Barack Obama became the first US president to visit the country, in a brief trip to Rangoon during which he gave his blessings to the transition. He gave a speech at Rangoon University, a traditional hotbed of student protests since colonial times. He defended the Rohingya, saying that they ‘hold themselves – hold within themselves the same dignity as you do, and I do’. But he also praised ‘the government’s commitment to address the issues of injustice and accountability, and humanitarian access and citizenship’.15
There was no reason to believe that the government had any serious intention to address such issues. On the contrary, its policies had contributed to worsening the situation in Arakan. At the very least, they had failed to prevent a second wave of violence only three weeks before Obama’s visit; but the US president refused to call out the Burmese government on this score.
The strict segregation of the two communities imposed after the riots in June had the stated purpose of preventing further violence, but had the perverse effect of making the rumours of nefarious Muslim plots seem more credible to the Rakhine. In many areas of the state ignorance grew within each community about the other; with intercommunal interactions reduced to a minimum, or even completely nonexistent in some areas, it had become more difficult to see the members of the other community as human individuals. On the contrary, they were feared as part of an undifferentiated mass.
Then, in late October, violence exploded throughout the state once again. On this occasion, it spread more widely than in June, encompassing several townships in central Arakan that had been spared in the past. The violence unfolded as a series of attacks on Muslim villages and quarters in nine of the seventeen townships in the state.16 By all accounts, the violence was mostly carried out by Rakhine mobs against Muslims. Moreover, this time there was a much higher level of coordination and organization than in June.17
The violence unfolded in various ways, depending on the location, but a common pattern would emerge in later investigations: a Rakhine mob would gather around a Muslim village or quarter and, after shouting insults and threats, attack it by throwing Molotov cocktails and jinglees (small arrows made with bicycle spikes and launched with slingshots). Many witnesses, both Muslim and Rakhine, reported that they could not recognize most of the attackers, indicating they had been taken from other areas. As in June, the police stood aside, or participated actively in the attacks against the Muslims. When the riots finished, many Muslim settlements had been razed to the ground again; an indeterminate number of people (mostly Muslims) had been killed, including around seventy in a single incident in Mrauk-U; and approximately 30,000 had been displaced from their houses, most of them Muslims.
I travelled to Arakan for the second time shortly after the October riots. On that occasion, I was able to travel to Kyaukpyu, on Ramree Island, with the Wan Lark Foundation, a local organization delivering donations to Rakhine people displaced by the violence. On the edge of the town lies the Muslim quarter, East Pikesake, which had been turned into a devastated landscape of debris and burnt trees, with the ashes of arson still covering the roads and what was left of the houses.18 The destruction was almost completely limited to the Muslim quarter, with only a few houses beyond its margins destroyed.
Local Rakhine witnesses alleged that the Muslims had initiated the attack, so I asked them why only Muslim houses had been burnt. They replied that the Muslims had torched their own homes before fleeing in boats. That night, in the hostel where we stayed, a young member of the organization proudly showed me a video of Rakhine people of all ages training with sticks to the tune of a patriotic song. ‘We have to protect ourselves’, said an older member, visibly embarrassed that I had been allowed to see those images. Then he changed his tune, somewhat contradicting himself: ‘But this is just for show, it’s not real training.’
In the Muslim camps around Sittwe there were many recently arrived refugees, and they were telling a very different story. According to most accounts, it was they who had been attacked; and while their houses were burning, the fire brigade had stayed outside the perimeter of the Muslim quarter, only trying to stop the fires from spreading to the houses of Buddhists.
It was very difficult to ascertain exactly what had happened from the contradictory accounts. But the notion that the Muslims would torch their own houses – a trope often repeated in Burma – supposedly to get access to the camps and the international aid they would receive there, seemed absurd. It fitted too neatly into the preconceived discourse circulated by many Rakhine of the Rohingya as abject ‘beggars’. People holding these views seemed to think that Muslims in the camps were well provided for, but very few Rakhine ever set foot there. Complete segregation, again, nourished stories about the other group that served to further demonize it.
While it was difficult to find out with certainty what had happened during the violence, it was clear that the authorities were dispensing very different treatment to the displaced from the different communities. Most of the displaced Rakhine in Kyaukpyu had been sheltered in a Buddhist monastery, Than Pyu, while others stayed in the houses of relatives and friends. There were 150 people sheltered in the monastery, and the government had sent two military doctors and two nurses to attend to them.
In contrast, healthcare was woefully inadequate in the vast zone of camps for Muslims near Sittwe. According to IDPs in one of the camps, the government sent just one doctor once a week, and he only provided paracetamol to treat any ailment. In Tat Kal Pyin, a village surrounded by a camp, there was a makeshift clinic staffed by seven volunteers from Rangoon who were overstretched attending hundreds of patients every day. Some international NGOs, including Médecins Sans Frontières, were visiting the camps, but they were facing hostility from the local Rakhine population, and could not go every day. At that stage, aid in the camps was not yet well organized, and Muslim people in the camps were dying of preventable diseases. Malnutrition was also rife.
The violence in October had not only affected the Rohingya. Most of the Muslim victims, particularly in Kyaukpyu and Myebon, but also in other townships, had been Kaman – a Muslim ethnic group that arrived in Burma in the late seventeenth century and that, in contrast to the Rohingya, is officially recognized as one of Burma’s 135 ‘national races’. As citizens, the Kaman had until then been able to participate in Burma’s social and political life, but they were starting to share the fate of the Rohingya. Among the Kaman affected by the violence was Khin Shwe, a forty-six-year-old mathematician who had until then been the only Muslim professor at Sittwe University. She was originally from the township of Pauktaw, where she found herself during the riots in October. When the violence broke out, she tried to escape in a commercial boat, but the army did not allow her to embark, alleging that it was not safe for her. She then decided to take one of the rickety boats that Muslims were using to flee what was virtually a war zone. The boat sank on the way to Sittwe, and thirty-eight of its fifty passengers perished, including her. One of the survivors was her younger brother, Mohammed, who I spoke to in one of the camps in Sittwe, where he told me what had happened to her.
Khin Mar Saw was another Kaman woman displaced by the violence. This small, dignified forty-two-year-old woman hailed from the devastated quarter in Kyaukpyu I had seen a few days before. She had previously worked as a clerk in the local police station, but during the violence in June, feeling unsafe, she decided to take leave, and moved with her two children to Shan State, in the north of the country, where she had some relatives. She returned in October, thinking that the situation in Arakan had calmed down. A few days later her neighbourhood was in flames. When she was fleeing, she was told by a cousin that her son had been shot while he was trying to put out the flames in the local mosque. While I was interviewing her, her husband was on a beach near Sittwe with other displaced people. They had been stranded there, surrounded by the military, for days. Bursting into tears, she asked me how she and her family could get asylum in Europe. ‘We Muslims have no future in this country anymore’, she said.
A few months before, when I had visited Sittwe for the first time, Rakhine ethno-nationalists had been adamant that they did not have any problem with Muslim people, only with ‘Bengali’
