This wasn’t a statement of universal brotherhood. But neither was it a call to expel all Muslims. Instead, the president was confirming that Muslims were entitled to citizenship, except for those who had illegally entered the country since 1948. In private, Burmese ministers admitted that, at most, 20 percent were illegal immigrants. The remarks by the president to Guterres were later taken down from his web page precisely because he had gone further in suggesting citizenship for Muslims in Arakan than any government leader had before. It was a potential opening for the UN to work with the new government on this now explosive issue. But it wasn’t followed up.16
That same year, the Burmese government approached Noeleen Heyzer (the senior UN official who had hosted Joseph Stiglitz) to help devise an economic development strategy that would benefit both communities. Heyzer passed this request on to the UN headquarters in New York. Nothing happened.
AYE AYE SOE returned safely to her hometown in the south of Arakan. She realized that the recent violence had altered the political landscape. “If you asked people in early 2012 if they were interested in politics, they would say no. If you asked them if they were interested in amyotha-ye [nationalism or the nationalist cause], they would also have said no. But after the riots that changed. We have to ask who benefited from this.” Within three months, the violence had come to her home too.
Beginning on the night of October 23, deadly clashes between Muslims and Buddhists broke out again, this time in and around Kyaukpyu. Some of the Muslims of the area are similar to Muslims in the north, nearer Bangladesh, speaking a dialect of Bengali and identifying themselves as Rohingya. But many Muslims in Kyaukpyu had a very different tale to tell, centuries old. In 1660, the Mughal prince Shah Shuja, having lost a contest for the imperial throne, fled with his family, harem, bodyguards, and vast treasure to the royal court at Arakan, hoping for asylum. It didn’t work out well. According to the accounts of contemporary Dutch traders (who had come from New Amsterdam), Shah Shuja attempted to overthrow his host, the king of Arakan, who in turn killed him and slaughtered many of his entourage. But not all: hundreds of the mostly Afghan soldiers, mainly archers, who accompanied the prince were merged into the king’s own forces. Their descendants were known as Kaman, from the Persian word for “bow.” It was this Muslim community, the Kaman, who lived in Kyaukpyu.
Unlike the Rohingya, whose identity is contested, the Kaman are acknowledged as an indigenous people, a taing-yintha, whose ancestors had lived in Burma since well before colonial times. In the villages around Kyaukpyu, they had lived alongside their Buddhist neighbors without problem for centuries, speaking the same dialect of Burmese.
Aye Aye Soe felt that the problem was not the Kaman villagers but “Bengali” troublemakers in the Muslim quarter of Kyaukpyu itself. She believes that it was they who first provoked the violence, leading to a response by the Buddhist Arakanese. “Within days there was all-out fighting, with Buddhists burning down Muslim buildings and Muslims shooting back with jinglees [slingshots]. I saw soldiers fire into the air. But there were not nearly enough soldiers or police to really crack down. I stayed most of the time in my house but could see the blazes in the distance. We were so scared. Our men took turns guarding the street. There were rumours all the time. “The kala are getting close!” “They’re coming to get us!” We didn’t sleep at all for days. Then we saw the Muslims leaving in their little boats. We were relieved to see them go.”
One of the Muslims who left was a close childhood friend of Aye Aye Soe. “I felt sorry for her. She left by car. I know she cried when she left. She sent me a note saying that she had to leave without her things, only the clothes she was wearing. I wanted to help and so, with a couple of other friends, collected as much as we could, clothes and other essentials, and sent it to her secretly. If any Buddhist Arakanese had found out, they would have killed us. She went first to a displaced persons’ camp, but because her family was well off they managed to get to Rangoon. From there she got a job in Qatar, where she is now. I haven’t seen her since we left. We sometimes send each other a little greeting on Facebook.”
