The Lady can’t hold back forces of hate
Aung San Suu Kyi’s battle for democracy has come up against a more primal force: murderous antiMuslim nationalism, says David Aaronovitch.
There is a petulant quality to some of the criticism of Aung San Suu Kyi. ‘‘After all we’ve done for her’’, it seems to run, ‘‘we stuck her picture up on the wall at the BBC, voted for her in online polls for ‘most inspiring person of 2015’, and even gave her the Nobel prize, and this is how she repays us.’’ Beacons of hope with feet of clay and all that. Big disappointment all round.
As a response to the movement of a people from their homes by violence, this beats the assertion I’ve seen in several places that since the Myanmar Rohingya minority are Muslims it must be their fault. And it’s understandable. The victory of Suu Kyi’s party in the last Myanmar elections was supposed to be the beginning of an era of democracy and human rights in a country ruled for so long by a military junta. We all began booking guiltless river cruises along the Irrawaddy to discover that ‘‘deeply spiritual and traditional way of life’’.
Now we’re looking at pictures of burnt villages and terrified refugees, hearing stories of rapes and murders. And Suu Kyi, far from risking re-arrest by condemning the massive, documented abuse of human rights, talks Trump-like of ‘‘allegations and counter-allegations’’, seeming to have bought the confected and lying military version of how this all began. True, she does not have the power to stop the atrocities.
The real boss of Myanmar is the armed forces commander-in-chief, Min Aung Hlaing, whose picture is not on anyone’s wall. But The Lady is the one with moral authority, we imagine. So what happened to her? For years fearless, did she become uncourageous almost overnight? Has she tired of the struggle? Or maybe she’s badly advised, listening to people she trusts who are giving her a honeyed account of Burmese actions in Rakhine province. Or is it possible that, even at a low level, she shares the animosity of many of her compatriots towards the Rohingya minority?
We in the West have a narrative of progress towards democracy and human rights that makes the desire for freedom almost the most powerful force in political behaviour. Give me Liberty or give me Death. It’s a story we tell ourselves partly because there’s some truth in it and partly because it’s not entirely true. As Suu Kyi will probably be well aware, in Myanmar the desire to sweep away the military dictatorship is only one popular impulse. Another is the atavistic desire to murder your rather different neighbour before he murders you.
This may be on the screens now but it has been coming for some time. Though Rakhine is a far-off place, if you give it its old name, Arakan, older readers may recognise a place where Brits fought and died in World War II defending what had been for a century part of the Empire. Burma is where George Orwell served in the colonial police.
Even then Arakan had a Muslim minority, the Rohingya, which, unlike the Buddhists, fought on the Allied side and was allowed to think it might get its own state. Then we left, our promises lapsed and the incoming nationalist administration began the process of denying not just statehood, but citizenship to people it described as ‘‘Bengalis’’. A cycle of low-level insurrection and repression continued through the postwar period.
By 2012 it was obvious to observers that alongside the movement for freedom and democracy there was also a popular racist movement. Sometimes reined in, sometimes encouraged, sometimes used by the junta, Buddhist ethno-nationalists were speaking, broadcasting and writing in terms that would have been instantly recognisable to any 1930s reader of Der Sturmer.
One of the most incendiary of these is a handsome, genial Buddhist monk called Ashin Wirathu, whom I first wrote about in 2013. ‘‘Whatever you do,’’ he typically begins his sermons, ‘‘do it as a nationalist.’’ He wants Buddhists to be prevented from marrying non-Buddhists. He urges ethnic Burmese to boycott nonBuddhist businesses and interact only with people of their faith. If that costs you more then ‘‘consider that extra you have to pay as your contribution to your race and faith’’.
Now, as the Rohingya flee, Wirathu scoffs at their situation. They are ‘‘posing for the media. They are not starving. They have so much food that they are selling it on in their shops, stealing even from their own.’’ And what about the rape of Muslim women? ‘‘Impossible,’’ he said. ‘‘Their bodies are too disgusting.’’
These days his language has a familiar element to it. He admires Marine Le Pen and cites the Trump Muslim ban. He is simply warning, he says, against the dangers posed by Muslims. They are innately terroristic, inherently incapable of living with other people. His propaganda suggests a Myanmar equivalent of ‘‘news’’ sites such as Breitbart and Westmonster, which concentrate on reporting anything dreadful committed by someone who might be a Muslim, and ignoring any crimes committed by anyone else.
Ethno-nationalism has its own seductive magic. Everything becomes the fault of the other, and not yours. Get rid of them and all will be better. Leave them, however, and they will take over. After Tito’s death in Yugoslavia and the fall of communism, democracy was one lure, but ethnonationalism for a bloody period trumped it. The result was war, massacre and Srebrenica and the seeming message to Muslims around the world that they would not be protected from genocide. Jihadism started not with pictures from Afghanistan but with stories from Bosnia. Right now the next generation of aggrieved Muslims are on social media looking at burning villages in Rakhine.
Some of the backwash will end up in Britain; it always does. In the meantime we have made the appropriate noises. The new United Nations secretary-general has told the Burmese rulers they must ‘‘end the military operations, allow unhindered humanitarian access and recognise the right of refugees to return in safety and dignity’’. Or else what? Renewed sanctions perhaps. Certainly those would be justified, even if they feel like a terrible backwards step from the Suu Kyi moment of apparent victory.
But hundreds of thousands of Rohingya are still in Burma and the Wirathus are still preaching. There is a global political commitment called the Responsibility to Protect. The international community in the shape of the UN Security Council should make plans to enable itself physically to protect a minority that could yet face genocide. I wish I believed it would. –