Burmese maze

The Economist
Thu 20 Dec 2007

For Muslims and other minorities, the monks’ battle was not their fight.

In the streets surrounding the Sule Paya pagoda in downtown Yangon, Burmese Muslims ply their trade, selling sweetmeats, calligraphy or spectacles. When the military junta opened fire on protesters led by monks in September, the Muslims had an excellent view of the violence. But for all the expletives they threw at the government, many refrained from joining the protesters. “It’s a Burmese problem,” says a grizzled old man, lolling outside the mosque opposite the pagoda. “Let them deal with it. They don’t think of us as being of their country.” The sense of being apart from Myanmar is an example of the religious and ethnic divisions that will persist, even if military rule eventually gives way to democracy.

The complexities of national identity are starkest in Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine (formerly Arakan) state in western Myanmar, bordering Bangladesh. Sittwe’s Muslims, who form anywhere from a third to half of the local population (official estimates of Muslim numbers are notoriously unreliable), are a mixed lot. Some claim descent from Indian and Bengali immigrants, who arrived in the once-thriving port when Burma was still a place where fortunes could be made. Others belong to the Rakhine ethnic group. Still others claim a distinct Rohingya ethnicity (a designation the junta does not recognise). But on one point, all agree: the government, being Buddhist, discriminates against Muslims. “The infidels are cruel to us and beat us,” goes a common refrain.

Severe poverty—the sight of ten people living under a single roof without electricity is as common as that of forced labour on the roads along the marshy sea—exacerbates Muslim resentment, particularly given the false but intractable belief that Myanmar’s Buddhists are getting rich. Although incidents of outright violence have decreased, relations between Muslims and Buddhists remain tense. Some Muslims take satisfaction from the government’s crackdown on the monks. “They [the junta] put them on a pedestal and now they’re the ones having a problem,” grins one local imam. Amongst Sittwe’s Muslims, the otherwise universal admiration for Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the opposition, is tempered. “She can’t help being an improvement on the current government,” says the imam. “But she’s Buddhist too. She’s probably not very good on the Muslim question.”

Religion is not the only source of division. Race plays a powerful role. Sittwe’s Muslims, like its rarer Hindus, find it almost impossible to travel outside Rakhine state. Even inside it, paperwork and perpetual inspections can make a simple fishing trip harrowing. Most attribute these restrictions to the government’s belief that Rakhine is plagued by illegal immigrants from India and Bangladesh who do not deserve citizenship or the right to travel.

Such oversimplifications miss the demographic complexities of Sittwe. Some residents are Indians who were born there. Others are products of mixed marriages. Many have family members in other parts of Myanmar whom they might never see again. “There have been Muslims here since before the British ever came to Burma,” says a local teacher. “And yes, a lot of the people here did come over from Bangladesh. But that was years and years ago.” Small wonder that most of Sittwe’s people nowadays just want to leave. “I’d go to Malaysia or even Bangladesh,” says a young man who was born of a Bengali father and Rakhine mother. “But I don’t have the money.”

Though it is most potent amongst Muslims, the idea of not belonging is common among other ethnic and religious minorities. Sittwe’s Hindus also say they are locked out of the labour market. Buddhists in Rakhine often identify themselves as belonging “Not [to] Myanmar, but the Arakan kings” (a reference to the ancient Rakhine empire). Forging a single national identity from these disparate ethnic and religious groups will be a challenge for any Burmese government. Already, disunity may have harmed the prospects for democratic change. “Where were the ethnic armies?” asked one resident of Yangon, plaintively, of the uprising against the junta in September. “If the Shan and Kachin had come, we might have got somewhere.” Perhaps, like the Rakhine and Muslims, they felt it was not their fight