Book Review: Myanmar’s ‘Rohingya’ Conflict
Myanmar’s ‘Rohingya’ Conflict
Written by: Anthony Ware and Costas Laoutides
Hurst & Company, 2018
ISBN 9781849049047, 276pp
Reviewed by: Chaplain Darren Cronshaw
Suggesting simple solutions is not helpful for a crisis as complex as that involving the Rohingya people in Myanmar, which is why Myanmar’s ‘Rohingya’ Conflict by Anthony Ware and Costas Laoutides is a welcome analysis pointing in constructive directions. The conflict and resulting refugee crisis of Myanmar’s Rohingya people has involved repeated and long- lasting violence, including claims of state-sponsored genocide and crimes against humanity. It is a massive humanitarian crisis with different groups contesting the causes and potential solutions of the troubles. There are over 1 million Muslims from northern Rakhine in Bangladesh, including the world’s largest refugee camp. Nobel Peace Prize winning leader Aung San Suu Kyi for decades claimed that her leadership would champion human rights, but now appears silent on this issue. She leads a multi-ethnic country but the Buddhist majority have little sympathy for the Muslim Rohingya. The challenges and dilemmas are huge for political leaders, aid and development workers and peacemakers.
Anthony Ware is Senior Lecturer in Development Studies at Deakin University and Director of the Australia Myanmar Institute. He has had many years of personal involvement in community development training in Myanmar. Costas Laoutides is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Deakin University. His background research expertise is separatist conflicts and he first visited Myanmar with Ware to contribute to a human rights training workshop. As they observed local conflict dynamics, they developed their combined interest in research and advocacy for getting beyond the multilayered hidden agendas to identify the real causes of the conflict and point towards peace-building possibilities.
The ‘Rohingya’ conflict is a complex, intractable situation. The conflict is multi-polarised against Rohingya Muslims, by Rohingya against the Tatmadaw Burman-dominated military and the local Rakhine Buddhists, and among the Burman and Rakhine. The government is in a power struggle with the military, who control defence, police and border regions without government oversight. Furthermore, the international community joins the conflict with public shaming and humanitarian action, not always with nonpartisan awareness.
Ware and Laoutides refuse to accept popular expedient explanations of the origins of or solutions to the problems. They unpack the four different (all often distorted) historical narratives presented by the different actors. This underlines why detailed historical background study is important, but also shows how actors adopt speculative history when faced with a struggle for survival. Basically the Rohingya ‘origin’ narrative emphasises their deep historical pre-Burman and pre-British roots, thus seeking to establish their right to be called taing-yin-tha or ‘indigenous national race’. The Rakhine- Burman ‘independence’ narrative asserts their antiquity in the land while ignoring the Muslim presence. The Burman ‘unity’ narrative suggests that Myanmar has historically been a family of races living in harmony; this is then used to marginalise other groups. Finally, the Rakhine-Burman ‘infiltration’ narrative suggests that Bengali Muslims have been illegally ‘infiltrating’ Myanmar over the last 100 to 200 years and furthermore became allied with the British colonial administration.
After explaining (and critiquing) this competing ‘stalemate of stories’, the writers offer different lenses to analyse the conflict—security dilemma, minority complex, greed or political economy, identity and territory grievances. These frameworks help unravel the causes and pathways of any intractable conflict that may seem to be based on religious and/or ethnic difference. For Myanmar, the authors conclude, the key issue for explaining the conflict is contested political inclusion and control over governance. They suggest that a territorial (rather than ethnic) definition of citizenship is needed to validate the Rohingya (and the Rakhine). They applaud the various recommendations of the Kofi Annan led Advisory Commission on Rakhine State but acknowledge the need for courageous leadership to implement them—for example, to create new citizenship pathways and open an inquiry into atrocities. Furthermore, they suggest, the situation needs more action, including protecting economic interests of returning refugees, advocating for justice for all groups, making the Tatmadaw accountable, and providing avenues for dialogue and reconciliation. They thus appeal for a negotiated solution to avoid more loss of life, but point in constructive directions for the kind of courageous leadership this will take—and for more than confrontational international public shaming.
The book helped me learn much about Myanmar, as well as principles and frameworks that apply in other intractable conflicts. It also modelled for me the potential of well-grounded research to look carefully at history and point productively forward into the future with constructive recommendations and conclusions. One of the challenges for military leaders is understanding the context in which they are deployed, including a region’s cultural values, history and religion and the part those factors play in a conflict. Myanmar’s ‘Rohingya’ Conflict is invaluable reading for anyone wanting to understand what is beneath the surface of the conflict, politics and refugee crisis of Myanmar, or indeed to consider implications for other similarly complex situations.
