Like millions of my fellow Buddhist Burmese, I grew up as a proud racist.\u00a0 For much of my life growing up in the heartland of Burma, Mandalay, I mistook what I came to understand years later as racism to be the patriotism of Burmese Buddhists.\u00a0 Our leading and most powerful institutions, schools, media, Buddhist church and, most importantly, the military, have succeeded in turning the bulk of us into proud racists.<\/p>\n
Around the world, supporters of democracy in Burmahave been shocked to learn of the \u2018ethnic cleansing\u2019 of the Muslim Rohingyas in Western Burmaand the attendant popular racist venom that is being spat at these most vulnerable stateless people[1]<\/a>.<\/p>\n President Thein Sein has characterised the events as \u2018communal violence\u2019[2]<\/a>, a deliberately misleading term designed to conceal the State\u2019s involvement in the massacres of the Rohingyas.\u00a0\u00a0 The damning new Human Rights Report states emphatically:<\/p>\n \u201cBurmese security forces committed killings, rape, and mass arrests against Rohingya Muslims after failing to protect both them and Arakan Buddhists during deadly sectarian violence in western Burmain June 2012. Government restrictions on humanitarian access to the Rohingya community have left many of the over 100,000 people displaced and in dire need of food, shelter, and medical care\u201d [3]<\/a>.<\/p>\n For nationalists, the clich\u00e9 \u201cto be Burmese is to be Buddhist\u201d is still a given, especially those in the ruling military clique.\u00a0 While having deep roots in our turbulent history, the current resurgence of Burmese racism, both official and popular, is, no doubt, a direct result of half-century of racist military rule.<\/p>\n Largely due to the country\u2019s international isolation under military rule, Burmese society as a whole remains deeply illiberal and potently ethno-nationalistic, in spite of the ritual pronouncements of democracy and human rights by an elite class of dissidents. Even a quarter century after Aung San Suu Kyi called for the \u2018revolution of the spirit\u2019, nothing spiritually progressive has taken root in the popular Burmese psyche[4]<\/a> \u2013 including among the country\u2019s noble dissidents.\u00a0 Burmese human rights defenders who spent half of their lives in military jail houses, Buddhist monks and the Burmese Buddhist diaspora are all singing from the same song sheet on issues of race.\u00a0 On this issue, they all stand alongside the country\u2019s Neanderthal generals and ex-generals.<\/p>\n One wonders what has resulted from the loud liberal rhetoric of human rights coming from noble dissidents when it comes to the persecuted Rohingyas?\u00a0 Where has the loving kindness of monks gone, who only five years ago flooded the streets of Rangoon and other urban centres of Burma chanting Loving Kindness for all sentient beings?<\/p>\n As a former racist who grew up thinking that any individual and any group deemed to pose a threat to national sovereignty and our Burmese \u201cBuddhist\u201d identity should be \u201cgassed\u201d, I feel a deep chill in my spine thinking about what my society is in effect evolving into.<\/p>\n First, President Thein Sein reportedly told the visiting head of the United Nations High Commission for the Refugees (UNHCR), Antonio Guterres, that his government is prepared to either expel the 800,000 Rohingyas en masse to any third country willing to take them, or segregate them in camps where entire Rohingya communities, on the basis of their ethnicity, religion and citizenship status, could be quarantined, clothed and fed by the United Nations.[5]<\/a><\/p>\n Second, despite the presence of many educated presidential advisers, the country\u2019s reformist generals and ex-generals aren\u2019t being called on, not even nudged, to rethink their anachronistic nationalism.\u00a0 Quite the opposite is happening. According to the New Yorker, Burmese presidential adviser and writer Thant Myint-U said:<\/p>\n \u201cAbstract moral arguments weren\u2019t going to cut much ice.\u00a0 And they were deeply cynical of Western rhetoric on human rights. The argument we made that got the most traction was: \u2018We\u2019re falling so far behind our neighbors economically\u2014 Chinaand India\u2014that, unless we change, politically as well as economically, it\u2019s going to be disastrous\u2019\u201d [6]<\/a>.<\/p>\n This unholy alliance between liberally-educated presidential advisers and the Burmese junta is cemented by economic nationalism \u2013 not human rights, nor liberal humanitarianism.<\/p>\n Last but not least, key international players in Burmese politics, such as the country\u2019s former ruler Britain and the United States, looked the other way for two full months while Burma\u2019s state-sanctioned racial violence against the Rohingya was raging on.\u00a0 For instance, British Foreign Secretary William Hague waited until 13 August to speak out, whereas the \u2018communal violence\u2019 broke out in early June[7]<\/a>.\u00a0 It took another 10 days for the United States Ambassador to follow suit.\u00a0 The West\u2019s primary interest in the full scale re-engagement with the \u2018reformist\u2019 military is primarily for their own strategic and commercial interests vis-\u00e0-vis a fast rising China.<\/p>\n It is still the primary responsibility of the Burmese themselves to resolveBurma\u2019s long-standing and emerging challenges including ethno-religious conflicts, be they the war against the Kachin in Northern Burma or the state-sponsored violence inWestern Burma.\u00a0 There is an urgent need to explain, expose, disrupt and eventually end the toxic merging of Burma\u2019s governmental and popular racism against the Muslim Rohingya.<\/p>\n Burma\u2019s military strong men have demonstrated neither the political will nor intellectual vision or capacity needed to resolve our post-colonial problems.\u00a0 Instead, they have shown time and again their sinister resolve to continue exploiting society\u2019s ethno-religious differences, be it against the Chinese \u2013 as in the case of state-induced anti-Chinese riots of 1967 \u2013 or Muslims in general, and the Rohingya Muslims in particular.<\/p>\n There are pockets of Burmese citizens, of all different faiths and ethnic backgrounds, who fully appreciate our cultural, religious and ethnic diversity to be our strength.\u00a0 Their voices, inside Burma and in the diaspora, calling for ethnic peace are currently being drowned out by the loud chorus of ethno-racial fanaticism which pervades Burmese and English-language social media such as Facebook, YouTube, Burmese chat rooms and, not surprisingly, the state media itself.<\/p>\n It is all the more important that conscientious Burmese in the diaspora and within the country work hard and together against the troubling ideological merger between popular racism with the military state\u2019s closeted fascism.\u00a0 If racism and fascism are learned behaviours, we must create civic educational initiatives that will enable our less informed citizens sedated on a ground-swell of racism to unlearn their racism.<\/p>\n Racist majoritarian democracy is no longer a viable design for our democracy.<\/p>\n NOTES:<\/strong><\/p>\n [1]<\/a> See New York Times<\/em> \u201cEthnic Cleansing in Myanmar\u201d, 12 July 2012<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Exclusive Interview with President Thein Sein, The Voice of America Burmese Service, 14 August 2012. http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=2L2-QRCs5s0&feature=relmfu<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> \u201cThe Government could have stopped this\u201d, 1 August 2012<\/p>\n [4]<\/a> See Sanitsuda Ekachai, \u201cThis is racism, not Buddhism\u201d, op-ed, The Bangkok Post<\/em>, 5 September 2012 & William McGowan, \u201cBurma\u2019s Buddhist Chauvinism\u201d, op-ed, Wall Street Journal<\/em>, 3 September 2012<\/p>\n [5]<\/a> \u201cUN refugee chief rejects call to resettle Rohingya\u201d, Associated Press<\/em>, 12 July 2012<\/p>\n [6]<\/a> \u00a0\u201cBurmese Spring\u201d, 6 August 2012<\/p>\n