Читать книгу The Burmese Labyrinth - Carlos Sardiña Galache - Страница 12

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Days of Fury in Arakan

By June 2012 the democratic transition seemed to be progressing smoothly, at least in central Burma. Aung San Suu Kyi had become a member of parliament in April; some political prisoners had been released earlier that year; and new laws liberalizing the media and trade unions were in the pipeline. Thein Sein was applauded internationally, and even Hillary Clinton had visited the country as US Secretary of State in late 2011 – a move by which the most powerful country on earth was giving its blessing to the new regime. The war in Kachin State seemed to be the only intractable problem in what might otherwise have looked like the beginning of a promising new era for the country. Then a new crisis suddenly erupted in Arakan State – a crisis that would only get worse in the coming years, and would have profound implications beyond the state.

In late May, a twenty-seven-year-old Buddhist Rakhine woman called Thida Htwe was brutally raped and killed on Ramree Island, in central Arakan. The alleged perpetrators, two Muslim men and an orphan Buddhist adopted by a Muslim family, were arrested the next day by the police, but villages and towns throughout the state were swept by media reports and pamphlets denouncing the crime, and emphasizing the religion of the perpetrators. Over the following weeks, this triggered a spiral of intercommunal violence that snowballed throughout the state and broke, perhaps irremediably, the fragile coexistence between the Muslim and Buddhist communities. A few days later, on 3 June, in Toungup, a town in the south of the state, a mob of several hundred Buddhists stopped a bus, dragged ten Muslim men from central Burma from it, and beat them to death.

Five days later, thousands of Muslim Rohingya in Maungdaw town, in the predominantly Rohingya north of the state, near to the border with Bangladesh, went on a rampage after Friday prayers, destroying a number of buildings and killing several Buddhists. The violence soon spread to the state’s capital, Sittwe, where it was mostly perpetrated by Buddhist Rakhine against Rohingya Muslims in retaliation for the rape and assassination of the Buddhist girl in Ramree and the attacks in Maungdaw. On 12 June, the army stepped in and restored order in the state. By then, hundreds of houses had been destroyed, over 100,000 people, most of them Rohingya, had been displaced to makeshift camps. The government claimed that seventy-eight people had been killed – a figure that was, in all probability, a gross underestimate.¹

The government portrayed the violence as an eruption of spontaneous sectarian hostility between two communities incapable of living together – a convenient narrative that allowed the Tatmadaw to portray itself as the pacifier. The rape and killing of Thida Htwe had been widely publicized in the state, playing up stereotypes circulated widely among the Buddhist population that depicted Muslims as brutal sexual predators. An individual criminal case was blown out of proportion; collective blame was assigned to the Rohingya community as a whole for the alleged actions of just three men. Not all Rakhine participated in the violence, or even supported it; but the invocation of collective responsibility played into pre-existing intercommunal tensions. It made thinkable and justifiable the retaliation against ten innocent men a few days later, and subsequently against the whole Rohingya community.

Intercommunal tensions had existed in the state for decades, but that was only part of the story. The violence was not entirely spontaneous; strong indications emerged that there was some element of planning on the Rakhine side. According to a well-researched report by the International State Crime Initiative, based at Queen Mary, University of London, local Rakhine businessmen, Rakhine civil society organizations and politicians of the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party (RNDP) had organized mobs from Rakhine villages and taken them on buses to Sittwe, where they attacked the quarter of Narzi, mostly inhabited by Rohingya Muslims, and burned it to the ground.² Moreover, at first the police did nothing to stop the violence, allowing it to escalate, and then often took sides with the Rakhine, shooting at the Rohingya and helping Rakhine mobs to torch Rohingya houses. The impunity that Rakhine attackers enjoyed also belies the notion that the authorities were impartial pacifiers; while many Rohingya in Maungdaw and Sittwe were jailed, not a single Rakhine was arrested.

