ဆာဂြ်န္ဂ်န္ကင္း
Saturday 26 August 2017
လြန္ခဲ့တဲ့ ၁၅ ႏွစ္က ၿဗိတိသွ်သံအမတ္ တစ္ေယာက္အေနျဖင့္ ရွည္လ်ား ေကြ႕ေကာက္ေသာ ျမစ္ေၾကာင္း အတိုင္း ေရွးေဟာင္း ဗုဒၶဘာသာ ရခိုင္ မင္းေနျပည္ေတာ္ ေျမာက္ဦးၿမိဳ႕သို႔ ခရီသြားခဲ့သည္ကို အမွတ္ရမိသည္။
ေခတ္သစ္ျမန္မာျပည္ အေစာပိုင္းကာလရွိ ထူးျခားေသာ လူမ်ိဳးစုတစ္ခု၏ အင္အားႏွင့္ စည္ပင္မႈကို ထင္ထင္ရွားရွား ျမင္ရေသာ အံ့ဖြယ္ခရီးတစ္ခု ျဖစ္ခဲ့သည္။ ရခိုင္ သို႔မဟုတ္ အာရကန္ ဆိုသည္မွာ ဒုတိယ ကမာၻစစ္ႀကီး အတြင္း အဓိကက်ေသာ စစ္ပြဲမ်ား ျဖစ္ခဲ့ရာေနရာျဖစ္ၿပီး ကြ်န္ေတာ္၏ ဦးေလးျဖစ္သူပင္ ၿဗိတိသွ် ေတာ္ဝင္ေရတပ္ႏွင့္အတူ ေရာက္ဖူးခဲ့ေလသည္။
ယခုေတာ့ ရခိုင္ကို အျခားအေၾကာင္းတစ္ခုျဖင့္ လူသိမ်ားသည္။ ႏွစ္ေပါင္း ငါးဆယ္ေက်ာ္ၾကာ စစ္အာဏာရွင္ စနစ္မွ ႐ုန္းထြက္ၿပီး ျပန္လည္ထူေထာင္ေနရေသာ ျမန္မာအစိုးရ က တစ္ဘက္၊ ႐ိုဟင္ဂ်ာဟု လူသိမ်ားၿပီး ျငင္းဆန္သူမ်ားလည္း ရွိေနေသာ ျပည္နယ္ေျမာက္ပိုင္းရွိ ဘဂၤလီစကားေျပာ မူဆလင္ လူစုတြင္းမွ အစြန္းေရာက္သူ အဖြဲ႕အစည္းမ်ား က တစ္ဘက္ ပဋိပကၡ ျဖစ္ေနေသာ ေဒသ ျဖစ္လာခဲ့သည္။
တစ္ဘက္ဘက္ကို ဘက္လိုက္ဖို႔က လြယ္ကူသည္။ ဆိုးဝါးတဲ့ ခြဲျခားဆက္ဆံမႈမ်ား ႏွစ္ေပါင္းဆယ္ခ်ီရွိေနသည္ဟု အမ်ားအားျဖင့္ လက္ခံထားၾကေသာအခါ ပိုမို လြယ္ကူသည္။ အတင္းအက်ပ္ ေရႊ႕ေျပာင္းေစမႈမ်ား၊ ေက်းရြာမ်ားကို မီးရႈိ႕မႈမ်ား၊ ႏိုင္ငံသားအျဖစ္ျငင္းပယ္မႈမ်ား အစရွိေသာ ျမန္မာလံုျခံဳေရးတပ္ဖြဲ႕မ်ား၏ ၾကမ္းတမ္းေသာ ျပဳမူဆက္ဆံပံုမ်ားကို ႐ိုဟင္ဂ်ာမ်ား ခါးစည္းခံခဲ့ရသည္ဟု အမ်ားက လက္ခံထားၾကေသာအခါ တစ္ဘက္ဘက္ကို ဘက္လိုက္ဖို့ ပိုလြယ္ကူပါသည္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ အေျခအေနမ်ား တိုးတက္ေကာင္းမြန္လာေစလိုသည္ ဆိုပါက အျပစ္တင္ရႈတ္ခ်ျခင္း မျပဳမီ အေျခအေနကို နားလည္ဖို႔ လိုပါသည္။ ဤအေရးသည္ ျမန္မာအတြက္သာမက အေရွ႕အလယ္ပိုင္း ေဒသအတြက္လည္း အေရးပါ၏။
