State Racism Meets Neoliberalism
In Myanmar, state racism isn’t just perpetrated by its military, but liberals like Aung San Suu Kyi.
Burma — officially known as Myanmar — celebrated the seventieth anniversary of its independence at a moment when the failures of its incomplete nation-building project have become increasingly evident.
Last year saw the almost complete ethnic cleansing of the Muslim Rohingya minority in the northwestern state of Arakan. More than 600,000 Muslims fled to overstretched refugee camps in Bangladesh. Meanwhile, wars between the Tatmadaw, as the Burmese Army is known, and several ethno-nationalist armed groups continued to rage.
The government’s civilian wing, led by Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD), seems unable to offer a vision for the country that differs from the “discipline-flourishing democracy” envisioned by the military junta that ruled Burma for five decades.The generals who once controlled the nation have accomplished an astonishing feat. Most of the population opposed them, but now a large section of the Buddhist Bamar population (the country’s majority group) and the Buddhist Rakhine population (the majority in Arakan) support — even cheer — the military’s “clearance operations” against the Rohingya. Meanwhile, the civilian government either covers up or flatly denies the atrocities while trying to move toward peace with other armed ethnic groups. Suu Kyi doesn’t control the military, but her government appears too timid to make meaningful change anyway.The elected government operates under a Tatmadaw-drafted constitution that grants the military wide powers and complete autonomy from civilian oversight. But these institutional constraints don’t fully explain the NLD’s shortcomings. Indeed, the party seems to share much of its ideology with the military junta it once resisted.The national question
If Burma has a hegemonic ideology, it’s the concept of “national races” (taingyintha) and its corollary, which holds that only members of those groups belong in the country.
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