it to the UN, and that for me was very important because the reports and the allegations were very serious”, he said. “I needed to hear from the Muslims and from the authorities what happened, but I couldn’t do anything like that. If the purpose was to avoid a UN investigator reaching the victims, then it was accomplished.” He never was able to determine how the mob knew of his arrival, and why the policeman had watched as the men encircled his vehicle. But there evidently had been an organised effort to block information about the violence from reaching the UN, and the nearby policeman had done nothing to prevent that. As indications of an organised element began to mount, theories circulated about the nature and intent of the unrest. One supposition that gained traction among those watching the events of 2012 and 2013 went that factions of the regime 20 4

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who were nervous about the potential for the transition to eat away at their influence might either manufacture, or allow to take hold, violence that appeared communal in nature. Greater political bargaining rights could be dangerous in a society with such deep fissures, so it went, for the populace was apparently already prone to conflict and this would only drive violent competition for the spoils of a democratic state. The scenes that emerged from Meikhtila and elsewhere would show that Myanmar was not ready for the military to step back. As a result, it could continue to assert its role as steward of the country’s internal affairs, and thereby protect its substantial political interests. The violence also placed Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy in a significant bind. The party had taken seats in the by-elections the previous year, and all knew that unless significantly challenged, her next election run would be a landslide and the military’s centrality would further weaken. But were Suu Kyi to condemn violence committed by Buddhists in a conflict increasingly demarcated along religious lines, then amid the heightened tensions of 2013, she might be seen as siding with Muslims and their suspected project to Islamise the nation. Wanting to secure a substantial political stake in the transition, she would be forced to choose sides: either take the moral highground, from where she would defend Muslim victims but lose Buddhist supporters, or maintain an ambivalence that, while not angering her chief constituency, would see her international reputation as a human rights defender weakened. The degree of organisation of the Meikhtila violence never became clear, and the lines of communication down which the 20 5

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directions to mobs were passed remained obscured. To what degree the state was complicit purely on account of its agents having either participated, or not intervened, was similarly uncertain. Perhaps those police harboured deep prejudices of their own towards Muslims, and had in fact acted independently from their superiors; perhaps they saw the arrival of outsider mobs as evidence that authorities higher than them were executing a plan that they were not to interfere in. Or indeed they may have received orders to do nothing. Police Captain Htay Lwin was on the ground in Meikhtila when the violence erupted. He had seen the mobs wrecking Muslim properties, but like all figures of authority in Myanmar concerned with the violence, when asked why police had been so inert he was reluctant to speak. “There were orders from above to intervene, and it is our duty to do so”, the captain said. “We tried to intervene. But, for instance, there was only one policeman for ten or twenty people.” He seemed to suggest that there had been insufficient numbers of personnel for the enormity of the event. Some of the videos showed police trying to negotiate with the hundreds-strong mobs that swarmed around them, but others had shown officers just standing by as Muslim property was destroyed. It seemed odd, even suspicious, that there was such a weak security presence. “I don’t think that kind of conclusion can be drawn”, was all the police captain would say. “We tried to stop it as much as we could.” Although there seemed to be a logic, a method in the madness that struck Meikhtila, there was never a smoking gun linking the violence to figures in the government or the 20 6

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military. There had been people unfamiliar to locals participating in the attacks, but so too had residents of the town been mobilised by the slaying of the monk by Muslims, and they then proceeded to participate as fiercely as anyone else. What did become clear, however, was that much of the groundwork for the violence had already been laid, and the government under President Thein Sein had been either unwilling or unable to counter the work of the murky forces that were driving it. His administration had allowed the hate speech that circulated around Rakhine State in the lead-up to attacks there to run free, and had given its blessing to the 969 monks, releasing a statement in June 2013, three months after Meikhtila, that lauded 969 as “a symbol of peace”, and its spiritual figurehead, U Wirathu, as a “son of Buddha”. Despite the invective the monk continually levelled at Muslims, and which often appeared to presage violence towards them, the abbot was able to tour the country unhindered by higher authorities, and the material he and other ultra-nationalist groups circulated was never condemned. A decade before he had been placed in prison for goading attacks on Muslims; now he was free to roam. In the months after the Rakhine State violence, which came a year after his release, U Wirathu had adorned the entrance to his monastery in Mandalay with images of Buddhists allegedly killed by Muslims. By March 2013 he had grown in prominence, and I went with two other journalists to visit him. He asked for the interview to take place in front of a wall covered floor to ceiling in self-portraits. Intermittently during the conversation his stony face would suddenly break into a huge smile, eyes ablaze, that disappeared as quickly as it came on. 207

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As we sat in a room of the Masoyein Monastery he ran through what would become a common refrain for him and other monks of the 969 movement: that every single rape recorded in the country was carried out by Muslims, and that Muslim husbands would torture their wives until they converted. There was evidence that Islam had “broken” Christianity and Buddhism in Malaysia, Indonesia and elsewhere. Myanmar would soon meet the same end, for entire villages were becoming Muslim and their men were trying to marry and reproduce at a high rate. U Wirathu had ended his sermon in Meikhtila in December 2012 with a declaration to his followers: “That is why by looking long term, use only places with the sign 969.” That would ensure that no Buddhists shopped at Muslim stores, and no Buddhist money would go towards strengthening their rivals. The 969 leaders wanted that distinction made clear. And just as the Star of David was painted on the doors of Jewish properties by the Nazis to brand their inhabitants, so too were the numbers 786 scrawled on Muslim houses in Meikhtila as the mobs pushed through the town, evidently marking them out for attack.15 After Meikhtila there was more violence, and it moved in mysterious ways. There is a highway that runs north from Yangon towards Pyay, and if you were to plot on a map the sites of unrest that occurred along that route in the eight days during and after Meikhtila then a neat line would form, starting in the small town of Thegon and ending in Tharawaddy. Somehow it travelled along that road, striking eleven towns, each roughly five kilometres from one another, in little over a week. 20 8

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There appeared to be a contagious element to the violence. How it was being transmitted from one location to the next wasn’t clear, but a pattern seemed to be playing out whereby an increase in material designed to stoke fear among Buddhists was soon followed by attacks on Muslims. There would usually be a trigger, something isolated and, on occasions, seemingly insignificant – the young Muslim girl who bumped into a monk while riding her bike in a marketplace in Okkan at the end of April that year, knocking his alms bowl to the ground and launching a day of attacks that left close to seventy Muslim homes damaged, and one person dead. Again the mobs seemed to form quickly, but no one knew where they came from. A second effect of the violence of Meikhtila and afterwards was to put the question of Muslim belonging back into the public consciousness, and not only Rohingya, but Muslims from the majority Bamar ethnicity whose citizenship hadn’t before been questioned. After the brawl in the gold shop, the Myanmar Post newspaper explained that the owners were a “Husband and wife from non-indigenous people group who beat a person who came to sell gold”.16 In the years after the violence I spoke with numbers of Muslims, and even Buddhists with Muslim relatives, who said that obtaining an ID card had become increasingly difficult. Officials at the immigration offices where they went to renew their IDs were refusing to register them as Bamar Muslims, as they had done before. Even the offer of a bribe no longer worked, and new nationalities were being forcibly added to the cards: Indian, Bangladeshi or Pakistan, for surely no Muslim could be purely Bamar. The violence had further Othered the Muslims of Myanmar in a 20 9

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legal sense too, for it was authorities that were questioning with greater intensity the claims to belonging of people who before had been recognised as indigenous. The men in robes moved from town to town in late 2012 and 2013: in December 2012 it had been U Wirathu in Meikhtila; in late February the following year it was U Wimala who spoke to crowds of Buddhists in Minhla, one of the eleven towns along that volatile stretch of road north of Yangon. Several weeks later, mosques and Muslim houses were burned. The same happened in Thandwe in September 2013. U Wirathu addressed crowds of Rakhine in villages close to the homes of Kaman Muslims, the same ones that became targets of attacks the following month. U Wirathu would say that he visited these places to ease tensions, but it was hard to believe. The sermon he gave in Meikhtila explicitly called on Buddhists to disassociate themselves entirely from Muslims, thereby solidifying the religious divide and making it clear that they were two very different groups of people, one to be trusted, the other not. And there was always a defence available to these monks: in the dominant interpretation of the Theravada strand of Buddhism practised in Myanmar, intention is key when assessing the positive or negative aspects of an action. If the objective is to safeguard Buddhism, then the means required to do so would need to be evaluated in light of that intent. Among their adherents, monks like U Wirathu were not therefore seen to be breaking with their gospel of peace, but instead ensuring that the peaceful way survives. As I was leaving U Wirathu’s monastery in Mandalay in April 2013, he handed over a bundle of DVDs and books. On 21 0

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the cover of one book was a painting of a young girl, her face contorted with fear as a huge wolf-like animal bared its teeth. It wasn’t difficult to figure out who was being represented. Accompanying us that day at the monastery was an English teacher from a local school who acted as translator and a man in his late twenties who had arranged the meeting with U Wirathu. He was a former monk, and although he had known U Wirathu for some time, he was wary of the abbot’s position on Muslims. The language was too extreme, he thought, and he worried about the effect it would have on relations between the two communities. Our conversation with U Wirathu lasted around two hours. Once it had wrapped up we emerged back into the compound and walked past the images of slain Buddhists. The heat in Mandalay in April is particularly fierce, and we made a beeline for the road outside where we could flag down a taxi and escape to cooler sanctuary. But as we went, the translator exclaimed that she had been impressed with the wealth of information the monk had. I was surprised. My thoughts had been moving in the opposite direction. Many of the statements U Wirathu made appeared so obviously baseless that it felt almost pointless to question them. Did she believe the claim that Muslims were responsible for all rapes in the country? She wasn’t sure, but had come to understand the significance of the threat facing Buddhism in Myanmar. We reached the road and parted ways. I returned to Yangon several days later. Soon afterwards a message came through on my phone. “I watched Wirathu CD. I feel very angry – they take our air, water, land; they make terrorism!” 21 1

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It had come from the young man who had organised our meeting. Only days before he had thought the monk to be a dangerously provocative figure. All it had taken was a DVD to flip him and to bring to his attention the supposed enemies in his midst. It gave an inkling of the power of the propaganda being circulated, which linked together in a simple chain of causation the fate of Buddhism to the fate of the nation, and thus the fate of the individual. Unless checked, it warned, events happening elsewhere in the country would soon come to bear on the security of people hundreds of miles away. Was it that linkage that allowed the fear to jump from Rakhine State into towns in the country’s centre, to transform neighbours into enemies and to turn supposed democrats into militant nationalists, espousing beliefs that otherwise seemed at odds with their political direction? Or was it that each eruption offered a fresh reminder that old problems hadn’t been addressed? Perhaps the violence and the information that followed it brought to the attention of Buddhists the irresolvable differences between them and Muslims, prompting a recall of past conflagrations whose revised meanings were brought into the present. The young man had said nothing to indicate support for the attacks, but his epiphanic message illuminated how those mental processes might begin to work. If violence was an act of defence against those who threaten the air, the water and the land then the cost of not engaging in violence could be enormous. U Wirathu would always emphasise that he never encouraged attacks, and nowhere in his sermons does he implore followers to take up the sword. But he did lay down tinder that could easily catch flame. 21 2

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By no means were all affected by the fear-mongering, and as the violence began to spread further, small grassroots movements formed to push back against the misinformation. Buddhists in Meikhtila who watched their community descend into bloodletting spoke of their disgust at the attacks, and voiced suspicion at the motives driving it. Others risked much to protect the fleeing Muslims, bringing them into homes and monasteries and warding off the braying mobs. One of these was U Witthuda. As the casualties from the violence in late March 2013 rose and more families fled their homes, the abbot opened the gates of his monastery. Along the dusty road leading out of Meikhtila they came, first in groups of ten or so that had made the three-mile walk there from downtown, and then in their hundreds. None were denied, neither Buddhist nor Muslim, and under the abbot’s watch they entered and found refuge there as the town around them split apart. I had gone to meet U Witthuda one day two years after the violence. The grounds of the Yadanar Oo Monastery were bathed in a crisp sunlight, and inside those walls, young novice monks, barely out of childhood, quietly went about their day. There was an affecting stillness to the place – the sounds of traffic had died out long before I reached the gates, replaced by the song of birds nesting in the trees that dotted the compound. As we entered he approached us slowly, with a curious smile on his face. We followed him inside the main hall and sat on the floor, my translator and I opposite the abbot. I asked him to recount the events of those few days. As we waited, he lit a cheroot, and in the measured, almost 21 3

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soporific tone that is the manner of monks, he explained what had happened. There was a police station close to the monastery. But at the time of the violence the police had received no orders to protect the Muslims that had fled there, and turned them away. So U Witthuda told the officers to send them to his monastery, and there they went: forty on the first day, and nearly 400 on the second. By the third day there were 800 people inside, and still more came. He asked men from his ward to search for others who had remained in hiding nearby, and they went out from the monastery each morning, afternoon and evening and looked high and low. “Some were in the paddy fields and in the trees. They were afraid”, the monk recounted. And I told those people inside the monastery to call their relatives to come and stay at this monastery. Some told me that there were this and that who were too scared to even get out of their houses, and I asked certain people to rescue them.

Among the group that had arrived on the first day was the family of the owner of the gold shop where the brawl between the Buddhist customer and Muslim owner had taken place. U Witthuda had once lived near to the shop and knew the owner’s son, and when they came he ushered them into the monastery. Yet news of the family’s arrival there soon reached the wrong people. In the early hours of the morning of 21 March, a group gathered outside the gates. 21 4

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“They asked me, ‘Bring out those Muslims in the monastery’.” He refused. “I am helping those people who are in trouble. I can’t. If you want to get them, you have to kill me first. I can’t bring them out.” There were two people at the front of the group who began to shout. “Who are you? Are you a Muslim monk?” But, said the abbot, there were around thirty-five monks in his monastery. “Those monks were standing beside me. So the group didn’t dare come inside the monastery, and turned their backs. And they didn’t come again.” By the fourth day, 940 people were sheltering inside the compound. The two communities were initially separated, but in time they came to be among one another. For the first two days, many of the Muslims hadn’t eaten. “They were that scared. They told me later that when they first came to this place they thought this monk had kept them here to kill them all.” Their fear soon faded and they accepted food, but it was a tumultuous few days. There were alcoholics who, bereft of liquor, shouted in the night, shattering the silence that descended as people huddled on the floor sleeping. Several women gave birth inside the monastery. And there was an elderly man who died from an illness he had brought with him. It was heart disease, U Witthuda thought. He had arrived with his family, and knew his time was near. What can I say? I think it is his fate that brought him to this monastery and defined this as his final resting place. And those whose fate defined this monastery as their birthplace were born here as well. You can view it that 21 5

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way, you know? We don’t know where we will be born and where we will die, do we?

In the days after the Meikhtila violence, more monasteries began to fill, and displacement camps outside of town swelled. One school had doubled up as a place of refuge for Muslims, and there in early April 2013 I had met the mother of a young man who was killed in the single worst massacre to befall the town, or indeed any other in central Myanmar that year. He had been twenty-six at the time, and taught in the Himayathol Islamic boarding school for boys in Mingalar Zayone quarter. On the morning of 20 March 2013 the madrasa was filled with 120 students. The youngest was eleven years old. They had learnt of the attack on the gold shop and the large mobs of armed Buddhists that were roaming the streets, and locked the doors of the building. At the western edge of Mingalar Zayone, the ground rises and a bank forms, along which runs a road. On the other side lies the northernmost point of the lake. By the evening of 20 March, the mobs began to appear on that road. They moved down into the quarter and the students could hear them working their way from house to house searching for Muslims. The students then fled and hid in small groups in the thickets of tall grass nearby. There they spent the night, standing in water up to their knees.17 Shortly before sunrise more groups began to gather on the bank. Elevated above the quarter, the road offers a vantage point to survey the ground below. Using the light from car headlamps, 21 6

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the people gathered there served as guides for the armed men down in the quarter, calling out the places where they could spot Muslims hiding. As the shouts rang out, those who had been in the grass all night ran back in the direction of the madrasa. They hid in a building inside a compound near to the school and stayed there until dawn broke. Groups of men then surrounded the compound and began to throw bricks and flaming wooden sticks. The group remained inside. Soon after eight o’clock on the morning of 21 March 2013, police arrived at the quarter and encircled the compound. They told those inside to come out. The woman I’d met in the camp had heard of her son’s final moments from other students at the school. She told how they were marched out of the compound by the police, hands held behind their heads. The officers had ordered them to walk towards the nearby Oat Kyune quarter, around 150 metres from the madrasa. “They said they would be safe”, the mother had said. “Some of the students tried to run but were caught by the mob.” They were beaten and hacked, with motorcycle chains, clubs and machetes. It was during this march out of the quarter that the man had been pulled from the tall grass into a clearing, where the monk had struck him repeatedly with a long pole. The attack was filmed by an onlooker, and shortly after the monk delivers his final blow, the camera pans to the right and the line of Muslims being led by police comes into view.18 Testimony later given to investigators detailed how people at the end of the line were being picked off and beaten to death, and how monks had goaded attacks and had forced the Muslims to kneel on the ground and worship them.19 The video footage 21 7

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shows that police were armed with rifles, yet they had done nothing to intervene. As he was marched through the quarter, the woman’s son confronted one group of attackers. They struck back. “The students told me that they saw him fall to the ground and then they cut him with a sword.” U Win Htein had been on the elevated road that morning. At the time he was the National League for Democracy’s member of parliament for Meikhtila, having taken the seat in the by-elections the year before. He had grown up in the town and knew its people well. On the morning of 21 March he walked the twenty minutes from the NLD office to Mingalar Zayone as news had spread that mobs were descending on the quarter. “That day was the worst. A house where the Muslim youths were hiding was surrounded by the Burmese crowd, and also monks”, he said. This was the compound where those from the madrasa had ended up. Between the Muslim youth and the Burmese mob there were police standing. It was about 8am. I asked the district official and district police commissioner whether they had a loudspeaker. They said yes. So why don’t you shout to the people, I asked? But they didn’t do that. And some people passed through the police line and dragged some of the young Muslims out and beat and killed them in front of me. I tried to stop them, but the boss of the group said, “You don’t interfere!” The police came to me and told me to move back, otherwise I would be harmed. 21 8

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He then went to see the chief minister for Mandalay Division, who had just arrived in town. They were together for half an hour, and their conversation quickly became heated. He was told by the chief minister that orders had been issued to “limit the damage to people”. But, said U Win Htein, in the time in which the conversation took place, “more than twenty or thirty people were killed in the same area”. U Win Htein had also grown suspicious of the reasons for police inaction. The officers deployed to Mingalar Zayone that morning appeared to have allowed armed men to pass between them and pick out Muslims hiding in the house, before taking them outside and beating them to death. There may have been a number of motives, he thought. One is that the police were ordered not to do anything. The second is that they were not given any specific instructions. I don’t know which. Why might the first possibility have happened? Because the government wanted the problem to get bigger and bigger. The MPs, especially me, represent the people from Meikhtila, and they want those people to think that I didn’t do enough to solve the problem. They want to blame me.

Later on the day of 21 March 2013, Sandar also arrived at Mingalar Zayone. By the time she got there, the police had gone. She also stood on the road, among crowds that were still directing the killers below. “I could see Muslim people hiding in their homes. Some were throwing stones at Buddhists, but the Buddhists had knives and they kept burning everything they 21 9

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saw.” She could see the remains of the madrasa and the skeletal structures that had been houses. And from up on the bank she saw a pile of bodies. “It was around my height. The biggest pile in the city.” As she looked down she saw one person dragging the body of a man across the earth and throwing it onto the mound of other slain Muslims. Amid this stacked pile, rising up to the height of a human, would have been the students and teachers of the madrasa. And perhaps somewhere in there was the son of the woman I’d met. She knew that he had been “cremated”, but wasn’t sure exactly how. After waiting for some time, Sandar went away. She returned to the spot two hours later. The sun had already gone down, leaving only a dull glow over the neighbourhood, and flames leapt from the pile. “At night they burned it, while I was there.”

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“WE CAME DOWN FROM THE SKY” THE BUDDHIST PREACHERS OF HATE

Three years on from U Win Htein’s remonstration with the chief minister in Meikhtila, I had gone to visit him in his small, spartan one-room apartment in the capital, Naypyidaw. It was late March 2016, and much had changed since the day the mobs levelled Mingalar Zayone. The National League for Democracy had won a resounding victory in nationwide elections in November the previous year and was preparing to take over government. U Win Htein, still a close aide of Suu Kyi, had been appointed spokesperson for the party. The nature of the movements agitating against the country’s Muslim population had also evolved. In the aftermath of the Meikhtila bloodshed, the 969 movement had faded. In August 2013, the State Sangha Maha Nayaka Committee, the government-appointed body charged with regulating the monkhood, issued a directive stating that it was illegal for monastic networks to organise around the principles of 969, and told its leaders that they were forbidden to use the 969 emblem as a symbol for Buddhism. The stickers began to disappear from the shop fronts and taxi windows they once adorned, and its followers melted back into anonymity. No longer were they so evident among the everyday public. 223

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But in the meantime, another equally divisive monk-led movement had arisen. It displayed a high capacity for organisation, with millions of supporters and an ability to wield influence at the highest rungs of government. A number of its most visible figureheads, some of whom came from the ranks of 969 – U Wirathu, U Wimala, Ashin Kawi Daza, the abbot in Kayin State that circulated the boycott order in October 2012, and others – preached a similarly exclusionary brand of nationalism that fixed on Islam as the overarching threat to the health of the nation. But like 969, they also appeared immune to criticism from politicians – even Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD had refused to condemn the sermons of the men in robes that so often appeared to precipitate attacks on Muslims. The party seemed to have cowered in the face of this new movement that formed in June 2013, as 969 began to wind down. Its official name, the Organisation for Protection of Race, Religion and Sa¯sana, echoed the mantra of the nationalists of the 1930s. Those were the three pivots around which the discourse on belonging revolved. In time it had come to be known by its acronym, Ma Ba Tha, and it was spoken of as a deity. “We are a two-year-old boy,” U Wirathu once said,1 “but we came down from the sky, not like a normal person. We are brilliant people.” In comprising both monks and laypeople it was able, for a time, to circumvent the restrictions that had been the downfall of 969. With its own Education and Propagation Department, led by U Wirathu, a Legal Affairs wing, an accounting department and a clutch of savvy media officers, it had become a well-resourced organisation with a nationwide presence. It 224

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included more considered monks alongside the firebrand figures. Even more so than its former incarnation, however, its ultra-nationalist faction had displayed an alarming ability to intimidate the political leadership in Myanmar. I told U Win Htein that the international media were portraying the NLD as cowardly, given the party’s reluctance to challenge the messages being circulated by U Wirathu and others. The order given to 969 evidently hadn’t been all-encompassing, for the same monks continued to sermonise on the perils of Islam, free from any condemnation by the government. The charge irked him. “You understand our reasoning!” he fired back. “The monks are quite respectable – they keep their eight precepts: celibacy, no eating after 12 o’clock; that thou shall not steal, thou shall not kill, thou shall not commit adultery. We regard them with a high standard.” There was another reason too. “If we argue politically we feel we commit a misdeed, to them and to us. It is not cowardliness, it’s abstaining from unnecessary argument. It is self-preservation.” The National League for Democracy was endowed with a reverence that often seemed as much a curse as a blessing. After its founding in 1988, there had never been any question of who would take over government if and when the military fell, and in that sense the party had almost become a byword for democracy. Having seen its victory in the 1990 elections annulled and Suu Kyi placed under house arrest, it hadn’t needed to play the difficult political game – to bargain and compromise with competing powers yet avoid alienating its support base. In the eyes of its legions of followers it became 225

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something approaching an ideal, a representation of everything the military was not. Its party base was vast, and cut across ethnic, religious and class lines. But that entailed a particular burden, and upon entering parliament in 2012 and taking up ministerial roles that put it in direct confrontation with its diverse constituency, it became evident that the party could not please everyone. In 2013, Suu Kyi was made head of a commission to investigate a crackdown on demonstrators at a copper mine in Myanmar’s north, when security forces fired incendiary devices into a protest camp. The white phosphorous that sprayed out from the devices left more than a hundred people, including monks, with extensive chemical burns. The commission she chaired criticised the use of force and the underlying bases for the protests – the duping of villagers into vacating their land, the lack of revenue returned to the displaced communities. But the protestors’ demands that it be closed would not be met, Suu Kyi said. Doing so would upset the delicate relationship with China, the commission argued, and hurt Myanmar’s domestic economy. Suu Kyi, for so long a seemingly inviolable figure, drew sharp criticism from communities around the mine. “Sometimes politicians have to do things that people dislike”, she told them. But placing her at the head of the commission seemed an astute move by the administration of President Thein Sein. Although it was the security forces, controlled by the military, that inflicted the damage, it was she who became the scapegoat. The idea that Suu Kyi might hold an ulterior value for the military seemed to be substantiated by the NLD’s position towards 969 and Ma Ba Tha, who, it would gradually become 226

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clearer, shared an ideological affinity with elements within the military. Were she to condemn movements that pitched themselves as defenders of the country’s Buddhists, then she would be depicted as pro-Muslim and lose support; continued silence, and her international reputation as a stalwart of democracy would suffer. Both scenarios could work against the standing of the NLD. I asked U Win Htein whether there wasn’t a need for deeper engagement with the messages being put forth by some of the monks within Ma Ba Tha. Among the key objectives set out in the organisation’s founding charter was the prevention of violence related to race and religion, yet the likes of U Wirathu and U Wimala had undertaken a number of campaigns that appeared to be aimed at furthering the religious divide and planting the seeds of conflict. They continued to tour the country and disseminate anti-Muslim propaganda through Facebook and other social media websites, meaning the potential for violence remained present. And not only had it grown to become perhaps the country’s most expansive social movement, with offices in the majority of townships, but it had set a precedent for other groups to emerge, some with an even more exclusionary stance towards Muslims. It was a reality he seemed reluctant to address. “We have thousands of problems, and Muslim problems are one of a thousand. We will deal with each and every problem according to the priority we choose.” That evasiveness reflected the NLD’s broader approach to an issue that had rapidly become a serious threat to its standing. Shifting the blame elsewhere seemed to be the party’s preferred strategy. 227

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“You media! You enlarge the problem, and say that we don’t have any problem other than that,” he finished.

When the NLD took power it inherited a country of far-reaching institutional and infrastructural ruin. On nearly every index of development, Myanmar lagged behind all other countries in the region. Only Afghanistan seemed a realistic challenger to its crown for Asia’s most moribund state, so corroded and corrupted had it been by decades of authoritarian rule and economic mismanagement. In the years prior to 2011 and the coming to government of the Union Solidarity and Development Party, combined spending on healthcare and education was less than 3 per cent of the total budget. As the USDP settled into office in 2011, the army launched repeated offensives against ethnic rebels in the north and east of the country, greatly widening the longstanding conflicts at a time when the military was supposed to be in retreat. Responsibility for ending these was placed in the portfolio of the NLD when it came to power in 2016, as were the more quotidian problems – persistent power shortages, an acute lack of resources for vital sectors – that resulted from decades of neglect. The economy remained dominated by military-aligned consortiums and tycoons that had made their wealth through close ties to the old guard, which they were reluctant to relinquish. It would be up to the NLD to correct all this, and it understood both the burden it had taken on and the weight of expectation it carried. The party’s historically antagonistic relationship with the military provided an additional problem, 228

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for several key ministries were still under military control: Home Affairs, Defence and Border Affairs – those tasked with managing the country’s security and administration, but which instead seemed to perpetuate instability. These myriad problems would need to be fixed if the government of the NLD was to really make a break with military rule. Yet the growing prominence of the firebrand monks and the unabated mass antipathy towards Rohingya did seem like priority issues, and not only for the threat they posed to the security of Muslims – nationalist movements were manipulating the religious divide to weaken Suu Kyi’s party. As the NLD campaigned for the November 2015 vote, senior figures in Ma Ba Tha began to implore followers to support the military-aligned USDP. Despite its past wrongdoings, their argument went, that was the party that would best safeguard Buddhism. “Do not look at the party. We only need to care about who will take care of our religion, who will care about the development of our community”, U Bhaddamta Vimala, a monk and prominent Ma Ba Tha member, told more than a thousand monks at a Ma Ba Tha conference in June 2015, five months before the elections.2 The NLD, on the other hand, had opposed a package of four laws submitted to parliament in December 2014 that were written and heavily promoted by Ma Ba Tha, and that smacked of discrimination, along both faith and gender lines. The “Protection of Race and Religion Laws”, as they came to be known, criminalised polygamy and required those who wished to convert to another religion to seek official permission beforehand. Local governments were also given the 229

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power to limit reproductive rates of women if they considered their particular region to be suffering as a result of overpopulation. Given the popular narrative of Rohingya as rapacious breeders bent on overwhelming the Rakhine Buddhist population, it appeared this law might have a particular community in mind. Finally, marriages between Buddhists and non-Buddhists were to be subjected to public opinion, with the couple required to publicise their union and await whatever objections might come forth. It seemed a clear attempt to curb interfaith marriages, for there remained a perception that Buddhist women must convert to Islam if they wanted to marry a Muslim man, thereby diluting the religious line further. Once again, history appeared to be repeating itself. An article in the now defunct Seq-Than Journal from 1938, several months on from the early wave of anti-Indian violence, had warned any Buddhist woman marrying an Indian that “You Burmese women who fail to safeguard your own race … are responsible for the ruination of the race”.3 It seemed that strain of patriarchy hadn’t diminished over time. The marriage law promoted by Ma Ba Tha hinged on the belief that in order for women’s freedoms to be protected, they should be denied the freedom to choose whom they marry. “Our Buddhist women are not intelligent enough to protect themselves”, the head of one Buddhist group, the Theravada Dharma Network, had said in June 2013, soon after the laws were first mooted by Ma Ba Tha.4 There was pushback, but it came at a cost. Grassroots networks coordinated to petition the government, but very quickly those who opposed the laws came to understand 230

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that the movement they were squaring up against was an altogether new beast. May Sabe Phyu had been among a number of activists that put their names to a joint public statement and letter sent to parliament that called for the laws to be dropped. The women’s rights campaigner, known widely across Myanmar for her efforts to end gender-based violence, decried the laws during public addresses, and told inquiring media that they were discriminatory and regressive. A day after the statement was released, Ma Ba Tha published an article in its journal describing the signatories to the letter as national traitors. Posters began to appear in monasteries bearing May Sabe Phyu and others’ faces and personal details, and branding them once again as traitorous. Then her phone began to ring. “If you’re against the race and religion law you will be killed”, a voice on the other end would say. Photos of the naked bodies of women who had been assaulted and killed were messaged through. “They told me that if I continued to oppose the laws I would be killed like this.” Her phone number started appearing on adult websites identifying her as a call girl. Men began to ring through asking for her services, sometimes more than a hundred times in a night. Explicit photos and videos were messaged to her mobile. The house phone then began to ring, and her children would pick up. “Why does your mother dare to oppose the laws? Tell her to take care”, the voice warned. In more than a decade of campaigning against military abuses in Myanmar’s ethnic regions, May Sabe Phyu hadn’t known anything quite like this. The content of the threats 231

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was both sinister and debasing, and they came at her again and again. Her children hadn’t previously been targeted. She and the colleagues who co-signed the letter had decided early on not to speak face to face with Ma Ba Tha. They feared that were they to travel to the organisation’s headquarters in northern Yangon, their conversation would be videotaped and then possibly manipulated and circulated to discredit them. But monks did visit her to discuss her objection, and when she spoke with them she was courteous. Still the threats arrived, however, and members of her civil society network began to worry about the public statements she continued to make. Perhaps the warnings would be extended to all associated with her, they feared. Once again, the campaign of intimidation had a chilling effect that stretched far beyond its primary targets. Despite the no-vote from the NLD, the laws were passed. Ma Ba Tha had been able to dictate policy at the highest level of government. Only four years before, the military leadership had been utterly impervious to popular will, and criminalised any expression of it. But much had changed in Myanmar in a short space of time, and the rise of xenophobic nationalism that accompanied the transition meant that new forces were now able to set the political agenda. Ma Ba Tha’s success with the laws reinforced a feeling of symbiosis between the nationalist monks and the militaryaligned Union Solidarity and Development Party. The party had voted overwhelmingly in favour of the laws, and in return it received the backing of the monks as it campaigned for the 2015 elections. The fact that electoral laws in Myanmar explicitly ban the use of religion in politics seemed to matter 232

