by GRAEME WOOD
Thousands of displaced Rohingya lived at the unsanitary Thet Kay Pyin Zay Camp in 2012. PHOTO/Greg Constantine
In Obama’s heaps of praise for Burma, he buried a brief note of concern, expressed in the mildest language. In the months before his visit, riots in Arakan (also known as Rakhine), a poor coastal state on the border with Bangladesh, had killed 167 people and displaced nearly 100,000. Most of them were Rohingya Muslims, driven from their homes by Buddhist mobs. “There is no excuse for violence against innocent people,” Obama said. “And the Rohingya hold within themselves the same dignity as you do.” He praised diversity as a cardinal virtue of the United States and urged Burma to embrace its minorities. But he mentioned the Rohingya by name only once before returning, sunnily, to the subject of reform and Burma’s “potential to inspire” other formerly oppressed countries. Nice place, he said in effect, except for the attempted genocide.
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With Suu Kyi silent, and the international community collectively golf-clapping as Burma edges toward freedom, the Rohingya are nearly friendless in their displaced-person camps and grim ghettos, with few real champions other than a handful of Muslim countries (Saudi Arabia, Malaysia) not known for their capacity to deal with humanitarian crises. Obama closed his Rangoon speech on what he no doubt meant as a cheery note: “I stand here with confidence that something is happening in this country that cannot be reversed.” Increasingly, it sounds like a prophecy of doom.
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Aung San Suu Kyi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. Now, some former admirers can’t decide if she’s a demoness or a fool. PHOTO/Getty
Recent Burmese history has been a series of tragedies and crimes—most of them Buddhist-on-Buddhist. Nine out of ten of Burma’s 53 million people are Buddhists, including the current president and all heads of state since Burmese independence in 1947. The generals who imprisoned Aung San Suu Kyi after she won the 1989 election were Buddhists, and the Burmese who stand to profit from the economic opening of the country (a powerful group of military-backed businessmen known as the “cronies”) are nearly all Buddhists. The opposition party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), is led almost entirely by Buddhists, and its willowy leader, Suu Kyi, is famously devout—almost nun-like, her associates say, in her abstemious ways (“she eats a quarter of what a normal person eats”) and observance of early morning Buddhist meditation.
But this narrative of Burma as a Buddhist country, governed by competing Buddhists, elides a bitter history of rivalry between Buddhists and Muslims. The military government had kept tight control of this conflict, or at least had kept it out of the headlines, until late May 2012 when three Muslims allegedly raped and murdered a Buddhist girl in southern Arakan. That incident became the catalyst for a series of riots that the government at first made little effort to suppress, and indeed might have encouraged. Local Buddhists said the rape was just the latest Muslim-on-Buddhist sexual attack, and official news outlets whipped up hysteria by making the event a top headline—even though, statistically, it was probably not the country’s only rape that day.
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A religious zealot holding a jerrican of gas in one hand and a lit match in the other is always and everywhere a worrisome sight, but not, of course, always and everywhere for the same reasons. Buddhists have, in some circles anyway, received a free pass from skeptics of religion, largely because of the good p.r. and fine examples of the Dalai Lama and his herbivorous Western celebrity proxies (Richard Gere, Uma Thurman). The last few years of resistance to Chinese occupation of Tibet have seen 124 self-immolations by protesting Tibetan Buddhists, and zero burnings of Chinese soldiers. By now the average American thinks that Buddhist extremists are less dangerous than Buddhist moderates (a pleasant contrast with certain well-known types of extreme Christians and Muslims) and that the most violent living Buddhist is Steven Seagal.
New Republic for more
(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)