Lian Sakhong, a tall man with hooded eyes and a broad smile, was a Chin and the descendant of Chin chiefs. The Chins (known in India as Mizos) are a tribal people who were independent until about a hundred years ago, when the British divided their upland territory between Burma and Assam. Many later converted to Christianity. At Rangoon University in the 1980s, Lian Sakhong first thought of becoming a doctor, then a writer, before training to be a pastor in the North American Baptist Convention. He was from early on attracted to the ideals of freedom and democracy. On Friday nights he watched movies at the US embassy’s American Center, which had been set up in the 1950s and was one of the very few outside institutions never dismantled. After the 1988 uprising, he felt strongly that there should be an ethnic minority element and perspective in the struggle against military dictatorship.
Lian Sakhong came to believe that federalism was essential for equality. By this, he meant that places like the Chin hills should govern themselves as part of a “Union of Burma.” He also came to fear arrest. By 1990, he had fled to India, where relatives were able to secure him an Indian passport. He applied for asylum in the West. Once Aung San Suu Kyi won a Nobel Prize, it was easy; he merely went to the Delhi office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and showed them a photo of himself with Aung San Suu Kyi. He was offered asylum in Sweden. “Great! Abba!” he thought. That was all he knew about his new home.8
For the next twenty years, Lian Sakhong tried, from Sweden, to draw attention to the plight of ethnic minorities in Burma. No one was interested. It was too complicated and muddied the simple story around Aung San Suu Kyi and the generals. He completed a PhD at Uppsala University, all the while talking, debating, attending conferences, and keeping in touch with allies along Burma’s borders, including in the different armed organizations.
In 2011, he was excited about Thein Sein’s invitation to peace talks. He had met Ye Htut (the president’s spokesman) the year before and had been impressed. Until then, he had no idea that there were “thoughtful people like that in the regime.”
The Chin National Front, with which Lian Sakhong was affiliated, signed a ceasefire agreement in early 2012. In late 2013 Lian Sakhong, now with salt-and-pepper hair, became a core member of the negotiation team on the side of what were now officially called the Ethnic Armed Organizations. He was often at the Myanmar Peace Center, for both formal and informal talks. There were others who came back from overseas, men like Harn Yawnghwe, son of Burma’s first president and an ethnic Shan, who had been in exile since his father’s imprisonment at the hands of Ne Win in the 1960s. He too became a key player. At the Myanmar Peace Center, Aung Min recruited not just the old Egress team but an assortment of others, including former exiles and even former insurgents. They included Min Zaw Oo (the former rebel and PhD from George Mason University) and Kyaw Yin Hlaing (who had a PhD from Cornell University and had been teaching for Egress).
The two sides worked together well. They were amazingly compatible, at least on the surface. After formal talks there were invariably boisterous dinners, sometimes leading to karaoke singing. There was much use of the word “trust” and a free flow of whiskey. But was it all just a show of bonhomie? I couldn’t tell. I remember a UN colleague, an experienced mediator, who told me that the peace talks that were the most successful were the ones in which the hatreds were visible and the sides trusted the process but not each other. Here, there was familiarity, but the process seemed to be lacking in a strategic direction.
I worked closely with a project set up by my wife, Sofia, called the Beyond Ceasefires Initiative. She had worked at the UN for many years as well, most recently with the peace process in Nepal. Our idea was a simple one: to bring people who had led successful peace processes in other countries to Burma, and have them share their experiences with their Burmese counterparts. These included the former UN mediators in Georgia, Libya, Guatemala, Burundi, Liberia, East Timor, and Colombia. It also included both the Nepal Royal Army’s top negotiator and his principal counterpart from the Maoist rebels.
We wanted to make sure the issues our visitors came to discuss were the ones most relevant to what was happening at that time in the peace process. We worked carefully with both ethnic armed group leaders and Aung Min’s team to identify the issues. We also wanted to make sure the foreigners, even though they would be speaking about their own experiences, understood the local context. We spent weeks preparing them.
