There were also strange new Chinese connections. The Yucheng Group was a Chinese financial company owned by a thirty-something-year-old entrepreneur named Ding Ning. Its most famous product was something called EZuBao, a Ponzi scheme which swindled more than $7.5 billion from nearly a million private investors. Before its collapse, the Yucheng Group was also deeply involved in Burma. It supported the Kokang militia as well as several other insurgent armies along the Chinese border. In 2015, it announced plans to set up a Yucheng Southeast Asia Free Trade Zone in the territory controlled by the United Wa State Army, promising 40 billion yuan (around $4 billion) in investment. Ding Ning and his Yucheng Group were likely planning to use Burma’s already well-established money-laundering operations to launder their own Ponzi scheme gains. Ding Ning is today in jail, but no one knows what happened to the $7.5 billion. Most suspect that wherever the money is, it got there via Burma.14
These sums, from narcotics, casinos, wildlife trafficking, and cross-border organized crime, are staggering. There’s no good estimate of how much money has actually been made or where it’s been kept. But even if only a fraction of the tens of billions of dollars involved wound up in Burma, the money would be shaping incentives across the political landscape. And it probably is.
Let’s assume for a minute, though, that all these problems could be miraculously solved, replaced by responsible investment, steady growth, less inequality, and even peace for all. Burma would then follow a path similar to many other countries in Asia, moving from the export of primary commodities to manufactured goods, and benefiting from a new consumerist middle class. Across the region, the default outcome is plain to see: relentless environmental destruction and congested cities, compensated for only by the opportunity for lots of shopping. Is this really the only future possible?
Burma is one of the richest countries in the world in terms of its biodiversity. In the past few years alone, more than forty new animal species were discovered in the country. Despite the ravages of the past two decades, the country still commands breathtaking natural landscapes and is home to the last free-flowing rivers as well as the largest population by far of wild elephants in Asia. It is also a country rich in unique cultural traditions, from forms of meditation to the art, cuisine, and folklore of dozens of different ethnic communities. In 2015, Burma was ranked the most generous nation in the world, measured in part by how often people helped strangers or volunteered for charities. That same year, torrential rains led to severe floods that displaced a million people. UN officials organizing the relief effort say they had never seen anything like the community-based efforts across Burma to raise money and deliver assistance. Yet none of these things are valued when the future of the economy is under discussion.
Neither has there been much discussion of climate change. Burma is set to become one of the five countries in the world most negatively impacted by climate change. By the mid-2000s, the monsoons, whose regularity set the seasons and are critical for farming, were becoming unpredictable. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of people from the arid middle of the country, where a few monsoon storms at the right time each year are essential for a good crop, were already leaving, because of repeated drought, in search of jobs in the cities or in Thailand. In 2015, extreme rain and the long-term effects of deforestation combined to produce the epic floods just mentioned. Other extreme climate events, like Cyclone Nargis, will without question become more common. Extreme heat will make vast swaths of the interior uninhabitable within decades. And if current predictions are even close to accurate, rising sea levels will submerge most of the coastline, including parts of Rangoon, within a generation.
By 2015, Rangoon was already becoming a less livable place. Liberalization and rising incomes led to a deluge of new cars, from 50,000 to 400,000, on the same colonial-era roads. For poor people, a thirty-minute commute by bus became a three-hour commute each way. Sidewalks were ripped up to make way for vehicle traffic, making walking impossible. Disease-ridden slums grew up around the city, as did adjacent high-end gated communities. The Yangon Heritage Trust tried to promote ideas around livability, urban planning, and the protection of public and green spaces, not least to offset future floods, but the momentum was on the side of growth at all costs.
Even those who were clearly better off were increasingly anxious, fearing being left behind. In the absence of a good conversation on issues of equality and the economy to come, there was little resistance to those who peddled an alternative set of conversations around race and identity. Those conversations would now steal the limelight.
