Western aid organizations have tried to help the Rohingyas, but Rakhines have often impeded aid. The Rakhines are poor, and scarce resources do not engender amicable relations. Rakhine State is the second least developed in Myanmar, and many people don’t have access to latrines or clean water. To function at all, global charities have had to assure a kind of parity, even though the Rakhines live freely while the Rohingyas languish in camps.
Though the Rohingyas are experiencing the worst of it, rage against all Muslims has escalated. Most of Yangon’s construction companies are Muslim-owned, and Buddhists have started refusing to hire them. Mandalay, the country’s second-largest city, has seen anti-Muslim riots. When I was in Myanmar, curfews had been imposed in areas of Yangon with sizable Muslim populations. “We had gangs in cars going down the streets near where I live warning the Muslims that they would be killed. People were cowering behind locked doors,” said Lucas Stewart, who works for the British Council in Yangon, and who called the 969 movement “nearly a terrorist organization.”
The Muslims in Myanmar can be divided into four categories. Bamar Muslims settled in the area some twelve hundred years ago; on ancient monuments, historians have found inscriptions to Muslims who served the early kings. Horse traders, artillery soldiers, and mercenaries who arrived in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries assimilated into this group. Second are Chinese Muslims in the northeast, who trace their origins mostly to Yunnan Province and are descended from Turkic settlers from Mongol times onward. Third are those whose nationality changed when Arakan was subsumed into Burma by the British. Fourth are the immigrants from India or Bangladesh over the past two hundred years. “There is ethnic prejudice, and there is religious prejudice from the monkhood,” Thant Myint-U said. “They affect the same people, but for somewhat different reasons.”
Schoolmaster Aye Lwin, who won gold for his country overseas as a volleyball player on Myanmar’s national team, is the leader of the Bamar Muslims. An elegant man, he lives in a pleasant apartment in central Yangon. He believes that the violence in Rakhine State has been incited by entrenched interests that oppose the slackening government control. “There are people behind a screen who are trying to undermine democratization,” he said, “because if there is full-fledged democracy, there will be rule of law. Rule of law will have repercussions on the current ruling class. Crime is happening every day, rapes are happening every day, but these people manipulate it into a religious conflict. They could have nipped the burning of houses in the bud; they could have constrained the hate speech. But nationalism can be used to exhaust people’s energy; it slows down the reform process.”
Misuu Borit pointed out that people in poverty reproduce fastest all over the world, and that while minority population growth was driving majority prejudice, majority prejudice was likewise driving minority population growth. Then a rumor that a Buddhist woman had been raped and murdered by Muslims kindled genocidal episodes. Rape has been used throughout history as an impersonal act of aggression in ethnic, religious, and nationalist wars, and Borit finds it sinister that these cross-ethnic rapes have received so much attention, especially given the “shameful” lack of police interest in rape among the Bamar or the Rohingya. “Someone is cooking something between the Muslims and Buddhists,” she said. “When things spin out of control, the rulers call in the army and say that they are ‘saving the country’ and we are the weaklings. They make that true.”
Ma Thida sees a more profound, generalized resentment finding expression in the anti-Muslim atrocities. “The generals did not discriminate in their cruelty,” she said. “It was a democratic cruelty.” She believes that people who never believed that the law was intended to protect them are taking their revenge on authority itself. “So this Muslim situation is not simply communal violence nor religious violence nor racial violence,” she said. “It’s a manifestation of something deeper: of undemocratic violence.”
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It is a five-hour boat ride from Sittwe, where I had seen the burned-out neighborhoods and the camps, to Mrauk-U, Arakan’s imperial capital from 1430 to 1785. In this northern part of Rakhine, the shadow of religious hatred seemed almost implausible. My first morning in Mrauk-U, I got up at four forty-five and drove through the eerily darkened byways of the impoverished town to the foot of a small mountain with steps carved into it. Mornings in Myanmar often find bewitching mists hovering over the valleys and around the hills, delineating what is small and close, and what is large and far. Temples and other monuments that look about the same size on first glance can be differentiated in scale by the blurring of their edges, which indicates greater distance. Visitors are enjoined to see all the great sites at sunrise, given the aesthetic appeal of the mists.
After a Rakhine breakfast of fish soup with rice noodles and a lot of spices and condiments, I went to visit some villages in the nearby state of Chin. The Burmese king used to take beautiful women for his harem; to protect themselves, according to legend, Chin women began tattooing their faces with lines like spiderwebs to make themselves ugly to the Burmese, a custom that continued long after the threat had abated. Perhaps as a result, the most easily accessible Chin villages are inundated with tourists, and tattooed women pose for thousands of photographs. Here, a few miles from the border with Bangladesh, people from various ethnic groups seemed hardly aware of the crisis faced by the Rohingya. In a country with such poor communications infrastructure, radicalization spreads in fits and starts, bypassing whole districts. We didn’t see a single 969 sticker there.
