Rohingya crisis: What Myanmar’s other Muslims think of Suu Kyi
Amid international condemnation for Myanmar’s handling of the violence in Rakhine state, many among the country’s other Muslim minorities fear a similar fate – but not all lay the blame at their de facto leader’s feet
At the time of writing, more than 120,000 Rohingya – dubbed the world’s most persecuted people – have fled Rakhine state, in Myanmar’s west.
Myanmar’s many minorities, including Muslims, have long faced a troubled and at times bloody relationship with the dominant Burmese majority who inhabit the core Irrawaddy Delta.
Still, Muslims have long been an integral part of Myanmese public life. Various rulers over the centuries, including King Mindon in the 19th century, encouraged Muslim settlement and mosque-building, seeing the community as an important source of commerce and revenue.
But the British defeat of Mindon’s Konbaung dynasty had a searing impact on the national consciousness, engendering a deep-rooted xenophobia. Unlike in Malaysia and Indonesia, where colonisers governed through local sultans, in Burma (as the country was then known) the administration was unequivocally British, managed from Calcutta and later Delhi.
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Burma was also an extremely valuable territory commercially. Timber, precious stones and petroleum drew foreign capital and labour deep into the heart of what had been a proud, ethnically Burmese, polity. Moreover, Marwari and Chettiar traders and moneylenders from the subcontinent soon realised the immense potential for rice cultivation, turning Burma within a matter of years into a major rice-exporting region.