By Eric Vandenbroeck

It is difficult to cite demographic characteristics of Myanmar's population with any precision. However, it has been estimated that the total size the population is approximately 48 million, of which about two-thirds a members of the eponymous majority known alternatively as Burmans (term adopted in this chapter), Bamah or Burmese. The conventional periodization of Burmese history based on the efforts early British colonial scholars including has characterized pre colonial Myanmar as essentially a succession of warring ethnic state. However, this characterization has been challenged by more recent scholars~ by, among others Aung- Thwin and E.K. Lehman in Ethnic Categories in Burma and the Theory of Social Systems", in Southeast Asian Tribes, Minorities and Nations, volume I, edited by Peter Kunstadter. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967, who insist that political a social relations during the early period were ethnically more nebulous a cooperative.

What we know with more certainty today is that archeological evidence suggests the Burmans likely imigrated to their present location from some indeterminate point of origin to the north - much as the Siamese, Lao, Khmer and Kinh peoples came to settle in their current locations. Unlike many of these "majority" groups (the Khmer and Kinh most pointedly), however, the Burman did not, in the  course of their migration south, simply drive off the peoples who had previously resided in the lowland plains and deltas but rather, established a civilization which existed alongside some of these groups, the Hmong and Rakhine being the clearest examples of other peoples whose civilizations co-existed with the Burmans in a relationship which was at times antagonistic and competitive, but in other instances cooperative and integrative. Indeed, by the time that Alaunghpaya established the Konbaung dynasty in 1752, the lowlands of what is now Myanmar seem to have become, culturally speaking, an ethnically variegated but essentially unified area the boundaries of which were defined in the minds of the inhabitants (and those with whom they had recurrent interactions) by a social organization based around wet-rice agriculture and a similar interpretation of Theravada Buddhism.1

The political influence of the Konbaung monarchs, like that of many of the lowland political elite who had preceded them, extended beyond this cultural zone into the uplands, a region characterized by a greater diversity of agricultural practices (mostly forms of swidden cultivation but also different forms of dry-land agriculture and forest-based resource management), belief systems (an array of ancestral and animist beliefs as well as forms of Buddhism which differed significantly from those of the plains), and languages. The societies of these upland areas tended to be organized around more localized commun~es and lineage groups but maintained tributary relationships with the kingdoms of the plains - not only those of the Burmans (or Mon or Rakhine) but also the Siamese, Yuan (northern Thai, whose kingdoms included Lanna and Haripunchai), Yunnanese Chinese (in Sipsongpanna), and Lao (Luang Prabang). There is furthermore evidence of significant political interplay and intrigue among the upland groups and between them and the lowland rulers, who depended on the upland peoples to supply manpower and provide a strategic buffer, particular in times of elevated tension between peoples based in what is now Myanmar and those in contemporary Thailand.

The dawn of the colonial era, brought about for the people of Myanmar through the invasion of British forces based in India, signalled the end of the traditional set of relationships. That said, especially for those residing furthest from the point of initial penetration, the transformation of traditional relationships occurred sporadically and incompletely. Indeed, the British annexation of Myanmar was itself a staged and conceptually staggered project, which some have sais to have been "unpremeditated".

It was not with the hopes of achieving significant political or economic gains that the British forces first invaded the land which they knew as Burma - though both of these explanations were later invoked to explain the extension and expansion of their campaigns. Rather, the colonial army was first sent across the Irrawaddy from British India to put an end to armed incursions by Burmese troops. Having first occupied Arakan and Tenasserim and subsequently all of Lower Burma, the British forces found themselves enmeshed in a protracted campaign to put down resistance which arose insidiously throughout the region. As time dragged on, the British commanders found themselves in the defacto position of having to make policy for the territory, a problem which they solved initially by simply treating their newly acquired holdings as an extension of their Indian holdings (for which they truly had colonial ambitions).

In other words, a clash of sovereignties appeared exacerbated by an inability of the British to acquire information about the Burmese throughout the nineteenth-century colonial advance into Burma. As C. A. Bayly writes, "No ethnic Burmese were found to write digests and reports on their homelands to help the conquerors, and even if there had been, the British could not yet read them." 2

The final reply of the Burmese monarchy on November 4, 1885, to an ultimatum delivered by the British a few days earlier, was dignified and firm in not parting with the accoutrements of real sovereignty. The Burmese did agree to the stationing of a British resident in Mandalay, but denied that his intervention would be necessary in a legal dispute with the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation, in which the Burmese judiciary's ruling remained supreme. The sovereign of Burma was also not prepared to conduct his state's foreign policy in the manner to which Indian princes acknowledging British paramountcy had been compelled.3   

It took the British and Indian military forces a mere two weeks to reach Mandalay and depose the king of Burma. Re­fused a last ride out of his capital on an elephant, the monarch and his family were bundled onto ox-carts to be exiled to India. The novelist Amitav Ghosh perhaps best captures the mood of that moment:

