A Savage Dreamland

by David Eimer

  Such misinformation served to polarise the Rakhine further from the Rohingya. There are around 2.4 million Rakhine, the descendants of people who migrated from China to central Burma before moving to Arakan around the tenth century ce. For the next 800 years various Rakhine kingdoms exerted a power and influence that extended into what are now Bangladesh and India and, through trade, beyond to the Middle East.

  Arakan’s time as an independent nation ended in 1784, when it was forcibly absorbed into the Burmese kingdom in a notably bloody conflict. The Rakhine are still resentful of their conquerors. It is one of the anomalies surrounding the crisis that the Rakhine dislike the Bamar as much as they do the Rohingya, in some cases more so, feeling that they have long been treated as second-class citizens of Burma themselves. Rakhine only became an official state in 1974, long after the Chin, Kachin, Karen and Shan peoples were given their own regions, even if in name only.

  Today, the Rakhine remain ferociously nationalistic and proud of their otherness. I have heard them described as the Sicilians of Burma, separated from the rest of the country not by sea, as Sicily is from Italy, but by the Arakan Mountains. In the colonial period it was quicker to travel to Sittwe from Calcutta than from Yangon. There are still only two real roads leading over the Arakan Hills, reinforcing the sense that Rakhine State is cut off from Burma proper.

  With their territory taken from them first by the Bamar, then by the British at the end of the First Anglo-Burmese War, and then once again by the Bamar after independence, the Rakhine are profoundly sensitive about losing land. The junta poked that wound deliberately and the Rakhine were easily persuaded that the Rohingya were flooding in from Bangladesh to displace them.

  Further inflaming their sense of injustice was the almost complete lack of investment in their homeland during the junta years, along with the rest of the border regions. After neighbouring Chin State, Rakhine is the most deprived part of Burma. Mixed together, the Rakhine people’s deep-seated anger over the annexation of their territory, their history of militant Buddhism, paranoia over the Rohingya and extreme poverty make for a very combustible cocktail.

  ‘As long as Rakhine stays poor, the people will stay angry. Rakhine people want access to their own natural resources. But the government ignores them,’ a Rakhine journalist named Ko Min Min told me. ‘There’s been no real difference since the NLD took over. The roads are a bit better and there’s more construction, but that’s it. If anything, people are angrier and more set in their attitudes. Rakhine people didn’t like Aung San much and it is the same with his daughter.’

  Ko Min Min was tall and thin with a quizzical smile playing on his face. He looked as if he doubted everything he heard, an entirely reasonable approach for an investigative journalist in Burma. He set up his own news agency in Sittwe in 2015 after working on local papers. ‘In Sittwe the newspapers are biased. They talk only about the Rakhine, just as the foreign media write only about the Rohingya. I set up my own agency to talk about all the ethnic groups, to be balanced.’

  Does he think there is a hunger in Rakhine State for such non-partisan reporting? ‘I think there are quite a few liberal people in Rakhine, but they don’t want to speak out,’ Ko Min Min replied. ‘Most Rakhine believe in the idea of their own state. They want their own nation and they’ll sacrifice other things to achieve that. Caring about the Muslims is far less of a priority.’ But Ko Min Min conceded that the progressives are outnumbered by the intolerant. ‘At a grassroots level, there’s a lot of hatred.’

  By his own admission he was once a Rakhine loyalist. ‘I used to believe what the nationalists said about Rohingya being an invented name so that the Muslims could establish themselves in Rakhine. I used to fly the Buddhist flag on my motorbike,’ he said. It hadn’t taken long for his change of attitude to anger his former nationalist friends. Within eight months of setting up his agency, Ko Min Min was receiving death threats on Facebook and a small bomb was thrown at the compound that houses his office.

  When we met for a coffee in a Yangon shopping mall, he shrugged off the attack. Ko Min Min was more concerned about one of his former colleagues, who had moved to Reuters and was now serving seven years in prison, after being convicted with another journalist of possessing official documents, which they had been handed by the police immediately before their arrest. Sentenced under a 1923 colonial-era law, the real reason for their imprisonment was their reporting on the killing of ten Rohingya men by the military in 2017, hard evidence of the state’s involvement in massacres in northern Rakhine.