IN 1914, THE FOSSIL of a small mammal was discovered northwest of Mandalay. It was later found to be the remains of an anthropoid primate, and the oldest of its kind. By the early 2000s, scientists concluded that this Eocene creature might well be of a genus ancestral to later, more humanlike species. That tantalizing fact was enough to spur speculation in Burma that the country might be the actual cradle of mankind. Scientists had said nothing of the sort, but imaginations ran in a resolutely nativist direction. By 2015 Burmese scholars were suggesting an uninterrupted lineage from the little primate, through recently discovered Neolithic sites and Bronze Age civilizations, right down to the last kingdom of Mandalay. British colonialism was, in this story, the only interregnum in the proud descent of the Burmese taing-yintha, the indigenous races, through the ages.
The old junta and a nexus of antiquarians, scholars, and bureaucrats under the military regime had nurtured a view of the past that was now conventional wisdom. There was no challenge to the taing-yintha idea. Fitting a prehistoric monkey into the picture was not difficult.
By 2015, there was also a new pride in the country. For generations, people had seen only a decline of their status in the world. A trigger for the 1988 protests had been the labeling of Burma by the UN as a “least developed country.” In the late 2000s, the idea that countries once far poorer, such as Cambodia and Bangladesh, were edging ahead was seen as deeply shameful. Now things seemed to be turning around, in all spheres. In 2013, Myanmar had hosted its first big international sports tournament, the South East Asia Games, with great pageantry; after years of doing abysmally poorly, it came second in gold medals. Tens of thousands packed the stadiums, waving the new flag and singing the national anthem.
This newfound pride also had a racial hue. In Burmese films and in the growing advertising and beauty industries, all the faces were of a type. Walk down the street in Rangoon and you will see people who could pass for anything from Siberian to Mediterranean to Polynesian, together with the faces of people whose ancestors came from every part of the Indian subcontinent. But in beauty pageants and on the giant billboards sprouting up everywhere, the only faces on display were a paler version of what many considered a “pure Burmese.” There was influence from elsewhere in the region, especially Korea, with Burma being one of the very first foreign countries to embrace K-pop, together with Korean soap operas and Korea’s light-skinned East Asian aesthetics. In the 1950s, many Burmese watched Bollywood films and an “Indian-like,” or kala-sin, look was often prized; not anymore.
At the same time, rapid change brought about fears that a traditional way of life was under attack. The ending of military dictatorship was almost universally welcomed, but there was concern that new elites—people whose values were not those of the conservative, largely rural or small-town Buddhist majority, people who mixed their Burmese with English words that most couldn’t understand—were coming to the fore, together with foreign companies and foreign influences.
Then came the violence in Arakan in 2012. I remember the strong emotions of many Burmese in Rangoon who believed their kinsmen were being slaughtered. The Muslims in Arakan were seen as kala. In the eyes of the Burmese Buddhist majority, they were indistinguishable from the “Indians” of Bangladesh. That they are usually of dark complexion, the men often bearded and some Rohingya women veiled, only added to the impression that they were alien and dangerous. So these currents inter
mingled: racial pride, fears of tradition under threat, and fear of the Muslim kala.
There was also Facebook. For most Burmese, the Internet means just Facebook, and by late 2013 more than half of all adults were regularly using the social network. By mid-2014, Facebook had become the principal if not the only way to reach a mass audience for Burmese media organizations, government agencies, celebrities, and political figures of all stripes. In many ways, Facebook added enormously to the transparency of political life. Nearly everyone, including the military commander-in-chief, posted their comings and goings. But it gave rise, as well, to a sudden coarseness in public discourse. One member of parliament told me that more than a few colleagues, after a hard day’s work and dinner at home, downed a couple of whiskeys before logging in to Facebook, ready to post comments. Facebook also made easier the mobilization of violence.
On July 14, 2014, a Facebook post alleged that the Indian Muslim owner of the Sun Teashop in Mandalay had raped one of his Burmese Buddhist employees. Within hours, a furious mob gathered. Police attempted to disperse the mob, at one point firing rubber bullets, but they were not successful, and by dusk bands of rioters, many on motorbikes and armed with machetes, were setting fire to cars and buildings. A curfew was imposed. It was barely a year after the Meiktila riots, and the government was keen to quell the violence as quickly as possible.