An anguished murmur ran through the crowd: the captives were moving, alighting from their ox carts, entering a ship. Rajkumar jumped quickly into the branches of a nearby tree. The river was far away and all he could see was a steamer and a line of tiny figures filing up a gang­plank. It was impossible to tell the figures apart. Then the ship's lights went out and it disappeared into the darkness. Many thousands kept vigil through the night. The steamer's name was Thoonya, the sun. At daybreak, when the skies lightened over the hills, it was gone.4

The way was now clear for Randolph Churchill to make a New Year's Day gift of Burma to Queen Victoria. On January 1, 1886, it was proclaimed:

By Command of the Queen-Emperor, it is hereby notified that the territories governed by King Theebaw will no longer be under his rule, but have become a part of Her Majesty's dominions, and during Her Majesty's pleasure be administered by such officers as the ... Governor-General of India may from time to time appoint.5

Burma had not yet been annexed as a province of British India. Lord Dufferin, viceroy and governor-general of India, gave some thought to the possibility of alternatives, including turning the country into a protectorate. In a minute of February 17, 1886, he dismissed these alternatives. Upper Burma could not work as a buffer state like Afghanistan, sovereign in internal administration and submitting to British supervision in foreign relations, because it was too weak to defend itself and might drag Britain into war with China. Dufferin also saw difficulties with converting it into "a fully protected State, with a native dynasty and native officials, but under a British Resident, who should exercise a certain control over the inter­nal administration, as well as over its relations with foreign Powers." In Dufferin's view, Burmese rulers were not "highly civilized, intelligent, and capable persons" like Indian princes; therefore, a "puppet King of the Burmese type would prove a very expensive, troublesome, and contumacious fiction." Besides, there was "no Prince of the Royal House to whom the trust could be safely confided," one likely candidate being deemed too greatly under French influence.6

Underlying Dufferin's prejudices about the inscrutable Burmese was a larger British failure on the northeastern fringe of their Indian empire to effectively penetrate Burmese information networks and knowledge systems. So without further ado, Burma was annexed to British India on February 26, 1886. Burma was to remain one of its provinces until the mid-1930’s. But it required a five-year protracted "war of pacification" against tenacious guerilla resistance and a dismantling of local Burmese institutions before a semblance of colonial order could be introduced.

One can only speculate on how Myanmar 's state-building process might have progressed had the British influence in the region been limited to the role they assumed in this early period. Tarling (2001) has presented documents suggesting that at least within the colonial administration there had been floated the idea of occupying the lowlands while allowing the uplands - which remained "unpacified" throughout the 1800s and in some instances essentially never fell completely within the control of the colonial regime - to exist as a "buffer zone" separating the British holdings in India from the French holdings in Indochina (a role which Thailand was later to assume). In any case, the actual method by which the British occupied and administered the area which they came to refer to as "Ministerial Burma" or "Burma Proper", that is, the alluvial plains and delta region, was consistent with the forms of colonial administration which in other parts of the region gave rise to indigenous notions of nationhood and a sense or national identily that, also in the case of India , and otherwise very differentiated wide region, would not have come to the forefront this way. Armed conflicts with "intransigent" upland groups, most notably the Wa, continued to plague the British throughout the colonial period and remained unresolved as the state moved into its post-independence period.

In May 1916, on the first stop of his voyage to the United States, celebrated poet Rabindranath Tagore obviously viewing it through his own lens, observed a distinctly Indian character while arriving in the capital of Burma: The streets are straight, wide and clean, the houses spick and span; Madrasis, Punjabis and Cujaratis are wandering about in the streets and on the river banks. In the midst of all this if somewhere suddenly one spots Burmese men or women dressed in colorful silk, one imagines that they are the foreigners. The city of Rangoon is not a city of Burma, it appears to stand in opposition to the entire country.7

The Bengali poet had set off on this long voyage from Calcutta on May 3, 1916, aboard the Japanese ship Tosamaru. Being primarily a cargo vessel, it had just a few cabins for pas­sengers. But there were plenty of deck passengers, mostly "Madrasis." These Tamils of south India , both Hindu and Muslim, moved in large numbers to Southeast Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as traders and laborers. Traveling on this route, Tagore encountered a mighty storm in the Bay of Bengal that left no dividing line between the clouds and the waves. Someone seemed to have opened the blue lid of the ocean and countless demons had emerged from below wrapped in grey coils of smoke, as in the Arabian nights, and were shooting up to the sky. After four days at sea the appearance of birds in the sky signaled that land was near. If the ocean was the domain of dance, its shores heralded a realm of music. As the ship moved up the Irrawaddy toward Rangoon, Tagore observed the row of kerosene-oil factories with tall chimneys along its banks, commenting that it looked as if Burma was lying on its back and smoking a cigar. Closer to the city, the long line of jetties seemed to him to be cling­ing to the body of Burma like so many hideous, giant, iron leeches. Other than the Shwedagon temple, Tagore did not find anything in the city that was distinctively Burmese. He lamented the cruelty of the goddess of commerce. "This city has not grown like a tree from the soil of the country," he wrote. "I have seen Rangoon, but it is mere visual acquaintance, there is no recognition of Burma in this seeing." 8

