{"id":192230,"date":"2021-08-23T12:00:19","date_gmt":"2021-08-23T11:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=192230"},"modified":"2021-08-19T10:36:59","modified_gmt":"2021-08-19T09:36:59","slug":"transnational-activism-vs-white-saviourism-in-myanmar-affairs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/08\/transnational-activism-vs-white-saviourism-in-myanmar-affairs\/","title":{"rendered":"Transnational Activism vs White Saviourism in Myanmar Affairs"},"content":{"rendered":"

As a Burmese who has been angry \u2013 very angry \u2013 for decades over numerous forms and countless instances of oppression and injustices in Myanmar, and emphatically, around the world, I am less concerned about the morally corrupt desire of revenge and vengeance of the oppressed towards their oppressor or the System than the enveloping White Saviourism with its corrupting coloniality.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Woman praying. Burma-Myanmar – FORSEA<\/p><\/div>\n

18 Aug 2021 – <\/em>The images from Kabul will haunt the world for decades while the good people of the West will feel ashamed of their government\u2019s colossal mistakes.\u00a0What is less discussed and covered\u00a0in the 24\/7 news coverage of the unfolding events in Afghanistan is the collapse of the White Saviour Industrial Complex alongside the regime of President Ashraf Ghani, the American puppet.<\/p>\n

Transnational activism is a time-honoured tradition wherein individuals and groups publicly stand with communities of resistance half-way around the world, offer material support (arms, tech, funding, ideas, training, etc.) and otherwise assist those struggling against political repression \u2013 all as acts of solidarity.<\/p>\n

But, when do human acts of solidarity become, counter-productive and unconsciously colonial and cliquey or \u201cmafia\u201d-like? In what ways does well-meaning activism morph into something nefarious, insidiously colonial or Orientalist? How and when do such acts reproduce colonial relations, with catastrophic consequences?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Transnational Activism is not White Saviourism<\/h3>\n

Historically many external transnational actors are well-meaning, feel compassion for Fanon\u2019s \u201cWretched of the Earth\u201d, and speak out or join the fight against the oppressors such as slave-traders and owners of the Old Europe, or colonizers of all stripes and colours to-date.\u00a0Contemporaneously, this is also the case. Typically, this support has been given in the name of abolition, representative government, \u201cthe rights of man\u201d, national liberation, and post-WWII, civil rights, human rights, and democracy.\u00a0The acts of solidarity have occurred across \u201cthe colour lines\u201d, and amongst the celebrated ones are Tom Paine, John Brown, MLK Jr, Che and Castro, Joan Baez, Desmond Tutu, just to name a few.<\/p>\n

The solidarity of the anti-Empire radicals on the fringe of Britain\u2019s Left, going back to Sepoy\u2019s rebellion in colonial India of 1850\u2019s, is a subject of Priyamvada Gophal\u2019s critically acclaimed Insurgent Empire<\/em> by Priyamvada Gopal. The reviewer Miles Taylor (\u201cA superb study of anticolonial resistance\u201d, The Guardian<\/em><\/a>), however, questioned the significance of Gophal\u2019s radical fringe in the \u201cMother Country\u201d, when he pointed out that \u201cBritish radicals have always been more comfortable opposing war than empire.\u201d<\/p>\n

The same can be said about the pro-human rights organizations, liberal or conservative that arise out of Western institutions and agendas, for example Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International. Such organisations can be characterised as \u201cwhite saviour\u201d groups. Politically un-prepared to distinguish between human rights as foreign policy and human rights as a set of fundamental values that have to\u00a0be lived, the world\u2019s leading watchdogs fail when they generally stay within the lobbyist\u2019s comfort zone of what is deemed acceptable in the corridors of power in the global North.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of the Rohingya Genocide in Myanmar.\u00a0These organisations based in London and New York have chosen, for example, not to rock the \u201cno genocide\u201d boat of powerful states that dictate what goes on in the most powerful inter-state bodies such as the Security Council. While scathing and loud in their chorus against the rogue regime in Myanmar, their lack of intellectual and moral conviction has prevented them from calling genocides genocide \u2013 from Rwanda in the 1990s to today\u2019s Myanmar.<\/p>\n

