Burma/Myanmar: “Communal Violence” Argument Being Peddled Again
ASIA--PACIFIC, 1 May 2017
Dr. Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service
What is fundamentally wrong with the “communal violence” argument in the paper below, ‘Interpreting Communal Violence in Myanmar,’ by Nick Cheesman.
1) A complete and inexcusable absence of attention to the role of the State
It lacks a fundamental empirical understanding of the instrumental role of the authoritarian state controlled by the military in 2012, despite the facade of civilianization of politics. (We had already lived through this sort of pseudo-civilianization, in a single-party context of BSPP, from 1974 till the collapse of the official Ne Win regime in 1988).
Nothing happens without the approval and knowledge of the military-controlled State in Burma. The Big Brother has never reduced its role and presence. It has only modified its specific functions and strategic aims.
2) Communal collaboration with the State long before political change in 2011
The Rakhine attacks on Rohingya did not get triggered because of the ‘political changes and the uncertainties’; Rakkhine state administration has always been staffed with anti-Rohingya racist Rakhine in all branches of the State. In various waves of attacks, Rakhine local communities, as well as those who occupy strategic spaces within the state’s breaucracies including security forces, collaborated with the central military regime and its agencies – in looting, burning villages, evicting target population from their neighborhoods, engage in direct killings, raping the targeted victims, etc.
3) The timing of the “communal violence”, yes, my CONSPIRACY THEORY
We live in the age of Snowden. Conspiracy theories are NOT in fact conspiratorial enough to capture ugly, state-involved realities.
A) The timing of the communal violence was more than curious.
A.1) Aung San Suu Kyi was the bigger celebrity at the World Economic Forum, eclipsing any head of state, at BKK, staying at Shangri La by the River. Thein Sein cancelled his participation. She was about to embark on what was to be viewed as her ‘victory lap’ – first with her first ever trip to Europe with a stop in ILO in Geneva, then Oslo and Dublin.
The impact: she was confronted for the first time by the western press about the ‘communal violence’ in her first press conference in Europe – at ILO. She flunked the media test and she dodged the issue as much as she could.
This issue is the military’s gift of rope to the Lady with which they want Suu Kyi to hang herself. She is doing just that.
A.2) The Rakhine nationalist leaders including Vet Aye Maung, Shwe Gas movement, etc. were beginning to demand greater administrative and political autonomy and the more equitable revenue sharing with the central gov. under military.
The impact: no Rakhine nationalist leaders have since found themselves in a position to push for these original objectives of the re-emerging Rakhine nationalist aims. For the military strategists have extremely cleverly diverted their energy into hating and waiting to cleanse Rakhine state of the scapegoated Rohingya. As a matter of fact, Rakhine leaders needed the Burmese military’s tacit and open consent, and impunity, to go after one of the two historical enemies – namely Rohingya; the Bama are the other enemy, more powerful and more ruthless.
B) Two immediate triggers for the first wave communal attack.
None has been mentioned in the article, nor is there any sign that the author understands, is aware or appreciates the significance of these manufactured triggers.
B.1) The tale of the rape of the 28-year old Ma Thida Htwe by 3 Muslims and how the military-controlled state media peddled this rape story and how ex-Major Zaw Htay, now Suu Kyi’s Director General out of puppet Preisdent Htin Kyaw’s office, was spreading this manufactured rape story on his Facebook and other social media.
Zarganar interviewed the medical doctor who performed medical examination on the corpse of Thida Htwe. There was NO TRACE or EVIDENCE of rape, and the doctor was forced to sign the pre-written medical report by the military authorities. Zarganar is a dentist by training and had 2-years of initial medical education. He told me in no certain term that the rape story was indeed manufactured.
Thein Sein’s advisor Kyaw Yin Hlaing wrote a piece in The Fletcher’s Forum on World Affairs, a few years before he was picked to serve Thein Sein, stating that the military intelligence whipped up rumors of Muslims raping Buddhist women, every time there was a popular expression of discontent directed against the military.
The popular joke among the Burmese society is that “it’s always Kulars raping village head monk’s niece”. For this is a well-worn narrative/propaganda device that has worked to mobilize violent anti-Muslim sentiment.
B.2) Immediately following the ‘rape’ story was the slaughter of 10 Muslim pilgrims in Taung Goke. Again, according to Zarganar, the Buddhist attackers KNEW exactly which bus was bringing these pilgrims, past Taung Goke. Several hundreds of them were waiting at the crime site as soon as the bus was sighted. The gang of attackers was highly organized and was made up of out-of-towners who came for this specific purpose.
None of the killers who slaughtered the entire group of Muslim pilgrims was brought to justice.
B.3) the ring leader of the accused rapists and murderers of Thida Htwe, named Htet Htet, was found dead in police custody in Taukng Goke. The explanation?: He committed suicide.
Then a month later, his freshly widowed wife was found dead in a village pond. Explanation?: She drowned because she couldn’t swim.
I am not going to spend more time or energy on this.
To recap, this peddling of the half-baked conceptual argument – ‘communal tensions’ boiling over in political transition – is an act, at best, of shallow broad stroke understanding of communal violence, without any real grounding in or correspondence with the empirical, specific realities, At worst, it is an act of intellectual masturbation tinged with downright intellectual dishonesty, absolving the main culprit – the racist, genocidal military-controlled State, of its primary responsibility.
ICG has done this sort of bullshit. I am deeply troubled by men and women of expertly zeal, who spit out rubbish without doing their homework.
No one in their right mind denies that there is a communal or sectarian aspect to what is going on in Rakhine state. But to blow this aspect up out of proportions while excluding or not understanding the instrumental role the Burmese military and the State it has controlled since 2 March 1962 is anti-empirical, immoral and downright stupid.
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Interpreting Communal Violence in Myanmar
Nick Cheesman | Taylor & Francis Online – Journal of Contemporary Asia
Abstract
Collective violence wracked Myanmar from 2012 to 2014. Overwhelmingly, Buddhists attacked Muslims. This article categorises the violence as “communal,” in so far as it consisted of recurrent, sporadic, direct physical hostility realised through repeated public expressions that Muslims constitute an existential threat to Buddhists. It advocates for interpretive modes of inquiry into the violence, as well as into the practices of interpretation enabling it. Eschewing methods aimed at producing a purportedly coherent picture of what happened, interpretive research raises questions about conventional readings of violence, and seemingly self-evident categories for its analysis. But as the articles in this special issue show, interpretivists do not repudiate the search for factual truth. The contributors all make strong truth claims, but claims recognising that factual truths are always contingent. They establish these claims by attending variously to the processes, narratives, histories and typologies that have contributed to the production of communal violence in Myanmar.
From 2012 to 2014, Myanmar suffered violence between different ascriptive communities, most of it involving Buddhists attacking Muslims. It ranged from localised, fleeting, inter-group violence, to large-scale, apparently well-organised, state-supported killing and destruction of property of a targeted group, running over a number of days. The most serious and protracted violence, which left hundreds, perhaps thousands of people dead and over a hundred thousand displaced, was in Rakhine State, on Myanmar’s western seaboard, bordering Bangladesh. There, its objects were people identified as Rohingya, or Bengali Muslims. Large-scale anti-Muslim violence followed in Mandalay Region and Shan State; smaller incidents, some isolated, others sequential, occurred elsewhere.
Collective violence is a feature of uncertain times. In Myanmar too – and before it, Burma – it has tended to occur amid rapid political and economic change. As in other religiously, culturally and linguistically heterogeneous countries where a politically oppressive state loosens a highly coercive grip, people there have found themselves wanting for genuinely democratic institutions to express and manage conflict (Tajima 2014 Tajima, Y. 2014. The Institutional Origins of Communal Violence: Indonesia’s Transition from Authoritarian Rule. New York: Cambridge University Press.[CrossRef], [Google Scholar], 3–4, 21–23). Mundane and seemingly apolitical events instead have been converted into moments of short-lived but intense “intimate mass violence” in which people living in proximity have divided sharply into groups, with one attacking the other (Fujii 2009 Fujii, L. 2009. Killing Neighbours: Webs of Violence in Rwanda. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. [Google Scholar], 3).
The six articles and introduction of this special issue constitute a response to the violence of 2012–2014. This introduction explains the choice of “communal violence” as the rubric for the issue, and makes a case for more deliberately bringing it, as an analytical category, into research on Myanmar. It addresses questions of interpretation and method pertinent to the subsequent articles, which are introduced in the final section.11. This introduction does not offer an overview of alternative approaches that the authors might have taken to communal violence, restricting itself to the interpretive work that they have chosen to undertake. For a useful survey of the divergent approaches to communal violence among scholars of India, which the author classes as primordial, ideological, instrumental, social-constructivist, social-psychological and relational, see Berenchot (2011, Ch. 2).View all notes For the benefit of readers who do not follow Myanmar closely, it begins with a short chronology of the violence.22. Anthropologists have discussed how chronological accounts of collective violence can convey a sense of purpose and design that may have been absent at the time, or absent from how violence is remembered (see Das 2007 Das, V. 2007. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press. [Google Scholar]; Duncan 2013 Duncan, C. 2013. Violence and Vengeance: Religious Conflict and its Aftermath in Eastern Indonesia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.[CrossRef], [Google Scholar], 9–10; Spyer 2002 Spyer, P. 2002. “Fire without Smoke and Other Phantoms of Ambon’s Violence: Media Effects, Agency, and the Work of Imagination.” Indonesia 74: 21–36.[CrossRef], [Google Scholar]). The chronology provided here is not an authoritative statement. It is but one interpretation of events, aimed at presenting some of the elementary factual claims about the violence.View all notes
Neither the chronology nor other contents in this special issue, be they empirical or analytical, address violence after 2014: most notably, the atrocities characterising army-spearheaded operations against Rohingya communities on the frontier of Bangladesh following seemingly co-ordinated attacks by groups of armed men on border guard posts in October 2016 (OHCHR 2017 OHCHR. 2017. Interviews with Rohingyas Fleeing from Myanmar since 9 October 2016. Flash Report. United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. [Google Scholar]). Unlike the events that are the subject of this special issue, those operations are unambiguously a form of state violence. Reports of killing, rape, torture and depopulation orchestrated and committed by military personnel – albeit allegedly with the involvement of irregulars and some Buddhist villagers – are consistent with voluminous accounts of how the armed forces have historically terrorised targeted populations during counter-insurgency campaigns, including those in the country’s north and east extensively documented in the 1990s and 2000s (OBL n.d.).