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little – complaints from competing parties about the close relationship between Ma Ba Tha and the ruling party were consistently ignored by the Union Election Commission. At other times, Ma Ba Tha clashed head-on with the USDP and won, thereby reinforcing a growing sense that a major political force had materialised that could challenge the government. In the middle of 2015, the administration of President Thein Sein cancelled a planned development of high-rises, one worth $300 million, in downtown Yangon. In the months before, Ma Ba Tha had protested against the project on the grounds that the construction of the buildings might damage the revered Shwedagon Pagoda. It won popular support, and threatened to take the protests nationwide. The government was forced to compensate the developers. For the NLD, its lack of support for the Race and Religion laws intensified a campaign of vilification of the party in the lead-up to the 2015 polls. Doctored photos of Aung San Suu Kyi wearing a hijab were circulated online and the NLD, despite a purposeful effort not to inflame anti-Muslim sentiment, was accused of being too strong on universal human rights and weak on protecting those of a select group, the country’s Buddhists. Ma Ba Tha encouraged voters to ask six questions of each candidate, including whether they are Buddhist, whether they support the four laws, and whether they would try to change the 1982 Citizenship Law.5 So hounded was the party in the run-up to the elections that it rejected the candidacy of more than a dozen of its Muslim members, as did other parties. It never said why, but all understood it to be a way to appease Ma Ba Tha and its legion of supporters 233

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at a time when the NLD was rallying support among its vital Buddhist constituency. The Buddhist nationalist movements that gathered strength during the transition had made the subject of religion so toxic that it was reshaping not just the orientation and make-up of a party that proclaimed inclusivity, but the wider political landscape in Myanmar. And the irony that arose from the decision by the NLD and other parties to block Muslim candidates wasn’t lost on anyone. To ensure a victory in the elections by civilian forces over the USDP, one that would mark a substantial step on the road to democratic governance, the country’s two-million-strong Muslim population, recognised as citizens, would have no representatives in parliament. What became increasingly apparent around this time was that the pro-democracy movement had begun to turn in on itself. Prior to the 2012 violence, Suu Kyi and the NLD had been a force so sacrosanct that criticism of it felt treacherous, even for foreign journalists writing on the country. The party’s only obvious nemesis had been the military, but now it, as well as activists who sought to bridge the religious divide after 2012, was coming under sustained attack from figures once allied to it. Exiled media organisations, once a key pillar of the pro-democracy movement, soon came to be targeted too. Their shortwave radio and television broadcasts that were beamed into the country from outside had comprised the only independent, uncensored source of information during military rule, but they came to be slandered as “pro-Bengali” for reporting on atrocities committed by Buddhists in Rakhine State. Either the importance of the nationalist cause 234

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was outflanking that of the democratic cause, or, perhaps more accurately, a particular form of democracy was being promoted that greatly limited democratic rights on the basis of identity. That posed a threat to a version of the transition that many Western governments had rallied in support of, for the mounting hostility towards inclusivity played so neatly into the hands of regressive forces that had no desire to see a true democratic opening come to fruition. The propaganda spun by Ma Ba Tha, in particular the way it framed inclusivity as antithetical to sovereignty and stability – and, along the way, Buddhism – had dramatically shaken up what once appeared to be a fairly coherent and unified movement for democratic change. In its denial of Muslim candidates and its capitulation to Ma Ba Tha, the NLD indicated that within the country was a political force more powerful than the one soon to lead the government. I put it to U Win Htein that unless challenged, Ma Ba Tha might take confidence from its success in intimidating the NLD to press the party even more. Was the Muslim issue really being over-exaggerated, I asked, or did it stand to threaten the NLD’s popularity among the electorate, not to mention imperil the several million Muslims in Myanmar? “No”, he replied. “It is because the Muslim lobby is much greater and much richer and much more influential. That is why the issue gets spread across the world.” Suu Kyi had come under criticism in late 2013 for making a similarly contentious claim. Asked by a BBC reporter about the underlying reasons for the violence, she replied: “You, I think, will accept that there is a perception that Muslim power, global Muslim power, is very great.”6 It seemed to be a riff on 235

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the fear that global events were coming to bear on Myanmar, as if the violence inside the country wasn’t localised but instead part of a wider pattern playing out beyond its borders. And it put Suu Kyi’s own stance towards Islam in Myanmar under scrutiny. Earlier in the same interview she had said: “There are many moderate Muslims in Burma who have been well integrated into our society.” It suggested that she might also perceive them to be outsiders, and thus that Buddhists held the sole claim to indigeneity in the country – a claim that had been a primary basis for the conflict. At one point in my conversation with U Win Htein he had mentioned self-preservation as a reason for not criticising the monks. It seemed a strange subject to raise in a debate that appeared, from the outside at least, predominantly political, and not one to be reduced to the individual or party level. “We believe in reincarnation”, he explained. “We might suffer by crossing those high-ranking monks. They may not have followed the teaching of Buddha, but that is up to them. We don’t cross them because we don’t want to lower ourselves for the next life.” That reply had felt inadequate, not because I dismissed the hold that karmic fears can have on the pious, but because it appeared self-centred. He and his colleagues may lose support for speaking out, but wasn’t there a greater common good at stake that trumped the fears of a few who, in coming to government, had sworn an oath to act in the common interest? I put that thought to him. “Yes”, he replied. “That’s in our hearts.” But there it appeared to stay. Suu Kyi and the NLD’s decision to refrain from criticising the monks and from calling 236

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for greater protections for Muslims may have shielded her government from further attacks, but it was both morally tenuous and, perhaps, even short-sighted. Wasn’t there a chance that as this strain of bigotry became increasingly entrenched, it would grow ever more combustible and eat away at whatever stability a civilian government might bring to the country? Ma Ba Tha had already been able to codify prejudices in the form of the four Race and Religion Laws, and its confidence grew as time passed. But while its anti-Muslim posturing had dominated much coverage of the movement, the popularity it garnered had far broader roots. It knew how to insert itself into existing social services and networks, filling gaps left open by an absent state, and it undertook community activities across the country that provided services to constituencies that had known only neglect. The brand of exclusionary nationalism that its more vocal members espoused may have drawn in followers who already felt themselves attuned to the precariousness of Buddhism, but it was in the work it did elsewhere, often superseding the role of weak local authorities, that brought it the widest appeal and pushed against narratives of the movement as one monolithic machine of exclusion. Yet the confidence that came with a growing and devoted support base, formed of millions who saw it as a more effective steward of the country than any that had come before in their lifetimes, often showed itself in authoritarian ways. In the middle of 2015, as flooding submerged large parts of Myanmar’s north, Ma Ba Tha took it upon itself to expel a local aid group in the town of Kawlin on the grounds that it 237

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hadn’t coordinated its efforts with Ma Ba Tha. It then took over responsibility for providing assistance to victims, unchallenged by township government officials. It had become both a mass nationwide pressure group, able to steer legislation in parliament, and one that took on local-level duties of the state. Its philanthropic work provided vital services to long-ignored communities, and from this its tentacles began to extend across the country. When I went to the Ma Ba Tha headquarters in northern Yangon, I asked how it could generate the kind of finance it seemed to have. Its magazines were disseminated en masse around the country, and it could buy up stocks of food and medicine to distribute to flood victims and other Buddhist poor. But it could also book out vast public spaces for rallies, like the 30,000-seat Thuwanna stadium in Yangon, packed to capacity in October 2015 to celebrate the passing of the Race and Religion Laws. In response, I was told of the public donations that devoted Buddhists poured into temples and monasteries. These were part of the “Charities and Ceremonies” expenditure that Myanmar households invested hugely in, hoping to “make merit” and improve their chances in the next life. Ma Ba Tha had that all-important monastic leadership that held sway over its audience, and many saw it not only as the one body willing and able to protect Buddhism, but one that functioned in place of the neglectful and abusive state apparatus they had known before. “We have many donors”, a man in the headquarters had explained. “Monks ask people to donate and they do – both rich and poor.” He held up his arm, pointing to his wrist. “Even the poor can still donate a watch.” Not long before, a gold 238

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company had donated a lump of gold worth close to $70,000. “If they do good things they believe they will get advantage.” The rapid rise of Ma Ba Tha and 969 had caught many in Myanmar off-guard. But it was not altogether surprising. Nationalist movements like those that arose during the transition are direct products of democratisation. They seek to exploit the insecurities of a population undergoing rapid change by pointing to the consequences of that change: upheaval, the decline of tradition, the introduction of unfamiliar norms that threaten the cohesion of society; of conflict and breakdown. The sudden explosion in new information channels that occurs as authoritarian rule winds down – and this was key for Myanmar, given the soaring use of social media as internet penetration expanded after 2011 – can be captured by these movements and used to spread fears of how newly enfranchised constituencies threaten the standing of the traditional order. There was a continuity in Myanmar that had been broken by the British, so it went, and now it would be broken again by Islam, with a bit of help from Suu Kyi and her party. The vision of a harmonious society that the vocal monks of Ma Ba Tha articulated, one of religious or ethnic uniformity, isn’t read by its supporters as regressive. Instead it is a return to a supposedly ideal past of familiarity and security, where Buddhism reigned supreme, and gains traction during times of great change precisely because it counters the momentum towards openness, and all the dangers that brings. This reimagining of the past helps sell to the population a deep conservatism because it ties security to exclusivity, and promises a stable, purified order like that of old. The kind of 239

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mass ideologies that the monks of 969 and Ma Ba Tha began to spread from 2013 onwards took hold and proliferated because they tapped into those latent anxieties, and at no time were they better able to than in the early stages of democratisation, when the objectives of a nervous political elite eager to retain power aligned with a grassroots nationalist base. These movements shackled the fate of Myanmar to the fate of Buddhism. Anyone not supportive of Buddhism, be they Muslims or dissenting Buddhists, didn’t support the national project, and therefore threatened Myanmar and those within it. It was for this reason that those who began to organise to counter that message found themselves in the crosshairs of the movement, derided as enemies of Buddhism and subjected to threats to their lives.

One of these was Myo, a soft-spoken young Muslim interfaith activist in Mandalay. He had held a workshop there in late July 2015 in which he brought monks and nuns together to discuss what pathways to harmony might exist. A year before, in July 2014, violence between Buddhists and Muslims had struck the city. But perhaps more than any other episode over the two years prior, this one appeared to bear the mark of higher organising powers. Once again it was triggered by reports of the rape of a Buddhist girl by two Muslim teashop owners. The allegations were first published on a Myanmar-language news aggregation website, Thit Htoo Lwin, but with the help of U Wirathu’s by then prominent social media presence, the report circulated quickly. On his 240

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Facebook page, the abbot named the teashop, and the next day a mob gathered outside. But the allegations had been cooked up, authorities later stated – the girl had been paid by two local men to fabricate the story. Who the men were and what interests they represented was never made clear. Suu Kyi had been due in the town two weeks after the violence to rally for changes to the constitution that would allow her to become president. Perhaps this had been an attempt to derail her campaign. Either way, the rumours catalysed four days of attacks that left two people dead – one Buddhist and one Muslim. Sandar, the same journalist that had witnessed the horrors of Meikhtila a year before, had seen the final moments of the Buddhist man. U Tun Tun was killed close to midnight on 2 July 2014, the second day of the violence, when a group of Muslims emerged onto the road from a mosque in downtown Mandalay armed with sticks and knives. They pulled him from his motorbike and beat him to death. U Soe Min, a fifty-one-year-old Muslim, followed the next day, also knocked off his bike and set upon by a group of men, this time Buddhist. The mobs that had attacked Muslim property in the meantime were unfamiliar to residents, as many had been in Meikhtila. After witnessing the death of U Tun Tun, Sandar had gone to the Masoyein Monastery where U Wirathu resided. It was midnight, and there she found a crowd of monks and lay Buddhists gathered outside, holding sticks and knives, preparing to march through the streets. Again she began filming, and one of the monks approached. “Don’t film”, he told her. “If you film I will kill you.” She noticed that he was wearing jeans under his saffron robe. 241

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At the workshop a year later, Myo began a discussion on the Buddhist concept of Right Speech, which commands followers to abstain from lying, divisive and abusive speech, and “idle chatter”. This seemed a topical point of conversation, given the continued provocative rhetoric of Ma Ba Tha monks and the rumours of Muslim misdeeds that had caused such strife in the city the year before. He knew one of the nuns was an assistant to U Wirathu. Most attendees at the workshop willingly partook in the discussion, but as it went on the nun became withdrawn. He thought little of it until a series of messages came through on his phone several days later. “Fucking kalar”, the first read, using that same derogatory term that had been levelled at Rohingya and other Muslims so persistently. “Why don’t you stop your work?” The following day another arrived. “You want to die? Why are you pressuring our monks?” Myo responded to neither, but grew agitated. A third then came through. “Who the hell are you to teach our monks? Motherfucker kalar, you’re going to die.” After a fourth message, he skipped Mandalay and went into hiding. “We will see you tomorrow”, it warned. Whoever was behind the messages believed his workshops to be an attempt to turn monks and nuns against Ma Ba Tha. In hiding in Yangon, he began to receive anonymous phone calls. The voice on the end of the line would curse him repeatedly and mock him for running away. He often thought he was being trailed by plain-clothed officers of the feared Military Intelligence (MI). Unfamiliar men would follow him in the street, or loiter outside his office. “When Ma Ba Tha find out something wrong that you’ve done, they tell MI”, he 242

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said. He never did warn police of the threats. If he made that call, he knew they would tell him that it was too dangerous to continue with his interfaith work, and pressure him to stop. So he continued alone, believing that Ma Ba Tha and Myanmar’s security agencies somehow seemed to be acting in unison. I met with Myo in his office in Mandalay several months after the text messages came through. Sitting next to him as we spoke was a young monk. As Myo outlined the dangers that accompanied any attempt to bring the two communities back together, the monk had waited quietly. He was also engaged in interfaith work, Myo explained. The monastic order in Myanmar was by no means a single-agenda entity; there were many monks who, as the violence spread, began to articulate Buddhist responses to the posturing of the ultra-nationalist monks, drawing on those same concepts of Right Speech that Myo had tried to illuminate. As I began to direct questions at the monk he told of how his work had isolated him from old friends, both inside and outside the monkhood. Any call for peace amid such sharp religious divisions was taken as a signal of support for Muslims, he said. The young monk had marched in September 2007, as did tens of thousands of other monks, when soaring fuel costs unleashed a wave of agitation against the regime that came to be known as the Saffron Revolution. But he was sceptical of the goals of many of the monks back then. “The monks didn’t understand much about democracy – they were concerned with petrol prices”, he said. “Most people who fight for democracy don’t understand it. They think it means that you can change the government and then 243

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do whatever you want. The monks didn’t like the military, but they didn’t have any alternative answer.” There may have been truth in that. Democracy was by and large articulated as an end to military rule and the conflicts it brought, and the election to government of the NLD. What happened beyond that, and how the process of reconciling different versions of democracy would play out, hadn’t appeared to figure much. But it seemed like a somewhat harsh statement. Monks had died in the crackdown that followed the uprising and they were integral to the mobilisation of tens of thousands of people of all creeds. The word in the Myanmar language for “boycott” is thabeik hmauk. It means to turn the alms bowl upside down. At the front of the protests in September 2007 were lines of monks doing exactly that, their lacquer-coated bowls inverted, signifying their refusal to take merit from the generals that had overseen the ruination of the country. They had chanted the metta sutta, invoking the desire of the Buddha to see all beings free from suffering. They had used Buddhist symbols for the purposes of effecting change, and for that were gunned down. But it was true that vocal monks were now preaching an entirely contrary message, one that ate away at the momentum of forces pushing for that democratic quality of inclusivity. Myo hadn’t been the only critic of Ma Ba Tha to be hounded. In Mandalay, not long after the text messages came through on Myo’s phone, another Muslim interfaith activist began to be stalked by police. One day in the middle of July 2015, Zaw Zaw Latt received a phone call from a policeman telling him to head to a café in downtown Mandalay where he would be 244

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met by officers from the Criminal Investigation Department. Once there, the thirty-one-year-old was questioned about a photo that appeared on Facebook of him holding a rifle. It had been taken in 2013 during a delegation of interfaith activists to Kachin State to meet with Christians displaced by the conflict between the army and Kachin rebels there, but somehow it was picked up two years later and circulated online. Police detained him on charges of “unlawful association” with an illegal group, the Kachin Independence Army, and another charge related to illegal border crossing from a trip to the India–Myanmar border the same year. A colleague of his, Pwint Phyu Latt, had also been on the delegation. She was arrested the following week. But it quickly became apparent that it hadn’t only been police pushing for their arrest. A month beforehand, the same photo had been printed in an article in Atu Mashi magazine, one of Ma Ba Tha’s two main publications that devote considerable column space to deriding alleged enemies of Buddhism. The article, written by a so-called “Scholar of Masoyein”, the monastery to which U Wirathu was abbot, was titled “Photo evidence of threat to Buddhism”. The author had scoured Zaw Zaw Latt’s Facebook page and published eleven images that supposedly proved his intent to harm Buddhism. Next to one photo of the interfaith activist sitting on a chair at a Buddhist temple, shoes still on, was written: “This is evidently an act of trespass, disgracing Buddhist artefacts to hurt the feelings of Buddhists with an intention to incite religious riots and insurrection against the state.” Not long after his arrest, a relative of Zaw Zaw Latt explained to me that at every court appearance, 245

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members of Ma Ba Tha had been present. “They put pressure on the mother of Pwint Phyu Latt and told them they could be in prison for seven years”, she recounted. After a nine-month trial ending in April 2016, they were both sentenced to four years in prison. It wasn’t the first time Ma Ba Tha had been able to influence a legal case so effectively. In October 2014, Htin Lin Oo, an information officer in the NLD, had given a speech in which he decried the fusion of violent nationalism and Buddhism. A video of the speech circulated on social media, and two months later he was arrested and charged with “outraging religious feelings”. He underwent a seven-month trial, and from time to time when he was taken from his cell to face the judge there would be monks outside the courthouse demanding the strongest sentence possible. That was eventually realised. In June the following year he was given a two-year prison term with hard labour. Ma Ba Tha appeared to have become so influential that it could sway judges. And amid all this, the NLD was nowhere to be heard. So chilling an effect did Ma Ba Tha seem to have on the party that, upon his arrest, Htin Lin Oo was ejected from its ranks and left to fend for himself.

Ma Ba Tha rose to heights that could only be reached with the backing of elements within the state, but exactly what connection existed wasn’t clear. There were politicians and military men who donated large sums to monks within the movement – nearly $8,000 from an army colonel to the organisation’s chairman, Ashin Tiloka Bhivunsa, in the middle of 2015;7 246

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$31,000 from a USDP candidate to U Wirathu in August that year, and who published photos of the handover of the money on Facebook.8 Local authorities would regularly allow Ma Ba Tha rallies to take place while refusing permits for other activist groups, including those marching for religious harmony. Yet none of this provided clear evidence to determine what interests the ruling party was funnelling through Ma Ba Tha. In the absence of facts, speculation began to mount that mirrored the kind that followed the Meikhtila violence. One line went that hard-line factions within the military-political elite needed a force like Ma Ba Tha to warn of the dangers of a democratic opening led by the NLD. There were figures like the late Aung Thaung, industry minister under the junta and a close associate of former junta leader Than Shwe, who was known to have met U Wirathu shortly after his release from prison in 2012. It was Aung Thaung who was rumoured to have played an organising role in the attack on a convoy carrying Aung San Suu Kyi through the town of Depayin in 2003, when seventy NLD supporters were killed by a mob made up of Swan Arr Shin, or Masters of Force, vigilantes – young, poor men who were paid with money or food for a day’s violence. This force was supposedly the brainchild of Aung Thaung. Suu Kyi once likened them to the Brown Shirts, the paramilitary unit tasked by Hitler with protecting Nazi rallies and attacking German opposition parties.9 Perhaps the mobs that suddenly appeared in Meikhtila, in Mandalay and elsewhere were also Swan Arr Shin, or a newer incarnation, working in the service of those who wanted to thwart, or at least slow, the transition. 247

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So much of politics in Myanmar operates in the dark, leaving observers with only briefly illuminated clues about the interests being fought over. Exactly which forces were driving the violence never became clear, yet a picture did begin to form of how Ma Ba Tha had become so politically powerful, so quickly. Not only was the organisation tacitly sanctioned by the leadership under the USDP, and used by it to undermine support for the opposition, but because of the influence it held over a large cross-section of the population, and the risks that came with criticising the clergy, it was then tolerated by the opposition. This created a vacuum in which it could grow and grow, unchallenged by parties either side of the political spectrum. Despite its campaigning prior to the 2015 elections, it didn’t succeed in re-electing the USDP to power, and the NLD won a resounding victory. But as the new leadership assumed office in early 2016, the monks brought their full pressure to bear. The party that in 2015 had staunchly opposed the four Race and Religion Laws told a UN convention the following year, soon after coming to office, that it would not seek to repeal them. At some point in its shift from opposition to leadership, it had been pressed into flipping its position. Those four laws were evidently off-limits. Whereas 969 had lacked coherence, Ma Ba Tha showed adeptness at making its presence known in the villages, in the classrooms, in the media and in parliament. It began Sunday Schools where students would learn the virtues of Buddhism and the importance of protecting race and religion. These soon expanded into fully fledged private high schools aimed at creating devoted Buddhists out of the country’s young. 248

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It seemed as if Ma Ba Tha was taking over where the Na Ta La schools in Christian-dominated border regions had left off – the cultivation of a dedicated youth that understood the national project of Myanmar. There were echoes of the school curricula under military rule, when textbooks would be prefaced with exhortations to the young to promote “patriotism, union spirit and the spirit of protecting independence”.10 Other ultra-nationalist groups that formed around the same time took the education initiative a step further. The Myanmar National Network toured schools in rural areas of the country, and in front of audiences of young children explained the horrors committed by Muslims elsewhere in the world. At one gathering that was caught on film, a teacher holds up a banner showing images of the bloodshed in Syria and asks, “Who is committing these violent murders?” In unison, the children shout “Islam!”11 Time and again people in Myanmar who were critical of the message of Ma Ba Tha explained that the group found most support among the poorly educated. Measures of nationwide literacy fail to illuminate the problem they were getting at, for close to 90 per cent of the country can read. It was how and what children were taught. A group of students in their late teens whom I met in Yangon had all spent time in government schools. They recalled that a typical lesson consisted of the teacher reading page after page from a textbook. Pupils were required to commit this to memory, and then regurgitate it word for word in exams. The asking of questions was frowned upon, even punished, so they would be compelled to pay for after-school tuition where they could safely probe the material 249

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they were being taught. If authoritarian rule relies on a certain measure of submission, then perhaps the regime thought that the stifling early on in life of critical thinking faculties would help pacify the population. So often it was proven wrong. Throughout military rule, Myanmar’s rich culture of defiance and its critical analysis of the ways in which power functions were displayed again and again, in public protest, in the mobilisation of underground activist and civil society networks, and in the quiet resistance to the military of farmers and rural villagers. But there were factors outside of this that seemed to work in Ma Ba Tha’s favour. The students I met with showed a diversity that wasn’t reflected in the school curriculum. Among them was a Chin Christian, a Shan Buddhist, a Bamar Buddhist and a Bamar Muslim, but the latter said that at her government school in Yangon all children were required to attend Buddhist ceremonies. The curriculum didn’t allocate much space to develop an understanding of religion, save for mentions of Buddhism’s growth in the country during Anawratha’s reign, but it did replicate the ethnic hierarchy in Myanmar. Bamar were often presented in textbooks as businesspeople engaged in commerce, while the other distinct minorities were folded into one, depicted loosely as farmers and peasants.12 Apart from tokenistic references to heroic figures from ethnic minorities who joined the battle for independence, thus assisting what was a Bamar-centric movement, the students said they learnt little about their compatriots, and virtually nothing of other religious communities. “We just thought they were insignificant, until we began to read the news”, one of the girls had said of the minority groups 250

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that formed 40 per cent of the country’s population, whose insignificance in the curriculum might well be read by students as a marker of their inferiority. The growth of the Sunday Schools seemed particularly concerning. The infusion of fear-laden propaganda into the minds of a youth already oriented towards an understanding of Buddhist Bamar superiority could provide a powerful foundation for the further spread of a xenophobic nationalism. The monks who preached division had a status that for many meant their words were taken as gospel. U Win Htein was proof of this, for even a senior politician in the country’s ruling party saw criticism of the clergy as a high-risk enterprise, fraught with both material and otherworldly concerns. Whatever message the monks delivered couldn’t be easily corrected, publicly at least, and this shield allowed hard-line elements within Ma Ba Tha to continue their campaign against the country’s Muslims.

Still missing from my broader understanding of the conflict was a sense of how monks, the supposed practitioners of non-violence, could rationalise such provocative rhetoric. U Wirathu had said when we met in 2013 that he would never encourage violence against Muslims; rather, that he used his sermons to “strengthen Buddhism”. But was there not a connection between his Othering of Muslims, one that would be doubly influential because it was undertaken by someone in a position of such reverence, and the mobs that over the years since Ma Thida Htwe’s rape and murder had attacked 251

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Muslim communities in the name of defending Buddhism against that Other? It was a question I put to U Parmoukkha. The monk had grown up in a village in central Myanmar “where only Buddhists live and where we didn’t know much about other religions”, and had become a prominent figure within Ma Ba Tha’s highest circle, the Central Committee. He appeared to have cultivated close connections to authorities, with images circulating online of him meeting with police over cases in which Muslims were accused of doing harm to Buddhists.13 He took to the podium at Ma Ba Tha rallies and spoke to crowds that gathered before him in their thousands. But he was often critical of Ma Ba Tha’s closeness to the USDP, and that seemed to provide a counterweight to characterisations of the movement as solely a vehicle for conservative political forces in the country to exercise their will among the populace. Like so many others, it had been the killing of the young seamstress in Rakhine State that had spurred a need for a closer inspection of Islamic teachings. “Only then”, he said, “did I start to learn the history of Islam and how the Buddhist nations had been converted to Islamic states.” I had gone to meet him one day in high summer at the Magwe Pariyatti Monastery on the northern fringes of Yangon, where he was abbot. It was a vast site, its buildings set back from a straight road lined with fences and gates that had doubled up as drying racks for dozens of saffron robes. U Parmoukkha had begun to read up on Islam after the chaos of June 2012, and from those books, he said, he had come to understand it as a religion of crusaders. 252

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Let’s take Indonesia as an example. Buddhism arrived in Indonesia in the second century, and from the seventh to the thirteenth century it was a glorious period for Buddhism in Asia. But after that, Islam arrived, and within a few hundred years Buddhism had fallen. The same is happening in Rakhine State, in Buthidaung.

I asked him what he made of the success of Christian missionaries in converting communities in the far north and east of the country two centuries ago. Why hadn’t this nationalist rage also fixed on that population? He had concerns about this too, he said, but Christians didn’t possess the capability for violence that Muslims had. He spoke of it as something innate – to be a Muslim was to be aggressive. “They don’t have the idea to dominate the whole world and to make it Christian, but Muslims have been trained since they are young in the mosque about these kinds of extreme ideas. Most of the Muslims are touched in this way.” From under his bench he pulled out a bundle of posters. On one was a photograph of a young Buddhist woman with bruises and dried blood on her face. U Parmoukkha knew the woman; she had been attacked by two Muslim men in the Botataung area of Yangon one evening not long before. She was too poor to attend court, and he had helped her file a case against the men. I asked why he was showing me the photo. “The woman has suffered violence. There’s no affiliation between the attacker and the attacked; the innocent woman has been attacked by a person she doesn’t know.” 253

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It had sounded like a random assault, but in that climate of heightened suspicion, nothing was random anymore. What actually happened, and how those involved were connected, wasn’t clear. And for me, it mattered little. How he interpreted it seemed more important, for it revealed the ways in which, in the swirl of anxieties provoked by Myanmar’s transition, new “truths” had come to displace facts, thereby creating a new mode of understanding events like these. U Parmoukkha leant forward, speaking slowly, each word clearly enunciated: “That is radicalism.” I paused. But what about cases when Buddhists attack other Buddhists on the street? In Buddhist teaching it is taught that you cannot harm other people. So the person who harms is not someone who follows Buddhist teaching. There cannot be radical Buddhists. I don’t know whether the people who say they are Buddhist and then attack only temporarily follow Buddhism, or whether they do not follow it at all.

He seemed to be suggesting there was an on–off switch available to Buddhists; that for the time taken to commit an act that violated the sanctity of their belief, they could step outside of their faith. It was in stark contrast to narratives of violence committed by Muslims, which were underpinned by a sense that theirs was an inborn evil, a constant – something core to their very being, and thus ineradicable. This partly explained why those pushing the idea of Muslims as a threat were unable to disaggregate individual acts from the group, because those acts were seen as being carried out in the service of the group. 254

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The killing of Ma Thida Htwe and the interpretations of it that were distributed en masse in its wake appeared bent on making this linkage explicit. Always when people unfamiliar with the conflict in Myanmar begin to learn of it, it is the notion of Buddhist-asperpetrator that confounds the most, for it goes against constructions of Buddhism as the ideal religion, doctrinally committed to peace. Just as Islam is so often associated with violence, Buddhism has been stereotyped as its polar opposite, and so we profess shock at the fiery language of the monks and the actions of their followers. That shock isn’t matched when we learn of similar acts being carried out by Muslims, and it spotlights a habit of which we are regularly guilty: that of essentialising the belief systems and cultures of faraway places, and bracketing people into static units of analysis to which we pin select attributes – good or bad. The way we better interpret and understand the exotic is to radically simplify it, but in the process all nuance and objectivity is lost. This has greatly muddled our understanding of the actions carried out by Buddhists – sometimes in the name of Buddhism, sometimes not – and we temper our surprise with a false rationale: that these people have broken with their teachings and chosen to now chart a different course. Yet Buddhist history carries the same tales of blood-soaked conquest as do all other religions, from the Zen masters of Japan to the Sangha in Myanmar today. In contemporary Sri Lanka, monks have also goaded attacks on Muslims in recent years using strikingly similar calls for protection of the faith. Like all other religions, when Buddhism deploys violence it 255

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does so with a powerful sense of righteousness, of a “just” battle being fought to ensure its longevity. But were the events of 2012 and after acts of “Buddhist violence”, or were they expressions of nationalism, of which Buddhism was one pillar? It was difficult to say, for in the minds of those trying to rationalise their support for attacks on Muslims, the nation had become so deeply entwined with the faith that one could not be distinguished from the other. Even so, I wanted to ask U Parmoukkha whether violence committed by a Buddhist could ever be justified, or indeed whether the actions of a Buddhist who contravened the Buddha’s message of peace and goodwill were not a greater threat to their religion than Islam. It was a question the abbot evidently felt uncomfortable answering. There was nothing in the scriptures that rationalised violence, he said. But after some hesitation, he began to speak: “When Buddhism is on the verge of extinction, violence could probably be used. If there is no Buddhism, there will be more violence, and the situation will be even worse.” Buddhism wasn’t yet on the verge of extinction in Myanmar, he said, but it was under threat, and he painted a doomsday scenario for what might follow its fall. “In Buddhism, all the robbery, all the killings are seen as bad deeds. So if there is no Buddhism, ideas might come about that these acts are not sinful. There would be no one to teach that they are bad.” If that were the case, and the values contained in the teachings were to perish, then those robberies and killings might appear acceptable, and society would spiral into a state of anarchy. Violence thus prevents further violence, he explained, and 256

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followers of an ideology can justify actions that deviate from, or go explicitly against, their teachings in order that those teachings are maintained. In Myanmar, the symbiosis between religious identity and national identity meant that a threat to one became a threat to the other, thereby greatly exaggerating the survival imperative and seemingly justifying more radical ways to defend it. It was the same reasoning that drove the bands of monks to attack British forces in the late nineteenth century. Theirs was a quest to reinstate Buddhism to its core place in Myanmar society, because doing so would restore the qualities of harmony that were central to it. That too seemed to be U Parmoukkha’s message. But like the mobs that in the years past had delivered violence in the name of protecting the master religion and ethnicity, these monks seemed to be pursuing the same project begun by the military decades before, one of national uniformity masquerading as unity. The risk that, under circumstances particular to such a fragile socio-political context as Myanmar, history might repeat itself, as it seemed to be doing now, had been prophesied long before by the same figure Ma Ba Tha had sought over and again to undermine. “Without a revolution of the spirit”, Aung San Suu Kyi had warned in 1990, “the forces which produced the iniquities of the old order would continue to be operative, posing a constant threat to the process of reform and regeneration.”14

Ma Ba Tha went from strength to strength as 2013 became 2014. But in Mandalay, in the middle of its second year of life, 257

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something began to change. The mobs that moved through the city on the evening of 31 June 2014, goaded on by the provocations of U Wirathu and others, garnered little support from locals, unlike in Meikhtila and elsewhere the year before. They went to the Moe Kaung Taik Monastery and gathered outside the gates, urging the monks to come out and join them. U Dama, the abbot, was inside the monastery that day. He told me the building of the sprawling complex was financed by a Muslim man, married to a Buddhist woman, who had moved to Mandalay from Ava soon after King Mindon established the seat of the royal throne there in the middle of the nineteenth century. There were Muslims in the king’s court and he gave land for mosques to be built on. Mandalay hadn’t seen this kind of violence before, and there was little kindling there to be lit; no backstories of communal hatreds that could be dredged up to mobilise locals. “They shouted that there were Muslims killing monks in the mosque and they called out for help”, U Dama said of the group that gathered. And he refused. A number of monks from the monastery had gone out earlier that day, after the violence had begun, and saw a group of people approaching both Buddhists and Muslims to warn that attacks were being plotted by the other side. The monks returned and told U Dama, so that by the time the men arrived outside the gate, his suspicion was already heightened. There were about twenty or thirty people and they were all drunk or on drugs. Only one person spoke – the rest were hanging their heads. They told me Muslims were 258

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killing Buddhist monks, and I said I don’t trust you because you are all drunk and you are not from this area.

