Kapitel 4
The Art of Belonging: Identity as Survival Strategy
For individuals caught in Myanmar's complex web of ethnic politics, identity became a matter of survival rather than just self-expression. Hla Hla's family went to extraordinary lengths to secure her Bamar identity when they moved to Yangon. Despite being ethnically Mon, they bribed local authorities to alter their ID cards, completely fabricating their genealogy to erase her complex ancestry-"half Muslim" father, Chinese Mon grandfather. Beyond documentation, she had to transform her comportment: "Me being dark. Also the way I sit and walk. The way you dress, the way you hold yourself and behave. You have to be a city girl, not like in the village."
This wasn't mere social climbing but a calculated response to a system where ethnicity determined one's freedoms. Non-Bamar faced heightened surveillance, with police routinely questioning travelers about their race and registration. "I didn't change my ID because of social pressure, but because of the way the government tried to control and discriminate," she explained. "So although we are Mon, when we moved to Yangon my mother said, 'No, we must be Bamar Buddhist because this is the highest identity we can get.'"
Even more remarkable is the story of U Maung Soe, a Rohingya Muslim who managed to join the military-an institution known for persecuting his people. When he turned 12 in 1978-the year Rohingya were forced to carry Foreign Registration Cards-he and his parents changed their ethnicity to "Rakhine Muslim," a recognized category before the 1983 census. Later, when joining the army at age 22, a Buddhist friend at the draft office wrote that he was "Rakhine Buddhist" on his form, initiating a second identity transformation. Despite being Rohingya, he rose to the rank of captain, even assisting the Na Sa Ka security force that oppressed his own people.
These stories reveal something universal about Myanmar's ethnic divisions-that identity is not fixed but malleable, undermining nationalist claims of ethnic purity. The ease with which individuals could cross supposedly impermeable ethnic boundaries through simple paperwork maneuvers exposes the artificial nature of the categories themselves. As U Maung Soe reflected, "In a democracy, all the diverse people can cooperate with each other. I proved it myself."
Kapitel 5
Ruling the Unruly: Social Engineering in Rakhine State
The military junta developed ambitious schemes to re-engineer northern Rakhine State's social landscape, systematically weakening the Rohingya while creating deeper divisions between Buddhists and Muslims. Their strategy materialized in a network of model villages populated by released Buddhist prisoners, homeless families, and Rakhine from the south-all part of a calculated demographic correction to counter what they perceived as the dangerous growth of Muslim population.
In the mid-1990s, Buddhist inmates across Myanmar's prisons were offered early release in exchange for relocating to northern Rakhine State. Those who accepted were transported to newly built model villages around Buthidaung, where they received houses, livestock, stipends, and monthly food rations. The fields surrounding these settlements were theirs to cultivate, creating permanent Buddhist fixtures in what the regime considered a region being "lost" to Muslims.
The resettlement scheme originated from an 11-point strategy document circulated in 1988 within the Ministry for the Progress of Border Areas and National Races (Na Ta La). Colonel Tha Kyaw's directive explicitly aimed "to strive for the increase in Buddhist population to be more than the number of Muslim people" through establishing these villages. The plan also outlined other suppressive measures: denying Rohingya higher education, banning mosque construction, restricting marriages, and systematically referring to them as "insurgents" to justify citizenship denial.
These Na Ta La villages deteriorated over time. Rations eventually stopped, and settlers who lacked farming skills struggled to survive. Villages like Shwe Yin Aye devolved into communities plagued by alcoholism, gambling, and prostitution. Disease, particularly malaria, ravaged these settlements. The regime's attempt to establish "facts on the ground" proving Buddhism's foothold in Muslim-majority areas had created desperate communities with little connection to their surroundings.
Beyond the Na Ta La villages in Rakhine State, the regime established Na Ta La schools in the 1990s, particularly in Chin State, targeting Christian communities. Unlike the strategy in Rakhine which aimed to weaken rather than assimilate Muslims, these schools sought to actively cultivate ideological alignment with the state's "Three Main National Causes." Reports emerged of forced Buddhist conversion of Christian students, who were attracted by free education and board-powerful incentives in a region where three-quarters lived below the poverty line.
Kapitel 6
: Season of Violence
Nine months before the discovery of Ma Thida Htwe's body that triggered widespread violence in Rakhine State, tensions had been building through organized efforts to delegitimize Rohingya claims to belonging. Rakhine historians, political leaders, and intellectuals held seminars denouncing what they claimed was Rohingya appropriation of Rakhine heritage. A magazine called Piccima Ratwan began circulation with an editorial board including Rakhine monks, police chiefs, and government administrators, repeatedly portraying Rohingya as terrorists and an existential threat.
