War On Women And Minorities In Colonial And
Post-Colonial Burma – Analysis
Rudyard Kipling remarked in
From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches, “This is Burma and it will be quite
unlike any other land you will know about.” 1 The country indeed has a unique
history that has shaped its fiercely independent and authoritarian governments.
Perpetual existential threats have created strong ethnic paranoia among the
Burmese establishment that has recently culminated in brutal repression of
minorities, particularly females.
Burma has had to fight off Chinese
and Mongol incursions from the porous northeast border for countless centuries.
2 Lavish monuments, such as the gold-plated, 76-carat diamond-topped Shwedagon
Pagoda, have made Chinese emperors and generals salivate at the nation’s myriad
natural resources, as well as the strategic Irrawaddy River, which flows from
China to the Indian Ocean, utilized in ancient times as part of the
Southwestern Silk Road. 3
The British likewise felt awe at the
boundless potential of Burma. Not only did Burma contain troves of valuable
metals and minerals, but rice paddies and teak. By the late 1930s, Burma would
come to produce 40% of the world’s rice exports. 4 The nation-spanning
Irrawaddy River could serve as an extremely convenient transit hub between
China and British India. As Secretary of State for (British) India, Lord
Cranborne, aka Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, remarked in 1867 that, “It
is of primary importance that no other European power insert itself between
British Burmah [sic] and China… The country itself is of no great importance.
But an easy communication with the multitudes who inhabit western China is an
object of national importance.” 5 Burma was a potential imperial super-highway.
Thus, Britain proceeded to
forcefully annex, in three stages, the various states of Burma between 1824 and
1886. Various British officers stationed in India, such as Rudyard Kipling and
George Orwell, moved east to administer the new territory. The colonial
government quickly turned Burma into a commodity state. Burmese farmers were
producing more and more rice, but they couldn’t keep up with the rising tax
rate. As a result, half of all arable land was defaulted on by 1936, leaving
them in the hands of British financiers. 6 Along with the taxes, Britain
economically enslaved Burma by keeping them in the dark about
industrialization, allowing the resource-rich nation to only produce raw
materials and food. The colonial government thus set up tariffs that gave
British companies a monopoly on the Burmese market; thus, any modern gadgets
desired or needed by the Burmese had to be bought at an exorbitant markup from
these foreign companies. 7 These economic tactics of colonial subjugation had
already been well tested and established in neighboring colony India 8 and
would lead to substantial and lasting poverty in both India and Burma.
Additionally, this would lead to a culture in Burmese governance that
emphasizes economic exploitation over the rights of minority groups.
Kachin
History
The Kachin people of northern Burma
have always been largely independent, naturally isolated by their mountains.
Kachin’s historical homeland is sandwiched in between China to the north and
the Bamar homeland to the south. As such, the Kachin people were frequently
consulted by Chinese and Bamar kings and generals whenever they planned to
invade the other; Kachin was also renowned for its mercenaries. 9 Due to this
respect for the Kachin state’s military significance, it was largely left
alone, up until the British colonial conquests of the 1800s. Even after Britain
officially completed its conquest of Burma, they still had to fight for control
of the hardy Kachin state. Britain’s colonial army launched a brutal
anti-guerilla campaign in northern Burma to finally force the Kachin into
submission. 10 60 years after Britain took control over most of the Bamar
kingdom, the colonial army had to resort to mass executions, burning entire
villages, branding thousands of suspects and deploying 32,000 troops to conquer
the sparse, quaint Kachin state. 11 Their wide-scale destruction of rebel
villages would set the template for the current repression of the Kachin.