The wealthiest of the "Madrasis" whom Tagore would have seen on the streets of Rangoon were the Nattukottai Chettiars, also known as Nakarattars, of the Ramnad district and the Pudukottai princely state of Tamil Nadu. "Displaced from the credit markets of Madras," writes David Rudner, "and displaced from British investment and exchange markets through­out greater British India, the Nakarattars found a new niche in servicing the credit needs of the indigenous Southeast Asians and migrant Indians who fought with each other and with the British in a race to produce agrarian commodities for the European export market." 9

Having made their initial overseas foray by following the British imperial flag into Ceylon and the Straits Settlements in the 182os and 1830s, they carved out their largest zone of operations in Burma following the colonial conquest of Lower Burma in 1852. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 dramatically expanded the European rice market and provided a major incentive to further colonize the rice frontier of the Irrawaddy delta from the 1870s onward. The area under rice cultivation in Lower Burma increased from 600,000 acres in 1852 but over 1,100,000 acres in 1872.

Related to this, there was another change that went on in Frontier Burma that had parallels in upland areas of French Indochina but not in the Iowlands, namely, the rapid growth of Christian missionary activity targeting the"oppressed minorities". Missionaries had been present in Burma prior to the fall of the Konbaung dynasty, but their numbers and level of activity increased markedly following annexation. The preachers cum teachers and in some cases, scholars, who infused even quite remote regions of the uplands, tought with them not only religions teachings but also support for education - often in local languages which they helped codify for the first time ­ld the chance to participate conceptually and sometimes literally in a global community of like-minded believers, an unprecedented experience in individuals who had always been located (even in their own minds) on society's periphery. They can thus be credited with helping y the seeds of the imagined national communities which would sprout lith from these ethnic enclaves 10

As seen following case study World War II is credited with bringing about the end of. British colonial rule in Myanmar, and indeed it was Japanese forces ho routed the British from their colony. However, while the Japanese Invasion was, in other parts of Southeast Asia essentially a global drama played out on local soil, in Myanmar, it was an expression of the society's own fracturing. The disparities which existed within colonial Burma, not only between the uplands and the lowlands, but also between different ethnic, political, and social factions within each region were, by the 1930s, coming to be expressed in the form of organized violence directed not only at the British authorities but also the groups whom the British rule had favored, for example, the Karen who unlike other ethnic groups, were permitted to serve in the army and hold preferred government positions. Thus Burmese supporters in London were put on their guard in October when a Karen 'goodwill mission' arrived in town and was entertained at the exclusive Claridge's Hotel by no less a luminary than Pethick-Lawrence.

But far from being a transient interlude in the colonial project, the war proved the breaking point of British hegemony over Burma and as we have seen in our case study, not only laying waste to significant proportions of the infrastructure which the British had established, but also throwing open the question of how the country would be governed, what territory would be included and what the involvement of the local peoples would be in governmental institutions. Although these queries were first expressed in relation to the prospect of continued (renewed) British involvement in the colony (an option which was quickly removed from the table), these issues in fact became the impassable morass in which nationalist debates in the country would founder for the two decades which followed. Attempts were made to build broad consensus by structuring the definitional elements of the proposed union in minimalist terms, essentially reducing the terms of belonging to the following principles: The unity of Myanmar's people and integrity of its territory; The right of the country's various constituent groups to express their ethnic, cultural and religious differences; Equality for all the state's ethnic groups.

Inoffensive as these terms may appear to an outside observer, they proved highly contentious for those involved in the process, especially as these broad principles came to be translated into actual policy statements. For example, equality translated to the promulgation of a state constitution which, in turn, ensured that the leadership of the various regions would be selected through a comparable process. This undermined the authority of the traditional leaders among the Shan and Karenni who were, in fact, themselves participants in the constitution drafting process.

As the debate dragged on and the various parties grew increasingly fractious and disenchanted with the process, the theme of ethnicity began to emerge ever more pronouncedly in the discussions. This is perhaps an unsurprising development given the significance which ethnicity had been assigned under the colonial regime. However, the implications of mapping ethnicity onto territory and political alignments were less pronounced in an era when all ethnicities and territories were essentially subjugated beneath the colonial regime. Now in the post-independence era, it was potentially the right of a given ethnicity/territory/political faction to pull out of the discussions and succeed from the union - a course of action which was threatened almost from the start.

