Members of ethnic groups like the Burman, Mon or Rakhine, do not have surnames, so their names are repeated in full every time they are mentioned – with the exception of Aung San Suu Kyi, who is often called simply ‘Suu Kyi’. Other ethnic groups like the Kachin or Chin names do often include family or clan names, and sometimes individuals may be referred to only by their surnames.
The Burmese often use honorifics determined by the relative age or social status of the person addressing them. For instance, to refer to a mature woman, or one holding a senior position, the speaker would add ‘Daw’ (as in ‘Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’, used often in Burmese media). For senior men, either by age or position, ‘U’ is commonly added (as in ‘U Nu’). Further examples of these honorifics include the following:
| Daw | for mature women and/or women occupying senior positions (roughly equivalent to ‘aunt’ or ‘Ms’) |
| Ma | for young women or women of roughly the same age as the speaker (roughly equivalent to ‘sister’ or ‘Ms’) |
| U | for mature men and/or men occupying senior positions (roughly equivalent to ‘uncle’ or ‘Mr’) |
| Ko | for young men or men of roughly similar age to the speaker (roughly equivalent to ‘brother’) |
| Maung | for younger men, often part of the name |
| Saya | for teachers or older men with special status |
| Ashin | for monks |
| Sayadaw | for senior monks |
| Bo | for military commanders |
| Bogyoke | for military generals |
| Thakin | ‘master’, used by the nationalists in the 1930s and 1940s to indicate that they were the masters of their own country |
I have not used these honorifics except in cases when they are so closely associated with the name of the person that they are rarely omitted (as in the case of the first prime minister of independent Burma, U Nu), or when quoting others using them.
Introduction: Trapped in the Burmese Labyrinth
How can we understand the violence and turmoil in Burma during most of the last decade, particularly the brutal ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority living in the west of the country? This has been a period of profound political and social changes in the country. Since 2011, the military junta that had ruled for decades has dissolved itself, the army loosened its tight grip on power, and initiated a carefully managed transition to a pseudo-democratic system. As a consequence, while maintaining considerable control over the state apparatus, the military allowed a degree of opening that resulted in new freedoms that the Burmese had not enjoyed for decades.
I visited the country for the first time in late 2010, only a few months before the change of regime, and travelled there often as a journalist in subsequent years to cover the transformations brought by the transition. It was an exciting time to work on the country, and I was able to visit areas hitherto out of limits and interview people who had been virtually silent, or silenced, for decades. At times, reporting on such changes gave one a heady feeling of discovery, but this excitement was often tempered by the cold realities of a nation that continued to be in turmoil: war, murderous intercommunal conflict, and deep-seated hatreds being expressed openly, which were ultimately acted upon in the most brutal manner.
This was most starkly seen in 2012, when sectarian violence erupted in the impoverished state of Arakan, in the west of the country. The conflict was between the Rohingya community and the state’s majority, the Buddhist Rakhine. Dozens, possibly hundreds, were killed as mobs from one community fell upon the other. Entire neighbourhoods were razed to the ground; tens of thousands lost their houses, seeking refuge in camps for internally displaced persons. The Rohingya, who had been severely oppressed by the military for decades, bore the brunt of the violence, and it soon emerged that the security forces had often sided with the Rakhine mobs attacking them.
The Rohingya were clearly the main victims, but that was not how they were seen by many in Burma. There is a widespread perception in the country that the Rohingya constitute a foreign threat to be contained at all costs. In the years following 2012, anti-Rohingya sentiment increased throughout the country, and the government dramatically ramped up the policies of exclusion and apartheid they had imposed for decades. In 2017, this culminated in the violent ethnic cleansing of more than three-fifths of the Rohingya population by the Burmese military.
A few weeks after the 2012 riots I visited Sittwe, Arakan state’s capital, and interviewed several people from both communities. I saw how whole quarters had been destroyed, and witnessed the misery in the camps where most Rohingya from the city had been confined – and still are. At that time, the National League for Democracy (NLD) – the party led by Aung San Suu Kyi, the revered leader of the pro-democracy opposition during the dark years of dictatorship – had placed a few MPs in parliament in a by-election held a few months before, including Suu Kyi herself. The party had little weight in parliament, but everybody expected it to dominate following the next general election, as indeed it did. I had met and interviewed some members of the party, including its leader, and felt a deep sympathy and respect for their struggle. Admittedly, their politics were somewhat vague, the personality cult around Suu Kyi seemed excessive, and the party was lacking in internal democracy. But those were traits I and many others were willing to overlook or explain away as stemming from the tremendous challenges it faced in its fight against the military dictatorship. Nevertheless, the party’s commitment to human rights and dignity seemed beyond doubt. It was, therefore, a shock when I enquired about the crisis in Arakan, and found almost invariably that NLD members shared the same assumptions about the Rohingya as Rakhine nationalists, government officials and, by all indications, large sections of Burmese society.
Understanding the roots of those prejudices became a sort of obsession for me, and for the next years it would be the main focus of my work. How could people who had made great sacrifices in the name of freedom, human rights and democracy harbour such hatred against a vulnerable and persecuted minority? Why had a beleaguered minority like the Rohingya come to be so reviled, and even feared, by so many people in the country? And, probably most centrally, how had national and ethnic identities come to be construed in the country?
The answers to these questions might explain how some of the horrors I had covered could possibly have happened. Of course, understanding violence and racial hatred does not mean condoning or justifying them. On the contrary, I believe that understanding the sources of such hatred and the barbarity to which it may lead is a moral endeavour and a precondition of fighting it. Sometimes the savagery to which those racial hatreds lead is impossible to comprehend. The cruelty many Rohingya have suffered defies language and logic, as it