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A Different View of Burma
Ethnic, Territory, and Economic Issues at Root of Rohingya Oppression
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
by TONY WALL
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I take issue with Kevin McKiernan’s article, titled “Burma’s Brutal
Buddhists” on your cover March 6. I returned from a trip to
Burma/Myanmar just a couple weeks ago. I do not proclaim to be an expert
on what is a very complex situation, but based on my personal
experience, reading, and discussions with people there, I see
McKiernan’s assessments of Burma as oversimplified, slanted, and
counterproductive to improving the situation.
Burma
is a beautiful country with a long and tragic history of internal
conflict among its many ethnic groups (one being the Rohingya). In
addition, its entire population (other than a small elite) has suffered
economic privation as a result of being isolated from the rest of the
world for over 50 years by a brutal military regime. One need only take a
short two-hour flight from Yangon, Burma, to see the hyper-modern,
high-rise buildings of nearby Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to realize the
striking contrast such economic isolation has created.
In
the last couple years, Burma’s military has finally, at least for now,
stepped back from complete power, and the country is tentatively taking
baby steps toward opening to the world and becoming a democracy. There
no doubt will be problems in that transition, problems that will not be
solved easily or quickly. The plight of the Rohingya is a tragic one.
But as sad as that situation is, many long-term observers of Burma are
surprised that the entire country did not implode into whole-scale
ethnic conflict and division as the military transitions from power, as
happened in the former Yugoslavia when Marshal Tito and the Soviet Union
went away.
As Thant Myint-U (the grandson of former UN Secretary-General U Thant) wrote in The River of Lost Footsteps: Histories of Burma,
“Any transition to democracy is always difficult. In many places around
the world, attempts to transform dictatorships into democracies have
led to many new problems, including inter-ethnic violence and civil
war.” I am not saying forget the Rohingya, not at all, but McKiernan’s
assessment of their plight is an oversimplification.
He
simply blames the “Buddhists” for oppressing them, but there are other
ethnic, territorial, and economic issues that play into it. As Robert D.
Kaplan sadly noted in his book Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of Power, in a visit to neighboring Bangladesh he heard strident criticism of the Rohingya by Muslims:
Local
Bangladeshis were unemployed because the ethnic Rohingya … were willing
to do the same jobs for less money. Muslim solidarity here was wearing
thin. One local politician told me, “The Rohingya deal in arms, drugs,
and any sort of crime. If you catch three criminals, there will be at
least one Rohingya among them. … You can hire a Rohingya to kill anyone
you want for a very small price,” one local claimed.
Like
Kaplan, I am not ascribing to such slurs on the Rohingya, but I quote
them to note that they are a minority in sad conflict with its
neighbors. The Rohingya need help, their problems needs to be solved by
Bangladesh and Burma, but to simply “blame it on the Buddhists” à la Mr.
McKiernan is ill-informed. As Kaplan notes, “[The Rohingya] embody the
racial and cultural linkage between the Indian Subcontinent and
Southeast Asia, and as a result are despised both [in Bangladesh] and in
Burma. Only a world of more flexible borders will free them.” Maybe,
but “flexible borders” is not easy to achieve.
What
McKiernan instead appears to suggest in regard to this complex
political/ethnic/economic conflict in Burma (with a fledgling new
government and a society struggling to transition into the 21st century)
is that we the American people fully understand this particular problem
of this country on the other side of the earth, we know the solution,
and should intervene to “make it happen.” Intervene by reinstatement of
sanctions and further isolation of the people of Burma.
McKiernan
is clearly disgusted by the prospect that lifting of the sanction is
allowing Burma to open up to foreign investment, noting “the stampede of
Western corporations hungry to share in this [the development of
Burma].” He must be shocked at the horrors of what that has done in
nearby Singapore — better health care and education, and a higher
standard of living, than in the U.S. He notes that prior international sanctions preventing investment by U.S. and
other Western companies were lifted when military controls were lifted
in Burma; he then claims “but it was followed by a rash of sectarian
violence between Buddhist and Muslims.” Lifting the sanction resulted in
oppression of the Rohingya? Burma has always had
sectarian violence, less so now than in many years before. So is
McKiernan saying he wants to resume sanctions? What would that do? As
Thant Myint-U wrote in The River of Lost Footsteps (when the sanctions and military power were still in place):
The
economy that was evolving under sanctions was exactly the opposite of
one that would create a strong middle class and pave the way for
progressive change. In almost every way, this policy of isolating one of
the most isolated countries in the world — where the military regime
isolated itself for the better part of 30 years and evolved well in this
isolation — is both counterproductive and dangerous.