In early June 1950, prime minister of Burma, U Nu, began a course of meditation, and retreated into meditation centre and vowed not to emerge until he had attained a certain stage in vipassana meditation.’Until then', he told his ministers, 'do not send for me even if the whole country is enveloped in flames. If there are flames, you must put them out yourself’. When told of his practice Nu's closest foreign friend, Jawaharlal Nehru remarked: 'That seems to me as good a way of governing Burma as any.’ "To be Burmese is to be Buddhist" is a slogan first coined by the early nationalist movement, the Young Mens' Buddhist Association founded in 1906 when the country was a British colony. Since then, this statement about national identity has been invoked in various contexts and has taken on diverse interpretations. Because of its history of mapping national identity onto a universal religious identity, Burmese Buddhism, its practices and institutions have drawn on a deep emotional reservoir and extensive social memory by which Burmese may interpret events of the present through experiences of a past, including riots and mass violence against the powers of the state.11

The Buddhist sangha is the only cultural institution surviving the collapse of the traditional kingdom after the third and final Anglo-Burmese war in 1885. Buddhism has been a rallying point for resistance against the colonial state and its successors since independence in 1948, even like is the case with Indonesia and India, Burma, represents the continuation of a ‘British colonial’ state. But the type of political and economic reforms critical to fostering civil society in Indonesia were not implemented with sufficient cohesion to build a post-colonial state to serve the Burmese nation.12

As other-worldly ascetics detached from worldly gains, monks have traditionally enjoyed a position of authority permitting the sangha to speak the "truth" to those in power. The sangha one should ad, has also been a steadfast critic of Burmese governments from the democratic administration of U Nu, to Ne Win's Socialist Program Party and its successor regimes under the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), and, most recently, the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC).

With the exception of the British colonial administration, every Burmese government since independence in 1948 has catered to the sangha for popular support, religious blessing, and political legitimation. By the same token, these governments have also had to contend with the power of the sangha to mobilize people. Governments have used Buddhist ritual to legitimate political power in times of constitutional crisis or in the absence of a national constitution altogether. Governments have used Buddhist authority or "Buddhification" to rally nationalist sentiments among the general population, to foster an ideological Buddhist nationalism, to integrate Christian, animist hill tribes and other ethnic minorities into the administration of the nation-state, and to put pressure on non-Buddhists to convert to Buddhism. For instance, "Indian Rights Group Accuses Myanmar of Forcible Conversion of Christians," Agence France Presse, November 11, 2001, reported that according to the Naga People's Movement for Human Rights (NPMHR), hundreds of Christian Nagas had been forced to convert to Buddhism by the ruling military junta and religious bodies. Those resisting either experienced displacement and persecution or were kept as bonded laborers by the junta and Buddhist monks. Other forced conversions occurred in other tribal areas.

Furthermore, Buddhist nationalist sentiments have been invoked to deflect public attention away from other crises, including agricultural shortages, banking failures, and impending anti-government demonstrations. The modem state imposed centralizing and standardizing reforms on the Buddhist sangha at several historical junctures. In order to revitalize Buddhist learning and invigorate monastic organization, U Nu convened the Fifth Buddhist Council in 1954-56. U Nu initially gained the support of Buddhist monks and thus enhanced his own charisma and the state's legitimation, but the demise of his government in 1962 was triggered by his inability to resist monastic pressure to establish Buddhism as a state religion. During the 1990s, the SLORC regime sponsored a great many lavish Buddhist rituals to legitimate its power in the absence of a national constitution and other means of legitimating the power of the state. And the state has used the authority of Buddhism to instigate and sanction mass violence to be perpetrated against "enemies of the Burmese nation" and religious and ethnic others.13

Anti-Muslim riots have periodically erupted since the late 1930s when the majority of Rangoon's population was of Indian origin and more than one million Indians lived in the Irrawaddy Delta region, making a living as land owners and money lenders. It is important to note the country's ethnic composition in this regard. Although the Burmese sangha is predominantly Burman, it also recruits significant membership among ethnic minorities, including the Mon, Karen, Arakanese, and Shan. Almost all ethnic Burmans, who make up 65-80 percent of the population, are Buddhist. This brings the total Buddhist population in Burma close to 90 percent. In Bruce Matthews, "Ethnic and Religious Diversity: Myanmar's Unfolding Nemesis," Visiting Research Series, no. 3, Institute for Southeast Asian Studies, 2001, 1-18, it is reported that ethnic Burmans, nearly all of them Buddhist, make up 65 percent of the country's population of 50 million people. The combined Buddhist population comprises an 80-90 percent majority, 4 percent Christians, 4 percent Muslim, and about 2 percent Hindu. Other accounts place the Muslim population closer to 8 percent. The above breakdown also does not account for a percentage of tribal, animist groups. According to "The Alms Bowl Remains Overturned: A Report on SLORC's Abuses of Buddhism in Burma," Buddhist Relief Mission February 1997, the sangha in Burma comprises approximately 400,000 monks.

A few weeks before, before the anti-Muslim riots in 1997, farmers had staged demonstrations to protest against forced government buy-outs of their harvest. Rumors of food shortages ensued. For several months leading up to the spring of 1997, monks from major Mandalay monasteries had secretly organized an impending human rights strike, demanding the release of 16 monks whom SLORC had previously imprisoned. A detailed and multi-faceted report on the situation for Muslims in Burma was published by Images Asia in two parts in March 1997.