The president’s office made an urgent overnight attempt to contact Facebook.15 Having no direct connection, the senior official in the office, Zaw Htay, reached out to an acquaintance, Chris Tun, who worked at Deloitte and had contact with several tech companies. “They started to panic and they did not know what to do,” said Tun in an interview with Reuters. After hours of trying to reach a human at Facebook, the government decided to temporarily block access to the site. This seemed to have an effect, as the violence quickly abated. The next morning, Chris Tun woke up to several emails from Facebook, concerned that their site seemed to be down in Burma. Facebook at the time had only a single Burmese-language speaker, who was tasked with monitoring all 18 million new users.
The Rohingya issue was seen in a very particular light. Until the 2010s, few people outside Arakan thought at all about the Muslims along the Bangladesh border. But the communal riots of 2012 focused attention and riveted the sympathy of the Burmese Buddhist majority squarely on one side. The idea that most of the Muslims of northern Arakan were either recent illegal arrivals, or at best Britsh-era immigrants, was accepted without question.
Few if any in the rest of Burma had ever heard the term “Rohingya” before. The British had not used the term, and neither had the military regime. Many Burmese saw the name as part of a drive to force acceptance of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh not only as Burmese citizens but as taing-yintha, an indigenous race. They insisted on calling the Muslims in northern Arakan “Bengali” (if not “kala”) instead. The more that outside activists, governments, and media insisted on using the term “Rohingya,” the more many non-Muslims in Burma suspected an international conspiracy.
Countless images of Al-Qaeda and Islamic State atrocities elsewhere were shared over Facebook. Stories circulated that Al-Qaeda cells were already at work near Rangoon. People were scared of an imminent attack. Maps were posted on social media which showed the spread of Islam over the centuries, with only Burma now standing between 160 million Muslims in Bangladesh on one side and 250 million Muslims in Malaysia and Indonesia on the other. For nationalists across the country, the Bangladesh border was increasingly referred to as anauk-taga, “the western gate.” The plight of the Rohingya and this dread of global Islamicist movements converged.
In early 2014, a new nationalist organization commonly known as Mabatha arose as a significant force.16 The word is a Burmese acronym for its full name, which translates as Association for the Protection of Race and Religion. Race, or amyo-tha, meant the Burmese race. Religion, or thathana, meant Buddhism. At the core of Mabatha’s worldview was a dissatisfaction with modernization as it had been experienced in Burma and a feeling that corrupt elites were running roughshod over ordinary people and the values most dear to them. Women, many pushing for greater women’s rights, were a big component of Mabatha’s growing constituency. Led by Buddhist monks, Mabatha members believed that at the root of recent conflicts were the tensions caused by the taking of young Burmese women as second wives by older Muslim men.
Mabatha championed four new laws formally called the laws to “protect race and religion.” The word used in Burmese, saungshauk, actually means something closer to “taking care,” as in taking care of your parents in old age. The first outlawed polygamy and made extramarital cohabitation a criminal offense (the first of only a few arrests, after the laws were passed in 2015, would actually be a small-town Burmese Buddhist man who cheated on his wife with a mistress in Rangoon). The second required anyone wanting to change religion to first undergo an interview and then study the new religion for at least ninety days before receiving permission to convert. The third stipulated that a Buddhist woman wanting to marry a non-Buddhist man needed parental consent if she was under twenty. The fourth and most controversial allowed the government to impose family planning requirements in geographic regions where population rates were considered abnormally high (meaning the Rohingya areas of Arakan).
