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Myanmar whitewashes ethnic cleansing
By Maung Zarni
With the exception of the Muslim commissioners, none of these ethno-religious diverse commissioners fought against the state-sponsored ethnocide of the Rohingya in the form of the commission's vehement opposition to the word "Rohingya". The two Muslim leaders who challenged this ethnocide and stood up for the Rohingya's own "imagined identity" were kicked out. Their crime? - frivolous charges of speaking to the press about the inquiry while others who also spoke to the media were left untouched.
As to be expected, the report made no mention of how politics got in the way of establishing truths about the mass violence in
Rakhine State. In fact, the commission sought to confirm the popular anti-Muslim racism without problematizing the recent growth of this increasingly virulent strain of Islamophobia and anti-Bengali sentiment across all indigenous national races of Myanmar.
The commission did raise passing concern about the 969, a neo-Nazi movement ostensibly led by Buddhist monks from Myanmar's leading teaching monasteries, and its divisive impact on ethnic and social relations in society. But it fell far short of pointing out the need to take seriously the new neo-fascist turn in the country's well-known anti-Muslim, pro-Buddhist racism. The report's authors chose to describe the now world infamous 969 rather mildly as "a campaign among the Buddhist to defend their own faith and to encourage intra-Buddhist commerce and trade".
All this is troubling but not unexpected. It was under the Religious Affairs Director-Generalship of Commission chair Dr Myo Myint that there was a proliferation of anti-Muslim quasi-religious publications, long before the previous crop of ruling generals allowed for greater freedom of press, assembly and speech. The leading voice of 969, Buddhist monk Wirathu, recently told the Associated Press that his views were formed as early as 2001.
Sadly, nearly half of the commissioners are my old, and now former, friends. Their collective document is unmistakably Bama racist/Orientalist in orientation, treating both communities in the conflict with a typical popular Bama contempt and dislike. This is adding insult to injury for both parties in the conflict, namely the Rakhines and the Rohingya.
The Rakhines are portrayed essentially as lazy natives who can not compete with the thrifty, business-savvy, hard-working "Bengalis" without the intervention of the state and its blood-based neo-fascist 1982 Citizenship Act.
The Rohingya are described as elementary school children-like people who, having obtained commission members' hand-phone numbers from their Muslim contacts in Yangon, kept on calling the commission members to blabber on about their sufferings and whine about their grievances.
These portrayals repeat a crucial racially charged popular narrative that turns out to be factually incorrect, namely that three Bengalis raped and brutally murdered a 28-year-old Rakhine Buddhist woman, the supposed first spark of the following pogroms. This was pointed out to me personally by a more honest commission member, Myanmar's most famous political comedian and former political prisoner, Zarganar.
This rape case is vitally important because the commission identified it as a key trigger for anti-"Bengali" mobilization by Rakhine nationalists, politicians and parties, including some of the Rakhine members of the Inquiry Commission, including Aye Maung, a vet-cum-MP in Naypyidaw from the Rakhine National Development Party, an ultra-nationalist group that has claimed to be working for the "purification of Rakhine state".
But the arrested and alleged rapists were officially registered as two Kaman Muslims and a Rakhine adopted by a Rohingya Muslim family in Pauk-taw Township. Zarganar, one of the five members who was one of the leading spokespersons for the commission at the press conference where the report was launched, told this writer in no uncertain terms that he interviewed the doctor in Rakhine state who performed the post mortem of the raped woman's corpse.
According to this videotaped interview, the alleged Rakhine rape victim bore no sign of having been raped. Yes, she was brutally murdered and her jewelry was gone. But she was certainly not raped, recounted Zarganar, based on his one-on-one recorded interview with the doctor. The doctor was eventually forced by the authorities to sign the official post-mortem report that established the rape that did not take place.
Then there was no mention of the "suicide in police custody" of one of the alleged rapists - Htet Htet, a non-Bengali adopted son of a Bengali family. Nor was there any mention of the fact that his freshly widowed wife was also found dead, allegedly having "drowned" in a local well.
Was there foul play? It appears that Zarganar, the well-respected political comedian and dissident who went to jail four times since the 1988 pro-democracy uprisings crushed by the military, was compelled to put his name to the official commission report which contained statements and misinformation which he himself knows are patently and verifiably false.
The entire report is riddled with inter-contradictions and inconsistencies that are not explained. For instance, the report raises the issue of the lack of or weak inter-agency coordination among the army, intelligence, civil administration, immigration, attorney general's office and Rakhine chief/prime minister's office. It discusses how and why the security forces and constitutive agencies only listened to direct orders from Naypyidaw.
But the commission chose not to ask why Naypyidaw failed to issue orders to provide adequate measures to protect the targeted Rohingya communities. Instead, the National Defense and Intelligence Council (or Kar-lon in Burmese) did nothing to mobilize security forces to protect the Rohingya, troops which Thein Sein and his deputies knew would obey only direct orders from ministerial headquarters.
Perhaps one silver living in the dark episode is that the report accurately states that local authorities in Rakhine State have absolutely no power to order security forces, including army, police, and border-control interagency troops, to do anything to quell mass violence. This was and still is something only Thein Sein's central government can do.
Command questions
That begs the question: why did the union level leadership of Thein Sein and his deputies on the Council in Naypyidaw choose not to mobilize the troops to restore order while the same security troops were called in to firebomb sleeping Buddhist monks protesting a China-invested mining project at 2 am using canisters containing white phosphorous? Alas, this is a question that fell outside of the purview of the presidential commission.
Furthermore, vague if not imaginary statistics are cited throughout the 186-page document without accompanying narratives or explanations. The commission did not even bother to account for its own official statistics from the government. The fact is that the greatest number of deaths and destruction were borne by the Rohingya. And yet a highly disproportionate number of the Rohingya vis-a-vis the Rakhine have been tried.
In the first wave of Rohingya-Rakhine violence in June last year, 4,188 Rohingya homes were destroyed while the Rakhine suffered the loss of 1,150 homes. In the second wave of violence in October, 2,371 Rohingya homes were destroyed as opposed to only 42 homes that belonged to the Rakhine. And again, out of a total of 1,835 arrested in connection with the mass violence, 1,589 are Rohingya and only 246 are Rakhine.
Perhaps the scholarly presidential investigators on the commission could advance and test a hypothesis that the economic productivity of Rakhine Buddhists (all Buddhists in Myanmar?) must be inversely correlated with the destructive capacity of the group. For the report orientalized the Rakhine as a low-productivity group, or more crudely, lazy natives.
The commission's official statistic implies the awesome power of a small group of Rakhine - 246 to be exact - to destroy thousands of homes and dozens of mosques in about a dozen different towns and cities and make over 120,000 Rohingya refugees homeless, shelter-less, internally displaced persons in a span of just five months.
If this number of Rakhine terrorizers, arsonists and slaughters does not seem quite convincing given the magnitude of death and devastation they had wrought throughout northern and southern Rakhine State, then who else aided and abetted the principal terrorizers among the Rakhine who wanted a Rakhine State only for the Rakhine?
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