While not explicitly comparative, this introduction refers to the literature on communal violence in India and Indonesia; the former, because of its historical linkages and geographic proximity to Myanmar, the latter because of political and sociological parallels, and both because of the important theory building on communal violence by scholars of each. Research on communal violence in Myanmar is still in its infancy and scholars of that country have much to learn from counterparts with a decade or decades of experience studying comparable phenomena elsewhere.
A Short Chronology of the Violence
As Myanmar’s army stepped back in 2011 from its role in the day-to-day running of the country, the precipitating incident for communal violence in 2012 was the rape and murder on May 28 of a young Rakhine Buddhist woman. State media used a derogatory epithet kula to signal that three alleged perpetrators were “Indian” or South Asian in descent.33. Kula, pronounced “kala” and sometimes written as kalar, is a generic term to designate people of South Asian origin and their descendants that has a pejorative connotation (see Schissler, Walton, and Phyu Phyu Thi 2017).View all notes Both state and private media subsequently emphasised that the accused were “Bengali Muslims.” Images of the victim’s body were shown in graphic detail in some private media outlets, like the then-popular Snapshot weekly, and circulated via social media.
On June 3, a mob reportedly stopped a bus carrying Muslim pilgrims and in retaliation for the rape and murder killed nine men and a woman. Images of their battered bodies quickly went online, prompting protests by members of the Muslim community. On June 8, communal violence began after Friday Islamic prayers, escalating quickly. According to official data, up to June 13 over 6,550 houses in six Rakhine State townships had been burned down. About two-thirds of these were Muslim properties, along with nine Buddhist temples, seven mosques and a government school. Of the 98 dead, 66 were recorded as “Bengali,” the remainder as “Rakhine” (ICSVRS 2013 ICSVRS. 2013. Rakhaing Pyinè Patibetka-mya Sônzanzitseye Kawmashin Aziyinkanza [Report of the Inquiry Commission on the Sectarian Violence in Rakhine State]. Naypyidaw: Republic of the Union of Myanmar. [Google Scholar], 31). On June 10, the president declared a state of emergency in Rakhine State and assigned the army responsibility to restore order.
Around this time, U Wirathu, a monk who had been released from jail in 2012 where he was serving a prison sentence for inflaming anti-Muslim sentiment in the late 1990s and early 2000s, began preaching for the defence of Buddhism against Islam.44. U Wirathu began making communalist sermons in 1997. He stopped on instructions from a superior but began travelling and preaching again in the early 2000s. In 2003 military intelligence detained him on accusations of provoking communal violence in Kyaukse, Mandalay Division. He denied the allegations but a closed court sitting inside a Mandalay jail sentenced him to 25 years’ imprisonment, of which he served around eight before being released under an amnesty in January 2012 (Kyaw Zeya Tun 2016 Kyaw Zeya Tun. 2016. Tit Kanba-lôn hnin Tit Yauk [One Man against the World]. 3rd ed. Yangon: Yo-hla-thanda. [Google Scholar]).View all notes He soon became the best-known face of a new, dispersed Buddhist movement calling for a boycott of Muslim businesses, going by the numeral “969.”55. Whether 969 preceded or emerged synchronously with the attacks is disputed. For commentary on the establishment, organisation and meaning of 969 and subsequently MaBaTha, see Nyi Nyi Kyaw (2016 Nyi Nyi Kyaw. 2016. “Islamophobia in Buddhist Myanmar: The 969 Movement and Anti-Muslim Violence.” In Islam and the State in Myanmar: Muslim-Buddhist Relations and the Politics of Belonging, edited by M. Crouch, 183–210. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.[CrossRef], [Google Scholar]), Schonthal and Walton (2016 Schonthal, B., and M. Walton. 2016. “The (New) Buddhist Nationalisms? Symmetries and Specificities in Sri Lanka and Myanmar.” Contemporary Buddhism 17 (1): 81–115.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]), Van Klinken and Su Mon Thazin Aung (2017), and Walton and Hayward (2014 Walton, M., and S. Hayward. 2014. Contesting Buddhist Narratives: Democratization, Nationalism, and Communal Violence in Myanmar. Honolulu: East-West Centre Policy Studies. [Google Scholar]).View all notes For a time, stickers and other paraphernalia emblazoned with the numeral appeared everywhere to indicate Buddhist-owned businesses and small enterprises. In mid-2013 a gathering of monks, including U Wirathu but also bringing together others more senior and prominent than him, resolved to establish the group today known as MaBaTha, an abbreviation of aMyo-Batha-Thathana saungshaukye apwè, roughly, the Organisation for Protection of Race and Religion – although its official English title is the Patriotic Association of Myanmar. MaBaTha leaders distanced themselves from the anti-Muslim violence while endorsing and celebrating the larger 969 agenda (Sopaka 2014 Sopaka, Ashin, ed. 2014. MaBaTha-paho e Hnitpatle Nyilagan Myingwin-go Pawnyunbônbawthi Dudiya Nyilagan [Views Aired at the Second Conference (First Anniversary Conference) of MaBaTha (Central)]. Yangon: Mizzima Padibada. [Google Scholar], 10).
Senior government officials and party office holders also either tacitly or explicitly sided with the Buddhist community against alleged Islamic “intruders.” The secretary-general of the army-established Union Solidarity and Development Party, Htay Oo, which at the time held most seats in the national legislature, called for a repeat of the infamous 1978 Nagamin operation, which drove hundreds of thousands of alleged illegals out of the frontier regions with Bangladesh (7 Day News, June 14, 2012).
At a mass meeting late in September, leaders and members of Rakhine communalist parties and their affiliates, including monks, resolved that the government should arm village militias, relocate Muslims away from main roads and towns and maintain apartheid-like segregation of Bengali and Rakhine “national races” (Narinjara 2012 Narinjara. 2012. Rathedaung Rakhaing-detha Ludu Azi-awe-hma Sônbyatchet 18-ku, Kangwetchet 6-ku hnin Azobyagyet 3-ku Cha-hmat [18 Resolutions, 6 Objections and 3 Proposals Adopted at Rathedaung Rakhine Area People’s Assembly]. Narinjara (September 25). Accessed 9 December 2016. http://www.narinjara.com/burmese [full URL in Burmese font]. [Google Scholar]; see Cheesman 2017 Cheesman, N. 2017. “How in Myanmar ‘National Races’ Came to Surpass Citizenship and Exclude Rohingya.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 47 (3): DOI: 10.1080/00472336.2017.1297476.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Google Scholar]). They also opposed the establishment of an office by the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation (OIC) in Rakhine State. Soon after, Buddhist monks led anti-OIC demonstrations in the state and other parts of the country. President Thein Sein quickly announced that the OIC would not be permitted to establish an office. Nevertheless, on October 21, a second round of violence spread across the state. Over three days, Muslim quarters and villages were razed.
Figures on casualties and destruction in the second round of violence diverge, but a United Nations (UN) office reported that officially 89 people had died, with over 5,300 houses and religious buildings destroyed (OCHA 2012 OCHA. 2012. Myanmar: Displacement in Rakhine State. Situation Report No. 11. United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. [Google Scholar]). The Rakhine State government later put the total deaths in 2012 at 192, with more than 8,600 houses destroyed, along with 32 mosques, 22 Buddhist monasteries and a variety of other premises (ICSVRS 2013 ICSVRS. 2013. Rakhaing Pyinè Patibetka-mya Sônzanzitseye Kawmashin Aziyinkanza [Report of the Inquiry Commission on the Sectarian Violence in Rakhine State]. Naypyidaw: Republic of the Union of Myanmar. [Google Scholar]). Its findings also point to the violence in October as being disproportionately directed at Muslim households and property, with just 42 of the documented 2,413 homes destroyed in that month identified as “Rakhine.” Other accounts have put the deaths of Muslims in October at over 500 (PHR 2013b PHR. 2013b. Patterns of Anti-Muslim Violence in Burma: A Call for Accountability and Prevention. Cambridge: Physicians for Human Rights. [Google Scholar], 12). By November, the UN announced that some 115,000 people had been left homeless or displaced in Rakhine State, while other reports put the total number displaced since 2011 at more than 250,000 (PHR 2013b PHR. 2013b. Patterns of Anti-Muslim Violence in Burma: A Call for Accountability and Prevention. Cambridge: Physicians for Human Rights. [Google Scholar]).
