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Myanmar whitewashes ethnic cleansing
By Maung Zarni
An official report into last year's violence in Rakhine State, launched on April 29 at the government's foreign donor financed Myanmar Peace Center, is intellectually, ideologically, empirically and analytically flawed, underscoring President Thein Sein's bid to whitewash the recent ethnic cleansing of Muslim Rohingya in the western state, which borders Bangladesh.
Established on presidential order, the Inquiry Commission has been conflicted from the day of its inception on August 17 last year. The five individuals who were hand-picked to launch the
report on Monday were a curious mix themselves: the country's most famous political comedian, the former daughter-in-law of the late despot General Ne Win, a well-known former student leader, a well-known former exile, and the president's personal adviser and interpreter.
Thein Sein and his allies are increasingly using various crisis inquiry commissions, including the Aung San Suu Kyi-led Letpadaung Mountain Copper Mine Inquiry Commission and now the Rohingya Ethnic Cleansing Inquiry Commission, as public relations instruments to deflect public attention from its spectacular failures in handling popular discontent, state-sponsored violence against civilian populations, and mass ethno-religious violence.
In instances where the role of government institutions was instrumental, for instance in last year's pogroms in Rakhine State, inquiry commissions have become useful tools of deflection for Naypyidaw. The latest official report, originally classified as "secret", of the Rakhine Sectarian Violence Inquiry Commission was strategically released to counter the damning and credible April 22 report "All You Can Do is Pray: Ethnic Cleansing and the Crimes Against Humanity in Myanmar", released by US-based rights lobby Human Rights Watch.
The Inquiry Commission was stacked with cooperative technocrats, ethnic minority leaders, socialites, religious leaders and so-called human rights activists who were prepared or compelled to sign off on the report despite knowing it contained verifiably false and distorted facts about important issues under investigation.
As a product of such an unholy alliance, the commission's report is patently un-professional, non-independent and unprincipled. Devoid of crucial truths, it is a document utterly uninformed by any well-established analytical concepts such as "ethnic formation", "identity formation", "state's mobilization" in genocide studies, "discourse", "nationalism", "history" - through which all scholars and researchers of the social world attempt to make sense of even ordinary human affairs, including genocides.
Ethnic labels in Myanmar, including for the Chin and the Kachin, were externally imposed by British colonial administrators and American Baptist missionaries on the "natives". These were disparate groups who originally identified themselves tribally, as clans and along geographic lines. The new ethnic labels were less than 50 years old upon independence in 1948. Mal-informed by the prevailing pseudo-scientific knowledge about race and ethnicity in Europe, the British colonials and American missionaries grouped these "tribal peoples" in borderlands together for administrative expediency.
As Indian economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen correctly pointed out during a public seminar on Myanmar at Columbia University last September, the geographical areas now known as Arakan or Rakhine State frequently changed hands among neighboring feudal rulers, and boundaries were always elastic in the pre-colonial era.
The Rohingya Ethnic Cleansing Inquiry report officially stresses how the Rakhine feudal lords expanded their reach over territories in what was then Bengal, while making light of the fact that there were Bengali kings who ruled what was then the Kingdom of Arakan. Academics, especially establishment ethno-nationalist historians, have long proven capable of recounting the past only from a victor's perspective. The two leading scholars on the Inquiry Commission are no exception.
For a commission that was led by two historically trained Burmese and a retired Rangoon [now Yangon] University history professor, the report's treatment of the history of a people whom the commission insisted on referring to as "Bengali" is anything if not "ethnocidal" - that is, an attempt to erase concrete historical evidence that the Rohingya, a self-referential identity, existed as an ethnic community and was officially recognized by the state under the democratic government of prime minister U Nu.
This recognition of the Rohingya as an official constitutive ethnic group of the country, as well as their full citizenship status, was not confined to civilian politicians from the ruling political parties. During its two-year caretaker government (1958-60), the army's senior most leadership of General Ne Win and his deputies including Brigadier Aung Gyi officially recognized the Rohingya by their own self-chosen ethnic name: the Rohingya.
While Thein Sein's commission's historians claimed to have poured over the archival records at the country's National Archives relevant to these "Bengalis", to borrow the standard Rakhine reference to the Rohingya of western Myanmar, they violated professional ethics as researchers by blatantly omitting any concrete evidence that the Rohingya were both an official ethnic group and citizens of Myanmar.
In fact, one doesn't need to bother going to the archives to verify the Rohingya's ethnic identity and their citizenship status. Photographic copies of the verifiably authentic official records (for instance, Burma's Encyclopedia published by the Government Printing Press in 1964, official transcripts of speeches by the Burmese generals bearing the Rohingya's name, Burmese state newspaper clippings announcing a national radio program for various ethnic languages including the Rohingya language, parliamentary records, etc) are easily accessible in numerous social media sites and on-line archives.
But the commissioners, either as anti-Rohingya Islamophobes or under duress from the government that appointed them to the Inquiry Commission, especially the professional historians among them, evidently chose to weed out any historical evidence that contradicts Myanmar's racist Citizenship Act of 1982, which was designed with input from Rakhine nationalists and earlier anti-Muslim elements in the Ministries of Defense and Immigration to strip Muslim Rohingyas both of their ethnic identity and citizenship standing.
Forgotten history
In the hands of the commission's Cornell- and Harvard-trained historians, including the likes of chairman Myo Myint, secretary Kyaw Yin Hlaing and Professor Tun Aung Chain, the Rohingya's migratory history began only in 1824 and going on to the Japanese advent in 1942, when large scale communal violence between the Rakhine and the Rohingya took place. The entire two decades of the 1950s and 1960s, during which the Rohingya were both official ethnic peoples and had citizenship rights, were completely skipped in the report's historical section. This omission highlighted the anti-Rohingya Rakhine nationalist version of history which denies that the Rohingya ever existed.
State-sponsored ethnocide, which began with the brutal immigration campaign of 1978 which drove out nearly 200,000 Rohingya from the Rakhine state across to neighboring Bangladesh, was "unproblematized" by the commissioners, all of whom insisted that they were "politically independent". The ethnocide is all the more shocking considering the commission's ethnic diversity, including representatives from the ethnic Kachin, Chin, Karen, Shan and other communities that have experienced oppression from state authorities.
Ethno-religiously, the commission was a good mix - that is, except that there was no Rohingya - nay, "Bengali" - representation. Dr Myo Myint (Bama or Bama-identified), Khun Tun Oo (Shan), Jana Lahtaw (Kachin), Dr Salai Andrew (Chin), U Soe Thein (Bama), Dr Yin Yin Nwe (Shan-Bama), Dr Kyaw Yin Hlaing (Shan-Bama), Zarganar (Bama), Aung Naing Oo (Bama), Ko Ko Gyi (a national security race?), Tin Aung Moe (Bama), Daw Than Than Nu (Bama), (Vet) Dr Aye Maung (Rakhine with neo-Nazi views), Aye Thar Aung (ultra-nationalist Rakhine), Reverend Margay Gyi (Karen), U Tun Aung Chain (Karen). There are also Myanmar Muslims (ethnically Indians) and Myanmar Hindu.
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