There are more than a hundred ethnic groups in what is now Myanmar, and they have a long history of violence in the myriad shifting empires of the region. The students of 1988 proved to be nearly as ruthless as the junta that defeated them, staying rigid in their demands, building their own prison camps, and engaging in torture. The nation’s myriad partisans have an often unnerving relentlessness. But Theravada Buddhism points toward an implacable serenity, and that, too, was manifest in most of the activists and artists I met. At their suggestion, I headed across the country and visited the Golden Rock, among the country’s holiest shrines. High up a steep mountain, the sprawling site was mobbed with pilgrims, monks, and nuns. Street foods and ingredients for traditional medicines were being hawked everywhere: porcupine quills; a goat’s leg soaked in sesame oil; bunches of dried herbs. Many people were sleeping on bamboo mats or in makeshift tents. Thousands upon thousands of candles flickered, the hum of chanting was ubiquitous, and the air was heavy with incense and the redolence of food offerings. Young couples come here not only out of piety, but also for the chance to interact in the anonymity of the crowds. Flashing LED displays festooned the buildings, even the animist shrines. If I were to say that it made Grand Central Station at rush hour look like a meditation retreat, I’d be underselling the chaos. Yet for all of that, it felt peaceable.
The Golden Rock itself is an extraordinary sight: a boulder, nearly round, twenty feet in diameter, balanced on the edge of the mountain as if on the verge of plummeting. Legend holds that it remains on its precarious perch thanks to three hairs of the Buddha. The entire rock is covered in gold leaf, to which pilgrims keep adding, so that in some places the gold is an inch thick and stands out in lumps. Atop the rock, far out of reach, is the Kyaiktiyo Pagoda. The gold orb glows at sunrise, in afternoon light, at sunset, in the floodlit nighttime. When the light changes, the effect shifts subtly, but it is never less than awe-inspiring. I climbed under it, stood beside it. From every vantage, one feels the fragility of its odd balance, the drama of its massive heft, and the tranquillity that holy places can achieve. It was both miraculously exciting and strangely reassuring. Like any great landscape, it holds the viewer’s attention even if he or she is not praying.
Myanmar has some half million monks and a large population of nuns—at least 1 percent of the country is in holy orders, and many others have served in the past. Most boys spend a while as monks, then return to their families. Even a casual visi
tor will pick up a bit of Buddhist arcana. To wit, the six types of religious structure are the pagoda or stupa (or zedi), a solid structure that often contains a relic; the temple, a hollow, square building for worship; the cave, which serves as a meditation center for monks; the ordination hall; the monastery, where monks live; and the library, where the Buddha’s scriptures are kept. Most figural monuments of the Buddha are made with a base of brick, or occasionally limestone, and covered with plaster and lacquer. The standard policy is to fix the plaster and lacquer as they fade or chip, which results in Buddhas that look newly reupholstered, without any patina of age. The eleventh-century reclining Buddha at Thaton, recently restored, looked as if it had been fashioned on Tuesday by a pastry chef.
Wherever you go in Myanmar, you are in a former capital—a place where some ethnic group reigned for a while. Bagan was the capital from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries. That was the era when it became fashionable to build pagodas and temples, and noblemen competed with one another to construct the grandest and most splendid, while poorer people built more modest structures. The detritus of that spiritual one-upmanship is a twenty-six-square-mile plain festooned with 4,446 religious monuments. It’s impossible to understand this trove through photographs, because its power lies in its sweep. We walked among the pagodas; we drove among them; we climbed one of the temples to watch the sun set; we surveyed the whole gloriously littered landscape from a hot-air balloon. Even in person, it’s hard to compass the scale of Bagan’s Plain of Temples. It’s bigger than Manhattan, more than eight times the size of the estate of Versailles. Some of the buildings have been poorly restored by the junta, others are dilapidated but still coherent, and countless others lie in ruins. Whichever one you are looking at, you see a thousand more over its shoulder. If one feels exalted by the Golden Rock, one is humbled by Bagan, for both what it was and what it is.
Issues of faith are a constant conversation, and many secular experiences are filtered through Buddhism. San San Oo, a psychiatrist in Yangon whom I met through friends, had been told repeatedly that Burmese people healed themselves through Buddhism and didn’t need her ministrations. She tried to explain that therapy might help people brutalized under the regime to emerge from post-traumatic stress disorder, but they insisted they would transcend it only through religious practice. San San Oo uses hypnosis and had finally managed to build a practice by characterizing hypnosis as a means for someone else to raise you to a meditative state. She told me she felt certain that it had the same brain-wave profile. Her husband, the artist Aung Min, who had been a provocateur before the reforms, said, “The Buddhist way means that anger is bad; it upsets emotion and thinking, causing only negativity and destruction. But I was so angry. So I did four months of hypnosis, and my anger diminished. It’s just deep meditation.”