  Media independence has been another casualty of the violence in Rakhine State. The press have been prevented from travelling to northern Rakhine since 2016, except on stage-managed trips. But even before the Rohingya crisis, legislation passed in the colonial and junta periods was routinely being utilised by extremist monks, politicians of all parties and the Tatmadaw to silence the local media. Since the end of military rule people have been arrested for everything from posting satirical comments on Facebook to reporting on the ethnic armies operating in the borderlands.

  In March 2012, when I was in Yangon covering the by-elections that resulted in Aung San Suu Kyi taking a seat in parliament for the first time, I visited the cramped and chaotic NLD head office. An emancipated fourth estate was on the party’s mind then. ‘We still have no free press,’ Nyan Win, a senior NLD figure and Daw Suu’s long-time lawyer told me. ‘We’d be more confident if we did.’ Six years on, the NLD appears happy to keep the media muzzled, while mimicking the junta’s tactics of closing off the parts of the country they don’t want outsiders to see.

  Unable to reach northern Rakhine, I decided to travel to Sittwe. I hadn’t been there for eighteen months, since just before the 2016 violence, and when I landed at the airport there were police on the runway checking who was disembarking. Others lined the route into town, many more than I remembered from my last visit. The roads had been upgraded, no longer punctuated by potholes the size of small craters, but they still lacked pavements and were choked with motorbikes, with everyone swallowing the dust kicked up by the traffic.

  Tensions were high. Two months previously seven Rakhine had been shot dead by the police during a protest in Mrauk U, their historic capital a few hours north of Sittwe. Less than a month before I arrived three bombs had gone off in downtown. The local conspiracy theorists were having a field day. ‘It was the government who set off the bombs. They’re trying to justify what happened in Mrauk U. They want people to think that the security situation is so bad that the police are under threat,’ said the man who drove me into town.

  People were feverish and not just because we were all burning up under a sun growing more intense by the day, signalling the approach of the monsoon, the time of year when tempers fray. The twitchy atmosphere served to make the town appear even less attractive than it already is. Sittwe’s modern incarnation is low-rise and mediocre, wooden and brick homes set on scrappy lanes that straggle back from the Strand, the riverfront road that winds past the port to a point where the Kaladan River meets the Bay of Bengal.

  Many businesses along the main road parallel to the Strand were closed. The rest were general stores or mobile phone shops. There was little sign of economic activity, apart from the large fish market. But much of the catch from Rakhine is taken by trawlers from outside the state and goes elsewhere, principally Yangon, while the natural-gas fields offshore supply India. ‘There’s no industry and there are no jobs. A lot of us have to go to Malaysia or Thailand to find work. Of course we’re angry,’ said a man at the market.

  Foreigners in Sittwe, almost all of whom are NGO workers, have been on the receiving end of some of that rage. People in provincial Burma are normally eager to stop and talk to westerners, but not in Sittwe. The Rakhine are naturally insular anyway, but now, following the worldwide condemnation of the crackdown on the Rohingya, they feel picked upon by the West and resentful of the aid agencies who come to Sittwe to help the Rohingya and not them.
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br />   Walking through the market, pushing through the crowds of people and the trishaws loaded with shopping, I attracted a lot of stares, by no means all friendly, and while some people responded to a greeting, others just ignored me. Circling back to the main road, I stopped outside the Jama Mosque. Surrounded by a high wall, behind which palm trees lean protectively in as a further barricade, the Jama is the oldest mosque in Sittwe, dating back to 1859.

  Sittwe was known then as Akyab. It was one of the earliest of the British acquisitions, taken in 1826 after the First Anglo-Burmese War, and later became a key port in the rice trade, with the grain shipped from the Ayeyarwady Delta to Akyab for export. But during the Second World War Arakan was the scene of some of the fiercest fighting between the British and the Japanese, with the Rohingya and Rakhine on opposing sides. Akyab was largely destroyed and never regained its former prominence after independence, the town left neglected and ignored.

