but most of our people’, he concluded. He had said on another occasion that he and the members of his organization, the 88 Generation Students, were willing to take up arms alongside the same military that had kept him behind bars for years against the ‘foreign invaders’.6
Like Win Tin, Ko Ko Gyi claimed to speak in the name of the majority of Burmese citizens – but no polls about the Rohingya had been conducted among a population that, until recently, had had virtually no access to reliable information even about their own country. Most Burmese had never met a member of the Rohingya community, which had been confined in northern Arakan State for decades. Far from responding to a supposed popular sentiment on which nobody could have certainty, it is more likely that these members of the prodemocracy elite were in fact contributing to the shaping of such sentiments. Voices like theirs were at least as responsible for it as were statements from the widely despised former generals who ruled the country, if not more so, as they were looked up to as heroes and listened to by many Burmese.
Ko Ko Gyi was not given the chance to fight alongside the military, but on the very same day I interviewed him he was appointed to take part in an official commission of inquiry to investigate the violence in Arakan that had taken place in June – a sure sign that an important sector of the old rebellious opposition to military rule was being absorbed into mainstream politics in the new Burma. Significantly, there was no Muslim from Arakan among the members of the commission.
Other pro-democracy activists echoed anti-Rohingya sentiments over the next few years. The few people defending the Rohingya were silenced or ostracized, or changed their minds, as the crisis worsened, the situation in Arakan growing increasingly polarized and the pressure to ‘take sides’ increasing. The largest enigma was still the silence of Aung San Suu Kyi, and I began to believe that this was due to a political calculation, but that most analysts had failed to grasp which audience she was struggling not to alienate. Her political career had been based since the beginning in 1988 on the support of the Burman public, and that of international human rights organizations and Western governments, which had led her to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, transforming her into the ‘Nelson Mandela of Asia’. If she defended the Rohingya, she risked alienating her domestic base; but attacking them would probably alienate her foreign supporters – and she needed both during the transition.
Nonetheless, she was criticized for not speaking out on the Rohingya, as she had been criticized for not speaking out on the Kachin – the most common narrative being that she had become a politician, casting aside her persona of human rights icon.7 In 2013 she remarked: ‘I’m always surprised when people speak as if I’ve just become a politician. I’ve been a politician all along. I started in politics not as a human rights defender or a humanitarian worker, but as the leader of a political party. And if that’s not a politician then I don’t know what is.’8 There was something deeply disingenuous about that statement, not least because she was introducing a false dichotomy between the exercise of politics and the defence of human rights. After all, she had told me two years previously that her idea of democracy was based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Noting the apparent consensus within her party and her ambiguity on the issue, I suspected that she was avoiding expressing her real feelings unequivocally because she did not want to be labelled abroad as a racist. Later developments, particularly after her rise to power, confirmed that suspicion. But, reading between the lines of her public statements in 2012, it was possible to glimpse her true thoughts. In an interview with an Indian newspaper in November 2012, she complained that ‘there were those who were not pleased, because they wanted me to condemn one community or the other’, when nobody had asked her to take sides between the two communities. Then she adopted an equidistant position, saying that ‘both communities have suffered human rights violations, and have also violated human rights. And human rights have been grossly mishandled in the Rakhine by the government for many decades.’9 She was reducing the issue to a problem of intercommunal violence poorly handled by the military junta. As on so many other occasions, she insisted on the necessity to uphold the ‘rule of law’ to solve the problem. But the most telling passage of the interview was when she was first asked about the issue, when she replied: ‘Of course we are concerned. I think in many ways the situation has been mishandled. For years I have been insisting, and the National League for Democracy also, that we have to do something about the porous border with Bangladesh because it is going to lead some day or the other to grave problems.’ Framing the issue as a problem of illegal immigration, she echoed the sentiments of Win Tin; but she expressed herself more obliquely.
After the riots in June 2012, intercommunal relations steadily deteriorated in Arakan, as a result of a campaign of virulent anti-Muslim propaganda voiced by local Buddhist monks’ associations and the RNDP. Several organizations had distributed pamphlets among the Rakhine population warning them of the danger posed by the ‘Bengali invaders’, and calling them to avoid any interactions with their Rohingya neighbours. A statement released on 9 July by the monks’ association of Mrauk-U, the ancient capital of the Arakanese kingdom, read:
The Arakanese people must understand that Bengalis want to destroy the land of Arakan, are eating Arakan rice and plan to exterminate Arakanese people and use their money to buy weapons to kill Arakanese people. For this reason and from today, no Arakanese should sell any goods to Bengalis, hire Bengalis as workers, provide any food to Bengalis and have any dealings with them, as they are cruel by nature.10
Such calls were heeded by many in the Rakhine population, often with chilling zeal. In some parts of the state, those Rakhine who were discovered dealing with the Rohingya were publicly humiliated, and their pictures posted in Facebook. A picture dated in August, supposedly taken in Myebon, showed a man with his hands tied being paraded in the town with a placard hanging around his neck with a sign reading: ‘I am a traitor and a slave of Kalar’ – a derogatory term often used to refer to people of South Asian origin.11
The central government was doing very little to improve intercommunal relations in the state. In late August, Thein Sein sent a report to the country’s parliament that was leaked to Agence France-Press. It read: ‘Political parties, some monks and some individuals are increasing the ethnic hatred. They even approach and lobby both the domestic and overseas [Rakhine] community … [Rakhine] people are continuously thinking to terrorise the Bengali Muslims living across the country.’12 But the government did not take any measures to stop or counter such hate speech. The report may have been accurate, but it was also self-serving, as it contributed to the larger narrative of a primeval intercommunal hatred between the two communities that the government was striving to control, but could not eliminate. It also suppressed the role that the central government was playing in stoking those hatreds.
During the violence in June, Zaw Htay, the director of the president’s office, had posted on Facebook: ‘It is heard that Rohingya terrorists of the so-called Rohingya Solidarity Organization [ARNO] are crossing the border and getting into the country with the weapons. That is Rohingyas from other countries are coming into the country. Since our Military has got the news in advance, we will eradicate them until the end! I believe we are already doing it.’13 None of it was true. ARNO, a Rohingya armed group that had operated from Bangladesh in the nineties and had been inactive for decades, never made any incursion into Arakan, and no armed Rohingya crossed from Bangladesh. But the Facebook post served to confirm the fears of a terrorist assault expressed by the Buddhist monks I had interviewed in my first visit to Sittwe.
The narrative of an intractable intercommunal conflict and a government trying its best to solve it was convenient not only for the Thein Sein administration, but also for Western countries trying to establish relations with Burma. The United States was at the forefront of initiatives to end the isolation of Burma, as part of its ‘pivot to Asia’, designed to counterbalance China’s growing power in the region. After her visit in December 2011, Hillary Clinton claimed some credit for nurturing ‘flickers of progress into a real opening’ in the country.14
Then,
