Myanmar's Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and the Making of a Muslim 'Other' (Asian Arguments)

by Francis Wade

In the years after the violence I spoke with numbers of Muslims, and even Buddhists with Muslim relatives, who said that obtaining an ID card had become increasingly difficult. Officials at the immigration offices where they went to renew their IDs were refusing to register them as Bamar Muslims, as they had done before. Even the offer of a bribe no longer worked, and new nationalities were being forcibly added to the cards: Indian, Bangladeshi or Pakistan, for surely no Muslim could be purely Bamar. The violence had further Othered the Muslims of Myanmar in a legal sense too, for it was authorities who were questioning with greater intensity the claims to belonging of people who before had been recognised as indigenous.