McKiernan
treats the recent lifting of sanctions as a cynical political move by
President Obama: “I guessed Obama sorely need a win in the foreign
policy column. And I watched with interest, following the visit [of
Obama to Burma], when the president lifted punishing economic sanctions
which had isolated Burma as a police state for decades. Now I wondered
how these events would impact the beleaguered Rohingya … ” I do not get
the segue there. As Robert Kaplan wrote four years ago inMonsoon (before
the sanctions were lifted by Obama), the Rohingya were already
beleaguered during the sanctions. Lifting the sanctions did not cause
the current Rohingya problem, and reinstating the sanctions will not
solve them; it will just punish the people of Burma who have already
suffered enough. But McKiernan sees it as all part of a larger political
game by Obama: “… the Administration’s attempt to refocus attention
from the Middle East toward the China-dominated Pacific, a gambit some
have dubbed Obama’s ‘Asian Pivot.’”
McKiernan is ill-informed if he thinks the recent focus of the current U.S. administration’s
on the countries of the Indian Ocean is simply a personal political
“gambit” by Obama to shift public attention from the intractable
problems of the Middle East in order to get in the “win” column. For
years, businessmen, government leaders, and international political and
economic analysts have been saying that the U.S. is already late to the game in focusing on this part of the world. Just read books like 2013’s Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants by Sunil S. Amrith or Kaplan’s Monsoon:
In
a densely interconnected world, America’s ability to grasp what, in a
larger sense, the monsoon [of trade, globalization, unity, and progress
happening in the Indian Ocean countries like India, Burma, Thailand,
Malaysia, and Indonesia, with China looming in the background]
represents and to recognize its manifold implications will help
determine America’s own destiny and that of the West as a whole. Thus,
the Indian Ocean may be the essential place to contemplate the future of
U.S. Power.
What most bothered me about McKiernan’s article is that it clearly serves as a deterrent to the readers of The Santa Barbara Independent to
spend their tourist dollars by visiting Burma. That would be sad if
that is the result. I encourage everyone who can afford it (a long plane
ride) to go there. It is a beautiful country with many beautiful
people. They have problems in parts of their country, but isolating the
Burmese and denying them tourist dollars will only hurt their transition
and only force them into the arms of the Chinese (who were only too
happy to support the prior military regime).
McKiernan
speaks of a seaside resort in Burma where he spent the night, “one of
many that developers hope will transform Myanmar into a tourist mecca.”
But then McKiernan goes on to poetically lament: “Then I thought of Ali
and others in the camp. They were like random beings adrift in a lawless
outer space, where the sound of voices cannot travel. Unhooked from the
earthship where most of the rest of us ride, they seem to be floating
away, tinier and tinier in the distance.” Aside from the fact that I do
not understand how only “most of” the rest of us ride the earthship
(where do the rest of us ride?), he seems to be saying in his muddled
way that turning Myanmar into a tourist mecca is a bad thing as long as a
Rohingya like Ali suffers.
Bringing
hotels and restaurants to Burma will create jobs there and help lift
their people out of poverty. Without that, Burma returns to getting
money from things like jade mines and harvesting teakwood forests, all
owned and controlled by the generals. It is sad that Ali suffers, but
helping the people of Burma to rise from poverty may end up helping
everyone there, hopefully including the Rohingya.
Tony
Wall is a long-term observer of Indian Ocean countries, having been to
and studied Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, China, Thailand, and
Singapore in recent years. He works as legal counsel for a number of
clothing manufacturers and has also worked an agricultural kibbutz,
interned with James Fawcett of the European Commission on Human Rights,
and been a lawyer in Denmark and Jordan.
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