But there is also a qualitatively different type of \u201cwhite actor.\u201d\u00a0These actors see the larger colonial picture and throw in their lot with the oppressed.\u00a0Nell Irvin Painter, professor emerita of history at Princeton University and the author of The History of White People<\/em>, writes in the New York Times op-ed \u201cWhat is whiteness<\/a>\u201d, \u201cin the 19th century, abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown helped end slavery. In the early 20th century, Mary White Ovington helped found the N.A.A.C.P.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The Colonizer and the Colonized, a nonfiction book by Albert Memmi, published in French in 1957. The work explores and describes the psychological effects of colonialism on colonized and colonizers alike.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Writing from within her African context, in her 2003 critical introduction to Albert Memmi\u2019s \u201cThe Colonizer and the Colonized\u201d, a foundational text in Post-Colonial Studies, South African activist and writer Nadine Gordimer stressed that \u201c(m)en and women from leftist colonial (white) backgrounds in South Africa were imprisoned, as Nelson Mandela and thousands of his fellow black South Africans were. Or they were tortured, as Steve Biko was, for taking part in liberation movements.\u201d In responding to the work of Memmi, she rejected the \u201csummary dismissal of the (white) Left in liberation from colonial regimes.\u201d\u00a0Fair enough.<\/p>\n

In the above-mentioned New York Times essay \u201cWhat is whiteness?\u201d, Princeton scholar Painter argues that\u00a0\u201c(c)onstructions of whiteness have changed over time, shifting to accommodate the demands of social change. Before the mid-19th century, the existence of more than one white race, (made up of \u201csuperior\u201d and \u201cinferior\u201d white races), was commonly accepted, in popular culture and scholarship\u201d.<\/p>\n

For the purpose of this essay, I will use Judith Butler\u2019s contextualized contemporary definition of \u201cwhiteness\u201d offered in her New York Times conversation with George Yancy, a professor of philosophy at Duquesne University and author and editor of \u201cBlack Bodies, White Gazes\u201d and \u201cLook, a White!\u201d\u00a0Throughout this article I refer to white not as a skin colour but as a form of social power that \u201creproduces dominance in explicit and implicit ways.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

To Yancy\u2019s probing question, \u201c<\/em>Do you also see whiteness as \u201ca stylized repetition of acts\u201d that solidifies and privileges white bodies, or even leads to na\u00efve, \u201cpost-racial\u201d universal formulations like \u201call lives matter\u201d?\u201d, Butler replied, \u201cYes, we can certainly talk about \u201cdoing whiteness\u201d as a way of putting racial categories into action, since whiteness is part of what we call \u201crace,\u201d and is often implicitly or explicitly part of a race project that seeks to achieve and maintain dominance for white people. One way this happens is by establishing whiteness as the norm for the human, \u2026\u201d\u00a0Butler continues, \u201cWhiteness is less a property of skin than a social power reproducing its dominance in both explicit and implicit ways.<\/p>\n

Butler-Yancy conversation was based on the tortured race relations in American society in particular. My own FORSEA colleague Michael W. Charney<\/a> of SOAS, offered a more specific take on the enduring phenomenon of those who do \u201cwhite saviourism\u201d, based on his honest reflections and observations on race-relations in the international context, particularly area studies in the academy in USA and Myanmar-focused human rights campaigns.<\/p>\n

Charney writes, \u201c(m)y view of a white saviour is someone who seeks to compensate for their own inadequacies by trying to work out a sense of moral or political sense of superiority in a non-white society by presenting themselves as a leader of some kind. This is the opposite of trying to empower non-white people and their voices. It is instead just another way to disempower and silence them and place the attention firmly on the white saviour. The main benefit intended is always for the latter, to self-empower and gain a status they could not achieve in their home society, to purge their guilt and compensate for their sense of inferiority, and to exploit the resources, material and intellectual, of non-white society. They want a colonial relationship in a postcolonial world and hide the whip in their back pocket.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Road to New Orientalism runs through \u201cHuman Rights mafia.\u201d<\/h2>\n
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Jack Healey,<\/b> an American human rights activist, alled \u201cMr. Human Rights\u201d by U.S. News and World Report<\/a><\/i>, Healey\u2019s focus has been on inspiring the youth to support non-violent activism that would push back oppressive governments and societies. Wikipedia Commons<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