ပထမဆံုး အေနျဖင့္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္း နာက်င္ခံစားရမႈမ်ားသည္ ရခိုင္ျပည္မွ မူဆလင္မ်ားသာ မဟုတ္ေခ်။ ၁၉၅၇ ကတည္းက စစ္မာဏာရွင္စနစ္ဆိုး တစ္ခုေအာက္တြင္ အားလံုး အဖိႏွိပ္ခံခဲ့ရျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။ ဗမာ၊ ရွမ္း၊ မြန္၊ ကရင္၊ ကခ်င္၊ ခ်င္း၊ ကရင္နီ၊ ပေလာင္၊ ကိုးကန္႔၊ ရခိုင္ရွိ ဗုဒၶဘာသာ၊ ရခိုင္ရွိ မူဆလင္ ေတြသာမက စစ္တပ္ တပ္သားသစ္ေတြ အေပၚတြင္ေတာင္ မေရွာင္ ဖိႏွိပ္ခဲ့တဲ့ စနစ္ဆိုးႀကီး ျဖစ္၏။ တိုင္းျပည္၏ စီးပြားေရးကို ၿပိဳလဲ သြားေစခဲ့သည့္၊ တိုင္းျပည္၏ လူမႈအဖြဲ႕အစည္းကို ဖ်က္စီးပစ္ခဲ့သည့္၊ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္ရွိ အသိုက္အဝန္း မ်ားစြာကို အခ်င္းခ်င္း ရန္တိုက္ေပးခဲ့သည့္ စနစ္ဆိုးႀကီးပင္။
ထို႔ေၾကာင့္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္အေနျဖင့္ ရခိုင္ျပည္မွ မူဆလင္မ်ားအေပၚ ဖိႏွိပ္မႈ ရပ္တန္႔ေစရန္ ခ်က္ခ်င္းထိထိေရာက္ေရာက္ မေဆာင္ရြက္ပါဟု အေဝဖန္ခံရတိုင္း ကြ်န္ေတာ္ စိတ္ဆိုးညည္းညဴမိသည္။ အနာတရျဖစ္ေနသာ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံလူ႔အဖြဲ႕အစည္း၏ ဒဏ္ရာကို ကုစားဖို႔ စတင္ရန္ပင္ မ်ိဳးဆက္ခ်ီ လိုအပ္ေနခ်ိန္ျဖစ္သည္။ အားလံုးေသာ ျပႆနာမ်ားက သူမႏွင့္ အရာအားလံုး အတုတ္အေႏွာင္ကင္းစြာ ေဆာင္ရြက္ႏိုင္ျခင္းမရွိေသာ အစိုးရသစ္၏ အာရံုစိုက္မႈကို လိုအပ္ေနခ်ိန္ျဖစ္သည္။
၂၀၁၅ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ ေအာင္ျမင္မႈသည္ ထိလြယ္ရွလြယ္ ျဖစ္၏။ ၂၀၀၈ အေျခခံဥပေဒအရ တပ္မေတာ္သည္ အဓိက လံုျခံဳေရး ဝန္ႀကီးဌာနသံုးခုကို ကိုင္တြယ္ရၿပီး ပါလီမန္အတြင္း ဗီတိုအာဏာ အပ္ႏွင္းခံထားရသည့္အျပင္ အရပ္သားထိန္းခ်ဳပ္မႈက ကင္းလြတ္ခြင့္ ရထားေပသည္။ ထိုဥပေဒကပင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ကို သမၼတျဖစ္ခြင့္မျပဳပဲ ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္၏ အတိုင္ပင္ခံရာထူးႏွင့္ ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရးဝန္ႀကီးသာ ျဖစ္ခြင့္ ေပးခဲ့သည္။ လက္ရွိအေျခအေနအတြက္ ထိုအခ်က္သည္ အဓိကပင္ျဖစ္သည္။
တိုင္းျပည္က ဒီမိုကေရစီအသီးအပြင့္မ်ားကို ျမင္ႏိုင္ေစရန္ သူမအေနႏွင့္ စီးပြားေရးကို တိုးတက္ေအာင္ ျပင္ဖို႔လိုသည္။ သက္တမ္း ရွည္လွၿပီး အႏၲရာယ္ႀကီးလွေသာ ရွမ္းေျမာက္ေဒသႏွင့္ ကခ်င္ျပည္နယ္ရွိ လက္နက္ကိုင္ ပဋိပကၡမ်ားကို အဆံုးသတ္ႏိုင္ရန္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ၏ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအေနအထားေပၚ ႀကီးစြာ သက္ေရာက္ႏိုင္ေသာ အေျခအေနမ်ားၾကားတြင္ တ႐ုတ္ႏိုင္ငံအကူအညီျဖင့္ သူမ ႀကိဳးစားေနပါသည္။