The manufactured nature of the violence in Mandalay seemed too obvious for it to take hold en masse among residents there. Religious leaders from both sides called snap meetings to prevent its further spread, and U Wirathu, who had warned in the wake of the attacks that a jihad was underway, later acknowledged that he hadn’t verified the claims of rape of the young Buddhist woman that he echoed to tens of thousands of followers on Facebook. But in a sense the forces behind the violence did achieve a measure of success. In villages outside Mandalay, members of the two religious groups grew anxious of one another, and a distance opened up between them. Even though it was clear the trigger for the violence had been fabricated, the fears it awakened rippled out to communities living side by side on the edge of the city that hadn’t had direct exposure to it, injecting into them a distrust that hadn’t been so present before. Rumours began to spread, and that same old process was activated, whereby violence elsewhere forced individuals to retreat within their own group. There, they would find security amid uncertain times, but the effect once again was to turn religious differences into a divide. It was in these villages that, soon after the Mandalay violence of July 2014, interfaith activists like Myo began their attempts to mend the fissures that had opened, and they became small laboratories in which different methods of communal healing could be tested.

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APARTHEID STATE CAMPS, GHETTOS AND THE NEW ARCHITECTURE OF CONTROL

One effect of the violence of 2012 in Rakhine State was initially lost amid the tales of bloodletting and the growth of camps along the Sittwe coast. Further north in the state, Rohingya were banished from towns in which they once lived and worked. The market in Kyauktaw, seventy kilo­metres north of the state capital, had been a place where the two communities would come together each day, and the town’s hospital once treated patients of all creeds who would travel there from homes nearby or in the surrounding countryside. But the reconfiguration of the security landscape in the years after 2012 meant that was no longer allowed. Checkpoints along the roads leading into Kyauktaw became the final point of movement for Rohingya. Increasingly they were contained inside their villages. Any attempt to cross the invisible perimeter fence that now encircled them would, they came to discover, be considered a criminal offence. In one village two kilometres from Kyauktaw lived a man, Aarif, who ran a small shop selling basic goods.1 He was the father of three children – two girls and one boy, the latter born in 2011, a year before the first wave of violence. Back then, as the boy had begun to signal his desire to enter the world, Aarif called upon a village midwife to attend to his wife. With 26 3

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only rudimentary medical training, the midwife felt his wife’s womb and knew delivery was close. She was driven the ten minutes along the road connecting the village to Kyauktaw, and in the hospital there she gave birth. Several days later they returned to the village. Three years later, his wife became pregnant with their fourth child. That was 2014, long after the segregation of the two communities had dramatically transformed the environment around them. She had conceived in early 2014, and by January the following year was in her final month of pregnancy. But she began to feel that all was not right. There were pains she hadn’t known before, and once again Aarif called the midwife to their bedroom in the tiny wooden house in the village where his wife lay. The baby was alive in the womb, but the wrong way around. As the pains built the husband informed the village administrator, who called the health department in Kyauktaw. That was the morning of 5 January 2015. And so began the process, altogether new to Aarif, of getting his wife to hospital. The after-effects of the violence of 2012 were multiple. What the banishing of Rohingya from Kyauktaw and towns elsewhere in the state amounted to was the quiet purification of urban areas of Muslims. They were penned inside camps, villages and barricaded ghettos. No longer could Aarif’s neighbours go to the markets; instead they were forced to develop roundabout ways of trading. They went to individual Rakhine, who at a reduced price bought from them a basket of eggs or fish to be sold at normal prices in the market, making a tidy profit for Rakhine but causing a loss in already meagre revenue for Rohingya. 26 4

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But the impacts on access to healthcare were more devastating. When the health department received word that morning in early 2015 of the complication with Aarif’s wife, it organised for staff to go the village. They arrived in the evening, eight hours after the first call was made, and confirmed the midwife’s fears – the baby was the wrong way round, and an operation was needed. The medics left, saying help would come. Aarif and his wife waited through the night, and by early afternoon the next day an ambulance arrived, accompanied by a police escort. The couple climbed aboard and drove out of the village onto the main road. Several years earlier, on the eve of her son’s birth, she had taken a right-hand turn at this point, and in a matter of minutes had been at the hospital in Kyauktaw. This time, however, they turned left. There are multiple strands to the story that follows, each telling in their own way of the acute condition of the Rohingya after the first wave of violence. They drove for three hours, winding their way down to Sittwe, where the only adequately equipped hospital in the state still permitted to accept Rohingya was. By the time they arrived it was late in the afternoon, more than a day and a half since Aarif had made the call to the village administrator. He remembers walking hand in hand with his wife from the ambulance to the hospital entrance. She had been shaky but could still stand, and they were taken into a room on the ground floor. She was able to explain the problem to the doctor, and after having done so she lay down on a bed. The doctor checked her over. “We had arrived at the hospital at five o’clock in the afternoon”, Aarif recalled. The doctor asked why she hadn’t been 265

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brought in sooner, given that it was an emergency case. The young man, thirty-one at the time, explained the staggered process he had undergone to get his wife there: that he first needed permission for the two of them to travel; that he had waited a day and a half since first reporting the problem for an ambulance to arrive, and that instead of being able to take that right turn to the hospital in Kyauktaw, they had needed to drive another three hours in the opposite direction. But five minutes after arriving at the hospital, as Aarif sat in a chair in the doctor’s room with his wife lying next to him, the doctor told him to leave. He had inspected the womb and, standing back from the bed, told him it was too late for his wife. The baby would die and so would she. Police were waiting outside the room to take Aarif away. Two nurses came in and lifted his wife to her feet. Still conscious and alert and able to move, she was walked out of the room and up the stairs, guided by the nurses. The police ordered Aarif back out to the ambulance. He was driven the three hours back to his village. Whatever power differential already existed between doctor and patient was greatly amplified in that room by the particular hierarchy of status between the sick woman and the man tasked with remedying her. Aarif wasn’t able to challenge the doctor, or the police who walked him out of the hospital, because of a unique burden that Rohingya carry. Their statelessness gives them no recourse to legal action because they exist outside of the law, and all that it entitles. But that culture of forced submission bleeds into everyday interaction with figures of authority, whether legal or not, creating a culture that denies them any voice to challenge decisions that affect them. What 26 6

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became of his wife after she left the room Aarif never knew, save for the fact that she had died. That most final of decisions was made entirely arbitrarily – another snapshot of a much larger problem for Rohingya. The day after Aarif returned to his village he received word that his wife’s body had been taken to Bumay, one of only two surviving Rohingya neighbourhoods in Sittwe. There, close to her family, she would be buried. He asked police in his village to grant him permission to travel back down for the funeral. They refused, claiming they wouldn’t be able to provide security for him, and he was left alone inside his home with his three children. The hundred dollars he paid for him and his wife to board the ambulance – $60 for the vehicle, $25 for the police and their food, and $15 for the driver – had cleaned out the savings he had stored away for his baby. But the baby was no longer, and his wife now lay in the ground in a town he would not be able to visit.

When the physical segregation began after June 2012, severing interaction between the Buddhist and Muslim communities of Rakhine State, it opened a gaping psychological divide. Several months after visiting Ko Myat in his home in Par Da Lek village and hearing of his role in the attack on Nasi quarter in Sittwe, I had gone back to try to meet with the village administrator. Min Oo lived not far from Ko Myat, in a stilted wooden house he shared with his wife and son. Having walked again through the winding streets of that village of less than 3,000 people we eventually found his home. On the raised wooden porch we sat and drank tea, and began to talk. 267

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He was an affable person with a lively face, but it was he who Ko Myat had said encouraged people to board the buses that took them along the road into downtown Sittwe. Min Oo shook his head, denying the charge as it was put to him. But he knew that his neighbours had gone to Nasi. “I can’t count how many from this village went to Sittwe”, he said. “It wasn’t only this village but people from nearby villages that went by buses too. It was a scary time. The whole village was worried that Muslims would come here. If they come we will kill them or they will kill us.” There had been no hope for protection from the military, who were stationed in barracks barely a kilometre down the road. Min Oo had been the administrator for two years before the violence; until June 2012 the toughest problem he’d faced was the confiscation of villagers’ farmland, a hundred acres of it, by the military as it sought to expand the barracks outwards. The army freely abused its power, he said, but it was the Muslims he feared more. Close to an hour into our conversation his son arrived and joined us on the wooden deck. He was in his mid-twenties, and had inherited the wide eyes and face-splitting grin of his father. During the violence he had been at a monastery in Yangon. Like many young Buddhists in Myanmar, he had undergone a brief spell as a monk, and returned home to find a divided state. He no longer interacted with Muslims, and spared few praises for them. “I get a fever when I see them”, he said, and he couldn’t bear to be around them. But he once had a Rohingya friend, a boy who came to his village to buy rice and who would, on occasions, stay over. 26 8

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That relationship had been broken by the violence. The friend was in Thet Kae Pyin camp along with thousands of others, and he knew little else of his condition. I was friends with him for two years and when I think about him now I would not like to be friends. They are very stupid. Before the conflict he would come to stay here and all was okay. Now we have no relationship. Their religion is bad. Before 2012 I didn’t think that way. After 2012 I think they’re bad.

He knew his friend hadn’t been involved in attacks on Rakhine, but that mattered little. What became apparent as we spoke was that his perception of his friend had been entirely flipped by actions for which he bore no responsibility, except for his membership of that group. “His blood is different”, the young man had said. “I don’t think he is a bad person, but even though he’s not bad, his ethnicity is bad. The group is bad.” At one point Min Oo leaned in, suggesting that I head up to the Mayu River if I wanted my questions answered. That was the boundary that marked the beginning of northern Rakhine State, where Muslims outnumbered Buddhists, and whose attempted rescue had come in the form of the Na Ta La village project decades before. The son then ducked inside the house and came out with a book. It was called “Mayu River is Crying”, and he had bought it at a store in Mrauk U some time ago. It detailed the trajectory of the region in the decades after the Mujahid groups had run amok following World War Two, and listed the death of every Rakhine person at the hands of 269

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Rohingya since the 1960s. “The book is real”, the son had said. “The book is describing how Muslims come and destroy the whole village and burn it down.” I had no solid grounds to question it. The accounts of the violence that followed the war showed it to have been savage and extensive, and I had been guilty in the past of falling for the tendency to sympathise with the side that suffers most in a conflict, to a point at which the claims of brutality directed at it by the other side are viewed with scepticism. It was always the Rakhine who were depicted as the sole perpetrators, and the Rohingya as passive victims, but no conflict is that black and white, and victims too can be perpetrators. The book was a supposed corrective for that narrative, yet what in there was actually truth and what was fiction seemed secondary to another effect it had. Material like this provided a file of memories that percolated down through the generations and allowed the young man to make sense of the current situation. He had decided that his friend was now of “bad blood”. What hadn’t been an innate quality now was, and I wondered if that had been in part triggered by the stories told in the book and elsewhere that suddenly gave this supposed evil a history, and made the violence of 2012 look not like an aberration, but the continuation of a norm. Sitting on that porch listening to the two speak, it already felt that the potential for the two communities to ever be brought back together was diminishing. In place of the countervailing information that normally comes with interaction, the divide that followed 2012, working its way through the towns and villages of the state, allowed whatever fears had 270

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lurked beforehand to crystallise. That created a cycle, whereby physical segregation fuelled a process of mental segregation which, over time, lessened the potential for wounds to heal. “I’m afraid of going to the Muslim village”, the young man’s father, Min Oo, had said of the community of Rohingya six miles from Par Da Lek where mutual exchange was once a daily activity. “If I go they will kill me. I do not dare to go.”

After the violence first erupted in June 2012, President Thein Sein dispatched battalions of soldiers to areas where attacks had taken place. For all the criticism of a militarised state, they appeared to have been effective in deterring more violence in those particular spots, and numbers of Rohingya welcomed them, as did Rakhine. But they were not the only security force there. After 2012 Rakhine civilians too began to police the state. Along the stretch of road running south out of Mrauk U lies a string of Rohingya villages whose inhabitants rarely leave anymore. Forbidden to enter the town, they suffered a similar fate to Aarif and his neighbours close to Kyauktaw – a trip to Sittwe hospital entailed the same drawn-out processes and the same fees, and for many it was beyond the realm of possibility. But one evening in early 2015 a brawl broke out in one of the villages south of Mrauk U. A man was stabbed in the left shoulder, the blade sinking two inches into his flesh.2 His family arranged for a trishaw to take him to a small hospital in a town further to the south that Rohingya were still allowed to access. The doctors there were unable to treat the wound and, with the man bleeding heavily, police were called and they 271

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made the decision to take him in the trishaw to the hospital in Mrauk U. It was a rare call, one that appeared to reflect a degree of police attentiveness towards Rohingya that was otherwise absent from narratives of the violence. But as the vehicle neared the entrance to the town, a group of Rakhine armed with knives and sticks gathered in the road. There appeared to have been prior warning. They surrounded the vehicle, and the police ordered them to disperse. They refused, and so a call was made to the main police station in Mrauk U and the township chief and several other officers came down. They spoke with the group, but still they wouldn’t let the injured man through. The driver turned the trishaw around in the direction of the village and gunned the motor, but the group blocked their exit. It took an hour of police persuasion to allow them to leave, and the man eventually returned to his village, his wound untreated. Long after the stabbing, the pain was still there, and it grew more acute each time he went to work in the fields next to the village. He had been forced to cut the number of hours he farmed each day, from nine to two or three, and his income dwindled. When I’d heard before of instances in which police denied Rohingya access to towns on the grounds they might be attacked, I had been sceptical. It is easy to suspect a higher hand in everything that happens in Myanmar, so adept was the regime at manufacturing unrest that appeared, on the surface, to be random. I often found myself thinking that perhaps there was no threat at the other end, and the police who denied Rohingya freedom of movement were instead willing players in 272

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a grand design to limit their means of survival. Yet the Rakhine who blocked access to the hospital showed this wasn’t always the case. They too were participants, and although the state may not have coordinated its actions with Rakhine civilians, their agenda often appeared to be closely aligned. This illuminated the combined weight of power that, long before having been made so explicit by the cleansing of 2017, was pitched against the Rohingya. Rakhine policed the state in other ways too. The presence of international aid groups there had long been a point of contention. Rakhine believed that assistance was unfairly concentrated on Rohingya, despite the clear poverty from which Rakhine too suffered. These tensions built after 2012 as the presence of aid organisations became more visible in the camps and as global attention fixed largely on Rohingya victims of the violence. Rakhine had already felt there to be an imbalance in aid distribution before 2012, and as Rohingya in the camps were increasingly cut off from basic resources, more international assistance was channelled to them. Clinics were set up, only for camp residents. It was standard protocol in light of the restrictions that limited the ability of Rohingya to seek treatment at the hospital in Sittwe, but it meant a further escalation in tensions: the access, however limited it was, that Rohingya and other confined Muslims now had to internationally provided healthcare was not so readily available to Rakhine. Aid workers could arrange for an ambulance to collect the sick, but Rakhine were left to their own devices. Through eyes clouded by bitter resentment, it may have appeared that the lot of Rohingya had in some ways improved 273

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as a result of the violence, while Rakhine were left once again to battle for whatever scraps the state provided. In March 2014, a foreign staff member working for an international aid organisation based in Sittwe removed a Buddhist flag that had been placed near the gate outside her office. Within hours, mobs of Rakhine began attacking that office and several others in the town, and in the subsequent days they destroyed stores of food and medical aid and the cars and boats used to deliver them. They went from one location to another, appearing to know in advance the addresses of NGO offices. More than thirty properties were attacked, and suspicions mounted that it had been planned in advance. The names of Rakhine staff that worked with organisations assisting Rohingya were circulated around Sittwe and they were warned to cease their activities. Landlords that rented property to international organisations were instructed not to, and the organisations began to pull out. Staff were evacuated to Yangon, and for several months the infrastructure that supplied aid to Rohingya was reduced to its barest form. That allowed local civil society networks in Sittwe to exert influence over the allocation of aid, and when international organisations returned to the state they discovered a new landscape for the aid industry. Rents for properties had doubled, even tripled, as a result of the pressure put on landlords leasing buildings to organisations assisting Rohingya. And they had a new authority to answer to. The Emergency Coordination Committee (ECC) was run by U Than Tun, a prominent Rakhine elder who taught in a local school. It quickly became 274

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clear that any talk of the Muslim community in Rakhine State greatly animated him. You first know that these Muslims are illegal – at least 80 per cent of them are. They are not from our country. They come from Bangladesh. They say they are Rohingya but that’s never seen in history. They want citizenship and to become an ethnic group. They are liars. Their name was never seen and never heard.

The attacks of March 2014 “were a time bomb; they weren’t planned in advance”, he said. Rakhine had grown increasingly angry at the perceived imbalance in aid distribution and had reacted. Yet Rakhine staff working for international NGOs had been receiving threats since late 2013, long before the town exploded once again. Leaflets were circulated that detailed the bias of these aid organisations, and staff were visited by local Rakhine nationalists who warned them that they should stop cooperating with the international community. These NGOs weren’t here for good reasons, they were told. Many staff quit as a result. A version of the ECC had been recommended years before by international aid agencies working in Rakhine State who wanted greater local input, but they had imagined something quite different to what eventually transpired. Rather than a body comprising Rohingya, Rakhine and representatives of the international community, U Than Tun’s group was solely Rakhine. Other local networks became more vocal too, and began to marshal aid distribution in their own particular ways, by blocking deliveries to camps and, in some cases, 275

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blocking camp exits as ambulances tried to take Rohingya to hospital in Sittwe. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the distribution of aid became politicised. No longer was it needs-based, with assistance targeted at those who required it most, but instead was reconfigured so that the balance in provision didn’t reflect the imbalance in the vulnerability of the communities receiving it, but rather an artificial fifty-fifty split so as to appease Rakhine. I suggested to U Than Tun that, regardless of popular perceptions of Rohingya, their condition in the crowded camps where they lived in wooden shacks and tents, where one latrine was often shared among nearly forty people,3 and where inhabitants largely depended on outside assistance surely indicated that they required aid more than Rakhine. That was a fundamental principle of the international humanitarian system – that aid goes where it is most needed. “You are a Western journalist coming here and saying to me, ‘Humanitarian, humanitarian!’ But in any country, national security is more important than humanitarian aid”, he replied. The aid that was being given to Rohingya was a national security threat because, he said, it created a pull factor for “Bengalis” to enter Myanmar. They would be coaxed over the border by the prospect of better healthcare and everything else the aid industry here offered. International NGOs were also brainwashing Rohingya, he thought. “They are giving a political mindset to the Bengalis. ‘You are Rohingya, you are not Bengali. This land is not Rakhine land, this is your Rohingya land.’” 276

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And, of course, they weren’t citizens. He asked whether my country, the United Kingdom, allows illegal immigrants the same rights as full citizens. I replied that immigrants, whether illegal or not, were on the whole still able to access healthcare. They were denied a great number of rights, but their access to hospitals wasn’t roundly curtailed in the same way it had been for Rohingya since 2012. Locals in the villages around Kyauktaw had said that an impending birth was by and large the only reason police would allow passage to Sittwe hospital. Other illnesses would be treated locally, often by poorly trained medics with only rudimentary equipment. U Than Tun waved his hand. The healthcare situation “was not serious for the Bengalis”, he said. “Their healthcare had been upgraded; they have no worries.” There were yet more effects of the violence that only gradually came into view. Colonel Tha Kyaw’s list of directives had been targeted specifically at Rohingya, but the violence of 2012 functioned like a dragnet that swept up all Muslim communities in the state and lumped them together as one, so that Kaman too began to experience a particular type of treatment they hadn’t known before. The violence created its own set of informal regulations about who could go where and what entitlements went to whom, and it flattened distinctions between different Muslim groups so that Kaman, who were citizens of Myanmar and whom Rakhine knew to have had a centuries-long presence there, also joined the ranks of the unwanted.

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Along one road running north from Sittwe is a village called Thinganet that borders a large military barrack, an extension of the same one that had eaten into the land belonging to the farmers of Par Da Lek village further to the west. Thinganet is like many villages in this part of the country. The walls of houses are built from latticed wooden panels that somehow withstand the heavy monsoons each year, and people gather each morning soon after dawn at a small market along a narrow street, where fish, vegetables and meats are laid out in all their colourful glory on mats on the baked ground. It is a Kaman village, and farmers here used to take their goods to the markets in Sittwe to sell for a higher price than they could get at home. Ma Win had done that for thirty years, each day taking a bus or rickshaw from outside her village into town, and each afternoon returning with the day’s income to spread among her family. “All ethnic and religious groups mixed in the market, working together”, she said of the time before the 2012 violence. “Things were normal and we socialised. We were sister to sister; we shared snacks.” For the two weeks after Sittwe erupted the Muslim villagers of Thinganet had stopped venturing into town. Ma Win had been there on the first day of the violence and was warned by a group of armed Rakhine to leave immediately, and so knew the dangers of returning there. But without access to the market, her income dried up, and by late June 2012 she was penniless. She left her village at around six o’clock one morning three weeks after being ordered to leave by the armed men. Other villagers needed supplies too and she was given $60 and a list of goods to buy. 278

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I wasn’t earning any income and couldn’t provide for my children so I got some vegetables from my garden and went to Sittwe to sell it. The market was very busy at that time in the morning but I didn’t see any other Kaman or Rohingya. It was very early, and there were only Rakhine there.

She set up her stall, and after doing so the group of women whom she had traded alongside for the past three decades approached. As I was selling the vegetables they arrived and asked why I was here selling vegetables. They had come from inside the market, from the same spot we used to sell at. I said because I have difficulty earning any money. They were saying, “You are kalar, you are Kaman”, and grabbed me. Two women held my hands, and then three or four beat me with sticks. For one hour they beat me. I could not walk. I fell down and police arrived and took me to the station. They investigated for half an hour and then sent me back to the village. My eyes and my face and my back – I needed twenty days of medication.

There had been someone nearby who tried to stop it, she said. It was a lady Ma Win knew. But when she tried to intervene the women shouted: “Why do you intervene? We will also beat you. Are you Kaman or not?” Several years on from the attack, Ma Win still experienced pain in her shoulder and head. She was forced to work longer days now, from six in the morning until nine at night, 279

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picking vegetables and carrying them to markets in villages nearby. She made less than $2 a day, and her sons who worked in a brick factory supplemented the family income. She felt frightened and depressed. The memories of the attack still haunted her, and travel to Sittwe to see a doctor was impossible. Only one person from the village now went into town to buy goods, a girl in her early twenties who could pass herself off as Rakhine. This girl had a lighter complexion and wasn’t suspected of being a kalar, the slur thrown at Ma Win as she was being beaten that branded people of darker skin with the “outsider” tag. It was clear from this and other developments that the violence of 2012 hadn’t been strictly ethnic in nature – it was also both religious and racial, for a different appearance meant a different origin, and thus a different nature of being. As the violence went on, the target lacked the boundedness that these categories – religion, ethnicity, race – seemed to offer. Instead a broader Otherness developed that seemed to come about in opposition to an increasingly purified notion of Rakhine-ness, and it was against this that the Kaman were lumped in with the Rohingya. They too became confined to their villages, unable to enter the towns and earn a viable living. They may have been citizens, on an equal legal footing to Rakhine, but a new set of rules had come into being that stripped that status of much of its meaning. After the violence, the various smaller Buddhist ethnic groups of Rakhine State – the Dainget, the Mro, the Khami – formed associations among themselves that excluded the Kaman. It may have been defensive, given the risks of association with any pariah community, but the effect was to push 28 0

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Kaman further towards the edges. U Than Tun had said that Kaman were targeted because the Rakhine “don’t accept them as part of our nationality. We accept them as citizens but we don’t accept them as our ethnic group”. They knew they were citizens, but the laws that made them so had been written by the government, not the Rakhine. The son of the village administrator in Par Da Lek had also evinced a disdain for Kaman. “They are like a stick with each end pointed”, he said, using a metaphor to illustrate how Kaman would “make friends with both Muslims and Rakhine”, something that was evidently unsound. Yet what perhaps singled out the Rohingya over and above Kaman wasn’t the mere fact of their complete social isolation from society. It was that the gulf between them and the system of laws designed to protect members of a community was both codified and routinised. They had neither legal rights nor political rights, and this spoke to the particular quality that makes statelessness so cruel a punishment: the stateless exist only in their physical form; every other claim to living is denied. They had from time to time served as useful tools for the government, which in return for their support had courted Rohingya in the run-up to the 2010 elections. But after the violence, even that kind of exploitation for political gain ceased. As the 2015 elections approached, Rakhine, flanked by monks, marched in their thousands in Sittwe to demand the Rohingya not be allowed to vote. The government then confiscated the “white cards” that five years before had been their ticket into the voting booth, thereby leaving them with no political voice whatsoever. Perhaps the incumbent Union Solidarity and 281

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Development Party, aligned as it was with the military, knew that with the National League for Democracy running this time, as well as a number of smaller Muslim-dominated parties, votes would not go to them. The rights granted to Rohingya in 2010 had been only temporary rights, it became clear, to be traded for a vote and then discarded. When the 2015 elections came round, the Rohingya had no hope of securing a representative in parliament, or even of participating in that basic act of democracy, the casting of a ballot. They crowded the camps outside of Sittwe and the towns in the north of the state, but they were essentially invisible. It was into this divided land that enumerators had come in 2014 to carry out Myanmar’s first census in more than three decades. It was supported by the UN, and the teams that fanned out across Myanmar to collect data on the country’s population were to include religion and ethnicity among the list of questions asked. It had seemed dangerous from the very start, for those two identifiers were already sources of great tension, and contestations over belonging – something the census was designed to establish officially – had played out so violently only two years before. But there were other concerns. Included on the enumeration list was a box labelled “Other”. The government had assured the UN that Rohingya would be free to write their identity as they chose. But Ma Ba Tha campaigned vigorously to have this overturned, as did Rakhine political parties. And at the final hour the government reneged. Any attempt to register as Rohingya would be refused, it said, as it would for other groups that lived in Myanmar but were excluded from the list of 282

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national races: Indians, Chinese, Gurkha and others. It would need to be “Bengali” or otherwise nothing. Enumerators went from house to house in towns and villages across Rakhine State in March 2014. Upon arriving and being told the inhabitants were Rohingya, they turned around and walked away. The debacle only served to fuel the mass resistance towards any acceptance of the Rohingya, thereby pushing them even further away and reaffirming their statelessness.

Over the mountains in central Myanmar, the violence too had long-term effects on the makeup of communities. When displaced Muslims returned to the razed neighbourhood of Mingalar Zayone in Meikhtila, where the madrasa had been destroyed and the pile of bodies set aflame, they discovered that they were forbidden from rebuilding their homes on the land they once inhabited. Nearly three years on from the violence, when I visited Meikhtila for the second time, a camp holding just over a hundred Muslims, mostly residents of Mingalar Zayone, remained next to a football stadium on the edge of town. Inhabitants there had been told by government officials that they would be rehoused by the end of 2014, but this hadn’t materialised. Several months after I met with the camp inhabitants in late 2015, a number tried again to return to their neighbourhoods, but Ma Ba Tha supporters petitioned local authorities to block them. Authorities told the displaced Muslims that they would not be able to guarantee their security should they try to set up home there once again, and so they returned to their shacks on the edge of town. 283

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During my second visit to Meikhtila I decided to go back to Mingalar Zayone, having known it before only as a mass of rubble and charred household possessions. My translator and I parked our bike at the edge of the quarter early one afternoon in November 2015 and walked in. The debris that once covered the area had been cleared away, but the skeletal walls of several houses were still standing. We approached one man, a Buddhist, outside his home and asked what relations had been like between the inhabitants of the quarter before the violence. “We were like brothers and sisters”, he said. “Like a family. There was no conflict.” He pointed to nearby patches of land marked by faint rectangular outlines where Muslim houses had once stood. One of them belonged to a man, his neighbour, who had been killed. Another was the home of a thirteen-year-old boy, also a victim of the mobs. We continued to move around the quarter. I snapped some photographs, and we climbed up the bank at the western edge to the point on the road where crowds had gathered two and a half years before to direct the killers below them. After several minutes we dropped back down and headed back across the quarter in the direction of our bike. A man quickly rode up behind us and muttered something to my translator, and stuffed a note in her hand. She grew agitated, and told me that we needed to leave quickly. We made for the bike, and she hurriedly relayed how the man had warned her we were being followed. He said he was a Muslim community leader, and had given her his phone number. We climbed on the bike and rode off back into town, but as we circled the same roundabout in the centre where Sandar had 28 4

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seen the body set aflame years before, I noticed another man in a white polo shirt riding parallel to us, casting looks in our direction. He soon disappeared into the traffic. We eventually found a teashop and ordered some food. Several minutes later the man entered and sat down at a nearby table. The food arrived, and as we ate he began to take photos of us on his phone. I assumed he was from the Special Branch wing of police intelligence, which often tracks the movements of journalists. We finished up, paid and rode off again, agreeing that it would be unwise to continue working that day. I had scheduled a follow-up interview with a man I’d met the previous day whose adopted son was killed in the madrasa massacre, but the risk that we might lead our pursuer to him seemed too great. So we rode out of town to a temple complex where we parked up and considered what to do next. It was mid-afternoon and the temple was empty. We walked to a pagoda inside the complex, and at the base of it sat down on some steps, shaded from the sun by a canopy overhead. Several minutes passed. Then, to our right, around the corner of the pagoda, the man appeared. He was smiling, and motioned to the step next to where the translator sat. I gestured for him to sit down. He was soft-spoken, polite and asked my translator to explain who I was. We knew him to be police, but still asked the same question back. He was indeed Special Branch, and had seen us in Mingalar Zayone. He took down our passport and ID card details as we spoke – a common procedure for foreign journalists in Myanmar – and enquired as to why we had visited the quarter. The 2015 elections were only a week away, I said, and we had been speaking to locals about their hopes for the vote and what might come 285

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after. He seemed amiable, and I asked why he had felt the need to follow us. Because the destroyed neighbourhood in which we were spotted was a sensitive site, he said, and what had taken place there remained a delicate issue. Police didn’t want journalists poking around. Evidently there was an effort to block new information from getting out there. I never did manage to meet again with the father of the slain child. The boy had been fifteen at the time. He was among those led out of the school by the police on the morning of 21 March 2013, but was picked off before he reached safety. His adopted father thought police had intended to protect the students, but had been unable to contain the mobs that grew with each passing minute. The son, who had moved to Meikhtila in 2005 after the death of his biological father, was left behind in the grass as the police line moved on and out of the quarter. A number of students who survived the madrasa attack had since moved to Thailand, while inhabitants of houses in Thiri Mingalar quarter that were destroyed were relocated to Kyaukse, ninety kilometres to the north. The knock-on effects of the violence in central Myanmar were less overt than the system of apartheid that had been implemented across Rakhine State. But it remained an acutely sensitive matter, not only for locals, but evidently too for the police, who had attracted so much suspicion for their puzzling actions during the butchery of March 2013. Even long after the town had returned to a semblance of normality, save for the still-displaced Muslims, there seemed to be an effort to control the collective memory of those events. 28 6

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The violence of 2013 in central Myanmar had given rise to groups like 969 and Ma Ba Tha that were able to influence the national conversation about Muslims and to apply pressure at the political level, but there were subtler day-to-day impacts too. The young student I’d met in Yangon who had lamented how she was required to attend Buddhist ceremonies at school despite being Muslim said that the violence had left her feeling more exposed. She had been one of the only Muslims in her school, and it began to affect her relations with classmates; not explicitly, but in understated ways. “A friend came up to me after the Meikhtila violence and said ‘You’re Muslim right? You heard about what happened?’” She knew the friend meant no ill-will, but she began to feel as if she stood out in a way she hadn’t before.