In 2013, the violence entered a new phase. Spreading to other parts of the country, it now took on a more generalised anti-Muslim character. Attacks on Muslims and their property began in Meiktila, south of Mandalay, on the night of March 20, after a fight at a gold shop over a transaction in which a Muslim had allegedly assaulted a Buddhist. Police intervened and arrested both parties. A crowd assembled and set fire to the shop, which spread accidentally or deliberately to adjacent shops and a mosque. More attacks followed on houses, shops, religious buildings and government premises. The five fatalities initially reported included a monk. Officially 44 people died, although some reports put the Muslim death toll at more than 100 (PHR 2013a PHR. 2013a. Massacre in Central Burma: Muslim Students Terrorized and Killed in Meiktila. Cambridge: Physicians for Human Rights. [Google Scholar]). Some of the killings allegedly also involved spectacular “extra-lethal violence” (Fujii 2013 Fujii, L. 2013. “The Puzzle of Extra-lethal Violence.” Perspectives on Politics 11 (2): 410–426.[CrossRef], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]). Muslims were said to have been herded together and humiliated by being force-fed pork or made to pray in the manner of Buddhists before being publicly beaten or hacked to death (PHR 2013a PHR. 2013a. Massacre in Central Burma: Muslim Students Terrorized and Killed in Meiktila. Cambridge: Physicians for Human Rights. [Google Scholar]). Arsonists burned down or damaged over a dozen mosques and three madrassas together with more than 1,500 houses, leaving over 12,000 people displaced. Around a quarter fled to monasteries, while the remainder was put up in government schools and sport facilities (OCHA 2013a OCHA. 2013a. Myanmar: Meikhtila Inter-communal Violence. Situation Report No. 4. United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. , 2013b OCHA. 2013b. Myanmar: Meikhtila Inter-communal Violence. Situation Report No. 2. United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. ; PHR 2013a PHR. 2013a. Massacre in Central Burma: Muslim Students Terrorized and Killed in Meiktila. Cambridge: Physicians for Human Rights. [Google Scholar]). As in Rakhine State, police allegedly either participated in the attacks or declined to intervene to stop the killing of Muslims and destruction of their houses. The president again declared a state of emergency and sent in the army.
As the violence subsided in Meiktila, through the remainder of March and into April sporadic but apparently co-ordinated attacks followed in Bago Region, central Myanmar, and in parts of Yangon Region. In May, two days of seemingly well-co-ordinated anti-Muslim attacks engulfed Lashio, in Shan State, near the border of China, and in August the violence reached Sagaing Region, in the country’s northwest. Further bouts followed in Rakhine State in June, July and October 2013 and Mandalay in July 2014 (see McCarthy and Menager 2017 McCarthy, G., and J. Menager. 2017. “Gendered Rumours and the Muslim Scapegoat in Myanmar’s Transition.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 47 (3): DOI: 10.1080/00472336.2017.1304563.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Google Scholar]). In sum, over a two-year period practically all regions of Myanmar had in some way experienced bloodshed and destruction of property due to communal violence.66. The geographic spread of violence does not imply intensity. Some regions of the country were largely untouched. In other places where conditions seemed to precipitate violence, it did not occur. When considered in relation to the universe of possible cases of communal violence, outside of Rakhine State actual outbreaks were relatively few. For some observations on the frequency and spread of violence, and successful efforts to prevent it from occurring in conditions conducive to it, see Walton, Schissler, and Phyu Phyu Thi (2016).View all notes
The “Communal” in the Violence
The articles in this special issue approach the events of 2012–2014 using different terms, variously describing and classing them as anti-Muslim violence (Van Klinken and Su Mon Thazin Aung 2017 Van Klinken, G., and Su Mon Thazin Aung. 2017. “The Contentious Politics of Anti-Muslim Scapegoating in Myanmar.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 47 (3): DOI: 10.1080/00472336.2017.1293133.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Google Scholar]); Buddhist-Muslim violence (Schissler, Walton, and Phyu Phyu Thi 2017 Schissler, M., M. Walton, and Phyu Phyu Thi. 2017. “Reconciling Contradictions: Buddhist-Muslim Violence, Narrative Making, and Memory in Myanmar.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 47 (3): DOI: 10.1080/00472336.2017.1290818.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Google Scholar]); religiously imbued violence (McCarthy and Menager 2017 McCarthy, G., and J. Menager. 2017. “Gendered Rumours and the Muslim Scapegoat in Myanmar’s Transition.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 47 (3): DOI: 10.1080/00472336.2017.1304563.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Google Scholar]); communal conflict (Chit Win and Kean 2017 Chit Win, and T. Kean. 2017. “Communal Conflict in Myanmar: The Legislature’s Response, 2012–2015.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 47 (3): 10.1080/00472336.2017.1291847.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Google Scholar]); and, communal violence (Brooten and Verbruggen 2017 Brooten, L., and Y. Verbruggen. 2017. “Producing the News: Reporting on Myanmar’s Rohingya Crisis.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 47 (3): DOI: 10.1080/00472336.2017.1303078.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Google Scholar]; Cheesman 2017 Cheesman, N. 2017. “How in Myanmar ‘National Races’ Came to Surpass Citizenship and Exclude Rohingya.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 47 (3): DOI: 10.1080/00472336.2017.1297476.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Google Scholar]). Together, we have taken the last of these terms as the rubric for our subject of inquiry, not to police our interpretations, but to give our common undertaking some cohesion.
What is it about the violence in this period specifically that made it “communal”? Informed by the work of Pandey (2006 Pandey, G. 2006. The Construction of Commuanlism in Colonial North India. 2nd ed. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Original edition, 1990.[CrossRef], [Google Scholar]), Chandra (1994 Chandra, B. 1994. Ideology and Politics in Modern India. New Delhi: Har-Anand Publications. [Google Scholar]) and Tambiah (1996 Tambiah, S. 1996. Leveling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press. [Google Scholar]), we take communal violence to entail overtly performed, episodic, recurrent, sporadic, direct physical hostility between self-defining and mutually identifiable ascriptive communities. Communal violence is realised through repeated public expressions that the fundamental common interests of the members of one community are irreconcilable with those of another, giving rise to a shared belief that the other community poses an existential threat.
Although empirically we are concerned with violence between people variously identifying as Buddhists and Muslims, typically having differentiating physical characteristics, analytically we leave open the question as to what ascriptive attributes of identity led to the violence – be they religious, linguistic, racial or otherwise.77. We treat religion as an ascriptive category because in Southeast and South Asia religious membership is typically inherited and retained: involuntarily assigned to a person at birth, constitutive of the person’s comprehensive identity before he or she is conscious of it, and more-or-less unchangeable, although religious categories themselves change over time. The person wanting to change membership voluntarily may encounter social rules that are not easily broken, and find that any attempt to do so has implications for his or her standing that go beyond religious practice to other dimensions of identity. Conversion might also be inhibited or prohibited by laws or regulations, as in Myanmar today (see McCarthy and Menager 2017 McCarthy, G., and J. Menager. 2017. “Gendered Rumours and the Muslim Scapegoat in Myanmar’s Transition.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 47 (3): DOI: 10.1080/00472336.2017.1304563.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Google Scholar]), and in some other countries in the region, notably, India and Sri Lanka (see Schonthal, Moustafa, Nelson, and Shankar 2016 Schonthal, B., T. Moustafa, M. Nelson, and S. Shankar. 2016. “Is the Rule of Law an Antidote for Religious Tension? The Promise and Peril of Judicializing Religious Freedom.” American Behavioral Scientist 60 (8): 966–986.[CrossRef], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]).View all notes That is, we decline to locate the causes of the violence in religious or other attributes that are conventionally assumed to be responsible for it. In declining to pre-suppose that we know what specific characteristics of a community identity might combine to generate violence towards another, we emphasise that the characteristics of the violence that make it communal are not intrinsic (Schissler 2016b Schissler, M. 2016b. “On Islamophobes and Holocaust Deniers: Making Sense of Violence, in Myanmar and Elsewhere.” In Conflict in Myanmar: War, Politics, Religion, edited by N. Cheesman and N. Farrelly, 285–311. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. [Google Scholar], 305). On the contrary, as discussed in the next section, they emerge through “after-the-fact interpretive claims” (Brubaker and Laitin 1998 Brubaker, R., and D. Laitin. 1998. “Ethnic and Nationalist Violence.” Annual Review of Sociology 24: 423–452.[CrossRef], [Web of Science ®], [CSA], [Google Scholar], 444; see also Chatterjee 2016 Chatterjee, M. 2016. “Bandh Politics: Crowds, Spectacular Violence, And Sovereignty In India.” Distinktion: Journal Of Social Theory 17 (3): 294-307.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Google Scholar]).
While agreeing with Das (2008 Das, V. 2008. “Violence, Gender, and Subjectivity.” Annual Review of Anthropology 37: 283–299.[CrossRef], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar], 284) that the concept of violence is extremely unstable, because we aim to obtain an analytical hold on its communal sub-type we do need to differentiate it from a variety of other types of violence with which it might be confused. Among them, the category of communal violence does not include economic or class warfare, fought primarily for reasons other than those concerned with ascribed identity, although we recognise that this distinction could be complicated where class and economic divides run along ascriptive community lines. Nor does it include armed resistance to the state, be it short-lived, informally organised rebellion or sustained, formally organised insurgency, even when declared and undertaken in the name of a community of a type that might also be associated with communal violence.
As such, communal violence excludes the violence accompanying all the civil wars and rebellions fought in Myanmar since political independence from Britain in 1948 up to the present, including those in the name of ethnicity, for which the country is well-known. The parties to those wars contest state sovereignty. Communal violence is distinguished not only by the absence of any such contestation but also by the firm insistence of a party or parties to the violence on the exercise of sovereignty. In the immediacy of the violence, one or more affected communities demand security, calling for police or military intervention, and tacitly, for the state to intervene on one side or the other. Thereafter, they may make normative political demands, such as that the state should strengthen “the wall of sovereignty” in the interests of the aggressor community (Maung Thwe Chun 2015 Maung Thwe Chun. 2015. MaBaTha, 969 hnin Agyôk-agya-ana Chanziyôn (Amyo Batha Thathana Kagwè-zaungshaukye Sazumya) [MaBaTha, 969 and the Wall of Sovereignty: Writings in Defence of the Race and Religion]. Yangon: Mangyaung. [Google Scholar]).
