The other, invisible suffering of Burma
Since the revolt of the monks against the military junta in Burma, all the western mass media have focused on the long history of oppression of this South Asian country, which, I suppose, few of us really know about. While in Italy, I saw people wearing purple T-shirts in the streets, at the universities, and organised protests at the Burmese embassies in support of the ‘Buddhist monks’. This
struggle for freedom has seen recently its first victims, and there is a
general fear that the new protest can be as unsuccessful as the attempted revolution in 1988. Yet the attention is very much focused upon the courage of the ‘peaceful’ monks.
From an anthropological viewpoint, the revolt
in Burma is particularly interesting for an anthropologist specialised
in Muslim societies and communities. There are two elements that attract
my attention. First of all, how this revolt is represented by the
western mass media and secondly, the near total lack of reference to the
drama that the Muslim minority, the so called Rohingya Muslims, have
experienced in the last three decades. There are some hard stereotypes
which affect how the mass media represent religions, and consequently,
how ordinary people understand religions.
To make a long story short (and of course
this means to over-generalise), religions are still understood through a
Manichean vision: peaceful versus violent, good versus evil, true
versus false. Of course, in the majority of cases, political correctness
has transformed the vehement apologetic diatribe of Middle Age
origin. Today, the Manichean discourse is passed to the mass media
audience through latent or manifest stereotypes, which essentialize
religion into a ‘real thing’; a powerful cultural artifact from which
actions derives. So, Buddhism is the most peaceful religion; Islam the
aggressive and violent; Christianity the confused one.
The mass media needs to simplify, to present news
in a sequence of exponential pathos, to attract your ocular bulbs and
conquer your mind long enough to feed you all the appropriate
advertisements (the real end of all the process). Yet religion is a
complex phenomenon, and I can tell you that it is as variegate as the
human beings which live on this beautiful, yet terminally ill, planet.
“Burma is a Buddhist state facing a Buddhist power
struggle.” This would be the headlines of newspapers if instead of a
Buddhist state with Buddhist monks, Burma was Iran, where the
confrontation between Shi’i Muslims and Sunni Muslims seems to be able
to explain everything, including the failure of the Iraqi American
dream. Of course, the Burmese drama is more complex than just a struggle
within a religion or the struggle between saints and kings.
However, the mass media, which discusses and
reports the oppression of the Buddhist population by the generals,
neglects to inform you about another story, another tragedy. The
omission, when compared, is not very dissimilar from the western
attitude towards other Muslim minority and refugee tragedies. Just to
mention one, allow me to remind you of the case of Bosnia-Herzegovina,
and its genocide
that nobody (not even Muslims) commemorate. Muslims often play only one
part in the drama of headline news, the evil character, like the
Indians in the
Hollywood Western films , before Sergio Leone corrected the historical mistake.
Here is a reality of Burma that probably you have
never heard about (if by any chance you had heard about Burma before!).
Muslims in Burma are a persecuted minority. It is a long story and
history that I will try to summarize for you, and let you read more from
the little available on the topic.
Burma has about 4% of Muslim population (Muslim
leaders say 10%). The life of Burmese Muslims has never been easy, and
as other Muslims (i.e. Palestinians) they received amazing promises from
us, the British, only to find themselves abandoned to a destiny of
suffering after the end of the British colonialism. So, here is the
story of the Rohingya Muslims, and their grim destiny. The Rohingya
Muslims live mainly in the North of the
Rakhine State and represent, officially, 4% of the entire
Burmese
population, but represent 50% of the population of Rakhine state
(previously known as Arkana) itself. Islam reached the region during the
9th century through contact with Arab merchants. Arkana was
an independent state until 1784 and developed it’s own culture and also
dialect. In 1784, a Burmese king, Bodawpaya, annexed Arkana to his
domain. This provoked a long guerrilla war with the Muslims, which saw,
according to historians, more than 200,000 Arkanese killed. Many of the
local Muslim population, at that time, were reduced to slavery and
forced to build Buddhist monasteries.
The struggle continued, but so unsuccessfully
that in 1796 more than two-thirds of the Muslim population of Arkana
had to leave the country and find refuge in what today is Bangladesh.
