Debate: First Round: Is Aye Chan an academician or an anti-Rohingya? by Dr.Bahar

Dear Arakan Readers:

At first when I began reading Aye Chan, I thought he was a scholar but as I went into details I found out that he has problems dealing "with multiple sides of issues" as is normally the case with xenophobes. You would notice here Aye Chan comments to Dr. Siddiqui and says:

"Main theme is 'Whether these Muslims who call themselves Rohingya are the immigrants from Chittagong District or not.'

I have proved 'They are.' Don't avoid the main topic, Siddiqui, the liar." Aye Chan also identifies himself as "A Challenger for life on this topic." It seems that Aye Chan is more of a Rakhine crusader on this topic than an academician. Unfortunately, the Rakhine extremists use him as a true "academician."

A detailed review of Aye Chan's claims that "Muslims who call themselves Rohingya are the immigrants from Chittagong District" is done in the following article "

"Aye Chan's Enclave with Influx Viruses Revisited."

and the same is also available as chapter 3 in my book "Burma's Missing Dots" 2010. After reading the review, readers will certainly find Aye Chan that he is not intellectually honest and essentially an anti- Rohingya xenophob. Due to his beliefs, his claims were selectively chosen to prove that Rohingyas are originally from Chittagong.

Aye Chan's Enclave with Influx Viruses Revisited."

Read here

Origin of the Tribes of Chittagong Hill Tracts

Read here

Read here

“The armed forces have not being created for the purpose of persecuting people, nor for the purpose of exercising power with weapons. The army is the servant of the country. The country is never the servant of the army.” (General Aung San)

Burma is a land of bountiful resources and abundant natural beauty, but the country’s real beauty resides in its multiethnic composition. To a tourist, Burma, with its smiling government officials and monks passing by in their yellow robes and its silent minorities occupied in their daily chores, gives the appearance of innocence and calm—the perfect Burma the military wish to portray. Situated in South East Asia between China, India, Bangladesh and Thailand, Burma has a sample of ethnic groups from each of its sister countries within its borders, the legacy of a series of conquests, first by its medieval kings and later by the British. More precisely, Burma has approximately 135 ethnic groups each with a distinct, ethnic identity. These groups have been kept under tight control by the military dictatorship for the past half-century. As Sui Khar notes: “Each of the ethnic groups taken individually might seem small, but together, …[they] constitute 40 percent of the population and occupy 60 percent of the land.” (1) Given this multiethnic makeup, Burma could have been the Switzerland of South East Asia if it had followed multiculturalism as its official policy. Unfortunately, after close to half a century of military rule, Burma, in spite of its resources and its beauty, is bleeding.

Historians approach Burma from two perspectives –that of its history of dictatorial rule, from the tyrannical medieval kings to its contemporary military rulers, to that of the people with their all-too-brief experience of democracy. (2) Scholars find in the latter a gentle, humorous but racially and culturally diverse people aspiring toward a multicultural society and in the former, a xenophobic military whose collaborators create “fear” and use “force” to rule the nation. Interestingly, their decades-long experience of army rule has accustomed the people to looking for enemies. It has inculcated a medieval tribal mentality. Depending on who is asking, there is no limit to the number of enemies to be found within the 135 ethnic groups. This number does not include certain ethnic groups who could be considered the most dangerous enemies of all. Not surprisingly, some surveys conducted in Burma by members of certain ethnic groups found considered the Burmans as their enemy, while other surveys found the minority Muslims, who form only 4% of the population as the number 1 enemy, and the list goes on. (3) The military, in its attempts to mobilize the population against the “danger within” have caused over a million refugees to flee across the border into neighboring countries.

Since the military leadership’s identification of the “real” enemy, ultranationalist activities have been constantly on the rise. Stateless people continue to look for shelter and genocidal activities continue unabated. The international community is deluded about Burma’s progress toward democracy. As a result of years of suppression, the ethnic minorities are too timid even to confess that they follow the “three monkeys rule,” (See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.) This has become one of their only means of survival. Revolutionary students protest in vain.