Christianity followed the colonists and Kachin state became a Christian
stronghold, thus creating another cultural barrier between the reclusive state
and greater Burma. 12
Rohingya
History
By contrast, the Burmese Muslims
(Rohingya) presiding in the western province of Rakhine (formerly called
Arakan) were protected by the British colonial government. Rakhine’s
inhabitants have been traced back to the 9th century AD. 13 It became
increasingly Islamic starting in the 1400s, but was nonetheless very tolerant
towards Hindus & Buddhists. 14 Rakhine straddles the Bay of Bengal on its
western border, so many Arabs, Afghans and other Muslims would migrate to
Rakhine over the centuries as sailors, mercenaries or merchants, but most
Muslims were native converts or converts from Bengal, with whom they shared a
porous border. According to a famed court poet from the Arakan Kingdom, Shah
Aloal, “The Muslim population of Arakan consisted roughly of four categories,
namely, the Bengali, other Indian, Afro-Asian [Middle Eastern] and native.
Among these four categories of the Muslims the Bengali Muslims formed the
largest part of the total Muslim population of Arakan. The inflow of the
captive Muslims from Lower Bengal contributed much to the ever-increasing Bengali
Muslims in the Arakanese kingdom.” 15 Currently, Muslims comprise 29% of
Rakhine State. 16 However, they comprise as much as 95% in Taung Pyo Tat Wal
District, or 92% in Maung Daw, the third most populous of Rakhine’s districts.
17 It’s important to understand the history of Rohingya citizenship in what is
now Burma to grasp the government’s current stance on the Muslim population in
Rakhine.
The Rakhine kingdom became
completely autonomous from Bengal and its other neighbors by 1531, taking
advantage of Mughal India’s invasion of Bengal. Rakhine enjoyed business and
diplomatic relations with Portugal, Afghanistan and the Arab Middle East for
centuries. However, they always had a tepid relationship with the Bamar
kingdom. The Bamar under King Bodawpaya invaded and conquered Rakhine in 1784.
18 It was a bloody conquest; the Bamar killed a sizable percentage of the
population and many of the survivors became refugees in neighboring Bengal. 19
Among those who remained, Bodawpaya enslaved over 20,000. 20 By default,
Britain then assumed control of Rakhine after claiming victory in the First
Burmese War in 1826. They encouraged countless starving and war-displaced
Rohingyas to establish roots in Rakhine. 21 Buddhist Burma came to deeply
resent the Muslims as abettors of their colonial subjugation. This animosity
was amplified during World War II when British loyalist Rohingyas were caught
spying on the liberating Japanese for Britain. 22 The WWII schism created
further distrust between the Rohingyas and the Burmese government.
Post-Colonial
Era
This colonial history has largely
shaped the current ethnic conflicts that plague the country today. After Burma
gained independence from Britain in 1948, the new political entity sought to
rally around the Buddhist majority. Burmese culture was officially promoted
over those of minorities and Buddhism was declared the state religion in 1961.
This led to the formation of the Kachin Independence Organization, enforced by
the complementary Kachin Independence Army. 23 The Burmese government has been
at war with the KIO, almost unabated, ever since. Burma’s junta fights the
Kachin not just for power, but for their huge reservoirs of gold, jade and
timber, as well as the commercial route that Kachin provides between China and
greater Burma. 24 Monolithic China has replaced the British Empire as the main
external actor in the economy of Burma, 25 but countless other nations play a
part in the current era of globalized markets, increasingly including the US.
From 2012 to 2013, the US rewarded the junta for undertaking democratic reforms
(establishing a civilian government) by opening up imports to Burma and
increasing the purchase of exports: in the span of this one year, US to imports
went from literally nothing to $29.9 million and exports increased by $80
million. 26 During that same span of time, tourism to Burma literally doubled,
from about 1 million to 2 million. 27 Inter-Asian and international dollars
directly fuel the conflict.