While Buddhism predominates and Islam follows behind, other faiths are also in evidence. There is a significant Christian population, and there are even a few Burmese Jews. Sammy Samuels is descended from Iraqi Jewish merchants who came to Yangon in the nineteenth century and set up business selling Burmese tea and rice to India. They established the city’s synagogue, a Jewish school, and a cemetery, and they married Buddhist women who converted to Judaism. By 1919, some three thousand Jews were in Myanmar. After 1969, most of the community migrated to Israel or the United States, but not the Samuelses. Every day, Sammy’s father goes to the synagogue to greet visitors from abroad; the minister for religions attended an interfaith service there. Burmese independence came the same year as the establishment of the state of Israel, creating an unlikely connection. The Burmese prime minister was the first head of state to visit Jerusalem after independence. Moshe Dayan and David Ben-Gurion have visited the Yangon synagogue. Even under the junta, Myanmar sent students to learn agriculture in Israel. Now the Jews find themselves championing the cause of the Muslims because both are beleaguered minorities uneasily united against Buddhist fundamentalism. Aye Lwin said, “We always were brothers, Muslim and Jews here.”
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The Rohingya situation is separate from, albeit related to, armed conflicts waged chronically by several ethnic insurgencies that seek to establish a federal system in which they would enjoy greater autonomy. The Muslim problem proceeds from sectarian, demographic, and religious tensions; the armed conflict, from minority nationalism. “You can have one or two civil wars in a country. Here, there are seventeen going on,” Mitchell said. All of the contentious ethnic groups want the right to elect their own legislatures, and to teach in their own languages. In 2014, the government pushed for a nationwide cease-fire as a precondition for preliminary all-party peace talks. The agreement that was reached stipulated that future negotiations would include ethnic political and social leaders, not just military chiefs; and that those subsequent talks would address nondiscrimination, constitutional changes to support more ethnic/regional control, a more accountable security sector, and the clearance of land mines. “They are willing to leave the central government in charge of defense, currency, and international trade,” explained Win Min, a presidential adviser, “but they want to control education, social sectors, fisheries, transportation within their own state. And they want to get tax money from the natural resources extracted in their territories.”
Myanmar’s ethnic conflicts are also ideological. At the height of the Vietnam War, the Cultural Revolution, and the Khmer Rouge, the threat of escalating guerrilla warfare was terrifying to many Burmese. The military was eager to expel the remnants of Chiang’s Kuomintang army from mountains near the Chinese border, fearing an invasion. At the same time, the Burmese military was fighting the Communists who opposed the regime. On several occasions, leaders of various ethnic groups sided with the Communists just because doing so gave them combined fighting strength. Thant Myint-U, who is also involved in peace negotiations, pointed out that Myanmar’s military government had justified itself by exaggerating “a half-century-old counterinsurgency campaign on autopilot.” Ma Thanegi said, “Since independence, there have been so many insurgencies, fighting not only the central government but also one another, that it’s a wonder they can keep things straight and not shoot their own people.”
The past few years have seen little sustained fighting, though skirmishes erupt when the government enters a contested territory to regain control of a road, build a dam, or establish dominance in a lucrative mining operation. British colonial rule never fully penetrated these remote, rugged areas, and infrastructure is as scarce as political stability. Some militias aim to defend local people against profiteers; others demand taxes from villagers. Other self-styled forces pursue their own business agenda; the three-thousand-strong Mong La National Democratic Alliance, for example, is led by a former Chinese Red Guard accused of running gambling and drug rings and trading in endangered wildlife. In Kachin, 120,000 people remain in government prisons because of their ethnic activism or sympathies; recent video footage shows the Myanmar army bombing Kachin trenches. The jadeite mines of Kachin produce several billion dollars a year, but little of that money trickles down to the Kachin people. In the Karen region, the average villager makes less than $1,000 a year and can see that Karen people a mile away on the Thai side are making $10,000.
When I traveled to Mon State, Kyi Zaw Lwin, a local politician and teacher, told me that he could not advance because he was only half Mon and therefore trusted by neither the Mon nor the Burmese. His mixed ethnicity far outweighed his politics, his experience, or his education. The Mon once had a kingdom comparable in scale to Thailand, but they were conquered by the Burmese in 1057—and they still want their original kingdom back. Individual states already have parliaments, so components of federalism are in place. But how much power should those parliaments have? And should they represent everyone in the state, or just the dominant ethnic group? The consensus is that the central government should share power with regional lawmakers, but to what extent remains in contention.
Thant Myint-U believes tha
t a peace deal is closer than at any time since 1948. Presidential adviser Win Min agrees that the level of trust between the ethnic fighters and the Myanmar army is exceptionally high. But Ko Minn Latt expressed grave concern that, with the nation as a whole unready for global competition, autonomous states were not ready to contend with such large neighboring economies as those of Thailand or Cambodia. The defining question is whether Myanmar can democratize without fragmenting into impotent pieces. How does the central government support a range of ethnic identities without losing a unifying, national one? How, indeed, can a national identity be forged that does not feel like a vestige of the generals’ artificial one? Many Myanmar-watchers fear a devolution similar to the splintering of the former Yugoslavia into long antithetical, warring republics.
The Buddhist emphasis on forgiveness is not without its ramifications here. There is, once more, little talk of retributive justice; moving on is more important than holding people to account. Win Min spent years in the jungle after the 1988 uprising; then he went to the United States to study, then moved to Thailand, where he became a professor. When he was invited to advise the new Burmese government, his family warned him that the regime might be using him to create an appearance of reform, but he yearned to be part of the changes he had hoped for. “We’re not at takeoff yet,” he said. “It takes time.”
Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change Page 52