A way out of Burma's ethnic clashes
Sreeram Chaulia says Burma must 'de-ethnicise' conflict with Rohingya
Renewed bouts of ethnic cleansing targeting the minority community of Rohingya Muslims in Burma's western Rakhine state have highlighted the plight of stateless people and the downside of democratisation. Horrific tales of atrocities committed against the Rohingya by extremist Buddhist clergymen and their patrons in Burma's government are reopening worries about the direction in which the country's political liberalisation is heading.
President Thein Sein says the Rohingya must be deported to any country willing to shelter them. His comment is in tune with the mainstream view among Burmese Buddhists that the Rohingya are recent migrants from Bangladesh, although there are historical counter-claims that they have been inhabitants of the Rakhine region since the Middle Ages.
Bias that the Rohingya are all "terrorists", and fears fanned by Buddhist monks that their population growth is disproportionately high, have fed into a narrative wherein the majority Bamar community has been trained to hate them.
The deafening silence of Burma's foremost pro-democracy leader and Nobel laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, on the repeated pogroms against the Rohingya has not helped calm the already turbulent waters. A perverse competitive communalism has afflicted Burmese political actors gearing up for the 2015 general elections. No party can afford to openly speak for a small minority like the Rohingya, who anyway lack voting rights (not to mention access to education or health care), and risk alienating the Theravada Buddhist majority vote bank.
The democratisation process in Burma, as in several other post-colonial or post-authoritarian societies, has thus empowered the genie of majoritarianism based on ethnicity, which is the antithesis of a more pluralistic form of civic nationalism. The alleged Rohingya "menace" has united the Burmese military, its civilian front - the Union Solidarity and Development Party of Thein Sein - the monkhood and the National League for Democracy into an incongruous alliance.
How can a society undergoing dramatic political transition like Burma overcome layers upon layers of accumulated malice towards the Rohingya? What positive role can neighbouring Bangladesh play in the sorry fate of a marginalised community that speaks a language close to the Chittagonian tongue? And what of the wider international community, which has been expressing shock at the ethnic conflagrations that threaten to derail Burma's democratisation?
The best step that all stakeholders could take is to "de-ethnicise" the conflict narrative. Burma needs to become comfortable with a vocabulary of civic citizenship, rights and responsibilities, and justice for past and present victims of unaccounted abuses, including serious consideration of decentralisation of power and autonomy to aggrieved regions.
International institutions like the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation, which are agitated by violence against Muslims in Burma and offering to intervene, should step back and allow more neutral bodies like the United Nations to take charge of humanitarian relief so as not to provoke hardliners among the Burmese Buddhist clergy.
Donors and investors flooding into Burma as a "greenfield" business opportunity must set benchmarks on human and people's rights and avoid strengthening the same fundamentalist institutions that are oppressing minorities.
Bangladesh will have to show greater magnanimity towards Rohingya fleeing death and devastation, instead of forcibly interdicting and repatriating them. Sandwiching the Rohingya between the devil and the deep sea is a certain path to slow genocide.
Given the rancour that has built up, finding an appropriate mix of policies that stresses the human, rather than the religious or linguistic, identities and struggles of different communities is an arduous task. But if cycles of violence are to be broken, there is no alternative.
