Читать книгу The Burmese Labyrinth - Carlos Sardiña Galache - Страница 14

5

The Counted and the Excluded

The census is one of the main instruments the state has to shape the nation, as well as to control its populations. In many senses, the Burmese nation is still a work in progress. Seven decades after independence, many members of the ethnic minorities still feel little allegiance to an overall Burmese identity they see as a project of Burman supremacy. During the Thein Sein period, the state was undergoing a crucial transformation in which, in 2014, the government decided to carry out a nationwide census. The way of classifying the population, particularly its ethnic make-up, would not be merely descriptive, but would have far-reaching political consequences. The list of ethnic categories had been elaborated by the military regime long before, and would potentially contribute to shaping the political voice of its varied population. According to the 2008 Constitution, political representation is based largely on ethnicity, and dividing or conflating ethnic groups could alter the balance of power between the various communities, at both the national and the local levels. The census was bound to create winners and losers, and nobody would lose more than those who were excluded.

It was the first census conducted in Burma since 1983. This was a very long gap, as in most countries censuses are conducted every ten years. It was possible that, with its stringent registration rules, the military junta that had ruled the country since 1988 already had some figures on the Burmese population; but it had never conducted a public, nationwide survey. The fact that it did not bother to do so for all those years could indicate indifference – the generals seemed more keen on cementing their power, strengthening the army and filling their pockets – but it also betrays the incapacities of a state that is extremely authoritarian but highly disfunctional in many aspects.

In the months ahead of the 2014 census, there was a campaign throughout the country presenting it as an exercise of civic duty and part of a common project of nation-building beyond political divisions. The famous comedian and pro-democracy activist Zarganar, who had spent years in prison for his anti-junta activities but had played an increasingly official role during the transition, was appointed ‘census ambassador’, and toured the country for three weeks. One of the activities involved the public shouting and holding signs with the official census slogan, ‘Nation-wide census – let’s all participate!’ for as long as possible in a competition to win an official census tee shirt or cap.¹

The census was conducted by what was then called the Union of Myanmar Ministry of Immigration and Population, with the technical assistance of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), which also distributed most of the funding provided by donor countries, including Australia and the United Kingdom.² In the climate of international optimism about the ‘democratic transition’ in the country, the UN and the donor countries supported the census, alleging that it was necessary for the development of that new Burma so many people wanted to believe was being born. To this end, the UNFPA even ignored its own rule for conducting censuses only during times of peace. The peace process between several ethnic armed groups and the government was extremely fragile, and the war was still raging in Kachin State, with sporadic flareups in other areas. Eventually, the census was not conducted in the areas of Kachin State controlled by the KIO,³ or in some townships in Karen State. According to the government, 46,600 people were not enumerated in Kachin, and 69,753 were left out in Karen.

There were dozens of questions in the census, but the most sensitive was that of ethnicity, or race – concepts often difficult to distinguish in the Burmese context. The Burmese word, lumyo literally means ‘type of people’, and is used indistinctly for both. In common usage, lumyo implies closed groups of descent not only with a common culture and language, but also with common physical and psychological features. In a country plagued by several violent ethnic and intercommunal conflicts, most of which are unresolved and some even deteriorating, there was fear that the census question relating to ethnicity risked exacerbating those conflicts, and some organizations even suggested dropping it altogether.⁴

There were several problems with the question. The respondents could only identify themselves with one ethnic group, so the final result did not reflect the fact that many Burmese are of mixed descent. Also, the list of groups was large, but closed. It was based on a more than two-decades-old classification of 135 ‘indigenous races’ (taingyinthar lumyo), with the possibility of choosing ‘other lumyo’, which, by definition, meant foreign. If ethnicity is a social construct, in this case the government classification imposed a state-directed construct of categories that reflected poorly the complex and fluid realities of ethnic allegiances in the country, and undermined the wishes of many people on how to identify themselves.

Again, this contravened the standards of the UN, whose Principles and Recommendations for Population and Housing Censuses, published by the United Nations Statistics Division, recommends that categories should not be fixed. Moreover, the classification of 135 groups was not accepted by the representatives of many ethnic groups. There are two tiers in the classification: eight ‘major races’, the Burman and the seven groups from which the seven states in the country take their names (Mon, Rakhine for Arakan, Kachin, Chin, Shan, Kayah for Karen, and Kayin for Karenni); and 135 ‘subgroups’ living in those states and subsumed in the ‘major races’ in a way that was often arbitrary and seldom reflected how people identify themselves.