In our private conversations, Jack Healey<\/a>, the renowned human rights campaigner who headed Amnesty International\/USA for 12 years in the 1980\u2019s, typically characterises, tongue-in-cheek, as \u201chuman rights mafia\u201d the lobby-focused human rights watch dogs such as Human Rights Watch and his old outfit AI\/USA.<\/p>\n

Against this characterization of influential US-UK-based human rights organizations, the vexing questions that have, however, pricked my mind for so long is this:\u00a0When do human acts of solidarity become, counter-productive and unconsciously colonial and cliquey or \u201cmafia\u201d-like?\u00a0In what ways does well-meaning activism morph into something nefarious, insidiously colonial or Orientalist? How and when do such acts reproduce colonial relations, with catastrophic consequences?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The critical insight which Judith Butler<\/a>, the renowned scholar in critical theory and comparative literature at UC Berkeley, offered, in reference to the production and reproduction of racism\u00a0in USA through daily social and institutional relations is applicable to (white) racism \u2013 interchangeably Orientalism \u2013\u00a0in the international human rights world.\u00a0Butler writes<\/a>, \u201cracism has complex origins, and it is important that we learn the history of racism to know what has led us to this terrible place. But racism is also reproduced in the present, in the prison system, new forms of population control, increasing economic inequality that affects people of color disproportionately.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here Gordimer is spot on when she took aim at the continuing colonial nature of the world\u2019s economy.\u00a0She writes, \u201c(w)hat the original liens of colonialism established in trade are worth in post-colonial times, is plenty. There are former colonies whose natural resources, from cocoa to gold, are still bought low and sold high.\u00a0One of globalisation\u2019s immense tasks is to serve as the means of tackling this final form of colonialism. And it cannot be done for <\/em>the developing countries that once were colonies (supposing there would be the will to do so \u2026), but must be done with<\/em> them, in full recognition of their essential place in policy decisions\u201d (p.43, italics original<\/em>).<\/p>\n

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Migration Studies and Colonialism, Lucy Mayblin, Joe Turner, Polity Press<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u00a0<\/em>\u201cThe Global Mobility Divide\u201d and \u201cTemporal White Spaces\u201d: Foundational Pillars of the White Saviour Industrial Complex<\/h3>\n

The well-known aphorism, \u2018we are here because you were there\u2019, was coined by the late Director of the Institute on Race Relations of UK, A. Sivanandan<\/a>. He, explained only 50% of the the post-colonial causal relations between post-Raj Britain\u2019s migrants of colour from former British \u201cpossessions and the British state, the \u201cMother Country\u201d that colonized foreign populations, grabbed their land, exploited anything of commercial and strategic values and disrupted lives and communities. This applies equally to present-day economically and geopolitically driven foreign policies of Europe and N. America. Resource extraction such as oil and gas, for instance, has wreaked havoc around the world, facilitating the displacement and triggering the outflows of millions of humans seeking refuge in the rich white world of the Global North or the West.<\/p>\n

