Intercommunal tensions had existed in the state for decades, but that was only part of the story. The violence was not entirely spontaneous; strong indications emerged that there was some element of planning on the Rakhine side. According to a well-researched report by the International State Crime Initiative, based at Queen Mary, University of London, local Rakhine businessmen, Rakhine civil society organizations and politicians of the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party (RNDP) had organized mobs from Rakhine villages and taken them on buses to Sittwe, where they attacked the quarter of Narzi, mostly inhabited by Rohingya Muslims, and burned it to the ground.2 Moreover, at first the police did nothing to stop the violence, allowing it to escalate, and then often took sides with the Rakhine, shooting at the Rohingya and helping Rakhine mobs to torch Rohingya houses. The impunity that Rakhine attackers enjoyed also belies the notion that the authorities were impartial pacifiers; while many Rohingya in Maungdaw and Sittwe were jailed, not a single Rakhine was arrested.
The violence did not come out of the blue. In the immediate context of the transition, Rakhine nationalists had lashed out against the Rohingya after they were allowed to vote in the 2010 election. In September 2011, several Rakhine associations held a seminar in Rangoon protesting the ‘Rohingyanization of Arakan’.3 One month later, the RNDP organized a series of public conferences in several towns in Northern Arakan with the same theme. ‘We have no intention to breed racial or religious hatred among the peoples living together on our land’, said U Aung Mra Kyaw, an MP for the RNDP. But the reaction of some people in attendance seemed to belie his words. One participant in one of the conferences was reported as saying: ‘Many people did not want to return home, even after concluding the conference … because they were embittered with the feelings that their land and valued heritages are being insulted by those groups of Chittagonian Bengali Muslims with their made up histories of Rohingya’.4
I visited Sittwe for the first time a few weeks after the first wave of riots. The government had imposed strict segregation between the two communities, with the ostensible rationale of preventing further violence; but the reality was that the city had been almost completely ethnically cleansed of its Muslim population, and it has remained so ever since. The overwhelming majority of Rohingya had been taken to a complex of camps near the city, mostly built around pre-existing Rohingya villages. Only two Muslim enclaves remained within Sittwe: Bumay, on the edge of the city, and Aung Mingalar, the Muslim ghetto downtown.
Those in the camps were, in one sense, more fortunate than those in Aung Mingalar: the ‘registered’ interns in the camps received food from UN agencies, while those ‘unregistered’ did not. Meanwhile the inhabitants of the ghetto were not officially regarded as IDPs, so they did not receive anything. I could not visit Aung Mingalar on that occasion, but I managed to speak on the phone with some residents, and they told me that they were forced to buy food from the police at as much as ten times its market price. Many of them received remittances from relatives in Rangoon or abroad, but, given that the money had to go through the police guarding the neighbourhood, the officers always got a substantial commission.
My interactions with Rohingya people were scarce and brief on that first trip. Having few contacts in Arakan, and with the camps closely guarded, I had to visit them with a military truck accompanying me and my Rakhine translator. Still, I managed to talk privately with a couple of them, who told me about how they had witnessed the police shooting relatives and neighbours in the recent violence. The camps where they had been confined were only a few weeks old, but there were already some suspicions that the displaced would not be able to return to their homes for a long time.
There were a few thousand displaced Rakhine, too, most of them sheltered in Buddhist monasteries; but their numbers were smaller than the displaced Rohingya and, unlike Muslims, they enjoyed freedom of movement. The traces of the recent violence were visible virtually everywhere. In the bustling market near the port, many shops were closed, their Muslim owners being confined in the camps or in Aung Mingalar and Bumay. In successive visits, I found most of those shops had been taken by Rakhine people. Meanwhile, Narzi quarter, the majority- Muslim area that had been attacked by Rakhine mobs and subsequently evacuated by the authorities, was a desolate landscape of debris in which no building had been left unscathed. It was a ghost town where I could see teams of monks and Buddhist laymen clearing the rubble during the day. President Thein Sein had declared a state of emergency on 10 June, and there was a strict curfew from eight in the evening to six in the morning. At night the streets were eerily empty except for a few checkpoints, and stray dogs.
It was easier to interview Rakhine people than Rohingya. It was then that I got a sense for the first time of the deeply ingrained siege mentality within the Buddhist community, with damning rumours about the other community constantly circulating. I also started to glimpse where those fears came from. When I interviewed some Buddhist monks, the abbot of Budawmaw, a monastery sheltering a dozen Rakhine families, told me that the Muslim community had been infiltrated by al-Qaeda and other international jihadist outfits. To prove his point, he showed me a VCD with stills of violence and ‘Muslim extremists’ undergoing training. Those images could have been taken anywhere, but he claimed they were all ‘Bengalis’ preparing to wage jihad in Arakan. No violence waged by the Rohingya during the recent clashes revealed any sophisticated training, and fire-arms had not been used; but the facts seemed to be irrelevant. On the VCD, there was a picture of the Thai army detaining Malay insurgents in southern Thailand. When I pointed that out, he was adamant that it was the Myanmar army.
The abbot of another monastery, U Pinnyarthami, laid out to me the theory that al-Qaeda was using international NGOs working in Arakan and the United Nations to supply local terrorists with weapons. I heard this kind of wild conspiracy theory innumerable times in the following years. Underlying them all was a widespread distrust among the Rakhine towards international NGOs and the UN, who many believed work exclusively for the Rohingya and neglected the Rakhine people. It is fair to assume that those men truly believed what they said. But they were not just channeling anti-Muslim sentiments – they were amplifying them within a community whose reverence for Buddhist monks often lends great weight to whatever words they utter.
In those early days after the riots, the triangular conflict between Burmans, Rakhine and Rohingya seemed to have flattened into a twosided conflict pitting the first two against the latter – the two ‘national races’ against the weaker ‘interlopers from Bangladesh’. Back then, it was not uncommon to see Rakhine people wearing tee-shirts bearing the sentence, ‘We support our President Thein Sein’, in both English and Burmese, in the streets of Sittwe. One month after the riots, the president said that the Rohingya were not welcome in the country, and asked the UNHCR to place them in camps or send them to another country.5 The UN agency immediately refused the petition, but it nonetheless garnered Thein Sein some support in Arakan. ‘We will take care of our own ethnic nationalities, but Rohingyas who came to Burma illegally are not [one] of our ethnic nationalities and we cannot accept them here’, he said. He also made a bizarre distinction between ‘Rohingya’ and ‘Bengali’, according to which the former were illegal immigrants who had arrived in Arakan after independence in 1948, and the latter those who had arrived during the colonial period, and were thus entitled to Burmese citizenship. But his stress on taking care of Burma’s ‘national races’ made implicitly clear that even the ‘Bengali’ citizens were not a priority.
The riots hardened prejudices against the Rohingya throughout Burma. It is impossible to asses with certainty how many people shared those prejudices, but the incipient Burmese public sphere was increasingly filled with anti-Rohingya news and commentaries portraying them as a demographic threat to the nation, denying both their identity and their right to live in the country. While the Rohingya were portrayed in international media as the main victims, sometimes ignoring the Rakhine, Burmese media almost invariably focused on the violence committed by the Royingya, often blaming them for things they had not done, and ignoring the discrimination they had suffered for decades. The Rohingya, or ‘Bengalis’, were not regarded as a ‘national race’, while the Rakhine were, and that coloured many perceptions of the whole crisis. There were very few dissenting voices, at least among the Burman ethnic majority or the Rakhine, and their numbers dwindled in the coming years as the situation in Arakan grew