ထို႔ျပင္ သူမ ဂ႐ုတစိုက္ ေဆာင္ရြက္ေနရသည္။ တပ္မေတာ္၏ ဒီမိုကေရစီအေပၚ သံသယ၊ ခြဲထြက္ေရးဝါဒ အေပၚ သံသယ၊ လူမ်ိဳးစုငယ္မ်ားအေပၚ သံသယ ႏွင့္ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ ပါဝင္မႈအေပၚ သံသယတို႔သည္ ပယ္ေပ်ာက္သြားေသးသည္ မဟုတ္ပါ။ အျခား အင္အားစုမ်ားျဖစ္ေသာ ရခိုင္အမ်ိဳးသားပါတီ ANP ႏွင့္ ရခိုင္တပ္မေတာ္ AA တို႔တြင္ သီးျခား ရည္မွန္းခ်က္မ်ား ရွိေနၾက၏။
သူမက ရခိုင္ျပည္မွ မူဆလင္မ်ားအေပၚ လစ္လ်ဴရႈထားသည္ဆိုပါက မွားေပလိမ့္မည္။ ကြ်န္ေတာ္သိထားသေလာက္ ဂ႐ုတစိုက္ ရွိပါ၏။ ၂၀၁၆ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ သူမက ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္ တည္ၿငိမ္ဖြံ႕ျဖိဳးေရးအတြက္ ကက္ဘိနက္ေကာ္မတီ တစ္ခုကို ထူးျခားစြာ ဦးေဆာင္ဖြဲ႕စည္းၿပီး ကုသမဂၢ အတြင္းေရးမႉးခ်ဳပ္ေဟာင္း ကိုဖီအာနန္ကို အၾကံေပး ေကာ္မရွင္တစ္ခု ထူေထာင္ရန္ ဖိတ္ေခၚ ခဲ့ပါသည္။ ထိုေကာ္မရွင္၏ အစီရင္ခံစာကို ၾကာသာပေတးေန႔က ရန္ကုန္တြင္ ထုတ္ျပန္ေၾကညာခဲ့သည္။ အေနအေျခအရႈပ္အေထြး မ်ားစြာၾကားထဲတြင္ပင္ သူမႏွင့္ ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္အစိုးရတို႔က အစီရင္ခံစာပါ အၾကံေပးခ်က္မ်ားကို တတ္ႏိုင္သမွ် အေကာင္အထည္ ေဖာ္ေပးရန္ ဆံုးျဖတ္ထားၾကပါသည္။
အားလံုးက တိုးတက္မႈကို လိုလားသည္မဟုတ္ပါ။ ေသာၾကာေန႔မနက္အေစာပိုင္းက ရန္ကုန္ရွိ အေျခအေနမ်ားႏွင့္ တိုက္ဆိုင္စြာပင္ ရဲကင္း ၂၀ ေက်ာ္ ကို တိုက္ခိုက္မႈ ျဖစ္ပြားခဲ့သည္။ တိုက္ခိုက္မႈကို ျပဳလုပ္သည္က အစြန္းေရာက္အဖြဲ႕ ဟာရာကတ္ အယ္လ္ယာကင္ Harakat Al-Yaqin မွဟု ယူဆရေသာ လက္နက္ကိုင္ ၁၅၀ ခန္႔ျဖစ္သည္။ ထိုအဖြဲ႕သည္ အယူအဆအားျဖင့္ Al-Qaeda၊ Daesh ႏွင့္ ပါကစၥတန္ရွိအစြန္းေရာက္အဖြဲ႕မ်ားႏွင့္ ဆက္စပ္ေနသာ အဖြဲ႕ုဖစ္ၿပီး ေခါင္းေဆာင္ျဖစ္သူမွာ လက္နက္ကိုင္ အၾကမ္းဖက္ ရာဇဝင္ရွိေနသူျဖစ္၏။