The flip side of Burma’s story is that it has also produced great leaders who have worked toward building the nation by creating alliances among groups. These include Aung San, U Razzak, U Thant, Aung San and Suu Ki, to name only a few.

Burma’s history is a long story of misfortune. Perhaps the greatest of these was the assassination of Aung San. During World War II, Aung San, along with Ne Win, returned to Burma from Japan, where they had been receiving military training to fight the British. Realizing the ethnic diversity of Burma, Aung San worked with the country’s leaders to promote a western model of a federal state. This culminated on February 12, 1947 with the signing of the Panglong Agreement. A very short time later, he and his entire team were assassinated. This unfortunate event took place just six months before the independence of Burma. Partly as a result of these tragic circumstances, Burma's fledgling democracy also suffered a premature death. From then on, under Ne Win, Burma began a history that can be summed up as a “lost half-century” spent in “poverty, paranoia and fear of the outside world.” (4) With the death of Aung San, Burma reverted to its melancholy medieval destiny. The catastrophic events of 1942, 1948, 1962, 1988, and 2007 have come and gone and yet the people’s suffering continues. Over the years, affairs have deteriorated so badly that in today’s Burma even trivial acts such as gossiping after a meal to break the tedium can land people in serious problems with the administration.(5)

The Western media primarily ascribe Burma’s problems to its prolonged military dictatorship; while substantially true, this interpretation is incomplete. There are missing dots in this type of explanation. Burma’s ultra-nationalist celebrities, for example fan the flames of division by emphasizing the aspects of the status quo that benefit them personally. They wonder aloud why anyone should change the military government when it has already made so many changes and kept Burma united. During the period of military rule, Burma was renamed “Myanmar,” Rangoon became “Yangon,” and many other towns and districts such as Akyab, (a Persian derived Rohingya word) was given the Rakhine Buddhist name “Sittwe.” All the new names were derived from Burman-related semi-mythical place names from earlier centuries. True, Burma has also changed in other directions. The aging military dictators are being replaced by a younger generation of military dictators. The ruling junta is made mainly of Burmans and Rakhines, a subgroup of the Burmese. The Burmese army increased from a mere few thousand in Aung San’s time to a force of 500,000 for a country of only 50 million people. Rakhine soldiers, both adult and boys, comprise 30% of the army out of a population of only 3 million. A 500,000-man army is needed to fight the ethnic minorities, the supposed enemy within. The military’s rule by force has kept Burma relatively unchanged. Amazingly, the regime has established its own human rights committees; the membership list of these committees, however, reads like a “Who's Who” of human rights violators in the country. (6)

The most lucrative job for the average Burman or Rakhine is that of a career soldier, as it offers the opportunity of supplementing one’s salary with the proceeds of black-marketing, bribery and taxing the movement of goods and humans. After over half a century of such widespread practice, the military now controls big business, the service sector and the bureaucracy. In line with this tradition, it preaches what it calls a “disciplined democracy,” a species of Fascism, whose propaganda is almost always directed against ethnic minorities. It propagates the myth that in the absence of the military rule, foreigners and ethnic groups will take over Burma, causing the country to disintegrate. Burma pursues its “war” against “the enemy” with imported military helicopters and fighter planes. The armed forces are on constant alert in the battle against ethnic groups and their allies, the democracy movement.

Through its use of xenophobia as an ideology, the military intentionally creates communal violence. In order to be effective, it even uses deception. A witness to the Pegu mosque attack of 1997 related that one attacker, supposedly a monk, “…did not put his robes on properly, and they later became loose and fell down. Onlookers nearby noticed he was wearing the army-issued underpants which are usually worn by soldiers. The group leader of the monks was seen holding some kind of mobile communication equipment.” (7) While members of minority groups reported that monks helped them to save their property, there was unfortunately no one to catch these frauds in saffron robes. The military’s prize captive is the celebrated Aung San Sui Ki, who in spite of being elected in 1988, saw the election result nullified and the repression continue. Even in the face of such outrage, the international community, beyond expressing muted formal disapproval and implementing ineffective sanctions, has made no headway towards improving the situation. Why?

