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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