The ‘other’ in Burma

Persecution of the Muslim minority continues as world conscience remains silent

“Up until now he only felt what it was like to be a second or third class Rohingyan Muslim in Myanmar, but here in Mecca, he prays side by side with an Egyptian, who stands next to an Englishman, who kneels beside a German, who prostrates next to a South African, who holds his hands to the sky and prays for all humanity.”

The political and social situation in Burma has been the target of much discussion all over the world. The unrest in Burma, officially known as Myanmar, has been going on well before the ethnic strife came into existence. Before the clash of the cultures, there was the Japanese invasion in 1941. In short, there was never a time for the country to come out of the struggle and stand up on its own feet.

The extract at the start of this write-up is from an interview with a Burmese Muslim locally known as the Rohingyans and serves to present an extension of the concept of “otherisation” which was introduced by Edward Said in 1978. The term proposes that the nations, states or any parties involved in a particular situation can be categorized into two groups, the saviour and the perpetrator. Otherisation exudes the concept of exclusion, of being out of the loop, of being a stranger to a diaspora, which is what is implied by the first paragraph. The man does not know what it is like to be treated with the same respect, the same rules, like those around him.

Otherisation allows one community to work on its agenda of promotion of its culture, values and opinions on another. What needs to be pointed out is that the boundaries created between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ are artificial. Some particular attributes are associated with the ‘self’, and whatever the self is not, the other is. This can then account for the fact that majority of the colonised countries have not yet been able to break the rut they were forced to get stuck in.

This is the dilemma faced by the Rohingyan who did not know what it is like to be an ‘equal’ to those around him and had to go to Mecca to feel ‘equality’. The general attitude of the media deprives the rest of the world of the sense of how Buddhist atrocities are affecting one person. All have been cooped up in one, general narrative, which reminds one of Said’s theories: generalisation and pigeonholing of the ‘other’ into a set of fixed beliefs and traits.

Burmese Muslims are subjected to the practical demonstration of otherisation, putting their lives and culture in danger. After the Partition, many Muslims emigrated to Burma. Fast-forward two decades, civil unrest dominated Burma as currency devaluation led to riots led by college students and Buddhist monks, which resulted in a large scale massacre. The government reacted brutally and many pro-democratic thinkers escaped and formed alliances with various ethnic groups. In 1990, the National League for Democracy, headed by Aung Sun Suu Kyi, won by a landslide but to no avail as the military took over and kept hold till 2007.

Though the Burmese monks tend to disagree, the Burmese Muslims have been part of this state since the start. The Muslim minority mostly consists of the Rohingya people who are the descendants of Muslim immigrants from India and China as well as the descendants from early Arab settlers. The local Buddhist people regarded Muslims as outsiders and referred to them as ‘kala’. In a ‘Burma for Burmese only’ campaign, Buddhists marched to the Muslim bazaar and three monks were injured in a clash with the police. This clash was used by the media to fuel further aggression against the “foreigners”. Muslim property, houses, shops and mosques were burned and destroyed and hundreds were assaulted and massacred. Later the AFPFL (Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom Party) expelled the Burma Muslim Congress from the political race because it supported the rights of the Muslims living there.

Muslims were expelled from the army under General Ne Wi. The Muslim communities who segregate themselves from the Buddhist majority face greater difficulties than those who integrate more at the cost of observance to Islamic personal laws. The Buddhist monks carried out a mass vandalism of Muslim property and life in “retaliation” for the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan while accusations of “terrorism” were also made against organisations like All Burma Muslim Union.

In 2001, Myo Pyauk Hmar Soe Kyauk Sa Yar (or, The Fear of Losing One’s Race) and other anti-Muslim pamphlets were distributed by monks followed by protests in which Muslim houses were burnt down, slaughtered while they prayed in the mosques and their women raped. Elaine Pearson, the Deputy Director of Human Rights Watch’s Asian Division said, “the treatment of the Rohingya in Burma is deplorable – the Burmese government doesn’t just deny Rohingya their basic rights, it denies they are even Burmese citizens.”

Earlier this year, 10 Muslim scholars were accused and killed for rape which led to mass murders of Muslims. As a result of this Holocaust, Muslims of Arakan became homeless as their homes were burned down, which caused them to escape to the sea without food and water to die even before they could reach to the nearest possible place they could find after running away from Akyab.

The discourse might not be able to do justice to what an individual is facing in Burma: the utter sense of disconnection, the choice between death and the fear of dislocation, the exclusion from a society they have been a part of for as long as they can remember. It is a struggle between the weak and the persecuted, between those who have the power to shape the discourse and those who are being victimised through it. This neo-orientalism and the dynamics of power are the chains that are slowly pulling Rohingya to their own personal hell and this is something they seem to be helpless against.

Does this not show up throughout history in one form or another? There are always those who claim to be doing the ‘right’ thing but their definition of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ is not a textbook definition, rather they seem to decide it by the end of the gun they are on.

The writer is a student of politics, an aspiring policy maker and can be reached at [email protected]