3
By June 2012 the democratic transition seemed to be progressing smoothly, at least in central Burma. Aung San Suu Kyi had become a member of parliament in April; some political prisoners had been released earlier that year; and new laws liberalizing the media and trade unions were in the pipeline. Thein Sein was applauded internationally, and even Hillary Clinton had visited the country as US Secretary of State in late 2011 – a move by which the most powerful country on earth was giving its blessing to the new regime. The war in Kachin State seemed to be the only intractable problem in what might otherwise have looked like the beginning of a promising new era for the country. Then a new crisis suddenly erupted in Arakan State – a crisis that would only get worse in the coming years, and would have profound implications beyond the state.
In late May, a twenty-seven-year-old Buddhist Rakhine woman called Thida Htwe was brutally raped and killed on Ramree Island, in central Arakan. The alleged perpetrators, two Muslim men and an orphan Buddhist adopted by a Muslim family, were arrested the next day by the police, but villages and towns throughout the state were swept by media reports and pamphlets denouncing the crime, and emphasizing the religion of the perpetrators. Over the following weeks, this triggered a spiral of intercommunal violence that snowballed throughout the state and broke, perhaps irremediably, the fragile coexistence between the Muslim and Buddhist communities. A few days later, on 3 June, in Toungup, a town in the south of the state, a mob of several hundred Buddhists stopped a bus, dragged ten Muslim men from central Burma from it, and beat them to death.
Five days later, thousands of Muslim Rohingya in Maungdaw town, in the predominantly Rohingya north of the state, near to the border with Bangladesh, went on a rampage after Friday prayers, destroying a number of buildings and killing several Buddhists. The violence soon spread to the state’s capital, Sittwe, where it was mostly perpetrated by Buddhist Rakhine against Rohingya Muslims in retaliation for the rape and assassination of the Buddhist girl in Ramree and the attacks in Maungdaw. On 12 June, the army stepped in and restored order in the state. By then, hundreds of houses had been destroyed, over 100,000 people, most of them Rohingya, had been displaced to makeshift camps. The government claimed that seventy-eight people had been killed – a figure that was, in all probability, a gross underestimate.1
The government portrayed the violence as an eruption of spontaneous sectarian hostility between two communities incapable of living together – a convenient narrative that allowed the Tatmadaw to portray itself as the pacifier. The rape and killing of Thida Htwe had been widely publicized in the state, playing up stereotypes circulated widely among the Buddhist population that depicted Muslims as brutal sexual predators. An individual criminal case was blown out of proportion; collective blame was assigned to the Rohingya community as a whole for the alleged actions of just three men. Not all Rakhine participated in the violence, or even supported it; but the invocation of collective responsibility played into pre-existing intercommunal tensions. It made thinkable and justifiable the retaliation against ten innocent men a few days later, and subsequently against the whole Rohingya community.
Intercommunal tensions had existed in the state for decades, but that was only part of the story. The violence was not entirely spontaneous; strong indications emerged that there was some element of planning on the Rakhine side. According to a well-researched report by the International State Crime Initiative, based at Queen Mary, University of London, local Rakhine businessmen, Rakhine civil society organizations and politicians of the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party (RNDP) had organized mobs from Rakhine villages and taken them on buses to Sittwe, where they attacked the quarter of Narzi, mostly inhabited by Rohingya Muslims, and burned it to the ground.2 Moreover, at first the police did nothing to stop the violence, allowing it to escalate, and then often took sides with the Rakhine, shooting at the Rohingya and helping Rakhine mobs to torch Rohingya houses. The impunity that Rakhine attackers enjoyed also belies the notion that the authorities were impartial pacifiers; while many Rohingya in Maungdaw and Sittwe were jailed, not a single Rakhine was arrested.
The violence did not come out of the blue. In the immediate context of the transition, Rakhine nationalists had lashed out against the Rohingya after they were allowed to vote in the 2010 election. In September 2011, several Rakhine associations held a seminar in Rangoon protesting the ‘Rohingyanization of Arakan’.3 One month later, the RNDP organized a series of public conferences in several towns in Northern Arakan with the same theme. ‘We have no intention to breed racial or religious hatred among the peoples living together on our land’, said U Aung Mra Kyaw, an MP for the RNDP. But the reaction of some people in attendance seemed to belie his words. One participant in one of the conferences was reported as saying: ‘Many people did not want to return home, even after concluding the conference … because they were embittered with the feelings that their land and valued heritages are being insulted by those groups of Chittagonian Bengali Muslims with their made up histories of Rohingya’.4
I visited Sittwe for the first time a few weeks after the first wave of riots. The government had imposed strict segregation between the two communities, with the ostensible rationale of preventing further violence; but the reality was that the city had been almost completely ethnically cleansed of its Muslim population, and it has remained so ever since. The overwhelming majority of Rohingya had been taken to a complex of camps near the city, mostly built around pre-existing Rohingya villages. Only two Muslim enclaves remained within Sittwe: Bumay, on the edge of the city, and Aung Mingalar, the Muslim ghetto downtown.
Those in the camps were, in one sense, more fortunate than those in Aung Mingalar: the ‘registered’ interns in the camps received food from UN agencies, while those ‘unregistered’ did not. Meanwhile the inhabitants of the ghetto were not officially regarded as IDPs, so they did not receive anything. I could not visit Aung Mingalar on that occasion, but I managed to speak on the phone with some residents, and they told me that they were forced to buy food from the police at as much as ten times its market price. Many of them received remittances from relatives in Rangoon or abroad, but, given that the money had to go through the police guarding the neighbourhood, the officers always got a substantial commission.
My interactions with Rohingya people were scarce and brief on that first trip. Having few contacts in Arakan, and with the camps closely guarded, I had to visit them with a military truck accompanying me and my Rakhine translator. Still, I managed to talk privately with a couple of them, who told me about how they had witnessed the police shooting relatives and neighbours in the recent violence. The camps where they had been confined were only a few weeks old, but there were already some suspicions that the displaced would not be able to return to their homes for a long time.
There were a few thousand displaced Rakhine, too, most of them sheltered in Buddhist monasteries; but their numbers were smaller than the displaced Rohingya and, unlike Muslims, they enjoyed freedom of movement. The traces of the recent violence were visible virtually everywhere. In the bustling market near the port, many shops were closed, their Muslim owners being confined in the camps or in Aung Mingalar and Bumay. In successive visits, I found most of those shops had been taken by Rakhine people. Meanwhile, Narzi quarter, the majority- Muslim area that had been attacked by Rakhine mobs and subsequently evacuated by the authorities, was a desolate landscape of debris in which no building had been left unscathed. It was a ghost town where I could see teams of monks and Buddhist laymen clearing the rubble during the day. President Thein Sein had declared a state of emergency on 10 June, and there was a strict curfew from eight in the evening to six in the morning. At night the streets were eerily empty except for a few checkpoints, and stray dogs.
It was easier to interview Rakhine people than Rohingya. It was then that I got a sense for the first time of the deeply ingrained siege mentality within the Buddhist community, with damning rumours about the other community constantly circulating. I also started to glimpse
