The worst incident was probably at the riverside village of Tula Toli. It was from there that ARSA had attacked government troops and also burned down a Mro village, killing six people. By August 30, the army had gained the upper hand and, together with militia, moved into the village, forcing hundreds to flee onto a peninsula to the east. Most couldn’t swim, so they were trapped. The men and older boys were separated from the rest before being executed. Some women and children were hit in the gunfire as well. No one knows exactly how many people were killed, but estimates run into the hundreds.23
Two days before, about five miles to the south, the army had arrived at the coastal village of Inn Din and, together with Arakanese militia, began torching Muslim homes, forcing Rohingya to flee into the nearby hills. On September 1, hundreds of people who had fled were caught by soldiers on the beach, looking for food and a means of escape to Bangladesh. Ten of the men were detained, interrogated, and then executed as suspected militants the next morning.24
The reaction in the West and the Islamic world was devastating. In New York, American UN ambassador Nikki Haley called what was happening a “brutal, sustained campaign to cleanse the country of an ethnic minority,” while UN Secretary-General António Guterres described it as a “human rights nightmare.”25 Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan claimed that genocide was taking place against the Rohingya minority. In Grozny, Chechnya, tens of thousands rallied in support of the Rohingya in front of the city’s main mosque. In Jakarta, days of protests including members of the extremist Islamic Defenders Front brought traffic to a standstill. Across Pakistan, demonstrators demanding action against the Burmese government clashed with police. Al-Qaeda warned that Myanmar would face “punishment for its crimes.”26
By mid-September, as many as 400,000 refugees, nearly all of them Muslim, had crossed the border into Bangladesh, many having walked for days without food or rest. It was the biggest single flight of refugees in modern times. Aung San Suu Kyi’s staunchest supporters in the West were dismayed that she had not demanded an end to the violence. In a public letter sent on September 7, Archibishop Desmond Tutu, calling her “my dearly beloved sister,” wrote, “It is incongruous for a symbol of righteousness to lead such a country. If the political price of your ascension to the highest office in Myanmar is your silence, the price is surely too steep.”27
On September 19, Aung San Suu Kyi broke her silence and, in a televised address to diplomats in Naypyitaw, questioned the narrative taking shape overseas. No military operations had taken place in the last two weeks, she stated. And most of the Muslim population of Arakan had not fled, which suggested that the situation wasn’t as severe as some were making out. She also said that those who had left for Bangladesh would be welcome back. Overseas, few were satisfied by this response. A wave of even more intense international criticism followed.
In late September, St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, replaced Aung San Suu Kyi’s portrait with a classical Japanese painting entitled Morning Glory. A couple of months later, the cities of Oxford and Dublin stripped her of the awards they had given her in 2012. Bob Geldof, who had sung for her that year, said, “We should not have any truck with this woman . . . it’s ridiculous, but she’s sort of let us Dubliners down, she’s let Ireland down, because we thought she was wonderful. But we’ve been duped.”28
The views inside Burma were not only different but diametrically opposed. The vast majority believed that ARSA was not only a real and present danger to the country but had inflicted terrible suffering on non-Muslim communities in Arakan. Burmese Facebook pages teemed with photographs of Arakanese Buddhists and Hindus who had been killed. Radio stations broadcast interviews with weeping survivors of ARSA attacks. Most cheered the army’s offensive to wipe out ARSA. Aye Aye Soe, whose hometown, Kyaukphyu, had been the scene of communal violence five years before, remembers people saying, “Why couldn’t the army have protected us like that back in 2012?”29 Few believed the stories of atrocities told by the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. “Everyone has a smartphone these days, why aren’t there any photos or videos?” I heard many argue. Others queried why Western governments could not produce any satelllite images of mass graves, when they had been able to do so in Kosovo nearly twenty years before. At worst, people said, the army campaign was no different from other counterinsurgency operations that had been going on for decades.
Over September and October, the army commander-in-chief, General Min Aung Hlaing, delivered a series of uncompromising speeches, promising to do his duty and finish the “unfinished business of 1942”—meaning the twin threats of “Bengali” immigration and Muslim insurrection. On Facebook, his following soared. There were loud calls for a wall to be built to prevent renewed “Islamic” aggression from across the Bangladesh border. Both Aung San Suu Kyi’s government and the army promised to make this happen and asked leading businessmen to help foot the bill.
Because so few believed the allegations of army massacres, there was also mounting anger at what was seen as extreme Western bias. Regional governments were largely supportive. Just days after the fighting began, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, on a visit to Burma, refused to denounce the crackdown, instead saying, “We share your concerns about extremist violence in Rakhine State and especially the violence against security forces.” In late October, thousands rallied in downtown Rangoon in support of the army and against “international pressure.”
On social media, the Burmese conjectured that the West’s unwillingness to even acknowlege the violence committed by ARSA was part of a Saudi–Western plot to destabilize Arakan and force the country to accept hundreds of thousands of new “Bengali” settlers. For what purpose, no one could say. Burmese cartoons showed UN officials, their pockets stuffed with cash, unlocking the “western gate” for jihadi militants while bearded men in Arab dress looked on approvingly.