Rohingya would often describe their lives after 2012 as if they were living out their days in a prison, every movement monitored, every act scrutinised for its legality. Not only were vital services restricted, but the people who delivered them – who would go from village to village giving treatment to those denied entry to a hospital – came to be criminalised. Chut Pyin, from where Ahmed Hussein and hundreds of others would flee in August 2017 upon the early afternoon arrival of soldiers, typified how villages that hadn’t seen any of the violence of 2012 came, in time, to feel its wider effects only too acutely. The village medic there, Roshan Ali, told me that before the divide opened in 2012, Rakhine from the north-eastern 287

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quarter of the village had regularly visited him at his home for treatment. Yet by 2015, he was being closely watched by the police and soldiers based there, and one day he was arrested and taken to a military base in nearby Zay Di Pyin. They questioned him about his treating of Rohingya, and warned that until they accepted the National Verification Card it should cease. They threatened to go to his home and search for any medicine or equipment. With his legs placed in a wooden clamp and soldiers raining down blows on his body, he was forced to pay a $400 fine and sign a declaration stating that he would stop giving treatment. Upon returning to the village, he began to work undercover. Three times a month he would travel to a small town several kilometres north of Chut Pyin, walking through the forests to avoid detection, and return with medicine. If he needed to go to another home in Chut Pyin, or even to another village, he would divide his medicine and equipment among several people and ask them to take it there separately. On the occasions when Rohingya would visit his house, he kept someone on watch outside. It felt as if the most routine acts had become illegal; that even keeping Rohingya alive was now considered criminal behaviour.

At his house in Thet Kae Pyin camp on the Rakhine State coast, Mohammed Ismail, the young teacher who had escaped Nasi quarter in Sittwe as mobs descended in June 2012, spoke of those left behind. While the majority of his neighbours had fled to the camps, a few moved into the homes of relatives in 28 8

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Aung Mingalar quarter, further towards the centre of town. But the tight restrictions on their ability to leave the quarter gave rise to a malaise that hung heavy over the neighbourhood, and could be felt by all who visited – a greyness in the eyes of those looking out from their doorways, and a depression that tugged at the body. “People who live in Aung Mingalar, their minds are not normal”, Mohammed Ismail had said. “They worry about more violence.” The official combined death toll from both waves of attacks in 2012 didn’t break 300. Such figures from the Myanmar government had always been grounds for scepticism, eager as it is to fudge any statistics from episodes of unrest lest it reflect poorly on its ability to wield authority. But either way, in the grand scheme of group violence, and especially against what would come five years later, it seemed small. Hundreds, possibly thousands, died at sea as they crammed onto wooden boats docked in the shallow waters off the Sittwe coastline and sailed to Thailand, Malaysia and beyond, drowning under the weight of numbers. But the figures of the dead failed to illuminate the true cost of the events of 2012. The barricades set up around Aung Mingalar became psychological barriers too, as did the checkpoints that came to demarcate the zones of movement for Rohingya across the state. What lay beyond them, in land they could no longer access, became the stuff of nightmarish rumour. When Aarif returned to his village near Kyauktaw from the hospital in Sittwe, he would have told of how his wife had been taken from him by the people charged with saving her. What exactly occurred in the hospital wasn’t clear, 289

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yet stories like that became “proof” that doctors were killing Rohingya, and therefore that a trip to hospital would put the final seal on one’s fate. This fear of what went on inside Sittwe hospital was echoed time and again, and meant that Rohingya increasingly began to refuse treatment for life-threatening illnesses. The health crises that came about as a direct result of the restrictions on access to healthcare were predictable, but I hadn’t foreseen the extent to which the system of segregation that was implemented after 2012 would work its way so deeply into the mental state of Rohingya there. In a hut in a village not far from Aarif’s lay Khine Begum.4 She was in her mid-forties, and had developed a lump on her stomach that the village medic had said was cancerous. It sat just below her belly button, around the size of the palm of a hand and protruded a centimetre out. The medic had little training though, and there wasn’t any way to substantiate the diagnosis. Being Rohingya, she was barred from travelling to Kyauktaw hospital for a scan, and visiting medics couldn’t transport equipment in. Had she requested travel to Sittwe hospital? “I’m afraid of going to Sittwe”, she told me. “If somebody goes they die in Sittwe hospital, and the bodies are never returned to the village.” This came to be a common refrain among Rohingya after the segregation measures were implemented. Khine Begum knew four people that she said had died inside the hospital. One of them was my friend and I spoke with her before she went. She couldn’t give birth in the village so she went to hospital – this was a year and a half 290

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ago. The four people who died, I think the doctor poisoned them.

These stories had a snowball effect. Compounding the fact that a visit to hospital might now take up to two days, people also feared the hospital so much that they avoided visiting until the last minute, when the illness had advanced to the point at which death was likely. Each time that a Rohingya entered and didn’t leave alive, it fed the rumours of doctors killing Muslim patients, thereby deterring more from going until it was too late, and the cycle would turn another revolution – more talk in the camps and villages of suspicious deaths, more reason to avoid seeking treatment. The bodies that left the hospital would not be counted in the tally of deaths caused by that first wave of violence, but they were most certainly victims of it. The changes that followed 2012 led to violence of a kind different to the butchery, but no less devastating. Access to the most basic of rights was determined solely on the basis of identity. These limitations had been in effect before 2012, but to a lesser degree, and were largely restricted to the far north. Afterwards, however, they became principal elements in a system of segregation that was active across the state, and which included Kaman too. This was violence, but not the kind that made headlines. It was structural; less spectacular, and harder to detect, but nonetheless equally catastrophic. Muslims wouldn’t die on the streets, bludgeoned by machete. They would die in their homes or in their huts in the camps, slowly and quietly. The government could hide behind the excuse that the restrictions were 29 1

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needed to protect them from attack by Rakhine, and there was some truth to this. But the system of measures it enforced – of allowing only one adequately equipped hospital to take a population of more than a million, of forcing Rohingya to pay fees they could not afford, of determining wholly arbitrarily whose condition did and did not warrant treatment; of endless delays and countless refusals – played a vital role in weakening Rohingya bit by bit and marking them out as unworthy of even the bare life they had previously led. The tightening of restrictions and the spread of checkpoints and no-go areas for Muslims amplified a process of dehumanisation that had been engineered over decades by the state, and which made more foot soldiers of Rakhine. To see Muslims being vetted at checkpoints on a daily basis and to know they were being confined to camps and villages for security reasons further animated the idea of them as a threatening presence. It wasn’t just that Rohingya had also attacked Rakhine in 2012; it was that everything that came before and after served as supposed proof of their inborn malevolence, and therefore the need to contain them en masse. In response, Rakhine took it upon themselves to police their own state, therefore acting as functionaries of the government and military, and allowing them to step back and deflect much of the blame. From my conversations with Rakhine, it seemed that the psychological effects that the segregation had on a population already primed to see Muslims as a threat were profound. Friends quickly became enemies because the actions of a few were portrayed as indicative of the intentions of many, and so 292

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the measures needed to address them were rolled out to all. As the communities grew further apart, there was nothing to correct these thought patterns, and they had a circular effect: the security measures could be read as evidence that Muslims had been allowed to roam free for too long; that they were always threatening, and that action was finally being taken to remedy that threat. This extended the narrative of the violent Muslim back to before the violence took place, and further justified the support Rakhine gave for the increasingly severe controls placed on the group. The son of the Par Da Lek village administrator had come to see “bad blood” in his Rohingya friend. He may not have been violent, but his group, his bloodline, was. The friend was susceptible, and therefore required confinement to a camp, as did all Rohingya.

Long after the violence of 2012 there still emerged stories from time to time of Rakhine amassing near Rohingya communities, or mysterious disappearances of Rohingya from camps. But for several years afterwards there were no repeats of the massacres, and the western coastal region of Myanmar seemed, in the eyes of the government, to have returned to normal. Yet it was in that perverse state of normalcy that a new beast was born. As the apartheid-like conditions in Rakhine State grew more acute, and the government in the centre became increasingly unresponsive, if not altogether indifferent, to the steady weakening of the Rohingya, the fear of a militant movement emerging from within the community grew. There was of course much the Arakan Rohingya 293

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Salvation Army could draw on to explain the need for armed mobilisation: no open channels to power for Rohingya, no voice with which to protest their increasingly grave condition; a political transition that seemed, as time went on, only to quicken their passage towards a terrible fate. The ARSA leadership after 2013, when the first moves towards mobilisation began to occur, had, in short, all the resources needed to rally aggrieved Rohingya handed to them by the same authority that so feared an empowered Rohingya. The conditions to which the violence of 2012 had given birth – the camps and the ghettos; the intricate architecture of control that denied healthcare to the dying – were perhaps more potent signifiers of the victimisation of Rohingya than even the most gruesome bouts of bloodletting in 2012 and after. In some ways, too, they were more distressing and more embittering to hear. When the hand of higher powers in episodes of outwardly communal violence is hidden by the hordes of people on the ground that deliver it, one can explain it away as the work of a collective of extremist individuals. The patterns the violence forms a part of aren’t so clear, and the measure of hostility faced by the victims doesn’t get a true reading. It might be recurrent, but it seems isolated from broader structures of power, and the animosity that feeds it appears localised. But as the extent of the reorganisation of the landscape in Rakhine State became clearer, that illusion was broken. The mobs that wrecked the aid infrastructure in Sittwe in March 2014 provided a more visible manifestation of processes that were quietly underway all across the state, whereby access to life-saving treatment was being controlled and greatly limited 294

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on the basis of identity, whether it be ethnicity or religion. It amounts to a system of racialised healthcare, purposeful and carefully designed, in its most extreme form. And because it is a system with an enforced command structure – from the village administrator required to telephone health officials who then bring in police to determine the fate of the individual – the hand of the state is plain to see. It, and not Rakhine civilians, decides how healthcare is distributed among the population. This system, and the methods of control that are integral to it, appeared calculated to ensure that the existence of the Rohingya community there would be made as fragile as possible. It seemed like the cruellest punishment, to delay or deny treatment for someone not because as an individual they have done wrong, but because they belong to a group considered collectively wrong. This was perhaps why those accounts were so affecting – through that lens, the young too are as guilty as the old, and the government, the supposed guardian of a populace, shared that view as much as the extremists on the ground that helped to enforce it. The stories from the Rohingya villages around Kyauktaw, Mrauk U and elsewhere had not been as sensational as those told from the sites of the massacres that came before and afterwards, and they didn’t make headlines. Rather, they were the silent continuation of a campaign of violence that began long before 2012, out of the public eye, and endured year by year thereafter, steadily diminishing the lives of Rohingya and laying a foundation for all that would follow. 295

11

U MAUNG SOE AN OUTCAST IN DISGUISE

The language that forewarns of genocide speaks of irresolvable differences between communities of people. Common threads are cut and individuals cease to exist; it is now “they” that need to be dealt with. As the apparatus of control hardened in Rakhine State in the years after 2012 and the public discourse around the Rohingya coarsened further, that language became more explicit. Rohingya bred “like African carp”, U Wirathu had said, and a million or so individuals were compressed into a single metastasising cell that threatened all who shared the mountains and coastal plains of western Myanmar. If it holds that at the heart of the darkness that descended on Myanmar after the transition began lies a belief that within those differences exists a threat so profound that it warrants the eradication of a group, then what of the instances when that belief shows itself to be false? What if even individuals from the most detested group can, with a bit of work, not only be accepted as members of the national community, but rise to a position of authority within its most prestigious institution? For all the blood spilled in the contestations over identity in Myanmar, there had been one story I heard that seemed to illustrate an element of the absurd in the way the regime determined who did and did not belong. U Maung Soe may have 299

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just been one person, and his life one especially peculiar step after another, but the path he took seemed as reflective of the mysterious and irrational ways in which power functions in Myanmar as any I’d come across. I first met the fifty-year-old in downtown Yangon. A friend had told me of a Rohingya man who had once served in the army. It was a rarity to find someone from such a derided group brought into that institution, and I was intrigued as to how he managed it, and why. It seemed odd that the army, whose principal task since independence had been the ethnic and religious homogenisation of Myanmar, would allow a Rohingya to join its ranks; even odder that he wanted a part in that project in the first place. U Maung Soe had been born in Buthidaung in 1966, and before his first birthday moved to Yangon with his mother and father. Both sides of the family could trace a lineage in northern Rakhine State back several generations. U Maung Soe’s great grandparents had been born there, and worked as farmers. His mother’s family hailed from the countryside to the north of Buthidaung, and his father’s from the south. He had always known both sides of the family to be Rohingya, but either way, it hadn’t been until the middle of the 1980s that the regime had required ethnicity to be recorded on ID cards. To officials, they were known only by their place of birth: “BTH”, or Buthidaung. Born four years after General Ne Win took power, U Maung Soe was, for much of his early life, unburdened by his ethnicity. But when he turned twelve and was required to obtain his first ID card, the problems began. That was 1978, the year 300

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Rohingya were forced to carry Foreign Registration Cards, and when more than 200,000 were were driven into Bangladesh after heavy-handed verification checks by the military turned into the first pogrom against Rohingya. But rather than maintain his Rohingya identity and risk being swept up in the pogrom of that year, he and his parents fudged their ethnicity. He “became” a Rakhine Muslim, a recognised category at the time, in the same way Hla Hla had transitioned from a Mon to a Bamar when she moved to Yangon, by convincing immigration officials otherwise. In doing so he secured citizenship, while his fellow ethnics came to know the particular pains of statelessness. It was a simple calculation for U Maung Soe and his family: to remain a Rohingya in the eyes of officials was to lose all the rights enjoyed by those groups that, in their various degrees of belonging, were accepted as part of the nation. By his early twenties, U Maung Soe had passed through university in Yangon and joined Ne Win’s Burma Socialist Programme Party, where he worked as an office clerk in the northern suburbs. Myanmar was a one-party state at the time, and his decision to join came down to a simple matter of knowing that a secure career path lay with the government. The pragmatic streak shown by his parents in their decision to switch ethnicities seemed to have passed down to their son, who understood that his immediate chances in life would be bettered if he worked in the offices of the government. He wasn’t there for long, however: the uprising of 1988 toppled Ne Win and his party, and U Maung Soe became jobless. Several months later, aged twenty-two, he found himself running errands for the National Unity Party, the civilian face 301

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of the military leadership that took Ne Win’s place. And then, in February 1989, he decided to join the army. “I didn’t think the military was positive”, he said. “I just wanted to learn the arts. There should be someone who knows military skills among my people. That was my father’s ambition. He said that joining the military is a good thing to do.” In his day, U Maung Soe’s father had fought alongside other Rohingya in the army. At that time, in the decade after independence, the institution hadn’t discriminated so heavily on the basis of religion and ethnicity. Only later were the ranks purified. “He joined the military to protect the land of his ethnic people and earn the pride for his people, just as there were Rohingya people who served the government as teachers, doctors, government servants and police with that same spirit”, U Maung Soe said. But much had changed in the four decades between his father signing up and U Maung Soe following suit. He may have undergone one identity shift to spare him the fate of other Rohingya, but Muslims were still barred from joining the military. He went to the draft office in Yangon in early 1989 where his friend, a Buddhist, was staff. The friend agreed to write on the draft form that U Maung Soe was Rakhine Buddhist, initiating a second transformation of identity – on paper at least. That kind of deceit between official and civilian was by no means unheard of in Myanmar. Nepotism, corruption and their many varied forms were par for the course, and shortly before turning twenty-three, U Maung Soe enrolled and was sent to Kayin State. By the time immigration officials came to his barracks in 1990, after a new round of National 302

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Registration Cards had been ordered, he was able to provide “proof”, in the shape of his army form, that he was now a Buddhist. The ID card handed to him soon after brought this new reality into being. Once in the military, troops aren’t given the luxury of choice – they go where they are told. U Maung Soe spent two years in Kayin State, fighting soldiers from the Karen National Liberation Army, before being sent back across the country to Kyauktaw in Rakhine State, close to his birthplace and the town that, after 2012, Rohingya would be altogether barred from entering. Soon after arriving there, his battalion was tasked with assisting the newly formed Na Sa Ka, the security unit composed of army, police and immigration officials that was formed to man the Bangladeshi border and to implement control measures on Rohingya. That unit came to be widely feared among the community for the abuse they freely inflicted on them, and at this point in his recollection of events, U Maung Soe became sparing with the detail. He was a Rohingya, aiding a security force preoccupied chiefly with suppressing the Rohingya. Na Sa Ka had helped to orchestrate the second pogrom against Rohingya that, by March 1992, had sent some 250,000 people fleeing into Bangladesh. U Maung Soe said that he largely remained stationed in the barracks in Kyauktaw, but would sometimes provide additional security for Na Sa Ka. His unit entered Rohingya-inhabited areas prior to the arrival of immigration officials, who conducted regular checks on Rohingya, and locked down the area entirely, preventing any movement. On one occasion in 1992, a group of nine young Rohingya had managed to leave their homes in Buthidaung, 303

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without permission and undetected by authorities, with the intention of reaching Yangon. They passed through Kyauktaw and made it as far as Mrauk U, where they were caught. Over the radio, U Maung Soe could hear the commander in Mrauk U ordering his soldiers to dig graves for the nine men and beat them to death. “The Western Command division commander ordered to kill them all. We could hear it from the communication device we had.” I asked him what guilt he felt about incidents like these, but he would never be drawn. “I did feel sad. More than sad – tragic.” But that was all. The thought of quitting the army hadn’t crossed his mind, he said. He wanted to learn all the skills the army might equip him with. He felt a sense of solidarity with the Rohingya, but at the same time, he was happy that he had been deployed to Rakhine State. He was close to home there, and from time to time he would go to see his father in Buthidaung. He knew the abuse that soldiers were inflicting on Rohingya, something he said he never took part in, but he would give medicine and other goods to Rohingya families and that would alleviate some of the bad feeling he had. Over the years, U Maung Soe – a Buddhist, in the eyes of his colleagues in the army – rose up the ranks. By the time he left the military in 2006, he was a captain. He was proud of his ascent, and handed me the military ID card he still carried. The photo showed him smiling, dressed in uniform, his epaulettes studded with three stars. But after leaving the army, his life took an even more unlikely turn. “It was just my fate,” he said. “When I turned forty, I was transferred.” 304

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It was common practice to reassign officers in the army to ministries, for the line between military and political life in Myanmar had long ago dissolved. Having retired from active duty in 2006, he was sent to the Ministry of Religious Affairs. At the time, the ministry was divided into two main departments. The Department for Religious Affairs ostensibly handled the affairs of the four major faith groups in Myanmar, but in reality served as an administration department for Buddhism, printing texts, holding exams for monks and administering schools and monasteries. The latter was more focused. Named the Department for the Promotion and Propagation of Sa¯sana, its principal function was to vigorously promote Buddhism, particularly in the mountainous border regions where Christianity was strong. It was to this department that U Maung Soe was assigned, and in 2006 he took up residence in an office in Kengtung, in the hills of southern Shan State where Baptist missionaries more than a century before had made converts of the Lahu, the Akha and other communities. The Department dispatched monks, the counter-missionaries of the regime, to their villages and it endowed Buddhist monastery schools in the hills with texts translated from Pali, the language used in many of the earliest Buddhist texts. U Maung Soe greeted these travelling holy men and set them up in newly built monasteries in the villages around Kengtung. But he soon came to learn of another function of the Department. In those tiny villages it held mass conversion ceremonies for Christians and animists. They would line up in fields in front of stages made of bamboo. To the monks that sat 305

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above them they pledged their commitment to Buddhism and in return received a National Registration Card. It was in spectacles like this that U Maung Soe, who still considered himself a Rohingya and a devout Muslim, would play an organising role. “In the conversion ceremonies, I had to perform as a ceremony master”, he told me. “The people who converted received bags of rice, salt and cooking oil, and the last thing they received was the NRC, which had ‘Buddhist’ written on it.” In the lead-up to the ceremonies, the monks sent by the Department to the villages would hold sermons on Buddhism and, along with the township authorities and religious affairs officers like U Maung Soe, explain to the villagers what rewards would be given for conversion. “They could persuade the poor who had no food to eat and the people who had no NRC to convert.” But there was a more mundane element to it all. The monks would read from the scriptures and then detail the incentives for conversion. Having garnered interest from the Christian communities, the township authorities then organised the conversion ceremonies. Presiding over these was the township governor, but as far as U Maung Soe understood it, the main incentive for authorities was the prospect of gaining credit from the regime. If the governor could report to Senior General Than Shwe how many people he converted to Buddhism, he received praise, and maybe even a promotion – he wanted acknowledgement for how much work he did. U Maung Soe understood the irony of it all. There he was, someone who had undergone a similar process of transformation in order that he could serve as an equal in society, standing 306

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at the side of a stage overseeing the coercion of thousands of others to do the same. The conversions were not ordered at gunpoint, but in the sense that options for the religious pariah would be severely limited unless they submitted, they were not voluntary. Without showing fealty to Buddhism, these people would not receive their National Registration Card, and would forever be branded by the regime as outsiders. “When I saw these events, it made me unhappy”, U Maung Soe said. “A person should be able to live freely. A citizen should be able to live freely due to his citizenship. A citizen should have freedom of religion as well.” The Lahu and the Akha weren’t in quite the same league of disenfranchisement as the Rohingya. Like many of the smaller minorities, they were recognised among the national races. Yet, U Maung Soe explained, many were uneducated as to their legal rights to a National Registration Card. Their community leaders often didn’t understand the processes involved, nor that they actually qualified for one, and so could be readily exploited by officials seeking prestige. U Maung Soe saw it as a mutually beneficial arrangement: they would gain legal status, and in return the regime would get a new tribe of loyal Buddhist followers. Like all the accounts of people in Myanmar who swapped their ethnic or religious identity, there was a strong element of the superficial to it all. For these villagers, it seemed to be a pure formality. They would often attend the monastery for a month or two, U Maung Soe said, before their commitment seemed to peter out. The monks would move on to other villages, and township authorities didn’t have the 307

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resources, or perhaps even the will, to check the attendance of the converts at monasteries. It seemed instead to be largely a matter of numbers – a way for local officials to convince higher powers that their project to create a uniform state was bearing fruit via the exhaustive efforts of their men on the ground. The transaction being offered – a National Registration Card for non-Buddhists in return for joining the fold – was blackmail, but in a sense the villagers knew how to play the game. They would gather in front of the stage and pledge their newfound fidelity to Buddhism, and be handed that most precious of cards, an emblem of belonging. Those cards kept their value, even when their holders quietly returned to their Christian practice. It illuminated just how farcical nation building in Myanmar could be when that primary goal of developing a cohesive and permanent political unit required the use of communities whose devotion to that project had been no more than a temporary show of submission. There was an irony too to the whole charade: the costs of being on the wrong side of the ethnic and religious divide in Myanmar have, for thousands upon thousands, been deadly, but if the villagers, and indeed U Maung Soe himself, could, under the watch of the regime, become members of the nation by adopting a new label without then being it and living it, then perhaps it showed that the regime saw little substance to those labels. They were just quotas to be filled to strengthen the illusion of Myanmar moving in the direction of a unified, harmonious state under the military. That would bring into sharper focus the minority of those who refused to join, for it 308

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was they who, even well into the transition, justified the relevance of a still-powerful military. After a year in Kengtung, U Maung Soe was transferred again, to Naypyidaw. There, he served as an assistant to the Deputy Religious Affairs Minister, Thura Aung Ko, who later headed the ministry under the National League for Democracy government. Shortly afterwards he became an administrator at the State Pariyatti Sa¯sana University in Yangon, helping to organise the trips made by monks out to the border regions to set up monasteries among Christians and begin the process of conversion. And by 2013 he was out of the Ministry of Religious Affairs for good. He took an altogether different path, setting up a construction firm, and it was in the company’s head office in downtown Yangon that I had listened to his story.

Amid the deadly identity politics of the past half-century in Myanmar, U Maung Soe’s passage into the military surely made him an outlier, and a peculiar one at that. It seemed strange that someone from an ethnicity that well understood the wrath of that institution had wanted to join its ranks. It was clear he had inherited from his father a keen interest in the art of warfare, and had spent a large chunk of his early childhood in military barracks surrounded by people of all religions, and then in neighbourhoods in Yangon where different communities mixed. He knew the texts of Buddhism and its history well, and this provided a useful platform when it came to convincing colleagues that he was Buddhist. But either way it appeared 309

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they hadn’t probed too deeply. Only Buddhists could join the military, and they just assumed he was one of them. Yet how had he reconciled himself with the knowledge that, once in the military, he would be aiding its almost obsessive pursuit of a racially uniform country, one that Rohingya, perhaps more than any other in Myanmar, were not to be a part of? “The important thing for me was that I love my country and I love my birth place”, he explained. “That is why I joined the military. I defended the country by serving in the military. I didn’t care how I was defined or regarded in terms of race and religion. I needed to represent proudly that I am a Myanmar citizen.” For the dictatorship in Myanmar, total commitment to the nation was best proven either by subservience to, or membership of, the one institution that would ensure protection of the nation. Yet U Maung Soe, who as a Rohingya and a Muslim was both a religious and ethnic pariah, was able not only to enter the military and make a contribution on a par with his fellow Buddhist soldiers, but was made a captain for it. He may have done it to prove he could be as much a part of the national community as anyone, or he may have merely wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps. Perhaps, even, his decision was the product of an opportunism so fierce that he was willing to aid the brutalisation of his own ethnicity in order to boost his prospects in life. It was difficult to detect any single motive, and he had always been evasive when I tried to discern any moral angst in the decisions he made. “Duty is duty”, he would often say. 310

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But in the context of nation building in Myanmar, what seemed to matter more than his own reasons for joining was the fact that, even in the climate of deep hostility towards Muslims, Rohingya in particular, U Maung Soe was first accepted into that institution, and then rose up within it. He hadn’t needed to change anything deep within himself in order to do so. Rather, it needed only a false statement on a form, and suddenly he was in. “In a democracy”, he told me, “all the diverse people can cooperate with each other. I proved it myself.” His passage from the far fringes of Myanmar society into its centre countered the assumption that ethnicity and religion were markers of deep and irresolvable differences in the core characters of the individuals that inhabited those groups. It was this lie that, in Myanmar, had determined so radically whether one was accepted into the nation, or violently cast beyond its boundaries. Although only one man, U Maung Soe seemed to be universal proof of that lie.