The
Kachin Plight
Since the Burmese Army broke the
cease-fire agreement with the KIA in June of 2011, they have unleashed a brutal
war against the Kachin people. There are wide scale reports of endemic human
rights abuses being committed by government forces. Villagers are frequently
enslaved, also referred to as “portering”, by troops. 28 Comprised of mostly
women, children and the elderly, these slaves are forced to act as minesweepers
and human mules for army supplies. Female porters often became sex slaves,
additionally. This doesn’t stop troops from preying on local women to
gang-rape. KWAT has documented the rapes of girls from the age of 9 to women as
old as 50. In one documented case, soldiers from the 37th Battalion troops gang
raped and then killed 39 year old Ma Kaw, alongside her 17 year old daughter,
Ma Lu. 29 This endemic sexual violence is supported by and also perpetrated by
senior military officials. Two young women in Myitkyina, Kachin’s capital, were
raped in public by multiple officers. The Burmese military’s official policy of
mass rape was explicitly stated to Mansai villager Kai Nu, who was told by
troops that, “they have been ordered to rape women.” Porters, activists and
other villagers are also subject to indiscriminate torture. 30 One porter, when
professing innocence and pleading with his torturer, was told, “villagers and
KIA are one so you should be beaten.” Murder is also common, especially amongst
victims of rape and torture. Army shooting rampages often plague villagers,
such as on December 6, 2011 by Lung Bum Hkaraw Ravine, where 200 Burmese troops
launched a sneak attack on 34 villagers, killing 3 and wounding more. 31 In the
Kachin state, the enemy and the people are one and the same.
The
Rohingya Plight
Rohingyas are also official targets
for oppression. Burma doesn’t recognize them as citizens, despite their
documented presence in Rakhine going back to at least the 9th century AD. Even
Burmese human rights advocate and Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi has refused
to acknowledge the validity of the Rohingyas’ citizenship. 32 The Burma
Citizenship Law of 1982 deliberately made it almost impossible for most
Rohingyas to obtain citizenship. Section 4 of this draconian law unilaterally
gives the Council of State the authority to decide if any given ethnic group is
considered to a national group or not, while Section 8 (b) also gives the
Council of State the power to revoke citizenship for anyone who isn’t a
“citizen by birth” 33 Simply being born in Burma doesn’t automatically qualify
a person for citizenship; Burmese law thus effectively leaves every Rohingya
child born stateless, a violation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the
Child. 34 Section 3 states that anyone whose ancestors have lived in the
country since 1823 are considered citizens of Burma. 35 It’s been proven by a
long line of independent historians, anthropologists and archaeologists that
the Rohingya people have been in modern-day Burma since well before this
imposed 1823 minimum. In spite of the facts, the official Burmese government
narrative continues to state that the Rohingyas are illegal immigrants from
Bangladesh; U Shwe Mg of the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party declared
to al-Jazeera that, “The so-called Rohingya are just illegal immigrants. We
allowed them to settle down here because we are generous people and we thought
they would just stay a while.” 36
President Thein Sein commissioned
the Rakhine Investigative Council, ostensibly to study the strife; they
released their findings in the Rakhine State Action Plan, which referred to the
Rohingyas both pejoratively and inaccurately as “Bengalis” 37 and demanded that
the Rohingyas refer to themselves likewise. 38 One Sittwe woman declared that
she would rather, “be a beggar than signing those documents the government is
pressing onto us to allow our resettlement, because in those papers they state
that we are Bengali.” 39 Ahead of a May 29, 2015 conference in Thailand on the
issue of the Rohingya refugee crisis, the Burmese delegation stated their
refusal to attend if the term “Rohingya” was used. 40 Lieutenant General Ko Ko
summed up the goals of the government’s plans for Rohingya situation as being
the, “tightening the regulations in order to handle travelling, birth, death,
immigration, migration, marriage, constructing of new religious buildings,
repairing and land ownership and right to construct buildings of Bengalis under
the law.” 41
Continuing the legal maneuvers set
by the Burma Citizenship Law of 1982 against the Rohingya people are Sections
42-44. Since the Rohingyas don’t meet the “1823” qualification for citizenship
according to the bureaucracy in Naypyidaw, they would have to seek “naturalized