At the Myanmar Peace Center, Kyaw Yin Hlaing had been tracking events closely. When I spoke to him in 2018, he said that the situation before 2010 had been a terrible one for most Muslims in the north. “The Nasaka [the state border police] were ruthless. It was like a caste system. The Muslims were the lower caste. But at that time they accepted it. A government official one day said to me, ‘Let me show you what I can do,’ and slapped a Muslim on the street. Before 2011, the Muslims felt they had to accept their status. But after the 2010 elections, in which they voted, and the political changes in 2011, they became more liberated in their minds. They hoped for international support. In 2012, when I spoke to people, almost no one referred to themselves as Rohingya. But in late 2012, everyone did.”
The state was very weak. The dismantling of the intelligence services in 2004 meant that the state was nearly blind. Now the Nasaka border force disbanded too. The remaining security forces had no idea what was happening in Arakan, especially in the north. Under the new constitution, the army had to take a back seat as well. In their place were ordinary police with Second World War .303 rifles of dubious quality. Kyaw Yin Hlaing remembers, during the 2012 violence, an incident in which the chief judge of the state, U Kyauk, found himself with three police officers on the top floor of a building, surrounded by a Muslim mob. The judge told the police to fire into the crowd. The police officer in charge said he didn’t have the authority. The judge shouted, “I’m the chief judge! I am giving you the authority. Fire!” One of the policemen finally pulled the trigger—but the gun didn’t fire.
In 2013, violence flared again, this time outside Arakan. Whereas in Arakan, the clashes had involved rioters from both Buddhist and Muslim communities, now the violence was overwhelmingly anti-Muslim. Meiktila, a large town south of Mandalay, was the epicenter of the bloodshed, with as many as fifty people killed and another 12,000 displaced over a few days in March. In April, the violence spread to Okkan, near Rangoon, with dozens of Muslim shops burned to the ground. A month later, in Lashio, a trading hub far to the northeast, near China, a mosque, a school, and a Muslim-owned cinema were destroyed by mobs wielding iron poles. The Muslims attacked in Lashio included many Panthay Muslims, the descendants of Turks and Mongols from Yunnan. In August, in a village near Shwebo, sword-carrying rioters singing the national anthem torched Muslim shops, stopping firefighters from fighting the blaze and even injuring a government minister who tried to intervene. Finally, in October, thugs killed five Muslims, including a ninety-four-year-old woman, in Sandoway, a palm-fringed coastal town on the Bay of Bengal.
The spark was different in each case: the violence in Meiktila started with an altercation between a Burmese couple and Muslim shop owners; in Okkan, after a Muslim woman allegedly bumped into a novice monk; in Lashio, after a Muslim man set a Buddhist woman on fire after a quarrel; and in Sandoway, after reports of the rape of a Buddhist woman by a Muslim man. The incidents were different but the dynamic was the same: rumors of a Muslim harming a Buddhist woman or a monk igniting mass anger and bloodshed.
The ferocity of the violence shocked many Burmese political figures. “I can’t handle what I saw there,” said Nilar Thein, a former political prisoner who had helped lead pro-democracy protests in 1988, who went to Meiktila to try to calm the situation. She described what she saw as “anarchic and unspeakable.”17 Some were certain that the violence had been instigated. Min Ko Naing, another 1988 protest leader, blamed “terrorists” who were “strangers and not local residents.” He also blamed security forces for doing too little.18
In many places, Buddhist monks protected Muslims. In Lashio, for example, a Buddhist abbot named U Ponnanda sheltered 1,200 Muslims in his monastery. “I welcomed them on humanitarian grounds, and gave them food and shelter,” he said, believing it was his duty as a Buddhist to protect the most vulnerable. “We were able to look after everyone, regard
less of race and religion.”19
In Meiktila, the abbot of a Buddhist monastery, U Vithuddha, gave refuge to over a thousand people, including eight hundred Muslims, during the height of the riots.20 When news spread that he was sheltering Muslims, an angry crowd surrounded his monastery after midnight and demanded he turn them over. He believed there was only one genuinely Buddhist reaction to the situation. “If you really want them, you have to get through me,” he told the mob. He reminded them of the Buddha’s teaching of compassion. He felt strongly that ordinary people were not the problem. Buddhists and Muslims sheltering in his monastery were talking and sharing food. “There was an invisible hand,” he said.