ကြ်န္ေတာ္တို႔အေနျဖင့္ အေရွ႕အလယ္ပိုင္းႏွင့္ ေျမာက္အာဖရိကရွိ အႏၲရာယ္ႀကီးလွေသာ အဖြဲ႕မ်ားႏွင့္ ႏိုင္ငံနယ္စပ္မ်ား ျဖတ္ေက်ာ္ ဆက္စပ္ေနေသာ ဖ်က္စီးမႈ အင္အားရွိသည့္ လက္နက္ကိုင္ ထႂကြမႈ ေနာက္ထပ္အသစ္တစ္ခု မလိုလားအပ္ေပ။ ထိုအေျခအေနကို တိုးတက္ေအာင္ ေဆာင္ရြက္ရန္ ျမန္မာအစိုးရအတြက္ တာဝန္ႀကီးျဖစ္သည္မွာ ရွင္းလွ၏။ သို႔ရာတြင္ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ အသိုင္းအဝိုင္းအေနျဖင့္လည္း ေဝဖန္ျပစ္တင္ေနရံုမွ်ႏွင့္ မၿပီးပဲ အကူအညီလည္း ေပးသင့္လွသည္။
၁၉၄၇ လြတ္လပ္ေရး ရကာစကတည္းက ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအတြက္ ျပႆနာတစ္ခုမွာ ယံုၾကည္စရာ မဟာမိတ္မ်ား မရွိျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။ ႏိုင္ငံတကာအသိုင္းအဝိုင္းက ထိုသို႔မျဖစ္ေစရန္ ဝို္ုင္းဝန္းရမည္။ အင္ဒိုနီးရွားႏွင့္ စကၤာပူတို႔က ကူညီလိုသကဲ့သို႔ အာဆီယံအဖြဲ႕ႀကီးအေနျဖင့္ အကူအညီေပးရန္ ေနရာရွိသည္။ ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္ကလည္း ကူညီႏိုင္ စရာရွိသည္။ ေဆာ္ဒီအာေရဗ် အပါအဝင္ အာရပ္ႏိုင္ငံမ်ားကလည္း ကူညီႏိုင္စရာရွိသည္။
ေဆာ္ဒီဘုရင့္ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္၏ ႏိုင္ငံတကာအေရး တက္ႂကြစြာ ေဆာင္ရြက္လာမႈသည္လည္း ႀကိဳဆိုဖြယ္ျဖစ္သည္။ အၾကမ္းဖက္မႈႏွင့္ စုစည္းထားသည့္ ေတာ္လွန္ေရးအဖြဲ႕မ်ားႏွင့္ လက္နက္ကိုင္လႈပ္ရွားမႈမ်ား၏ အႏၲရာယ္ကို ရွင္းလင္းစြာ ရႈျမင္လာသည္။ ဥပမာအေနျဖင့္ ထိုေျပာင္းလဲမႈသည္ အီရတ္အေရးႏွင့္ပတ္သက္ၿပီး အေရးႀကီးေသာ မူဝါဒ အခ်ိဳးအေကြ႕ ျဖစ္ေစခဲ့သည္။ ေဆာ္ဒီဘုရင့္ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္က အိမ္နီးခ်င္းအခ်ိဳ႕ႏွင့္ ကြဲျပားစြာ အလားတူ အျပဳသေဘာေဆာင္ေသာ ခ်ဥ္းကပ္မႈမ်ိဳးျဖင့္ ျမန္မာႏွင့္တကြ အေရွ႕ေတာင္အာရွႏိုင္ငံမ်ားရွိ ကြဲျပားေသာ္လည္း အီရတ္ႏွင့္ အလားတူ ခက္ခဲသည့္ ျပႆနာမ်ား ရွိေနသည္ကို ရႈျမင္ႏိုင္ပါက ဝမ္းေျမာက္ဖြယ္ ျဖစ္ပါလိမ့္မည္။ ရခိုင္ျပည္မွ မူဆလင္မ်ား စီးပြားေရးလူမႈေရး နိမ့္က်ေနမႈမ်ားကို ေျဖရွင္းႏိုင္ရန္ အတြက္ ျမန္မာအစိုးရႏွင့္ ပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္ရြက္မည္ ဆိုပါက ေကာင္းမြန္လွေသာ ေျခလွမ္း ျဖစ္ပါလိမ့္မည္။