Most contemporary works on Burma blame the military for the present state of affairs in the country. I consider this type of interpretation to be ridiculously incomplete. A far more fruitful line of inquiry is to ask questions about the circumstances and conditions that keep the army in power. Burma’s problems are even deeper than they appear. What needs to be understood is what validates the power base of the Burman and the Rakhine state population from which the army is mostly recruited. The leaders of Burma’s never-ending quest for democracy, who are themselves members of the ethnic majority, are shackled by their practice of favoritism and by the fact that they fail to expose collaborators in their midst.

The smiling anti-Rohingya drs. of Rohingya genocide are Dr. Aye Kyaw and Dr. Aye Chan. Both intellectuals were originally from the state of Arakan. The former is the self confessed military’s collaborator who enjoys his US citizenship but helped in the drafting of the 1982 xenophobic Burmese Citizenship Act thar declared Burma’s Rohingyas as the noncitizens of Burma. Dr. Aye Chan is a former student of Aye Kyaw also a US citizen, now teaches in Japan is the coauthor of the anti- Rohingya book, Influx Viruses, which dehumanizes Rohingyas as if viruses needing extermination from Burma. Admittedly, from 1948 to 1962, Burma had democratic government. The question needs to be asked: What actually went wrong to cause the military to come to power? There are also several other related questions; in a future democratic Burma, what will the status of the minorities be? How citizenship will be determined? Is this going to be defined in a way that guarantees both the individual and the collective rights of the ethnic communities or will the Suu Ki experiment be a temporary triumph for the Burman majority and lead to a repetition of the tragedy of military rule? If democracy returns to Burma, can Suu Ki thrive if the conditions for the military’s success in remaining in power are not removed? Can the country avoid the vacillation between civilian and military rule that has characterized the history of Pakistan?

In this regard, it is not that there are no Burmese leaders with strength and foresight. Emphasizing the ethnic dimension of the problem, Harn Yawnghwe states, “The military came to power because of its disagreement over a constitutional matter. The talks will have to deal with constitutional matters. When this happens, the process needs to be expanded to include all stakeholders, especially the ethnic nationalities.”(8) Burma is a country beset with ethnic problems, and more work has to be done to understand this side of the real Burma.

One continues to wonder: unlike in Eastern Europe after the cold war and Indonesia, Iran, Nepal, where popular protest led to profound changes in the way the countries are governed, why in Burma, with so many of its citizens earnestly yearning for democracy, has the army continued to rule a population of 50,000,000 million for so long? Surely, there must be other important factors present. Again what are the circumstances and conditions that keep the army in power? Are there networks of rank and file civilian members who collaborate with the army? There are reports that in parallel with the democracy movement demonstrations, vast numbers of Burmese people also gather in cities and townships to show their continued support for the military. Even more disturbing is the phenomenon of imposters, who infiltrate, not only the rank and file, but also the leadership of the democracy movement. On record is a monk originally from Arakan who supported the military’s genocide in that province, who is now a leading democracy movement leader in New York. This charlatan even managed to get an “Asia leadership award.” (9)

In Burma, everybody loves the slogan word “democracy.” Almost everybody except Than Shaw, who can’t hide from his real identity, claims to be either a democracy movement leader or the supporter of the democracy movement. The word democracy is so popular in Burma that Than Shaw even calls his version “disciplined democracy.”