The extent of violence inflicted upon Muslim communities is difficult to ascertain. One measure, however, is the large number of Muslim refugees the riots engendered, especially among Rohingas who fled their native Arakan in Lower Burma primarily to Bangladesh. The attacks caused an unknown number of deaths, the burning of Muslim homes and shops, and the desecration of sacred sites and objects, including the destruction of mosques, scattering of Qurans in the street, and driving pigs through consecrated grounds. Accounts about these raids do not add up to a coherent master narrative, but fall into separate versions. They include an official version given by government media, accounts by Buddhist monastic organizations, and additional versions based on foreign press reports and first-hand descriptions by Burmese Muslims, Buddhists monks, and other eyewitnesses. Each kind of narrative attributes to entirely different contexts the underlying causes and immediate catalysts for these mob attacks on Burmese Muslim.

Different observers affirmed SLORC's role in instigating the riots. Some observers stated that the monastic attackers, whose identity was mostly hidden by robes draped over their heads, were, in actuality, mere imposters and agitators sent by the regime's grassroots organization the Unity, Solidarity, and Development Association (USDA). The Nation reports on March 28, 1997: "Lt. Gen. Myo Nyunt, Burma 's religious minister went to meet local Muslim leaders and reportedly said: 'Let them [monks] destroy it - don't resist them, the army will compensate you for everything.' Thus warnings of impending attacks would come from local government officials or army officers urging Muslims not to retaliate or fight back, but to endure the Buddhists' rampage. This allowed many Muslim families to flee to safety, abandoning their homes and mosques to destructive fires set by rampaging crowds.

In response to the rioting that spread within days throughout Burma , SLORC imposed martial law, closed all universities, and instituted curfews on monasteries in Mandalay and in other cities. Soldiers surrounded many of the larger monasteries, especially in Mandalay and Rangoon. At the same time, state television aired lengthy and frequent broadcasts depicting the regime's leading generals venerating senior Buddhist monks and making extravagant donations to them.

In a statement on March 18, 1997, the All Burma Young Monks' Union (ABYMU), an exile group founded in the aftermath of 1988 explained that monks in Mandalay had planned human rights demonstrations to protest against the government's refusal to reveal the fate of 16 monks who had been previously arrested. Their demands also included easing government restrictions on the sangha. Other senior monks urged calm among the general population, explicitly distancing themselves and the sangha as an institution from violence committed against Muslims. Concurrently, they affirmed their allegiance with Muslim suffering in a common struggle against SLORC's injustice.

SLORC most likely instigated the initial attacks against Muslims in Mandalay to contain anti -government activities among Buddhist monks in Mandalay and the threat of renewed demonstrations that public knowledge of their activities would likely bring about. Over the past decades, there have been repeated allegations of such diversionary tactics that create umest the military can contain, while detracting public attention away from impending crises that were seen as a greater threat to the state's stability. At the same time, it is also clear that Buddhist monks participated in later stages of the anti-Muslim mass rioting. Aung Zaw writes in The Nation: "A young monk in Rangoon did not deny that they were involved. 'Yes! We do have a plan to protest against this brutal regime. Our target is SLORC." The rationale that anti-government monks adduced to justify attacks against Muslims as actually an attack on SLORC appears convoluted. Such justifications were born out of the popular resentment among Burmese of the support SLORC's bid to join the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) had received at that time from Malaysia's Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. In addition, Indonesia 's former president Suharto had recently visited Ne Win in Rangoon. The public support from Muslim nations for SLORC was popularly seen as undercutting the movement for democracy in Burma. In the same piece, Aung Zaw reports that " ... about 50 monks at Bargaya Road in Rangoon followed by soldiers and riot police went to another mosque, chanting: 'We don't want Muslims' and throwing stones at the mosque. The authorities did not intervene." 14

Monks soon became victims of the state's reprisals against "enemies of the state" who agitated in the uprising. Senior monks were held accountable for the involvement of younger ones in the riots. Many were forcibly disrobed, demonstrating the military's flagrant disrespect for traditional monastic authority. Hundreds of monks were detained and imprisoned for years to come. Some died in prison due to torture, illness, or lack of medical care. The government subjected monasteries to collective reprisals and retaliated with curfews and other restrictions on monastic participation in public life. It imposed rigid and comprehensive reforms on all religious organizations in Burma, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, or Christian alike. Nearly every aspect of monastic administration, education, and the personal lives of individual monks was under close government scrutiny. Most significantly, religious reforms since 1988 have brought the Buddhist sangha under the authority of the modem state. The Ministry of Religious Affairs has been strengthened in many ways and has been given the charge to implement the preservation and propagation of Buddhism in Burma. In sum, in response to popular demands for political reform, the state appropriated the religious authority and institutions of Buddhism, exerting unprecedented control over religion in public life.

