Asian Arguments. London: Zed Books; Chicago: The University of Chicago Press [distributor], 2017. xiv, 280 pp. (Map.) US$24.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-78360-527-9.
This is an excellent study of how Buddhism, recognized for teaching compassion and non-violence has, in the case of Myanmar, become implicated as the impetus behind racial sectarianism and a policy of apartheid. The author is an informed, expert journalist who has in the last decade made repeated trips into Myanmar, especially the Rakhine State on the border with Bangladesh. He claims at the outset that he was only a visitor to Myanmar, “an outsider with no pretensions otherwise” (4). But he has nonetheless provided a highly readable and scholarly account of a longstanding and infamous situation in Myanmar, focused on the one-million strong Rohingya minority in the Rakhine. The book is comprised of a prologue and eleven chapters that aim to show how and why the majority ethnic Burmese (Bamar) population has historically (with important exceptions) resisted acceptance of the Rohingya as citizens of the state. What gives the book a special nuance is the author’s extraordinary outreach to ordinary Bamar and Rohingya folk at a time when access to this troubled part of Myanmar was (and is) severely restricted. A first chapter highlights a key event in May 2012, with the rape and murder of a young Bamar Buddhist woman ostensibly by Rohingya perpetrators, and the chaos of violence that followed, especially in Sittwe, the Rakhine state capital. This was a mob reaction by Buddhist activists which was allowed to run its course without government interference, the precursor of more horrific events.
Chapters 2 and 3 affirm how Muslim traders and settlers were socially and economically accepted in the eighteenth-century Buddhist polities of Mrauk U and Bagan, and then trace the roots of religious and racial distress to the British colonial period (1824–1948). As part of British India for many decades, Myanmar experienced a large influx of labour from Bengal, provoking Bamar economic resentment. But relations between the Bamar Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims were especially compromised during World War II, when the Rohingya supported British military initiatives, and the Bamar (initially at least) supported the Japanese. In addition, as a fourth chapter outlines, a 1931 British census of indigenous “races” would have serious consequences for determining post-independence citizenship. For whatever reasons, the Rohingya were not listed as one of the 135 “indigenous peoples” of Myanmar. Under the 1962 military rule of New Win, this fixation on race would see the expulsion of thousands of Indian, Chinese, and other peoples not considered bona fide citizens. For a time, the Rohingya were not included in this cohort because they could prove a family presence in Myanmar going back two generations, but after 1982, citizenship only became available to the 135 putative “races” listed in the old census, strengthening a sense of Bamar “siege mentality.”
Chapter 5 provides a cogent review of the several dozen so-called Na Ta La “model villages” (acronym for Border Areas and National Races Ministry) constructed in areas close to Rohingya traditional territory during the 1990s, and for Bamar Buddhist occupancy. The residents were long-term felons in Myanmar prisons who were offered the relative freedom of a village life. The Na Ta La initiative, along with the withdrawal of Rohingya national citizenship, predictably resulted in completely isolating this community from any semblance of a balanced place within the state, so that access to health care and education was virtually eliminated. A sixth chapter brings forward the 2012 by-elections, followed by the epochal 2015 national election, which saw Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD) swept into theoretical power, only to inherit a country in infrastructural and communal ruin. Initially, it appeared that Myanmar was finally distancing itself from military rule despite the fact that the armed forces still controlled the key ministries. The author argues that Bamar “fear of a reversal of status,” along with heightened Buddhist religious activism, stoked attacks on the Rohingya (108). Even more insidious, anti-Muslim sentiments outside of the Rakhine, this time not against the Rohingya but targeting the old and well-placed Bamar Muslim (Kaman) community elsewhere, spread without government interference. Of note was an infamous incident in the central Myanmar city of Meikhtila in 2013. Many Bamar Buddhist pro-democracy supporters were also expressing anti-Muslim resentment, spurred on by the message that Islam was slowly devouring Myanmar’s religion, society, and economy.
Chapter 7 reveals how the Rohingya became “the source of national hysteria” (125) and how inexplicably Daw Suu Kyi seemed unable to seriously challenge the prevailing worldview, at odds with her initial image as the champion of human rights. The author argues that the NLD is “compliant in fuelling the mentality” that gave rise to state-sanctioned debasement of the Rohingya, and that the NLD has no “countervailing narratives that might de-stigmatize the identity of the Rohingya” (129). Thus the focus of public anger, so long directed against the long-term military rule of Ne Win and dictators who followed, was “redirected horizontally” against the Rohingya and Muslims in general. An eighth chapter, “We came down from the sky—the Buddhist preachers of hate,” is an in-depth review of the chaotic influence of the infamous Ma Ba Tha (Organization for the Protection of Race and Religion). With its xenophobic leadership able to intimidate political leaders, Ma Ba Tha escapes the consequences of censure even by the state Sangha Maha Nayaka Committee.
Three final chapters outline the topic of camps and ghettos for the disenfranchised Rohingya in the Arakan up to 2016, with the untoward response of the so-called Muslim faith movement (Harakah al-Yaquin) and its attack on police posts at the Bangladesh border—a portent for the massive August 2017 government assault that has raised intense international outrage as nearly the entire Rohingya population faced genocide conditions and a forced evacuation to Bangladesh. In every way, Francis Wade has presented an outstanding account of a complex contemporary situation involving religion, ethnicity, and national identity in an Asian context.
Bruce Matthews
Acadia University, Wolfville, Canada