“This is the most complex situation I’ve ever seen in my life,” a veteran UN mediator told me in 2013. He had served in a dozen conflict situations in Latin America, Africa, the Balkans, and Asia. There was the peace process involving the government (which in turn was divided between the president, his cabinet, the army, and parliament) and dozens of Ethnic Armed Organizations, with other insurgencies and militia sitting on the sidelines; the contest between the generals and ex-generals and Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy, as well as dozens of other political parties and now hundreds of civil society organizations, all wanting a say in the future of the country; and the rising violence between Buddhists and Muslims, mainly in Arakan but spilling over into other parts of the country. And big powers—including China, the US, Japan, India, the UK, and a host of other governments—were jostling for influence.
At the heart of the problems was a state that still did not control its territory and a society divided on who belonged and who did not. Both were colonial legacies. In 1948, the British had left behind a weak state that collapsed within months into civil war. The peace process had started off well, but there was no real strategy for how a state could be knitted together. The old-fashioned way was for the central power simply to defeat its enemies on the battlefield. But that road to state-building—a military solution—was neither desired nor probably even possible. And questions around belonging were raising their heads just as a more open and democratic politics was trying to take root. This was no coincidence. In the absence of other ideologies or agendas, identity-based mobilization was an obvious way to gain political advantage. Troublemakers saw the value in setting communities against one another. But more than that, there was no vision of Burma as a genuinely multiracial, multicultural place.
Fear and intolerance were easy to kindle where there was a failure of the imagination. No history, other than nationalist mythology, had been taught in schools or universities for generations. Isolation bred insecurity. And the idea that race, ethnicity, and identity could be mutable, evolving, and contingent was nowhere to be found across the Burmese political spectrum. The peace process, in a way, only entrenched the notion that there were fixed ethnic groups around which everything else must be structured. International advisors did little to suggest a more useful approach.
By 2013, there was constant, upbeat talk of Burma’s “transition.” And the country was indeed changing, fast—though not necessarily toward either peace or democracy.
EIGHT
VIRTUAL TRANSITIONS
THE GOOD NEWS IN 2013 was that Burma’s economy seemed to be headed in a brighter direction. Sanctions were rolled back and business confidence was sky-high. Prospective foreign investors crowded Rangoon’s hotels. Real estate prices rose to stratospheric levels. The bad news was that Sofia and I had to find an apartment.
Until late 2011, we had commuted weekly from Bangkok. Beginning in 2012, we spent nearly all of our time in Rangoon, living in different hotels. But with the price of a room with reliable air-conditioning and Internet access spiraling to well over $150 a night, this became unsustainable.
Our choices on a decent but still limited budget were awful. A couple of years back, just as the country was beginning to show promise, I remember diplomats chatting at a reception about the need to avoid the worst of other “post-conflict” experiences, in which a deluge of expats led quickly to a bubble in rental prices, crowding out local residents, only later to collapse. Many governments were planning on setting up new embassies or expanding old ones. “We should consider a coordination mechanism,” said one ambassador enthusiastically, while the others nodded.
What happened was the opposite, as foreign companies and embassies vied for the small supply of nice houses, to use both as offices and residences. A three- or four-bedroom house with a garden in a pleasant part of Rangoon might have rented for $1,000 a month in the late 2000s. By 2013, the same house cost $20,000 a month. Both UNICEF and the World Health Organization were reported to have spent nearly $1 million a year each (in rent!) on small compounds to use as their headquarters in Burma. Multilateral organizations such as the World Bank and the European Union began providing staff “housing allowances” of as much as $10,000 a month.1 Renters were expected to pay a year’s rent up front. For us, a house became out of the question.
The apartments, though, were dismal. The very few serviced apartments run by foreign firms were an exception, but they charged astronomical sums. So we were left looking at the apartments built by local developers during the days of the military regime, shoddy constructions with bizarre interior layouts: living rooms with no windows, bathroom tiles lining the corridor. Electricity was intermittent, the wiring dangerous, the water filthy, the furniture made of plastic covered in vinyl: all yours for the price of a similar-sized flat in Mayfair or the Upper East Side.