Drillers and extractors, \u201care still there\u201d in resource-rich Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, but they do not want our brown and black bodies to seek refuge on the shores of Europe. The threat of Communism is no more. But typical foreign policy of western governments dictates that refugees, migrants and asylum-seekers must be contained. A well-documented case is Sudan\u2019s ex-genocidal militia \u2013 known as Janjaweed. The group was \u2013 reincarnated by Sudan in 2014 as \u201cRapid Support Forces\u201d, with EU political endorsement and millions of Euros as part of migration management and EU border control programmes. (See \u201c\u2018Border Control from Hell\u2032 report targets EU funding in Sudan\u201d,\u00a0 DW 06.04.2017<\/a>. ) In the post-Brexit United Kingdom, the British Home Secretary Priti Patel, a child of immigrants from Africa herself, is pushing to even criminalize humanitarian assistance<\/a> to any asylum-seekers while unlawfully \u201ctrying to evict thousands of migrants during the pandemic despite the risks to the communities they live in from doing so.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s another part to Sivanandan\u2019s aphorism, which he did not mention. The white western bodies roaming around the coloured world of the wretched is not a historical accident.\u00a0For example, well-meaning, liberal or \u201ccompassionate conservative\u201d, globe-trotting, Myanmar or Asia-bound white saviours raise their pro-human rights voices, as free-lancers, philanthropists, government \u201cdonors\u201d, volunteers, interns, advisers, \u201ccapacity-builders,\u201d INGO researchers, and so on.\u00a0Hundreds take up residence in places like Yangon, Kuala Lumpur or Bangkok. Some \u201cgo native\u201d and throw in their lot with the wretched. Meanwhile others parachute in as gurus of peace-building and development, rule of law consultants, or \u201cstar academics\u201d, pursuing their divergent \u201cmissions\u201d, \u201cassignments\u201d or \u201cfield work\u201d. They render the lives lived by the wretched into temporal \u201cwhite spaces\u201d.<\/p>\n

Travel is one-directional from the centres of global power to Myanmar to extract and produce knowledge about the brown world.\u00a0Burmese do not occupy the same the old or new white centres of wealth and power in the West. They do not arrive as \u201c<\/em>Britain-watchers\u201d, or expert commentators on USA or European affairs. This is a prominent feature of the nominally post-colonial world, which remains foundationally colonial in essence, structure and practices. None more so than in the practice of knowledge production. In his provocative essays \u201cHow Racist is your Engagement with Burma Studies? | FORSEA \u201c the American scholar of Southeast Asia Michael W. Charney of SOAS took aim at \u201cthe white academy\u201d of the West and the colonial root of the region\u2019s centres of knowledge production, that is, the universities. State-Think and the Problem with University Education in Post-Colonial Societies.<\/p>\n

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In his essay \u201cThe White Saviour Industrial Complex\u201d (Known and Strange Things, 2016, p.345), Teju Cole, the American writer of Nigerian origin, wrote, matter-of-factly, \u201ca nobody from America or Europe can go to Africa and become a godlike saviour, or at the very least have his or her emotional needs satisfied. Many have done it under the banner of \u2018making a difference\u2019.\u00a0To state this obvious and well-attested truth does not make me a racist.\u201d\u00a0Ditto that in Myanmar affairs.<\/p>\n

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Known and Strange Things (faber & faber). The first collection of essays from Teju Cole, writer, photographer and professional historian of early Netherlandish art<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

In the jargon of Migration Studies, \u201cthe Global Mobility Divide,\u201d wherein the world is made \u201ca small village\u201d which exclusively opens the gates for those (Whites) with their \u201chighly ranked<\/a>\u201d passports is one foundational factor that has long facilitated the emergence of the latter-day version of the old Europe\u2019s Civilizing Mission \u2013 or Cole\u2019s \u201cWhite Saviourism\u201d.<\/p>\n

White people are aware of consular representation or access, if they have a brush with local law in countries of the Global South, or possibility of a medical airlift out of Trumpian \u201cshithole countries\u201d back to Euro-American homes if their tummy aches worsen, or they can get on their embassy-organized chartered flights when the brown people\u2019s conflicts show signs of engulfing their white lives be it Kabul, Afghanistan this week or Saigon, Vietnam of 1977.<\/p>\n

Irrespective of the white saviours\u2019 noblesse oblige<\/em> (or the privileged responsibility of noble obligation), which White saviours may personally experience, the coloniality of this mobility divide is a priori<\/em> at work in the world of international human rights. Just as Cole\u2019s scathing tweets about the white saviourism does not make Cole a black racist\u201d \u2013 an oxymoron anyway! \u2013, belabouring this obvious point does not make me a racist or human rights reactionary.\u00a0Colonial relations are to be exposed and resisted, whether they developed in Orwell\u2019s Burma of 1920\u2019s as he did brilliantly in his first novel \u201cBurmese Days\u201d, or in today\u2019s human rights INGO-ism and Myanmar policy affairs.<\/p>\n

