Interpreting Communal Violence in Myanmar

Nick Cheesman

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138504448
• eBook ISBN: 9781351380249
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Myanmar's recovery from half a century of military rule has been fraught. As in other religiously, culturally and linguistically heterogeneous countries where a dictatorship has loosened a tight grip, people there have wanted for democratic institutions to express and manage conflict. Under these circumstances, mundane and seemingly apolitical events sometimes unfold into moments of intense violence.

Interpreting Communal Violence in Myanmar addresses one such violent chapter in Myanmar's recent past: the communal violence that shook the country between 2012 and 2014. The violence, most of it involving Buddhists attacking Muslims, ranged from localised, fleeting, inter-group melees, to large scale, apparently well-organised, state-supported killing and destruction of property of a targeted community, running over a number of days.

The book's seven chapters comprise a response to the violence by a group of Myanmar and Southeast Asia experts. Their contributions trace the histories and contemporary features of the violence, and the legal and political arrangements that made it possible. Their interpretations, while specific to Myanmar, also contribute to broader debate about the characteristics, causes and consequences of communal violence generally. The chapters were originally published as a special issue in the Journal of Contemporary Asia.

The Contentious Politics of Anti-Muslim Scapegoating in Myanmar

Gerry van Klinken and Su Mon Thazin Aung

ABSTRACT

Recent anti-Muslim violence in Myanmar cannot be understood primarily as a spontaneous outburst of religious feeling among the general population. Rather it was a shocking repertoire deployed by a semi-organised social movement with clear political goals, which overlapped with those of Myanmar’s military elite. In this article we trace the history of contention that saw key collective actors emerge who staged violent events and then framed them for the public. Elite competitive strategies leading to the 2015 election shaped its rhythm. A new regional player, the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party, initiated the violence. When the ruling elite failed to condemn it, a monk-led, apparently popular, chauvinistic movement expanded rapidly throughout Myanmar. Asserting the Rakhine violence as an existential threat to the Burmese nation, a moral panic effectively created a crisis where none existed. The movement then routinised itself into a de facto pro-regime, anti-National League for Democracy, theocratic political party favouring President Thein Sein’s re-election. While maintaining broad ties (but not chains of command) to military elites, it enjoyed a degree of autonomy not seen before under military rule. It ultimately failed to influence voter behaviour significantly, but the new salience of anti-Muslim chauvinism portends future conflict in the fledgling democracy.

Myanmar’s cautious reforms following a constitutional referendum in 2008 created political opportunities for new forms of contentious politics. A xenophobic discourse scapegoating Muslim citizens as “invaders” has been the most striking expression of these forms of politics. One observer called it a “typically violent and ugly…story of nation-building in the context of late development” (Prasse-Freeman 2013, 2–3). More pointedly, some international observers feared it would “eventually undermine the reform process itself” (see UNGA 2013). How did this story emerge? Chauvinistic religious solidarities have been strong in Myanmar politics since before independence. Yet it would be a mistake to assume that the present eruption is simply the natural result of loosened military restrictions that had long kept them in check. Instead, the evidence points to an emerging contention in which small groups of protagonists deploy considerable mobilisational resources to achieve desired ends. This article pursues a historical reconstruction of that contention.

It does appear that the military leadership wants a more open political system. So far, the transition has followed their 2003 Road Map, where the goal was “discipline-flourishing democracy” (apparently meaning “democracy” guided by the military), rather than popular empowerment. Indeed the 2015 election was held on the terms of the military, not as a result of political pressures from outside the regime. Those pressures were no more than modest. Mass protests since a 2007 crackdown had been few and focused on specific issues rather than the government as such. Most armed ethnic movements were negotiating peace with the centre. Nevertheless, a more open Myanmar will still see a significant realignment of domestic political forces. Obviously, the military wanted to ensure that what they were starting did not result in them “going down hard” (Slater 2014, 177). Thein Sein won the election in November 2010 and began to unwind repressive measures the following year. This led to a loosening of international sanctions. A by-election held in April 2012 was widely seen as a test of strength for the 2015 election. The ruling, military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) knew before the November 2015 election it would struggle to maintain its position, though the extent of its rout at the handsof the National League for Democracy (NLD) must have surprised its leadership. Each election race brought new players onto the political stage. This competition provided the immediate context in which anti-Muslim violence broke out in Rakhine State in June and October 2012, and repeatedly since then in that state and elsewhere.