Perhaps most importantly, we spent a lot of time on language and translation. I had been to many meetings where a good part of what was said was mistranslated and 100 percent of the nuance was lost. Burmese is a wonderful language for telling stories and expressing human feelings and experiences, but it is not very good for expressing policy ideas. Many words related to government are neologisms. “Human rights” is translated as lu-akwint-ye, where the word for “right” is the same as the word for “license” or “opportunity”; it’s related to the word meaning an opportunist. The words for “economic” and “business” are the same: si-bwa-ye. So an economist is literally a business expert.
At one of our first events, over a hundred people involved in the peace process from all sides came to listen to Nepali general Shiv Ram Pradhan and Maoist commander Comrade Pasang talk about how they had loathed each other at first (“I wanted to kill him!”) but learned to work together as friends. General Shiv Ram said that his army had been reluctant to engage in talks, and had seen UN involvement as an insult, even thinking at times of overthrowing the government in order to scuttle the negotiations. But in the end, with peace, everyone, including the army, was much better off. We made sure his remarks were properly translated.
We worked hard on the Beyond Ceasefires Initiative. Others worked harder. Aung Min himself was tireless, traveling around the country to the most remote rebel bases, then to Naypyitaw to see the army and report to the president, trying to keep everyone on track. But by 2014, the peace process was hitting one roadblock after another. Clashes continued, especially between the Burmese army and the Kachin despite the earlier agreement. Sometimes these were because of local misunderstandings, when small companies of soldiers inadvertently came into contact with one another. Other times, they were the result of one side trying to maximize its position before whatever came next. The negotiations for the nationwide ceasefire agreement also proved to be a nightmare. What was meant to be a catalyst for further quick advances became a drag. The formal discussions were like UN drafting sessions, with literally hours, if not days, spent on a single word or the positioning of a subordinate clause. And the swirl of foreign and press attention began to make progress increasingly tough to achieve, as everyone played to the galleries.
The Chinese watched the unfolding landscape in Burma with increasing alarm. They had long advised the Burmese to reform, make up with the West, get sanctions lifted, and stop being an embarrassment to them at the UN Security Council. But they were not prepared for a genuinely freer and more democratic Burma, which not only “suspended” big Chinese projects such as the Myitsone dam but seemed to be embracing the West with abandon. Their concern sharpened when the old ceasefires began to break down and fighting intensified along the common frontier. Refugees fleeing into the People’s Republic were bad enough, but stray shells killing civilians inside China, as they would several times over these years, was an affront to their dignity.
As the Chinese watched the peace talks inch ahead, they saw the European Union and the Norwegians in leading roles. They also saw the Japanese becoming ever more influential. The Nippon Foundation positioned itself as a broker, funding all sides and then attempting to bring them together. Tokyo appointed Yohei Nishikawa, head of the Nippon Foundation, as its special envoy to the peace process. Nishikawa’s father, Ryoichi Nishikawa, had been a prominent supporter of the Japanese military during the Second World War. Yohei Nishikawa was now a regular feature of the peace talks, often dressed in full Burmese costume. The Chinese, whose own popular history of the Secon
d World War was of brutal mistreatment by the Japanese invaders, were not impressed.
The Chinese were even more perturbed when, in April 2014, General Gun Maw of the Kachin Independence Organization traveled to Washington. The very notion that the Americans were now influencing insurgent armies right on their border was a troubling one. Gun Maw met with an array of senior State and Defense Department officials, including UN ambassador Samantha Power. On his arrival, assistant secretary for human rights Tom Malinowski escorted Gun Maw to the Lincoln Memorial. Malinowski later affirmed the close ties of “the Kachin and American people” going back to the Second World War.
From the Chinese perspective, it got worse. By 2015, it wasn’t just the border groups going to Washington; it was Washington coming to the border. In January that year, a visiting American delegation held a “human rights dialogue” in Naypyitaw, and this was followed by discussions in Myitkyina, the Kachin capital, about 60 miles from China. Those in the delegation included General Anthony Crutchfield, the deputy commander of the US Pacific fleet. The leadership in Beijing started to take notice: fighting was bad, but the wrong kind of peace could be worse.