The violence did not come out of the blue. In the immediate context of the transition, Rakhine nationalists had lashed out against the Rohingya after they were allowed to vote in the 2010 election. In September 2011, several Rakhine associations held a seminar in Rangoon protesting the ‘Rohingyanization of Arakan’.³ One month later, the RNDP organized a series of public conferences in several towns in Northern Arakan with the same theme. ‘We have no intention to breed racial or religious hatred among the peoples living together on our land’, said U Aung Mra Kyaw, an MP for the RNDP. But the reaction of some people in attendance seemed to belie his words. One participant in one of the conferences was reported as saying: ‘Many people did not want to return home, even after concluding the conference … because they were embittered with the feelings that their land and valued heritages are being insulted by those groups of Chittagonian Bengali Muslims with their made up histories of Rohingya’.⁴

I visited Sittwe for the first time a few weeks after the first wave of riots. The government had imposed strict segregation between the two communities, with the ostensible rationale of preventing further violence; but the reality was that the city had been almost completely ethnically cleansed of its Muslim population, and it has remained so ever since. The overwhelming majority of Rohingya had been taken to a complex of camps near the city, mostly built around pre-existing Rohingya villages. Only two Muslim enclaves remained within Sittwe: Bumay, on the edge of the city, and Aung Mingalar, the Muslim ghetto downtown.

Those in the camps were, in one sense, more fortunate than those in Aung Mingalar: the ‘registered’ interns in the camps received food from UN agencies, while those ‘unregistered’ did not. Meanwhile the inhabitants of the ghetto were not officially regarded as IDPs, so they did not receive anything. I could not visit Aung Mingalar on that occasion, but I managed to speak on the phone with some residents, and they told me that they were forced to buy food from the police at as much as ten times its market price. Many of them received remittances from relatives in Rangoon or abroad, but, given that the money had to go through the police guarding the neighbourhood, the officers always got a substantial commission.

My interactions with Rohingya people were scarce and brief on that first trip. Having few contacts in Arakan, and with the camps closely guarded, I had to visit them with a military truck accompanying me and my Rakhine translator. Still, I managed to talk privately with a couple of them, who told me about how they had witnessed the police shooting relatives and neighbours in the recent violence. The camps where they had been confined were only a few weeks old, but there were already some suspicions that the displaced would not be able to return to their homes for a long time.

There were a few thousand displaced Rakhine, too, most of them sheltered in Buddhist monasteries; but their numbers were smaller than the displaced Rohingya and, unlike Muslims, they enjoyed freedom of movement. The traces of the recent violence were visible virtually everywhere. In the bustling market near the port, many shops were closed, their Muslim owners being confined in the camps or in Aung Mingalar and Bumay. In successive visits, I found most of those shops had been taken by Rakhine people. Meanwhile, Narzi quarter, the majority- Muslim area that had been attacked by Rakhine mobs and subsequently evacuated by the authorities, was a desolate landscape of debris in which no building had been left unscathed. It was a ghost town where I could see teams of monks and Buddhist laymen clearing the rubble during the day. President Thein Sein had declared a state of emergency on 10 June, and there was a strict curfew from eight in the evening to six in the morning. At night the streets were eerily empty except for a few checkpoints, and stray dogs.

It was easier to interview Rakhine people than Rohingya. It was then that I got a sense for the first time of the deeply ingrained siege mentality within the Buddhist community, with damning rumours about the other community constantly circulating. I also started to glimpse where those fears came from. When I interviewed some Buddhist monks, the abbot of Budawmaw, a monastery sheltering a dozen Rakhine families, told me that the Muslim community had been infiltrated by al-Qaeda and other international jihadist outfits. To prove his point, he showed me a VCD with stills of violence and ‘Muslim extremists’ undergoing training. Those images could have been taken anywhere, but he claimed they were all ‘Bengalis’ preparing to wage jihad in Arakan. No violence waged by the Rohingya during the recent clashes revealed any sophisticated training, and fire-arms had not been used; but the facts seemed to be irrelevant. On the VCD, there was a picture of the Thai army detaining Malay insurgents in southern Thailand. When I pointed that out, he was adamant that it was the Myanmar army.

The abbot of another monastery, U Pinnyarthami, laid out to me the theory that al-Qaeda was using international NGOs working in Arakan and the United Nations to supply local terrorists with weapons. I heard this kind of wild conspiracy theory innumerable times in the following years. Underlying them all was a widespread distrust among the Rakhine towards international NGOs and the UN, who many believed work exclusively for the Rohingya and neglected the Rakhine people. It is fair to assume that those men truly believed what they said. But they were not just channeling anti-Muslim sentiments – they were amplifying them within a community whose reverence for Buddhist monks often lends great weight to whatever words they utter.