Discussing the Rohingya crisis with the Washington Post in November, Aung San Suu Kyi said, “The whole thing is a rigmarole.”30
By year’s end, there were over 700,000 newly arrived Rohingya in Bangladesh, the vast majority at the sprawling Kutapalong camp, the largest single refugee site in the world. More than half were children, thousands of them traumatized by the violence they had witnessed. The Burmese government wanted to counter increasingly strident international claims of “ethnic cleansing,” but they were wary of opening themselves up to criticism at home, where few accepted the UN’s figures. So they entered into a bilateral agreement with the Bangladesh government, promising to take back all who could give evidence of past residence. It wasn’t clear what evidence might be accepted, and it was even less clear whether actual citizenship for those who had left would be any more likely if they returned than it had been before. In any case, with over a hundred thousand Rohingya left behind in Arakan still languishing in camps, aid restricted, few journalists allowed into the area, and an adamant refusal to permit international investigation, there seemed little possibility that the refugees themselves would want to return anytime soon.
If they did, they would be coming back to a changed landscape. Over late 2017, dozens of burned-down villages were bulldozed. New roads were built as well, to better connect northern Arakan with the rest of the state. Many on the Burmese side, believing that the strip along the Bangladesh border had long been a locus for illegal entry, crime, and more recently militant violence, argued that it should be kept “Bengali-free” and be given a beefed-up security infrastructure. Rohingya returnees, after undergoing a “verification process,” would be resettled farther inland.
In December, two Reuters journalists, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, were arrested while carrying documents that had just been given to them by police officers, in what was widely viewed as a set-up. Both men had been investigating the execution of Rohingya men at Inn Din village. The military subsequently conducted its own inquiry, uncovered the bodies of the ten men, and sentenced seven of their own to ten years’ hard labor. The Reuters journalists were none
theless prosecuted for violation of the Official Secrets Act, setting off an international furor.
With the new year, the situation became more convoluted still. On the evening of January 16, 2018, police opened fire on Arakanese Buddhist demonstrators in Mrauk-U, a large town not far from Sittwe which was also the capital of the old Arakanese kingdom, its sublime 16th-century temples and the remains of palace walls and moats a reminder to Arakanese nationalists of past sovereignty. The demonstrators were demanding the right to commemorate an upcoming anniversary of the fall of the kingdom to Burmese invaders in 1785. Seven were shot dead, and twenty police were reported injured in clashes with the crowd. Two days later, the leading Arakanese politician and member of parliament Aye Maung was arrested for sedition. Prosecutors alleged that at a literature festival earlier in the month, he had made comments that were supportive of the Arakan Army. This was a new rebel outfit, set up far to the north at the Kachin Independence Army’s headquarters on the China border. Its leader, Twan Mrat Naing, was a charismatic thirty-something erstwhile tour guide, who now promised self-determination for the Arakanese (Buddhist) people. Using the hashtag #ArakanDream2020, he and his followers posted increasingly assertive statements on Twitter while also uploading slick videos of their military prowess, including versions in English, on YouTube. Recruits included the desperately poor Arakanese migrants who had been working in the jade mines. During 2018, the Arakan Army, now several thousand strong, moved at least a thousand troops south and began battling government forces in the hills just north of the area where the recent Rohingya violence had taken place.
Aye Maung and his Arakan National Party had trounced both the NLD and the USDP in state elections—the only party to defeat the NLD anywhere. They dominated the state legislature. But under the constitution, the president appoints the chief minister of every state. The Arakan National Party had hoped that, in the spirit of democracy, Aung San Suu Kyi would appoint one of their own. When she didn’t even reach out to them, they felt humiliated. Many, especially young Arakanese, gravitated toward the Arakan Army.
The conflict in Arakan in 2018 was not simply between Muslims and Buddhists, or between the Burmese state and the Rohingya. Forgotten in many outside perspectives is the central place of the Arakanese Buddhists, many of whom consider themselves heirs to a once independent Arakan, and who see both the Burmese to the east and the “Bengalis” to the west as existential threats to their future.
BY APRIL, FACEBOOK founder Mark Zuckerberg was getting ensnared in the Burma debacle. That month, he was called before the US Senate to answer questions about his company’s use of personal data. He was also grilled on Facebook’s possible role in stoking communal violence in Burma. He said that what had happened was a “terrible tragedy, and we need to do more.”31 Speaking to the news site Vox, he later said that Facebook was indeed actively monitoring Burmese posts and in one case had moved quickly to stop incitements to violence. Burmese human rights groups critical of Facebook’s lackadaisical approach responded immediately, saying that it was they who had discovered the posts, alerted Facebook, and then waited days for Facebook to respond. Zuckerberg apologized and promised again “to hire more Burmese speakers.” He made no mention of hiring speakers of Burma’s many other languages.
