Source: Asian Correspondent

In November last year, a piece I wrote on the potential for the Arakan state violence to evolve into wider anti-Muslim conflict in other parts of Burma was met with accusations of sensationalism and a misreading of the root causes of the Arakan unrest. The piece had argued that the first obvious signal that this wasn’t just ‘communal’ or ‘inter-ethnic’ violence, as many observers were calling it, was the targeting of Kaman Muslims in Arakan in October, who are distinct from the Rohingya.

Half a year on from the first attacks on Kaman Muslims, and despite the current rioting in Meikhtila and surrounding areas, there still seems to be an attempt in Burmese ultra-nationalist circles to write this violence off as a series of isolated incidents. This reading suggests that the first wave of attacks on Rohingya in June last year are not linked to the first attacks on Kaman Muslims in October, and that the targeting of Kaman has nothing to do with the more recent Meikhtila riots. Instead, individual groups are reacting to provocation from Muslims, which happens to have increased in frequency since June 2012.

The stance is being used to counter accusations that the violence is born of anti-Muslim sentiment – that beyond just confronting ‘terrorists’ or ‘land-grabbers’, as the Rohingya were branded, an entire ideology is being targeted. This is obviously much harder to justify, and portrays Burma’s militant nationalist movement in a primitive and ugly light, which it doesn’t want.

The signs however are clearly there. In fact they’ve been there for decades, but religious persecution was never really part of the Burma story during the dictatorship, which the world viewed through a very black and white lens. Go back to the civilian government of U Nu, and you’ll see that he expelled the Burma Muslim Congress and made Buddhism the state religion; General Ne Win carried out several pogroms against Rohingya, and deported hundreds of thousands of Indian Hindus and Muslims. The army has for decades attacked sites of Christian and Muslim worship in the ethnic states in a deliberate attempt to Burmanise (“Buddhicise”?) the entire country. Read more