The nomenclature of communal violence does not denote a condition in which evenly matched groups engage in tit-for-tat bloodshed for which each bear equal responsibility. As scholars of India have done, we want to stress to the contrary that the violence with which we are here specifically concerned was overwhelmingly one-sided (see Kaur 2005 Kaur, R. 2005. “Mythology of Communal Violence: An Introduction.” In Religion, Violence and Political Mobilisation in South Asia, edited by R. Kaur, 19–45. New Delhi: Sage. [Google Scholar], 23). In India, Hindus have contrived to commit most of the violence that scholars have classed as communal, against outnumbered and politically marginalised minorities. In Myanmar, between 2012 and 2014, Buddhists contrived to commit most of the violence and on every occasion their targets were identified as Muslims, who officially make up approximately just 4.3% of the national population (Pyithu-ina Uzidana 2016 Pyithu-ina Uzidana [Department of Population]. 2016. Pyidaungzu (Kogwèthi Batha) Thangaungzayin Aziyinganza Adwè (2-ga) [Union Census Report, Volume 2C: Religious Faith]. Naypyidaw: Union of Myanmar. [Google Scholar]).88. The number is approximate because omitted from the head count were over one million people in Rakhine State, the majority of whom the data analysts estimate are Muslim. For a critical overview of the census preparations and methodology see TNI-BCN (2014 TNI-BCN. 2014. Ethnicity without Meaning, Data without Context: The 2014 Census, Identity and Citizenship in Burma/Myanmar. Amsterdam: Transnational Institute & Burma Centrum Nederland, Burma Policy Briefing Series. [Google Scholar]).View all notes A feature of communal violence that Myanmar shares with India, then, is the relative lack of capacity of the targeted community to retaliate, and the high degree of certainty that members of the dominant community will enjoy impunity for their actions.
As an analytical category, communal violence cannot do everything that we might ask of it. Like other categories for the ordering and study of complex human activity, including commonly used terms salient to our discussion like “Buddhist nationalism,” “communal violence” is imperfect. Nevertheless, for our purposes it has heuristic value, since it raises questions about the seemingly self-evident categories that scholars and practitioners use for the study of collective violence. We speak of communal violence precisely because the term invites contestation over our available analytical categories and their usefulness for study of contemporary events, which in turn gives rise to questions about the facts of those events themselves.
One reason that we prefer the term “communal violence” is that it is sufficiently capacious to allow for the study of a range of forms of collective violence, but also sufficiently circumscribed as to omit other forms that are beyond the scope of the articles that follow.99. Problems with classifying a variety of different types of events as “communal violence” are discussed in Brass (2003, 30–31). Sidel (2006 Sidel, J. 2006. Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. [Google Scholar]) similarly encounters the challenge of drawing together four different categories of phenomena from a range of cases under the rubric of “religious violence” in Indonesia. In this special issue our empirical concerns are restricted to events in Myanmar over a relatively short time: events that, although they differed in their specific characteristics, were sociologically and politically linked. Our levels of analysis are fewer, the number of incidents from among which to study less, although no less horrific, than in India and Indonesia. Our primary difficulty has not been the claim that these events somehow ought to be studied together, but rather, how best, for analytical purposes, to categorise them. As the articles indicate, we do not have a consensus on this question, and despite agreement on the approach to the issue, the authors diverge in their preferred usages.View all notes The category incorporates certain types of group solidarity but does not extend to every conceivable case of collective violence through strong partisanship (see De La Roche 2001 De La Roche, R. 2001. “Why is Collective Violence Collective?” Sociological Theory 19 (2): 126–144.[CrossRef], [Web of Science ®], [CSA], [Google Scholar]). It operates in between unidimensional journalistic accounts of primordial hatreds, and the multi-dimensional “generalizing rubric of ethnicity” that subsumes all ascriptive and physical group characteristics prevalent in some strands of scholarly literature (Brubaker 2015 Brubaker, R. 2015. “Religious Dimensions of Political Conflict and Violence.” Sociological Theory 33 (1): 1–19.[CrossRef], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar], 4).
For our purposes, the term “communal violence” encompasses two levels that Van Klinken (2007 Van Klinken, G. 2007. Communal Violence and Democratization in Indonesia: Small Town Wars. London: Routledge. [Google Scholar], 3) has classed in his study of Indonesia as “large-scale communal violence” and “localised communal riots.” It does not include many types of communal conflict, which may be expressed publicly in different types of action and speech that produce animosity but not recurrent physical hostility. It does not preclude the possibility that the violence directed towards the Rohingya in Rakhine State in particular is part of a larger “slow-burning genocide” (Maung Zarni and Cowley 2014 Maung Zarni, and A. Cowley. 2014. “The Slow-burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingya.” Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal 23 (3): 681–752. [Google Scholar]). However, genocide brings with it a different set of questions than those we take up; questions that deviate from ours, because of that normative category’s juridical orientation and concern with meeting deductively applied standards of proof, as well as its application to a wide variety of heterogeneous phenomena (see Straus 2001 Straus, S. 2001. “Contested Meanings and Conflicting Imperatives: A Conceptual Analysis of Genocide.” Journal of Genocide Research 3 (3): 349–375.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Google Scholar]).
Another reason we prefer to speak of communal violence is that the term gives us some historical purchase, which is integral to the interpretive modes of inquiry that we adopt. Communal violence was intertwined with both the theory and practice of British colonial administration (see Doyle 2016 Doyle, M. 2016. Communal Violence in the British Empire: Disturbing the Pax. London: Bloomsbury. [Google Scholar]). While being careful to avoid “lazy historicisation” of the sort that Schissler, Walton and Phyu Phyu Thi (2017 Schissler, M., M. Walton, and Phyu Phyu Thi. 2017. “Reconciling Contradictions: Buddhist-Muslim Violence, Narrative Making, and Memory in Myanmar.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 47 (3): DOI: 10.1080/00472336.2017.1290818.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Google Scholar]) warn against, which equates contemporary violence with earlier episodes in the 1930s and 1940s so as “to present religious antagonism as historically determined and irreconcilable,” we are interested in how boundaries between groups have been drawn, erased and redrawn over time so as to generate conflict by including some people and excluding others (see Cheesman 2017 Cheesman, N. 2017. “How in Myanmar ‘National Races’ Came to Surpass Citizenship and Exclude Rohingya.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 47 (3): DOI: 10.1080/00472336.2017.1297476.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Google Scholar]).
Undoubtedly, religion mattered for the nascent nationalist movement in colonial Burma. Nationalist leaders articulated and justified their project in a Buddhist idiom. The “shoe question” motivated Burmese to agitate publicly against the colonisers, as did “cow protection” for Indians (see Freitag 1996 Freitag, S. 1996. “Contesting in Public: Colonial Legacies and Contemporary Communalism.” In Contesting the Nation: Religion, Community, and the Politics of Democracy in India, edited by D. Ludden, 211–234. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. [Google Scholar]).1010. The “shoe question” arose out of the refusal of Europeans to remove their footwear when upon the grounds of Buddhist temples and pagodas, as customarily required of religious adherents (see Turner 2014 Turner, A. 2014. Saving Buddhism: The Impermanence of Religion in Colonial Burma. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.[CrossRef], [Google Scholar], Ch. 5).View all notes Turner (2014 Turner, A. 2014. Saving Buddhism: The Impermanence of Religion in Colonial Burma. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.[CrossRef], [Google Scholar], 3) has written of how “a Buddhist framework for understanding the colonial condition enabled Burmese Buddhists…to contest colonial categories” and renegotiate their relations with European colonisers. This mode of political action encouraged a sense of communal identity that was distinct from the idea of the nation. Yet while communal identity is distinct from national identity, and the politics of one different from those of the other, the two emerged and grew in proximity. Increasingly Buddhism in colonial Burma served as “an adjunct to the nationalist project” (Turner 2014 Turner, A. 2014. Saving Buddhism: The Impermanence of Religion in Colonial Burma. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.[CrossRef], [Google Scholar], 139). Over time, the national past became a Buddhist past, the Buddhist religion the authentic national religion and its adherents the rightful representatives of this past (Cheesman 2002 Cheesman, N. 2002. “Legitimising the Union of Myanmar through Primary School Textbooks.” MEd (Hons) dissertation, Graduate School of Education, University of Western Australia. [Google Scholar], 159). This reflects the way Hindu nationalism functions as a synonym for Indian nationalism among some segments of the Indian population.
The idea that such a relationship exists between religious community and national community, Chatterjee (1993 Chatterjee, P. 1993. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press. [Google Scholar], 110) points out, is not “the vestige of some premodern religious conception” but is entirely modern and secular, and one that allows “for a central role of the state in the modernisation of society and strongly defends the state’s unity and sovereignty.” So, it is not surprising that the project to conflate the Buddhist nation with the modern state reached its apogee in the period of “Myanmafication” under military dictatorship in the 1990s and 2000s (Houtman 1999 Houtman, G. 1999. Mental Culture in Burmese Crisis Politics: Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy. Tokyo: Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. [Google Scholar]). In this period, all publications and media outlets iterated the need for the unity and integrity of the state and preservation of sovereignty. It is in the wake of this period of discursive “unity through hegemony” (Walton 2015 Walton, M. 2015. “The Disciplining Discourse of Unity in Burmese Politics.” Journal of Burma Studies 19 (1): 1–26.[CrossRef], [Google Scholar], 2), that communal violence in Myanmar can be interpreted as an assertion of modern statehood, in a country where the business of state formation is far from over.