ၿပီးခဲ့ေသာ ဆယ္ႏွစ္အတြင္း ကြ်န္ေတာ္တို႔ ရခဲ့ေသာ သင္ခန္းစာ တစ္ခုရွိသည္ ဆိုပါက အစြန္းေရာက္အဖြဲ႕မ်ား၏ အႏၲရာယ္မ်ားသည္ ခ်ိတ္ဆက္ေနမႈျဖစ္ၿပီး ျမန္မာျပည္အစြန္အဖ်ားမွ လႈပ္ရွားမႈတစ္ခုသည္ ကြ်န္ေတာ္တို႔ အားလံုးအေပၚ သက္ေရာက္လာမည္ ဆိုသည္ပင္ ျဖစ္သည္။ လက္နက္ကိုင္ အၾကမ္းဖက္မႈမ်ားသည္ အားလံုးအတြက္ လွပေသာ ဇာတ္သိမ္းခန္း ရမည္မဟုတ္ေပ။ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ကို ကြ်န္ေတာ္တို႔ ေထာက္ခံပံ့ပိုးေပးၾကဖို႔ လိုအပ္ပါသည္။ သူမကို လစ္လ်ဴရႈထားၾကမည္ဆိုပါက အျခားျဖစ္စရာမရွိပါ။ ေနာက္ထပ္ စစ္အာဏာရွင္ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္မႈတစ္ခု ျဖစ္လာပါလိမ့္မည္။ ထိုသို႔ျဖစ္လာလွ်င္ အားလံုးအတြက္ ေကာင္းစရာမျမင္ပါ။ ရခိုင္ျပည္မွ မူဆလင္မ်ားအတြက္လည္း ေကာင္းစရာမျမင္ပါ။
(စာေရးသူ ဆာဂြ်န္ဂ်န္ကင္း Sir John Jenkins သည္ ဘာရိန္းႏိုင္ငံရွိ International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) ၏ အေရွ႕အလယ္ပိုင္းဆိုင္ရာ Corresponding Director ျဖစ္ၿပီး Yale University ရွိ Jackson Institute for Global Affairs ၏ Senior Fellow လည္း ျဖစ္သည္။ ၂၀၁၅ ဇန္နဝါရီလ အထိ ေဆာ္ဒီအာေရဗ်ႏိုင္ငံဆိုင္ရာ ၿဗိတိသွ်သံအမတ္ အျဖစ္ တာဝန္ထမ္းေဆာင္ခဲ့သည္။)
ဘာသာျပန္ #HaveASay
မူရင္းေဆာင္းပါး
Credit to Have A Say !
I recall 15 years ago, as British Ambassador in Rangoon, a lengthy and
winding river journey to the ancient capital of the Buddhist Rakhine
Kingdom in Myanmar, at Mrauk U. It was magnificent, a testimony to the
power and wealth of one of the most distinctive polities of early modern
Myanmar. Rakhine, or Arakan, was also where some of the key battles of
the World War II were fought; my Royal Marine uncle was there.
Now we know Rakhine for different reasons. It has become the center of a dangerous conflict between a Myanmar state in the process of reconstructing itself after more than five decades of military dictatorship, and radicalized elements in the Bengali-speaking Muslim community in the north, widely if not universally known as Rohingya.
