a monastery sheltering a dozen Rakhine families, told me that the Muslim community had been infiltrated by al-Qaeda and other international jihadist outfits. To prove his point, he showed me a VCD with stills of violence and ‘Muslim extremists’ undergoing training. Those images could have been taken anywhere, but he claimed they were all ‘Bengalis’ preparing to wage jihad in Arakan. No violence waged by the Rohingya during the recent clashes revealed any sophisticated training, and fire-arms had not been used; but the facts seemed to be irrelevant. On the VCD, there was a picture of the Thai army detaining Malay insurgents in southern Thailand. When I pointed that out, he was adamant that it was the Myanmar army.
The abbot of another monastery, U Pinnyarthami, laid out to me the theory that al-Qaeda was using international NGOs working in Arakan and the United Nations to supply local terrorists with weapons. I heard this kind of wild conspiracy theory innumerable times in the following years. Underlying them all was a widespread distrust among the Rakhine towards international NGOs and the UN, who many believed work exclusively for the Rohingya and neglected the Rakhine people. It is fair to assume that those men truly believed what they said. But they were not just channeling anti-Muslim sentiments – they were amplifying them within a community whose reverence for Buddhist monks often lends great weight to whatever words they utter.
In those early days after the riots, the triangular conflict between Burmans, Rakhine and Rohingya seemed to have flattened into a twosided conflict pitting the first two against the latter – the two ‘national races’ against the weaker ‘interlopers from Bangladesh’. Back then, it was not uncommon to see Rakhine people wearing tee-shirts bearing the sentence, ‘We support our President Thein Sein’, in both English and Burmese, in the streets of Sittwe. One month after the riots, the president said that the Rohingya were not welcome in the country, and asked the UNHCR to place them in camps or send them to another country.5 The UN agency immediately refused the petition, but it nonetheless garnered Thein Sein some support in Arakan. ‘We will take care of our own ethnic nationalities, but Rohingyas who came to Burma illegally are not [one] of our ethnic nationalities and we cannot accept them here’, he said. He also made a bizarre distinction between ‘Rohingya’ and ‘Bengali’, according to which the former were illegal immigrants who had arrived in Arakan after independence in 1948, and the latter those who had arrived during the colonial period, and were thus entitled to Burmese citizenship. But his stress on taking care of Burma’s ‘national races’ made implicitly clear that even the ‘Bengali’ citizens were not a priority.
The riots hardened prejudices against the Rohingya throughout Burma. It is impossible to asses with certainty how many people shared those prejudices, but the incipient Burmese public sphere was increasingly filled with anti-Rohingya news and commentaries portraying them as a demographic threat to the nation, denying both their identity and their right to live in the country. While the Rohingya were portrayed in international media as the main victims, sometimes ignoring the Rakhine, Burmese media almost invariably focused on the violence committed by the Royingya, often blaming them for things they had not done, and ignoring the discrimination they had suffered for decades. The Rohingya, or ‘Bengalis’, were not regarded as a ‘national race’, while the Rakhine were, and that coloured many perceptions of the whole crisis. There were very few dissenting voices, at least among the Burman ethnic majority or the Rakhine, and their numbers dwindled in the coming years as the situation in Arakan grew increasingly polarized. Furthermore, anti-Muslim sentiment linked to extreme forms of nationalism extended throughout Burma.
Arguably, there was only one person with enough moral authority to tackle the issue, and at least to open a debate that might have led to a different perception of the Rohingya inside the country: Aung San Suu Kyi. Many people in Burma, albeit probably not so many in Arakan, would have listened to what she said, even if it went against the official discourse voiced by a government then still dominated by the distrusted military. For a while, it was somewhat of a mystery what the position of Suu Kyi and the NLD was on the Rohingya. She generally avoided the issue, and when she addressed it her statements were ambiguous at best. She and her party had talked about democracy and human rights for years, and it was puzzling that they were silent on such flagrant violation of the rights of around a million people within the borders of her country. Many abroad assumed that her silence was due to the strategic logic of avoiding alienation from her party’s supporters by defending what seemed an utterly unpopular cause. But it soon became clear that the NLD’s thinking on the Rohingya, and on who belonged to the Burmese nation, were not too dissimilar to that of the generals.
This position was most clearly articulated by the former journalist Win Tin. He was perhaps the second most important figure in the NLD, and undoubtedly its second most popular after Aung San Suu Kyi. Here was a man of unyielding principles who never wavered in his fight against the military junta – a person who I deeply respected and admired. I had already interviewed him at length in late 2010, then in hospital a year later, and we had a cordial relationship. Then, two years after our first encounter, I met him again in his humble house. The situation had changed. Win Tin was loyal to Aung San Suu Kyi, but he was critical of her approach of getting close to the generals. For him, the military was still the enemy. Our interview was going smoothly until I touched upon the crisis in Arakan State. ‘The problem there is created by foreigners, the Bengalis. That is a problem we have had for a very long time. All the people in the country regard these people as foreigners – they are Bengalis who cross to this country, over land and by sea and by river’, he said.
He went on to repeat the official narrative denying the Rohingya identity: ‘The word “rohingya” cropped up only after, some years back, maybe thirty years, these people want to claim the land, they want to claim themselves as a race, they want to claim to be a native race, and that is not right, that is the problem.’ He also repeated a myth that is rather common in Burma. In 1978, the government launched Operation Dragon King in Arakan, with the alleged intention of detecting illegal immigrants. The heavy-handed tactics of the army and the police sent more than 200,000 Rohingya Muslim refugees into Bangladesh; but, after some international pressure, the government was obliged to accept them back. Win Tin claimed that more people returned than those who had left in the first place – a false allegation. But he also added something else: ‘What the authorities from Bangladesh did was to put beggars, prostitutes and criminals they wanted to get rid of with the so-called Rohingyas, Bengali refugees, and sent everybody to Burma.’ Finally, the solution that Win Tin proposed to the ‘Rohingya problem’ was quite similar to that suggested by President Thein Sein:
The problem is these Rohingya foreigners, and we have to contain them one way or another; something like what happened in the United States during World War II with the Japanese. The US government contained them in camps, and after the war they were sent to Japan or they could apply for citizenship. We can solve this problem that way. We cannot regard them as citizens, because they are not our citizens at all, everyone here knows that. My position is that we must not violate the human rights of these people, the Rohingya, or whatever they are. Once they are inside our land maybe we have to contain them in one place, like a camp, but we must value their human rights.
I challenged Win Tin on his views, and he grew increasingly irritated. Eventually, he abruptly interrupted our conversation and told me I had to leave, as he had visitors waiting for him. When I left, there was nobody waiting outside. We never met again, and he passed away two years later, wearing until the very end the blue shirt he used to wear while in prison as a symbolic reminder to the world that his country was not yet free. There was no doubt that he had expressed his real opinions without reservation. He was an honest man who cared deeply for his people. But that did not detract him from his racism: it was clear that the Rohingya were excluded from what he regarded as his people.
During that visit to Burma, I discovered that his opinions were far from unique within the party. They were the consensus within the NLD and the Burman pro-democracy elite. A few days later I interviewed Ko Ko Gyi, a student leader in the 1988 uprising who led a high-profile Civil Society Organization. The Rohingya ‘pretend they suffer so much’, he told me in another increasingly heated encounter. ‘If the international community [exerts]
