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Introduction: Trapped in the Burmese Labyrinth

How can we understand the violence and turmoil in Burma during most of the last decade, particularly the brutal ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority living in the west of the country? This has been a period of profound political and social changes in the country. Since 2011, the military junta that had ruled for decades has dissolved itself, the army loosened its tight grip on power, and initiated a carefully managed transition to a pseudo-democratic system. As a consequence, while maintaining considerable control over the state apparatus, the military allowed a degree of opening that resulted in new freedoms that the Burmese had not enjoyed for decades.

I visited the country for the first time in late 2010, only a few months before the change of regime, and travelled there often as a journalist in subsequent years to cover the transformations brought by the transition. It was an exciting time to work on the country, and I was able to visit areas hitherto out of limits and interview people who had been virtually silent, or silenced, for decades. At times, reporting on such changes gave one a heady feeling of discovery, but this excitement was often tempered by the cold realities of a nation that continued to be in turmoil: war, murderous intercommunal conflict, and deep-seated hatreds being expressed openly, which were ultimately acted upon in the most brutal manner.

This was most starkly seen in 2012, when sectarian violence erupted in the impoverished state of Arakan, in the west of the country. The conflict was between the Rohingya community and the state’s majority, the Buddhist Rakhine. Dozens, possibly hundreds, were killed as mobs from one community fell upon the other. Entire neighbourhoods were razed to the ground; tens of thousands lost their houses, seeking refuge in camps for internally displaced persons. The Rohingya, who had been severely oppressed by the military for decades, bore the brunt of the violence, and it soon emerged that the security forces had often sided with the Rakhine mobs attacking them.

The Rohingya were clearly the main victims, but that was not how they were seen by many in Burma. There is a widespread perception in the country that the Rohingya constitute a foreign threat to be contained at all costs. In the years following 2012, anti-Rohingya sentiment increased throughout the country, and the government dramatically ramped up the policies of exclusion and apartheid they had imposed for decades. In 2017, this culminated in the violent ethnic cleansing of more than three-fifths of the Rohingya population by the Burmese military.

A few weeks after the 2012 riots I visited Sittwe, Arakan state’s capital, and interviewed several people from both communities. I saw how whole quarters had been destroyed, and witnessed the misery in the camps where most Rohingya from the city had been confined – and still are. At that time, the National League for Democracy (NLD) – the party led by Aung San Suu Kyi, the revered leader of the pro-democracy opposition during the dark years of dictatorship – had placed a few MPs in parliament in a by-election held a few months before, including Suu Kyi herself. The party had little weight in parliament, but everybody expected it to dominate following the next general election, as indeed it did. I had met and interviewed some members of the party, including its leader, and felt a deep sympathy and respect for their struggle. Admittedly, their politics were somewhat vague, the personality cult around Suu Kyi seemed excessive, and the party was lacking in internal democracy. But those were traits I and many others were willing to overlook or explain away as stemming from the tremendous challenges it faced in its fight against the military dictatorship. Nevertheless, the party’s commitment to human rights and dignity seemed beyond doubt. It was, therefore, a shock when I enquired about the crisis in Arakan, and found almost invariably that NLD members shared the same assumptions about the Rohingya as Rakhine nationalists, government officials and, by all indications, large sections of Burmese society.

Understanding the roots of those prejudices became a sort of obsession for me, and for the next years it would be the main focus of my work. How could people who had made great sacrifices in the name of freedom, human rights and democracy harbour such hatred against a vulnerable and persecuted minority? Why had a beleaguered minority like the Rohingya come to be so reviled, and even feared, by so many people in the country? And, probably most centrally, how had national and ethnic identities come to be construed in the country?

The answers to these questions might explain how some of the horrors I had covered could possibly have happened. Of course, understanding violence and racial hatred does not mean condoning or justifying them. On the contrary, I believe that understanding the sources of such hatred and the barbarity to which it may lead is a moral endeavour and a precondition of fighting it. Sometimes the savagery to which those racial hatreds lead is impossible to comprehend. The cruelty many Rohingya have suffered defies language and logic, as it comes from the darkest depths of the human soul. But such hatred and savagery are only activated and made ‘permissible’ in a certain combination of circumstances. If we are to have any hope of understanding such behaviour, we need to investigate those circumstances – historical, social, political and psychological. To find answers to all those questions, it is necessary to look beyond Arakan, to other conflicts in Burma that at first sight might seem detached from what has happened there.

When the first wave of sectarian violence was sweeping Arakan in June 2012, I happened to be several hundreds of kilometres to the north-east, in the hills of Kachin state. I was in the territory along the Chinese border controlled by the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), an ethnoationalist armed group that had been fighting the Burmese military (known as the Tatmadaw) intermittently for five decades in the cause of selfdetermination for the Kachin people, a mostly Christian ethnic group. One year before, a precarious ceasefire between the two armies that had lasted for seventeen years had been broken, and the state was at war again. I had travelled there to report on the protracted conflict, which had displaced tens of thousands from their homes. The Kachin were hospitable hosts, and they went to great lengths to explain why they wanted independence, or at least autonomy, for their Kachin land, and why they did not regard themselves as belonging to the same nation as the Burmans – the most numerous and dominant ethnic group in the country.

But the KIA was not the only ethno-nationalist group fighting the government. Throughout Burma’s short history as an independent nation-state, many others had fought Burman domination. The Shan, the Karen, the Wa, the Mon, the Karenni, the Chin, the Rakhine and the Rohingya themselves – virtually every ethnic group in the country – have all at some point produced an armed insurgency, and some were still active during the transition. As a result, large areas of the country’s borderlands are beyond the control of the central state. At the beginning of the transition, more than six decades after independence, the project of building a Burmese nation looked very much like a failure.