Just four weeks after Crutchfield’s visit, a heavily armed ethnic Chinese militia crossed into Burma and seized the Kokang town of Laukkai, leading to weeks of heavy fighting. The militia was loyal to Peng Jiasheng, the warlord who had been ousted by the Burmese from his Kokang base following the first round of fighting in 2009. He was now trying to claw his way back into the picture, and perhaps win a seat at the peace talks.
The fighting sent 60,000 refugees, nearly all ethnic Chinese, into China. On Weibo, a Chinese social media site, Peng used images of these refugees and appeals to racial solidarity to crowd-fund financial support. The Chinese government allowed him to open a bank account to receive the money. It also allowed Peng’s troops to quietly use Chinese territory to outflank Burmese positions.9 The Burmese responded with air strikes. In March 2015, Burmese Air Force jets accidentally bombed inside China, killing four civilians. The Chinese military establishment reacted angrily, promising “resolute measures to protect the safety of Chinese people and their assets.”10
Beijing now had to take a hard look at the situation. Continued fighting was not in Chinese interest. The border needed to be stable, not least to facilitate the growing trade and economic ties they wanted. But an accord reached through a Western- and Japanese-supported process was not ideal, especially if it led to anything resembling international peacekeepers, or even foreign ceasefire monitors, on China’s southwestern flank.
By this time, Burma was looking less and less like a country on the verge of what negotiators called htawara-nyeinchan-yay, “permanent” or “everlasting” peace. Over 100,000 people had been displaced in fresh fighting since the peace process began, and another 100,000 temporarily displaced by the battle for Kokang. UN aid agencies estimated a million people in need of humanitarian assistance.11
But there was a deeper problem. The peace process began as a quest for ceasefires between the new government and the Burmese army’s longtime battlefield opponents. But who should be involved? Was this simply an armed conflict between government and rebels, or an inter-ethnic struggle between the majority Burmese and ethnic minorities? Whose voice was important, and whose voice was legitimate?
Many of the people actually negotiating on the ethnic armed group side were political figures, motivated by long-held political beliefs and divorced from the war economies of the border. The biggest rebel group of all, the United Wa State Army, chose to stay on the sidelines and didn’t attend any of the talks. Also not present at the table were the Border Guard Forces or any of the literally hundreds of militias, most allied to government and often neck-deep in illicit industries. These smaller militias seemed a breed apart, but it seemed unlikely that any peace deal could be sustained without their consent. And the National League for Democracy and Aung San Suu Kyi were not involved at all.
It wasn’t clear who really spoke for whom. Were the armed groups the principal voices of the minorities they claimed to represent? Nor was it clear whether the aim was simply an end to fighting (in which case, an old-style ceasefire with lucrative business deals might have done the trick), or the start of an effort to completely remake state–society relations. If the latter, who had the legitimacy to decide? For the army and the insurgents, legitimacy came from fighting. The more the peace process became the flagship of Burma’s reform drive, the more it was the men with guns who held the cards.
There was also an even deeper problem. The peace process did nothing to address questions of identity, and how Burma should see itself as a multiracial and multicultural country. The concepts and language of indigenousness were assumed. The peace process was about the “indigenous peoples of Burma” finding a new formula to live together. But there were other ethnicities, other identities, and the shadow of colonial-era race-based conflicts in play. They would now retake center stage.
ON THE EVENING OF May 28, 2012, three men killed a woman named Thida Htwe, near her village in southern Arakan. The story quickly spread that the three men were “Bengali Muslims” and that the woman had been raped as well as murdered. Five days later, a mob attacked a bus in a nearby town, believing the culprits were on board. Ten people, all Muslims, died in the assault. In the weeks that followed, both Rohingya Muslim and Arakanese Buddhist gangs destroyed shops and houses belonging to the other’s community. Over 75,000 people were forced to flee their homes.12
In Maungdaw, in the far north of Arakan on the border with Bangladesh, clashes began on June 8 with the torching of several Muslim houses. Muslims comprised four-fifths of the population of Maungdaw, and within hours there were retaliatory attacks. Riots spread to other areas of the state, including the state capital, Sittwe, a seaside town of about 150,000.