In those early days after the riots, the triangular conflict between Burmans, Rakhine and Rohingya seemed to have flattened into a twosided conflict pitting the first two against the latter – the two ‘national races’ against the weaker ‘interlopers from Bangladesh’. Back then, it was not uncommon to see Rakhine people wearing tee-shirts bearing the sentence, ‘We support our President Thein Sein’, in both English and Burmese, in the streets of Sittwe. One month after the riots, the president said that the Rohingya were not welcome in the country, and asked the UNHCR to place them in camps or send them to another country.⁵ The UN agency immediately refused the petition, but it nonetheless garnered Thein Sein some support in Arakan. ‘We will take care of our own ethnic nationalities, but Rohingyas who came to Burma illegally are not [one] of our ethnic nationalities and we cannot accept them here’, he said. He also made a bizarre distinction between ‘Rohingya’ and ‘Bengali’, according to which the former were illegal immigrants who had arrived in Arakan after independence in 1948, and the latter those who had arrived during the colonial period, and were thus entitled to Burmese citizenship. But his stress on taking care of Burma’s ‘national races’ made implicitly clear that even the ‘Bengali’ citizens were not a priority.

The riots hardened prejudices against the Rohingya throughout Burma. It is impossible to asses with certainty how many people shared those prejudices, but the incipient Burmese public sphere was increasingly filled with anti-Rohingya news and commentaries portraying them as a demographic threat to the nation, denying both their identity and their right to live in the country. While the Rohingya were portrayed in international media as the main victims, sometimes ignoring the Rakhine, Burmese media almost invariably focused on the violence committed by the Royingya, often blaming them for things they had not done, and ignoring the discrimination they had suffered for decades. The Rohingya, or ‘Bengalis’, were not regarded as a ‘national race’, while the Rakhine were, and that coloured many perceptions of the whole crisis. There were very few dissenting voices, at least among the Burman ethnic majority or the Rakhine, and their numbers dwindled in the coming years as the situation in Arakan grew increasingly polarized. Furthermore, anti-Muslim sentiment linked to extreme forms of nationalism extended throughout Burma.

Arguably, there was only one person with enough moral authority to tackle the issue, and at least to open a debate that might have led to a different perception of the Rohingya inside the country: Aung San Suu Kyi. Many people in Burma, albeit probably not so many in Arakan, would have listened to what she said, even if it went against the official discourse voiced by a government then still dominated by the distrusted military. For a while, it was somewhat of a mystery what the position of Suu Kyi and the NLD was on the Rohingya. She generally avoided the issue, and when she addressed it her statements were ambiguous at best. She and her party had talked about democracy and human rights for years, and it was puzzling that they were silent on such flagrant violation of the rights of around a million people within the borders of her country. Many abroad assumed that her silence was due to the strategic logic of avoiding alienation from her party’s supporters by defending what seemed an utterly unpopular cause. But it soon became clear that the NLD’s thinking on the Rohingya, and on who belonged to the Burmese nation, were not too dissimilar to that of the generals.

This position was most clearly articulated by the former journalist Win Tin. He was perhaps the second most important figure in the NLD, and undoubtedly its second most popular after Aung San Suu Kyi. Here was a man of unyielding principles who never wavered in his fight against the military junta – a person who I deeply respected and admired. I had already interviewed him at length in late 2010, then in hospital a year later, and we had a cordial relationship. Then, two years after our first encounter, I met him again in his humble house. The situation had changed. Win Tin was loyal to Aung San Suu Kyi, but he was critical of her approach of getting close to the generals. For him, the military was still the enemy. Our interview was going smoothly until I touched upon the crisis in Arakan State. ‘The problem there is created by foreigners, the Bengalis. That is a problem we have had for a very long time. All the people in the country regard these people as foreigners – they are Bengalis who cross to this country, over land and by sea and by river’, he said.