One year later, in 2013, a new wave of intercommunal violence erupted, this time in the plains of Central Burma. Angry Buddhist mobs attacked Muslim quarters in several towns and cities. The violence was not directed at the Rohingya – a group the overwhelming majority of Muslims outside Arakan do not belong to – but at Muslims in general, both for their religion and for not being regarded as Burmese. The violence had been partly incited by extremist Buddhist monks expounding a hateful brand of nationalism, who had spread a variety of paranoid theories about the threat of an Islamic conspiracy to take over the country. Those extremist monks were at the forefront of a succession of ultranationalist movements that came to play a prominent role in Burmese politics during the transition, largely dictating the terms of public debate.

These issues – the plight of Rohingya, the wars in the borderlands (especially involving the Kachin), and a sometimes deadly Buddhist ultranationalism deploying very narrow criteria about who belongs in the country – constitute the main threads traced in this book. These three problems have usually been analysed separately, or the anti-Muslim violence in central Burma has been understood as a mere extension of the anti-Rohingya violence in Arakan – and, while each has its own specific dynamic and history, the three phenomena cannot be completely separated. In many ways they are interconnected, often feeding each other. All of them pertain to notions of belonging and nationalism, and to the ways in which these forces have shaped a country perpetually at war with itself.

This is one of the reasons why this book devotes more space to the conflict in Arakan and to the Rohingya than to other issues in the country. The liminal case of the ‘excluded’ is symptomatic of how the Burmese define themselves; every nationalism is just as concerned with who belongs to the nation as it is with who does not. The conflict in Arakan and the exclusion of the Rohingya thus serve to throw light on conflicts elsewhere in Burma.

The structure of this book reproduces the way I have approached Burma over the years, as a journalist covering contemporary developments, but often diverted to a study of the past in an attempt to find clues to its present enigmas.

Part I covers the period between the beginning of the democratic opening in 2011 to the election in 2015, which the NLD won by a landslide. The year 2011 was a dramatic turning point in the country’s recent history, which in many ways seemed to be a new beginning for a country that had suffered several false starts since its independence in 1948. It was a period in which the speed of history seemed to have been accelerated after decades of apparent stagnation under the military dictatorship. It is during this period that the immediate causes of the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya, as well as the resumption of the war in Kachin state or the emergence of Buddhist ultra-nationalism, are broadly to be found, though their historical roots are of course deeper.

In Part II I rely mostly on secondary sources. It is an attempt to explain the history of the territory that we know as Burma in order to illuminate how that past affects the present, as well as how it has been interpreted, and often manipulated, for present political purposes. I rely here almost exclusively on secondary sources.

Part III takes up the narrative pursued in Part I, covering the period from late 2015 to 2019. During this time, while Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD were in power, the war continued in Kachin State and the Rohingya suffered a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing at the hands of the military, pushing a majority of them into neighbouring Bangladesh.

I do not believe that Burma’s past has determined its present in a mechanical, inflexible way. Many trends could have gone in other directions if chance and free human choices had been different. History is not characterized by an ineluctable fate beyond the control of its protagonists; but it does largely condition the sorts of choices available to them. As Karl Marx famously wrote: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.’

The title of this book pays homage to The Spanish Labyrinth, written by the British author Gerald Brennan in the aftermath of the biggest tragedy that hit my country in the twentieth century: the civil war that ravaged Spain between 1936 and 1939, leading to four decades of National–Catholic dictatorship. Brennan wrote on the background of the war, attempting to make sense of how a country that fascinated him so much had sunk to such depths of savagery. The book became a classic of Spanish studies in my country and abroad, and its translation was widely, and clandestinely, circulated in Spain during the years of Francoist dictatorship. Like Brennan, I write about a country that is not mine, but that I have come to feel close to, in spite of the huge cultural differences it has from my own, and the sadness I may feel about its many tragedies.

It seems to me that Burma, like many other countries, is trapped in its own labyrinth – a labyrinth composed of wars, dangerous delusions, unaddressed grievances, furious hatreds and power structures that leave most of its inhabitants impoverished in virtually every sense. The Burmese people are trying to find their way out of that maze, and if they seem to be unable to find the exit, it is precisely because many of them are trapped inside and can see only its confining walls, and not its overall shape. In this book, I try to offer both a sense of how different people see things from inside such a labyrinth, by giving voice to the people I have interviewed over the years, and a general vision of the historical, cultural, social and political forces that have shaped it.

Brennan was not Spanish, and I am not Burmese. When I read Brennan’s book, I often felt that there were things he just did not understand – that only a Spaniard could possibly appreciate; some of his generalizations annoyed me at times. I can imagine that any Burmese reading this book may have similar feelings, and I can only apologise in advance, and assure them that I have tried my best to understand the country. But at his best moments, it was precisely Brennan’s detachment that produced insights that only a foreigner, seeing things ‘from outside’, could offer. That is partly why his book remains readable seven decades after its publication. This book is written from a similar position of detachment – but one that does not represent any attempt to be ‘neutral’. Most conflicts in Burma, particularly in Arakan, revolve around clashes of historical narratives, and my intention is not to present the versions of ‘all sides’ without critically examining them. Ultimately, the motivation of this book is the hope of adding something of value, however small, to the collective endeavour of mapping the Burmese labyrinth. My hope is that this endeavour might help all the people of Burma to cast off the dead weight of history.