In a meeting with one of Aung San Suu Kyi’s chief aides in February 2014, U Wirathu, a firebrand monk and member of Mabatha, asked why the National League for Democracy would oppose these laws when it claimed to be on the side of “the people.” Many Buddhist nationalists applauded the NLD aim of ending military rule and returning power to “the people.” They saw the protection of “the people,” meaning the Burmese Buddhist “race,” as integral to the same agenda. The monk said, “We would put Aung San Suu Kyi’s bronze statue on a pedestal and worship her forever” if she supported the laws.17
In Burmese, the word for “National” in the name of the National League for Democracy is amyo-tha. It’s the same as the word for “race.” “Race” and “nation” are synonymous, and for some “democracy” should mean nothing more or less than the supremacy of the race-based nation. In Arakan, Buddhist women told Western and Burmese researchers that their number-one fear was being raped by Muslim men.18
Into this explosive environment came the first nationwide census in over thirty years, conceived and carried out in close collaboration with the United Nations Population Fund.19 In a country were nearly everyone I know has parents or grandparents from different communities, all responders were asked to list their ethnicity. That the government had not thought to use the census as an opportunity to encourage a more fluid notion of identity was not surprising. That the UN did not consider this at all was inexcusable.
The key issue then became whether “Rohingya” should be one of the categories offered. The immigration minister, Khin Yi, who was in charge of the census, first said that people would be free to self-identify as they wished. This prospect—that Muslims in Arakan could list themselves as “Rohingya”—rang alarm bells across Arakanese nationalist circles. Feelings were at a fever pitch. In February 2014, the charity Doctors Without Borders was told by the government to suspend all work in Burma, on the grounds that it was biased in favor of the Rohingya community. That impoverished Arakanese Buddhists received little or nothing from international agencies was not entirely true, but it was universally believed. A month later, large protests against allowing Muslims to identify themselves as they pleased in the census swept towns across Arakan. When the government refused to budge, Arakanese nationalists called for a boycott of the census. And after a Western aid official removed a Buddhist flag from the front of an office in Sittwe, aid agencies across the town were attacked, prompting the evacuation of over three hundred aid workers. Tensions were already running high against a foreign aid community believed to have taken sides. Vital humanitarian assistance was interrupted.
On the eve of the census, the government gave way to mounting pressure and a
nnounced that Rohingya would not, after all, be permitted to list themselves as such, only as “Bengalis.” The boycott was lifted.
In January 2014, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, called for an immediate investigation after receiving “credible information” that “at least 40 Rohingya Muslim men, women and children” had been killed by police in the little village of Ducheeyartan.20 This massacre was allegedly carried out as a reprisal for the murder of a policeman days before. The government enquiry that followed found that no one had been killed, and Western human rights researchers and diplomats quietly admitted that the story had been made up.21 The UN, though, never acknowledged this. The suspicion grew on Burmese social media, as well as in Naypyitaw, that Rohingya leaders and their supporters abroad were becoming adept at manufacturing “fake news.”
Also that January, three Burmese-born members of the Pakistani Taliban were arrested in Bangladesh. Bangladeshi police charged them with planning to “launch activities” in Arakan using their experience in “high-powered explosives.” Pakistani Taliban were then urging their followers to take revenge for violence against Rohingya and “Kill in the Path of God.”22 In the minds of many Arakanese Buddhists, fear mingled with conspiracy theories.
Meanwhile, life for Rohingya were getting bleaker by the day. Nu Nu Khin, a Rohingya educated at Sittwe University, had been a government worker in Maungdaw until 2012. She and other Muslims were summarily dismissed.23 In the middle of Sittwe itself, Aung Mingala, the largely Muslim quarter, was surrounded by barbed wire, its several hundred inhabitants unable to leave without a pass. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of European history in the 1930s would find it difficult not to draw analogies. Mosques were closed or torn down. Rohingya now had at best limited access to essential public services and no access to higher learning. Approximately 100,000 people were trapped in “internally displaced persons” camps around Sittwe or elsewhere in Arakan. Schools in the camps were abysmal, and a trip to the hospital required permission. Many died before permission was received. Access by humanitarian aid groups was also restricted, leading to rising malnutrition as well as death from water-borne illnesses.
The Hidden History of Burma Page 22