Peter Popham on why Aun San Suu Kyi is silent on the murder of Muslims
There is no concealing the
disappointment felt by many of Aung San Suu Kyi’s supporters around the
world in the face of her failure to denounce the attacks on Burmese Muslims by members of her own community, the Buddhists who constitute more than 90 per cent of the population.
Burma opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi waves to supporters after
she attended a ceremony to mark her 68th birthday at the headquarters of
her National League for Democracy (NLD) party Wednesday, June 19, 2013,
in Yangon, Burma. (Khin Maung Win/AP)
Perhaps
she couldn’t stop it, people say, but at least she could have taken a
stand. She is seen as the teacher, the mother of her nation; moral
rebirth has been at the centre of her mission ever since she signed up
with the democracy movement; her most influential essay was titled A Revolution of the Spirit. How can she possibly stay silent as Muslims are slaughtered?
The
first attacks came in June 2012, just as she was embarking on her first
trip abroad in 24 years. A young Buddhist woman in Arakan state, which
borders the overwhelmingly Muslim nation of Bangladesh in the west, was
raped and murdered by two Muslim men. In retaliation, a group of
non-Muslim men stopped a bus and killed the Muslims on board, and the
spiral of murder quickly got out of control. There were many victims on
both sides but the Muslims were in the majority. Many thousand lost
their homes and were resettled in squalid temporary camps.
Another, even more serious wave of attacks
came in October. Unlike June’s events, these were initiated by the
majority community and closely co-ordinated, as a recent investigation
by Human Rights Watch explained in detail
(http://www.hrw.org/features/burma-ethnic-cleansing-arakan-state). And
although there have been no recent attacks as vicious or widespread as
October’s, the fire has not burned out. Instead it has spread across the
country. And still Suu Kyi holds her tongue.
How are we to explain it?
The
glaringly obvious reason is that, upon her election to parliament in
April 2012, Suu Kyi became a politician. As Hillary Clinton presciently
warned her a few months earlier, there is a world of difference between
being an activist and a politician. In the heyday of her activism,
addressing crowds gathered outside her home in Rangoon in the mid-90s,
Suu Kyi happily teased and chastised the ruling military regime. Today
she sits alongside them in parliament: one-quarter of the seats are
occupied by unelected soldiers.
And not only does she have to share their space, she has to do business with them – serious business.
Burma
is scheduled to hold general elections, followed by presidential ones
(the president is elected by members of parliament), in 2015. Suu Kyi’s
party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), is much the most popular
in the country. If the elections are run fairly, like the by-elections
in 2012 that brought her to parliament, the NLD is likely to win by a
landslide. But if they are rigged, like the general elections of 2010,
that victory could be stolen. So between now and then she has two
pre-eminent challenges: to retain the support of the great majority of
her people; and to persuade the generals who still hold power behind the
scenes that she and her colleagues can be trusted.
And still Suu Kyi holds her tongue. How are we to explain it?
There
is a third challenge: to change the constitution. Suu Kyi has made it
clear in recent weeks that she hopes to become Burma’s president. But
Section 59 (f) of the 2008 constitution requires that none of the
children of a presidential candidate shall “be subject of a foreign
power or citizen of a foreign country” – and both of Suu Kyi’s sons are
British citizens. It appears that this requirement was written in
deliberately to bar her way to the highest office. To remove it would
require 75 per cent support in parliament. Until 2015, she is walking on
eggshells.
Suu
Kyi, then, has ample reason to choose her words with care. Her recent
affectionate descriptions of the army are examples of this. But why
can’t she denounce something as grotesque as the attacks on Muslims?
There
has been bad blood between Buddhists and Muslims in Burma for many
years. In particular in Arakan state, the issue of large-scale illegal
immigration of Muslims from Bangladesh has stoked riots and protests
over the course of many years. Anti-Muslim prejudice is common even at
the top of Suu Kyi’s party, and among leading dissident activists. If
Suu Kyi were to speak out loud and clear about the attacks she would win
the applause of people in the West. But it would be the quickest way
for her to plummet in the approval of the Burmese masses.