Arkana was annexed to the rest of the British Empire by 1885, and many
Rohingya Muslims decided to go back to their homeland. The
journey between their homeland and Bangladesh would become a cruel
ritual for this population. Until the Second World War, Muslims and
Buddhists were able to live more or less peacefully side by side. Yet
the Japanese were reaching the region in 1942, and so again the Muslims,
and this time also the British, were forced to leave Arkana .The
Buddhists found an opportunity to clear the Muslim population from
Arkana, and thus another 20,000 Muslims had to reach the British Indian
territories (again today Bangladesh). Indeed, while the Rakhine
Buddhists supported the Japanese, the Muslims, as in other countries,
supported the British forces. The British, to thank the Muslims for
their support and loyalty, promised the Rohingyas an autonomous region
in the north of the country. Many refugees decided to come back to their
homes, full of hope for the possibility of having their own state. As
usual in British foreign relationships and history, the promise was
never honoured. Also the fact that the Muslim population had supported
the British and tried to achieve autonomy in the northern region, made
them appear suspicious to the Burmese regime and the main Buddhist
population. These feelings toward the Muslim minority not only still
exist today but also have been reinforced, after the Taliban destroyed
the Buddhas of Bayan.
Muslims in Burma are not considered to be
citizens. They have no rights and often suffer discrimination and
indiscriminate killings. Many of them, in particular after 1962, had to
flee the country and still today live in refugee camps in Bangladesh,
which actually do not welcome them. Although Muslims have taken active
part in the 1988 revolt, and paid the consequences more than the
Buddhist population, the majority of monks and Buddhists in Burma have
anti-Muslim sentiments, in particular based on the fear of possible
intermarriages.
Pamphlets glorifying race purity and Buddhism
and actually reinforcing anti-Muslim sentiments have been distributed
since 2001 (i.e. Myo Pyauk Hmar Soe Kyauk Hla Tai or
The Fear of Losing One’s Race). These
inflammatory publications, preaching against the Muslim minority, as
well as rumors spread about Muslims raping children in the streets,
provoked a series of monk-led riots against Muslim families and the destruction of mosques. Muslims were killed and mosques destroyed, and again the Rohingya Muslims had to flee to Bangladesh.
Today we are witnessing a new Burmese revolt,
organised mainly by the few politicised monks. Everybody hopes that the
Buddhist monks can succeed in mobilising the population in a sort of
Intifada. Some Muslims, I know, are repeating their Inshallahs in the
not so distant Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh. They hope that the
end of the military junta means the end of their oppression.
Nonetheless, a question remains, after such
strong monk-led anti-Muslim campaigns which were also reinforced by the
welcomed ‘Bushit’ rhetoric of ‘war on terror’: would the new, certainly
Buddhist, regime accept the history and the existence, as Burmese
citizens, of Rohingya Muslims? Or, would the new regime, like their predecessor generals the Muslims as an easy scapegoat?
Gabriele
Unless the Muslims have played a pivotal role in the latest regime
change, I doubt their situation will change much. I know very little
about Burma/Myanmar (I know they had a road we were really worked up
about 65 years ago, and the Flying Tigers were stationed there. Oh, and
they have a Nobel prize-winner under perpetual house arrest). But this
all sounds depressingly familiar. No power means no influence, and no
influence means you’re last on the list of political priorities.
Thanks to the isolation the last regime arranged for Burma, there
won’t be a whole lot of attention paid regardless. Hopefully, folks like
you can at least keep the spotlight on.
http://marranci.wordpress.com/2007/09/30/the-other-invisible-suffering-of-burma/
Real names of celebrities and their aliases — Today we learn the real names of celebrities who have come up with pseudonyms to hide from us their origin or to consonance, 30 more celebrities after the break...
Demi Moore - Demetria Gaynes
Tom Cruise - Tom Mapozer
Puff Daddy - Sean Combs, John
Angelina Jolie - Angelina Jolie's
Elton John - Reginald Kenneth Dwight
Snoop Dogg - Calvin Broadus Kordazer
Shenayya Tueni - Eileen Regina Edwards
Tom Jones - Thomas Woodward
Miley Cyrus - Destiny Hope Cyrus
Shakira - Shakira Isabel Mebarak
Jodie Foster - Alicia Christian Foster
Busta Rhymes - Trevor Smith
Chuck Norris - Carlos Ray
50 Cent - Curtis Jackson
Ashton Kutcher - Christopher Ashton Kutcher
Axl Rose - William Bailey
Alicia Keys - Alicia Cook Odzhello
Bob Dylan - Robert Zimmerman
Bruce Lee - Lee Yuen Kam
David Bowie - David Robert Jones
Whoopi Goldberg - Caryn Johnson
Fergie - Stacey Ferguson
Madonna - Mary Louise Ciccone
Kirk Douglas - Issur Danielovich
Marilyn Monroe - Norma Jean Baker
Woody Allen - Allen Konigsberg
George Michael - Georgios Panaionku
Winona Ryder - Winona Laura Horowitz
Danny DeVito - Daniel Michael