citizenship” instead. Under the tenets of Section 43, you can only apply for
naturalized citizenship if at least one of your parents is already registered
as one of the forms of citizen. Thus, all children born to a pair of
undocumented Rohingya parents are summarily denied citizenship. According to
Section 42, it’s also possible to achieve naturalized citizenship, provided
that you are able to procure “conclusive evidence”. This is simply impossible
for Rohingyas by and large, due to the fact there were scant few family
registry records recorded in pre-industrial colonial Burma. 42 Even the average
American would have to shell out good money on a site like ancestry.com to try
accessing pre-1950s family records. There is also a third tier of citizenship,
“associate citizenship”, but the deadline to apply for that was October 15,
1982. 43
After independence from Britain, the
non-citizen Rohingyas were paradoxically barred from seceding. Their movements
within Burma have been highly restricted by the government since the
institution of Act VII of Registration of Foreigners Act, 1940. 44 A displaced
Rohingya living in a camp outside the Rakhine state capital of Sittwe, Muhammad
Uslan, summarized the current situation, “We are caged like animals here. We
cannot work or go to the town to buy things. Our young people grow up knowing
they will never be able to go to university.” 45
Rohingyas are, like their fellow
Kachins, subject to portering; not only are they not considered citizens, they
are also forced to work for the state that doesn’t accept them as such. Rape is
an endemic form of violence that is likewise used to subjugate the Rohingya
people. In one northern Maungdaw village alone, human rights activists recorded
13 different rapes on the night of February 20, 2013. 46 Mass rape has been
documented as a weapon used against the Rohingya people since at least 1992, a
time when the government was undertaking an anti-Rohingya campaign. 47
Prominent Buddhist monks, like Wirathu, preach Islamaphobia that has incited
massive pogroms. Wirathu told Time Magazine that Muslims, “are breeding so fast
and they are stealing our women, raping them.” 48
Hundreds of Muslims have been killed
since the junta fell in Islamaphobic riots that are increasingly being
considered by outside observers to be genocide. 49 140,000 were internally
displaced in 2012 alone due to the violence, while another 86,000 fled the
country.50 Human Rights Watch has concluded that the Burmese government and
security forces were not only complicit in the anti-Rohingya violence of 2012,
but were active participants. 51 About 1500 Rohingya refugees have been
imprisoned by human traffickers in Thailand, awaiting “deportation.” 52 Thai
newspapers report that 40,000 Rohingyas are estimated to have been trafficked
last year in Thailand, often with the help of the Thai authorities, who want
the refugees out of the country. Many of the women and children are
specifically funneled into Thailand’s lucrative sex industry. 53 The wave of
refugees continues as the Burmese government turns a blind eye — and sometimes
participates in — to the Islamaphobic pogroms in Rakhine.
The Burmese government and their
multinational corporate partners are interested in tapping Rakhine’s massive
oil and gas reserves. 54 Rakhine’s strategic location by the Bay of Bengal also
creates a demand for Burmese commercial access to the area. State-owned China
National Petroleum Corporation is funding $2.5 billion on the Kyaukpyu (a
Rakhine port city) Shwe Gas Pipeline, which will shuttle oil in between China
and the Bay of Bengal. 55 Locals have staged protests against it, complaining
that all the proceeds from the endeavor will go to either Chinese businessmen
or Burmese politicians. Thus, the recent opening-up of Burma’s economy to the
outside world must be viewed with a critical eye, rather than just with blind
praise.
Women
in Burma
Women in Burma have been
historically much enfranchised. They had a lot of freedom in public and respect
in the household. It was common for women to work outside the home and they
were generally treated as equals. 56 Kipling and Orwell, being raised in the
shadow of Victorian culture, were very impressed by the Burmese woman’s spirit.
However, decades of rule by the junta has caused a precipitous drop in respect
for human rights, particularly for women. From opposition leader Aung San Suu
Kyi to AIDS activist Phyu Phyu Thin, any woman who has made the military regime
feel uneasy has been hunted by the police. 57 Women who are incarcerated for
political crimes are often raped, tortured, killed or “disappeared”, such as
student activist Thin Thin Aye. 58
This has led to an environment that
undermines all women and girls. Rape is endemic in areas under Army occupation.
