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In recent weeks, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Rohingya have been forced to flee from Myanmar, in the midst of a brutal army offensive that has been described by the UN’s human-rights chief as “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.” The crackdown began on 25 August, after a militant attack by Rohingya insurgents. Now, more than 400,000 of 1.1 million Rohingya inside Myanmar have sought refuge in neighbouring Bangladesh. This devastating violence follows several waves of Buddhist-on-Muslim violence to have hit Myanmar since its democratic transition began in 2011. De facto leader and Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi has been criticised for her refusal to condemn the military’s campaign, which has emptied more than 170 Rohingya villages of their inhabitants.

For many years, Myanmar was ruled by a tightly repressive military junta, and internationally, it was understood only in these terms. What are the forces underpinning this recent outbreak of violence? How far back does the tension go? And what comes next? Francis Wade is a journalist and author of a new book "Myanmar’s Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and the Making of a Muslim ‘Other’". Here, he discusses some of the deep roots of the current lethal tensions.

How have established narratives about Myanmar been upturned in recent years?

Myanmar had always been depicted by observers in quite binary terms—of an oppressive military junta ruling over a stoic, peaceful, largely Buddhist population. In the decade or so prior to the start of the democratic transition in 2011 the country only really made international headlines when journalists reported on the monk-led protests, or embedded with ethnic armies fighting wars of resistance against the military in the borderlands. So it was set up as “bad junta” versus “good society”, and the frictions within each camp, particularly the latter, hadn’t had much of a nuanced reading.

That began to change when a wave of violence, largely communal in its expression, broke out in the west of the country in June 2012. Over four days Buddhist and Muslim mobs attacked one another in fits of frenzied violence. This repeated itself again in October, before seeming to spread to towns and cities in central Myanmar the following year. Suddenly these fissures had opened that hadn’t really been part of the narrative before, and it prompted a re-reading of the complex dynamics of society there.

Much of the violence was being perpetrated by Buddhists, goaded on by monks, and this greatly confounded observers. Finally, it had begun at a time when the country appeared to be moving away from the military’s divisive rule, and raised important universal questions: how is democracy interpreted differently by members of a society emerging from dictatorial rule? Why does early democratisation often provide such ripe conditions for mass violence? What are the long-term consequences of the manipulation of ethnic, racial and religious identities? There are historical precedents for what was—and is—happening in Myanmar, but in examining how violent prejudices are cultivated, one starts to see certain patterns and strategies used by nationalist leaders across all types of society, and even in certain faltering democracies in the developed world.

Should we be surprised at the violence between Buddhists and Muslims we are now seeing in Myanmar?

We should be shocked, but not surprised. Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Rohingya Muslims—the primary target of the 2012 violence—have been forced to flee their homes in western Myanmar into Bangladesh since 25 August. We’re witnessing a pogrom of unimaginable intensity—ethnic cleansing by forced removal. But for this to happen, and for the military to receive the popular support it appears to have, certain conditions and perceptions need to be in place. The denial of citizenship to Rohingya means they lack state protections, however limited these are in general in Myanmar. Soldiers are seemingly free to execute civilians and raze entire villages without fear of legal recrimination. Once you’re legally cast as a pariah group it feeds local perceptions of you as an alien entity, of threatening intent—you must have been made stateless because to allow you to be a citizen would imperil our security. You cannot have the rights that would grant you greater political power, because that would be used to pursue whatever cause your group has set out to achieve—in the case of the Rohingya, the theft of resources, the Islamisation of Myanmar, and so on.

It produces the same mental state that we’ve seen presage other campaigns of ethnic cleansing. Look at how these same processes developed among supporters of the Nazis’ anti-Jewish policies. It is primarily fear, aided hugely by dehumanising propaganda and policies—tight restrictions on movement and access to healthcare; checkpoints at which Rohingya must show ID cards, and which reinforce this perception of them being a threat. That fear helps to justify the violence towards this community, and construe that violence as defensive. That’s how you sell a campaign of ethnic cleansing. Hence a situation has arisen whereby those who criticise the military’s actions are rounded upon by the same people who for so long opposed the military. Now that it has ostensibly stepped back from power, a newer, even more menacing threat has emerged in the form of a Muslim group with apparently Islamising intentions. We’ve seen versions of this play out in transitional societies across the world.

Could you tell me about the historical roots of these tensions?

There are multiple interweaving factors, past and present, but it’s also important to avoid overly historicising current events—that what’s happening today is an inevitable outcome of the past. Much of the present-day crisis has been stoked by the self-serving interests of nationalist leaders who dredge up historical conflicts in order to justify the exclusionary policies they support.

That being said, there are foundations that go back some way. During British rule of Myanmar between 1824 and 1948 it imported vast numbers of Indian workers, as it did in colonies elsewhere in the region—Malaysia, Sri Lanka and so on. This caused a sudden demographic change, and writers from the 1920s and 1930s described Yangon as almost an “Indian city”. Many settled, others returned. But this demographic shake-up gave further wind to a budding anti-colonial movement spearheaded predominantly by Bamar Buddhists (Bamar is the majority ethnic group, and Buddhism the dominant religion), and those two identities became the pivot around which a national identity was forged against British rule. Indians came to be seen as stooges of British rule, given they’d often been privileged in professional hierarchies. Muslims in particular became the source of a nationalist resentment, and were targeted in communal violence in the 1930s. Nationalist groups accused them of diluting the “bloodline” by forcing Buddhist women to convert when they married.

So there are roots going back quite some time, but after the military took power in 1962 it vigorously promoted Buddhism as the national religion (although that was never enshrined in law), and Bamar as effectively the master race. Later it decided, with no evidence provided, that precisely 135 ethnic groups existed in the country. British censuses don’t record any mention of a Rohingya ethnic group, although Rohingya claim a presence in the country going back several centuries and were recognised by the government after independence. Not being considered among the 135 indigenous groups, they gradually became a pariah community, denied citizenship and stripped of political rights.

