Gendered Rumours and the Muslim Scapegoat in Myanmar’s Transition

ABSTRACT

Since 2012 Myanmar has experienced recurrent waves of religiously imbued violence. Violence has been both physical and symbolic. Symbolic violence has included the popularisation of the belief that Muslim men are the primary threat to Buddhist women, and by extension, the body politic of Myanmar. This article draws on ethnographic research and theory on rumours and nationalism to show how colonial era social and legal processes have been drawn on to establish Muslim men as the scapegoats for deeply held social grievances amongst the Buddhist majority. Rumours of the rape and forced religious conversion of Buddhist women make the political personal and justify demands for male and state protection. We argue that in Myanmar the figure of the wealthy Muslim perpetrator has been popularised both as a scapegoat for decades of brutal authoritarianism and as a threat to the contemporary social reproduction of the national Buddhist polity.

KEYWORDS:

• Myanmar
• Buddhism
• Islam
• rumour
• gender
• nationalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The Buddhist Special Women’s Marriage Law was initially brought to popular attention in mid-2013 prior to the formation of MaBaTha but is an amendment of a pre-existing law, the Buddhist Special Women’s Marriage and Inheritance Act 1954 (Schonthal and Walton 2016, 6; also see Crouch 2016, 86).

2. Notions of sexually promiscuous Muslims having large numbers of children also served to confirm popular narratives of an “unstoppable tide” of Muslims overtaking Buddhists as the demographic majority. The results of the flawed 2014 census challenged these narratives, finding that Muslims comprised 4.3% of the overall population – a 0.4% increase from similarly flawed 1973 and 1983 censuses. These 2014 estimates include over one million Muslim inhabitants of Rakhine State not enumerated due to disputes about ethnic self-identification (Republic of the Union of Myanmar 2016; see also Prasse-Freeman 2013b; Ferguson 2015).

3. For the full English-language post see Hla Oo. 2014. “Race Riots in Mandalay After Muslims Raped Buddhist Girl.” Accessed September 10, 2015. http://hlaoo1980.blogspot.com/2014/07/race-riots-in-mandalay-after-muslims.html.

4. Given the false nature of these allegations, the authors have removed non-essential identifying information from this account and replaced it with [XX].

5. English translation of original Burmese language post by Kenneth Wong and reviewed by Burmese interpreter. For a useful compilation of social media commentary from the time, including screen-shots of both the original Burmese language Thit Htoo Lwin and U Wirathu posts that have since been removed or hacked see Wong (2014).

6. In 1980 the sangha was “purified” through the persecution of anti-regime monks and the elevation of military-aligned monks into senior positions of the newly formed State Sangha Maha Nayaka Committee (or MahaNa) (Gravers 2015, 8). The MahaNa is a board of senior monks, appointed since 1992 by the Ministry of Religious Affairs, that regulates the monastic community. All monks are required to register and carry identification issued by it (Cheesman 2003; McCarthy 2008).

7. By mid-2016, over 43 million sim-cards had been sold by telecommunications companies Telenor, Ooredoo and Myanmar Posts and Telecommunications. It was estimated that half (21.5 million) of these sim-cards had active internet data accounts and 39 million had the capacity for internet use, highlighting the widespread availability and uptake of low-cost, web-enabled smartphones in Myanmar (Myanmar Times, July 19, 2016).

8. The observations here and in the next paragraphs are based on fieldwork observations on June 25, 2015. The social media and conversational comments are translated from Burmese.

9. Concern about the infringement of Myanmar’s borders stood in stark contrast to the lack of concern given to the Indian military’s border incursions of up to 11 kilometres the week following this incident, when Indian troops pursued Naga insurgents into Sagaing Region in mid-June 2015. Despite boastful coverage in Indian media, international reporting (see Wall Street Journal, June 10, 2015), as well as reports of Chinese support to the rebels from within Myanmar (see Keenan 2015), the Myanmar Armed Forces issued a simple denial stating they had no intelligence confirming the incursion had occurred (Myanmar Times, July 17, 2015).

10. Use of “liar” here relates to violation of Burmese moral and legal norms around sexual relations. In colloquial Burmese, “sex with a lie” is used to describe the practice of “seducing” women – frequently virgins – with the promise of marriage. Thank you to an anonymous reviewer for highlighting this aspect of usage.

11. Similar anxieties about inter-religious marriage and conceptualisation of religious irreconcilability were reflected in research conducted in six different cities throughout Myanmar in early 2015, indicative of a broader concern about the reproduction of the values of the nation at a time of rapid social, economic and political transformation (see Schissler, Walton, and Phyu Phyu Thi 2015; 2017, Walton and Hayward 2014).

12. In October 2016, Maungdaw was also the site of an attack by Rohingya militants on a police post in which six officers were killed and a cache of weapons stolen. The incident prompted allegedly indiscriminate Myanmar military “clearance operations” which drove thousands of civilians to flee to Bangladesh. See ICG (2016) for an in-depth examination of these attacks and the subsequent Myanmar military response.

13. The observations here are based on fieldwork observations and translations from Burmese on July 6, 2015.

14. The interviews reported in the next section were conducted in Burmese, with an interpreter, on July 10, 2015, October 16, 2015 and November 9, 2015.

15. By early 2016, he described the organisation as “having gone quiet” after the November 2015 elections. The information that follows is drawn from an interview on July 10, 2015, in Burmese with an interpreter.

16. In the context of the interview, legal action was framed not in relation to the Race and Religion Laws but as simply “taking action” within the highly arbitrary legal system of Myanmar. See Cheesman (2015) for discussion of arbitrariness in Myanmar’s court system.

17. Interviews in this paragraph were conducted in Burmese with interpreter on July 10 and November 9, 2015.

18. On rumours and communal solidarity see Guha (1989). Experimental studies both online and offline highlight the gradual infusion of propagators’ biases and prejudices amidst the spread of rumour (see Allport and Postman 1947; Knopf 1975; Liao and Shi 2013). These studies show that the transmission of rumour from one person to another often entails the loss of some information and the addition of elements that reflect the interests of the propagator.

19. Studies of online urban myths show that attempts to “debunk” aspects of rumours that may not be precisely “true” are frequently overcome by propagators claiming a “deeper truth” at the heart of the rumour that resonates with deeply embedded historical grievances (see Donovan 2007).

20. In July 2016, the State Sangha Maha Nayaka Committee, the MahaNa, stated that MaBaTha is distinct from the state-sanctioned and regulated Buddhist order. The MahaNa said it did not endorse MaBaTha, nor did it recognise its legitimacy. The statement was the result of a MahaNa review of MaBaTha, at the request of Yangon Region Chief Minister Phyo Min Thein, who had said that MaBaTha was redundant and unnecessary given the existence of the MahaNa. Since the enquiry, MaBaTha has faced legal disputes, with a defamation suit brought against U Wirathu, and the Minister of Culture and Religious Affairs has also warned it about its activities (Myanmar Times, July 15, 2016). The minister also said a new hate speech law is being developed (Myanmar Times, December 15, 2016). Government support for MaBaTha seems to have lessened, but deeper grievances and assumptions about Muslims recounted in this article continue to be held by many members and supporters of the NLD interviewed by the authors.