Some subgroups are only geographically related to the major races of which they are supposedly a part – such as, for instance, the Wa, who live in Shan state but have little relation to the Shan ethnic group. In other cases, the subgroups would be better characterized as tribes or clans of the ‘major races’, like the Kachin subgroups (with the possible exception of the Lisu). In the case of the Chin, the major race had been divided into fifty-three different subgroups – a division that many Chin leaders regard as false.⁵ In at least one case, one group was under two different ‘major races’: the Mro are a subgroup of the Rakhine in Arakan, and a subgroup of the Chin (to whom are really related) with another name (Wakim) in Chin State.

Not unsurprisingly, civil society leaders, intellectuals and politicians of most ethnic groups protested against such classification, alleging that it had been created artificially to split and distort the political representation of the minorities.⁶ On top of that, and given that it was the enumerators who would fill in the forms without the respondents being able to check that it had been done correctly, there was ample room for mistakes and manipulation.

A few months after the census, the government announced that it would not release the data on ethnicity until after the election. It alleged that it was too technically complex to do it quickly⁷ – though it is more likely that it feared the findings might provoke further conflict that it could not manage. At the time of writing – years later and with another government in charge – the results are still unknown. Nevertheless, Min Aung Hlaing, the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, gave a speech on October 2016 commemorating the nationwide ceasefire signed with eight armed groups, in which he revealed very precise statistics about Shan State and Kachin State. It turned out that, in Kachin State, out of a total population of 1.6 million, the Kachin were less than 50 per cent. It is unclear if that was a veiled warning to the Kachin nationalists and the KIO, who had not signed the ceasefire yet; but for some served to confirm old allegations that the government had been pursuing plans to dilute the Kachin population in their own state.

The results of the census that proved to be far less sensitive than expected were those on religion, released two years later, in July 2016. There was some fear that intercommunal violence could flare again if the new figures showed a marked growth in the Muslim population since 1983. But a quick look at the last three censuses showed clearly that, if Buddhism were under threat in Burma, Islam would be an unlikely menace. According to the 2014 census, there were 2,237,495 Muslims in the country, comprising 4.3 per cent of the total population, while Buddhists comprised around 87.9 per cent. In both the 1973 and 1983 censuses, Muslims accounted for 3.9 per cent of the population, and Buddhists for 88.8 and 89.4 per cent, respectively.⁸ Meanwhile, the Christian population grew from 4.6 per cent in 1973 and 4.9 per cent in 1983 to 6.3 per cent in 2014.⁹ According to the 2014 census, the total population in Burma was 51,486,253 (including those not enumerated, but excluding many among the up to 4 million migrants in neighbouring countries). The total population in 1983 was 35,307,913. The total population had grown by 45.8 per cent, the Buddhist population by 43.9 per cent, the Christian population by 83.4 per cent, and the Muslim population by 62.5 per cent. But the higher growth of the Muslim population was due to that of Arakan, as we shall see below. The Muslim population elsewhere in Burma – a total of 1,118,764 – grew by 40.9 per cent, from 793,950 in 1983, which was a lower rate than any other religious group, and lower than the overall growth rate of the country as a whole. But, while these data disproved the notion of a Muslim threat voiced by Buddhist ultra-nationalists, the prevalence of anti-Muslim rhetoric did not change after the results were announced.

The most problematic aspect of the census was the Rohingya issue. The Rohingya are not included in the list of 135 ‘national races’, as only those ethnic groups that were allegedly settled in Burma before the beginning of the colonial period in 1824 are regarded as taingyinthar, and the official narrative on the Rohingya claims that they arrived later, as labourers from Bengal during the colonial period – and some even later still, as illegal immigrants after Burma’s independence in 1948. Thus, the term ‘Rohingya’ itself is rejected in Burma, on the assumption that it is a recent invention by which the ‘Bengalis’ have contrived an indigenous identity in order to gain political rights to which, as ‘foreigners’, they are not entitled.

Meanwhile, Rohingya activists and politicians allege that their presence in Burma, and the term Rohingya itself, pre-date the arrival of the British by several centuries, and that they are as indigenous as any of the other 135 ‘national races’. In principle, the question of whether the Rohingya are taingyinthar or not should not by itself determine their citizenship status; but the distinction between taingyinthar and citizenship had become increasingly blurred in public discourse. This issue acquired more prominence than ever after the sectarian violence in 2012; by the time of the census, a seemingly academic debate on the Rohingyas’ place in the history of Arakan had become a matter of life and death.