He went on to repeat the official narrative denying the Rohingya identity: ‘The word “rohingya” cropped up only after, some years back, maybe thirty years, these people want to claim the land, they want to claim themselves as a race, they want to claim to be a native race, and that is not right, that is the problem.’ He also repeated a myth that is rather common in Burma. In 1978, the government launched Operation Dragon King in Arakan, with the alleged intention of detecting illegal immigrants. The heavy-handed tactics of the army and the police sent more than 200,000 Rohingya Muslim refugees into Bangladesh; but, after some international pressure, the government was obliged to accept them back. Win Tin claimed that more people returned than those who had left in the first place – a false allegation. But he also added something else: ‘What the authorities from Bangladesh did was to put beggars, prostitutes and criminals they wanted to get rid of with the so-called Rohingyas, Bengali refugees, and sent everybody to Burma.’ Finally, the solution that Win Tin proposed to the ‘Rohingya problem’ was quite similar to that suggested by President Thein Sein:

The problem is these Rohingya foreigners, and we have to contain them one way or another; something like what happened in the United States during World War II with the Japanese. The US government contained them in camps, and after the war they were sent to Japan or they could apply for citizenship. We can solve this problem that way. We cannot regard them as citizens, because they are not our citizens at all, everyone here knows that. My position is that we must not violate the human rights of these people, the Rohingya, or whatever they are. Once they are inside our land maybe we have to contain them in one place, like a camp, but we must value their human rights.

I challenged Win Tin on his views, and he grew increasingly irritated. Eventually, he abruptly interrupted our conversation and told me I had to leave, as he had visitors waiting for him. When I left, there was nobody waiting outside. We never met again, and he passed away two years later, wearing until the very end the blue shirt he used to wear while in prison as a symbolic reminder to the world that his country was not yet free. There was no doubt that he had expressed his real opinions without reservation. He was an honest man who cared deeply for his people. But that did not detract him from his racism: it was clear that the Rohingya were excluded from what he regarded as his people.

During that visit to Burma, I discovered that his opinions were far from unique within the party. They were the consensus within the NLD and the Burman pro-democracy elite. A few days later I interviewed Ko Ko Gyi, a student leader in the 1988 uprising who led a high-profile Civil Society Organization. The Rohingya ‘pretend they suffer so much’, he told me in another increasingly heated encounter. ‘If the international community [exerts] force or pressure on this Rohingya issue, it will have to face not the military government but most of our people’, he concluded. He had said on another occasion that he and the members of his organization, the 88 Generation Students, were willing to take up arms alongside the same military that had kept him behind bars for years against the ‘foreign invaders’.⁶

Like Win Tin, Ko Ko Gyi claimed to speak in the name of the majority of Burmese citizens – but no polls about the Rohingya had been conducted among a population that, until recently, had had virtually no access to reliable information even about their own country. Most Burmese had never met a member of the Rohingya community, which had been confined in northern Arakan State for decades. Far from responding to a supposed popular sentiment on which nobody could have certainty, it is more likely that these members of the prodemocracy elite were in fact contributing to the shaping of such sentiments. Voices like theirs were at least as responsible for it as were statements from the widely despised former generals who ruled the country, if not more so, as they were looked up to as heroes and listened to by many Burmese.

Ko Ko Gyi was not given the chance to fight alongside the military, but on the very same day I interviewed him he was appointed to take part in an official commission of inquiry to investigate the violence in Arakan that had taken place in June – a sure sign that an important sector of the old rebellious opposition to military rule was being absorbed into mainstream politics in the new Burma. Significantly, there was no Muslim from Arakan among the members of the commission.

Other pro-democracy activists echoed anti-Rohingya sentiments over the next few years. The few people defending the Rohingya were silenced or ostracized, or changed their minds, as the crisis worsened, the situation in Arakan growing increasingly polarized and the pressure to ‘take sides’ increasing. The largest enigma was still the silence of Aung San Suu Kyi, and I began to believe that this was due to a political calculation, but that most analysts had failed to grasp which audience she was struggling not to alienate. Her political career had been based since the beginning in 1988 on the support of the Burman public, and that of international human rights organizations and Western governments, which had led her to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, transforming her into the ‘Nelson Mandela of Asia’. If she defended the Rohingya, she risked alienating her domestic base; but attacking them would probably alienate her foreign supporters – and she needed both during the transition.

