Why Deadly Race Riots Could Rattle Myanmar's Fledgling Reforms.

Apparently "Democracy" Isn't The Only Thing Failing In Myanmar; So Is Multiculturalism. Someone Also Forgot To Tell The Burmese That Diversity Is Strength.

From The Christian Science Monitor, June 12, 2012.

The deadly race riots now cleaving northwestern Myanmar are an alarming reminder of a key threat to the country’s fragile and embryonic democracy: conflict among Myanmar’s myriad ethnic groups.

Violence continued Tuesday in Arakan state, three days after President Thein Sein declared a state of emergency there and sent troops to quell the looting, arson, and mob clashes that have pitted the Buddhist Rakhine minority against Muslim Rohingya. At least seven people were reported killed.

The president warned in a televised speech that “if we put racial and religious issues at the forefront … if we continue to retaliate and terrorize and kill each other … the country’s stability and peace, democratization process and development … could be severely affected and much would be lost.”

Many ethnic minorities have waged guerrilla insurgencies against the government since Myanmar’s (Burma’s) independence in 1948, seeking wider economic and political autonomy from the central authorities, which are dominated by the majority Bamar. The current clashes, however, are different, setting two minorities against each other, and posing an awkward security challenge for the government as it seeks to present a softer and more democratic image, steering the country away from military rule.

Hostility between the Rakhine and the Rohingya dates back many decades; as British troops fell back before the advancing Japanese in 1942, Rakhine mobs took advantage of the power vacuum to launch a pogrom against their neighbors.

The Rakhine regard the Rohingya descended from laborers imported from what is now Bangladesh by the British colonial government more than a century ago as foreign intruders.

The estimated 750,000 Rohingya, one of the most miserable and oppressed minorities in the world, are deeply resentful of their almost complete absence of civil rights in Myanmar.

In 1982, the military junta stripped the Rohingya of their Myanmar citizenship, classing them as illegal immigrants and rendering them stateless. They are not allowed to leave their villages, nor may they marry, without permission. They are forbidden to have more than two children and for many years the authorities have subjected them to slave labor.

Rohingya make up around 90 percent of the population of north Arakan, but their Rakhine neighbors dismiss them as “Bengali Muslims” and refuse to acknowledge the Rohingya communal identity that local Muslim leaders have forged over the past half century.

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