In August, the UN’s Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar released its initial report. This investigation was mandated by the global body’s Human Rights Council in the aftermath of the 2017 violence and refugee exodus. From the start, the Burmese government refused to cooperate. Investigative teams were not allowed inside the country to collect evidence and so relied primarily on the reports of Rohingya refugees.32 Their conclusions were stark. At a press conference in New York, one of the mission’s members, Radhika Coomaraswamy, argued that “the horrors inflicted on Rohingya men, women and children during the August 2017 operations, including their indiscriminate killing, rise to the level of both war crimes and crimes against humanity.” Other mission members called for “top military commanders in Myanmar to be investigated and prosecuted for the gravest crimes under international law, including genocide.” In addition, they said that Aung San Suu Kyi had “not used her de facto position as head of government nor her moral authority to stem or prevent the unfolding events.”33
A day later, the UN Security Council met in open session. Western representatives issued damning statements. Nikki Haley spoke of the “stomach-churning” accounts in the State Department’s own report. At the UK’s invitation, the actress Cate Blanchett, who had just visited the refugee camps in Bangladesh, pleaded for more assistance. “Please let’s not fail them again,” she said.
The following week, the International Criminal Court ruled that it had jurisdiction over the crime against humanity of deportation allegedly committed against the Rohingya, opening the door to possible future prosecution. Even though Burma wasn’t a signatory to the Rome Convention, the court said that it had jurisdiction because “an element of the crime” took place in Bangladesh.34 A few days later, responding to an ICC investigation into possible American war crimes in Afghanistan, US National Security Advisor John Bolton launched an excoriating attack on the court, calling it illegitimate and threatening sanctions. “We will let the ICC die on its own. After all, for all intents and purposes, the ICC is already dead,” said the longtime foe of international institutions.35 His remarks were shared widely on Burmese social media.
But the move that received the most attention in Burma was the shutting down of the army commander-in-chief’s Facebook page, which was followed by millions of people.36 Just as the UN’s human rights report was being released, Facebook took down eighteen accounts, an Instagram account, and dozens of linked pages, including the army’s official pages. Facebook had learned the day before that it was going to be named by the UN as having contributed to the rise of hate speech in Burma, panicked, and chose the most obvious targets.
As Western opprobrium mounted and the United Nations heaped on the pressure, China stepped into the breach. In the early 2010s, Beijing had watched as the military junta it had supported for decades first mutated into a quasi-democratic government and then embraced Western suitors without even a nod in their direction. They felt that an Aung San Suu Kyi government might give them a fresh start, and they were right. Since her time in opposition, Aung San Suu Kyi had said consistently that she wanted good relations with Burma’s northern neighbor. She knew that China, with its influence over all the rebel groups along the common border, was indispensable for the success of any peace process. And now China offered vital protection at the UN, blocking (with Russia) any move toward harsh Security Council action.
In December 2017, as international media coverage of the Rohingya crisis reached fever pitch, Aung San Suu Kyi called on Xi Jinping and other top Chinese leaders. She was accompanied by a team of ministers, including the ministers of energy and construction as well as the chief minister of Mandalay. The week before, the army commander-in-chief had visited as well, meeting Xi on what was his eighth visit and touring extensively arround the country. Burma was already a partner in China’s Belt Road Initiative, a set of global insfracture projects, valued at over a trillion dollars, designed to place China squarely at the center of a new world economic order. Talks now turned to a “Chinese–Myanmar economic corridor”: massive Chinese investments in Burma, including fulfillment of the long-held dream of a multi-billion-dollar deep-sea port in Arakan and a rail network connecting the port to Mandalay and then the Chinese hinterland.37
The Chinese had long assumed that they would be Burma’s primary economic and strategic partner. The past few years had disrupted their plans. Now was the time to get things back on track. The Chinese foreign ministry went on a charm offensive, inviting hundreds of Burmese from across the political spectrum (including me) to visit on study tours and to attend conferences. While Western embassies discussed punitive measures, China’s energetic ambassador in Rangoon, Hong Liang, hosted lavish banquet
s for the country’s business elite. China’s top party officials, ministers, and senior officers of the People’s Liberation Army visited Naypyitaw almost weekly. The proposed projects would not only connect China across Burma to the sea; they would also fasten Burma even more tightly to Chinese markets. In September 2018, Burmese and Chinese ministers signed an agreement to move ahead.
BY EARLY 2019, Burma was facing a wall of challenges. Near the Bangladesh border, the Arakan Army, moving south from their hilltop bases into the plains below, attacked police stations and military convoys. Fresh counterinsurgency operations then displaced thousands of Arakanese Buddhist civilians. Tensions between Arakanese nationalists and their Burmese counterparts approached a boiling point as insults were traded over social media. Meanwhile, the plight of both Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh and the half million remaining in Arakan showed scant signs of improvement. Over the preceding year, relations between Burma and the West had cooled dramatically, with the US, Canada, and the European Union all considering a fresh round of sanctions.
Hopes for a lasting peace had also dimmed. Fighting flared across the north and northeast of the country, not only between government and rebel forces but now among the Ethnic Armed Organizations as well. On secluded hillsides, troops of the Restoration Council of the Shan State battled both the Taang National Liberation Front and their ostensible brethren in the Shan State Army North. In Lashio, near China, fighting between rival militias could be heard on the outskirts of town. At least 100,000 people were living in displaced persons’ camps in the Shan and Kachin states, many with little access to outside assistance.
The Hidden History of Burma Page 26