Nonetheless, she was criticized for not speaking out on the Rohingya, as she had been criticized for not speaking out on the Kachin – the most common narrative being that she had become a politician, casting aside her persona of human rights icon.⁷ In 2013 she remarked: ‘I’m always surprised when people speak as if I’ve just become a politician. I’ve been a politician all along. I started in politics not as a human rights defender or a humanitarian worker, but as the leader of a political party. And if that’s not a politician then I don’t know what is.’⁸ There was something deeply disingenuous about that statement, not least because she was introducing a false dichotomy between the exercise of politics and the defence of human rights. After all, she had told me two years previously that her idea of democracy was based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Noting the apparent consensus within her party and her ambiguity on the issue, I suspected that she was avoiding expressing her real feelings unequivocally because she did not want to be labelled abroad as a racist. Later developments, particularly after her rise to power, confirmed that suspicion. But, reading between the lines of her public statements in 2012, it was possible to glimpse her true thoughts. In an interview with an Indian newspaper in November 2012, she complained that ‘there were those who were not pleased, because they wanted me to condemn one community or the other’, when nobody had asked her to take sides between the two communities. Then she adopted an equidistant position, saying that ‘both communities have suffered human rights violations, and have also violated human rights. And human rights have been grossly mishandled in the Rakhine by the government for many decades.’⁹ She was reducing the issue to a problem of intercommunal violence poorly handled by the military junta. As on so many other occasions, she insisted on the necessity to uphold the ‘rule of law’ to solve the problem. But the most telling passage of the interview was when she was first asked about the issue, when she replied: ‘Of course we are concerned. I think in many ways the situation has been mishandled. For years I have been insisting, and the National League for Democracy also, that we have to do something about the porous border with Bangladesh because it is going to lead some day or the other to grave problems.’ Framing the issue as a problem of illegal immigration, she echoed the sentiments of Win Tin; but she expressed herself more obliquely.

After the riots in June 2012, intercommunal relations steadily deteriorated in Arakan, as a result of a campaign of virulent anti-Muslim propaganda voiced by local Buddhist monks’ associations and the RNDP. Several organizations had distributed pamphlets among the Rakhine population warning them of the danger posed by the ‘Bengali invaders’, and calling them to avoid any interactions with their Rohingya neighbours. A statement released on 9 July by the monks’ association of Mrauk-U, the ancient capital of the Arakanese kingdom, read:

The Arakanese people must understand that Bengalis want to destroy the land of Arakan, are eating Arakan rice and plan to exterminate Arakanese people and use their money to buy weapons to kill Arakanese people. For this reason and from today, no Arakanese should sell any goods to Bengalis, hire Bengalis as workers, provide any food to Bengalis and have any dealings with them, as they are cruel by nature.¹⁰

Such calls were heeded by many in the Rakhine population, often with chilling zeal. In some parts of the state, those Rakhine who were discovered dealing with the Rohingya were publicly humiliated, and their pictures posted in Facebook. A picture dated in August, supposedly taken in Myebon, showed a man with his hands tied being paraded in the town with a placard hanging around his neck with a sign reading: ‘I am a traitor and a slave of Kalar’ – a derogatory term often used to refer to people of South Asian origin.¹¹

The central government was doing very little to improve intercommunal relations in the state. In late August, Thein Sein sent a report to the country’s parliament that was leaked to Agence France-Press. It read: ‘Political parties, some monks and some individuals are increasing the ethnic hatred. They even approach and lobby both the domestic and overseas [Rakhine] community … [Rakhine] people are continuously thinking to terrorise the Bengali Muslims living across the country.’¹² But the government did not take any measures to stop or counter such hate speech. The report may have been accurate, but it was also self-serving, as it contributed to the larger narrative of a primeval intercommunal hatred between the two communities that the government was striving to control, but could not eliminate. It also suppressed the role that the central government was playing in stoking those hatreds.

During the violence in June, Zaw Htay, the director of the president’s office, had posted on Facebook: ‘It is heard that Rohingya terrorists of the so-called Rohingya Solidarity Organization [ARNO] are crossing the border and getting into the country with the weapons. That is Rohingyas from other countries are coming into the country. Since our Military has got the news in advance, we will eradicate them until the end! I believe we are already doing it.’¹³ None of it was true. ARNO, a Rohingya armed group that had operated from Bangladesh in the nineties and had been inactive for decades, never made any incursion into Arakan, and no armed Rohingya crossed from Bangladesh. But the Facebook post served to confirm the fears of a terrorist assault expressed by the Buddhist monks I had interviewed in my first visit to Sittwe.