Aye Aye Soe, a twenty-eight-year-old staff member of Save the Children, was in Sittwe on the first day of the riots, visiting from her hometown farther south. She remembers crowds of young Muslim men armed with knives and holding Molotov cocktails, as Arakanese Buddhists, both men and women, ran and shouted, “The kala are coming!” She witnessed a Buddhist mob catch a young Muslim man holding a Molotov cocktail and beat him to death there on the street. She had never seen such violence in her life.13
Neither had Tin Hlaing, the Muslim businessman mentioned earlier, who was then thirty-seven years old. He had over five hundred laborers working for him, including about a hundred Muslims. The day after Thida Htwe was killed, he saw activists from the (Buddhist) Arakan National Party at the central market. They were handing out leaflets that said, “Are we just going to stand for this?” When the violence began, he was told by the authorities to evacuate his Muslim workers to prevent trouble.14 He was worried for his family and quickly returned to his home in the Muslim quarter, a densely packed neighborhood of approximately 30,000 people. He remembers Buddhists setting fire to buildings, and Muslims retaliating by throwing rocks.
At first Tin Hlaing didn’t think much of what was happening. “In 2001 there had been a big fight,” he told me. “Houses and shops were burned. Rocks were thrown. Troops fired into the crowds. Then it was finished. Over. Two weeks later everything was normal, as if nothing had happened, people meeting, greeting, buying and selling. So I didn’t have the feeling that my life was about to change completely.”
But this time, the violence intensified. It was a scorching hot and humid summer week, with temperatures over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, made worse by the fires all around. Every hour the fires came closer, and so Tin Hlaing and his family decided to go north, on foot. Soon they were in a crowd of thousands. He held tightly to the hands of his wife and child but in the crush lost sight of his parents and siblings. He and another university-educated Muslim man talked to police they passed along the way, pleading for their help. There was a Buddhist mob, several hundred strong, not far away, and twelve policemen in between. “People were crying, shouting. I could hear the police captain
on his phone asking permission to shoot. I knelt down in front of him and begged him to help get what was now about 20,000 men, women, and children to safety. He then fired into the air and allowed us to walk to a village about an hour and a half away. We reached the village after dark. By then it was pouring with rain and we were all drenched, our feet covered in mud. People rested where they could, in the houses of villagers, under trees, in the open field. There was a little Buddhist village nearby. If we wanted, we could have attacked them. But no one did. That night, I was reunited with my parents and siblings.”
On June 10, President Thein Sein declared a state of emergency in northern Arakan, “to restore security and stability,” imposing martial law and giving the army temporary administrative control of the region. Five infantry battalions arrived in Sittwe and fanned out across the countryside to reinforce existing security forces. It took two more weeks to quell the riots. By the end of the month, as many as a hundred people had died and nearly 100,000 were displaced.
Burma was visited that week by António Guterres, then UN High Commissioner for Refugees (and from 2016 the UN’s Secretary-General). He met with President Thein Sein. This was the same week that Aung San Suu Kyi was beginning her triumphal visit to Europe. The meeting didn’t go well. International media reported that Thein Sein had told Guterres that the UN should intern all Rohingya and then ship them overseas.15 It was the first indication, later etched in the minds of people abroad, that the government had taken a hardline anti-Muslim stance, already bordering on the genocidal.
It was partly a problem of translation. Thein Sein had said, “During the colonial period, many Bengalis came to Arakan to work. A portion chose to stay. Under Burmese law, anyone who is a third-generation descendant of these immigrants is entitled to Burmese citizenship. But there are also illegal immigrants who have come since colonial times and who are using the name ‘Rohingya.’ Their presence threatens stability. We cannot take responsibility for them. The UN should place them in refugee camps until they can be taken to a third country.”
The Hidden History of Burma Page 19