Against this background of increasing restrictions on monastic life, the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), the regime that eventually succeeded Ne Win and his disbanded BSPP government, sought to transform a national community into a ritual community devoted to the veneration of sacred relics of the Buddha, thus minimizing the agency of the sangha. Participation in this Buddhist ritual community also implied participation in a national economic and political network few could afford to ignore. In this manner, the state used Buddhist sacred objects and ritual to enforce a totalizing hold on power.15

The anti-government uprising in 1988 constitutes a tragic watershed in the recent history of a country whose citizens believed themselves to be on the verge of political reforms, only to plunge into the shackles of a military regime that rules by force and exploitation. The bloody path from that moment of hope in 1988 to the subsequent decades of fear was paved with the bodies of thousands. These deaths and subsequent purges in education, government, and in the monasteries affected the personal lives of every Burmese family. The absence of a national constitution, the lack of effective political reforms, deeply seated resentment towards the military regime, and widespread social suffering have collectively determined the parameters for Burmese politics since 1988.

In the months prior to the uprising in March and August of 1988, a failing economy caused reverberations throughout Burmese society. Shortages of food staples such as rice and oil, student unrest at Rangoon Technical Institute and Rangoon University , signs of the imminent resignation of the Burmese Dictator Ne Win, and the promise of a multi-party system further heightened tensions. Sparked by a seemingly minor student encounter with police in a Rangoon coffee shop, the demonstrations spread rapidly to the Rangoon Technical Institute and Rangoon University , but were quenched each time with brutal police force. As the demonstrations turned into riots, the police and military killed scores of students, deaths for which the Burma Socialist Program Party (BSPP) refused to hold its security forces accountable. More and more segments of Burmese society took to the streets of Rangoon, Mandalay, and soon cities throughout the country to demand government reform and accountability. In early August 1988, large segments of the Burmese work force, including professionals, civil servants, customs officials, nurses, doctors, and even soldiers from certain military units went on strike to join mass protests and demand radical political change. Perhaps inspired by the Philippine experience of "people power," there was a prevailing sense in Burma and abroad that real political and economic reforms and a change of government were imminent. The army responded quickly and put a bloody end to the uprising. As thousands of demonstrators were killed by police and military, many, especially students and monks who feared reprisals and mass arrests fled up country and eventually crossed the border into Thailand.

The parameters of this four part research project do not permit to focus on other secular resistance organizations, including the Burmese Government in exile, the National League for democracy (NLD) and a great many others in and outside of Burma. We simply want to mention them here to underscore that the focus of this part three-article, does not intend to convey a monolithic presence of Buddhism in the anti-government struggle, though clearly it is a major force contesting the hegemonic powers of the regime. Moreover, as the tensions extended into decades, some monks have successfully circumvented the policing structures of the state through selective collaboration with their efforts and by accepting "taxation," especially on the foreign donations they receive.

Amidst the chaos the Burmese sangha emerged to provide an organizational structure to the popular uprising. Monasteries became sanctuaries, particularly at night when military police arrested student agitators at their homes. Monks organized demonstrations, relayed information through an internal monastic network, and even stepped up to administer some judicial and civil infrastructures in those towns and areas considered "liberated" by the democratic uprising. The yellow robes of the Buddha offered anonymity to those fleeing from government persecution and the monastic network became a conduit for safe travel to the border and into exile. Along with numerous other exile and refugee organizations, the All Burma Monks' Union was formed to speak for the sangha from the relative safety of the Thai border.

Accounts of the monastic role in these events are found in news media reports, in Bertil Lintner, Outrage: Burma 's Struggle for Democracy (Hong Kong, 1989); and in reports by the Buddhist Relief Mission. The regime refers to "the tragic disturbances of August 1988" as the work of communists, especially the Burmese Communist Party (BCP) plus "foreign imperialists" and their agents with whom they are in "collusion." This entirely mythic attack is a diversionary strategy to detract from the actual crises that reappears frequently in the regime's rhetoric. See, for instance, Maung Maung, The 1988 Uprising in Burma, Yale Southeast Asia Monograph, 1999, where the role of the sangha is never mentioned.

While Buddhist kings (dhammaraja) were expected to convene and promote monastic reforms, Buddhist law (vinaya) stipulates that monastic ordination removes an individual from civil jurisdiction. Upon becoming a member of the sangha, Theravada monks assume new names and social identities. They also give up all property and are no longer subject to civil authority. However in an open letter commemorating the fifteenth anniversary of these riots, the All Burma Young Monks' Union (ABYMU) made the following statement: "Since 1988, the Buddhist monks of Burma have been imprisoned, forcibly disrobed, used as porters in military operations, sent to labor camps, prohibited from freely practicing their religion, and forced to move out of the monasteries in which they reside by the leaders of present military regime. For these cruel acts, there are now some monks who have already passed away in prison. Among the detained monks were many prominent and senior monks, including a well-known Tipitakadhara monk. These leading monks are well respected by lay devotees for their efforts in Dharmma and Vinaya. The regime has a long history of oppressing revered Buddhist figures." 16