Democratic transitions are often dangerously uncertain and marked by internal violence (Marshall and Gurr 2003). By definition, low-capacity states do not support the protected consultation that democracy needs to flourish. Any transition short of a complete revolutionary overturn is more likely to be filled by collective actors associated with the former regime than by free civil society organisations debating an ideal future (Snyder 2000). The most powerful players in today’s Myanmar have all emerged against a complex backdrop of a black market fuelled by heroin, jade and timber, rigid social hierarchies, xenophobic and communitarian ideologies and, above all, a violent and militarised history. The black economy, rife with ethnic clientelism and violent militias, is not friendly to liberal notions of inclusive citizenship rights. It was for reasons such as this that Holliday (2008) warned that democratisation could trigger ethnic mobilisation. Aggressive nationalist posturing, he noted, was likely to arise because of elite strategising during a transition, rather than from a broad social foundation.

Despised ethnic or religious minorities cast suddenly into the role of scapegoats are a part of this transitional pattern. Think of the fate of ethnic Chinese in Indonesia in 1965 and 1998, of Indians in Uganda in 1972 or of Bosnian Muslims in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. The technique is well known among small radical groups who want to move the entire political spectrum in their direction. At the same time, many such movements have found supporters within conservative parts of an authoritarian regime under threat of democratisation. Our argument is that Myanmar’s anti-Muslim violence can be put in the same category as the hatred of minorities that ultra-nationalists have espoused in many other countries emerging from authoritarian regimes.

In this article, we use a contentious politics approach to explain how newly expanded conservative elite coalitions, established under the competitive pressure of the looming national election in 2015, and with the boosted patronage of a booming economy, mobilised the widespread (but normally not salient) feeling that Buddhism is under threat in an attempt to marginalise their more liberal rivals.

Contentious Politics

Before the advent of social movement/contentious politics theory, outbreaks of ethnic or religious violence were usually traced directly to prejudices within society. Communal feelings such as pride in one’s religion were thought to burst out spontaneously into violence against those of a different persuasion. In 1973, Tilly contradicted this idea. He wrote, “There is no reason to expect a close connection between collective action and solidarity” (Tilly 1973, 10). Communal solidarity is difficult to measure, Tilly argued. It is moreover never easy to show that either the presence or absence of such solidarity directly explains an episode of collective action such as an attack on an ethnic minority. Instead, Tilly advocated a new approach, which he called “resource mobilisation.” It could be applied to an episode of ethnic conflict, but also to many other types of collective action. The best way to understand how such an episode develops, he wrote, is to focus on the resources deployed by collectivities of (semi)-organised actors that are smaller than an entire community. Contentious politics focuses on actors. These can be individuals or formal organisations. Or they can be the rather tentative, fluid, ad hoc collectivities called “social movements.”

Identities, perhaps tied to religion, ethnicity, place, lifestyle, gender or class, remain important, of course. Without a collective identity, movement organisers will have no followers. However, identities by themselves do nothing. Only people engaging in collective action can produce results. Successful action requires mobilising a range of resources, and at the right moment. A contentious politics analysis therefore does not begin with identities. It begins with politics, with history and with the material interests of all those involved. Unlike regular institutional politics, contentious politics frequently transgress legal boundaries. They can involve riotous crowds as well as parliamentary debates. Transgressive politics are typically semi-organised. They are neither entirely spontaneous nor completely under the control of political leaders. They are the politics of the social movement.¹