Interpreting Communal Violence
This special issue is concerned with the interpretation of communal violence in two senses: first, in that the interpretation of communal violence is integral to the production of communal violence itself, and second, in that the contributors each offer their own interpretations of the violence in Myanmar through analysis of interpretations in the first sense.
The manner and circumstances under which beliefs about communal violence are formed, justified and institutionalised is contingent on how people interact and communicate; on how some present opinions and interpret events to have others come to share their beliefs about what happened and why. As in other sites of communal violence, “politically driven ‘tactical’ media [and] the circulation and sedimentation of ideologically potent images” (Spyer 2002 Spyer, P. 2002. “Fire without Smoke and Other Phantoms of Ambon’s Violence: Media Effects, Agency, and the Work of Imagination.” Indonesia 74: 21–36.[CrossRef], [Google Scholar], 24) online and in print played an especially significant part in how communal violence was produced and reproduced in Myanmar from 2012 to 2014.
One example of an outlet specifically established to interpret and defend an anti-Muslim communalist position is MaBaTha’s Aungzeyadu. This weekly news-style periodical, which takes its title from the pre-regal name of the last empire-building Burmese king, Alaung-hpaya, reproduces sermons of leading anti-Muslim monks, and features articles advocating legal and policy changes to protect Buddhism. It also publishes racist tracts directed against “the Bengali,” reports of Islamic terrorism and anti-Muslim protests and movements around the world, commentaries welcoming the flight of Rohingya by boat, and editorials condemning international organisations for bias, and labelling as traitors local writers who oppose the communalist cause. Some of its columnists go on to republish their writings in collected volumes (see Maung Thwe Chun 2014 Maung Thwe Chun. 2014. Buddha Bathagantatkyi Yanthu Let-hma Magyazônzeya (Amyo Batha Thathana Kagwèzaungshaukye Sazumya) [May the Forces of Buddhism Not Fall at the Hand of the Enemy: Writings in Defence of the Race and Religion]. Yangon: Panzagya. [Google Scholar], 2015 Maung Thwe Chun. 2015. MaBaTha, 969 hnin Agyôk-agya-ana Chanziyôn (Amyo Batha Thathana Kagwè-zaungshaukye Sazumya) [MaBaTha, 969 and the Wall of Sovereignty: Writings in Defence of the Race and Religion]. Yangon: Mangyaung. [Google Scholar]; Maung Yekkita 2015 Maung Yekkita. 2015. Thamma Ditti Lumyo (Amyo Batha Thathana-yeya Saungba-mya) [A Race Holding the Right View: Articles on Racial and Religious Affairs]. Yangon: Gôndu. [Google Scholar]).
Blatantly communalist propaganda of this sort does not appear to enjoy wide circulation through newsstands and bookstores, although the fact that it can be distributed openly is alarming. Of greater concern is that its influence has been felt through more mainstream, popular outlets, whose writers have moderated the propagandists’ language, but concurred with many of their premises. After the violence in 2012, news articles in popular periodicals like Weekly Eleven, The Voice and 7-Day News consistently featured sympathetic portrayals of displaced Rakhine Buddhist populations. Photographs of Buddhist women, children and the elderly escaping to the refuge of monasteries were juxtaposed with a handful of images of marauding Muslim mobs armed with sticks, confronting riot police. Laudatory accounts of local welfare groups’ efforts to bring aid to Buddhists contrasted with the disapproval of international groups for providing the same kinds of support to Muslims. Only when violence spread to other parts of Myanmar in 2013 did some outlets shift their interpretations, expressing scepticism that the violence was spontaneous, speculating about who was responsible, and what they stood to gain.
Leaders of civil society groups re-emerging after decades of political struggle against dictatorship have also taken on roles as “specialists” in violence interpretation (see Brass 2003 Brass, P. 2003. The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]). Few have challenged the idea of communal identity as the basis for political relations. Some have spoken in support of greater border controls to prevent the perceived influx of alleged illegals, and emphasised that citizens’ rights must be put ahead of human rights (see Weekly Eleven, August 8, 2012). Other new interpretation specialists include commissions of inquiry. One established to probe the violence in Rakhine State identified a purported explosion of the “Bengali” population as a root cause and recommended tighter border controls, citizenship scrutiny, more programmes for cultural assimilation and the teaching of patriotism to those permitted to remain in the country (ICSVRS 2013 ICSVRS. 2013. Rakhaing Pyinè Patibetka-mya Sônzanzitseye Kawmashin Aziyinkanza [Report of the Inquiry Commission on the Sectarian Violence in Rakhine State]. Naypyidaw: Republic of the Union of Myanmar. [Google Scholar]).
Former head of military intelligence, Khin Nyunt, has endorsed the commission’s position on the supposed population explosion and published a book with his reading of recent events and details of the role he played in the Nagamin operation in 1978 (Khin Nyunt 2016 Khin Nyunt, U. 2016. Naingngan-e Anaukpet Tagabauk-ka Pyathana [The Problem of the Nation’s Western Opening]. Yangon: Panmyodaya. [Google Scholar]). That an ex-spymaster is sufficiently confident that his views on these matters are consonant with those of some of the very people whom in earlier years he had imprisoned for political dissidence as to publish them is indicative of the anti-Muslim consensus among non-Muslim interpretation specialists in Myanmar. Despite the disagreements of journalists, civil society activists, former army officers and insurgents on pretty much every other politically salient topic, views on communal violence have tended to converge, as in the aftermath of comparable events in India, towards “a lack of remorse combined with a brash display of communal power” over the targeted population (Kaur 2005 Kaur, R. 2005. “Mythology of Communal Violence: An Introduction.” In Religion, Violence and Political Mobilisation in South Asia, edited by R. Kaur, 19–45. New Delhi: Sage. [Google Scholar], 19).
At the same time, the views of Burmese have diverged sharply from those of international partners working in Myanmar (Wells 2016 Wells, T. 2016. “Making Sense of Reactions to Communal Violence in Myanmar.” In Conflict in Myanmar: War, Politics, Religion, edited by N. Cheesman and N. Farrelly, 245–260. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. [Google Scholar]). So too have they deviated from groups monitoring the country from abroad, not least of all, those making a case for crimes against humanity and genocide (see Green, MacManus, and Venning 2015 Green, P., T. MacManus, and A. Venning. 2015. Countdown to Annihilation: Genocide in Myanmar. London: International State Crime Initiative, Queen Mary University of London. [Google Scholar]; Lindblom, Marsh, Motala, and Munyan 2015 Lindblom, A., E. Marsh, T. Motala, and K. Munyan. 2015. Persecution of the Rohingya Muslims: Is Genocide Occuring in Myanmar’s Rakhine State? New Haven: International Human Rights Clinic, Yale Law School. [Google Scholar]). Interpretation specialists communicating to audiences in Myanmar have aggressively rebutted these allegations, and any allusions made to the Holocaust (see Thayawun 2014 Thayawun. 2014. “Myanma-byi-mha Lumyodôn-thatpyat-hmu-dwe Takè Shi-tha-la” [Is There Really Genocide in Myanmar?]. In Abagannitstan-dwin Buddha-thathana Kwèbyaukthwagyin hnin Agyazaungba-mya [The Disappearance of Buddhism in Afghanistan, and Other Articles], 122–129. Yangon: Kantkawwutyee. [Google Scholar]).1111. The financier George Soros reportedly remarked after a visit to the part of the Rakhine State capital, Sittwe, housing Muslims whose homes had been destroyed that “the parallels to the Nazi genocide are alarming” and that “in 1944, as a Jew in Budapest, I too was a Rohingya” (New York Times, May 28, 2015).View all notes They have blamed the international community for deliberately or ignorantly misinterpreting events (Eleven Media, June 27, 2013). They also have accused the international community of ignoring the legitimate grievances of national races.1212. When in September 2016 former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan led a delegation of a newly established special international advisory commission invited to study the violence in Rakhine State, he stressed that he and his counterparts would not investigate human rights abuses but instead make recommendations that would “reduce tension and support development” (cited in The Irrawaddy, September 8, 2016). Predictably, the commissioners met with protests and opposition from communalist political parties intent on rebuffing any attempts at international intervention.View all notes Some have alleged that Muslim organisations, countries and advocacy groups have been conspiring to discredit Myanmar in international forums and the media (Aung Naing Thein 2013 Aung Naing Thein. 2013. Myanma Nainggnan Anaukbet-winbauk Andayè hnin Thamaing Kwinzet-mya [The Danger of Myanmar’s Western Entrance and Its Historical Linkages]. Yangon: Gôndu. [Google Scholar]). Like aggressor communities elsewhere, they have positioned themselves as victims rather than perpetrators, as defenders of an embattled religion or culture under attack from others representing an implicitly or explicitly inferior tradition (see Walton and Hayward 2014 Walton, M., and S. Hayward. 2014. Contesting Buddhist Narratives: Democratization, Nationalism, and Communal Violence in Myanmar. Honolulu: East-West Centre Policy Studies. [Google Scholar], 27–28). They have justified the violence and declined to ameliorate the suffering of those from the other community “not by defending what they are doing but by denying that they are doing it” (Walzer 1997 Walzer, M. 1997. On Toleration. New Haven: Yale University Press. [Google Scholar], 2).
