Introduction: Interpreting Communal Violence in Myanmar

ABSTRACT

Collective violence wracked Myanmar from 2012 to 2014. Overwhelmingly, Buddhists attacked Muslims. This article categorises the violence as “communal,” in so far as it consisted of recurrent, sporadic, direct physical hostility realised through repeated public expressions that Muslims constitute an existential threat to Buddhists. It advocates for interpretive modes of inquiry into the violence, as well as into the practices of interpretation enabling it. Eschewing methods aimed at producing a purportedly coherent picture of what happened, interpretive research raises questions about conventional readings of violence, and seemingly self-evident categories for its analysis. But as the articles in this special issue show, interpretivists do not repudiate the search for factual truth. The contributors all make strong truth claims, but claims recognising that factual truths are always contingent. They establish these claims by attending variously to the processes, narratives, histories and typologies that have contributed to the production of communal violence in Myanmar.

KEYWORDS:

• Buddhists
• Muslims
• Burma
• Myanmar
• communal violence
• interpretive research

Acknowledgements

The genesis for this special issue was a research colloquium convened by the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University (ANU), in Yangon during March 2014. The colloquium, a follow-up event to the ANU’s 2013 Myanmar/Burma Update conference, brought together scholars in Myanmar with their counterparts from other institutions abroad to explore the cultural, historical and institutional dimensions of communal violence. The colloquium gave rise to a set of essays, which were published as the first locally available, bilingual scholarly book on contemporary communal violence (Cheesman and Htoo Kyaw Win 2015). Both the colloquium and the book that followed generated energetic debate among participants and contributors, which led to further research that has culminated in this special issue.

The editor extends his thanks to everyone involved along the way, in particular, Veronica Taylor and Trevor Wilson for their parts in convening the colloquium, and Htoo Kyaw Win for his work on the edited book. He is especially grateful to Kevin Hewison for agreeing to publish the special issue and for working productively and supportively with the contributors. For their comments on this introductory article, I thank especially Edward Aspinall, Christopher Duncan, Lee Ann Fujii, Kevin Hewison, David Kazanjian and Matt Schissler.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author

Notes

1. This introduction does not offer an overview of alternative approaches that the authors might have taken to communal violence, restricting itself to the interpretive work that they have chosen to undertake. For a useful survey of the divergent approaches to communal violence among scholars of India, which the author classes as primordial, ideological, instrumental, social-constructivist, social-psychological and relational, see Berenchot (2011, Ch. 2).

2. Anthropologists have discussed how chronological accounts of collective violence can convey a sense of purpose and design that may have been absent at the time, or absent from how violence is remembered (see Das 2007; Duncan 2013, 9–10; Spyer 2002). The chronology provided here is not an authoritative statement. It is but one interpretation of events, aimed at presenting some of the elementary factual claims about the violence.

3. Kula, pronounced “kala” and sometimes written as kalar, is a generic term to designate people of South Asian origin and their descendants that has a pejorative connotation (see Schissler, Walton, and Phyu Phyu Thi 2017).

4. U Wirathu began making communalist sermons in 1997. He stopped on instructions from a superior but began travelling and preaching again in the early 2000s. In 2003 military intelligence detained him on accusations of provoking communal violence in Kyaukse, Mandalay Division. He denied the allegations but a closed court sitting inside a Mandalay jail sentenced him to 25 years’ imprisonment, of which he served around eight before being released under an amnesty in January 2012 (Kyaw Zeya Tun 2016).

5. Whether 969 preceded or emerged synchronously with the attacks is disputed. For commentary on the establishment, organisation and meaning of 969 and subsequently MaBaTha, see Nyi Nyi Kyaw (2016), Schonthal and Walton (2016), Van Klinken and Su Mon Thazin Aung (2017), and Walton and Hayward (2014).

6. The geographic spread of violence does not imply intensity. Some regions of the country were largely untouched. In other places where conditions seemed to precipitate violence, it did not occur. When considered in relation to the universe of possible cases of communal violence, outside of Rakhine State actual outbreaks were relatively few. For some observations on the frequency and spread of violence, and successful efforts to prevent it from occurring in conditions conducive to it, see Walton, Schissler, and Phyu Phyu Thi (2016).

7. We treat religion as an ascriptive category because in Southeast and South Asia religious membership is typically inherited and retained: involuntarily assigned to a person at birth, constitutive of the person’s comprehensive identity before he or she is conscious of it, and more-or-less unchangeable, although religious categories themselves change over time. The person wanting to change membership voluntarily may encounter social rules that are not easily broken, and find that any attempt to do so has implications for his or her standing that go beyond religious practice to other dimensions of identity. Conversion might also be inhibited or prohibited by laws or regulations, as in Myanmar today (see McCarthy and Menager 2017), and in some other countries in the region, notably, India and Sri Lanka (see Schonthal, Moustafa, Nelson, and Shankar 2016).

8. The number is approximate because omitted from the head count were over one million people in Rakhine State, the majority of whom the data analysts estimate are Muslim. For a critical overview of the census preparations and methodology see TNI-BCN (2014).

9. Problems with classifying a variety of different types of events as “communal violence” are discussed in Brass (2003, 30–31). Sidel (2006) similarly encounters the challenge of drawing together four different categories of phenomena from a range of cases under the rubric of “religious violence” in Indonesia. In this special issue our empirical concerns are restricted to events in Myanmar over a relatively short time: events that, although they differed in their specific characteristics, were sociologically and politically linked. Our levels of analysis are fewer, the number of incidents from among which to study less, although no less horrific, than in India and Indonesia. Our primary difficulty has not been the claim that these events somehow ought to be studied together, but rather, how best, for analytical purposes, to categorise them. As the articles indicate, we do not have a consensus on this question, and despite agreement on the approach to the issue, the authors diverge in their preferred usages.

10. The “shoe question” arose out of the refusal of Europeans to remove their footwear when upon the grounds of Buddhist temples and pagodas, as customarily required of religious adherents (see Turner 2014, Ch. 5).

11. The financier George Soros reportedly remarked after a visit to the part of the Rakhine State capital, Sittwe, housing Muslims whose homes had been destroyed that “the parallels to the Nazi genocide are alarming” and that “in 1944, as a Jew in Budapest, I too was a Rohingya” (New York Times, May 28, 2015).

12. When in September 2016 former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan led a delegation of a newly established special international advisory commission invited to study the violence in Rakhine State, he stressed that he and his counterparts would not investigate human rights abuses but instead make recommendations that would “reduce tension and support development” (cited in The Irrawaddy, September 8, 2016). Predictably, the commissioners met with protests and opposition from communalist political parties intent on rebuffing any attempts at international intervention.

13. Social science has a long history of refusal to confront atrocity, complicity with perpetrators, and apologies for crimes committed, and we can ill-afford to contribute to it. Brass (2003, 15) criticises social scientists who in their role as interpretation specialists of communal violence in India participate in a process of blame displacement “that does not isolate effectively those most responsible for the production of violence, but diffuses blame widely” and thereby contribute to the persistence of the phenomena studied. If this were the worst that could be said of some of what passes for scholarship on communal violence in Myanmar, then we might have less cause for dismay and not so great a need for research of the sort published here.

Additional information

Funding

The editor of this special issue acknowledges the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific for the allocation of funds from a grant provided by AusAID [Grant Agreement 65115] for the holding of the research colloquium on communal conflict in Myanmar on March 17 and 18, 2014.