In analysing the contentious politics actually producing anti-Muslim violence in Myanmar, it is necessary to go beyond personalities such as Myanmar’s well-known militant monk U Wirathu. This article attempts to discern the mobilisational processes at work that have shaped contention over the last couple of decades. It situates them in the grey zone that connects formal electoral politics and an informal world of social movements; that straddles the formal economy and a booming black economy; and that bridges a world of formal democratic intentions and legal regulation to another characterised by personalised clientelistic networks and threats of violence. It agrees with the analysis of others, such as Min Zin (2015), ICG (2013), and Chit Win and Kean (2017), that the context for the anti-Muslim scapegoating of the last few years was the political transition. But it goes beyond them in seeking explanations in the semi-organised movements that link the core institutional contenders – the military and its USDP on the one hand, the opposition NLD on the other – with masses of non-party members. The popular anti-Muslim actions that have taken place since 2012 mobilised thousands of not particularly politicised people. Brokerage – one of the key concepts in contentious politics – is the key to understanding how such contentions expand beyond elite circles to small towns and villages. The aim of brokers is to build coalitions and to bring new people into the contention. As controls over political association were relaxed, and as both monks and ethnic warlords became drawn into the contention, they seized opportunities to mobilise their followers onto the streets. Myanmar’s legal system offers citizens little protection (see Cheesman 2015b). Following economic liberalisation in the 1990s, its economy is awash with black money, in ways that deeply implicate the state itself (Spanjers and Kar 2015; Meehan 2015). Clientelistic loyalties created in this illiberal environment conceivably did more to motivate those who joined the contention than did private convictions.

Contention occurs in waves. In each wave, loosely defined collective actors form who have strategic objectives, either in defiance of existing power arrangements or perhaps in defence of them. They deploy shocking repertoires of action intended both to attract sympathisers and to intimidate rivals. Their coalitions grow when that repertoire strikes a chord in the minds of large numbers of previously uninvolved people. As the analysis of contentious politics is historical, we can therefore best sketch this development chronologically.

Anti-Muslim Contention Then and Now

A survey of anti-Muslim violence in Myanmar’s past demonstrates that anti-foreigner mobilisation has been deployed so often that it is virtually a standard repertoire in the political armoury of the nation’s elites. At the same time, not every episode of contention involves anti-Muslim or anti-foreigner sentiment. Long periods have passed without such mobilisation, even at moments of turbulence. It needs to be understood that Muslims are a minority in a nation of many minorities. The average citizen’s feelings about them only occasionally become salient. Anti-Muslim repertoires were hardly in evidence in two previous national episodes of post-independence contention. In 1988, students from the Rangoon Institute of Technology drew large crowds, including civil servants and monks, to participate in strikes and demonstrations against economic deprivation caused by the military-dominated Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP) regime. While the government hesitated, Aung San Suu Kyi emerged as the symbolic leader of a movement demanding “democracy.” The military, led by General Saw Maung, seized power, establishing the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), but also began promising elections. When the NLD Aung San Suu Kyi came to lead won them by a large majority two years later, SLORC refused to honour the outcome. The 2007 protests were again triggered by economic conditions. Large numbers of young monks took the lead, along with student veterans of 1988 known as the “88 Students Generation.” The international media once more framed 2007 as a “democracy movement.” In reality, the absence of Aung San Suu Kyi, who was under house arrest, and agitation by violent pro-government militias, created considerable murkiness about the agenda (Cheesman 2015b, 200–225). Some anti-Muslim sentiment was heard in both 1988 and 2007, but only in the margins.