The narrative of an intractable intercommunal conflict and a government trying its best to solve it was convenient not only for the Thein Sein administration, but also for Western countries trying to establish relations with Burma. The United States was at the forefront of initiatives to end the isolation of Burma, as part of its ‘pivot to Asia’, designed to counterbalance China’s growing power in the region. After her visit in December 2011, Hillary Clinton claimed some credit for nurturing ‘flickers of progress into a real opening’ in the country.¹⁴

Then, in November 2012, Barack Obama became the first US president to visit the country, in a brief trip to Rangoon during which he gave his blessings to the transition. He gave a speech at Rangoon University, a traditional hotbed of student protests since colonial times. He defended the Rohingya, saying that they ‘hold themselves – hold within themselves the same dignity as you do, and I do’. But he also praised ‘the government’s commitment to address the issues of injustice and accountability, and humanitarian access and citizenship’.¹⁵

There was no reason to believe that the government had any serious intention to address such issues. On the contrary, its policies had contributed to worsening the situation in Arakan. At the very least, they had failed to prevent a second wave of violence only three weeks before Obama’s visit; but the US president refused to call out the Burmese government on this score.

The strict segregation of the two communities imposed after the riots in June had the stated purpose of preventing further violence, but had the perverse effect of making the rumours of nefarious Muslim plots seem more credible to the Rakhine. In many areas of the state ignorance grew within each community about the other; with intercommunal interactions reduced to a minimum, or even completely nonexistent in some areas, it had become more difficult to see the members of the other community as human individuals. On the contrary, they were feared as part of an undifferentiated mass.

Then, in late October, violence exploded throughout the state once again. On this occasion, it spread more widely than in June, encompassing several townships in central Arakan that had been spared in the past. The violence unfolded as a series of attacks on Muslim villages and quarters in nine of the seventeen townships in the state.¹⁶ By all accounts, the violence was mostly carried out by Rakhine mobs against Muslims. Moreover, this time there was a much higher level of coordination and organization than in June.¹⁷

The violence unfolded in various ways, depending on the location, but a common pattern would emerge in later investigations: a Rakhine mob would gather around a Muslim village or quarter and, after shouting insults and threats, attack it by throwing Molotov cocktails and jinglees (small arrows made with bicycle spikes and launched with slingshots). Many witnesses, both Muslim and Rakhine, reported that they could not recognize most of the attackers, indicating they had been taken from other areas. As in June, the police stood aside, or participated actively in the attacks against the Muslims. When the riots finished, many Muslim settlements had been razed to the ground again; an indeterminate number of people (mostly Muslims) had been killed, including around seventy in a single incident in Mrauk-U; and approximately 30,000 had been displaced from their houses, most of them Muslims.

I travelled to Arakan for the second time shortly after the October riots. On that occasion, I was able to travel to Kyaukpyu, on Ramree Island, with the Wan Lark Foundation, a local organization delivering donations to Rakhine people displaced by the violence. On the edge of the town lies the Muslim quarter, East Pikesake, which had been turned into a devastated landscape of debris and burnt trees, with the ashes of arson still covering the roads and what was left of the houses.¹⁸ The destruction was almost completely limited to the Muslim quarter, with only a few houses beyond its margins destroyed.

Local Rakhine witnesses alleged that the Muslims had initiated the attack, so I asked them why only Muslim houses had been burnt. They replied that the Muslims had torched their own homes before fleeing in boats. That night, in the hostel where we stayed, a young member of the organization proudly showed me a video of Rakhine people of all ages training with sticks to the tune of a patriotic song. ‘We have to protect ourselves’, said an older member, visibly embarrassed that I had been allowed to see those images. Then he changed his tune, somewhat contradicting himself: ‘But this is just for show, it’s not real training.’

