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

by Francis Wade

both the Rakhine and Rohingya consider the other as privileged – Rakhine as superior in the hierarchy of status in Myanmar; Rohingya as the beneficiaries of international sympathy and support. Neither sees the other as a victim of the military, and so the history of shared suffering is obscured. Like the Chin Buddhists in the village near Mindat who turned on Naing Ki after his conversion to Christianity, the triangulation of communal animosities has been a crowning achievement of the military’s nation-building efforts. It deflects attention away from its own manoeuvrings and sows the potential for unrest that it can profit from well into the future.