Albert Memmi was a Sorbonne-trained philosopher and activist. In his 1957 publication of The Colonizer and the Colonized<\/em> with Satre\u2019s introduction, he stirred up the debates about dependency between the colonizer and the colonized based on his own personal experience as a Tunisian Jew who sided with Muslims against the French colonizers. the Afterwards, in his 1967 preface, he conceded that his book contains \u201cscandalous content\u201d.. I happily invite new waves of scathing slanders and attacks against me for causing yet another \u201ccontroversy\u201d in the world of Myanmar affairs by labelling well-meaning whites as the usurpers of Burmese voices, the gate-keepers, content-managers and censors, and controllers of policy recommendations and advocacy soundbites.<\/p>\n

Being Good and Doing Good in a Bad Colonial World: Memmi\u2019s Usurpers and Myanmar Policy Advocacy<\/h3>\n

In her rather thought-provoking piece in the Boston Review, The Philosophy of Anger<\/a><\/em> (April 2020), Agnes Callard, the Berkeley-trained scholar of ethics and ancient philosophy pointedly argued that \u201cWe can\u2019t be good in a bad world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed you can\u2019t be good colonials in Gordimer\u2019s \u201cpost-colonial\u201d colonial world, even with your\u00a0new Message of Salvation, that is, human rights as an elastic and compromised element of western Foreign Policy vis-\u00e0-vis a set of lived, inalienable values.<\/p>\n

Remember \u201cCivilizing Mission\u201d?<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s for a moment suspend this big-picture Global Mobility Divide. This global predicament, no radicals or revolutions can rectify overnight \u2013 if at all.\u00a0And let\u2019s make a hypothetical<\/em> moral case for today\u2019s transnational human rights activism.<\/p>\n

Surely, the educationally deprived, half-starving, and now Covid-stricken Burmese, dissidents and average Joe alike, must welcome any kind of support and assistance, (intellectual, strategic, moral, psychological, institutional and so on), that any well-endowed and well-placed organizations are prepared to offer as we\/they (the Burmese) struggle or simply long for the rights of humans, freedoms from our homegrown military tyranny, an advancement of our career or simply a decent life in this big bad world.<\/p>\n

Correct, up to a point.<\/p>\n

The \u201cCorrect\u201d ends where the acts of \u201cprivileged white helpers\u201d render Myanmar\u2019s wretched agency-less. It ends when these helpers inject their white agendas or white contents in the form of scripts and talking points for the locals, desperately seeking a microphone or a platform. Unequivocally, the \u201cCorrect\u201d or my own<\/em> \u201ccorrect!\u201d ends when the white helpers or supporters \u2013 in unequal personal and organizational power relations \u2013 begin acting like Usurpers.\u00a0There is no such thing as a good colonial, despite his or her desire for the salvation of oppressed.<\/p>\n

In The Colonizer and the Colonized<\/em>, Albert Memmi\u00a0identified three factors \u2013 profit, privilege and usurpation \u2013 that typify the colonizer.\u00a0In the 21st<\/sup> century of international law, new colonies, be they textbook White Settler countries like those of north\u00a0America and Australia, or classical Raj of the bygone era, are no longer conceivable.<\/p>\n

But what I call \u201cglobal White Spaces\u201d \u2013 with the capitals W and capital S \u2013 retain the residual symptoms of the Old World. In the Old World genocidaires, plunderers, landgrabbers and so on have often been framed in the media or school curricula of the formerly colonial West \u2013as \u201cexplorers\u201d \u201cadventurers\u201d or \u201cdiscoverers\u201d \u2013 of whom Columbus of Genoa (present-day Italy) is only the most infamous.<\/p>\n