On June 8, 2012, following a prayer ceremony at a Maungdaw mosque for Muslims killed in a bus attack days earlier, confrontations erupted between Rohingya and Rakhine groups. After police allegedly shot at Rohingya, they began stoning Rakhine shops and later moved to outlying Na Ta La villages, burning hundreds of houses. The Weekly Eleven journal characterized these as "Rohingya terrorist attacks" and warned of "ethnic cleansing or genocide"-referring to the supposed threat Rohingya posed to Rakhine. Government silence on this inflammatory coverage allowed fear and resentment to crystallize into action.
By June 12, violence reached Nasi quarter in Sittwe, where Adul Shukur witnessed Rakhine attackers with machetes and flaming torches. After Nasi burned, the government moved Rohingya into camps like Thet Kae Pyin, where over 5,000 lived in cramped wooden huts and tarpaulin shelters. What began as a temporary measure to ease tensions became permanent segregation, enthusiastically supported by Rakhine political powers who viewed the camps as rightful places for Rohingya confinement.
High walls, both literal and figurative, rose between the communities. In July 2012, Rakhine monks issued directives commanding Buddhists to cease all contact with "Bengali kalar," forbidding their employment in ports, farms, and businesses. By October, monks at Dakaung Monastery in Sittwe threatened to expose any Rakhine who assisted Rohingya as "national traitors," publishing their photos-echoing Rwanda's targeting of Hutu "moderates" who had helped Tutsis. The pressure was so intense that when a Rakhine man was caught selling rice to a Muslim in Mrauk U, fellow Rakhine beat him to death.
Meanwhile, anti-Muslim sentiment was spreading beyond Rakhine State. By 2013, violence had erupted nationwide: in Meikhtila, three Muslim quarters were completely destroyed; similar violence occurred in Okkan, Lashio, and Htangone. What had begun as localized conflict between ethnic groups in Rakhine State had transformed into nationwide Buddhist-Muslim violence.
Kapitel 7
Democracy's Dark Side: Nationalism Unleashed
What shocked observers almost as much as the violence itself was the public response to it. Not only did Rakhine crowds jeer at Rohingya as they fled destroyed homes, but unexpected voices from the pro-democracy movement joined the chorus of resentment. Ko Ko Gyi-who spent 17 years imprisoned for opposing the junta-declared Rohingya "absolutely not an ethnic race of Burma" and suggested that "democratic forces" might join hands with the military to resolve this "national affair."
The NLD remained conspicuously quiet on violence toward Rohingya. Aung San Suu Kyi took an ambivalent line, arguing that "violence has been committed by both sides" and refusing to take sides to work toward reconciliation. Her reluctance to acknowledge the widespread racism feeding the violence revealed a deeper problem. The Rohingya had never featured on the pro-democracy movement's radar, nor been included in calls for ethnic equality. Suu Kyi consistently avoided using the term "Rohingya" and evaded direct questions, speaking vaguely about clarifying citizenship laws without addressing their prejudicial basis.
By early 2013, anti-Muslim sentiment had spread beyond Rakhine State through the "969" movement. Initiated by U Wimala, a monk from Mawlamyine, the movement distributed stickers bearing the numbers 969 (representing Buddhist attributes) to counter the Muslim practice of marking shops with "786" (representing a Quranic phrase). For many Burmese, Buddhism represented not just faith but national identity-a sanctuary during military rule that they believed needed protection.
After the 969 movement was declared illegal by the government-appointed State Sangha Maha Nayaka Committee in August 2013, a new, more organized group emerged-the Organisation for Protection of Race, Religion, and Sasana (known as Ma Ba Tha). With millions of supporters, departments for education, legal affairs, accounting, and media, it wielded significant political influence. Ma Ba Tha successfully pushed through the discriminatory "Protection of Race and Religion Laws" in 2014 despite NLD opposition. These laws criminalized polygamy, required official permission for religious conversion, allowed local governments to limit women's reproductive rates in "overpopulated" regions, and subjected Buddhist-non-Buddhist marriages to public scrutiny.
Those who opposed Ma Ba Tha's agenda faced severe consequences. When women's rights campaigner May Sabe Phyu signed a public statement against the laws, Ma Ba Tha labeled her a "national traitor." She received death threats, had her phone number posted on adult websites, and was sent explicit images. Her children were also threatened. Despite her decade of campaigning against military abuses, she had never experienced such targeted intimidation.
Kapitel 8
Apartheid State: The Architecture of Control
The violence of 2012 in Rakhine State created an intricate system of segregation that fundamentally transformed the social fabric of the region. Rohingya were systematically banished from towns where they had lived and worked for generations, their homes and businesses abandoned or seized. Markets, schools, hospitals, and other public facilities that had previously served all communities became strictly off-limits, enforced through a complex network of checkpoints and surveillance that effectively imprisoned Rohingya within their villages. Even attempting to cross these invisible but rigorously enforced boundaries became a criminal offense, punishable by fines, detention, or worse.