  Since 2012 that has been the fate of the Jama Mosque. It was closed after almost all of Sittwe’s Muslims were moved to camps for the internally displaced, although ‘deliberately displaced’ is a more accurate description. Now the Jama is falling apart by inches, plaster crumbling off to reveal the brickwork, wooden shutters and doors hanging by their hinges, the plinths on the roof gone, so the minarets stand forlorn at the four corners of the building, the intricate patterns around the windows barely discernible under the dirt and mould.

  Standing on tiptoes to peer over the wall at the mosque, I noticed two men looking at me. I heard them shouting as I took a few pictures with my phone, and then a policeman was running up to me. ‘You can’t take photos here. It’s not allowed.’ I said, ‘OK’, and moved off. The two men were grinning now. They had told the policeman I was taking pictures. Sittwe is seeking to obscure its Muslim past and doesn’t want any witnesses, so the Jama is being left to collapse discreetly behind its high wall, the authorities looking forward to the day when they can bulldoze the rubble and all memories of it.

  ‘They’re trying to make us leave of our own accord. We’re not being forced out directly, but they’re making life difficult for us, making us hungry,’ my Rohingya contact in Sittwe told me. We were talking fifty metres beyond the barbed-wire barrier and police post that guards the entrance to Aung Mingalar, the one remaining neighbourhood in Sittwe where Muslims can be found. A few thousand Rohingya live here, close to the Jama Mosque, unable to leave officially without permission, even if it is a major medical emergency, which is only granted if a bribe is paid.

  Aung Mingalar’s residents are effectively imprisoned, reliant on food deliveries from outside to survive, with the local officials waiting for their money to run out so they can be transported to join the rest of the Rohingya in the camps outside town. ‘They say, “Go to the camp and you will get rations.” But I’ve seen the camps and the conditions are very bad,’ said the man. ‘It’s impossible for me to leave. My house is here. Some Rakhine are still nice and supply food and other things to us, for a profit.’

  My contact was taking a risk leaving Aung Mingalar illicitly, even if we were close to the entrance. We were hidden from view, having arranged to meet inside a shop, but I knew I had been noticed by the police as I approached. He had needed to come out, though, to meet with two Rakhine men looking to hire labourers for 5,000 kyat (£2.65) a day. Some Rakhine continue to employ the Rohingya, not least because they are cheap. ‘The police won’t let them have the men unless they pay some tea money first,’ said the Rohingya man. In Burma, ‘tea money’ is the euphemism for a bribe.

  Getting out of the ghetto, if only for fifteen minutes, was the highlight of his day. ‘There is nothing for us to do in Aung Mingalar. There is no business, we have no jobs. We sit in the house or the tea shop, we walk and talk and pray. This is the Aung Mingalar life.’ He looked older than his age, but he was smart in a longyi and patterned shirt over his belly and his eyes were still bright and lively. He wasn’t giving up.

  Four hours later I sat waiting in a near-empty tea shop a few hundred metres down the road from Aung Mingalar. It was early afternoon and I was sweating in the heat. The teenage waiters were slumped over tables, heads on their arms, or fanning themselves with the plastic menus. My phone rang. ‘He’s on his way. Wait outside.’ A couple of minutes later a Rakhine man pulled up on a motorbike. He offered a smile as a greeting and handed me a helmet, motioning me to pull down the visor. I climbed on the back and we accelerated away.

  We were on our way to one of the villages outside Sittwe whose Rohingya residents haven’t been driven into the camps. Behind me, out of sight on another bike, was my contact. I hadn’t suggested we try and reach a village, knowing that if we got caught he would be in serious trouble and so would I. But he knew I wanted to go, and I understood that it made him happy to outsmart his captors and escape Aung Mingalar for a while.

  Whipping through Sittwe’s northern suburbs, we went through an archway manned by police who didn’t get the chance to see us for more than a couple of seconds. This was the military area of town. For the next two miles we passed a succession of barracks on both sides of the tree-lined road, home to some of the units that deployed to northern Rakhine in 2016 and 2017 to drive the Rohingya across the border to Bangladesh. The garrison is built on land confiscated from Rakhine and Rohingya farmers in the 1980s.