Thanks to \u201cthe Global Mobility Divide\u201d (See Migration Studies and Colonialism. 2021), \u201cthe human rights mafia\u201d \u2013 again to borrow a rather apt label coined by my old friend Jack Healey of Washington DC with half-century of deep involvement in global human rights and peace activism, the web of personal ties, funds, access to power, propaganda machinations, and certain buzzy political lingo, are intricately linked.\u00a0The White Spaces such as human rights, peace and democracy fora are abuzz with initiatives labelled \u201ccapacity building\u201d, \u201cempowerment\u201d \u201cbrainstorming\u201d or \u201cpartnership building,\u201d. These spaces assume the forms of academic panels, press conferences, NGO meetings, congressional or parliamentary hearings, fieldwork, policy retreats and advocacy meetings.\u00a0Many are ultimately geared towards influencing the proceedings and policy debates within the inter-state and state bodies (for instance, UN and European Union or influential national governments or Congress\/Parliament\u00a0such as the United States and United Kingdom).<\/p>\n

What acutely concerns me is not so much the\u00a0profits and privilege of the whites, (the first 2 of the 3 factors Memmi identified as features of the colonial relations), as the vicious and recurring pattern of numerous acts of usurpation.<\/p>\n

These acts of usurpation as part of the White Saviour Industrial Complex in Myanmar emerged from the presence of INGOs, freelancers and professionals on the Thai-Burmese borders a quarter century ago when thousands of Burmese activists fled the cities to the rebel-held border regions following the bloody crack-down of their nationwide uprisings by General Ne Win\u2019s military dictatorship. Two decades on, this complex in Myanmar affairs shifted itself inside Myanmar, to accompany the military\u2019s sham processes of \u201cdemocratisation\u201d and \u201cdevelopment\u201d over the past decade.\u00a0My American colleague, SOAS Professor Michael W. Charney, characterises this usurping as \u201ccarpet-begging\u201d.<\/p>\n

The white domination of Burmese spaces of resistance has multiplied, like an invasive plant species. Burmese modes of resistance and affecting change in their own troubled country are suffocated by international Myanmar policy discourses centring around humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, human rights and democracy, peace building and development.<\/p>\n

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Have a glance at the above tweets by Teju Cole, which have been critically acclaimed by some and labelled as \u201cracist\u201d by others. Tweet One: \u201cFrom (Jefferey) Sachs to (Nicholas) Kristof to Invisible Children to TED, the fastest growth industry in the US is the White Saviour Industrial Complex.\u201d Well, this complex has no borders, and USA may be the home of the biggest juggernaut; but, Europe with its focus on exporting \u201cpeace\u201d, \u201cdevelopment\u201d and \u201chumanitarianism\u201d is no less important.<\/p>\n

His other insightful tweets read: \u201cthis world exists simply to satisfy the needs \u2013 including, importantly, the sentimental needs \u2013 of white people and Oprah (Winfrey). White Saviour Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.\u201d<\/p>\n

Against the backdrop of the celebrated \u201cMyanmar Spring\u201d, I had written a chapter-length essay \u201c\u200bOrientalisation and Manufacturing of \u2018Civil Society\u2019 in Contemporary Burma\u200b\u200b<\/a>\u201d (2012) on the subject of how powerful and well-endowed Western actors have manufactured their<\/em> civil society (that is, a network of local elites friendly to western corporate interests and pliable to the honey-tongued dictates of \u201cwestern donors\u201d). Emphatically, the institutionalized White Saviourism goes beyond the Colean sentimental needs of individual whites.<\/p>\n

Intruding Brown Bodies in White Spaces<\/h3>\n
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Zarni speaking on the failures of the international community in Myanmar genocide, theBi-Annual Conference of the Parliament of the World\u2019s Religions, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, Oct 2015<\/p><\/div>\n

Throughout my three decades of doing transnational activism around Myanmar, I have seen up-close and personal how the white saviours of Cole\u2019s Complex engage in numerous acts of usurpation.<\/p>\n

To give an example \u2013 among dozens of tales I can recount \u2013 I have seen and known first-hand, a year after I started my American schooling at the University of California at Davis 32 years ago, I attended an NGO- event organized by the Rain Forest Action Network (RAN) and some other human rights NGOs. At the event, the Burmese were relegated to sit in the audience while the White campaigners \u2013 a white American female lawyer and the director of RAN, a white American male campaigner, explaining what life and the Environment were like for the Burmese. We were apparently the subject of their charitable intellectual expositions.\u00a0Never mind that that the Bay Area is one of the world\u2019s largest pockets of Burmese emigres and immigrants, including older generation exiled dissidents who knew a thing or two about the repressive military\u2019s political economy and policies and practices.<\/p>\n