Muslims make up only 4% of this overwhelmingly Buddhist nation (Myanmar Times, July 22, 2016).² While they live in many parts of the country, large concentrations are in Rakhine State. Following the influx of Indian Muslims under British rule in the late nineteenth century, Muslims in Rakhine State used “Rohingya” to indicate their orientation towards Burma rather than India (Yegar 2002, 27). This designation became highly politicised. An armed revolt (cum rice smuggling ring) by Mujahideen that sputtered throughout the 1950s in Rakhine State also adopted the Rohingya identity, and fighting left a bitter local legacy. In the increasingly xenophobic ideology of citizenship developed under military rule, “Rohingya” had, by the 1980s, come to signify a category of foreign interlopers, officially called “Bengalis” (see Skidmore 2004). Today, the government and non-Rohingya people typically refer to this population as “Bengali,” to indicate they do not belong to the national political community (see Cheesman 2017).³ Thus marginalised, Muslims are politically almost invisible and economically confined to trade. As a group they are not particularly wealthy.

Anti-Muslim riots belong to a wider phenomenon of protests against “foreigners” (kala or kula in Myanmar language, a stigmatising term). The first riots with an anti-Muslim element go back to protests against the labour migrations the imperial British had encouraged. The incidents of 1930 and 1938 were sectoral affairs directed against migrant Indian harbour workers by unemployed Burmese. Burmese nationalists turned them into propaganda material with the slogan “Burma for the Burmans.” Monks amplified the anti-colonial militancy by insistently repeating that “To be Burman is to be Buddhist” (Walton 2013). The protests gave shape to, and reflected, a Burmese project that responded to the great disjunctures of the day with a discourse of protecting from decay the core religious identity. The 1938 riots took place against a backdrop of the worldwide economic torpor and internal political turmoil. The parties to the nation’s first elected government, installed the previous year, had campaigned against foreign economic control but internal squabbling soon caused the government to fall. Its successor collapsed as well, amidst debilitating communally tinted labour riots. The sense at once of entitlement over foreigners, and of anxiety about loss at their hands, arose from this struggle. It came to define the nation’s core identity, which was both ethnically Bamar (that is, from the central Irrawaddy plains of Burma) and religiously Buddhist. During the Pacific War, Aung San rallied ethnic Bamar Burmans for the Japanese, while the Allies recruited non-Bamar Burmans. Ethnic and religious cleavages deepened in the chaotic years that followed independence in 1948. In his struggles for authority with the military, Prime Minister U Nu promised to make Buddhism the state religion. This helped him win a landslide election victory in 1960, but also precipitated an upsurge in anti-Hindu and anti-Muslim violence (Charney 2009, 104).

In 1978, the BSPP government raised these incidental abuses against Muslims to a new level of violence when it launched the Naga Min operation. Initially designed to update the government’s demographic data following Bangladeshi migrants fleeing violence in their own country, the operation was carried out so brutally that it soon resulted in a flood of a quarter of a million refugees in the reverse direction, back to Bangladesh. They “told horror stories about the Burmese army and local Arakan Buddhists – arbitrary arrests, rape, desecration of mosques, and the destruction of villages” (Yegar 2002, 55–56). Beginning in late 1991, the new SLORC military regime created another Muslim exodus from Rakhine State. Seeking to punish elements that had participated in the anti-government uprising of 1988, and to increase its legitimacy among core constituencies by hammering on its “national races” theme, it punitively started depriving anyone it considered Rohingya of their citizenship papers (Yegar 2002, 63; Cheesman 2017). The 1982 Citizenship Law, Rohingya said, did not recognise them. The ar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Interpreting Communal Violence in Myanmar
• 1 The Contentious Politics of Anti-Muslim Scapegoating in Myanmar
• 2 Reconciling Contradictions: Buddhist-Muslim Violence, Narrative Making and Memory in Myanmar
• 3 Gendered Rumours and the Muslim Scapegoat in Myanmar’s Transition
• 4 Communal Conflict in Myanmar: The Legislature’s Response, 2012–2015
• 5 Producing the News: Reporting on Myanmar’s Rohingya Crisis: Lisa Brooten and Yola Verbruggen
• 6 How in Myanmar “National Races” Came to Surpass Citizenship and Exclude Rohingya
• Index