Brooklyn, NY: Verso [an imprint of New Left Books], 2020. xi, 336 pp. (Maps.) US$29.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-78873-321-2.
In August and September 2017, villages in the northwestern Myanmar state of Rakhine burned by the hundreds, and the region’s rivers ran with the blood of the thousands of Rohingya massacred at the hands of Myanmar’s military. After the smoke cleared, it became apparent that hundreds of thousands more Rohingya had been expelled into nearby Bangladesh. Why? What could explain this paroxysm of genocidal violence, especially at this particular moment, amidst an apparently bright historical juncture as the country appeared to be transitioning from authoritarian military rule to democracy? As importantly: Why did so many Burmese people—from military supporters to leaders of the democracy movement—seem to endorse Rohingya suffering? Carlos Sardiña Galache’s book, The Burmese Labyrinth, seeks to answer these questions. As he puts it early on, “Understanding the roots of those prejudices became a sort of obsession” (3); hence, the book’s apt title. Across 352 pages, Sardiña Galache locates his inquiry at the site of the violence—Rakhine State itself—yet simultaneously refuses simplistic explanations that might keep him there. Sardiña Galache instead delves both journalistically and historically into the warren of political structures and historical events that might possibly explain the mass violence, at each turn broadening the account until a maze of impressive complexity has been sketched.
The book’s journalistic sections (parts I and III) provide insight into the events leading up to and including the mass violence in 2017. While conventional wisdom tells of the hatred pent-up by the authoritarian regime’s long control of the country (1962–2011) that was “unleashed” during political liberalization (2011–2021), Sardiña Galache finds instead that animus towards Rohingya was being constructed even as violence against them unfolded, often fomented by putative democrats (48–49). The author’s reporting also refutes another platitude of the transition era: that the exclusion of Rohingya could be resolved through granting them liberal rights. Instead, he finds that Rohingya in the Rakhine State township of Myeboun who managed to acquire citizenship documentation were still confined by authorities to camps (83–84). Sardiña Galache argues instead that the “plight of the Rohingya” cannot be understood without exploring other political phenomena roiling the country, particularly the “wars in the borderlands (especially involving the Kachin), and a sometimes deadly Buddhist ultranationalism deploying very narrow criteria about who belongs in the country” (4), which impacted Rohingya’s substantive ability to participate in the polity.
To explore the genealogies of war and ethno-religious nationalism, part II delves into Burmese history. It begins from earliest human settlement, with each era of history discussed, again, by zeroing in on how historical formations and changes affected present-day Rakhine State, while factoring in the surrounding domains. This section benefits from Sardiña Galache’s interrogation of a significant amount of secondary literature. For instance, take Myanmar’s now-infamous 1982 citizenship law. In numerous scholarly accounts, this law is taken as enacting a massive sea-change in policy toward the Rohingya—marking the moment that the country’s 135 officially-recognized “national races” were elaborated, and at which point the Rohingya were excluded and subsequently made stateless. Sardiña Galache not only gives the law context (that it was first drafted in 1976; that there were public consultations enacted) and clarifies that it neither enumerated the infamous 135 nor explicitly excluded the Rohingya (189–190). He also follows the actual implementation of the law, finding ambiguous effects: its “enforcement was extraordinarily slow” but it did commence the policy in which identity cards “included the religion and ethnicity of their bearers” (191) in Myanmar.
Such close reading of the citizenship law enables Sardiña Galache to make conclusions that defy both nationalist and scholarly conventional wisdoms alike. Perhaps most critically, the author’s scrutiny of the evidence of population flows over centuries between what is now Rakhine State and Chittagong in Bangladesh, allows him to refute histories that follow the colonial map and its cloistered ways of seeing Buddhists as “belonging” in what is now Myanmar and Muslims “belonging” in present-day Bangladesh. As he puts it: “Given the migration flows in both directions for centuries, it is perfectly plausible that many ‘Chittagonians’ were descendants of ‘Arakanese Muslims,’ and vice versa” (135). When this is understood, the discourses that insist Rohingya do not exist—that they are “really just Bengalis”—quite literally lose the ground they stand upon (135).
Despite these important contributions, there is a concern that in such extensive efforts to build the Burmese labyrinth, the ability to fulfil the book’s initial motivation—to comprehend the roots of the prejudice against Rohingya—is forfeited. For instance, the reader is shown both the military state’s propaganda campaigns and the polity’s mistrust of that same military: What then allows the people to so easily accept state lies spread about the Rohingya? Could political-economic forces have played into this? While the book is published at Verso, the world’s self-described top radical press, there is no assessment of class dynamics amidst violent campaigns of dispossession and capitalist expansion that were interwoven into Burma’s last three decades, dynamics that may have impacted both ethnogenesis and ethnic conflict in the country.
That critique notwithstanding, The Burmese Labyrinth provides an impressive synthesis of historiography and social science texts in Burma studies, all while featuring perceptive reporting that introduces valuable new material.
Elliott Prasse-Freeman
National University of Singapore, Singapore