Apparently, like fish in the water unaware of their medium, neither the two American speakers nor the event organizers were conscious of this latter-day colonial absurdity wherein the Burmese were rendered \u201csubjects\u201d of the discussion, but had no space other than to ask questions politely, when requested, during Q and A.<\/p>\n

Finding the Kafkaesque situation unbearable, I walked up to the white-only panel from my seat, inserted myself at one corner and, standing, offered my more textured take on our country\u2019s sordid affairs, in my \u201cEnglish (as a Second Language) with Ngapi <\/em>or fish paste accent\u201d, as we mock ourselves. Alas, an intruding brown body in reserved white space!\u00a0I sensed that I had made the two American speakers and the event organizers feel uncomfortable.\u00a0That was indeed my first act of rubbing white usurpers the wrong way, in retrospect.\u00a0But is this still relevant 32 years later? Despite the brown tokenism on panels and in the media, yes I think so.<\/p>\n

The intrusions, disruptions and irreverential behaviour of mine in Global White Spaces have since become a subject of disdain among the international world of Myanmar affairs. <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

I confess that I am a repeat offender in these circles of intellectual influence, social respectability or state power.\u00a0In other words, I rub many a White Saviours the wrong way. <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

In the later 1990\u2019s, I vividly remember telling the Clinton Administration officials that the Burmese lives, murdered, maimed or tortured, were not just stats, at a meeting in the West Wing. In attendance were the Director of Asia on the National Security Council whose name has since faded from my memory and the then Presidential speech writer Tom Malinowski (now US Congressman after having worked as Washington Director of Human Rights Watch and US Assistant Secretary of State on Democracy, Labour and Human Rights Affairs at the US State Department).<\/p>\n

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Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak, delivering her keynote address at the Berlin Conference on Rohingya Genocide, The Jewish Museum of Berlin, Germany, February 2018.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Habitually, I began exposing what Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak calls the \u201csanctioned ignorance\u201d of the colonial white world, which in the words of Spivak, is \u201cinseparable from colonial domination.\u201d\u00a0Sanctioned Ignorance \u2013 GLOBAL SOCIAL THEORY<\/a>\u00a0I have indeed sinned by \u201cspoiling\u201d the white saviours\u2019 \u201cbig sentimental experiences\u201d and disrupting their moments of intellectual ignorance and moral self-gratification, the very subjects of Teju Cole\u2019s scathing tweets: I call them out on their discernible internalized \u201cOrientalism\u201d, or worse.<\/p>\n

My sole guiding motto has been \u201cThou shall not validate the white privilege nor succumb to the conditioned brown, yellow or black sensitivities towards what has come to be diagnosed as \u201cWhite Fragility.\u201d<\/p>\n

Myanmar\u2019s \u201cGreat Opening\u201d of 2010 was lauded by the then President Barack Obama \u201can extraordinary transition\u201d. He suggested it was something which Iran and Democratic People\u2019s Republic of Korea (N. Korea) should emulate. (Incidentally, Obama has not even fired a single tweet of concern since Feb 1st<\/sup>, when the country moved from genocide to the coup to \u201canarchy\u201d as the Washington Post editorial put it.) Meanwhile, the Myanmar White Saviour Industrial Complex has forged an ever-expanding circle of Memmi\u2019s inter-generational Usurpers. Tony Blair and his team are amongst the crowd, having migrated from other world\u2019s \u201chot spots\u201d and other \u201chardship postings\u201d of the Middle East and Africa. I have heard tales of the new Burmese Days as veterans of the old Free Burma campaigns mingle with the new Myanmar Spring crowds. The grey eminences of Burma Studies who have for half-century or so served as gatekeepers, are grooming new crops of white scholars and vetted brown bodies. Those brown bodies are Myanmar scholars, who are sufficiently deferential towards the established Epistemological and Academic Order of the field and grateful towards their individual white patron-academics.<\/p>\n