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IN THE OLD CINEMA HUT A DELICATE THREAD IS CUT

Although often only fleeting, there were encounters I had in Rakhine State that made it clear that not everyone, whether Buddhist or Muslim, saw the cleavages that opened up after 2012 as a matter of life-or-death significance. Each visit to the region since that first wave of violence had brought new, and newly unsettling, revelations about the dynamic between communities there, and sharpened my sense of just how radically the western coast had been altered by those days in early June that year. But on occasion a somewhat different light was thrown onto the landscape. Journalists visiting the camps and ghettos around Sittwe often reported it as a microcosm of the wider racial geography of the region, but even in the wake of those attacks, there had been pockets of the state where Rohingya and Rakhine communities still seemed to hang together, if only by a thread. The monks who had called for any traitorous Rakhine assisting Rohingya to be exposed were not universally adhered to, and for some, life went on almost as before. In villages outside of Sittwe, a year or so after the 2012 violence, the two groups began to come together again, slowly and cautiously. Further north, in Buthidaung, there had not been the deep fissuring that the state capital and elsewhere experienced. The town remained more or less as it had 315

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been: the two communities still interacted, in the teashops and in the schools and marketplace, and Rakhine still employed Rohingya, as they had always done. Tensions had emerged that were particular to this town, but the divide that occurred elsewhere hadn’t been so powerful here. And if you could wind the clock back to the midpoint between that earlier wave of violence and what would come five years later, the sense that all this was inevitable and uncontrollable, that nothing could slow the momentum, might not have seemed so final. One of my final trips to western Myanmar before Aung San Suu Kyi took office had been in November 2015, several weeks before the elections and just shy of a year before the first ARSA attack. From the doorway of the guesthouse in Buthidaung where I spent part of that trip, I could look out across the road to the jetty where Rohingya had, until three years earlier, boarded boats to take them to university in Sittwe. Only Rakhine now queued there, and upon alighting in the state capital three hours downriver, they would walk through a town now largely emptied of its once thriving Muslim community. But Buthidaung was different. One evening I left my guesthouse there and headed with a Rakhine friend to the local cinema hut. It was one of the few places that stayed open beyond 11.30pm, the hour each night when the power was cut and darkness fell over the town. It was early in the English Premier League season, and on that night Arsenal was playing Manchester United. We knew the place would be busy, for football is astonishingly popular in Myanmar, and the appetite for European leagues is particularly intense. As we turned onto the street and made for the hut, groups of people 316

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up ahead were ducking through its narrow doorway. Outside, illuminated by a bulb, a man was selling cans of beer from a stall. We bought enough for the game and headed inside. Rows of benches and chairs were set up, most of them already taken up, and a hulking old projector beamed the preparations for the game onto the wall at the front. The building was musty and dilapidated in the way I’d imagine an old Victorian theatre to be, with its high ceiling, peeling walls and its hotchpotch of loosely arranged seats. As people crammed in, the volume of noise grew and the game got underway. It was one of the few places I’d come across since the 2012 violence where Rohingya and Rakhine still came together, not to trade goods or to labour alongside one another, but as social peers. They sat side by side on the benches, hollering as the game fizzed on in all its intensity. The hut didn’t have the functional basis of a marketplace – it was a zone of purely voluntary interaction where religious or ethnic identity seemingly had no bearing. I noticed a camaraderie inside the hut that surprised me, and the lines of division that had been so visible elsewhere were less evident here. At the end of the game, they got up and poured out into the pitch-dark street. They mingled for a brief moment, and before long, using the light from their phones, they walked back home. Late the next morning I visited the house of Abdul, a young Rohingya acquaintance of my friend. You can spot which houses in Buthidaung belong to Rohingya by the small arched cover, like a miniature roof, that sits above the front gates of their houses and protects the wood from sun and rain. A number of the homes along his street had those, but others 317

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didn’t, and that marked them out as Rakhine. Abdul had gathered a group of people from both communities together for lunch, and we sat in the cool, dark upstairs room of the house as his sisters prepared food in the kitchen. Back then a corresponding lunch in Sittwe would have been unimaginable, with Rohingya inviting Rakhine into their home and Rakhine eating food cooked by Rohingya. Among the two Rakhine who sat with us was Aung Tun. He ran a business selling bamboo, and worked for the General Administration Department, the expansive local-level state body that administers villages and towns across Myanmar. He grew up in a village outside Buthidaung where Rohingya were a majority, and could practise his religion there freely, he said. Later, as a businessman, he sought cheap labour. The day rates demanded by Rohingya tended to be less than Rakhine, and so the majority of his staff were Rohingya. Buthidaung lies north of the Mayu River, in that area the military and many Rakhine had warned was a Muslim stronghold, one step away from secession. But after the violence of 2012, the demographic difference that saw Muslims outnumber Buddhists there seemed to have a converse effect, in the towns at least: Buthidaung in particular remained more integrated than many other places in the state. Aung Tun’s business would have struggled if Rohingya there had been herded into camps, or if the stigma of maintaining contact between Buddhists and Muslims had been as strong there as it was further south. He was reliant on that contact and all that came with it – a dependable workforce and buyers within both communities. 318

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No one theory for explaining why ethno-religious violence occurs, or why, for some, cooperation continues amid hostile times, can be applied to all who have a stake in it and are affected by it. There were Rakhine and Rohingya in Buthidaung who disdained one another as much as they did anywhere in the state. But that disdain wasn’t able to mutate into a total reconfiguration of the social landscape of the town, as it had done in Sittwe after 2012. Instead the two communities had stayed in contact, and the degree of trust that remained as a result of that continued interaction meant they didn’t fear one another to quite the same extent. Aung Tun had said he worried about going to remote Muslim villages beyond the town limits; there were greater unknowns, and thus greater fears, the further one ventured from the familiar. This became all the more acute among Rakhine after the emergence of ARSA, which kept eyes in the villages and recruited largely from the rural areas of the north. But in and around Buthidaung he, like other inhabitants of the town, maintained relations with Rohingya. There was a frequency of contact that made it harder for the kind of unsettling rumours that gained traction elsewhere in the state to impact so heavily on relations. So they continued to mingle together, not just in the marketplace, but in the teashops and in the old cinema hut. While Sittwe town itself may have been entirely segregated after 2012, thereby shattering whatever mutual trust had existed before, villages just outside of the town in time came back together again. One day during a visit there I headed out of town to the village of East Tonbyin. I was still looking for people who had joined the mobs to attack Nasi quarter and 319

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elsewhere, and East Tonbyin sat back from the same road that had served as a thoroughfare for the buses that ferried armed Rakhine into Sittwe several years earlier. Our strategy for finding participants was somewhat crude: we would locate the house of the village administrator, knock on the door and, if he was receptive, sit down and begin talking more generally about the political situation in Rakhine State and development in the area. This provided context for the grievances Rakhine held towards both Rohingya and the central government, and from there we could steer the conversation towards the events of 2012 – how had the village been affected, and who had been caught up in the violence? In East Tonbyin that day the administrator was away, so we wandered around the village and came across a man in the process of erecting sections of a large wooden frame for a two-storey house. Behind his yard was a field, and on the other side, some 200 metres away, lay the village of South Tonbyin, populated largely by Rohingya. Win Zaw was a jeweller in Sittwe and earned around $6 a day. His wife, who had been sitting at the back of the yard as we came in, didn’t work, and instead tended to the house and garden. The 2015 elections had taken place three months before, and they had both voted for the Arakan National Party, which had formed from a merger of the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party and the Arakan League for Democracy. The previous government of the Union Solidarity and Development Party had brought some improvements to the region, he said – school textbooks for his two children were now free of charge. But the USDP was still backed by the military, and was too distant a presence. 320

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It did nothing on the ground in Rakhine State, and nothing for working people there. On the third day of the violence in June 2012, a large group of Rohingya had converged on East Tonbyin, armed with sticks and machetes. Win Zaw had seen them but didn’t recognise among them any inhabitants of the village across the field. He thought the majority had come from Thet Kae Pyin village, around which the camp for displaced Rohingya later sprang up. There was a temporary standoff, before a unit of soldiers nearby intervened, stationing themselves between the two groups. The Rohingya mob eventually dispersed. That had been the only time the village came under threat. Before that day, relations between East and South Tonbyin had been good. Rakhine from this village would cross the field and sit in the teashops of South Tonbyin, and Rohingya would come here to sell fish and vegetables. But even though none of the mob had come from South Tonbyin, that exchange stopped altogether after the violence, and the field separating the villages became a no man’s land between the two communities. Win Zaw said that they stopped trusting their neighbours and no longer sat in their teashops. Three motorbikes and two cows had gone missing from East Tonbyin the previous year, and he suspected it was the work of Rohingya. Win Zaw had said earlier in our conversation that he didn’t trust Muslims. With that curious mathematical specificity I’d heard elsewhere, he told how 70 per cent of them were dishonest. As we spoke, his wife wandered over. Mya was more sympathetic. By late 2013, Rohingya had begun returning to the village to sell fish and vegetables, and she would say hello 321

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to them when they passed by. She still avoided going over to South Tonbyin, even when old friends invited her. It wasn’t that she feared the residents, but instead that Muslims from the camps might be in the village, and that meant trouble for Rakhine. The peril of the unknown was there again: something to fear in unfamiliar faces. As she spoke, a young man in his early twenties arrived at the gate of the yard. He carried two buckets of fish, each hanging by a rope from either end of a wooden plank that rested across his shoulders. He was Rohingya, and had come that morning from his home in South Tonbyin to do the rounds of houses where he knew he could offload his catch. He had been selling fish to Win Zaw and Mya for several years. We ushered him into the yard, and he came in slowly and sat down next to Mya. He was sweating heavily. The day was a hot one, but this seemed like a fever, and his eyes were glazed and heavy. It was malaria, he thought. “You’re always sick when I see you”, Mya told him. They talked together with an air of familiarity. The young man had been unwell for several days and the medicine he was taking hadn’t worked. That medicine was for the stomach, not a fever, Win Zaw said. Fever and stomach pain are different. They knew he couldn’t go to Sittwe hospital – malaria wasn’t considered threatening enough to override the restrictions on Muslims receiving treatment there – and I asked if there was a clinic around here he could access. “Ya-deh, ya-deh”, they both said. No problem, no problem. Mya would contact a doctor in a nearby Rakhine village to see if he could visit there. Later as I walked with my translator back to our bike, he told how he had met the family a year before. Back then Win 322

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Zaw had spoken with far greater contempt of Muslims than he had the day I met him. It seemed that time had dampened his disdain. He was milder now, and although evidently still suspicious of Muslims, he had shown an attentiveness towards the ailing Rohingya man that surprised my translator. I wondered how my conversation with them might have gone if we had met in the year after the violence, when interaction between the two villages had broken off entirely. The mental wounds from the attempted attack by Rohingya would have been fresher, as would the stories that had come in from nearby villages where violence had taken place. But so too would their anxieties have been compounded by the absence of any contact with the objects of that anxiety. When Rohingya began returning to East Tonbyin a year after that first wave of violence, the intensity of those emotions began to ease. Might it be that the behavioural traits in people that are often read as signs of a deeply ingrained prejudice are instead more visceral, temporary responses to the tensions around them? And might that hatred not change if those tensions were to subside? The emotions that underpin prejudice – the fear and the resentment of those considered rivals – are exploited by nationalist leaders to create foot soldiers of a community. But were those emotions to be dampened, either by proactively cultivating greater interaction, or by merely allowing communities to naturally coalesce again, instead of segregating them, then whatever fears had arisen in the meantime could be countered. As a result, the job of recruitment might become harder, for the emotional resources needed to whip up rage wouldn’t be so readily available. 323

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Win Zaw had worried that the violence would come again, and that meant he couldn’t relax. He was angry too about the theft of the bikes and cows. Yet still, at that particular point in time, East Tonbyin was a pocket of relative communal calm in a landscape where hostility seemed to be the abiding sentiment. The cautious return to the old ways of interaction between South and East Tonbyin may well have been particular to the local dynamic in that village tract, whose residents had come to understand that coexistence, albeit limited, didn’t spell the end. But I was left contemplating the extent to which that might, in time, have been mirrored elsewhere, had it not been for the continued efforts of religious and political leaders to keep the peoples of Rakhine State segregated, and had the emergence of an armed group among Rohingya not provided the final piece of evidence to confirm all the fears that had developed after 2012. Towards the end of my conversation with Win Zaw and Mya, another Rohingya man walked past the gate with baskets of vegetables. He paused outside, looking inquisitively in, and Mya called him to come and sit down. Mohammed Rafique also came from South Tonbyin, and could remember the time nearly three decades before when this sister village was built over a crop field. He had known this family almost as long as that. But for a year after the violence he too stopped coming here, as had everyone else in South Tonbyin. They were afraid of this village and this village was afraid of them. But on that day he had sat there, next to the Rakhine husband and wife, and he seemed at ease, save for the endless questions being asked of him by a foreign journalist. 324

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In the towns of central Myanmar struck by violence several years into the transition, the stigma of contact between Buddhists and Muslims hadn’t been as powerful, or as pervasive, as it was in Rakhine State after 2012. But still it was still there. A year after the Mandalay killings, the young Muslim interfaith activist, Myo, went to work in the villages that lay on the edge of the city, almost indistinguishable from the suburbs that sprawled south from the centre in their endless grid patterns. The death threats sent to his phone after the workshop he gave to monks and nuns in the middle of 2015 had served as a warning that he needed to change his strategy. Rather than addressing directly the religious tensions in central Myanmar, he opted for a more mundane approach. Joined by a small team of activists and educators, he began surveying residents of Kan Ywar village, founded more than two centuries before as a place for the Kaman Muslims who had brought the statue of the Mahamuni Buddha to Mandalay from Rakhine State to live under the favour of the king. The Muslims here knew they descended from Kaman, but now largely considered themselves Bamar. Buddhists, also Bamar, moved there soon after it was settled, and they had lived side by side ever since. One day during the violence in downtown Mandalay, a group of men had entered the village carrying stones. They loitered briefly in the street, sizing up their surrounds, and were spotted by residents of nearby houses who ran out to confront them. They quickly dispersed and never returned. That was the only instance of near-violence that Kan Ywar had experienced, but the village was already living in uncertain 325

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times. Mysterious rumours had been circulating among both Buddhist and Muslim communities since the 2012 carnage in Rakhine State, warning that each would be attacked by the other. No one knew their origin – they seemed to have carried in on the wind and worked their way through the streets and alleyways, unnerving the communities so much that they shrank within themselves. It sent a chill through the village: Muslims became doubly careful not to cause any accidents that might harm Buddhists, like the girl in Okkan who the year before had bumped into a novice monk while riding her bicycle, sparking a day of attacks. Buddhists grew wary of walking through streets where Muslim households were concentrated, and kept to themselves. These were nagging doubts, in no way explicit, but they accumulated as the rumours kept coming, and slowly a wall of distrust began to snake its way through the village. One afternoon I travelled with Myo to Kan Ywar. He had come here for the first time a year after the Mandalay violence and gathered community leaders from both sides together. They had discussed what problems there were in the village – not religious, but day-to-day concerns: too much litter, not enough greenery. Those were the issues that united the communities in their frustration, thereby bridging the religious divide that had opened as the violence in the city sent ripples out to its periphery. The day I visited, Myo was holding a workshop in a madrasa there. The following week it would take place in the monastery, and thereafter alternate between the two. Twenty people, both Muslim and Buddhist, had enrolled, the majority of 326

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whom worked in the community, in library or funeral services or blood donation groups. These were the kinds of civil society organisations that had been tolerated by the junta: apolitical, but nonetheless ones that provided people in Myanmar with a sense of cooperation across lines of difference. Amid violence of the sort that erupted in the wake of the junta’s retreat from power, these pre-existing links would prove vital in the effort to reintegrate communities. The discussion in the madrasa that day focused on the shape and function of a democratic government: the separation of powers between the executive and judiciary, and fundamental rights for citizens. Slides were beamed onto a screen, and a Buddhist educator brought up from Yangon asked questions of the attendees. This pool of participants was in the latter stages of the programme. They had already looked at strategies to address waste management in the village, and as time went on the topics moved more towards the rights of the communities. Myo said there were two principal aims to the programme: to bring the two groups together along lines of common interest, and to help them finally engage with the political system in Myanmar. Talk of religion was generally avoided, but occasionally arguments would break out. Two months before they had discussed LGBT rights. Myanmar retains a deeply conservative streak when it comes to sexuality, and the class descended into a row. Another time, Myo had organised tours for the whole group to visit their respective religious buildings, and the group became tense. A pause came midway through the workshop. With Myo, I approached a Muslim man in his early thirties and began to 327

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talk. He knew the history of the village well. Before it became Kan Ywar, it was known as “Kaman Village”, and in the early days the two communities had lived among one another to a far greater extent than they did now. Buddhists occupied houses directly in front of the mosque where the workshop had taken place. Over time they had retreated into somewhat separate enclaves, yet still, until 2014, he would stay at the homes of Buddhist friends, and they would stay at his. It was only after the Mandalay violence that this was stopped, when a deeper distrust, fed by the swirl of rumours, began to pervade relations. The workshops had achieved several things, the man explained. The mere act of mixing allowed attendees to get to know one another again – not only on an individual basis, but in a way that helped to de-stigmatise the broader identity of the other community. It gave birth to a kind of neighbourhood watch initiative, whereby leaders from each side held meetings whenever signs of tension arose and pledged to the other that they would not attack. “We know these rumours come from the outside”, the man had said. “This community is very closed. We don’t have much information coming in and these rumours create fear.” Back then, all that police did when stories began to circulate was to order people to stay inside their homes. They offered nothing in the way of organic trust building. The workshops had filled that void – they served as a space in which that vital mechanism for communal healing could begin to be generated. One of the great paradoxes of group violence is that, so often, a key driver is the misplaced anger that results from disenfranchisement of one or both groups by the political leadership. 328

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During the rule of the military, all communities in Myanmar were denied the ability to negotiate their grievances through institutional channels. Those had been closed off entirely. For some, like the ethnic minority groups who rose up one by one in the decades after independence, violence towards the junta appeared the only viable alternative expression. But if that leadership could redirect the target of that anger away from itself and towards another group, framing it as a competitor for the scarce political and economic capital being sought by the in-group, then the violence would play out on a more horizontal axis. That would deflect animosity away from the leadership and towards the more immediate threat: one’s neighbours. The Muslim man at the workshop had said that local authorities continually harassed residents of Kan Ywar: not only Muslim, but Buddhists too. When it came to managing the local population here, they discriminated little. But through the workshops he and the other attendees had come to know of their legal rights and could communicate this to their communities. In the process, those channels were opened up. Residents of Kan Ywar became both able, and more emboldened, to address issues of neglect or abuse by the state directly, rather than leaving frustrations to fester in a way that could turn up the heat inside the village. “We have become united and we can now elect our own village heads”, he had said, and the outcome of this empowerment was quick to bear fruit: a youth from the village had been arrested several weeks before on what the man believed was a spurious charge – he didn’t say what exactly – and he had gone to the station and spoken with the police, who then ordered the youth’s release. 329

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Among the workshop participants who had been left embittered by the class Myo gave on LGBT rights were several poets. Months on from the row that erupted during their discussion, these poets began contributing their work to an LGBT magazine. Here and there, small victories were being won, and, said Myo, the first step in that process – seemingly small, but vital – had been to bring them into a shared space, to give them all a voice. “We first need to get them into an environment where they can collaborate”, he said of the villagers, “and then we can work on cohesion.” It would always be a stepby-step process, slow, painful and beset by suspicions that were amplified by the propagandising of political and religious figureheads. Myo’s hope was that the contact rekindled in the workshops between the Buddhists and Muslims of Kan Ywar would filter into communal interactions outside of that space, gradually defusing the tensions that had built in the preceding years. Greater knowledge of their legal rights would give the communities a degree of ownership of their fate that had long been denied to them, and that would slowly relieve the feeling of vulnerability that was so intimately connected with the fears Buddhists and Muslims here felt of one another.

As time passed, the strain on communal relations in central Myanmar eased, and the likes of Ma Ba Tha began, bit by bit, to fade from view. Later, the State Sangha Maha Nayaka Committee would order a ban on the group, but even though it changed its name and reorganised under a new banner, the Buddha Dhamma Charity Foundation, its firebrand monks 330

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grew quieter. Had their use been spent? Was there even still a significant role for these agitators? The project of nationalist figureheads who preach purification of the social order nears completion when it infects the minds of a majority of the population, and the mass resentment towards Rohingya that expressed itself in the alignment of otherwise competing interest groups showed that, with the eventual emergence of ARSA in northern Rakhine State, a common enemy had finally arisen. Its first attack on the morning of 9 October 2016 pitched that corner of Myanmar, already blighted by all that had come in the decades before, into much darker territory. The shift in the wider dynamic of the region was so profound, and the new restrictions it birthed for Rohingya who remained in their villages that much more punishing, that whatever tenuous sense of optimism those marginal spaces outside of Sittwe or Buthidaung might once have offered was overwhelmed by an altogether new and more alarming reality. Yet the massive deployment of army battalions and their unforgiving sweep through the villages of the north in late 2016 did more than indicate a newly precarious phase for Rohingya. It also cast a light on how miscalculated the West’s enthusiastic courtship of the government had been, seven months into the National League for Democracy’s rule and amid mounting signs that, on the Rohingya, the civilian leadership would capitulate to the military.

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BYSTANDERS QUIET DIPLOMACY AND A “GLARINGLY DYSFUNCTIONAL” UN

In early November of 2016, a group of diplomats and UN officials in Yangon were sent a letter written and signed by seven staff working in the aid and human rights sector in Myanmar.1 Each of the signatories belonged to a different organisation, but all had one thing in common: they had been in Sri Lanka seven years earlier as the government’s war with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) was reaching its final stages. In the days and weeks before the war’s end in May 2009, they had watched appalled as the UN scrambled, and failed, to organise a robust response to clear evidence that the Sri Lankan military was killing civilians in their thousands. Moreover, they knew that even months before the full weight of the army came to bear on the civilian population in the combat zone, many of whom were being used by the Tamil insurgents as human shields, the warning signs of impending catastrophe were in plain sight, but were somehow not being publicly acknowledged. There had been the announcement in late 2008 that the government, whose forces were pushing deep into Sri Lanka’s north, could no longer guarantee the safety of aid workers, journalists and protection monitors, thereby forcing a withdrawal of observers at the same time that thousands of extra troops were being repositioned inside 335

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the combat zone. There was also a sense that the rhetoric of the government and military carried a finality that hadn’t been so explicit before. Yet somehow the significance of all this seemed not to have been factored into the UN’s action plan around the rapidly worsening situation there. Instead, it appeared to favour quiet diplomacy, and refused to directly confront the government, or even warn member states, over the tightening blockade on aid to trapped civilians and the expulsion of independent witnesses. Many would later argue that the UN’s prevarication, whether strategic or the product of a systemic incapacity to respond to warning signs of mass atrocity, had given the government in Sri Lanka a green light to escalate the violence and pursue the war to its grisly end. The seven signatories to the letter acknowledged the lasting effect this feeling of helplessness in the face of a coming storm had on them. They also shared a deep sense of foreboding at what was developing, now with an altogether new momentum, in Rakhine State. The early morning attack by ARSA on Border Guard Police posts on 9 October 2016 was the work of an embryonic and under-resourced group. Its leader, Ata Ullah, a Rohingya émigré born in Pakistan and raised in Saudi Arabia, had spent the preceding months travelling between Saudi and Bangladesh to coordinate the attack and marshal additional Rohingya to participate. Yet despite the rudimentary nature of its opening act, it was the first indication since the 2012 upheaval of an organised violent resistance within the Rohingya, and it had a powerful effect on undermining the already fragile sense of security felt by many Rakhine. Several thousand 336

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Rakhine fled their villages following the assault, fearing more would come. Two subsequent smaller attacks took place in early November, and then ARSA seemed to disappear. Yet the perception of Rohingya as a crusading force, one that had gradually hardened in the years after 2012, had finally crystallised with the group’s emergence. The following day, the military, joined by Border Guard Police, began what it called “clearance operations” throughout hundreds of Rohingya villages. These quickly drew vocal civilian support from across Rakhine State and beyond. Mirroring the tactics they used against ethnic armies in the north and east of the country, soldiers destroyed civilian food stocks they claimed could have been used to support ARSA, burned villages and, having cordoned off the area, blocked distribution of aid to tens of thousands of Rohingya. By December, more than 65,000 refugees had crossed into Bangladesh. Around the same time, soldiers were intensifying attacks on insurgent groups in Kachin State and northern Shan State whose demands for greater autonomy during the many earlier ceasefire negotiations had gone unheeded. Like that underway in Rakhine, the violence in the north and east was far-reaching, with villagers displaced in their thousands and aid to those sheltering in insurgent-held areas blocked. Military officials maintained that their campaigns in the borderlands were precision targeted, but the seven signatories to the letter thought differently. “What we are seeing and hearing”, they warned, “is uncomfortably too familiar.” Two processes were well in motion by late 2016 that, although functioning separately, were having an increasingly 337

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mutually enforcing effect. First was the widening scope of the military’s violence in Rakhine State, which, as the weeks after 9 October passed, bore the hallmarks of a wholly indiscriminate campaign against Rohingya civilians. More than 1,500 buildings were burned, and entire communities were uprooted and forced to flee, unsure of whether they would ever return to Myanmar. But the second concern, especially haunting for the signatories to the letter, all of whom had been country directors of various international NGOs in Sri Lanka, was the position of the UN and the broader diplomatic community in Myanmar on what was unfolding in the zones of violence. Several weeks after the letter was sent, the group of diplomats, together with the UN’s senior-most official in the country, the Resident Coordinator, gathered in Yangon along with the signatories to discuss the letter. Once together, they were read a statement that unpacked in starker detail the reasons for alarm.2 “To start things off, our primary and blunt message is that mass atrocities can and do happen”, they were told. “We believe it’s dangerous to think that they don’t, and as you probably understand very well, if it does happen, there will be allegations about our collective complicity in it.” The statement was, in essence, a warning of what might lie ahead. But it was also a lament, a reflection by its authors on an event now too late to fix. “We feel it important to remind ourselves that these grave and unimaginable events do happen because at some points during our time in Sri Lanka, we didn’t believe that such a thing was even possible.” Three years after the Sri Lankan government announced its victory over the LTTE, and with estimations of some 338

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40,000 civilians killed, an internal report on the UN’s failings was issued. Among the many points it highlighted was a lack of clarity over who within the UN, whether inside Sri Lanka or at the headquarters in New York, was responsible for crafting a response to escalating violations. It also questioned whether the refusal by the UN to condemn the government’s obstruction of assistance to civilians deep inside the combat zone may have encouraged the military to escalate the violence. “The expectation that the UN would not confront it on the issue may, in turn, have influenced Government action”, the report said.3 Moreover, UN action was heavily influenced by a broadly held perception that any explicit condemnation of the government would place the mandate and continued presence of UN staff in the country at great risk, something the internal UN report referred to as an “institutional culture of trade-offs”. The tendency to see options for action in terms of dilemmas frequently obscured the reality of UN responsibilities. In fact, with its multiplicity of mandates and areas of expertise, the UN possessed the capabilities to simultaneously strive for humanitarian access while also robustly condemning the perpetrators of killings of civilians.

But had that culture of trade-offs followed the UN to Myanmar too? As the segregation of Buddhists and Muslims grew more acute in Rakhine State in the years after the 2012 violence, aid organisations were forced to weigh a dilemma: should they 339

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continue to provide assistance to the camps in and around Sittwe, knowing they were effectively propping up a system of apartheid, or should they pull out and thereby send a clear message to the government that the confinement of Rohingya was an affront to humanitarian principles? The blocking by state authorities of access to vital services for Rohingya had not been undertaken in a blatant fashion. Rather, Rohingya couldn’t visit particular towns and the hospitals in them because of the fear of attack by Rakhine; therefore, the locales in which security personnel could watch over them were limited, and that inevitably meant a limiting of services to them. The same argument went for the camps: these were temporary displacement sites, and the police blocking Rohingya from leaving their confines were doing so to guard them against violence. There was no other way around this, so it was claimed. International NGOs supplying the camps clearly saw through the lie. There had been no effort by the government or security forces to thwart the mobilisation of Rakhine mobs who blocked routes to hospitals, while the restrictions on access to healthcare were just one component of an arsenal of measures, crafted and enforced by state authorities, designed to limit the movement and well-being of Rohingya. The camps were not displacement sites but long-term internment camps, key elements in a broader system of segregation whose only escape was into the sea. Where the government claimed to be acting in the best interests of both Rakhine and Rohingya, others saw more sinister machinations. The upshot therefore was a very real concern that the government’s evident willingness to limit life-saving treatments to Rohingya meant that it 3 40

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would control, and withdraw, at its discretion, the facilities and infrastructure designed to safeguard the lives of Rohingya. The alternative to not supplying aid to the prison-like camps and villages was therefore to leave the fate of Rohingya at the mercy of the state’s own disturbing inclinations. Faced with such a dilemma, it was clear that aid should continue. But what became apparent was that the UN inside Myanmar, and Western governments that had vociferously supported the transition, saw this as a zero-sum game: were they to take a strong public stand on the camps, then both their assistance mandate, and the wider relationship they were cultivating with the government, might be under threat. Also at risk would be the vision that those who claimed a stake in the transition had for Myanmar: long-term development, a hand in guiding the peace process with warring ethnic armies and, for Western governments in particular, steady political relations and the economic windfall that might result. All of these required a functioning relationship with the civilian leadership. Yet that institutional culture of granting concessions to a government whose position was becoming increasingly unsettling – in this case, by refraining from public criticism of it and the military – in return for both continued access to highly vulnerable communities and lasting relations engendered its own culture of compliance. It had been precisely this problem in Sri Lanka that had caught the UN Secretary General’s attention in September 2009, several months after the war had ended. “I am now facing difficult questions about how far the [UN] is willing to go in supporting a situation where IDPs are 3 41

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denied freedom of movement”, Ban Ki-moon wrote to President Rajapaksa that month, after survivors of the war were herded into displacement camps from which they could not leave. “We will not be able to support the creation or maintenance of further closed camps that detain IDPs into the medium term.”4 This same scenario began to play out in Myanmar, and there was no signal from the government that the camps would ever close. The Office of the Resident Coordinator issued several statements in the year after June 2012 condemning the deepening segregation and ongoing violence against Rohingya. “Inter-communal tensions fuel fear and resentment”, it warned in June 2013. “Left unresolved, they will drive communities further apart.” Yet bit by bit, the Office’s line on the human rights situation in Rakhine State grew quieter. Ban Ki-moon’s letter, along with a decision by the US to withdraw support for the camps and to apply greater diplomatic pressure on the Sri Lanka government, had eventually prompted the Rajapaksa administration to close the sites and allow refugees to return to their homes. In Myanmar, the UN said that it was working to resettle interned Rohingya, and one-sixth of the 140,000 who were displaced after 2012 did go back to their villages several years later. But the vast majority remained in camps, with little sign they would leave, and at a time when the situation in Rakhine State had begun to show starker similarities to post-war Sri Lanka, the public face of the UN increasingly became one of passivity and inertia. The internal UN report several years before had warned of the cost of inaction. If the 3 42

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UN was already losing sight of the lessons from the Sri Lankan camps, could it therefore miss other, arguably more explicit, indicators of a developing catastrophe in western Myanmar? While the attacks on NGO offices in Sittwe in March 2014 had signalled how vulnerable the aid infrastructure in western Myanmar was, it was an incident two months earlier that had aggravated the UN’s already delicate relationship with the government, and sharpened perceptions of the world body as unfairly biased towards Rohingya. In January that year reports had begun to filter out of northern Rakhine State of an alleged massacre of Rohingya by soldiers in the village of Du Chee Yar Tan, near Maungdaw. A policeman had gone missing on a visit to the village and, so villagers reported, soldiers then moved in, opened fire and killed some forty-eight people. A UN investigation, based on interviews with survivors and witnesses, claimed to have corroborated the reports of mass killings, and The New York Times ran the story under the headline, “Rise in Bigotry Fuels Massacre Inside Myanmar”. UN officials and diplomats demanded action by the government, but the government denied the incident had taken place. Gradually, over the subsequent weeks and months, it became unclear whether the massacre had indeed been as reported. Forensic analysis of the images sent by villagers to investigators founds that many were taken during earlier episodes of violence, one diplomat told me, and a villager whose name was included on a list of alleged fatalities was then interviewed by investigators over the telephone. Something had occurred in Du Chee Yar Tan – Médicins Sans Frontièrs had treated survivors of attacks, including several 3 43

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women who had been raped – but the claims of mass killing began to fray in the face of a lack of supportable evidence, and the government claimed that villagers had exaggerated the story to attract international attention. There was no final verification either way, but when MSF’s aid operations were suspended the following month, it seemed the government was taking retaliatory action. The attacks on NGO offices in Sittwe soon after spotlighted just how delicate the positon of outspoken international organisations had now become. Explicit talk of human rights would necessarily involve discussion of whose rights were being violated, and by whom, and the incarceration of Rohingya in camps meant that the focus would likely fall on its enforcers. Any vociferous public lobbying by the UN could invite a response similar to that which MSF experienced. Instead of confrontation, a policy of “quiet diplomacy” would be pursued alongside a more publicly neutral approach to the crisis. This approach emphasised the need for economic development to benefit all communities of the state. Once the Suu Kyi-led administration came to power, it too took up the cause: improving infrastructure and livelihood opportunities would alleviate the fierce economic competition between groups that, in the eyes of the government, had been the main driver of violence. But there were clear problems with that approach, and no one within the UN or diplomatic presence in Myanmar seemed to be publicly raising them: how would development possibly benefit a community of 140,000 people who were being held in camps, not to mention the many hundreds of 3 44

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thousands more unable to leave their villages? How could a truly participatory decision-making process about where and on what to spend development funds take place if a supposedly key stakeholder had no authoritative voice? And, most glaringly, where were the government-led efforts, difficult to craft but vital, to counter the bitter enmity towards Rohingya that the policy of segregation being administered by it had only hardened? The UN stressed that, in its work, human rights and development always functioned hand in hand to promote inclusiveness and social cohesion. Yet there was no coherent explanation as to how that could be done when so many Rohingya had already been so violently excluded. By 2014 it was clear that the camps were sites of internment, and not temporary displacement. That reality remained unchanged upon Suu Kyi’s entry to office in 2016. A team of experts, led by the former UN chief Kofi Annan, was commissioned by Suu Kyi to come up with a set of recommendations to reduce tensions in Rakhine State with a view to eventually reintegrating the Rohingya. Yet in spite of this, the position her government took – no robust condemnation of the camps, no clear effort to ease the tightening security measures for Rohingya – indicated that it prioritised the containing of Rakhine nationalist sentiment over the promotion of freedom of movement for Rohingya, and would not intrude on the military’s inviolable security remit. The status quo would therefore remain until the point at which Rohingya could once again resume their lives as they had been before 2012. That point however remained undefined, and the many interplaying 3 45

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processes needed to reach it, which lay far beyond the development sphere, were left unspoken.

