Myanmar continues to make mistakes of the past
January 4 marked the 72nd anniversary of Myanmar’s independence from Britain. The civil war in which the country – a patchwork of diverse ethnic regions, with mutually incomprehensible languages, unerasable regional identities and distinct political histories was born has come a full circle. It is noteworthy that modern Myanmar was not the creation of nationalists. It was born out of the external shock of the Second World War and the dissolution of external colonial powers. Few Myanmar nationalist historians have acknowledged this historical fact, for it fundamentally and effectively undermines the nationalist historiography that typically glorifies and exaggerates the contributions of the ethnic-Burmese (Bama) nationalists particularly State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi’s father and the Tatmadaw (military), originally a fascist proxy created by Japan as part of its wartime design against British rule in colonial Burma.
Today, being an important site of the geopolitical rivalries among external powers, including China, India, the US and Japan, coupled with multiple domestic ethnic fault lines, Myanmar faces the very real prospect of another external shock, more than at any point in the country’s seven-decade post-independence history.
According to the Arakan Army, a relatively new but effective armed movement seeking “the national liberation” of Buddhist Rakhine from the grip of the Myanmar government, there have been nearly 600 military battles fought in the Rakhine region (and adjacent Chin state), with government troops suffering an estimated 6,000 casualties. Myanmar today is ruled, in effect, by a coalition of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) and the military, however uneasy their power-sharing may be.
Disturbingly, both parties are repeating the mistakes of past nationalist and military leaderships without addressing the decades-old grievances on the part of minorities that gave rise to the early rebellions in the first place. In a twist of history, the larger geopolitical equation that has direct bearings on the government’s domestic policies with respect to Myanmar’s troubled inter-ethnic relations, including Rohingya, has shifted. China, Japan and India are backing the increasingly anti-human-rights Myanmar leadership, albeit out of their competing commercial and strategic agendas.
After a euphoric global honeymoon resulting from what was commonly but falsely celebrated as the “Myanmar Spring,” the United States and the rest of the world now scream foul over Naypyidaw’s criminal policies and conduct in Rakhine, particularly the slow-burning genocide of Rohingya. This has been reflected in the last several UN General Assembly resolutions on Myanmar, where more than 140 member states condemned the Southeast Asian pariah for its “grave crimes” under international law.
Domestically, the Myanmar government continues to treat non-Bama minorities as second- or third-class communities in keeping with its heavy-handed racist record. Myanmar’s nationalist leaders wear on their sleeve their fake respect for ethnic diversity by wearing minority attire on their election-campaign trails.
Meanwhile, Myanmar state and state-allied economic players plunder the ethnic-minority regions of natural resources such as gas, timber, gold, jade and other minerals, take the lion’s share accruing from overland trade routes through minorities’ ancestral regions, grab vast tracts of minorities’ land, and sell large-scale commercial concessions to the highest-bidding foreign investors.
Without heeding the need and call for devolution of power to ethnically defined regional communities, Suu Kyi has handpicked her sycophants to be the chiefs of local administrations in ethnic-minority regions. Her attempts at forcibly erecting statues of her martyred father Aung San and naming bridges and other landmarks after him in several minority capitals has created further frictions and offended local sensibilities.
While she often extolls the (voluntary) “Union spirit” – attributed to her father and his minority counterparts of the 1940s – and exhorts the multi-ethnic nation to forge national harmony, ethnic equality and reconciliation, her autocratic and racist deeds further damage the very spirit she wants the ethnic minorities to reinvigorate.
The minorities who had rallied behind her NLD leadership have come to view her as yet another ethnic-Bama nationalist who speaks better English, and whose words are sweeter, than the crude and crass nationalists in generals’ uniforms.
In this discernibly colonial state of Myanmar where Bama Buddhists are more equal than others that Rohingya have fared poorly over the last 40 years.
As the only Muslim community with their own geographic pocket sharing linguistic, demographic, cultural and commercial ties with adjacent Bangladeshi states of Chittagong and Tek Naf, the Rohingya have long been the subject of strategic concerns for the Burmese military leaders.