The State of Myanmar Human Rights Advocacy: Progress?<\/h3>\n

Infused with the new generation\u2019s ideas \u2013 gender equality, optics, agency, etc. \u2013 their methods of running the White Saviour Industrial Complex have changed with the times and are infused with more progressive norms. Or are they?<\/p>\n

The Old Myanmar hands in the complex now pay close attention to identity-politics and are sensitive to the need for managing optics.\u00a0After all, in the social media age, images and words travel instantaneously.\u00a0No reputable leading human rights groups or lobby network desires bad PR.<\/p>\n

During the 1980\u2019s and 1990\u2019s, Burmese refugees, particularly females, were brought into the corridors of power \u2013 US Congress, British\u00ad\u00ad parliament, etc. \u2013 where, clad in their colourful native attire, they routinely used tear-jerking narratives designed to reinforce that the West should \u201cdo the right thing\u201d.\u00a0These Burmese brown bodies may be informed about the gross violations of human rights or international criminal law (for instance, war crimes or convention against torture) by British and American governments, but they (the Burmese) stick to the script designed to reinforce and appeal to the collective sense of moral power in white spaces..<\/p>\n

Alas, the victims of egregious violations of universal human rights help momentarily to fulfil, wittingly or not, the collective and individual \u201csentimental needs\u201d of the white saviours as the victims and their representatives appeal for the Salvation of brown bodies half-way around the world. Then come white scholars, experts and NGO personnel who would offer\u00a0policy recommendations and country analyses based on field trips and human rights research.<\/p>\n

The Browning of White Messages of Salvation<\/h3>\n

Those tear-jerking days are gone, along with the bad optics.\u00a0Now we are typically treated to the sight of brown Myanmar bodies \u2013 gender-balanced, often \u2013 billed as \u201cauthentic\u201d voices of the oppressed, who not only tell their sorrowful tales as Myanmar activists but also suggest what needs to be done.<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t help but notice the emergence of new phenomenon which I call \u201cbrowning the policy templates\u201d or scripting the victims\u2019 policy advocacy narratives.<\/p>\n

Carefully vetted brown bodies \u2013 the Burmese, ethnic minorities, the Rohingyas, the Muslims, the refuges, the former political prisoners, the exiles \u2013 have become the vehicles to convey and reinforce (white) INGO-pre-determined messages.\u00a0That is, with one caveat.\u00a0The chosen ones among the Burmese need to be prepared to stay within the discursive parameters which will come across as \u201cnot too radical\u201d to power.\u00a0This vetting process is typically the job of the White Saviours \u2013 NGOs, government advisers, Congressional aides, who serve as the first line of sanitizers in these corridors of power.<\/p>\n

Year in and year out, the latter will dutifully deliver the browned<\/em> policy messages at various international fora \u2013 including upon occasions at the Security Council and seasonally at the United Nations Human Rights Council sessions and side-events, with their scripts littered with technical buzzwords \u2013 \u201cCOI\u201d (for Commission of Inquiry), \u201ctargeted sanctions\u201d, \u201carms embargo\u201d, \u201ctransitional justice\u201d, \u201caccountability\u201d and so on and so forth.<\/p>\n

At a glance, many of these jargons sound sensible. The sound-bites may even come across as smart, strategic and moral.\u00a0But the fact that they are put in the heads of the chosen few among the millions of the wretched, and in some cases, even against their better judgment \u2013 to be regurgitated through brown mouths is a fundamentally colonial act.\u00a0Most certainly, the late Memmi would call this act of usurpation.<\/p>\n

In his 18-minutes conversation with a Danish interviewer, the renowned Kenyan writer and anti-colonialist scholar, Ngugi wa Thiong\u2019o, talked about how the process of domination and subjugation involves supplanting memories of the dominated in the context of both the African slavery, which most White European powers \u2013 not just the usual suspects of the old France, Britain, Spain, Portugal, and Netherlands, but also Sweden and Denmark, much-lauded today for their \u201cheavenly\u201d social democracies. (See this 18-minutes interview at ABOUT \u2013 Ngugi wa Thiong\u2019o<\/a>.)<\/p>\n