Arguably, there was only one person with enough moral authority to tackle the issue, and at least to open a debate that might have led to a different perception of the Rohingya inside the country: Aung San Suu Kyi. Many people in Burma, albeit probably not so many in Arakan, would have listened to what she said, even if it went against the official discourse voiced by a government then still dominated by the distrusted military. For a while, it was somewhat of a mystery what the position of Suu Kyi and the NLD was on the Rohingya. She generally avoided the issue, and when she addressed it her statements were ambiguous at best. She and her party had talked about democracy and human rights for years, and it was puzzling that they were silent on such flagrant violation of the rights of around a million people within the borders of her country. Many abroad assumed that her silence was due to the strategic logic of avoiding alienation from her party’s supporters by defending what seemed an utterly unpopular cause. But it soon became clear that the NLD’s thinking on the Rohingya, and on who belonged to the Burmese nation, were not too dissimilar to that of the generals.
This position was most clearly articulated by the former journalist Win Tin. He was perhaps the second most important figure in the NLD, and undoubtedly its second most popular after Aung San Suu Kyi. Here was a man of unyielding principles who never wavered in his fight against the military junta – a person who I deeply respected and admired. I had already interviewed him at length in late 2010, then in hospital a year later, and we had a cordial relationship. Then, two years after our first encounter, I met him again in his humble house. The situation had changed. Win Tin was loyal to Aung San Suu Kyi, but he was critical of her approach of getting close to the generals. For him, the military was still the enemy. Our interview was going smoothly until I touched upon the crisis in Arakan State. ‘The problem there is created by foreigners, the Bengalis. That is a problem we have had for a very long time. All the people in the country regard these people as foreigners – they are Bengalis who cross to this country, over land and by sea and by river’, he said.
He went on to repeat the official narrative denying the Rohingya identity: ‘The word “rohingya” cropped up only after, some years back, maybe thirty years, these people want to claim the land, they want to claim themselves as a race, they want to claim to be a native race, and that is not right, that is the problem.’ He also repeated a myth that is rather common in Burma. In 1978, the government launched Operation Dragon King in Arakan, with the alleged intention of detecting illegal immigrants. The heavy-handed tactics of the army and the police sent more than 200,000 Rohingya Muslim refugees into Bangladesh; but, after some international pressure, the government was obliged to accept them back. Win Tin claimed that more people returned than those who had left in the first place – a false allegation. But he also added something else: ‘What the authorities from Bangladesh did was to put beggars, prostitutes and criminals they wanted to get rid of with the so-called Rohingyas, Bengali refugees, and sent everybody to Burma.’ Finally, the solution that Win Tin proposed to the ‘Rohingya problem’ was quite similar to that suggested by President Thein Sein:
The problem is these Rohingya foreigners, and we have to contain them one way or another; something like what happened in the United States during World War II with the Japanese. The US government contained them in camps, and after the war they were sent to Japan or they could apply for citizenship. We can solve this problem that way. We cannot regard them as citizens, because they are not our citizens at all, everyone here knows that. My position is that we must not violate the human rights of these people, the Rohingya, or whatever they are. Once they are inside our land maybe we have to contain them in one place, like a camp, but we must value their human rights.
I challenged Win Tin on his views, and he grew increasingly irritated. Eventually, he abruptly interrupted our conversation and told me I had to leave, as he had visitors waiting for him. When I left, there was nobody waiting outside. We never met again, and he passed away two years later, wearing until the very end the blue shirt he used to wear while in prison as a symbolic reminder to the world that his country was not yet free. There was no doubt that he had expressed his real opinions without reservation. He was an honest man who cared deeply for his people. But that did not detract him from his racism: it was clear that the Rohingya were excluded from what he regarded as his people.
During that visit to Burma, I discovered that his opinions were far from unique within the party. They were the consensus within the NLD and the Burman pro-democracy elite. A few days later I interviewed Ko Ko Gyi, a student leader in the 1988 uprising who led a high-profile Civil Society Organization. The Rohingya ‘pretend they suffer so much’, he told me in another increasingly heated encounter. ‘If the international community [exerts] force or pressure on this Rohingya issue, it will have to face not the military government but most of our people’, he concluded. He had said on another occasion that he and the members of his organization, the 88 Generation Students, were willing to take up arms alongside the same military that had kept him behind bars for years against the ‘foreign invaders’.6
Like Win Tin, Ko Ko Gyi claimed to speak in the name of the majority of Burmese citizens – but no polls about the Rohingya had been conducted among a population that, until recently, had had virtually no access to reliable information even about their own country. Most Burmese had never met a member of the Rohingya community, which had been confined in northern Arakan State for decades. Far from responding to a supposed popular sentiment on which nobody could have certainty, it is more likely that these members of the prodemocracy elite were in fact contributing to the shaping of such sentiments. Voices like theirs were at least as responsible for it as were statements from the widely despised former generals who ruled the country, if not more so, as they were looked up to as heroes and listened to by many Burmese.
Ko Ko Gyi was not given the chance to fight alongside the military, but on the very same day I interviewed him he was appointed to take part in an official commission of inquiry to investigate the violence in Arakan that had taken place in June – a sure sign that an important sector of the old rebellious opposition to military rule was being absorbed into mainstream politics in the new Burma. Significantly, there was no Muslim from Arakan among the members of the commission.
Other pro-democracy activists echoed anti-Rohingya sentiments over the next few years. The few people defending the Rohingya were silenced or ostracized, or changed their minds, as the crisis worsened, the situation in Arakan growing increasingly polarized and the pressure to ‘take sides’ increasing. The largest enigma was still the silence of Aung San Suu Kyi, and I began to believe that this was due to a political calculation, but that most analysts had failed to grasp which audience she was struggling not to alienate. Her political career had been based since the beginning in 1988 on the support of the Burman public, and that of international human rights organizations and Western governments, which had led her to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, transforming her into the ‘Nelson Mandela of Asia’. If she defended the Rohingya, she risked alienating her domestic base; but attacking them would probably alienate her foreign supporters – and she needed both during the transition.
Nonetheless, she was criticized for not speaking out on the Rohingya, as she had been criticized for not speaking out on the Kachin – the most common narrative being that she had become a politician, casting aside her persona of human rights icon.7 In 2013 she remarked: ‘I’m always surprised when people speak as if I’ve just become a politician. I’ve been a politician all along. I started in politics not as a human rights defender or a humanitarian worker, but as the leader of a political party. And if that’s not a politician then I don’t know what is.’8 There was something deeply disingenuous about that statement, not least because she was introducing a false dichotomy between the exercise of politics and the defence of human rights. After all, she had told me two years previously that her idea of democracy was based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Noting the apparent consensus within her party and her ambiguity on the issue, I suspected that she was avoiding expressing her real feelings unequivocally because she did not want to be labelled abroad as a racist. Later developments, particularly after her rise to power, confirmed that suspicion. But, reading between the lines of her public statements in 2012, it was possible to glimpse her true thoughts. In an interview with an Indian newspaper in November