Some
believe that senior military figures hostile to her orchestrated the
violence in Arakan state last year for precisely this reason: by goading
Suu Kyi into speaking out on the issue, they hoped to destroy her
popularity. If that is true, she has disappointed them – and proved,
perhaps, that she can be as slippery a politician as the next one. That
may not endear her to the west, but shrewdness is a necessary attribute
of politicians everywhere; even those the world would prefer to regard
as saints.
A woman cries moments after she and other Rohingya Muslims, trying
to cross the Naf river into Bangladesh to escape sectarian violence in
Burma, were intercepted by Bangladeshi border authorities, June 13,
2012. Bangladesh has refused boatloads of Rohingya Muslims, officials
said, despite growing calls by the international community for the
border to be opened. (Munir Uz Zaman/AFP/Getty)
Muslims from an obscure ethnic group in western Burma have become targets of vicious Buddhist mob attacks. Brendan Brady reports from Rakhine state on the increasing violence.
As
mobs wielding torches and machetes rampaged through his neighborhood,
Abdul had a strangely candid encounter with one assailant. Recognizing
the man as his long-time neighbor—the same man who had once showed great
affection towards Abdul’s children—Abdul yelled to his would-be
executioner: "‘Why are you doing this?’ He told me, ‘Sorry, I’m fighting
for my people.’” Abdul, whose full name is withheld to protect his
identity, is a Muslim from the Rohingya ethnic group and his attacker, a
Buddhist. Abdul kept him and other members of the mob at bay by
throwing his valuables out of his window onto the street. As they were
distracted collecting the cash and jewelry, another group of Buddhists
from his street approached his house from the rear. They, too, were
armed but they had come to escort Abdul and his family out of the
besieged neighborhood. “They saved our lives.”
The
conflict in western Burma’s Rakhine State erupted last June, when
reports spread that a Buddhist woman was raped and murdered by three
Rohingya men. Shortly after, a mob of Buddhists exacted retribution by
pulling over a bus carrying Muslims and beating 10 passengers to death.
The incidents ignited sectarian violence throughout the state. Nearly
200 were killed and many more injured, and some 10,000 homes were
destroyed. The vast majority of the estimated 140,000 displaced were
Rohingyas, and a year after their violent upheaval they continue to
languish in squalid temporary encampments.
In
recent months, the violence spread to include attacks on Muslim
communities in other parts of the country. In March, provoked by a small
dispute in a Muslim-owned gold shop, a Buddhist mob tore through a town
in central Burma, killing over 40 people, burning mosques and Muslim
homes, and displacing thousands. In May, 1,200 Muslims in the country’s
northeast fled from their homes when throngs of armed Buddhists
mobilized after unconfirmed reports that a Muslim man killed a Buddhist
woman in the area.
Agirl and a woman carry bricks from damaged buildings in Sittwe,
Rakhine, in western Burma, after long-standing resentment between the
Muslim Rohingya and Rakhine Buddhists, two ethnic groups, erupted in
bloody fury, June 16, 2012. (Khin Maung Win/AP)
The
turmoil carries worrying implications for national reconciliation and
the sustainability of democratic reforms in Burma, also known as
Myanmar, which is in the first stages of transitioning from military to
civilian rule. Since independence, in 1948, Burma’s government has been
in alternately hot and cold conflicts with myriad ethnic minority groups
in the country’s border regions. The xenophobic generals who seized
power by coup in 1962 justified their iron-fisted rule as necessary to
hold together a fractured country. The junta stepped down in 2011 and
Burma’s new semi-civilian government has carried out surprisingly
comprehensive reforms: loosening controls on political association,
civil society and the press, as well as releasing hundreds of political
prisoners. But fresh sectarian violence serves as fodder to the army’s
insistence on remaining a backstop to the fragile civilian government
and maintaining ultimate authority. It also raises questions about how
far democratic reforms will extend to minorities.