In January 2015, the human cost of this segregation was starkly illustrated through the tragedy of Aarif, a Rohingya shopkeeper whose story became emblematic of the system's cruelty. When his pregnant wife developed life-threatening complications, they faced an impossible situation. Just four years earlier, in 2011, they could have reached Kyauktaw hospital in minutes. Now, they were forced to navigate an exhausting bureaucratic maze, requiring multiple permissions from different authorities, none of whom treated the medical emergency with urgency. After an excruciating 36-hour wait for clearance and transport arrangements, they had to undertake a grueling three-hour journey to Sittwe hospital instead of the ten-minute drive to their local facility. The devastating outcome - the death of both mother and child - was compounded by the final indignity of Aarif being forcibly removed by police and denied the right to attend his wife's funeral.
The physical segregation imposed after June 2012 created deep psychological barriers that transformed longtime neighbors into perceived enemies. In Par Da Lek village, the transformation was particularly evident in the case of administrator Min Oo's son. Despite having shared meals and overnight stays with his Rohingya friend, he now claimed to "get a fever" merely at the sight of Muslims. His chilling explanation, "Before 2012 I didn't think that way. After 2012 I think they're bad," revealed how quickly manufactured hatred could override years of personal friendship and shared experiences.
The enforcement of segregation became increasingly decentralized, with Rakhine civilians taking on unofficial policing roles. This vigilante enforcement was demonstrated in a 2015 incident near Mrauk U, where a critically injured Rohingya man was prevented from reaching medical care by armed Rakhine villagers who had set up their own checkpoint. The man was forced to return home without treatment, highlighting how civilian enforcement had become as effective as official restrictions in controlling Rohingya movement.
The violence created a complex web of informal regulations that erased long-standing distinctions between different Muslim groups. Even the Kaman people, who held official Myanmar citizenship and had centuries of recognized presence in the region, found themselves targeted. The case of Ma Win from Thinganet village illustrated this brutal shift - a Kaman woman who had peacefully traded in Sittwe markets for three decades was subjected to an hour-long beating by Rakhine women who had been her regular trading partners and customers. This incident exposed how the violence transcended ethnic boundaries to target religious and racial differences, with darker-skinned individuals increasingly marked as "outsiders" regardless of their legal status or historical ties to the region.
Kapitel 9
Glimpses of Hope in the Darkness
While much of Myanmar experienced violent Buddhist-Muslim conflict during the transition, some areas maintained fragile coexistence. In northern Rakhine State, the town of Buthidaung-where Muslims outnumber Buddhists-avoided the violence and segregation that afflicted Sittwe and other towns. Here, communities continued interacting in teashops, schools, and marketplaces, demonstrating that segregation persists only where calculated to benefit the dominant group.
In Buthidaung, a dilapidated cinema hut screening English Premier League matches became one of the few spaces where Rohingya and Rakhine still gathered as social equals. Inside this musty building with its peeling walls and mismatched seating, religious and ethnic divisions temporarily dissolved as fans hollered side by side, sharing a camaraderie absent elsewhere in the state.
In East Tonbyin, Win Zaw and his wife Mya showed signs of healing relations with their Rohingya neighbors. Though Win Zaw had voted for the Arakan National Party and claimed 70% of Muslims were dishonest, he and Mya now welcomed Rohingya vendors from South Tonbyin who sold fish and vegetables. When a young Rohingya fisherman arrived with malaria symptoms, they showed genuine concern, with Mya offering to contact a doctor.
Among the heroes working quietly against violence was U Witthuda, a Buddhist abbot who, during the 2013 Meikhtila violence, opened his monastery to both Buddhist and Muslim refugees. When mobs demanded he surrender the Muslims, including the gold shop owner's family whose dispute had sparked the violence, he refused: "If you want to get them, you have to kill me first." By the fourth day, 940 people sheltered in his compound, initially separated but eventually mingling together-sharing food, witnessing births, and even a death. His monastery became a sanctuary where people of different faiths found solidarity amid chaos, offering a hopeful vision for Myanmar's future.
Even in areas where social engineering had most deeply divided communities, individuals continued to bridge ethnic and religious divides. In late 2015, a group of Rohingya and Rakhine men played chinlone together in a paddy field south of Maungdaw, their game set against a rainbow arching over the hills-a powerful symbol of possibility. Despite Myanmar's "rainbow nation" of diverse cultures being undermined by those promoting division, these connections persisted quietly.
The transition brought unprecedented freedoms to Myanmar, exemplified by Muslims gathering in Kan Ywar's mosque to learn about democratic processes-an activity that would have led to imprisonment not long before. Yet alongside these freedoms, dangerous forces emerged. The NLD had an opportunity to break with the military's narrative that ethnic and religious diversity threatens national stability. Instead, the party-dominated by privileged Bamar-focused on rule of law and development in Rakhine State without addressing the stigmatization of Rohingya identity.
Wade's book concludes with both warning and hope. The warning came true in August 2017, when massive military operations forced over 700,000 Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh in what UN investigators later called a genocide. Yet the hope remains in those quiet heroes who risked everything to protect their neighbors across religious divides-proving that Myanmar's future could still be one where diversity becomes a source of strength rather than division.
