Myanmar, a country with a majority Buddhist population and a Nobel Peace Prize winner as head of government, would seem to be an unlikely location for ethnic cleansing or genocide. However, it is the epicenter of an ethnic conflict between the Rohingya, the Muslim minority, and the military of Myanmar. Conflicts between the two groups date back to World War II, when Myanmar (then called Burma), was under the rule of the United Kingdom. During World War II, the Japanese fought the British for Burma, a country strategically located and gifted with natural resources that Japan sorely needed. Tensions between the Rohingya and the Buddhist population stem from this conflict between the Japanese and British; the Rohingya sided with the British colonial rulers, whereas the the Burmese Buddhist population primarily sided with the Japanese, whom they greeted as liberators from the oppressive British rule. After the war (in which the British were victorious over the Japanese), the exhausted British granted Burma its independence, as the British neither had the will nor the financial resources to keep control of their slowly disintegrating empire on the Indian subcontinent.
For Burma, independence lead to a decade of chaos, as the new government that was set up proved weak and ineffective. In 1962, Myanmar was taken over in a military coup, in which the military nullified the country’s constitution and created a military junta (collective dictatorship). The new government’s first action was to figure how to gain the support and loyalty of the Burmese people. The junta used the dangerous tactic of finding a common enemy to rally the population behind the regime, constructing a national identity based on the Buddhist religion. The common enemy became the minority Muslim population, and in specific the Rohingya people. The military started a blitz campaign to single out this ethnic group, claiming that they were illegal immigrants from the majority-Muslim nation of Bangladesh – which borders Myanmar to the west – even though the lineage of the Rohingya people can be traced back to 15th Century Burma. In 1978, the junta began to ramp up actions alienating the Rohingya people, launching a massive campaign called “Operation Dragon King.” This campaign was a massive crackdown on the Rohingya in which the government used rape and violence to force 200,000 Rohingya people into Bangladesh. However, 170,000 Rohingya returned after the conclusion of this operation. In 1982, the Burmese government passed the “Citizenship Act”, which recognized 135 ethnic groups but did not list the Rohingya. The Rohingya, then having a population of over 1 million people, were no longer recognized as citizens of the country, even though much smaller ethnic groups has been. Revealing a cruel sense of humor, in 1991 the military of the newly named Myanmar launched another ethnic cleansing campaign called “Operation Clean and Beautiful Nation.” This campaign forced an additional 250,000 Rohingya Muslims to flee the country to Bangladesh.
The latest wave of ethnic cleansing by the military of Myanmar started in 2016, as retaliation against the rise of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army. This group is a militant organization of Rohingya Muslims that coordinated small-scale attacks against the police stations on the border of Rakhine State, the area of Myanmar where the Rohingya are mainly located. An attack on August 25th, 2017 left 12 Police officers dead at one of these border stations, and the Rakhine state security forces retaliated in brutal fashion. The military burned 210 villages to the ground, and their reprisal attacks led to the death of over 400 people. They also forced out 400,000 people out of their homes, creating a refugee crisis that has generated headlines across many Western media outlets.
The militant attacks by Rohingya groups led to a resurgence of Buddhist nationalism and a rise of Islamophobia among a sizable proportion of Myanmar’s Buddhist majority. When the BBC sent reporters to interview people in Myanmar about the incident, the residents of the country seemed to paint a completely different version of the events from those appearing in the Western media. Rather than recognizing that it was the aggression of Myanmar’s military that was leading to increased tensions, they characterized the issue as a rise of Islamic Terrorism in their country.
This thinking is part of the resurgence of Buddhist nationalism in recent years, with Buddhist monks such as the famous Ashin Wirathu leading the movement against the Muslim populations in the country. Wirathu was named as the “Face of Buddhist Terror” by Time Magazine, and his words are listened to my millions of fervent followers. His main ideology boils down to what he sees as “protecting his flock” against external threats. But this “external threat” is actually internal, as he sees Myanmar’s Muslim population as a direct threat to the existence of the nation. This is why he will only discuss the Rohingya if they are described as “Bangladeshis,” or, in a sense, Muslim foreigners. Muslims comprise only 5% of Myanmar’s population of 54 million, but nationalists like Wirathu are pushing the idea of an Islamic threat, and the consequences have been dangerous. In 2013, riots in Mandalay, Myanmar were instigated by the followers of Wirathu, but he denies having any involvement in the incident. However, it’s clear Wirathu’s message is pushing a dangerous narrative of the events in Rakhine state, “claiming [that] the 1 million Rohingya Muslims living in precarious conditions in his country – described by human rights agencies as the most persecuted people on Earth – ‘don’t exist’… ‘It only takes one terrorist to be amongst them,’ he says. ‘Look at what has happened in the west. I do not want that to happen in my country. All I am doing is warning people to beware.’ Wirathu rejects the stateless Rohingya as illegal immigrants, a view echoed by the government.”
The issue can mostly be traced back to the Burmese government’s policies for the past half century to rid the country of the Rohingya populations who they saw as not ethnically Burmese. The Government originally turned to targeting the Rohingya as a common enemy to unite the Majority buddhist population under their rule. Policies and military actions to disenfranchise and leave the Rohingya stateless lead to the rise of Rohingya militant groups which carried out small scale terrorist attacks against police of the Rakhine state. The Buddhist population saw this as a wave of Islamic terror attacks aimed at taking control of the country under Sharia law. This lead to many turning to Buddhist nationalist leaders such as Wirathu who preached a strong anti-Muslim message which only furthered hate toward the Rohingya people.