The prejudice and hostility that Rohingya Muslims face in Myanmar stretch beyond the country’s notoriously brutal security forces to a general population receptive to an often virulent form of Buddhist nationalism that has seen a resurgence since the end of military rule.
Many of Myanmar’s Buddhists have objected to the way the media and international community have portrayed the crisis in Rakhine state, which has caused half-a-million Rohingya to flee the country in the past month. Rather than recognize what the UN calls ethnic cleansing, they see a threat to national sovereignty and the future of Myanmar as a Buddhist-majority nation.
The standard academic work cited by Buddhist nationalists seeking to argue their case against the Rohingya — who they see as migrants living illegally in Myanmar — has a telling title: Influx Viruses: The Illegal Muslims in Arakan.
Illustration: Yusha
“They are seen as foreigners trying to infiltrate the country and Buddhists of the strident type see them as trying to undermine their faith,” said Robert Taylor, who has studied Myanmar’s political history.
Yet, just as Rohingya have roots in Myanmar stretching back centuries, so do the historical forces that have shaped their oppression.
BRITISH COLONIALISM
The Rohingya, while not recognized as an ethnic group in Myanmar, are descendants of centuries of intermingling between indigenous Muslims and migrants from the area that is now Bangladesh and India’s West Bengal. They lived mostly untroubled until after the British arrived and Myanmar became part of British colonial India, and later the separate colony of Burma.
For about a century until the 1930s, more than a million South Asians — Muslims and Hindus alike — flooded into the country to take jobs as laborers, civil servants and moneylenders, leading to a “deep resentment” among the Burmese, said Mikael Gravers, a Danish anthropologist specializing in Myanmar.
They “took work from Burmese and land from peasants who could not pay their debt,” he said.
The identity of Indians was intertwined with the British colonizers and that was seized upon in the 1920s by the nascent Burmese nationalist movement, in which Buddhist monks were closely involved.
“Burmese nationalists saw themselves as colonized twice, first by the British, secondly by the Indians who, in particular, dominated the economy,” Taylor wrote in a 2015 study of ethnicity in Myanmar.
The Rohingya, with their dark skin and South Asian features, were caught up in this resentment. By the time the British were pushed out by the Japanese in 1942 — an invasion welcomed by the nationalists — Buddhist locals in Arakan, which is now Rakhine, took out their frustrations on those seen as British allies: Muslims, including the Rohingya.
Thousands were killed in attacks and Muslim counterattacks.
RELIGION
Myanmar is almost 90 percent Buddhist and for nationalists, religion has always been a successful issue with which to whip up support. That has been helped, both past and present, by the involvement of Buddhist monks in the movement.
With monks involved, “the alleged threat posed to the persistence of Buddhism as the religion of the majority of the population began to seem real,” Taylor wrote. “The memory of ‘Indian domination’ and ‘Buddhism in danger’ became part of the legacy of the nationalist movement inherited by Myanmar politicians and historians.”
General Ne Win, who led a 1962 coup that led to five decades of military rule, was not known as a particularly devout Buddhist, yet he was influenced by the Buddhist nationalism of the colonial era.
His nationalization of private enterprise put much of the large ethnic Indian trading class out of business. He was also responsible for letting loose the security forces on the Rohingya in 1977 and 1978, launching a hunt for illegal immigrants that set off the first major exodus to Bangladesh of about 200,000 people.
His most toxic legacy for the Rohingya was a 1982 citizenship law that granted full citizenship rights only to members of ethnic groups settled in Myanmar before 1823. About 135 ethnic groups were officially listed as meeting this historical deadline, but not the Rohingya.
This official decertification of Rohingya rights still serves as justification within Myanmar for their statelessness and social ostracism.
Myanmar also has a Muslim population distinct from the Rohingya who live in a mostly assimilated manner in other parts of the country outside Rakhine. Yet Muslims of every kind become targets of scapegoating in times of tension, a trend that has grown in recent years.
Rohingya, who numbered about 1 million among Myanmar’s 53 million people before the most recent exodus, evoke an oversized fear and loathing among nationalists, who trot out statistics purporting to show that they have far higher birth rates than others in Myanmar.
DEMOCRACY
Myanmar began the shift away from military rule in 2011 with the seating of an elected, although military-backed, government. An election in 2015 brought State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi to power, although with military restraints on her authority.
“Since the start of the political transition in 2011, Buddhist nationalism in Myanmar has become significantly more visible,” the Brussels-based International Crisis Group said in a report this month. “As authoritarian controls were lifted after years of repression, deep-seated grievances emerged into the open, and new freedoms of expression allowed individuals and the media to give voice to these grievances in ways that were not possible before.”
Access to new forms of communication, such as cellphones and social media, has helped accelerate the spread of nationalist narratives, hate speech and rumors, it said, adding that often, such rumors are tales of sexual violence allegedly perpetrated by Muslims against Buddhist women.
Rakhine state has Myanmar’s largest concentrations of Muslims by far and historically has been regarded as a buffer against Muslim neighbors to the west. Yet it was not until violence broke out in 2012 that it became a focal point for Buddhist nationalists.
“If you asked about the Rohingya 20 years ago, most Burmese in Rangoon would be indifferent,” said Michael Charney, a Southeast Asia specialist at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, using another name for Yangon, the country’s largest city.
“This situation has changed in the last few years — in part, ironically, because of the greater freedoms made possible since 2010,” Charney said.
Events outside Myanmar also lent credibility to dire warnings of a Muslim takeover: the rise of militant Islamist groups and the consequent tide of Islamophobia in the West.
“It is important to take the fear of Muslim conquest seriously. It is a result of 50 years of isolation, limited education, violence, injustice and insecurity during military rule,” Gravers said. “This paranoia has returned during the transition from military rule, but now global influence in the form of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State has an important role too.”
Taiwan’s semiconductor industry gives it a strategic advantage, but that advantage would be threatened as the US seeks to end Taiwan’s monopoly in the industry and as China grows more assertive, analysts said at a security dialogue last week. While the semiconductor industry is Taiwan’s “silicon shield,” its dominance has been seen by some in the US as “a monopoly,” South Korea’s Sungkyunkwan University academic Kwon Seok-joon said at an event held by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. In addition, Taiwan lacks sufficient energy sources and is vulnerable to natural disasters and geopolitical threats from China, he said.
After reading the article by Hideki Nagayama [English version on same page] published in the Liberty Times (sister newspaper of the Taipei Times) on Wednesday, I decided to write this article in hopes of ever so slightly easing my depression. In August, I visited the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka, Japan, to attend a seminar. While there, I had the chance to look at the museum’s collections. I felt extreme annoyance at seeing that the museum had classified Taiwanese indigenous peoples as part of China’s ethnic minorities. I kept thinking about how I could make this known, but after returning
What value does the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hold in Taiwan? One might say that it is to defend — or at the very least, maintain — truly “blue” qualities. To be truly “blue” — without impurities, rejecting any “red” influence — is to uphold the ideology consistent with that on which the Republic of China (ROC) was established. The KMT would likely not object to this notion. However, if the current generation of KMT political elites do not understand what it means to be “blue” — or even light blue — their knowledge and bravery are far too lacking
Taipei’s population is estimated to drop below 2.5 million by the end of this month — the only city among the nation’s six special municipalities that has more people moving out than moving in this year. A city that is classified as a special municipality can have three deputy mayors if it has a population of more than 2.5 million people, Article 55 of the Local Government Act (地方制度法) states. To counter the capital’s shrinking population, Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) held a cross-departmental population policy committee meeting on Wednesday last week to discuss possible solutions. According to Taipei City Government data, Taipei’s