It is tempting to take sides, especially as it is largely accepted that there has been massive discrimination for decades and the Rohingya have been subject to sustained brutal treatment by the Myanmar security forces, including forced displacement, the burning of villages and the denial of citizenship.
But if we want to improve the situation, we need to understand before we condemn. This matters not just for Myanmar but for the Middle East too.
First, suffering in Myanmar is not the preserve of Rakhine Muslims. From 1958 onwards a harshly militarised system of rule sytematically oppressed everybody, including Burman, Shan, Mon, Karen, Kachin, Chin, Karenni, Palaung, Kokang, Rakhine Buddhist and Rakhine Muslim and even army recruits themselves. It spared no one. It wrecked the economy, destroyed civil society and turned the many communities that make up Myanmar against each other.
So when people criticize Aung San Suu Kyi for not taking effective action immediately to halt the oppression of Rakhine Muslims, I groan. Even to start to repair the fabric of Burma’s wounded society is a generational task. Everyone has a claim on her attention and that of the new and hobbled Myanmar government.
Suu Kyi’s electoral triumph in 2015 is a fragile one. The 2008 constitution gives the military three key security ministries, a permanent blocking veto in Parliament and freedom from civilian oversight. It also blocked Suu Kyi from becoming president, leaving her as state counsellor and foreign minister. And this is the key to the current situation.
Suu Kyi needs to fix the economy so people see that democracy brings prosperity. She is trying — with Chinese support — to negotiate an end to long-running and highly dangerous insurgencies in the northern Shan states and in Kachin state, with immense implications for Myanmar’s international position.
It is simply untrue to suggest that Suu Kyi does not care about Rakhine Muslims. She does: I know. In 2016 she agreed, uniquely, to chair a Cabinet committee on peace and development there and invited the former UN secretary general Kofi Annan to form an advisory commission on Rakhine state. Its report was released on Thursday in Rangoon. Suu Kyi has committed herself and the government to implement as many of its recommendations as possible in such a complex environment.
Not everyone wants progress. Early on Friday morning, probably timed to coincide with events in Rangoon, there was an attack on more than 20 police posts by about 150 armed insurgents probably belonging to the extremist group Harakat Al-Yaqin. This group’s leaders have previous experience of violent insurgency and their cause has been championed by Al-Qaeda, Daesh and extremist groups in Pakistan.
We do not need another destructive insurgency with transnational connections to the most dangerous groups in the Middle East and North Africa. There is clearly a huge responsibility on the Myanmar government to improve the situation quickly. But the international community should also help, not simply criticize.
One of the problems Myanmar faced upon independence in 1947 was the absence of reliable allies. We cannot allow that to happen again. ASEAN, where Indonesia and Singapore have sought to be helpful, has a role to play. So does Bangladesh. And so do the major Arab states, not least Saudi Arabia.
The Kingdom’s new international activism is welcome. It sees clearly the threats from organized and violent revolutionary and insurgent movements. This has led to an important reboot of policy toward Iraq, for example. It would be wonderful if the same constructive approach — in contrast to some of its neighbors — could be adapted to the different but equally troubling circumstances of Myanmar and other parts of South East Asia. Engaging with the Myanmar government on ways to address the immediate economic and social vulnerabilities of the Rakhine Muslims would be an excellent step.
If we have learnt one thing from the past decade it is the interconnectedness of all extremist threats: what happens in a remote part of Myanmar will affect us all in the end. Insurgencies do not end well for anyone. And Suu Kyi deserves our support. If she is abandoned, there is no alternative. We shall get another militarised regime. That would be a disaster for everyone, including Rakhine Muslims.
• Sir John Jenkins is Corresponding Director (Middle East) at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), based in Manama, Bahrain. He is also a Senior Fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. Until January 2015, he was the British ambassador to Saudi Arabia.
Now we know Rakhine for different reasons. It has become the center of a dangerous conflict between a Myanmar state in the process of reconstructing itself after more than five decades of military dictatorship, and radicalized elements in the Bengali-speaking Muslim community in the north, widely if not universally known as Rohingya.