At great expense to the citizens who donated money and labor for lavish religious construction and rituals, SLORC largely succeeded in reinforcing its hegemonic power through its use of religious sources of authority. By the early 1990s, the state had co-opted the senior sangha and the majority of the Buddhist population into acquiescent participation. These programs to silence and police Buddhist and other forms of dissent drove popular protest underground, creating a generalized distrust and fear in private and public spheres of Burmese life in which rumors abound, filtering public events and producing counter-narratives at amazing speeds. To explore the role of rumors and conflicting narratives about events that led up and occurred during the riots, see Paul R. Brass, Theft of an Idol: Text and Context in the Representation of Collective Violence 17

The ambush and massacre of National League for Democracy (NLD) supporters in a wooded area near Dipeyin began in the evening of May 30, 2003. The events surrounding this incident are primarily political and not religious in character. They indicate heightened political tensions between Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) and the ruling regime, that, by that time, had been renamed the State Peace and Development CounciI. It is, however, the state's manipulation of Buddhist symbols of authority in constructing the ambush that qualifies it for inclusion in this discussion. Although the SPDC had been under international pressure to negotiate with the NLD, Senior General Than Shwe, Chairman of the SPDC, who staunchly resisted such negotiations, consolidated his power within the inner circles ofthe SPDC in April 2003 and again in the fall of 2004. Aung San Suu Kyi, Secretary General and charismatic leader of the NLD had been released from house arrest for nearly a year. Despite repeated interference with her travels in Burma and public speeches, Suu Kyi speaks out publicly about her concern over the lack of progress made in UN negotiations. On May 6, she left Rangoon for a tour to re-energize the membership in the NLD youth groups and the events of the massacre led to her eventual re-arrest and detention since that time.

For a discussion of religious and political aspects of Aung San Suu Kyi's charisma and her role in formulating Socially Engaged Buddhism in Burma, see Juliane Schober, "Buddhist Visions of Moral Authority and Civil Society: The Search for the PostColonial State in Burma," in Burma at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, ed. M. Skidmore.18

Traveling in the evening of May 30, 2003, the NDL caravan of some two dozen cars and motorcycles was redirected by a military road block, to a minor road that turned out to be blocked by fallen trees. As they made their way through a wooded area near the village of Dipeyin, the caravan was greeted by a large crowd of villagers. A Buddhist monk approached Aung San Suu Kyi's car and invited her to speak to the crowd. Suu Kyi declined due to the late hour, but the monk persisted until her aide, Htun Zaw Zaw, got out of the car to dissuade him. Once the caravan stopped, USDA members emerged from the near-by woods to attack NLD supporters. Hundreds of police, men dressed as monks, armed soldiers, and prisoners from Mandalay Prison suddenly dismounted from trucks, armed with bamboo spears, guns, iron pipes, and rocks and joined in the attack. In the massacre, more than one hundred supporters of the NLD are said to have been brutally slaughtered. Suu Kyi's car escaped to Dipeyin where she was taken into "pre-emptive" custody. US Embassy personnel visited the site days later and concluded in an official statement that the attack had been planned.

Signaling perhaps the most egregious manipulation of Buddhist symbols and authority, the monk's role in stopping the NLD caravan speaks to the tremendous respect individual Buddhist monks as well as the institution of the sangha as whole occupy in contemporary Burmese culture and politics. Brig-Gen. Soe Naing was promoted to the number two position within the government during the fall of 2004, following another political reshuffle. In December 2004, he addressed an international Buddhist summit in Rangoon.

One of the main components of the state of the consciousness which Nu believed that he had attained that summer was 'freedom from fear'. But as the Korean War entered a critical phase and the threat of global nuclear conflict grew ever closer, this was no easy goal. By the middle of the year, Allied forces in Korea seemed on the verge of conquering the whole peninsula and a major war with China and the Soviet Union loomed. In Britain Attlee broadcast to the nation of further preparations for war in Korea and also against Russia, 'if another world war is to follow’. In Delhi, Nehru, urged the US to draw back, arguing that war solved nothing. In his alarm, he seemed to be conjuring up again the non-violent maxims of the late Mahatma Gandhi. Attacked by the Americans for appeasement of totalitarianism, Nehru was equally suspect in China and Russia for his suppression of Indian communists.

The period 1950 to 1953 was one of reconsolidation in Burma. The government's authority began to reassert itself, even if many of the failures which would eventually drive Burma to the margins of the new world order were also present: corruption, an arbitrary military and botched measures of economic development. One sign of the changing mood was the attempt of the Communist Party of Burma (CPB) to compromise with the Rangoon government. After their striking successes of 1949, the red-flag communists of the CPB and their Karen allies had abandoned their policy of trying to take and hold the towns. They now became more 'Maoist' in their strategy, basing themselves in villages and eliminating landlords. They were never again to seize the initiative. The government may have been weak, and its army underpaid and undersupplied, but it had kept its hold over Rangoon, the sole remaining financial prize in the country. It had done so because foreign financial and military aid, particularly small arms, had reached it in large quantities. Even in 1948 and 1949 Burma had never collapsed into total anarchy. In most districts notables and important men still held sway. They were generally suspicious of the communists and hostile to the Karens and other minority group rebels. Provided the government directed some cash, some local offices and, best of all, arms to them, they were prepared to come back into Rangoon 's fold.