Under the circumstances, as the waiting game for democracy continues, the military keeps its elite club functioning by dispensing privileges. “A … military-led middle class with a corrupt, authoritarian mindset, as its benefactors or protectors, has developed over the past 45 years under military dictatorship. It operates at a level of skewed superior profits, which are distributed among a small group of beneficiaries along the corrupt military chain and do not therefore put purchasing power to a wider public, which could have an impact on the economy. Corrupt superior profits have a marginal effect on the economy of the country, as they are hoarded by the givers and recipients alike as insurance, when one is removed from the corrupt chain.”(10) In the same fashion, democracy movement leaders also reserve their exclusive “pure ethnic” club membership for themselves and maintain a distance from racially and religiously different Burmese ethnic minorities. Some of the movement’s members even accept the military’s definition of who is a native (“taingyintha” in Burmese translated as “native of a country) and who is a “foreigner.” There have been complaints that many high ranking democracy movement leaders even espouse the military’s anti-ethnic Rohingya agenda. No doubt, the situation within the democracy movement leadership is complicated by the presence of ex-military infiltrators, xenophobic intellectuals and leaders in high positions who surreptitiously prevent individuals from deprived minorities from gaining access to the leadership. This is the ugly face of ethnic discrimination in Burma.

These are the circumstances under which military rule through xenophobia is carried out in Burma, and the world’s longest civil war continues. Refugees continue to cross international borders exacerbating an already grave humanitarian crisis. Here, contrary to what Aung San, the founding father of Burma decreed, the army is no longer the servant of the country. The country has become the servant of the army. While Burma’s ethnic leaders discuss these important issues in the world’s foreign capitals in order to determine exactly who is the real enemy, the military leadership is merely buying time because it already knows who the enemy is. As a Burmese proverb popular among government supporters recommends, when faced with a deadly snake and an ethnic at the same time, don’t kill the snake first. (11) From our vantage point, we see several very important “dots” still remain to be joined before the real enemies of Burma are fully revealed.

The multiethnic Burma give the impression of being like a Russian motyoshka doll: inside each layer of ethnic groups is another, which has another inside it and so on. In reality, however, Burma is a far more complex society than this surface would suggest. In consideration of the above, this book will primarily deal with problems of democratic development in western Burma. As a Sociological worh, it will deal with classical Buddhism which is opposed to the anti-ethnic malevolence in Burma such as prejudice, racism, and in particular it will locate the ideological roots of anti-Rohingya Burman-Rakhine chauvinism, and the solemn issue of stateless people from Arakan of Burma.

Endnotes:

(1) Quoted in SAJAI JOSE, 'Democracy can only be a transition in Myanmar' Fri, 30 Nov 2007 09:23:35 -0800 http://www.tehelka. com/story_ main36.asp? filename= Ws081207Burma. asp# TEHELKA - Friday, 30 November 2007 TEHELKA “Shan-EUgroup” Shan-EUgroup@yahoogroups.com

(2) Joshua Eliot and Jane Bickersteth, Myanmar (Burma), (England: Footprint handbooks Ltd., 1997), p.7.

(3) A survey was done by Arakan Information Website which gave the readers choice between Muslim Rohingyas or the Burmans as the enemy. Reading the survey felt like I was reading a medieval text.

(4) Robert Horn, “Orbituary: The Puppet Master of Burma, Ne Win made his nation what it is today: poor, paranoid and oppressed,” Time Asia, http://www.time.com/time/asia/covers/1101021216/newin.html

(5) The corrupt Nasaka, Burma’s border security force takes money from people on any excuse. In this case, a group of people gossiping in a house to get rid of boredom after having food in Tin May village in Arakan State were being penalized for the act, the excuse that they were gossiping against the military government. Kaladan Press: Nasaka extorts money for gossiping Tue 7 Nov 2006 Filed under: News, Inside Burma http://www.burmanet.org/news/2006/11/07/kaladan-press-nasaka-extorts-money-for-gossiping/

(6)Aliran Kesedaran Negara, Oral Intervention at the