Author(s): Mürsel BAYRAM∗ Yasin YAYLAR
Myanmar is a Southeast Asian country where Chinese, Tibetan, and Indian cultures have intermingled with each other throughout the country’s history. The conflict between the Buddhists and Muslims of Indian origin in the Arakan/Rakhine region is fueled mainly by three historical dynamics of differentation. Firstly, Buddhists and Muslims opted for different alliances during the competitions for regional dominance. During the Second World War, for instance, Buddhist Bamars supported the Japanese occupiers against Britain while Arakanese Muslims took sides with Britain with the hope of establishing a state independent from Burma. This difference of alignment led to conflicts not only between the Buddhists and Muslims but also the pro-British groups and Burmese nationalists. The second dynamics is the regional immigration movements and the resultant socioeconomical differentation. As a colonialist power in the Indian subcontinent, Britain made it possible for Indians and Bengalis to come and settle in today’s Myanmar. These Muslim immigrants not only became active in the colonial bureaucracy and commerce but also became landed proprietors. The economical crisis in early 1930s increased the discontent among native people against those Indian immigrants who had better living conditions and this led to assaults against Indians. The third dynamics is the exclusionary and discriminatory policies of the postindependence governments against the ethnic and religious minorities in the country. The Myanmarese socialist stratocracy exercised a firm hand in its tough-minded nation-building process based on the principle of “one nation (Myanma), one language (Myanma bhasa) and one religion (Buddhism) only ”. The ethnic and religious minorities, Muslims in particular, have not been treated as equal citizens. Since Buddhism is identified with the national unity, the presence of Muslims has been perceived as a threat to that unity. Along with the global trends, these factors have fueled the Buddhist-Muslim conflict growing violent in 2012. In this context, Myanmar is a significant example to see the relationship between violence and Buddhism which is normally characterised as a pacifist religion
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