Regarded
in many quarters as the most persecuted ethnic group in Asia, the
Rohingya live in the borderlands between Burma and Bangladesh but are
officially a stateless people. There are around a million Rohingya in
Burma today. Their exact roots are debated but many likely settled in
Burma in the 19th century, having migrated from modern-day Bangladesh
into the newly-acquired lands of the British empire. Today, the
Rohingya, along with a few other maligned minorities, are excluded from
the 135 ethnic groups Burma’s government recognizes as citizens. Many
Burmese say the Rohingya should “go back” to Bangladesh, whose
government also disavows the Rohingya. Among other consequencesof apartheid policies against them,the
Rohingya need special permission to travel and marry and face severe
discrimination in access to employment, education, and medical care.
Last
year’s violence unveiled particularly chilling dimensions of racial and
religious hatred toward the Rohingya. When the wife of Mohamed Salam
was found dead floating in a river, her body carried a sinister message.
She was abducted along with two of her children in June, and Salam was
later told by sympathetic Buddhists how they had died. According to
them, her captors said her breasts gave milk to Muslim babies and her
womb gave birth to future generations of Muslims. Her breasts were then
hacked off and her genitalia mutilated with sharpened bamboo. Her
teenage son was tethered to a motorbike and dragged across a rocky road.
Salam would not elaborate on how his daughter met her end. Today, he
cares for his remaining 5-year-old boy in a camp for displaced people
outside of Sittwe, the state capital, and the prospect of receiving
justice is even more illusory than his chances of returning to his home
and job.
Human Rights Watch alleges last year’s bloodshed amounted to ethnic cleansing. In a detailed report releasedin
April, the international rights monitor said state security forces did
more to facilitate than to prevent abuses against the Rohingya, and
sometimes even directly participated in atrocities. The group profiled
one particularly brutal episode, last October, in which 70 Rohingyas,
including 28 children, were left easy prey for a Buddhist mob to butcher
after local riot police disarmed the Rohingya of rudimentary weapons
they carried to defend themselves. The report said local Buddhist
politicians and monks publicly demonized the Rohingya—describing them as
a threat to Burmese society and encouraging their removal from the
state—“in full view” of authorities, “who raised no concerns.” Burmese
rights groups have criticized Human Rights Watch’s assessment as
one-sided, and instead described the violence as “communal.”
A doctor attempts to stanch the bleeding from a gun shot wound to
San Shar Aung, a Buddhist Rakhine, in Kyauk Taw township hospital on
October 25, 2012 in Kyauk Taw, Burma. Over 20,000 people have been left
displaced following violent clashes between Muslim and Buddhist groups
in the country which began in June. (Kaung Htet/Getty)
Such
labels aside, what may be most foreboding are the dim prospects for a
normalization (in relative terms) of life for Rohingyas in Burma. Time
has not softened the vitriol many Buddhists in Rakhine State feel
towards the group. “We cannot go back to living together,” says Hla Moe
Thu, a 58-year-old Buddhist woman living in a camp for displaced people
on the outskirts of Sittwe. “They should go to Bangladesh, where they
came from, or they should be killed,” she adds, as her grandchild sits
beside her. According to Ashin Ariya, the head monk of Shwezedi
Monastery in Sittwe, Rohingyas have wicked designs: to rape Buddhist
women, colonize Buddhist land, and convert non-Muslims to Islam. “The
Muslims like to kill people and rape women, and they want to take over
the whole area and make everyone Muslim,” he says matter-of-factly.
Paradoxically,
democratic reforms have fed the jingoistic chorus. Over the past year,
Burma’s new government has dialed back the heavy press and Internet
censorship of the previous military regime, allowing journalists greater
independence and web users nearly limitless access to sites. But
freedom of speech has unleashed pent-up prejudices. Online forums
contain rafts of posts referring to the Rohingya in expletive-filled
terms, and Burmese newspapers have shown the Rohingya no quarter. Eleven,
one of Burma’s largest-circulation newspapers, has focused its coverage
of Rakhine State on slamming the Rohingya. Ho Than Hlaing, their
correspondent in Sittwe, says the “Bengalis” living in relief camps are
quarrelsome freeloaders who receive better care than displaced
Buddhists—in fact, conditions in camps for the much smaller number of
displaced Buddhists are markedly better than those in Rohingya camps,
some of which are blocked by authorities from receiving international
aid.