While interpretation specialists have dominated reportage on the communal violence, the people who actually did the killing and burning have remained obscured. Rarely have specific individuals been praised or condemned for leading an attack on a mosque or murdering its occupants. The people “holding the machetes or throwing the kerosene” have been present throughout but never really visible (Aspinall 2008 Aspinall, E. 2008. “Ethnic and Religious Violence in Indonesia: A Review Essay.” Australian Journal of International Affairs 62 (4): 558–572.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar], 570). This awkward lack of specificity and seeming absence of agency after the fact of violence contributes to its sense of menace, to the “phantom danger” that interpretations of violence instil (Spyer 2002 Spyer, P. 2002. “Fire without Smoke and Other Phantoms of Ambon’s Violence: Media Effects, Agency, and the Work of Imagination.” Indonesia 74: 21–36.[CrossRef], [Google Scholar], 33). The spaces that cannot be occupied by named and known aggressors instead are populated with shadowy, behind-the-scenes types, provocateurs or string-pullers, and unnamed and unidentified policemen who either turn a blind eye or participate in killings.
A lack of specificity about perpetrators and their motives is among the reasons that it remains difficult, despite the many advances in social scientific research design of recent years, to develop persuasive causal theories and explanations about communal violence. Nevertheless, whether researchers adopt modes of inquiry that are oriented towards the causes or constitution of violence, they are forced to address questions about what did or did not happen, about the factual truth or falsity of reported events.
In response to these challenges, the authors in this special issue have chosen to adopt interpretive modes of inquiry. Confronted with the peculiar ambiguity of collecting reliable data on communal violence, and lacking what Brass (1997 Brass, P. 1997. Theft of an Idol: Text and Context in the Representation of Collective Violence. Princeton: Princeton University Press. [Google Scholar], 263) initially sought but failed to recover in his work on India, namely, a “central core of truth,” the authors do not aim for definitive answers or to paint “a coherent picture of the drama as a whole” (Sidel 2006 Sidel, J. 2006. Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. [Google Scholar], 6). Instead they treat their materials, with Brass (1997 Brass, P. 1997. Theft of an Idol: Text and Context in the Representation of Collective Violence. Princeton: Princeton University Press. [Google Scholar], 6), “as ‘texts’ subject to multiple interpretations rather than as sources of valid or confirmed information or data about events.”
This does not imply that the articles abandon the classic social scientific search for factual truth. To deny the possibility of factual truth when working on a topic whose foundations comprise acts of murder and arson would amount to an act of irresponsibility.1313. Social science has a long history of refusal to confront atrocity, complicity with perpetrators, and apologies for crimes committed, and we can ill-afford to contribute to it. Brass (2003, 15) criticises social scientists who in their role as interpretation specialists of communal violence in India participate in a process of blame displacement “that does not isolate effectively those most responsible for the production of violence, but diffuses blame widely” and thereby contribute to the persistence of the phenomena studied. If this were the worst that could be said of some of what passes for scholarship on communal violence in Myanmar, then we might have less cause for dismay and not so great a need for research of the sort published here.View all notes An interpretive mode of inquiry does not repudiate the search for factual truth. Nor is it inherently relativist (see Bevir and Rhodes 2016 Bevir, M., and R. Rhodes. 2016. “Interpretive Political Science: Mapping the Field.” In Routledge Handbook of Interpretive Political Science, edited by M. Bevir and R. Rhodes, 3–27. London: Routledge. [Google Scholar]). On the contrary, it makes strong truth claims of its own. But these claims are qualitatively unlike their positivist counterparts. Interpretive research disentangles factual truth from certainty. It recognises that truth is always contingent and changing; the subject of readings that are historically grounded and institutionally situated. The truth of an event can emerge only in relation to other events and the claims made about them, including untruthful claims. Consequently, rather than dismissing untruthful claims as unreliable, the interpretive researcher embraces them, not to express scepticism about truth, but because even “lies can reveal new insights” into what has happened, and why (Fujii 2010 Fujii, L. 2010. “Shades of Truth and Lies: Interpreting Testimonies of War and Violence.” Journal of Peace Research 47 (2): 231–241.[CrossRef], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar], 234).
Although interpretive research offers its practitioners the resources to produce more sophisticated truth claims about communal violence than other methods, it is also easier said than done. The authors whose writing follows grapple not only with the difficulties of fieldwork but also with the inherent difficulties of “on the one hand, trying to retrieve [something of] what really happened, and on the other hand, analysing how understanding is constructed and conveyed by social actors, in the light of whatever it was that they understood to have happened” (Blaikie 1991 Blaikie, N. 1991. “A Critique of the Use of Triangulation in Social Research.” Quality & Quantity 25 (2): 115–136.[CrossRef], [Web of Science ®], [CSA], [Google Scholar], 128). No single research design offers readymade solutions to these difficulties. The authors address the methodological challenges they encounter by treating the inherent ambiguity of communal violence not as an obstacle but rather as an opportunity for precisely the kind of interpretive work with which we are here concerned; work that necessitates the search for and use of factual truths with which to engage in theoretically informed and analytically rigorous critique and comparison of rival interpretations.
The Articles
While the six articles in this special issue have certain documentary objectives, each also aims to contribute to broader debate through “an attempt to understand the particularities and specificity of violence” (Aspinall 2008 Aspinall, E. 2008. “Ethnic and Religious Violence in Indonesia: A Review Essay.” Australian Journal of International Affairs 62 (4): 558–572.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar], 561). To these ends, all adopt modes of inquiry that are concerned with language and its uses, with socially constructed categories and their meanings, and with how ideas are constituted through human relations (see Wedeen 2004 Wedeen, L. 2004. “Concepts and Commitments in the Study of Democracy.” In Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics, edited by I. Shapiro, R. Smith, and T. Masoud, 274–306. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.[CrossRef], [Google Scholar]). Although they overlap in some of their generalities, in their particulars the articles are complementary, attending variously to processes of resource mobilisation, narratives of existential threat, scapegoating of the Muslim “other,” institutional responses of the legislature and media, and to juridical arrangements that have contributed to conditions enabling the violence.
In the first article, Van Klinken and Su Mon Thazin Aung (2017 Van Klinken, G., and Su Mon Thazin Aung. 2017. “The Contentious Politics of Anti-Muslim Scapegoating in Myanmar.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 47 (3): DOI: 10.1080/00472336.2017.1293133.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Google Scholar]) lay out a research agenda for scholars of communal violence in Myanmar. Like Brass (2003), Berenchot (2011 Berenchot, W. 2011. Riot Politics: Hindu-Muslim Violence and the Indian State. New York: Columbia University Press. [Google Scholar]) and many others studying comparable phenomena in India, they reject theories that attribute violence to spontaneous outpourings of hatred in response to unanticipated events, asking instead about how the violence might have been produced. They work in the sociological tradition of contentious politics pioneered by Tilly and other social movement theorists (see McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001 McAdam, D., S. Tarrow, and C. Tilly. 2001. Dynamics of Contention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.[CrossRef], [Google Scholar]; Tilly 2003 Tilly, C. 2003. The Politics of Collective Violence. New York: Cambridge University Press.[CrossRef], [Google Scholar]) and consistent with earlier research by Van Klinken (2007 Van Klinken, G. 2007. Communal Violence and Democratization in Indonesia: Small Town Wars. London: Routledge. [Google Scholar]) in Indonesia. Asking a process-oriented question about how militant Buddhist nationalism went from being “the concern of a few monks and some hardliner military figures to a movement that appeared to engross the nation,” Van Klinken and Su Mon Thazin Aung find a plausible explanation in skilful brokerage: the pulling together of disparate groups of people through deals made between former army officers and influential monks. The bringing of certain constituencies to the fight through these deals, together with images of spectacular violence spread with vitriolic commentary through social media, persuaded many that Buddhism was endangered and that decisive action had to be taken in its defence.
The language of existential threat to “race and religion” that Van Klinken and Su Mon Thazin Aung identify as contributing to the violence is the central topic of the second article, by Schissler, Walton, and Phyu Phyu Thi (2017 Schissler, M., M. Walton, and Phyu Phyu Thi. 2017. “Reconciling Contradictions: Buddhist-Muslim Violence, Narrative Making, and Memory in Myanmar.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 47 (3): DOI: 10.1080/00472336.2017.1290818.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Google Scholar]). Like Van Klinken and Su Mon Thazin Aung, Schissler and co-authors are keen to understand how the violence was produced. However, their preferred method is narrative analysis. Working with the transcripts of 78 interviews conducted in six cities, the authors encourage us to listen to the voices of people who in everyday life are supportive or at least sympathetic of communal politics. They find that not only do these narratives cast Islam as an existential threat to the Buddhist religion and its community of practitioners, but also that it is represented as a personal threat to individual non-Muslims. Drawing on work by Das (1998 Das, V. 1998. “Specificities: Official Narratives, Rumour, and the Social Production of Hate.” Social Identitites 4 (1): 109–130.[Taylor & Francis Online], [CSA], [Google Scholar]), Schissler, Walton, and Phyu Phyu Thi argue that this doubly threatening form is realised by transforming rudimentary fear of the other into a condition of the fearsome other. When the other is categorically fearsome, violence can legitimately be directed towards those falling into its category.