  Emerging from the trees, we drove through open fields towards a village that is home to one of Sittwe’s universities. After ten minutes I could see the institution and knew that we had missed our turn-off. The driver halted by the side of the road and called his colleague for instructions, while I squatted by the side of the bike hiding from the traffic. A police pickup truck went past, the men in the back in helmets with shotguns on their knees, followed by an army officer in a car that passed so close I could see the rank insignia on his epaulettes.

  This wasn’t the ideal place to stop. But we were mobile again soon, retracing our way back to a large tree where we found the other bike and a paved path that led away from the road at a right angle. After a couple of hundred metres the concrete gave way to a dust track that wound through a small Rakhine village, haystacks interspersed with wooden homes. The dust was thick and deep, the driver struggling to control his front wheel as we slithered through it.

  Then we were sliding around a corner and in the near distance I saw the unmistakeable shape of a mosque with a small dome and two metal crescents atop either side of its entrance. This was the Rohingya village, home to 200-odd families, around a thousand people. A single dirt road led through it, the palm-thatched houses on either side and down small lanes shielded from view by high bamboo fences, something I hadn’t encountered in Burma before. ‘It is to prevent our women being seen from outside,’ the village elder explained when I was introduced to him.

  Bald with a white and yellow beard, in a short-sleeved shirt and longyi, he sat on a raised platform in a tea shop. Around him were men ranging in age from their late teens to their sixties, some with beards, many wearing taqiyah caps. I saw hardly any women while I was in the village. Those who did emerge from their houses were in black burkas, their faces covered completely.

  Two Rakhine men came down the road, driving their cattle ahead of them. ‘They are from the next village. We live side by side with the Rakhine here and it has always been peaceful. There was no violence here in 2012. In the rainy season we work in their fields sometimes. Now we have nothing to do, so we stay in the tea shop all day,’ said the elder. But the Rakhine village occupies land that once belonged to the men in the tea shop, taken from the Rohingya in the junta era and handed to the Rakhine.

  Most Rohingya are traditionally farmers or fishermen. But with their land appropriated over the years many Rohingya around Sittwe used to work as labourers, either on Rakhine farms or in the city. ‘We can’t do that now. We can’t go too far from the village,’ said the elder. ‘Most of us have relatives working abroad, in Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh or Malaysia, and they send money back to us
so we can live.’ The money is remitted under the hawala system, an informal banking network first used a millennium or more ago by Muslim traders on the Silk Roads.

  Just like the people living in Aung Mingalar, the Rohingya here are being deliberately isolated by the authorities in the hope that they will leave the village, either to move to the camps, which were out of sight south of us, or to go abroad. ‘The government knows we are here but they never come. They don’t care. The government will do nothing for us. They just want us to disappear,’ the elder said. There was no bile in his voice as he spoke. Some of the men sitting with him were sullen, their anger obvious, but more of them appeared resigned to their fate, beaten down by their circumstances.

  None advocated armed resistance to the government, or any form of opposition. Their situation is too far gone now for that. ‘People here don’t support violence. Maybe some villages in the north did. But ARSA can’t do anything for us. How can they liberate northern Rakhine with no weapons and no support? Look at the Kachin and Shan people. They have been fighting for seventy years and they still have nothing,’ said the elder.

  Nearby were a few other Rohingya villages, the only ones left in the vicinity of Sittwe. There are far more in northern Rakhine, but their residents are now also imprisoned in them. Just a thirty-minute drive from the centre of Sittwe, the village has no electricity or running water, just wells and a couple of shops selling basic supplies. ‘This is still better than living in the camps,’ my contact told me. I asked what happens when people fall ill. ‘We take them to the clinic in the camp. If it’s serious, we pay to be allowed to take them to the hospital in Sittwe.’

  Later, the elder showed me around the village. It was silent, with hardly any passing traffic and no noise coming from the homes. By far the liveliest place was the madrasa attached to the mosque, full of boys and girls as young as three in skullcaps and headscarves sitting beneath a blackboard with Arabic script on it as they studied the Koran. The elder pointed to a wooden hut in the mosque’s compound. ‘That is our school. Before 2012, the children went to the government school in the Rakhine village. They can’t now, so we teach them ourselves.’