In the Muslim camps around Sittwe there were many recently arrived refugees, and they were telling a very different story. According to most accounts, it was they who had been attacked; and while their houses were burning, the fire brigade had stayed outside the perimeter of the Muslim quarter, only trying to stop the fires from spreading to the houses of Buddhists.

It was very difficult to ascertain exactly what had happened from the contradictory accounts. But the notion that the Muslims would torch their own houses – a trope often repeated in Burma – supposedly to get access to the camps and the international aid they would receive there, seemed absurd. It fitted too neatly into the preconceived discourse circulated by many Rakhine of the Rohingya as abject ‘beggars’. People holding these views seemed to think that Muslims in the camps were well provided for, but very few Rakhine ever set foot there. Complete segregation, again, nourished stories about the other group that served to further demonize it.

While it was difficult to find out with certainty what had happened during the violence, it was clear that the authorities were dispensing very different treatment to the displaced from the different communities. Most of the displaced Rakhine in Kyaukpyu had been sheltered in a Buddhist monastery, Than Pyu, while others stayed in the houses of relatives and friends. There were 150 people sheltered in the monastery, and the government had sent two military doctors and two nurses to attend to them.

In contrast, healthcare was woefully inadequate in the vast zone of camps for Muslims near Sittwe. According to IDPs in one of the camps, the government sent just one doctor once a week, and he only provided paracetamol to treat any ailment. In Tat Kal Pyin, a village surrounded by a camp, there was a makeshift clinic staffed by seven volunteers from Rangoon who were overstretched attending hundreds of patients every day. Some international NGOs, including Médecins Sans Frontières, were visiting the camps, but they were facing hostility from the local Rakhine population, and could not go every day. At that stage, aid in the camps was not yet well organized, and Muslim people in the camps were dying of preventable diseases. Malnutrition was also rife.

The violence in October had not only affected the Rohingya. Most of the Muslim victims, particularly in Kyaukpyu and Myebon, but also in other townships, had been Kaman – a Muslim ethnic group that arrived in Burma in the late seventeenth century and that, in contrast to the Rohingya, is officially recognized as one of Burma’s 135 ‘national races’. As citizens, the Kaman had until then been able to participate in Burma’s social and political life, but they were starting to share the fate of the Rohingya. Among the Kaman affected by the violence was Khin Shwe, a forty-six-year-old mathematician who had until then been the only Muslim professor at Sittwe University. She was originally from the township of Pauktaw, where she found herself during the riots in October. When the violence broke out, she tried to escape in a commercial boat, but the army did not allow her to embark, alleging that it was not safe for her. She then decided to take one of the rickety boats that Muslims were using to flee what was virtually a war zone. The boat sank on the way to Sittwe, and thirty-eight of its fifty passengers perished, including her. One of the survivors was her younger brother, Mohammed, who I spoke to in one of the camps in Sittwe, where he told me what had happened to her.

Khin Mar Saw was another Kaman woman displaced by the violence. This small, dignified forty-two-year-old woman hailed from the devastated quarter in Kyaukpyu I had seen a few days before. She had previously worked as a clerk in the local police station, but during the violence in June, feeling unsafe, she decided to take leave, and moved with her two children to Shan State, in the north of the country, where she had some relatives. She returned in October, thinking that the situation in Arakan had calmed down. A few days later her neighbourhood was in flames. When she was fleeing, she was told by a cousin that her son had been shot while he was trying to put out the flames in the local mosque. While I was interviewing her, her husband was on a beach near Sittwe with other displaced people. They had been stranded there, surrounded by the military, for days. Bursting into tears, she asked me how she and her family could get asylum in Europe. ‘We Muslims have no future in this country anymore’, she said.

A few months before, when I had visited Sittwe for the first time, Rakhine ethno-nationalists had been adamant that they did not have any problem with Muslim people, only with ‘Bengali’ people, pointing out that there had not been any clash with Kaman people. After the violence in October, they would say that Kaman had the right to stay in Arakan, but that many of them were ‘fake Kaman’, and in fact ‘illegal Bengali immigrants’ who had somehow managed to bribe officers to obtain documents. It seemed that the circle of the ‘undesirable’ population had been widened from a specific ethnic group to include all members of the Muslim religion. And that circle would be widened even further in the coming months, extending beyond the mountains that mark the border between Arakan and the rest of the country.