In contrast to Van Klinken’s emphasis on resources and opportunity structures in his studies of Indonesia, the article by Schissler and colleagues resonates with the work of Indonesianists such as Bubandt (2000 Bubandt, N. 2000. “Conspiracy Theories, Apocalyptic Narratives and the Discursive Construction of ‘the Violence in Maluku’.” Antropologi Indonesia 63: 15–32. [Google Scholar]), and Duncan (2013 Duncan, C. 2013. Violence and Vengeance: Religious Conflict and its Aftermath in Eastern Indonesia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.[CrossRef], [Google Scholar]). These authors have emphasised how discursive constructs and vernacular understandings produce and reproduce religious violence. Essentialising identities plays an important role in such moments. Interpretation specialists use these understandings to produce communal subjectivities and mobilise people who otherwise stand to gain relatively little from participating in violence, making appeals to moral and religious understandings of “right order,” which they represent as opposed to those of the other community (see Brubaker 2015 Brubaker, R. 2015. “Religious Dimensions of Political Conflict and Violence.” Sociological Theory 33 (1): 1–19.[CrossRef], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]). The article by Schissler, Walton, and Phyu Phyu Thi (2017 Schissler, M., M. Walton, and Phyu Phyu Thi. 2017. “Reconciling Contradictions: Buddhist-Muslim Violence, Narrative Making, and Memory in Myanmar.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 47 (3): DOI: 10.1080/00472336.2017.1290818.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Google Scholar]) also recalls research on Indonesia by Sidel (2006 Sidel, J. 2006. Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. [Google Scholar]) in again drawing attention to how collective violence is prone to occur in conditions of uncertainty and anxiety about identities and boundaries, and how such violence aims to redefine identity and rearticulate claims to authority that might appear to be less stable than previously assumed.
Min Zin (2015 Min Zin. 2015. “Anti-Muslim Violence in Burma: Why Now?” Social Research 82 (2): 375–397.[Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]) has argued that Myanmar today is distinguished from earlier times by the degree to which anti-Muslim hate speech is openly propagated, and the ease and manner with which it is distributed, including through the internet – particularly Facebook (see Schissler 2015 Schissler, M. 2015. “American Election Watching in Myanmar: Considering Social Media and Buddhist-Muslim Conflict.” In Communal Violence in Myanmar, edited by N. Cheesman and Htoo Kyaw Win, 215–225. Yangon: Myanmar Knowledge Society. [Google Scholar], 2016a Schissler, M. 2016a. “New Technologies, Established Practices: Developing Narratives of Muslim Threat in Myanmar.” In Islam and the State in Myanmar: Muslim-Buddhist Relations and the Politics of Belonging, edited by M. Crouch, 211–233. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.[CrossRef], [Google Scholar]). McCarthy and Menager (2017 McCarthy, G., and J. Menager. 2017. “Gendered Rumours and the Muslim Scapegoat in Myanmar’s Transition.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 47 (3): DOI: 10.1080/00472336.2017.1304563.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Google Scholar]) adopt an ethnographic mode of inquiry to explore hateful expressions of this sort, and the relationship of online messaging to meaning making about the violence in local communities with no direct involvement in it. Like other ethnographers of collective violence, they attend to what Fujii (2010 Fujii, L. 2010. “Shades of Truth and Lies: Interpreting Testimonies of War and Violence.” Journal of Peace Research 47 (2): 231–241.[CrossRef], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]) calls the “meta-data” of oral and online accounts: rumours, inventions, denials, evasions and silences.
McCarthy and Menager are particularly interested in how the trope of vulnerable Buddhist womanhood is smuggled into stories told by interlocutors in central Myanmar and their Facebook friends to situate and justify the threat posed by the gendered fearsome other, whose archetype is the Muslim male perpetrator of sexual violence. Working backwards from the 2015 passage of legislation aimed at regulating religious conversion, marriage, monogamy and sexual reproduction, they trace this motif to colonial politics. Yet as McCarthy and Menager suggest, their argument goes beyond the peculiarities of Myanmar’s history to universally held concerns about the control and subordination of women in the interests of cultural and religious reproduction – of which Walzer (1997 Walzer, M. 1997. On Toleration. New Haven: Yale University Press. [Google Scholar], 64) has observed, women everywhere “are taken to be the most reliable agents.”
The fourth article, by Chit Win and Kean (2017 Chit Win, and T. Kean. 2017. “Communal Conflict in Myanmar: The Legislature’s Response, 2012–2015.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 47 (3): 10.1080/00472336.2017.1291847.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Google Scholar]), also draws on extensive interview data and documentary research. However, its site is not the dusty village laneway or crowded urban teashop but the gleaming halls and corridors of the national legislature. Research on collective violence in India has long debated the role of parties in mobilising on communal politics and using legislatures to advance communalist goals, particularly at election time (see Brass 2003 Brass, P. 2003. The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar], 219–239; Varshney and Gubler 2012 Varshney, A., and J. Gubler. 2012. “Does the State Promote Communal Violence for Electoral Reasons?” India Review 11 (3): 191–199.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Google Scholar]; Wilkinson 2004 Wilkinson, S. 2004. Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.[CrossRef], [Google Scholar]). Yet the violence in Myanmar occurred early in the country’s political transition away from military dictatorship. The new legislature, which began work the year before the violence started, had no institutional history or prior experience on which to draw in dealing with such events. The members of political parties occupying it were untested, and largely unknown. While some saw that their political fortunes lay in making as much of the violence as they could, for others it was a liability.
As both Chit Win and Kean have discussed elsewhere, the first post-junta legislature, which military appointees and proxies dominated, proved to be more active on a range of issues than analysts had expected (Chit Win 2016 Chit Win. 2016. “The Hluttaw and Conflicts in Myanmar.” In Conflict in Myanmar: War, Politics, Religion, edited by N. Cheesman and N. Farrelly, 199–220. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. [Google Scholar]; Kean 2014 Kean, T. 2014. “Myanmar’s Parliament: From Scorn to Significance.” In Debating Democratisation in Myanmar, edited by N. Cheesman, N. Farrelly, and T. Wilson, 43–74. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. [Google Scholar]). But on the question of communal violence, the response of the Union Solidarity and Development Party, which held the majority of seats, was to suppress debate and prevent minor parties from using the legislature as a forum to espouse provocatively communalist views. Chit Win and Kean suggest that the legislature could have worked harder in response to the violence, but credit it for at least not descending into a forum for the politics of hate.
With the installation of a new legislature dominated by the National League for Democracy in 2016, the dynamics of legislative politics have changed dramatically. It is not yet clear what lessons might have been gleaned from its predecessor’s experience, but with the advent of further bloodshed in the same year, this time allegedly mostly at the hands of military and police personnel, the new government has, like its predecessor, been criticised for inaction, anti-Muslim prejudice and restricting journalists’ access to affected areas.
In another article, Brooten and Verbruggen (2017 Brooten, L., and Y. Verbruggen. 2017. “Producing the News: Reporting on Myanmar’s Rohingya Crisis.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 47 (3): DOI: 10.1080/00472336.2017.1303078.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Google Scholar]) address questions of access and news production in response to the violence of 2012–2014. Both have previously written about domestic and international media interpretations of the violence, examining how it has been represented and how local journalists and outlets have justified the choices they have made in reporting on it (Brooten 2015 Brooten, L. 2015. “Blind Spots in Human Rights Coverage: Framing Violence against the Rohingya in Myanmar/Burma.” Popular Communication 13 (2): 132–144.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Google Scholar]; Brooten, Ashraf, and Akinro 2015 Brooten, L., S. Ashraf, and N. Akinro. 2015. “Traumatized Victims and Mutilated Bodies: Human Rights and the ‘Politics of Immediation’ in the Rohingya Crisis of Burma/Myanmar.” International Communication Gazette 77 (8): 717–734.[CrossRef], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]; Verbruggen 2015 Verbruggen, Y. 2015. “Reporting on the Communal Conflict.” In Communal Violence in Myanmar, edited by N. Cheesman and Htoo Kyaw Win, 109–122. Yangon: Myanmar Knowledge Society. [Google Scholar]). In their article, Brooten and Verbruggen focus on the interaction of foreign and domestic journalists and their local “fixers,” and map the various actors involved in how news on Rakhine State has been made for domestic and international audiences. Through this mapping exercise they show that interactions between fixers and outsiders, far from encouraging new interpretations, have succeeded in confirming assumptions and perpetuating a narrative of victimhood through “a search for misery” rather than understanding the violence and its consequences.
In the final article (Cheesman 2017 Cheesman, N. 2017. “How in Myanmar ‘National Races’ Came to Surpass Citizenship and Exclude Rohingya.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 47 (3): DOI: 10.1080/00472336.2017.1297476.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Google Scholar]), I depart from the other five and rather than concentrate on the violence itself, adopt a conflict-based approach to its context. Isolating a juridical category responsible for the exclusion of people identifying and identified as “Rohingya” from the political community “Myanmar,” the article argues that this same category gives rise to the politics that obligate people to identify as Rohingya, which makes for the conditions enabling violence. That category is “national races,” or in Burmese, taingyintha. Tracking the genealogy of taingyintha from the colonial period to the present day, the article suggests that its contemporary connotations can be traced to a 1964 speech by then-military dictator, General Ne Win, giving rise to new institutional arrangements that have, in stops and starts, led to the potency of the national races idea for politics today.
My article concludes by urging scholars to take more responsibility for how they interpret the politics of inclusion and exclusion in contemporary Myanmar. The appeal echoes a not-too-distant plea from Brubaker and Laitin (1998 Brubaker, R., and D. Laitin. 1998. “Ethnic and Nationalist Violence.” Annual Review of Sociology 24: 423–452.[CrossRef], [Web of Science ®], [CSA], [Google Scholar], 446) that the categories of practice produced and reproduced in the media, in political discourse and in the language of civil society not be adopted uncritically as categories for analysis. Instead scholars have a responsibility to interrogate and disaggregate categories of practice and come up with more analytically useful ones. Whether the call is heeded, the contributors to this special issue have each demonstrated a commitment to re-examine and rethink conventional interpretations of communal violence, not only with a view to improving our understanding of conditions in Myanmar but also so as to contribute to the corpus of comparative research on the topic in South and Southeast Asia from which we ourselves have benefited.