The UN’s experience in Sri Lanka had impacted not only on outside perceptions of the institution, long seen as uniquely positioned to referee the world’s many crises, but also inside the UN and among the many aid and human rights organisations that worked alongside it. It prompted searching reflection on the overall purpose of the body. Was it fit for the tasks it was created to pursue? Whose interests did it serve? In Sri Lanka, its incapacities had been starkly illustrated. During the final months of the war, UN member states held not one meeting on Sri Lanka. Instead, discussions were downgraded to “informal interactive dialogue” meetings that produced no formal outcomes. “At the meetings, senior Secretariat officials presented prepared statements that focused largely on the humanitarian situation”, the internal UN report stated. They did not discuss the role of the government in blocking humanitarian aid, or mention that most of the casualties were victims of government attacks. And at the core of the problem, the report noted, was a separation of the humanitarian response from what UN officials explained were “political” issues: who was killing civilians, how many were being killed and what lay at the root of the crisis. “Issues appear to have been defined as political not because they had a political aspect but rather because UN action to address them would have provoked criticism from the Government.”5 3 46

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Four years after the war’s end, with Ban Ki-moon still at the helm, it finally responded to the debacle. The Human Rights Up Front initiative outlined in sparse detail the processes needed to address UN impotency in the face of mass atrocity warnings.6 Staff working on Sri Lanka had, it noted, lacked both a shared understanding of the situation and of the UN’s responsibilities there, and had not reacted to the warnings being issued by human rights monitors. The UN would undergo an operational change, whereby early warning signs would be acted upon, and a better framework developed for political engagement with member states to bolster their support for preventative action. A cultural change would also be sought whereby employees would be encouraged to “act with moral courage”, and the UN headquarters would “back UN staff who take principled actions, whether in the most serious situations or in much earlier work for prevention”. By 2015, it said, all senior UN officials would begin to be assessed on whether they were meeting the responsibilities set out by Ban Ki-moon. By 2015, the camps in Rakhine State had been around for three years, and the barricades remained at the entrances to the Aung Mingalar ghetto inside Sittwe. In March that year, voting rights had been stripped from Rohingya, and in August, three months before the elections, the only Rohingya MPs – U Shwe Maung and Aung Zaw Win – were expelled from parliament. Neither the Union Solidarity and Development Party government nor the ascendant National League for Democracy had given any indication that restrictions on movement and the political disenfranchisement of Rohingya would be reversed. 3 47

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Agencies working in western Myanmar were justifiably fearful that they would again be made the focus of a building anger among Rakhine who saw, with more aid workers descending on the state, a new kind of colonialism gathering pace. As the international news cycle turned its attention to Myanmar in the lead-up to the elections, much of the excitement at imminent change was tempered by an acknowledgement that acute problems endured in the country’s periphery. Could Suu Kyi bring long-running conflicts to a close, commentators asked, and could she find a way to remedy the crisis in Rakhine State? Or would the status quo remain? But if a status quo hints at a sense of things not moving – that the condition of minority groups, whether Rohingya or others, was static – then communities in the border regions were experiencing something quite different. The parallel realities of Myanmar, whereby fast-paced developments in the centre sat at sharp odds with deepening crises in the periphery, were becoming even starker. Yet it was clear that Western actors who had sought deeper engagement had failed to properly comprehend the competing political interests that were being sharpened by the transition. In the conflict zones of the north and east, millions of dollars of donor money had gone into supporting the ceasefire process, and both the UN and the expanded corps of Western diplomats were given levels of access to the government and its negotiation teams they had not previously known. But there were differentiating views on what the ceasefires might offer up. Hardliners within the political-military establishment saw the peace process as a way to project their power and business interests deeper into 348

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the border regions. Ceasefires were used as a tool to placate, or buy off, armed insurgent groups, and were buttressed with UN-funded credit schemes for farmers, or money for schools where, it would turn out, ethnic minority languages could not be taught. Elements of the deals offered to armed groups were such that they further eroded the prospects for greater autonomy for minorities, thereby directly undermining the likelihood of a unified peace. The schisms that resulted between armed groups – some of whom signed on, others who saw the whole process as inherently deceitful – meant that as government negotiators and Western emissaries increased pressure on ethnic leaders to agree a deal, groups began to turn their guns on one another, thereby making the already complex dynamics of the conflict vastly worse. Suu Kyi had watched this play out while in opposition, and made the realisation of ceasefires a central component of the National League for Democracy’s campaigning platform. On taking office, she announced that the approach of the previous government would be revised, and that armed groups and their constituencies would be offered alternative incentives for signing a deal. Yet, most bewilderingly, the final election victory of the party, celebrated so rapturously by local and international supporters, heralded the beginning of an even more critical phase for ethnic minority communities. As armed fighting worsened, so too did aid workers discover that their ability to access civilians in Myanmar’s many conflict zones had become harder. Letters needed to be sent to government offices, sometimes six weeks in advance, requesting travel authorisation. 3 49

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The letter would need to detail information that seemed oddly superfluous, and that changed week by week: what were the populations of the villages or camps where aid would be distributed, and how many buildings were at these sites? What were the names of staff visiting, how long would they go for, and who was driving the vehicles that took them there? This was required across the chain of responsibilities, whether groups were distributing building material for camp shelters, food aid, or critical medical assistance. Different relief agencies had to deal with different ministries, and as a result conflicting details were being given about where they could go and what they could do. None of the aid workers I spoke to knew why. Perhaps, in the horse-trading that went on prior to the elections, the military had made it clear to the NLD that it would remain in charge of the border regions. Its efforts to rout those armed groups who had refused a ceasefire were floundering, and if it couldn’t end the insurgencies by force, then perhaps it could weaken their support base by cutting off vital supplies. Yet neither the constricting space for aid delivery nor the intensifying fighting seemed to shift the international line on the political opening. “The Government in Burma is now more democratic, more accountable and has less military influence than has been the case in the last six decades”, wrote Britain’s Minister for the Asia and Pacific, Alok Sharma, nearly a year after the elections. In recognition of the country’s “remarkable journey from dictatorship to democracy”, and in spite of “all its wrongdoings”, the military should be engaged with. “We should acknowledge the part it has played in the democratic transition, by enabling reforms to happen.”7 35 0

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Over in Rakhine State, the space for aid distribution continued to be restricted as the months of 2016 passed, but the fallout from ARSA attacks of October took this far beyond anything seen so far. Ten days after the assault, as the military’s campaign widened, the World Food Programme issued the first warning that its planned deliveries of food to 80,000 Rohingya trapped inside the clearance zone in northern Rakhine State had been blocked.8 Staff made exhortations to government officials to end the blockade, only to be told that ongoing military operations meant no access would be given. The usual lines of communication between the towns and villages of northern Rakhine State and the offices of aid agencies in Sittwe and Yangon went quiet. The next harvest wasn’t until November, and October had always been a period of food scarcity in the already fragile north of Rakhine State. Malnourishment was endemic among Rohingya children, and that aid hadn’t merely supplemented existing food stocks, but often underpinned them. As aid workers were blocked, so too were journalists, and for several months after October, as the numbers of Rohingya crossing into Bangladesh climbed into the tens of thousands, the already flickering lights went out and that remote pocket of Myanmar retreated deeper into darkness.

In late 2012, Derek Mitchell, who earlier that year was appointed the first US ambassador to Myanmar since 1990, had flown the two hours from Yangon to Sittwe accompanied by diplomats from the United Kingdom and Australia. The second wave of violence had hit Rakhine State shortly before 351

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his visit, and the delegation was seeking a clearer measure of the severity of the developing situation there. “I went and listened to Rakhine people on the ground after that second round in October and got very worried about their narrative of dehumanisation – that Rohingya are coming after our women; that they want our land”, he told me. Shortly afterwards, he told an off-the-record briefing in New York of his fears upon leaving Rakhine State. I knew we’d heard this type of language before in history and it was deeply worrying. The ethnic cleansing concerns were starting even then, not because there was evidence of imminent action or intention by the government or military, but because of the deep hostility that existed on the ground in Rakhine and obvious antipathy towards the Rohingya more broadly in the country. At the same time, the prospect of action on the scale eventually seen seemed unthinkable. We were very clear with the government about the stakes for its entire reform project, including its increasingly positive international profile, should violence against the Rohingya in Rakhine State continue, let alone spin out of control.

In conversation with Mitchell, officials from the Thein Sein government repeatedly spoke of their belief that, in the wake of the 2012 violence, the Rohingya Solidarity Organisation was mobilising again. The ambassador told them that the US, perhaps more attuned to the movements of non-state armed groups than any other world government, had seen no evidence 352

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they were reforming, but the administration in Naypyidaw would not drop it. “They considered them a terrorist cell and they brought it up all the time.” While still in opposition, Suu Kyi had regularly chastised the Thein Sein government for not moving to close the camps and begin reintegration, thereby leaving the problem – and, potentially, a resultant armed movement – to the next government. “We had one long conversation about it and she was thoughtful and understood the situation fairly well”, Mitchell told me. “I got no sense of a hostile attitude like that which I heard from the military.” Once in power, however, her language too began to change. Mitchell had left his post in March 2016, but continued to visit the country and meet with Suu Kyi. It’s a very common theme from her to connect a problem occurring inside the country to people on the outside, that there are external troublemakers. She told me they may be seeking to create “Rohingyastan”, presumably out of northern Rakhine. I thought she must be surrounded by people who are telling her these things.

The government appeared to share the view of many Rakhine that Rohingya had separatist intentions – a “Kosovo strategy”, as Mitchell put it, “to cut off a piece of Myanmar and create a new sovereign entity under the Rohingya, perhaps with the help of the West”. The narrative after 2012 had fixed on the belief that Rohingya were working in the service of a broader Muslim 353

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project, and Mitchell, in closed-door meetings with the government, was expressing deepening concerns about the deterioration in conditions in Rakhine State, and the nature of the language being used. But I asked him why, back when he first noted the warning signs of ethnic cleansing, the US had not been more outspoken about its fears that the violence of 2012 might augur something vastly more serious. “The Rakhine already felt they were victimised,” he replied. Even when I was there the Rakhine and other ethnic groups would ask, “Why are you always just focusing on Rohingya?” Rakhine themselves complained: “Why is the UN going into Rohingya camps and only helping them? We’re the least developed state in the union. We need things and no one is talking about how we were victimised by the Bamar, or that Rohingya have a history of wanting our territory, and aggressing against our people.” We came to recognise the more we all harped only on the needs of the Rohingya versus understanding and giving some kind of voice to the perspectives of the Rakhine, the deeper the ditch we were digging in building trust necessary to help address the increasingly dangerous and desperate Rohingya impasse. We may not have agreed with the Rakhine perspective, but we felt demonstrating sincere interest in understanding it was a first step to finding a constructive solution, and that excessive public commentary could work against such efforts.

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Mitchell went on: At the same time as the situation for Rohingya worsened severely in 2012 and nascent conditions for ethnic cleansing appeared, I considered that the junta could have cleared the Rohingya out anytime when they were in power. Why would they choose a moment when they clearly sought a good relationship with the West and open up their country to development to do this? As a result, we sought to use the government’s apparently reform-minded desires as leverage to get them to address the Rakhine issue proactively and decisively in a positive direction.

Without action from the government, he said, “the issue would continue to be a ticking time bomb”. The explosion came seven months after Mitchell’s posting in Myanmar had ended. By December, with military operations continuing, diplomats in Yangon were finally forced to publicly acknowledge the rapidly turning tide, and in a joint statement fourteen heads of mission called on the government to reopen access for aid agencies. But few then appeared to step back and place the military’s behaviour in the months after October that year in a longer view of developments in western Myanmar. There was a frenzied focus on the immediate crisis, and agreement that the so-called “clearance operations” were vastly disproportionate to the scope of ARSA’s attacks. But there was no evident zooming out to a wider plain of vision, and no public acknowledgement of 355

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the concerns being voiced behind closed doors: that, rather than a bump in the road in the otherwise apparently steady, if deplorable, conditions in Rakhine State, what was happening might well be the beginnings of a descent into something vastly more serious. Of course they couldn’t know with any certainty what the outcome of late 2016 might be. No one did. There was a long history of violence in Rakhine State, whether military-led or the work of armed groups or civilian mobs. Should this be read as something very different? But the signatories of the Sri Lanka letter had urged that longer view. They wanted its recipients to know that long before a mass eruption comes, there are smaller fires here and there, ignited and then doused, apparently not linked. The violence of late 2016 needed, they thought, to be situated against the backdrop of events since 2012, and against the quieter state manoeuvring that had come in the decades before. “The groups in question have a violent past that includes armed clashes and numerous, seemingly unconnected, human rights abuses and violations”, the UN officials and country ambassadors were told at the November meeting. These violations dot a temporal landscape of “moments and periods of stability where, on the surface, things appear to be improving”. A mass atrocity isn’t inevitable; the abuses can just be those bumps in the road. But, they warned, don’t let the light blind you to the creeping shadows. “We explored how a mass atrocity can unfold and why we needed to start to prepare for it”, one of the participants in the meeting later told me. 35 6

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I even remember being in that room and saying that mass atrocities can and do happen and it’s dangerous to think they don’t. But when we said this, people were just in denial. They were still in that feeling that we were in a transition, and it – that rosy image of a democracy – had become this ideal that we were investing in. Everybody put all their hopes and energy and finances and beliefs into this, and this culture of denial stuck.

The complexity of the crisis, and the wildly diverging interpretations within and outside the country of who exactly the principal victims were, meant that any public response, whether from the government or international bodies, would necessarily be a fraught endeavour. Suu Kyi, who by the time of ARSA’s first attack had been in office for seven months, had already developed a reputation for evasiveness on the issue, and would often be defensive to the point of hostility. “Show me a country without human rights issues”, she told reporters at a news conference three days after the October violence began. “Every country has human rights abuses.”9 Vijay Nambiar, then Ban Ki-moon’s special advisor on Myanmar, had urged Suu Kyi to “listen to her inner voice”, but neither he nor anyone outside of her close circle knew what that voice might be telling her. Had it gone quiet, for commentators repeatedly spoke of her “silence” on the matter? Yet silence wasn’t what was coming from her office; rather, inconsistent statements were being issued in local media and on Facebook. Whether they were from her or less restrained party colleagues wasn’t clear, but the accusations of “fake rape” and 357

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the use of the “national security” pretext to seemingly justify the military’s response showed that the military’s own line on the violence was being echoed by the government. Other times, and under a different spotlight, Suu Kyi seemed to draw back from that, to a position whereby blame for the deepening crisis would not, she affirmed, be attributed to any one side. All the while, the foreign media couldn’t come to terms with the fact that a Nobel laureate, whose public image had been defined by her defiance of the military, was unable to bring herself to confront that same military for acts as heinous as any it had committed while she was an oppositional activist. She and the NLD knew that its position was precarious, and that the delicate act of balancing domestic and international opinion had become vastly more difficult now the party was in power, and with political fissures widening. This was no easy office to hold, and its influence over the military was minimal, if any. A chorus of voices echoed Nambiar’s call for that powerful moral conscience of hers that had withstood the barrage of the military over nearly three decades to guide whatever pragmatic approach she was now taking. Might she defy a great cross-section of her support base that seemed to see justification in the military’s assault by calling it what it was: an all-out attack on civilians? Or, indeed, if she could really do nothing, should she resign her post? But if there seemed to be broad unity among Western officials outside the country in entreating her to at least take a stronger stand, whatever that might be, then this wasn’t being replicated inside Myanmar. As the transition had advanced it became apparent that the multitude of Western stakeholders 358

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in this transition – the UN agencies, US and European diplomatic missions, the international NGOs – were taking diverging approaches to the worsening conflicts. Two camps quietly formed: one felt there should be much greater public advocacy around what was happening, while the other feared such advocacy could imperil their continued mandate in the country. In the latter camp was the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, which had the largest presence of all aid agencies in northern Rakhine State. It evidently felt the situation to be so delicate that, in its reports, it refused even to name the fleeing refugees as Rohingya, instead referring only to “people who have been displaced”, or “Muslims who self-identify as ‘Rohingya’”. Similarly equivocal was the Resident Coordinator’s Office. It issued a statement three days after the violence began that condemned ARSA’s attack and noted a growing concern at the “unfolding situation”, but it would take until December, two months later, and after more than 50,000 had fled, for a second statement to call for an investigation into allegations of widespread abuse. In the intervening time, on 24 October, the day when UN staffers around the world pause each year to mark UN Day, the Resident Coordinator, Renata Lok-Dessallien, gave a speech in Yangon that might, with the right set of ears, have sounded like a veiled riposte to the UN’s growing army of critics. It was the kind of institution that inevitably got “caught in the cross-fire between unloving critics and uncritical lovers”, she said. “Some choose to focus on our shortcomings, of which there are many. But they often forget that we were designed with many of these 359

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shortcomings so as not to interfere with the sovereignty of our member states.”10 After several weeks spent petitioning the UN, I was granted a written interview with Lok-Dessallien, whose posting had run from January 2014 – the month of the Du Chee Yar Tan incident – to late 2017. The UN’s quiet diplomacy approach of that period had been heavily criticised, but so too was it evident that deeper structural problems within the UN that continued long after the Sri Lanka debacle had hampered the ability of the Country Team to respond to developing crises. The Country Team, she said, had lacked the support needed to deal with scale and complexity of the multiple crises in Myanmar that emerged, and worsened, during the transition. “In situations similar to this level of work intensity, the UN often has a relatively large mission authorised by the UN Security Council with significantly more resources”, she told me. “But in Myanmar there was no UN mission and the Resident Coordinator and Country Team had to carry out its complex work with limited resources.” The letter sent in late 2016 to ambassadors and NGO heads had warned that an active ingredient in the UN’s weak response to mounting abuses in the build-up to the Sri Lankan war’s culmination had been disorganisation and disunity within the UN: no coherent command structure, no one taking charge of public messaging, and no clarity over who was responsible for addressing what the internal review later said were the “political” issues, namely those that would likely have angered the government. In Myanmar, these concerns should have been dealt with by the Office of the High Commissioner 360

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for Human Rights and the Secretary General’s Special Envoy. But the Office had been denied permission to establish a formal presence in the country, thereby leaving no one in the UN system inside Myanmar with an explicit mandate to negotiate with the government and military over mounting abuses. It was instead left up to the Resident Coordinator, who still had to maintain good relations with various authorities so that humanitarian and development activities could continue. The signatories to the letter began to feel a haunting déjà vu. Two years before ARSA’s attack, the UN had been told in an expert report that Rohingya were experiencing “a human rights and livelihood emergency”, and that their “living conditions and life chances are deteriorating”. Lok-Dessallien told me that any activities the UN undertook in Rakhine State always had human rights as their centrepiece, yet even long after the violence of October 2016 the UN still internally referred to the situation in central Rakhine State as a “humanitarian situation caused by a human rights crisis”. But what exactly did that mean? The result of a human rights crisis was still a human rights crisis, and it demanded much more than the usual provisions – aid and development – needed to respond to a humanitarian situation. Tens of thousands of Rohingya were being held inside the camps, against their will, unable to leave; the remainder were penned inside villages, and required special permits to move. By 2015, without voting rights or a place for their representatives in parliament, their political disempowerment was complete. But the few statements on Rakhine State issued by the UN in-country teams after 2014 indicated that the clear “political” basis of the crisis 361

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wasn’t being publicly addressed, and nor was it being made explicit in the broader position of the Western diplomatic community. No one wanted to openly confront the fact that it was the military, and not poverty and underdevelopment, that was really driving the crisis. The language of “communal violence” was still being used to explain what had gone on in 2012, and whatever murky forces had organised the mobs and spread information that helped mobilise Rakhine civilians were not being scrutinised. The terminology used to describe a crisis has a major bearing on the shape of the response, and in Myanmar, despite even the NLD’s reluctance to confront the continued existence of the camps and ghettos, the crisis was still being treated as a humanitarian situation. Yet that existed in a very different world, structurally speaking, to a human rights one. If the language of human rights had been emphasised then it would have necessarily required a more confrontational relationship with the actors perpetrating abuses, whether security forces or Rakhine politicians and activists, but the dynamic being sought by the UN didn’t allow for this. Might public denunciation be too much for its declaration of respect for member states’ sovereignty? Might it have limited whatever influence the UN had, whether then or in the future? That same trade-off had taken place years before, and the disaster it contributed to had prompted Ban Ki-moon’s acknowledgement that the system wasn’t working. But if ever there was a scenario in which the kind of early warning systems promoted in the Human Rights Up Front initiative could be put to the test, then surely it was Myanmar. And if, therefore, Myanmar was to be just such a 362

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test case, then the UN’s in-country teams, and the many other concerned stakeholders, not least the European and American diplomats who enjoyed a more direct line to the government, would need to respond directly to the human rights crisis and its causes, and not deflect by dressing it up in the language of humanitarian response. “It was just this inability to be bold and really see these things, to see the processes behind mass atrocities”, the participant in the November meeting told me. “There was a fear that any substantial statement from the UN or diplomats would just cause the government or military to shut down their access. The idea of looking at things through the lens of short-term gains was and is the modus operandi.” The Human Rights Up Front initiative had explicitly called for a “cultural change”, for staff to feel empowered to raise the alarm, even when doing so risked angering governments. Lok-Dessallien told me that nearly 2,000 UN staff inside the country were trained in Human Rights Up Front strategies, and that after the October 2016 attacks, the UN expanded its early warning system and consulted closely with UN headquarters. Through its monitoring, she claimed, it was able to detect potential local triggers of conflict. This information was then used as the basis of its advocacy with the government, as well as, she said, to de-escalate the many local tensions in Rakhine State that had re-emerged and intensified after the ARSA attacks. Yet the military’s assault continued until December, and it wasn’t until well into that month that Lok-Dessallien released a statement stressing that the UN had “repeatedly condemned the attacks”. It was true that officials outside the country had 363

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done so, but that December statement had been the first the Resident Coordinator’s office had published in more than two months. Save for periodic updates on the humanitarian situation, UN in-country teams largely refrained from any public messaging that would have accurately reflected the gravity of the developing crisis in Myanmar’s west. Contrary to LokDessallien’s assertions, an internal memo sent to Ban Kimoon’s successor, Antonio Guterres, in April 2017 warned that “The United Nations in-country presence in Myanmar continues to be glaringly dysfunctional”.11 The impact of this, it stated, was the “growing irrelevance of the UN in guiding and defining the international community’s efforts to address the challenges confronting Myanmar”. Perhaps the structural problems within the UN were more severe than Ban Ki-moon had allowed for, and perhaps old habits required more than a boldly named initiative to kill off. International aid organisations find ways of working with hostile governments, and the UN had kept a presence in Rakhine State since the 1990s, when the military had ruled. It already had a framework for cooperation in place, and during those years it worked within the limits of that framework, pushing when it could and stepping back when things got delicate. But there was an assumption that the framework would naturally change when Suu Kyi took over from the military, because, well, the character of her party was inherently different – an altogether more progressive, unifying steward of the country than the military had been. The UN, and the bulk of people watching Myanmar, were not prepared for the fact that the transition would, in key areas, be marked 364

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not by change, but by continuity, if not deterioration; that when it came to the Rohingya in particular, the NLD would capitulate to a genocidal military. “There needed to be red lines and for people to take positions; there needed to be an appetite for new ideas”, the participant said. “But the ability to change one’s behaviour and their habits of working with governments, knowing that relationships could be broken, is too much for people to contemplate, and so this psyche of denial takes over.” What the Human Rights Up Front framework would have required, were it to have been properly implemented, was for the UN to acknowledge the potential for relationships with governments to sometimes be confrontational. It asked UN agencies not to stand inert while warning signs mount, but rather to do what they could to stymie momentum towards mass atrocities. But the UN, as well as Western governments that had thrown their weight behind the transition, feared that to publicly take such a position could push the government further towards the military. The United Kingdom, as the so-called “pen holder” for Myanmar in the UN Security Council, had traditionally led the efforts within the Council to rally a response to crises in the country. But its position as a principal backer of the political transition similarly compromised this. Only much later would it come to acknowledge this. In December 2017, four months after the second military campaign began, a Foreign Affairs Committee report accused the British government of having applied too much focus “on supporting the ‘democratic transition’ and not enough 365

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on atrocity prevention and delivering tough and unwelcome messages to the Burmese government about the Rohingya”. International action on the situation in Rakhine State had been inadequate, it charged, and the United Kingdom “bears some responsibility for this”.12

Whether by providence or by the inevitable career progression of a conflict specialist, the author of the report on the UN’s role in Sri Lanka, Charles Petrie, found himself shifting his focus to Myanmar around the time the first wave of violence in Sittwe began in 2012. He already knew the country well, having served as the UN representative there between 2003 and 2007. But nearly a decade before that, in April 1994, Petrie was asked to deploy to Rwanda. A UN force established late the previous year to aid peace-keeping efforts between the Hutu government and Tutsi rebels suddenly found itself the subject of an international dispute over the extent to which it should intervene in the rapidly developing genocide, which had begun weeks before Petrie’s arrival. He was tasked with supporting the efforts of General Roméo Dallaire, commander of the UN force that ultimately failed to thwart the work of the Hutu mobs and militias. Petrie saw a similar structural incompetence – the UN’s too-vague rules of engagement on Rwanda, a general absence of understanding among senior staff in New York about the nature of the violence and the institution’s protection mandate – repeat itself in Sri Lanka, and the report he subsequently published referenced a note written by the UN Department of Political 366

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Affairs in early 2008, the year before the war’s end, that urged “more assertive action before [the crisis] becomes a bigger man-made disaster of Rwanda magnitude”.13 Later in Myanmar, he saw echoes not only of Sri Lanka, but of the political machinations that had driven the Rwanda genocide too. He had returned to Yangon as a specialist advisor in the country’s fledgling peace process, but the violence between Buddhists and Muslims in the west that unfolded that year before erupting in central Myanmar stirred old memories. That really shocked me because with the opening of political space and the opening up of public expression, of course you saw really interesting positive dynamics, but you also saw this other side, which was the ability of people, especially political leaders, to manipulate existing fears in order to develop constituencies. That was something I’d seen in Rwanda, and what really worried me was the systemic nature of what began in Myanmar. You had outside elements coming into a community, either amplifying or provoking an incident and then generating this furore, and that gave way to strong local participation.

The episodes in the centre, particularly Meikhtila, had spotlighted, perhaps with greater clarity than in Rakhine State, how political elites might use the fracturing of religious communities for their own benefit. It wasn’t clear where this might lead, but Petrie had seen violence of this nature serve as a preparatory strategy elsewhere. 367

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The genocide in Rwanda didn’t start on 6 April 1994; it began in 1992 when you had these test runs of popular mobilisation against Tutsis – provocation events triggered by outsiders. So you’re preparing the population and finding a spark that outside elements then help to transform into a flame.

What also became apparent to Petrie, even once the NLD was in power, was the government’s deftness at exploiting dysfunction within the UN. Suu Kyi’s administration had a mercurial quality to it, and it could capitalise on the fact that condemnation of abuses by the government and military coming from outside the country wasn’t being echoed by in-country teams. Some saw that first ARSA attack and the military’s response as a critical shift in the crisis, warranting a substantial revision of the relationship with the government; others felt it to be a mere epiphenomenon. The latter camp, which continued to echo Suu Kyi’s development-first agenda, could be courted by the government, and those who wanted a stronger line shut out entirely. “The government was playing one part of the UN off against the other”, Petrie explained. “When there was a step taken by one agency, perhaps on a human rights issue, the government could just ignore it because they knew they had another part of the UN that was deeply engaged in discussions with them.” But this dysfunctionality went further. “In Myanmar the UN just repeated the same mistakes it made in Sri Lanka. There was no level of accountability and responsibility within 368

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the UN as a whole that would have formed a system-wide approach to addressing Myanmar.” As a result, strategies formulated around the spiralling crisis in Rakhine State after 2012 were being implemented discretely from one another, allowing for little symbiosis. Lok-Dessallien said that despite criticism the UN and government had emphasised development as the principal remedy, rather than addressing abusive state policies, Rohingya were continually consulted on any projects or initiatives the UN undertook in the state. But what was the quality of these consultations? It was true that the UN carried out regular assessments of the needs of Rohingya, but was it going further and incorporating the views of Rohingya into wider strategic discussions about their worsening situation? Did the UN’s decision to downplay public advocacy in favour of better access actually reflect the wishes of Rohingya? Even if that deeper dialogue had taken place, Petrie said that so divergent were the various approaches to the crisis by this point that they had anyway become competing and mutually exclusive. Added to that was the false belief that the Country Team was the centre of the overall approach and everyone had to help them, which was a total fallacy because the Country Team and the Resident Coordinator has no oversight over the political and human rights component of the UN.

Amid this developing antagonism between UN agencies, and despite claims by the Resident Coordinator that its principles 369

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were closely adhered to, Human Rights Up Front sank without trace. As Rwanda, Sri Lanka and now Myanmar attested, the idea that an international framework around atrocity crimes could ever really provide a robust preventative to a state’s worst excesses confronted a harder political reality, that of sovereignty. It was clear that the sacrosanct nature of that principle provided not only a shield for the guilty party, but also a convenient obstacle to intervention by states which, save for notable exceptions, seldom saw sufficient gains to be made from stepping into a far-off country’s nightmare. Internationalism had its limits, and in Myanmar the problem was compounded by the existence of a political transition that the usual interventionist nations had invested so much in. The shift away from overt military rule might have offered a headline story for the wonders of Western influence, not to mention a new investment frontier, yet that might all be threatened by intervening to save a minority group. Was it worth the risk? Or should Western actors just hope that this would soon blow over, and that Suu Kyi, being Suu Kyi, would fix the mess? “I had the sense that the British in particular were very much responsive to what she needed and wanted without realising that it was necessary to challenge her”, Petrie told me. “They embraced her completely, they had people working with her. They should have seen her authoritarianism and how little prepared she was to govern. They were much too passive – they had the greatest leverage and they never used it.” The delicate dynamic that had emerged during the transition was premised on a belief that making concessions to the 370

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military and downplaying international exposure of its abuses would strengthen the position of those who had taken it upon themselves to aid the military’s reform. What appeared to have been left out of the equation, despite in particular the UN’s long experience with the military, was the likelihood that the generals would take that feeble stance as evidence that they could control the narrative around the violence. By encouraging a reluctance among UN and diplomatic actors to break with the fraying line that the democratisation process was progressing, the military could then influence the kind of information reaching concerned governments and international watchdogs in Geneva or New York. That would in turn obfuscate a true reading of the gravity of the situation unfolding in Rakhine State. Had these Western actors taken better note of the contours of the public response to the first ARSA attacks, then maybe there would have been no option but to sound the alarm. A popular view inside Myanmar held that the insurgency wasn’t merely a distinct faction within the Rohingya community, but was representative of the consensus interests of that entire community. All therefore needed to go. It was clear around this time too that governments in Europe and elsewhere that had championed the transition had failed to understand the growing divergence in interpretations of just what democracy meant to the different communities of Myanmar. The vocal nationalist lobby that rallied in support of the military’s campaign seemed to see the cleansing of the Rohingya not as a derailment of the transition, but rather a step closer to an ideal democratic 371

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state. Buddhism was evidently not the only thing at risk in a modernising society; also under threat was the political standing of communities that saw themselves as legitimate claimants to rights long denied to them. Should the transition have brought about a true levelling of the playing field, enfranchising the Rohingya and upending a supposedly age-old hierarchy in the country’s west, then the position of other communities would, so it went, be weakened. Claims to citizenship by Rohingya had grown in volume during the transition, yet citizenship was not being viewed merely as a device to elevate Rohingya to a position equal to that of other communities, but to usurp those positions. Violence was therefore a way to prevent that, and to secure democratic rights for those who really deserved them, whether Rakhine, Bamar, or other citizens. That construal meant that the military, in its campaign against Rohingya, could proceed with a degree of public support that it hadn’t received to the same degree anywhere before – and not just then, but in the future too, perhaps. If the nature of public opinion at home had emboldened the military, then perhaps so too did the quiet and guarded public stance of UN in-country teams and diplomats, who felt they still had some leverage over the military. Yet that seemed to miss the fact that the military’s strategy in Rakhine State was mutating, from the structural violence it had exercised through the camps and the ghettos to its more physical expression: massacres, mass rapes and razed villages. The internal UN report on Sri Lanka three years earlier had asked whether the non-confrontational position the UN 372

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took on the intensifying assault might have encouraged the army to escalate the violence. With little surprise, the same questions began to be asked in Myanmar after the October 2016 attacks, tempered only by the understanding that the UN had, by that point, lost whatever tenuous influence over the military it once may have enjoyed. Yet in the broader silence from Western actors that followed, rooted in a deep reluctance to risk their stake in the transition, might the military have seen a green light to escalate things further, should a future incident provide it with the necessary justification?