It is tempting to take sides, especially as it is largely accepted that there has been massive discrimination for decades and the Rohingya have been subject to sustained brutal treatment by the Myanmar security forces, including forced displacement, the burning of villages and the denial of citizenship.
But if we want to improve the situation, we need to understand before we condemn. This matters not just for Myanmar but for the Middle East too.
First, suffering in Myanmar is not the preserve of Rakhine Muslims. From 1958 onwards a harshly militarised system of rule sytematically oppressed everybody, including Burman, Shan, Mon, Karen, Kachin, Chin, Karenni, Palaung, Kokang, Rakhine Buddhist and Rakhine Muslim and even army recruits themselves. It spared no one. It wrecked the economy, destroyed civil society and turned the many communities that make up Myanmar against each other.
So when people criticize Aung San Suu Kyi for not taking effective action immediately to halt the oppression of Rakhine Muslims, I groan. Even to start to repair the fabric of Burma’s wounded society is a generational task. Everyone has a claim on her attention and that of the new and hobbled Myanmar government.
Suu Kyi’s electoral triumph in 2015 is a fragile one. The 2008 constitution gives the military three key security ministries, a permanent blocking veto in Parliament and freedom from civilian oversight. It also blocked Suu Kyi from becoming president, leaving her as state counsellor and foreign minister. And this is the key to the current situation.
Suu Kyi needs to fix the economy so people see that democracy brings prosperity. She is trying — with Chinese support — to negotiate an end to long-running and highly dangerous insurgencies in the northern Shan states and in Kachin state, with immense implications for Myanmar’s international position.
It is untrue to say that Myanmar’s de facto leader does not care about the plight of the Rohingya, but she needs international understanding to deal with that and other challenges.And she needs to tread carefully. The military’s suspicion of democracy, separatism, ethnic minorities and international actors has not gone away. Other powerful groups, including the largely Buddhist Arakan National Party and the Arakan Army, have their own ambitions.
Sir John Jenkins
It is simply untrue to suggest that Suu Kyi does not care about Rakhine Muslims. She does: I know. In 2016 she agreed, uniquely, to chair a Cabinet committee on peace and development there and invited the former UN secretary general Kofi Annan to form an advisory commission on Rakhine state. Its report was released on Thursday in Rangoon. Suu Kyi has committed herself and the government to implement as many of its recommendations as possible in such a complex environment.
Not everyone wants progress. Early on Friday morning, probably timed to coincide with events in Rangoon, there was an attack on more than 20 police posts by about 150 armed insurgents probably belonging to the extremist group Harakat Al-Yaqin. This group’s leaders have previous experience of violent insurgency and their cause has been championed by Al-Qaeda, Daesh and extremist groups in Pakistan.
We do not need another destructive insurgency with transnational connections to the most dangerous groups in the Middle East and North Africa. There is clearly a huge responsibility on the Myanmar government to improve the situation quickly. But the international community should also help, not simply criticize.
One of the problems Myanmar faced upon independence in 1947 was the absence of reliable allies. We cannot allow that to happen again. ASEAN, where Indonesia and Singapore have sought to be helpful, has a role to play. So does Bangladesh. And so do the major Arab states, not least Saudi Arabia.
The Kingdom’s new international activism is welcome. It sees clearly the threats from organized and violent revolutionary and insurgent movements. This has led to an important reboot of policy toward Iraq, for example. It would be wonderful if the same constructive approach — in contrast to some of its neighbors — could be adapted to the different but equally troubling circumstances of Myanmar and other parts of South East Asia. Engaging with the Myanmar government on ways to address the immediate economic and social vulnerabilities of the Rakhine Muslims would be an excellent step.
If we have learnt one thing from the past decade it is the interconnectedness of all extremist threats: what happens in a remote part of Myanmar will affect us all in the end. Insurgencies do not end well for anyone. And Suu Kyi deserves our support. If she is abandoned, there is no alternative. We shall get another militarised regime. That would be a disaster for everyone, including Rakhine Muslims.
• Sir John Jenkins is Corresponding Director (Middle East) at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), based in Manama, Bahrain. He is also a Senior Fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. Until January 2015, he was the British ambassador to Saudi Arabia.
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