Pregnancy termination is banned in all but cases in which the mother’s life is
endangered. 59 A woman can be sentenced to up to seven years in prison for
illegally terminating her pregnancy. 60 There is very little access to
contraceptives, either. According to the research of Liz Sime at Marie Stopes
International, 2/3 of the population has inadequate access to contraceptives.
61 Even sex education is forbidden, as evidenced by the arrest warrants for
Phyu Phyu Thin and other reproductive health educators. Research done by the
Reproductive Health Response in Crises Consortium imply that over half of
maternal deaths were due to post-abortion complications. 62 These dismal
statistics are unlikely to change anytime soon, even with generous pledges from
sponsors of the Millenium Development Goals ($300 million); the program
director of the Burma Medical Association, Saw Nay Htoo, lamented that, “Even
with ceasefires with the ethnic groups, direct support from the Burmese
government is still not there. There is no concrete progress we can see.” 63
Paradoxically, there is a 2-child
policy amongst the Rohingyas, enforced by fines and imprisonment. 64 This
eugenic policy is meant to gradually reduce the Muslim population; in 3rd World
countries, the replacement fertility rate can be as high as 3.4. To use a frame
of reference, the fertility replacement rate in East Africa is 2.94; lowering
the birth rate to 2 would lead to an eventual generational population decrease
of about 1/3. 65 The military and government are almost exclusively male. This
hegemony is maintained by the persecution of female opposition leaders like Suu
Kyi and women’s rights advocates. Even minority guerilla groups are dominated
by men. Moon Nay Li of KWAT noted that, “it’s a bit difficult to talk about
women’s participation in this process and in politics, because in our culture
and tradition, the men feel the [sic] man have to do [this], it is their duty.”
66 Everyone in every faction of Burmese society, military and governance must
work to include the thoughts and actions of women (half the total population)
in local and national policies and mediation. Moon Nay Li then warns, “If women
are not involved in the ceasefire process, and I mean at every step, every
level of the process, if women are not participating, the consequences might be
a longer conflict in Burma, and the fighting will not stop.” 67
Even the name of the country is
ethnically divisive. It was changed in the aftermath of the wide-scale ‘88
Uprising, from Burma to Myanmar. 68 The junta derided the colonial name and
presented “Myanmar” as the post-colonial alternative, inclusive to all
ethnicities. The British colonial government derived the name “Burma” from the
Bamar people, the traditional inhabitants of the Irrawaddy Valley and long-time
majority group in the region that would become a future nation. 69 However,
critics have pointed out that “Myanmar” is the term that the Bamar people
called themselves. 70 Thus, “Burma” and “Myanmar” have the same denotation.
During the colonial era, everyone in the country unified under the term
“Burma”, becoming used to the name. Ethnic minorities saw the name change as
just another unwelcome reminder of the Bamars’ dominance of government. Aung
San Suu Kyi and the opposition continue to avoid using the term “Myanmar”, as
they connotate it with Bamar oppression of other ethnicities. 71
Conclusions
British colonial rule paved the way
for the strict authoritarianism that Burma is now at least attempting to move
away from with “civilian rule”. For too long, the Burmese government has, like
imperial Britain, used oppression as an official tool to stay in power, using
draconian and deliberate laws and wide-scale violence against primarily women
and children. Bamar ultra-nationalism has led to the systemic
disenfranchisement of minority groups, to the extent that the Rohingyas aren’t
even considered citizens. Local Burmese intellectuals joke that George Orwell
wrote not only one book about Burma, but a trilogy: Burmese Days, Animal Farm
and 1984. 72 The government and domineering military will have to immediately
suspend its persecution of minorities and then negotiate for the extraction and
sharing of indigenous commodities. Burma’s President-Elect must also act to
stop the hate-mongering invoked by prominent monks and intervene in any future
pogroms; he can no longer look the other way when it comes to anti-Muslim
rioting. Full suffrage should be granted to the Rohingya, in order to fully
facilitate Burma’s transition from junta to democracy. All of Burma’s
ethnicities must ultimately play a part in the reconciliation and redemption of
the country and should have an equal role in shaping its democratic future.
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