In late November 2016, a little over a month after the violence began, the New Light of Myanmar went to publication with an opinion piece headed “A Flea Cannot Make A Whirl Of Dust, But – ”. By this point, the censor board had been obsolete for three years and the information ministry that oversees the press had come under civilian control. Journalists were publishing frontline reports on military offensives in Shan State, and the culture of openness first signalled by the Irrawaddy Literary Festival in 2012 had, with some important caveats – not least the blackout in northern Rakhine State that began after ARSA’s first attack – continued to flower. But so too had an increasingly sinister development in Myanmar’s media sphere. The article began: “As per nature, we all want to live in peace and stability. Somehow, some want others to live differently. These people make our environment unstable and plunge it into chaos.” 373

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Its author, Khin Maung Oo, was something of a polymath whose writing ranged in focus from the dangers of drink driving to an appreciation of the role teachers played in educating the young. He had a flair for the expressive, if spare, opener: “In spite of our advancing ages, we are still reminiscent of our younger days”; or, “Every individual loves his or her life, by nature”. At other times, he would grow reflective. In the November 2016 article he lamented the evolution of the information age, one that had arrived late in Myanmar. “Very often, a childish idea occurs to me about whether it would be better for us to have never seen any bad news. How impossible! Our planet is not a utopia, an imaginary place that exists only in mind.” There was a school text he remembered that posited the question of whether a world in which the climate was the same all over would mean that flowers and trees grew alike, and that people too would be the same. “What a dull world this would be! Fortunately this is not so. Because of the change of climate on the earth, the people change too. Their habits change and their ways of living are different.” He continued: “Oh, quite right in saying so! We are in favor of nature, having places of pleasure to live, abundance of edible foods, fruits and vegetables, enormous natural resources to exploit and use. So our natural world is a pleasant and lovable place per se for all beings to peacefully dwell together.” But in reality, things were not so harmonious. Within that salubrious world were rotten apples. “Simultaneously, the nature gives us bad guys who are morally bad and wishing to cause trouble or harm – villains”. 374

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Two days before Khin Maung Oo’s article appeared, the head of the UNHCR in Bangladesh told reporters that the military’s sweep of northern Rakhine State, which by that stage had left more than a thousand buildings razed in Rohingya villages, had as its “ultimate goal” the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya.14 Prince Zeid al-Hussein, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, noted the “devastating cruelty” visited upon Rohingya, and asked: “What kind of ‘clearance operation’ is this? What national security goals could possibly be served by this?”15 However, the counter-narrative that had developed inside Myanmar, which pivoted around the conviction that it was not the military but Rohingya who were the chief aggressors, was intensifying. “Extremists, terrorists, ultra-opportunists and aggressive criminals can be likened as fleas that we greatly loathe for their stench and for sucking our blood”, Khin Maung Oo’s article continued. “Our country is also facing the danger of the human fleas. A flea cannot make a whirl of dust, but they are trying to combine with each other to amass their force.” The primary goal of these parasites was to destroy national unity and strength, through physical attacks, rumour and subversion – a well-oiled propaganda campaign driven by the sob stories told by fleeing Rohingya, and breathlessly taken up by the international community. “We should not underestimate this enemy. At such a time when the country is moving toward a federal democratic nation, with destructive elements in all surroundings, we need to constantly be wary of the dangers of detestable human fleas.” 375

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If the military’s retaliatory campaign in the villages of northern Rakhine State turned more eyes to the brutality with which it freely went to work on minority groups, then the rhetoric from civilians inside Myanmar that drew no reaction from the government might have signalled the steady normalisation of a deepening hatred. Sitagu Sayadaw, one of Myanmar’s most respected monks, later assured soldiers during a sermon in Kayin State that their conscience should not be disturbed by events in the west of the country. He recounted the story of an ancient Sri Lankan king who had suffered anguish after his army’s slaughter of Hindus in battle against a Tamil ruler, and was accordingly counselled by Buddhist clerics. “Don’t worry, king, it’s a little bit of sin. Even though you killed millions of people, they were only one and a half real human beings.” If certain thresholds have to first be passed for a campaign of mass violence to garner popular support, then October 2016 will have marked a pivotal moment, after which the train of events that led to the military’s subsequent, vastly more seismic, assault on the Rohingya the following year was set in motion. The effect of the October 2016 violence, both ARSA’s provocation and the military’s response, was to further shift the moral calculus in the direction of a position that saw violence as legitimate. There were indeed voices of dissent against the developing narrative of fleeing Rohingya as peddlers of lies – “We have seen the devastation caused by this criminal military against our people for many years”, the Karen Women’s Organisation later wrote.16 “This is the story 376

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of our nightmares and must be stopped immediately” – yet these voices were marginal, threatened and up against a formidable tide of contrary opinion. No one knew where that flipping of the victim–aggressor dynamic might end up, but as the months passed, discussions around what all this could portend were being had with a new urgency. An April 2017 internal report, written to advise the UN on its by then highly tenuous role in Rakhine State, warned of the high likelihood of another ARSA attack in the subsequent six months, and told that it would, with little doubt, provoke a similarly fierce response.17 The previous year’s assault had produced positive results for the military, and it would feel emboldened by the response it received: the broad support of the local population in the campaign, and the passivity of the international bodies supposedly there to encourage it to break with a deep culture of abuse and impunity. The violence between Rohingya and Rakhine mobs in 2012 may have heralded a new phase in the security of Rohingya, but the emergence of ARSA in 2016, the brazenness with which commentators were now publicly dehumanising Rohingya, and the legitimation of violence by senior monks pushed the Rohingya into a vastly more precarious position.

Ten months had passed between the first ARSA attack and the morning in early August 2017 when the village of Zay Di Pyin was enclosed in barbed wire. Around the same time 377

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that the first rumours of the barricading began to circulate, reports came through that new battalions of soldiers had been deployed to Maungdaw and nearby towns. With increasing frequency, the bodies of dead Rakhine or members of other Buddhist minorities – Mro or Daignet – were being found in the forests and mountains of northern Rakhine State, picked off, so police reported, by ARSA. The group had already been accused of killing informants, whether Hindu or even Rohingya, and the discovery of new victims and new training camps in the forests meant that reinforcements were needed, so the army said. Military transport planes were landing at Sittwe airport and offloading hardware and troops from elite combat units controlled by the central command in Naypyidaw; boats were traveling upriver and dispatching soldiers to the northern townships. The South Korean university professor and human rights specialist Yanghee Lee, who in 2014 had taken over from Tomas Ojea Quintana as UN special rapporteur for Myanmar, issued a report sounding her concern at the build-up, fearful that a repeat of the attacks of the previous year might be in the making.18 The small police post in the Rakhine quarter of Chut Pyin had enough room for the dozen or so soldiers stationed there, but by the middle of August, Ahmed Hussain, the mazhi of the village, noticed that unfamiliar men in fatigues had begun taking up residency in the nearby monastery. A curfew put in place the previous year meant that Rohingya couldn’t venture outside of their compounds after dark, but then soldiers began to pull down the bamboo fences that surrounded them. They 378

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would need to see everything going on inside the Rohingya section of the village, they told residents. Traditional Rohingya homes have their washroom in an outhouse, but the new restrictions, and the lack of the privacy once afforded by the fences, now meant that after nightfall they had to make those arrangements inside the home. The unsettling goings on in the Rakhine quarter kept them vigilant through the night, barely sleeping. All lights were turned off, and the villagers were forced to cook and eat before sundown, after which they quietened their conversations and stayed alert to any movements in the streets outside. After the meeting in the primary school on 22 August, more soldiers began to come and go. They were unusually aggressive, Ahmed said. If they saw Rohingya out walking in the street or nearby fields they would beat them with a frequency and abandon he wasn’t used to. Then Ahmed himself was set upon. A group of soldiers approached a boy tending cattle in a field next to the village. The boy fled and the soldiers began to round up the cattle. Another villager asked Ahmed to try and reason with them. He did, and they dragged him under a nearby tree, knocked him to the ground and began kicking him, leaving his face and stomach bruised. The next day, he arose and, in pain, went about his duties. It was shortly before midday that he saw, across the stretch of fields, the smoke rising up from Zay Di Pyin. As news of ARSA’s attack that morning filtered through to Yangon, emergency meetings were called. The Kofi Annan commission had published its report the day before, and upon 379

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ARSA’s early morning move and the military’s swift reply, it seemed the commission’s work had been done in vain. The Resident Coordinator put out a statement deploring the attacks and urging restraint by security forces. That would be the last public comment she issued on the matter before her tenure finished amid mounting criticism in late October. The participant in the meeting the year before told me of the moment the first reports of the attacks came in. We were deeply concerned and on the morning of 25 August, and for days thereafter, there was a kind of numbness. I spoke with various people that morning and it was really bizarre – they hadn’t digested the potential for these events to unleash what then began.

The frequency of reports coming out from NGO staff in northern Rakhine State began to lessen as the days passed. It seemed as if a veil was being pulled back over the region, blocking any view of what was happening inside the enlarged clearance zone. “There was such limited information getting out but it still felt like business as usual. They just hadn’t thought it all through. We had moved into a crisis situation months before but there was no real planning around what to do.” A familiar feeling of deep unease was returning. One of the immediate priorities was security and to evacuate international staff from northern Rakhine State, 38 0

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fearing that violence could spread. People were saying this wasn’t another tsunami, and I thought it was, in the way that things were now irreversible and could get much worse. I’d gone through this before in Sri Lanka and I felt physically sick.

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REBIRTH AFTER THE KILLINGS

The hillsides of south-eastern Bangladesh, rain-soaked by the August monsoon and within view of the first line of destroyed villages inside Myanmar, were stripped of their trees at such a pace after the exodus began that it seemed as if a parasitic disease was eating its way across the dimpled landscape. The demand for bamboo to build tens of thousands of new shelters meant that plantation farmers far up in the Chittagong Hill Tracts were felling their crop at a rate never before known and loading it onto trucks bound for Kutupalong. Bangladeshi fisherman too saw economic gain from the crisis, charging sometimes $100 for individual Rohingya to be ferried across the Naf River, and taking deposits of jewellery or hard promises of repayment should the fleeing man or woman not have the funds to hand. By the time the number of new refugees had passed 700,000, the camp stretched more than seven kilometres from north to south, breaking only when it threatened to engulf existing hamlets. A single two-lane road, forever choked with rickshaws, cars and lorries, linked it to the town of Cox’s Bazar, twenty kilometres north. You could walk for hours through the warren of endless pathways and dirt tracks that rose and fell over the hills, and save for the identikit tarpaulin shelters 385

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and the bold humanitarian branding on their façade, think you were in a one-storey city. The massive relief operation triggered by the exodus had initially provided scenes of great contrast. Staff from international agencies travelled the route from Cox’s Bazar in Landrovers and minivans, and the drivers of UN and Red Cross trucks carrying goods for delivery were given specific drop-off points inside the camps. Alongside that a local effort developed: men atop lorries piled high with donated clothing threw bundles down onto the puddled ground below, where they were set upon. Food trucks that went out in convoy from town handed out bags of cooked rice as they rolled by, and the fights that broke out as crowds chased and wrestled for the supplies ended with numbers of the hungry falling under the wheel. Within a week of 25 August the north–south road was strewn with ragged clothing either piled up in the dank mud that lined the verges or flattened like carpet into the tarmac. A refugee crisis can, should it be desired, provide ample political opportunity for the host government. Before long banners were appearing along the road into Kutupalong that proclaimed, in English for all visiting journalists and dignitaries to see, the god-like altruism of Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina – eight years in office and, the banners read, the country’s own “Mother of Humanity”. But for all the boasting among her circle of the unrivalled benevolence of the ruling Awami League party, the government’s decision to open the door to Rohingya, having initially tried to seal the border in the days after the ARSA attacks, was a bold one. The finger of land between the Myanmar border and the Bay of 38 6

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Bengal may be rather less densely populated than elsewhere in the country, but it still has many thousands-strong communities of Bangladeshis who for several decades had already shared the area with the old Rohingya refugee population. Even after the October 2016 violence, when a comparatively fewer 65,000 refugees had crossed over, food prices in Teknaf and other towns near the camp began to rise noticeably. By the time I arrived in September the following year, two weeks into the second wave, my local translator didn’t hide his frustration at the more than two-fold increase in prices in the restaurant we often stopped by en route to the crossing point. Hasina’s administration had been quick to make clear that these settlements would not be permanent, and nor would their inhabitants. Brick walls were not allowed; only wood and tarpaulin, easy to dismantle. Rohingya would soon return to Myanmar, and the trees would return to the hillsides. But on the other side of the border, food shortages were worsening and the threat of violence hadn’t abated. Militias made up of Rakhine villagers were being trained by security personnel, thereby signalling to Rohingya that Suu Kyi’s government was willing to delegate the policing of communities to civilians already radicalised by violence, and who might help to deliver future military campaigns. Rohingya thus continued to arrive in Kutupalong for more than a year after August 2017. Towards the northern tip of the camp, signposted by a towering radio mast, is an elevated point that offers an expansive panoramic view of the sprawling, febrile mass that radiates out below. The bulk of the 700,000 or so people who came to form this vast new population had crossed from nearby 387

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Maungdaw township, where more than 200 Rohingya villages were attacked and emptied. But within a month of the start of the exodus, while the military was still going from village to village with gasoline and launchers, Myanmar’s Minister for Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement told a meeting in Sittwe that the government would be taking over the land on which the razed villages had stood. A longstanding Myanmar law meant that any burned land automatically reverted to the state, and this meant too that the ripening paddy around the villages would now be harvested by local authorities. In dozens of villages, bulldozers were brought in to finish the job the flames hadn’t, and they set about flattening any remaining structures. Perhaps it was in preparation for their rebuilding, or perhaps it was simply to destroy evidence of the military’s crimes, and, for future generations, evidence that Rohingya had once lived among these fields. The government’s quick grab of the land fuelled eager debate in the drawn-out aftermath of August 2017 over the motivations behind the campaign. Was this indeed the culmination of a decades-long strategy, driven by a racist ideology, to wipe Rohingya off the national map, each stage carefully designed and executed? Or did the swift appropriation of thousands of hectares, and the announcement two days after the attacks began of a new Special Economic Zone in Maungdaw, signal that business interests were a significant driver too? Or that, at the least, the redevelopment that began after the cleansing, and because of the cleansing, had a bountiful political economy of its own that was intimately tied to what had gone before? Within two months a new public–private body, 38 8

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the Union Enterprise for Humanitarian Assistance, Resettlement and Development in Rakhine, had been formed, and numbers of top crony businesspeople were approached with tenders for the reconstruction effort. Someone had to help with Suu Kyi’s push for broader development of the state: new roads needed to be built, and agricultural productivity improved. The World Bank promised loans to aid that quest, but the same questions that had hounded the UN’s own development-first approach arose: how could the entire population of the state benefit from this funding when three-quarters of a million people had been driven out? Wouldn’t the World Bank inevitably be taking up a position whereby it was facilitating discrimination – if that word justly captured the new reality in western Myanmar – given that a significant portion of the population had been driven beyond the reach of its benefits? Hasina understood that accepting refugees might show her beneficence to a world growing increasingly wary of her government’s authoritarian tendencies. Yet as the security of Rohingya still inside Myanmar continued to diminish and the influx to Bangladesh grew, other concerns came into focus: the threat that young Rohingya men, bereft of a home and uncertain of their future, would be radicalised by the predatory terrorist cells that already had a presence in Bangladesh. There was also the question of how long the international aid effort would be able to sustain this vast and precarious population. By November 2017, with upwards of 5,000 Rohingya still crossing each week, Hasina signed a deal with the Myanmar government to begin repatriation. By early the following year Bangladeshi authorities sent Naypyidaw the names of some 389

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8,000 would-be returnees, none of whom had asked to go on the list. Yet even so, only a few hundred were approved, and the remainder told they were ineligible to return. Meanwhile, as the talks with Naypyidaw continued, Hasina’s government was devising an audacious – many thought reckless – plan to relocate 100,000 refugees to a low-lying sand island in a cyclone corridor just off the southern coast. By April the following year forklift trucks and building materials were being shipped over the narrow stretch of ocean to the island to begin work. No one I spoke to in the year after the exodus knew what would become of the Rohingya in Bangladesh, not least Rohingya themselves. Would the island-bound refugees remain there indefinitely? Could they visit the mainland, or did the water around them mark the limits of their movement? And what of those who stayed in Kutupalong? Hasina’s government had been clear that their length of stay was finite, but did it really believe that its counterpart in Myanmar had either the ability or will to protect a population so recently driven out? Within ten months of the start of the exodus, and as the Hasina administration was growing more vocal on the need to repatriate the refugees, the UN came to be persuaded that the time had come to begin talks with Myanmar about the potential for Rohingya to return voluntarily. In April, a senior UN official had visited Myanmar and warned that the continued flight of Rohingya made it clear that any repatriation would be highly risky.1 But by June, a Memorandum of Understanding with Naypyidaw was signed. That agreement, so the UN claimed, would begin the process of addressing what it was 390

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that was still forcing Rohingya to leave, thereby identifying the changes needed to allow for their safe return.2 Rohingya in Bangladesh received the news of the deal with the same shock as many onlookers, but their response had an additional layer: once again, none had been consulted on it, and the text of the agreement was not made public; they only found out after it was signed. Protests were staged in the camps and petitions handed to UN agencies there. The UN reassured the growing mass of aggrieved camp inhabitants that it hadn’t taken a steering role, but instead was there to support government-led efforts to assess what conditions would be conducive to a secure repatriation process. But all this was news to Rohingya, who knew only of the new camps being built near Maungdaw to accommodate returnees – barracklike compounds surrounded by high wire-mesh fences that echoed the internment camps around Sittwe – and of the bulldozing of half-burned villages and construction of military posts on the cleared land. Where would they be housed, and what security force would possibly guarantee them protection? Both the military and Border Guard Police had worked hand in hand to propel the most concentrated refugee outflow seen anywhere in decades, and already hostile Rakhine civilians were being equipped with arms by those same security forces. And so a scene began to play out whereby Rohingya, who had fled months before, were the subject of discussions – into which they had no input – between the UN and Myanmar government over what was needed for them to cross back into a landscape of charred villages and mass graves from which refugees were still leaving. 39 1

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Ahmed Hussein remembered a feeling of growing anger inside the camp around this time. After hearing of the deal, he was called to a meeting along with all the mazhis from his block where a UN staff member explained the points contained in the agreement. “But the meeting happened after the agreement was already signed”, he told me. “She said that if you agree to return we will help you, but there’ll be no pressure to go back – it’s only if you want to.” “But”, he paused, “there’s no option for us to return. We worry we’ll be forced back.” The UN maintained that any repatriation should only be done voluntarily, but that did little to quell the rising fears of Rohingya in the camp. Similar promises had been made, and broken, before. It had taken only two months following the end of the 1978 pogrom against Rohingya for the UNHCR to announce it would begin assisting the administration in Dhaka with what it claimed would be their voluntary return. Around a quarter of a million refugees had arrived in Bangladesh, converging on Kutupalong, but the Bangladesh government was clear about its wish to see them repatriated as quickly as possible. Reports soon emerged of security personnel attacking Rohingya and limiting their food aid to a point at which they had few options other than to go back, or else face starvation.3 Within a year of the exodus, Rohingya were perishing in the camps at a rate four times higher than the national average in Bangladesh. Thousands opted to return, knowing that the level of assistance couldn’t sustain them. Yet the repatriation agreement, with its cornerstone pledge that any returns would be purely voluntary, remained intact. The 392

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UNHCR was roundly criticised for failing both to denounce what were effectively forced returns, and to leverage its influence over the Bangladesh government to improve conditions and provide adequate food aid. Shortly after the second pogrom began in late 1991, the Bangladesh government again began restricting food aid to refugees, thereby compelling thousands who had fled only weeks or months before to move back across the border. But despite all this, and despite no evident improvement in security for Rohingya in Rakhine State, by the middle of 1993 the UNHCR had signed an agreement with the government to assist with repatriation, and said it would “undertake promotional activities to motivate refugees to return home”.4 The fear in the camp now was that this might repeat itself. Rohingya I spoke with felt that the sense of powerlessness they had known in Myanmar was almost being replicated in Bangladesh – they could protest, and did, but it was only ever after the fact, once a decision had been taken for them. Like 1992, the demand for citizenship upon return had been voiced loudly by protest leaders, but when the details of the June 2017 agreement eventually made it out, it was clear the UN had again won few vital concessions from the Myanmar government. It contained no provision that provided a clear route to citizenship. Instead, the process for verifying citizenship claims was left in the hands of a government that, as the experience in November the previous year had shown, saw only a fraction of the population as even eligible to return home and begin the process, let alone be given any indication they might succeed. Nor did it make clear that Rohingya would be allowed 393

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freedom of movement outside of Rakhine State. Instead, as before, it seemed they would be returning to much the same set of conditions they had left, save for the increased military presence and the even deeper communal hostility. The language in the agreement provided further cause for anger: the word “Rohingya” wasn’t mentioned once; instead, they were referred to as “displaced persons” or “returnees”. And although, as far as the UN was concerned, repatriation should always be voluntary, the noises coming from Dhaka suggested that they might one day soon feel themselves being pushed out of their huts and back across the border. Only a tiny fraction of Rohingya I spoke to in Bangladesh in the year after the violence had voiced a desire to cross back over anytime soon. Yet still, it was only those who would return almost at whatever cost that seemed able to leverage a degree of control over their future. Despite the periodic protests, it felt at times that a sense not just of resignation, but of a deeper fatalism, had settled over many in the camp. They all wanted to go home, and they wanted justice and some kind of compensation – financial, perhaps, or just the recognition of what had happened, that this mustn’t be forgotten. But as to what would come next, they felt it was no longer in their hands. The military in Myanmar had become a faraway monster, a brooding, malevolent presence that held the mountains and plains across the river. There was a darkness over there. But their present situation too was precarious. Who knew what the mercurial government in Bangladesh would do next? And so, they said, it would have to be Allah who now guided and protected them. So much 394

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had already been taken away, and their faith should no longer be placed in human hands.

Increasingly evasive as international criticism mounted, Suu Kyi was speaking to the media less and less by early 2018. European countries targeted Min Aung Hlaing and various other senior-level commanders with sanctions, and options for their referral to the International Criminal Court were tabled. The army chief’s explanation of the “clearance” a week after it began had been frank: the “Bengali issue had persisted for many years,” he told a fundraising ceremony in Naypyidaw for displaced Rakhine, “but it had never been concluded”.5 Yet still, in the media’s eyes, the chief architect of the cleansing would remain in the wings while Suu Kyi held the stage. Asked in February 2018 whether the Nobel laureate might one day be charged with crimes against humanity, the UN Special Rapporteur for Myanmar, Yanghee Lee, replied: “I’m afraid so.”6 Suu Kyi was the fallen idol, the peacenik turned possible génocidaire, and it was of much less interest to unpack the savagery of an army chief than to explore the moral inconsistency of a Nobel-winning abettor of that ultimate crime. Everyone had heard the story of a minority population being massacred, but few had seen a volte face as spectacular, and baffling, as hers. Coverage of the crisis became as much about its direct victims as about The Lady. As she sought to wall herself off from the interrogation of the press, so too did her government. By September, her spokesperson announced that he would no longer be taking 395

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calls from journalists; the only way to speak with him now would be at bi-weekly press conferences. That had continued a gradual retreat by the NLD government after it came to office. The seven NGO staff who signed the letter of warning to diplomats late in 2016 remembered that towards the end of the war in Sri Lanka, as troops were pushing deeper into the north, the channels of communication between the Mahinda Rajapaksa administration and international actors there began to constrict. Yet they could still just get through. They might have needed to press much harder, but even as the army’s assault was gathering a frightening new momentum, the government was still meeting their demands to keep some kind of dialogue going, fruitless as it may have ultimately been. However, in Myanmar, they found that after the change in government, their access to its senior offices became virtually non-existent. Ministries were being merged and new roles given to inexperienced apparatchiks, resulting in administrative havoc. But, one aid worker stationed in Myanmar at the time told me, communication with the NLD had never been easy. The party had been reluctant to engage with international NGOs over the Rohingya even while in opposition. That continued after it came to power, and by the time ARSA first struck its doors were shut almost entirely. This exacerbated the insecurity, if not paranoia, that many felt during the information blackouts that began after both the 2016 and 2017 violence, and as the accounts of atrocities made their way out of Bangladesh. The crop of Western diplomatic missions that had remained tight-lipped as the cleansing proceeded were anxious 396

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to keep those channels open. Should they close, and should the liberalising influence they thought they could still wield diminish further, then Suu Kyi would move closer to China, and perhaps closer to the military too. In November of 2017, while villages were still being torched in Maungdaw township, British Prime Minister Theresa May had gone on television to reassure onlookers that her government “would do everything possible to stop this appalling and inhuman destruction of the Rohingya people”.7 Bold words, but there was no acknowledgement of its inert response to warning signs in the years prior, nor of its engagement with the military that persisted even after the 2016 attacks. It hadn’t been until nearly a month into the second wave of massacres the following year that Britain’s programme of training army officers in English language and the arts of civil leadership and democracy – one reward offered for the military’s apparent retreat from power – would be suspended. The foreign secretary eventually gave his support for a referral of military leaders to the International Criminal Court, but there remained a dislocation between the rhetoric coming from London and that from diplomats inside the country who continued their purposeful tip-toeing. Either way, whatever gentle leverage they felt could be exercised through the quiet diplomacy they pursued had by then diminished.

Via text message from London, I got back in touch with Abdul, the young Rohingya man in whose house I had lunch during my visit to Buthidaung several years before. The violence 397

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in the township had been less severe than in Maungdaw to its west, at least in the number of sites targeted, but that was of little comfort to those in the several dozen villages outside Buthidaung that were razed to the ground. Nor was it to Rohingya who remained inside the town itself. Abdul still lived at the house where we had met, and continued to communicate with Rakhine he had known before the first ARSA attack, but his radius of movement had greatly narrowed: “We struggle as in a jail”, he wrote one day when I asked if he still felt able to walk through the town. UN officials would visit Buthidaung, but he knew what would happen if he or other Rohingya spoke to them without permission from authorities. His own sense of vulnerability was vastly more pronounced, evident even in the clipped lines of text he sent through: “We very take care not to disturb government or Rakhine”; “Our mind is always frightened”. If I didn’t respond straight away, he’d write again: “How do you see our situation? Bad or good?” “Say something bro.” He had an illness – he didn’t say what – but that final route out of Buthidaung, from the river jetty direct to the hospital in Sittwe, that had just about remained open for Rohingya past the 2012 violence was now closed. “Step by step dead.” ARSA had had something of an idea of the life they envisaged for Rohingya after their early morning announcement in August 2017, for it was written in the goals they affirmed time and again, via typed statements and tweets sent by their enigmatic media wing: recognition of the rights of Rohingya; dignity for all ethnic minorities in Myanmar. But while their attack hadn’t caused the flight of nearly three-quarters of a 398

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million of the very people whose rights they claimed guardianship of – the military had done that – it provided all the justification that Min Aung Hlaing and the army’s Western Command needed. International attention on the Rohingya might have been the first step in the group’s nebulous gameplan, and indeed that was achieved, if only temporarily. But all across the north of Rakhine State there were grave sites, not victory grounds. Rights groups reported massacres of Hindu villagers by ARSA on the same day it attacked police posts in August 2017,8 and on annotated satellite imagery released by human rights investigators in the months after August 2017, the many red marks that dotted the landscape, clustering near Chut Pyin, Min Gyi and hundreds of locations elsewhere, showed just how far the militants had got. Theresa May had said in her November 2017 address that the violence “looked like ethnic cleansing”. Little over a year on from the start of the military’s campaign, when the UN General Assembly held its annual summit in New York, legal experts who had been drafted in by the Human Rights Council to investigate the violence concluded on the basis of arguments in past international tribunals – Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia – that what had taken place in Myanmar was a genocide, and that if the generals were ever hauled in front of a judge, that should be the charge to be investigated.9 They wrote that the killings and expulsion had been only the more public expression of a decades-long effort to diminish the life of Rohingya so much that the community would no longer exist. Whether the August 2017 campaign was the culmination of a grand plan, or whether it had begun as an over-zealous response to 399

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the ARSA attacks that then became an opportunity to speed this process up dramatically, mattered not for their final conclusion. The assault, and the gradual ridding of Rohingya from Myanmar in the decades before, had shown intent for the core goal of a genocide: the destruction, in whole or in part, of a group defined racially, ethnically and religiously. By phone I asked Ahmed Hussein what he thought of the report’s conclusion. He and the other elders in Thangkali had discussed it after the news broke, and received it somewhat coolly. “We’d like to thank the UN and other organisations who speak for us, but nothing is changing and the government is not listening to anyone.” He spoke of the camps around Maungdaw they would return to if they went back, and those further south near Sittwe where Rohingya had been confined now for six years. The frequency of the reports being published on the violence and its aftermath was mounting by the week but inside the camp in Bangladesh there was a stasis, if not something worse – the fear of a return, sharpened by persisting rumours of Rohingya still being taken from the spared villages in the north, not to be seen again. He wondered how and if the work of international bodies would ever become something more substantive. I could sense a fatigue, not just in Ahmed but in many of those I spoke to in the camp: they had told their story so many times and wanted something from it. Ahmed was surrounded by the survivors of Chut Pyin, and in a sense the young man now bore some responsibility for them. I remembered the teenage girl across from his hut who hobbled on crutches in her doorway, her leg locked 400

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straight after a bullet shattered her kneecap, and the twentyfive-year-old woman a few doors up who was raped that afternoon in 2017 by soldiers and who discovered upon regaining consciousness that her husband had been killed. For those who made it out, Ahmed’s home had become a meeting place – he would sit against the wall in the darkened space as they recounted their stories, and said afterwards that he felt a heaviness that would not lift.