There was one other possibility: renovating a place in the old colonial downtown. We had visited the apartment of an Australian friend, Richard Horsey, and saw what was possible. The space, in a gritty but gorgeous 1920s construction, had been exquisitely remade, with teak floors, a 21st-century kitchen, and French windows overlooking the Edwardian-era Secretariat, once the hub of British rule. By sheer luck the apartment just upstairs was about to come on the market, for a fraction of the normal expat rent.
The building was once known as Soorti Mansions, and had a very special history. In 1927, the poet and future Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda lived here as the Chilean consul, during which time he had a torrid love affair with a Burmese woman named Josie Bliss, a “passionate and knowledgeable lover” who was, he wrote, “consumed by her overwhelming jealousy” and whose temper drove to her “savage paroxysms.” They listened to Paul Robeson records together, in the sticky heat, the windows open to the pungent smells below. At night, he would sometimes awaken and see her brandishing a long, sharpened “native” knife, trying to decide whether or not to kill him. “When you die, she used to say to me, my fears will end.” Neruda soon fled to Ceylon.2
The renovations over the coming months weren’t easy, but in the end we had a fine-looking place with a Neruda connection to boot. Neruda had written a poem during his time in Rangoon titled “From My Windows on Dalhousie Street.” Now they were our windows on Dalhousie Street. I began imagining that my experience could be replicated, that all of the old downtown could be remade, and that this remade downtown could be the centerpiece of an amazing new urban plan. Dreams soon came up against reality.
Around this time I set up the Yangon Heritage Trust. The mission was to save what was left of Rangoon’s built heritage. Until the mid-1990s, Rangoon was a time capsule, not socially or politically, but in how it looked: dilapidated but with more or less the same layout and buildings as in the 1930s, beautiful edifices in an eclectic mix of architectural styles from the neoclassical New Law Courts to the art deco headquarters of Standard and Chartered. Then came the return of capitalism. Over a thousand prewar structures were demolished. Only a thousand were now left, mainly downtown. This square mile was not only Asia’s last intact colonial-era landscape, but was also home to an unparalleled collection of sites belonging to all the world’s major religions: Anglican and Roman Catholic cathedrals, Protestant churches of every imaginable denomination, an Armenian church, a Jewish synagogue, doze
ns of Hindu, Chinese, Sikh, and Parsi temples, Buddhist pagodas and monasteries, and dozens of mosques, both Sunni and Shia. It was a landscape with a bloody history of war, riots, revolution, colonialism, and anti-colonialism. It was for the Burmese a physical connection to their past. And, except for the religious buildings themselves, it was being torn down.
I was already meeting ministers on a regular basis to discuss the latest VIP foreign visitor or the peace process then still in full swing. I added heritage protection to the agenda. “Never heard of the word ‘heritage,’ much less the idea of protecting these old buildings,” said one minister. “What a crazy idea!” said another. I pulled together a team of dedicated architects, historians, and businesspeople who shared a desire to protect what was left.
After several high-level meetings and an international conference, to attract maximum media exposure, the government called a temporary halt to further demolitions. “It’s good you intervened when you did, we were about to knock down the whole lot,” said a top official. There was a buzz. City administrators began boasting to Western ambassadors about Rangoon’s “heritage” buildings: “The famous poet Richard Kipling stayed in one!”
Soe Thane was an early advocate of our work. He was lobbied in turn by a slew of foreign dignitaries, in particular Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd. “All these foreigners always talk about your heritage buildings!” Soe Thane told me enthusiastically. One day, Soe Thane phoned me from Oslo to say he noticed historic plaques on buildings. “You should do the same thing. They will offer some protection, even before any new laws are in place.” We did. Our “blue plaques” program has been a big success, with ministries, schools, and private associations such as the YWCA lobbying to be the next to receive the now coveted recognition.
The Hidden History of Burma Page 20