When the wife of Mohamed Salam was found dead floating in a river, her body carried a sinister message.
The
rhetoric has carried over into daily life. A recently launched campaign
urges Burmese to only patronize shops that display “969” signs—a code
referring to Buddhist teaching—in their storefronts. The group of
zealous monks spearheading the movement allege it is intended to promote
Buddhist pride, but its true aim seems to be to marginalize Muslims.
Aung
Naing Oo, a member of the Myanmar Peace Center, a governmental group
that advises on ethnic disputes, likens the dangerous nationalism in
Burma today to the escalation of ethnic tensions in former Yugoslavia
after the fall of the Soviet Union: no longer fettered by the strictures
of a military state, people are freer to act on long-suppressed
prejudices. But even within this scheme, animosity toward the Rohingya
is singularly severe. Indeed, they are viewed both as carpet-bagging
intruders and low-caste detritus. “Indians”—including various peoples
from the subcontinent and those with South Asian features— are resented
in Burma because many arrived following the British takeover and soon
emerged as a dominant group in urban commerce. Rohingyas are viewed with
particular suspicion and scorn for their religion and distinctly dark
skin. And, to top it off, they are seen to epitomize the existential
threat posed by neighboring Bangladesh, whose large and poor population
the Burmese feel is perpetually on the cusp of spilling over en masse
into Burma.
The
turmoil in Rakhine State is further complicated by hostilities between
the local Buddhist population, from the Arakanese ethnic group, and the
Burman majority and central government they dominate. The Arakanese were
the ancestors of a small kingdom that used to control what is
modern-day Rakhine State and, like many ethnic groups in Burma, they
desire autonomy. Beyond ethnic pride, the Arakanese resent that Rakhine
is Burma’s second-poorest state despite its natural riches – the area’s
timber, oil, gas and precious metals have for decades been pillaged by
the military and their cronies. “Our people want a real federal state
with self-determination and our share of profits from natural
resources,” says Than Thun, a community leader in Sittwe. But Arakanese
autonomists like Than Thun have, for the time being, found common cause
with the central government in directing their ire towards the Rohingya,
who are easy scapegoats.
Few
figures inside Burma have spoken out against the anti-Rohingya
sloganeering. Most conspicuous has been the near silence of the
country’s iconic human rights and democracy icon, Aung San Suu Kyi.
After 15 years under house arrest, Suu Kyi is now a parliamentarian and
has political calculations to consider. Observers believe she sees
support for the Rohingya as going treacherously against the tide of
popular opinion. The new president, Thein Sein, has said he will
crackdown on “political opportunists and religious extremists,” but his
intentions and ability to control eruptions of violence remain unclear.
Thein Sein is a former high-ranking general who has surprised many in
and outside the country with his moderation but that may not extend to
his feelings toward the Rohingya. And observers note the upper echelons
of his government remain stocked with former military figures who
delight in the potential for sectarian violence to steer power back
toward the army.
In
the meantime, Rohingya in and outside the camps are in greater numbers
turning to the sea to escape their dire prospects. Chris Lewa, head of
the Arakan Project, an NGO that tracks rights abuses in Rakhine State,
estimates that nearly 28,000 Rohingya attempted to flee through the Bay
of Bengal during the recent dry season, three times the normal rate. The
journey is perilous: hundreds die every year from starvation,
dehydration, and drowning aboard barges that are ill-equipped for ocean
travel and steered by mercenary crews.
In
Boomay—a Rohingya quarter just outside of Sittwe that is hemmed in by a
series of army checkpoints—a group of men in a shanty teashop are
watching an ancient television tuned to a news channel with footage of
Rohingya on barges intercepted by the Bangladeshi navy. The program
shows Rohingya kneeling under tarps on the deck of a boat as waves come
crashing against the bow. The teashop’s owner pays little attention to
scenes of horror—she has already determined her daughter will attempt a
similar voyage to join her husband in Malaysia, where he is working
illegally but earning steady wages. “If we could stay here in peace and
have some freedom, then it would be better to stay here and not take
this risk,” says the daughter, who is in her early 20s and plans to take
her 5-year-old child along. “But we don’t know if that will ever be the
case.”