How can the scars of so many years of dictatorship be healed?

This problem isn’t felt solely by the Muslim communities. All across the country, minorities have suffered a particular form of oppression under the junta, and as a result we have these protracted ethnic conflicts, some of which have been going on for seven decades. It goes way back to when the British took Myanmar in the early 19th century and imported its obsession with racial science. Colonial administrators set about carving up and codifying communities into distinct groups, and pinning attributes to them: some ethnic groups were gentle, others were wild, and so on. So this led to a hierarchy of sorts, and certain groups were drafted into the colonial army, while others were barred. It did this in its colonies across the world, and the results, as we know, have been toxic. What were fluid cultural differences between groups become sharp divides, and in Myanmar as elsewhere they have spawned competition and conflict—exacerbated greatly by a military that wanted control of every corner of the country—that seems intractable. This has become a permanent fixture in many post-colonial societies.

The new government’s faltering efforts to secure ceasefire deals with ethnic armies shows just how difficult the task of remedying prolonged identity-based conflict is. The Rohingya have felt this the most, but it’s pervasive across Myanmar society. Ethnicity and religion have become heavily politicised.

Buddhism is often understood in the west as an exceptionally peaceful, serene religion. Is that view simplistic?

You’d be hard pressed to find any justification for violence in the scriptures of Theravada Buddhism, which is what the majority in Myanmar practice. But what’s always forgotten in these analyses of how certain religions are supposed to “be” is that people act primarily as human beings, with human fears and anxieties. During several conversations with monks and Buddhist laymen that I recount in the book, I was told that while Buddhism doesn’t support violence, those Buddhists who have perpetrated violence acted with the conviction that if Buddhism ceased to exist in Myanmar, the country would descend into anarchy. “If the Buddhist cultures vanish … there wouldn’t be the influence of peace and truth. There will be more discrimination and violence,” one person told me.

We have this habit of essentialising the belief systems and cultures of faraway places. We’ve done this as much with Buddhism as Islam, stereotyping them and attaching different qualities to each. It’s a way to better interpret the exotic—to radically simplify it—but in the process, all nuance and objectivity is lost. These may be Buddhists committing violence, but they’re also humans. I think its key to look beyond the religious element—it appears to me more an expression of nationalist-based anxieties, of which the fear of Buddhism’s demise is but one aspect.

Could you tell me about the role of Buddhist monks in fomenting communal violence in Myanmar?

There have been vocal monks sermonising on the dangers of Islam, and spearheading quite effective boycott campaigns of Muslim businesses over recent years. It’s a minority in a sizeable monastic community, but they’ve risen to prominence for several reasons. First, because they’ve been able to turn floating existential anxieties felt by many Buddhists into something more concrete by pointing to other former bastions of Buddhism—India, Malaysia and so on—where Islam is now predominant. Second, because a number of Buddhist nationalist movements have also functioned as providers of welfare to a population that has known only neglect. Monks carry huge social capital in Myanmar—for centuries and more they have served as the moral glue of society. Because they’re so venerated it’s difficult for those who don’t agree with their more recent expressions of xenophobia to challenge them. Their rise as a powerful socio-political movement has gone unchecked. It’s always hard to determine any causal link between someone’s words and the deeds of others, but through this persistent sermonising it does seem as if these monks have provided at least the kindling for violence.

What about the role of pro-democracy activists?

There have been numbers of prominent figureheads of the pro-democracy movement who have issued inflammatory anti-Rohingya rhetoric. Again though, it shows a certain naivety on our part. We knew that they 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. There’s this assumption that the democratic transition acts as an elixir that, slowly but surely, remedies the ills of society, but so often this isn’t the case. The Myanmar of today—and numbers of its pro-democracy luminaries-cum-chauvinists—proves how wrong it is to equate the concept of democracy with the principle of tolerance for all. Democracy promises what authoritarianism denies—ownership of destiny, a stake in decisions that affect one; the freedom to spread ideas and support or resist the ideas of others. But while this can engender an openness and tolerance, it can also have the converse effect, and that’s what we’re seeing.

What do you make of Aung San Suu Kyi’s response to the violence against the Rohingya?

It’s deeply problematic. She seems to think it more constructive to keep the military onside than to leverage the moral influence she has to stop the cleansing. There are no countervailing narratives coming from the leadership to de-stigmatise the identity of the Rohingya; rather, quite the opposite. The insurgency has unleashed a horror that seems to know no bounds, and the military is able to run free. A democracy is supposed to open up institutional channels through which grievances can be negotiated, but instead Suu Kyi has given the green light for a continuation of a culture of where local frictions are remedied with violence.

How do you see the situation developing?

The government’s national security adviser has said that only those Rohingya who can prove their rightful claim to citizenship will be allowed to return from Bangladesh. Around a third of the entire Rohingya population inside Myanmar has been forced out in a matter of weeks. They left burning houses and the threat of death, and so whatever documents they might have to prove their lineage would have been left behind. When you understand the context - decades of persecution and dehumanisation suffered by this group - it takes a wilful denial, which some western diplomats continue to maintain, to see this as anything other than ethnic cleansing. Even if they are allowed to return, the security landscape they’ll come back to—of routine harassment, even tighter restrictions on movement and access to vital services, not to mention a toxic community dynamic—is now perilous. We can only hope that the Bangladeshi government will continue to allow them in and assist them, and that groups documenting the crimes of the military will gather enough evidence to force the government into position whereby it can no longer act as a shield for the military, but finally become the responsible leadership it had promised.