Acknowledgements
The genesis for this special issue was a research colloquium convened by the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University (ANU), in Yangon during March 2014. The colloquium, a follow-up event to the ANU’s 2013 Myanmar/Burma Update conference, brought together scholars in Myanmar with their counterparts from other institutions abroad to explore the cultural, historical and institutional dimensions of communal violence. The colloquium gave rise to a set of essays, which were published as the first locally available, bilingual scholarly book on contemporary communal violence (Cheesman and Htoo Kyaw Win 2015 Cheesman, N., and Htoo Kyaw Win, eds. 2015. Communal Violence in Myanmar. Yangon: Myanmar Knowledge Society. [Google Scholar]). Both the colloquium and the book that followed generated energetic debate among participants and contributors, which led to further research that has culminated in this special issue.
The editor extends his thanks to everyone involved along the way, in particular, Veronica Taylor and Trevor Wilson for their parts in convening the colloquium, and Htoo Kyaw Win for his work on the edited book. He is especially grateful to Kevin Hewison for agreeing to publish the special issue and for working productively and supportively with the contributors. For their comments on this introductory article, I thank especially Edward Aspinall, Christopher Duncan, Lee Ann Fujii, Kevin Hewison, David Kazanjian and Matt Schissler.
Notes:
- This introduction does not offer an overview of alternative approaches that the authors might have taken to communal violence, restricting itself to the interpretive work that they have chosen to undertake. For a useful survey of the divergent approaches to communal violence among scholars of India, which the author classes as primordial, ideological, instrumental, social-constructivist, social-psychological and relational, see Berenchot (2011, Ch. 2).
- Anthropologists have discussed how chronological accounts of collective violence can convey a sense of purpose and design that may have been absent at the time, or absent from how violence is remembered (see Das 2007 Das, V. 2007. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press. [Google Scholar]; Duncan 2013 Duncan, C. 2013. Violence and Vengeance: Religious Conflict and its Aftermath in Eastern Indonesia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.[CrossRef], [Google Scholar], 9–10; Spyer 2002 Spyer, P. 2002. “Fire without Smoke and Other Phantoms of Ambon’s Violence: Media Effects, Agency, and the Work of Imagination.” Indonesia 74: 21–36.[CrossRef], [Google Scholar]). The chronology provided here is not an authoritative statement. It is but one interpretation of events, aimed at presenting some of the elementary factual claims about the violence.
- Kula, pronounced “kala” and sometimes written as kalar, is a generic term to designate people of South Asian origin and their descendants that has a pejorative connotation (see Schissler, Walton, and Phyu Phyu Thi 2017).
- U Wirathu began making communalist sermons in 1997. He stopped on instructions from a superior but began travelling and preaching again in the early 2000s. In 2003 military intelligence detained him on accusations of provoking communal violence in Kyaukse, Mandalay Division. He denied the allegations but a closed court sitting inside a Mandalay jail sentenced him to 25 years’ imprisonment, of which he served around eight before being released under an amnesty in January 2012 (Kyaw Zeya Tun 2016 Kyaw Zeya Tun. 2016. Tit Kanba-lôn hnin Tit Yauk [One Man against the World]. 3rd ed. Yangon: Yo-hla-thanda. [Google Scholar]).
- Whether 969 preceded or emerged synchronously with the attacks is disputed. For commentary on the establishment, organisation and meaning of 969 and subsequently MaBaTha, see Nyi Nyi Kyaw (2016 Nyi Nyi Kyaw. 2016. “Islamophobia in Buddhist Myanmar: The 969 Movement and Anti-Muslim Violence.” In Islam and the State in Myanmar: Muslim-Buddhist Relations and the Politics of Belonging, edited by M. Crouch, 183–210. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.[CrossRef], [Google Scholar]), Schonthal and Walton (2016 Schonthal, B., and M. Walton. 2016. “The (New) Buddhist Nationalisms? Symmetries and Specificities in Sri Lanka and Myanmar.” Contemporary Buddhism 17 (1): 81–115.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]), Van Klinken and Su Mon Thazin Aung (2017), and Walton and Hayward (2014 Walton, M., and S. Hayward. 2014. Contesting Buddhist Narratives: Democratization, Nationalism, and Communal Violence in Myanmar. Honolulu: East-West Centre Policy Studies. [Google Scholar]).
- The geographic spread of violence does not imply intensity. Some regions of the country were largely untouched. In other places where conditions seemed to precipitate violence, it did not occur. When considered in relation to the universe of possible cases of communal violence, outside of Rakhine State actual outbreaks were relatively few. For some observations on the frequency and spread of violence, and successful efforts to prevent it from occurring in conditions conducive to it, see Walton, Schissler, and Phyu Phyu Thi (2016).
- We treat religion as an ascriptive category because in Southeast and South Asia religious membership is typically inherited and retained: involuntarily assigned to a person at birth, constitutive of the person’s comprehensive identity before he or she is conscious of it, and more-or-less unchangeable, although religious categories themselves change over time. The person wanting to change membership voluntarily may encounter social rules that are not easily broken, and find that any attempt to do so has implications for his or her standing that go beyond religious practice to other dimensions of identity. Conversion might also be inhibited or prohibited by laws or regulations, as in Myanmar today (see McCarthy and Menager 2017 McCarthy, G., and J. Menager. 2017. “Gendered Rumours and the Muslim Scapegoat in Myanmar’s Transition.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 47 (3): DOI: 10.1080/00472336.2017.1304563.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Google Scholar]), and in some other countries in the region, notably, India and Sri Lanka (see Schonthal, Moustafa, Nelson, and Shankar 2016 Schonthal, B., T. Moustafa, M. Nelson, and S. Shankar. 2016. “Is the Rule of Law an Antidote for Religious Tension? The Promise and Peril of Judicializing Religious Freedom.” American Behavioral Scientist 60 (8): 966–986.[CrossRef], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]).
- The number is approximate because omitted from the head count were over one million people in Rakhine State, the majority of whom the data analysts estimate are Muslim. For a critical overview of the census preparations and methodology see TNI-BCN (2014 TNI-BCN. 2014. Ethnicity without Meaning, Data without Context: The 2014 Census, Identity and Citizenship in Burma/Myanmar. Amsterdam: Transnational Institute & Burma Centrum Nederland, Burma Policy Briefing Series. [Google Scholar]).
- Problems with classifying a variety of different types of events as “communal violence” are discussed in Brass (2003, 30–31). Sidel (2006 Sidel, J. 2006. Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. [Google Scholar]) similarly encounters the challenge of drawing together four different categories of phenomena from a range of cases under the rubric of “religious violence” in Indonesia. In this special issue our empirical concerns are restricted to events in Myanmar over a relatively short time: events that, although they differed in their specific characteristics, were sociologically and politically linked. Our levels of analysis are fewer, the number of incidents from among which to study less, although no less horrific, than in India and Indonesia. Our primary difficulty has not been the claim that these events somehow ought to be studied together, but rather, how best, for analytical purposes, to categorise them. As the articles indicate, we do not have a consensus on this question, and despite agreement on the approach to the issue, the authors diverge in their preferred usages.
- The “shoe question” arose out of the refusal of Europeans to remove their footwear when upon the grounds of Buddhist temples and pagodas, as customarily required of religious adherents (see Turner 2014 Turner, A. 2014. Saving Buddhism: The Impermanence of Religion in Colonial Burma. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.[CrossRef], [Google Scholar], Ch. 5).
- The financier George Soros reportedly remarked after a visit to the part of the Rakhine State capital, Sittwe, housing Muslims whose homes had been destroyed that “the parallels to the Nazi genocide are alarming” and that “in 1944, as a Jew in Budapest, I too was a Rohingya” (New York Times, May 28, 2015).
- When in September 2016 former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan led a delegation of a newly established special international advisory commission invited to study the violence in Rakhine State, he stressed that he and his counterparts would not investigate human rights abuses but instead make recommendations that would “reduce tension and support development” (cited in The Irrawaddy, September 8, 2016). Predictably, the commissioners met with protests and opposition from communalist political parties intent on rebuffing any attempts at international intervention.
- Social science has a long history of refusal to confront atrocity, complicity with perpetrators, and apologies for crimes committed, and we can ill-afford to contribute to it. Brass (2003, 15) criticises social scientists who in their role as interpretation specialists of communal violence in India participate in a process of blame displacement “that does not isolate effectively those most responsible for the production of violence, but diffuses blame widely” and thereby contribute to the persistence of the phenomena studied. If this were the worst that could be said of some of what passes for scholarship on communal violence in Myanmar, then we might have less cause for dismay and not so great a need for research of the sort published here.
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___________________________________________
Dr. Maung Zarni is a Burmese activist blogger, Associate Fellow at the University of Malaya, a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment, founder and director of the Free Burma Coalition (1995-2004), a visiting fellow (2011-13) at the Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit, London School of Economics, and a nonresident scholar with the Sleuk Rith Institute in Cambodia. His forthcoming book on Burma will be published by Yale University Press. He was educated in the US where he lived and worked for 17 years.
Nick Cheesman – PhD (ANU), MEd (Hons) (UWA), BCom, GDipEd (Melbourne). Fellow, Department of Political & Social Change, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific. nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au
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