A year before ARSA’s October 2016 attack, on a visit to Maungdaw, my Rakhine friend and I had driven out of a Na Ta La village south of the town one afternoon and came to a road that cut through a wide plain of paddy fields. Up ahead a line of hills climbed and fell across the horizon. Soon after joining the road we passed a group of six men in a cleared corner of one field playing chinlone, leaping high off the ground as they scissor-kicked the small woven wooden ball through the air and over the net. We slowed to watch them play and saw that it was a mixed group, Rohingya and Rakhine. Behind them a rainbow arced over the hills. It had been raining all morning, easing only an hour before, and the droplets that lingered high in the sky had conspired with the brilliant late afternoon light to form a vivid backdrop. All across that region, for twenty years and more, a social engineering project of the most cynical design had been undertaken. The myriad points of blight on the landscape there – the stolen land on which the Na Ta La villages were built, the checkpoints and the ritual humiliation, the freely abusive 401

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police and army – testified to the existence of a state whose manipulation of the population there knew no moral limits. Yet to do as these men in the corner of the paddy field had then done, to keep a connection going across an ethnic and religious divide that powerful forces had tried so hard and for so long to deepen, showed that these cleavages had once mattered less than some might hope. A genocide does not begin with the killings; nor do they mark its denouement. Destruction is followed by rebirth, and a little over two years after that encounter, with much of the land now wiped clean, members of the Rakhine State parliament voted unanimously to press the government to block any resettlement of the hundreds of thousands of Rohingya who had fled southern Maungdaw, should they ever return. Lawmakers in Naypyidaw needed to consider the country’s sovereignty and the safety of Rakhine, as well as, they were told, the rule of law. Rakhine politicians spoke of the expulsion of more than 700,000 people with a sense of relief. Nothing in the year after the exodus seemed to evoke more chillingly the mental state that had driven the genocide than the fact that the sum total of such enormous human loss could be expressed in the language of gain or progress. A year on from the start of the violence, at a World Economic Forum event, Suu Kyi too talked of security and rule of law. That last refrain, long a favourite of hers, had by then been emptied of any true meaning. There are of course ways in which we, with hindsight, might think that the situation could have been handled 402

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better. But we believe that for the sake of long-term stability and security we have to be fair to all sides. The rule of law must apply to everybody; we cannot choose and pick who should be protected by the rule of law.10

So it went. Anyway, there would be little for returnees to go back to: hundreds of villages in southern Maungdaw were no longer. Where Rohingya and Rakhine communities had once shared the same village, photographs taken from above in the aftermath of the violence showed carefully demarcated lines between the dark roofs of the Rakhine houses that remained intact and the grey-black blur of the wasted ashen quarters that lay alongside them. In a flicker, three-quarters of the entire Rohingya population of western Myanmar was driven out; whoever was left behind lived in camps or in confined villages, or, like Abdul, lived in fear of living as he had.

It had taken the massive displacement of Rohingya to finally bring a semblance of unity to the disjointed and feeble Western approach to Myanmar. Yet the economic sanctions applied to Min Aung Hlaing and other senior-ranking generals and the threat of an international tribunal seemed to quicken the military’s effort to get hold of the narrative once and for all. There had been so much misinformation, it claimed over and again, and on the one-year anniversary of the 2017 campaign it released a booklet that offered the apparently definitive account of events in western Myanmar, from the “start of the Bengali intrusion into Rakhine State” 403

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up to the attempted vanquishing of ARSA.11 In detailing the legacy of British rule and the fractured society that was left behind, it sought to establish the origin story of Myanmar’s present-day affliction, and it raised a flag for the work the military had undertaken in the decades after independence to heal those wounds. Dotted throughout were photographs of Rakhine slain by ARSA, and of Min Aung Hlaing briefing Western dignitaries on the true nature of the threats facing the nation. There were pointed appeals to the public to work hand in hand with the military: “All citizens are to bear the fact in their mind that they, and not only the army, are responsible for the country’s defence.” As he ran stumbling through the smoke-filled streets of Chut Pyin on the afternoon of 27 August 2017, Ahmed had seen that doctrine come to life before him. Four of his old school friends were among the groups of Rakhine who joined the military in the attack. They had attended the primary school in the Rakhine quarter of the village where scores of men, women and children were later killed. Aged eleven, they began at the high school over in Zay Di Pyin. A culture of discrimination practised by teachers meant that Rohingya students were forced into a perpetual state of wariness, Ahmed said, but outside of school, away from institutional norms, it was different. He would often walk the three miles to Zay Di Pyin with the Rakhine friends, and they played football together or sat in the teashop after class finished for the day. He hadn’t been altogether surprised to see those friends among the hundreds of soldiers that entered Chut Pyin. The sharp rupturing in relations after 2012 meant they had long 404

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since stopped talking to one another, and in the silence left by all that was not said in the subsequent years Ahmed was able to imagine how they might one day turn on him. He was oddly unmoved too by their participation that afternoon: it hadn’t been their decision, he told me – they had just been following instructions passed down from religious elders, and had been pressed into service by the relentless casting of their neighbours as a threat. The ARSA attacks were proof that these warnings had been valid all along, and the appearance of his friends signalled that the military’s exhortations had finally been acknowledged. “Wars will be won only when the people participate in it”, the booklet had said. I’d read the booklet, the work of the army’s Directorate of Public Relations and Psychological Warfare, over the course of several days. From dry descriptive text it moved to the kind of freewheeling prose that had been deployed by the propaganda technicians of the old junta: evocative imagery cut through with severe warnings; baleful messages that darkened otherwise whimsical passages of writing. It ended with a nod to one of Aesop’s Fables, “You Are Beautiful As You Are”, which told the story of a crow who hated his feathers and so donned the cast-offs of a nearby peacock, only to be told by his fellow birds to be grateful for what he had. The booklet’s take on the fable went: Every living being desires to live where the water is clear and the grass is green. Not only humans, but animals also look for greener pastures. But although one can move to another land or sea, the origin and glory of a race 405

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cannot change. Crows cannot become peacocks just by inhabiting the same place as peacocks.

The original fable, written more than two millennia ago, was a hymn to the belief, common at the time, in the immutable state of man; that one would always remain as one was born. Yet its central tenet – to be confident in your own skin – had been twisted by the authors of the booklet into a cautionary tale of the treachery of those who tried to tamper with the “natural state”. The peacock had been a symbol of national resistance in Myanmar since the time of the kings, and it later adorned the party flag of the National League for Democracy. There were intruders who now wanted its plumage for themselves. This raw narrative of theft and deceit that drove the cleansing of Rohingya was told with such force on Myanmar’s emergence from the authoritarian darkness that whatever shared lives and old ties had once bound neighbour and neighbour together in the country’s west could no longer hold.

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NOTES

1: A popular massacre 1

AFP. (2017). “Min Aung Hlaing Urges Unity over Rakhine Crisis.” Frontier Myanmar. 17 September 2017. Accessed at https://frontier myanmar.net/en/min-aung-hlaing-urges-unity-over-rakhine-crisis 2 MSF. “MSF surveys estimate that at least 6,700 Rohingya were killed during the attacks in Myanmar.” Médecins Sans Frontières. 12 December 2017. Accessed at https://www.msf.org/ myanmarbangladesh-msf-surveys-estimate-least-6700-rohingyawere-killed-during-attacks-myanmar 3 Htet Naing Zaw. (2017). “Mass Exodus of Muslims from Rakhine ‘Not Honest’: Govt Spokesperson.” The Irrawaddy. 6 October 2017. Accessed at www.irrawaddy.com/news/burma/mass-exodusmuslims-rakhine-not-honest-govt-spokesperson.html

3: Sons of whose soil? 1

Yegar, Moshe. (1972). The Muslims of Burma: A Study of a Minority Group. Otto Harrassowitz. Page 6. 2 Ibid. Page 2. 3 Tin Maung Maung Than. (1993). “Some Aspects of Indians in Rangoon.” In Indian Communities in Southeast Asia. Sandhu, K.S. and Mani, A. (Eds). ISEAS Times Academic Press. Page 586. 4 Smith, D.E. (1965). Religion and Politics in Burma. Princeton University Press. Page 27. 5 Spiro, M.E. (1970). Buddhism and Society: A Great Tradition and Its Burmese Vicissitudes. Harper & Row, p. 379. 6 Smeaton, D.M. (1887). The Loyal Karens of Burma. Kegan Paul, Trench. Page 4. Quoted in Smith, D.E. (1965). Religion and Politics in Burma. Princeton University Press. Page 45. 7 Smith, D.E. (1965). Religion and Politics in Burma. Princeton University Press. Pages 92–93. 407

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

8

Riot Inquiry Committee. (1939). “Final Report of the Riot Inquiry Committee.” Supdt., Govt. Printing and Stationery, Burma. Page 6. 9 Ibid. Page 8. 10 Ibid. Appendix 2, page x.

4: The art of belonging 1

2 3 4 5

6 7

8

9 10

11

Minye Kaungbon. (1994). Pages 168, 178. Quoted in Houtman, G. (1999). Mental Culture in Burmese Crisis Politics: Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy. ICLAA Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa Monograph Series No. 33. Page 68. Accessed at www.burmalibrary.org/docs19/Houtman-1999Mental_Culture_in_Burmese_Crisis_Politics.pdf Lieberman, V.B. (1978). “Ethnic Politics in Eighteenth-Century Burma.” Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 12, No. 3. Page 457. Smith, M. (1991). Burma: Insurgency and the Politics of Ethnicity. Zed Books. Pages 34–35. Scott, J.C. (2009). The Art of Not Being Governed. Yale University Press. Page 238. Buadaeng, K. (2007). “Ethnic Identities of the Karen Peoples in Burma and Thailand.” In Identity Matters: Ethnic and Sectarian Conflict. Peacock, J.L., Thornton, P.M. and Inman, P.B. (Eds). Berghahn. Page 75. Thiong’o, N.W. (1986). Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. James Currey. Page 16. Cheesman, N. (2015). “Problems with Facts about Rohingya Statelessness.” E-International Relations. Accessed at www.e-ir.info/ 2015/12/08/problems-with-facts-about-rohingya-statelessness/ Callahan, M. (2004). “Language, Territoriality and Belonging in Burma.” In Boundaries and Belonging: States and Societies in the Struggle to Shape Identities and Local Practices. Migal, J.S. (Ed.). Cambridge University Press. Page 108. Taylor, R.H. (2015). General Ne Win: A Political Biography. ISEAS Publishing. Page 484. Gravers, M. (1999). Nationalism as Political Paranoia in Burma: An Essay on the Historical Practice of Power. NIAS Report No. 11. Copenhagen. Nordic Institute of Asian Studies. Page 56. Smith, M. (1991). Burma: Insurgency and the Politics of Ethnicity. Page 37. 408

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

5: Us and them 1

Gutman, P. (2001). Burma’s Lost Kingdoms: Splendours of Arakan. Orchid Press, p. 21. 2 Harvey, G.E. (1967). History of Burma: From the Earliest Times to 10 March 1824: The Beginning of the English Conquest. Frank Cass. Page 267. 3 Seekins, D.M. (2006). Historical Dictionary of Burma (Myanmar). The Scarecrow Press. Page 278. 4 Ibid. 5 Charney, M.W. (1999). “Where Jambudipa and Islamdom Converged: Religious Change and the Emergence of Buddhist Communalism in Early Modern Arakan, 15th–19th Centuries.” PhD thesis. University of Michigan. Page 260. Accessed at www.burmalibrary.org/docs21/Charney-1999_thesis-Where_ Jambudipa&Islamdom_Converged-red-tu.pdf 6 Scott, J.C. (2009). The Art of Not Being Governed. Yale University Press. Page 7. 7 Haque, S.A. (2012). “An Assessment of the Question of Rohingyas’ Nationality: Legal Nexus Between Rohingya and the State”, Page 2. Accessed at www.burmalibrary.org/docs14/ARAKAN-%20 Question_of_Rohingyas_Nationality-red.pdf 8 Arendt, H. (1986). The Origins of Totalitarianism. Andre Deutsch. Page 300.

6: Ruling the unruly 1 Charney, M.W. (1998). “Crisis and Reformation in a Maritime Kingdom of Southeast Asia: Forces of Instability and Political Disintegration in Western Burma (Arakan), 1603–1701.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 41, No. 2. Page 164. 2 A copy of the original document was provided to me by Phil Rees and Al Jazeera. I am grateful for this and the accompanying information. 3 Development of Border Areas and National Races. Website of the Embassy of Myanmar in Brazil. Accessed at www.myanmarbsb. org/development_of_border_areas_and.htm 4 Pearn, R.B. (1952). “The Mujahid Revolt in Arakan.” Research Department, Foreign Office. 31 December 1952. Page 9. Accessed 409

NOTES TO C HAPTER 6

at http://web.archive.org/web/20160430034640/http:/www. networkmyanmar.org/images/stories/PDF18/Pearn-1952-rev.pdf 5 Adloff, R. and Thompson, V. (1955). Minority Problems in Southeast Asia. Stanford University Press, Page 154. 6 Yegar, M. (2006). “The Crescent in Arakan.” Accessed at www. kaladanpress.org/index.php/scholar-column-mainmenu-36/36rohingya/216-the-crescent-in-arakan.html 7 Yegar, M. (2002). Between Integration and Succession: The Muslim Communities of the Southern Philippines, Southern Thailand and Western Burma/Myanmar. Lexington Books. Page 35. 8 Pearn (1952). “The Mujahid Revolt in Arakan.” Page 9. 9 Ibid. 10 Chin Human Rights Organisation. Threats to Our Existence: Persecution of Ethnic Chin Christians in Burma. Page xiv. Accessed at www.chro.ca/images/stories/files/PDF/Threats_to_Our_ Existence.pdf 11 New Light of Myanmar. (2011). “Second Regular Session of First Amyotha Hluttaw Continues for 17th Day.” 14 September 2011. Page 9. Accessed at www.burmalibrary.org/docs11/NLM201109-14.pdf 12 UNICEF. “Chin State: A Snapshot of Child Wellbeing.” Page 1. Accessed at www.unicef.org/myanmar/Chin_State_Profile_Final.pdf 13 Chin Human Rights Organisation. Threats to Our Existence. Page 109. 14 New Light of Myanmar (2011), “Second Regular Session of First Amyotha Hluttaw Continues for 17th Day.” Page 9. 15 Ministry for Home and Religious Affairs statement, 16 November 1977. Quoted in Human Rights Watch. (1996). “Burma: The Rohingya Muslims: Ending a Cycle of Exodus?” Accessed at www. refworld.org/docid/3ae6a84a2.html 16 Human Rights Watch. (1996). “Burma: The Rohingya Muslims: Ending a Cycle of Exodus?” Accessed at www.refworld.org/ docid/3ae6a84a2.html 17 Fortify Rights. (2014). “Policies of Persecution: Ending Abusive State Policies Against Muslims in Myanmar.” Page 24. 18 Ibid. 19 Rakhine Inquiry Commission. (2013). “Final Report of Inquiry Commission on Sectarian Violence in Rakhine State.” Cited 410

NOTES TO C HAPTER 6

in Fuller, A., Leaning, J., Mahmood, S.S. and Wroe, E. (2016). “The Rohingya People of Myanmar: Health, Human Rights, and Identity.” The Lancet. Page 5. 20 Ibid. Page 6. 21 See de la Cour-Venning, A., Green, P. and MacManus, T. (2015). Countdown to Annihilation: Genocide in Myanmar. Report by the International State Crime Initiative. 22 Brown, W. (2016). “Where There Is Police, There Is Persecution: Government Security Forces and Human Rights Abuses in Myanmar’s Northern Rakhine State.” Physicians for Human Rights Report, October 2016. Page 9. Accessed at https://s3.amazonaws. com/PHR_Reports/Burma-Rakhine-State-Oct-2016.pdf

7: 2012 1

2

3 4 5 6 7

8

Takaloo. (2011). “Mass Protest around Misuse of the Term ‘Arakan’ Arises in Arakan State.” Narinjara News. Published on BNI International on 1 November 2011. Accessed at http://e-archive. bnionline.net/index.php/news/narinjara/11994-mass-protestaround-misuse-of-the-term-arakan-arises-in-arakan-state.html Rakhine National Defence and Protection Organisation. (1988). Statement released by RNDPO. Accessed at www.maungzarni. net/2013/10/report-of-sentiments-of-rakhine-tai-yin.html Appadurai, A. (2006). Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger. Duke University Press. Page 91. Ibid. Paccima Yatwun. (2012). “What the Rohingya Is.” Author unknown. Not available online. February 2012. Latt, Sai. (2012). “Intolerance, Islam and the Internet in Burma.” New Mandala. Accessed 1 April 2016. Eleven Media. (2012). “Curfew Imposed in Rakhine Township amidst Rohingya Terrorist Attacks.” Eleven Media. 8 June 2012. Accessed at http://aboutarakaneng.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/curfewimposed-in-rakhine-township.html Than Htut Aung. (2012). “I Will Tell the Real Truth (3).” Eleven Media. 26 June 2012. Quoted in Human Rights Watch, All You Can Do Is Pray. Page 25. Accessed at www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/ reports/burma0413webwcover_0.pdf. My requests to interview editors at the Weekly Eleven journal for this book were not granted. 411

NOTES TO C HAPTER 7

9

Allchin, J. (2012). “The Rohingya, Myths and Misinformation.” Democratic Voice of Burma. 22 June 2012. Accessed at www.dvb.no/analysis/the-rohingya-myths-and-misinformation/ 22597 10 Vanderbrink, R. (2012). “Call to Put Rohingya in Refugee Camps.” Radio Free Asia. Accessed at www.rfa.org/english/news/ rohingya-07122012185242.html 11 Human Rights Watch. (2013). All You Can Do Is Pray. Page 26. Accessed at www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/burma0413 webwcover_0.pdf 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Rakhine Nationalities Development Party. Statement released on 26 June 2012. In author’s possession. Not available online. 15 Venus News Weekly, Vol. 3, No. 47. 14 June 2012. Page 2. Translated from Burmese. Not available online. 16 Copy of statement in the author’s possession. Not available online. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Burma Campaign UK. (2013). “Burma Briefing: Examples of Anti-Muslim Propaganda.” Briefing No. 21, p. 1. Accessed at www.burmacampaign.org.uk/images/uploads/Examples_of_AntiMuslim_Propaganda.pdf 20 The Nation. (2012). “Normalcy Returns to Rakhine State.” 31 October 2012. Accessed at www.nationmultimedia.com/aec/ Normalcy-returns-to-Rakhine-official-30193314.html

8: At first light the darkness fell 1

Hla Myaing. (2012). “An Open Letter to 88 Generation Students Leader Ko Ko Gyi.” 30 July 2012. Translated from Burmese. Accessed at http://myanmarmuslimsvoice.com/archives/474 2 With thanks to Elliott Prasse-Freeman for bringing this point to my attention. 3 Pasricha, A. (2012). “Aung San Suu Kyi Explains Silence on Rohingyas.” Voice of America. 15 November 2012. Accessed at www.voanews.com/a/aung-san-suu-kyi-explains-silence-onrohingyas/1546809.html 4 UNICEF. “Rakhine State: A Snapshot of Child Wellbeing”, Page 3. 412

NOTES TO C HAPTER 8

5 6





7

8

9

10

Accessed at www.unicef.org/myanmar/Rakhine_State_Profile_ Final.pdf Copy of the magazine in author’s possession. Economist U Myint noted in 2011 that household spending on “charity and ceremonials” had by 2001 become the third biggest outgoing. There are several possible reasons why C&C has become more important in the everyday life of an average Burmese city dweller. It could be that the family is performing more meritorious deeds because its members have become more interested in the next life than in the present one. Or it could be that the family is taking advantage of (or is being persuaded to take advantage of) the many new opportunities for making contributions to charities, welfare activities, community self-help schemes and other worthy causes (such as building roads and public works) that have mushroomed in the country in the process of transformation into a market-oriented economy. Or it could simply be that the household is playing an active part in numerous ceremonies, celebrations, festivals, mass rallies and rituals that have become a major national preoccupation in recent years. Myint, U. (2011). “National Workshop on Reforms for Economic Development of Myanmar. Myanmar International Convention Center (MICC). Naypyitaw, 19–21 August 2011. Myanmar: Pattern of Household Consumption Expenditure.” Accessed at www.burmalibrary.org/docs12/NWR2011-08-Pattern_of_ Household_consumption_expenditure-Myint%28en%29.pdf BBC. (2013). “Burma Riots: Video Shows Police Failing to Stop Attack.” British Broadcasting Corporation. 22 April 2013. Accessed at www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-22243676 YouTube. (2013). “Anti Muslim Monk Wira Thu Talk about Meiktila before Riot.” 24 March 2013. Accessed at www.youtube. com/watch?v=N7irUgGsFYw Burma Campaign UK. (2013). “Burma Briefing: Examples of Anti-Muslim Propaganda.” Briefing No. 21. Page 2. Accessed at www.burmacampaign.org.uk/images/uploads/Examples_of_AntiMuslim_Propaganda.pdf I am grateful to Phil Rees and Al Jazeera for providing a copy of the leaked document. 413

NOTES TO CHAPTER 8

11 Human Rights Watch. (2002). “Crackdown on Burmese Muslims: Human Rights Watch Briefing Paper: July 2002.” Accessed at www. hrw.org/legacy/backgrounder/asia/burma-bck4.htm 12 Karen Human Rights Group. (2002). “Easy Target: The Persecution of Muslims in Burma.” 31 May 2002. Accessed at http://khrg. org/2014/09/khrg0202/easy-targets 13 US State Department. (2001). “Annual Report on International Religious Freedom, 2001.” Page 113. Accessed at www.state.gov/ documents/organization/9001.pdf 14 Bookbinder, A. (2013). “969: The Strange Numerological Basis for Burma’s Religious Violence.” The Atlantic. 9 April 2013. Accessed at www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/04/969-thestrange-numerological-basis-for-burmas-religious-violence/ 274816/ 15 Brodney, M. and Gittleman, A. (2013). “Patterns of Anti-Muslim Violence in Burma: A Call for Accountability and Prevention.” Physicians for Human Rights Report, August 2013. Page 13. Accessed at https://s3.amazonaws.com/PHR_Reports/BurmaViolence-Report-August-2013.pdf 16 Burma Campaign UK. (2013). “Burma Briefing: Examples of AntiMuslim Propaganda.” Page 6. 17 Atkinson, H.G. and Sollom, R. (2013). “Massacre in Central Burma: Muslim Students Terrorized and Killed in Meiktila.” Physicians for Human Rights. Page 10. Accessed at https://s3.amazonaws.com/ PHR_Reports/Burma-Meiktila-Massacre-Report-May-2013.pdf 18 YouTube. (2013). “Recent Violence in Meikhtila, Buddhist ‘969’ Mob Strikes in front of Police (Part 2).” 16 April 2013. Accessed at www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEowvdIX7Bk 19 Atkinson, H.G. and Sollom, R. (2013). “Massacre in Central Burma: Muslim Students Terrorized and Killed in Meiktila.” Physicians for Human Rights. Page 10. Accessed at https://s3.amazonaws.com/ PHR_Reports/Burma-Meiktila-Massacre-Report-May-2013.pdf.

9: “We came down from the sky” 1

Lawi Weng. (2015). “The Rise and Rise of the Ma Ba Tha Lobby.” The Irrawaddy. 10 July 2015. Accessed at www.irrawaddy.com/ commentary/the-rise-and-rise-of-the-ma-ba-tha-lobby.html 414

NOTES TO C HAPTER 9

2

Lawi Weng. (2015). “Support Incumbents, Ma Ba Tha Leader Tells Monks.” The Irrawaddy. 23 June 2015. Accessed at www.irrawaddy. com/election/news/support-incumbents-ma-ba-tha-leader-tellsmonks 3 Ikeya, C. (2005). “The ‘Traditional’ High Status of Women in Burma: A Historical Reconsideration.” Journal of Burma Studies, Vol. 10, 2005–2006. Page 73. Accessed at www.academia. edu/23408501/The_Traditional_High_Status_of_Women_in_ Burma_A_Historical_Reconsideration 4 Democratic Voice of Burma. (2013). “Monks and Religious Leaders Back Interfaith Marriage Ban.” Democratic Voice of Burma. 26 June 2013. Accessed at www.dvb.no/news/politics-news/monksand-religious-leaders-back-interfaith-marriage-ban/28988 5 Ei Ei Toe Lwin. (2015). “Guardians of ‘Race and Religion’ Target NLD.” The Myanmar Times. 2 October 2015. Accessed at www. mmtimes.com/index.php/national-news/16801-guardians-ofrace-and-religion-target-nld.html 6 BBC. ‘Aung San Suu Kyi: Burma Not Genuinely Democratic.” Accessed at www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-24649697 7 C4ADS. (2016). “Sticks and Stones: Hate Speech Drivers in Myanmar.” C4ADS report. Page 33. Accessed at https://static1. squarespace.com/static/566ef8b4d8af107232d5358a/t/56b41f1ff 8baf3b237782313/1454645026098/Sticks+and+Stones.pdf 8 Wa Lone. (2015). “USDP Candidate Donates Big to Ma Ba Tha.” The Myanmar Times. 3 September 2015. Accessed at www. mmtimes.com/index.php/national-news/16287-usdp-candidatedonates-big-to-ma-ba-tha.html 9 Houtman, G. (1999). Mental Culture in Burmese Crisis: Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy. ICLAA Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa Monograph Series No. 33. Page 119. Accessed at www.burmalibrary.org/docs19/ Houtman-1999-Mental_Culture_in_Burmese_Crisis_Politics.pdf 10 Metro, R. (2016). “Students and Teachers as Agents of Democracy.” In Metamorphosis: Studies in Social and Political Change in Myanmar. Egreteau, R. and Robinne, F. (Eds). NUS Press Singapore. Page 211. 11 Video accessed at www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_ fbid=1691946937734537&id=100007577414909&comment_ 415

NOTES TO C HAPTER 9

id=1697713610491203¬if_t=mentions_comment¬if_ id=1467816243411247 12 Metro, R. (2016). “Students and Teachers as Agents of Democracy.” Page 211. 13 C4ADS. (2016). “Sticks and Stones: Hate Speech Drivers in Myanmar.” Page 15. 14 Aung San Suu Kyi. (1990). “Freedom from Fear.” Accessed at www. thirdworldtraveler.com/Burma/FreedomFromFear Speech.html

10: Apartheid state 1 Testimony provided by Amnesty International based on field research interviews conducted by the organisation in February 2016. Any conclusions drawn are my own. 2 Ibid. 3 Fuller, A., Leaning, J., Mahmood, S.S. and Wroe, E. (2016). “The Rohingya People of Myanmar: Health, Human Rights, and Identity.” The Lancet. Page 6. 4 Testimony provided by Amnesty International based on field research interviews conducted by the organisation in February 2016. Any conclusions drawn are my own.

13: Bystanders 1 Letter in author’s possession, not publicly available. 2 Statement in author’s possession, not publicly available. 3 IRP (Internal Review Panel). (2012). “Report of the SecretaryGeneral’s Internal Review Panel on United Nations Action in Sri Lanka.” November. Page 17. Accessed at www.un.org/News/dh/ infocus/Sri_Lanka/The_Internal_Review_Panel_report_on_Sri_ Lanka.pdf 4 Ibid. Page 21. 5 Ibid. 6 IASC (Inter-Agency Standing Committee). (2016). “Human Rights up Front: An Overview.” IASC. 13 October 2016. Accessed at https://interagencystandingcommittee.org/system/files/overview_ of_human_rights_up_front_july_2015.pdf 7 Sharma, A. (2016). “Celebrating Success with Aung San Suu Kyi, and Looking to the Future for Burma.” Foreign Office Blogs. 23 September 2016. Accessed at https://blogs.fco.gov.uk/ 416

NOTES TO C HAPTER 13

8

9

10

11 12

13

14

15

16

aloksharma/2016/09/23/celebrating-success-aung-san-suu-kyilooking-future-burma/ AFP. (2016). “More than 80,000 not Receiving Aid in North Rakhine: WFP.” Frontier Myanmar. 20 October 2016. Accessed at https://frontiermyanmar.net/en/news/more-than-80000-notreceiving-food-aid-rakhine-wfp Perlez, J. & Moe, W. (2016). “Myanmar’s Leader Faulted for Silence as Army Campaigns Against Rohingya.” New York Times. 1 December 2016. Accessed at www.nytimes.com/2016/12/01/ world/asia/myanmars-leader-faulted-for-silence-as-armycampaigns-against-rohingya.html Lok-Dessallien, R. (2016). “Remarks by Ms. Renata Lok Dessallien, UN Resident/Humanitarian Coordinator on the Occasion of UN Day 2016.” United Nations in Myanmar. 24 October 2016. Accessed at http://mm.one.un.org/content/unct/myanmar/en/home/news/ 71st-un-day-commemoration-in-nay-pyi-taw.html Internal memo not publicly available, in author’s possession. Foreign Affairs Committee. (2017). “Violence in Rakhine State and the UK’s Response.” 8 December 2017. Accessed at https:// publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmfaff/ 435/43503.htm#_idTextAnchor003 IRP (Internal Review Panel). (2012). “Report of the SecretaryGeneral’s Internal Review Panel on United Nations Action in Sri Lanka.” November 2012. Page 45. Accessed at www.un.org/News/ dh/infocus/Sri_Lanka/The_Internal_Review_Panel_report_on_ Sri_Lanka.pdf Hossain, A. (2016). “Myanmar’s Goal is ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ of Rohingya – UN.” BBC. 24 November 2016. Accessed at www.bbc. co.uk/news/av/world-asia-38091822/myanmar-s-goal-is-ethniccleansing-of-rohingya-un OHCHR. (2017). “Devastating Cruelty against Rohingya Children, Women and Men Detailed in UN Human Rights Report.” UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. 3 February 2017. Accessed at www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews. aspx?NewsID=21142 Karen Women’s Organisation. (2017). “Karen Women’s Organisation Press Statement on Burmese Military Persecution of the Rohingya People.” 18 December 2017. Accessed at https://karenwomen. 417

NOTES TO C HAPTER 1 3

org/2017/09/18/karen-womens-organisation-press-statement-onburmese-military-persecution-of-the-rohingya-people/ 17 Horsey, R. (2017). “The Role of the United Nations in Rakhine State: Recommendations for Strategy and Next Steps.” In author’s possession. 18 OHCHR. (2017). “Myanmar: UN Rights Expert Urges Restraint in Security Operation in Rakhine State.” UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. 11 August 2017. Accessed at www. ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID =21968&LangID=E

14: Rebirth 1 Reuters. (2018). “Myanmar not Ready for Return of Rohingya Refugees: UN Official.” The Daily Star. 18 April 2018. Accessed at www.thedailystar.net/rohingya-crisis/myanmar-not-readyreturn-rohingya-repatriation-refugees-ursula-mueller-unitednations-un-1559767 2 UN News. (2018). “UN Agencies and Myanmar Ink Agreement, Setting Stage for Rohingya Return.” UN News. 6 June 2018. Accessed at https://news.un.org/en/story/2018/06/1011491 3 Lindqvist, A.C. (1979). “Report on the 1978–79 Bangladesh Refugee Relief Operation.” Accessed at www.ibiblio.org/obl/docs/ LINDQUIST_REPORT.htm 4 Crisp, J. (2018). “‘Primitive People’: The Untold Story of UNHCR’s Historical Engagement with Rohingya Refugees.” Humanitarian Practice Network. October 2018. Accessed at https://odihpn.org/ magazine/primitive-people-the-untold-story-of-unhcrs-historicalengagement-with-rohingya-refugees/ 5 Quotation translated from original Burmese language article, available at https://bit.ly/2M8bmQg 6 Miller, J. (2018). “UN Special Envoy Claims Aung San Suu Kyi Could Be Guilty of Crimes against Humanity.” Channel 4 News. 14 February 2018. Accessed at www.channel4.com/news/un-specialenvoy-claims-aung-san-suu-kyi-could-be-guilty-of-crimes-againsthumanity 7 Craig, J. (2017). “Theresa May Vows to Tackle ‘Inhuman Destruction of Rohingya People’.” Sky News. 14 November 2017. 418

NOTES TO CHAPTER 14

Accessed at https://news.sky.com/story/theresa-may-myanmarmust-take-responsibility-for-rohingya-crisis-11125483 8 Amnesty International. (2018). “Myanmar: New evidence reveals Rohingya armed group massacred scores in Rakhine State.” 28 May 2018. Accessed at https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/ news/2018/05/myanmar-new-evidence-reveals-rohingya-armedgroup-massacred-scores-in-rakhine-state/ 9 Human Rights Council. (2018). “Report of the Detailed Findings of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar.” 17 September 2018. Accessed at www.ohchr.org/en/hrbodies/hrc/ myanmarffm/pages/index.aspx 10 Reuters. (2018). “Suu Kyi Defends Court Decision to Jail Reuters Journalists.” The Daily Star. 13 September 2018. Accessed at www. thedailystar.net/rohingya-crisis/news/suu-kyi-defends-courtdecision-jail-reuters-journalists-1633243 11 Directorate of Public Relations and Psychological Warfare. 2018. “Myanmar Politics and the Tatmadaw. Part (I).” In author’s possession.

419

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