Under the surface of the government's resurgence, however, the balance of power was shifting irrevocably towards the military, though Nu hardly noticed it as he flew around the world on missions of peace and sanctity in the early 1950s. The army had appropriated more and more of the country's diminished wealth. It benefited from the feeling that Burma was a threatened country in the midst of an armed camp, with the Chinese, the rump of the British Empire or even India greedily surveying the remains of its assets of oil, timber and rice.

The first coup against the civilian government finally came on 26 September 1958. Nu returned to power briefly in the early 1960s but his grip was never firm. A second coup occurred in 1963 and Nu went into a long exile. Ne Win and his family were to hold power in Burma for much of the next forty years. The consequence was that a country once fabled for its natural wealth and promise isolated itself increasingly from the world. Burma fell further and further behind its Southeast Asian neighbors, suffering international sanctions and continuing local rebellions. Only the new wealth spilling into the country from a booming China in recent decades seems capable of ending its long stagnation.

Indeed, never was the fallacy of the British administration designations clearer than in the post-independence era when it became clear that not only were all the persons residing in, for example, the Chin state, not necessarily Chin, but that Chin-ness itself was not a unitary, well-defined characteristic with unambiguous political implications. One might go so far as to state that in the two decades following the end of World War II the peoples of Myanmar, and in particular, those residing in the country's periphery, were suddenly vaulted from a quasi-feudal era through the modern age and directly into a condition of post-modernity.

The disunifying forces within Myanmar society, which in the decades following World War II had also had disastrous consequences for Myanmar 's economy, reached their pinnacle in the early 1960s when the complete dissolution of the union seemed an imminent possibility. Stepping into the breach, as they had in many states in the region during periods of (perceived) crisis or political uncertainty, was the military - in this case the so-called Revolutionary Council under the leadership of General Ne Win. Where the provisional governments which had preceded the Revolutionary Council had attempted, however ineffectively, to draw the country together by consensus and the articulation of loosely defined terms of affiliation, the military regime took the opposite approach, attempting to impose order through force. Administrative control was centralized within the regime itself, thus revering the trend among previous post-independence governments towards recognition of regional authorities and devolution of control. There was furthermore a nationalization of productive assets, which included not only the manufacturing and agricultural apparatus of the lowland areas, but also the natural resources of the upland areas.

Unsurprisingly, these changes were met with fierce resistance, including both acts of passive defiance amongst the rice producers in the fertile delta region and armed uprisings. And the Burmese armed forces defying anything that could lead to democracy continued to prosecute its claims over these lands and peoples, and to employ military force to seek to retain and, indeed, reintegrate them. In the absence of an agreed upon basis for peaceful, productive cooperation among Myanmar's people, conflict thus came to be defined as the currency by which the country's various constituent elements retained some degree of engagement with one another.

 

1 For this see, Carl H. Lande "Ethnic Conflict, Ethnic Accommodation, and Nation-Building in Southeast Asia", Studies in Comparative International Development 33, no. 4, 1999, pp 89-117.

2 C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 141. See also pp. 113-128.

3 Htin Maung Aung, The Stricken Peacock: Anglo-Burmese Relations, 1965, pp. 87-89.

4 Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace, 2000, p. 47. 35.

5 Aung, Stricken Peacock, p. 92.

6 Anil Chandra Banerjee, Annexation of Burma, Calcutta, 1994, PP. 316-317.

7 Tagore, Japane-Parashye, In Japan and Persia, Calcutta: 1940, pp. 18-19.

8 Ibid., pp. 14, 17-25.

9 Rudner, Caste and Capitalism in Colonial India: The Nattukottai Chettiars, University of California Press, 1994, p. 69.

10 For details see Robert H.Taylor. "Do States make Nations? The Politics of Identity in Myanmar Revisited", Southeast Asia Research 13, no. 3 (2006): 261-86.

11 See Mary Callahan, Making Enemies: War and State Building in Burma, Cornell University Press, 2003.

12 Robert W. Hefner, Civil Islam, Princeton University Press, 2000.

13 See Juliane Schober, "Buddhist Just Rule and Burmese National Culture: State Patronage of the Chinese Tooth Relic in Myanmar," History of Religions 36, no. 3, 1997: 218-43.

14 Aung Zaw, " Rangoon Plays the Muslim Care!," The Nation, March 28,1997.

15 See Bruce Matthews, "The Present Fortune of Tradition-Bound Authoritarianism in Myanmar," Pacific Affairs 7, no. 1, 1998.

16 ABYMU, "Statement of the All Burma Young Monk's Union Regarding the Demonstrations by Buddhist Monks in Mandalay on March 17, 1997.

17 Princeton University Press, 1997; and Vena Das, "Specificities: Official Narratives, Rumour, and the Social Production of Hate," Social Identities 4, no. 1 (1998): 109-30.

18 University of Hawaii Press, 2005.

 

 

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