Expulsion / Incorporation: Valences of Mass Violence in Myanmar

2 EXPULSION/INCORPORATION Valences of mass violence in Myanmar Elliott Prasse-Freeman and Andrew Ong Introduction The Myanmar military’s 2017 ethnic cleansing of 700,000 Rohingya from Myanmar has captured the world’s attention, as attested in part by the three other Rohingya chapters in this volume on mass violence in Southeast Asia. The sheer immensity of the horror – with thousands killed, hundreds raped, and scores of villages burned – has stunned people across the globe. Yet, while international discourse has tended to analyze this horror in isolation, casting the Rohingya plight as exceptional to standard political analysis of Myanmar, UN Human Rights rapporteur Yanghee Lee highlighted how the Rohingya genocide includes acts “that have been alleged against the military and security forces for generations,” adding that, “for many in Myanmar, they have elicited a tragic feeling of déjà vu” (quoted in Selth 2018, 3). Indeed, the Myanmar state, formally or effectively controlled by its military (the Tatmadaw) for most of the past half-century, has been waging protracted wars against its ethnic minority peoples for generations – Karen, Kachin, Shan, Mon, and others (Sadan 2016; Smith 1999). Critically, this violence has often been directed not only at formal combatants – Ethnic Armed Organizations (EAOs) – but at broader civilian populations as well. Tactics including mass deportations, land grabs, orchestrated famine, and rape as a method of war have turned civilian populations into objects of mass violence – violence directed at masses of people, largely not differentiated from others “like” them. Moreover, the military-state did not direct this kind of violence only against ethnic minorities, but also against members of the dominant Burman majority. Whether during slaughter of peaceful protesters at various moments during its post-independence history (1962, 1974, 1988, 2007), or in the quotidian deprivations immanent to everyday survival, violence defined existence during the military period. One might then, 42 Elliott Prasse-Freeman and Andrew Ong as Lee suggests, expect Burmese of all stripes to empathize, and express solidarity, with the Rohingya. This has not happened. Rather, an outpouring of dis-identification with the Rohingya – from expressions of satisfaction with the Rohingya’s fate to bizarre populist rallies in support of the military – has been well documented. The feeling of déjà vu that Lee expected might be better construed as outraged resentment, but not at the military for yet again waging war on its population. Instead, Burmese discourse on the international coverage of the Rohingya genocide observes continuities in the violence, even as its exponents seek to deny political similarity (and hence solidarity) with the Rohingya. For instance, a federation of ethnic leaders rallied together against the Rohingya, declaring that “‘Rohingya’ is not to be recognized as a nationality,”1 while Zaw Aye Maung, a Rakhine politician, has declared that “if genocide was taking place in Rakhine State, then it was against ethnic Rakhine Buddhists.”2 A 2018 Irrawaddy article focusing on the plight of non-Rohingya ethnic peoples under attack was entitled “All But Forgotten” (Lawi Weng 2018). The same newspaper, a long-standing outlet for anti-military commentary, followed up later by publishing a cartoon presenting UN officials walking through a heap of corpses (meant to be ethnic Rakhine slain in the ongoing war with the Tatmadaw) while commenting that genocide could not have occurred because the victims were not Muslim (Than Toe Aung 2019). Further, non-elites likewise identify an ostensible elision of their own plight: as one Karen social media user put it, “Burma wasn’t well known before the Rohinga [sic] outbreak. Thousands of Karen refugees have left their own places by suppressive military regime long before current atrocities in Rakhine state.” Others have explicitly denied any political commonality between the violence against the Rohingya and other ethnic groups (Delle 2017), with many condemning the few statements of solidarity with the Rohingya – such as the one by the Karen Women’s Organization (KWO 2016). What accounts for this dis-identification in the face of similar experiences of suffering? A common explanation is simple racism: that by committing the dual sins of being kala (of South Asian appearance3) and Muslim, both markers of non-belonging, the Rohingya are irredeemably tainted as foreigners. Yet, many others fulfilling the same description, such as Muslims living in Yangon, are not objects of similarly intense scorn. Further still, while members of the Kaman ethnic group are considered both kala and Muslim, the group has nonetheless been recognized as indigenous (taingyingtha). In 2014 even the bigoted Burman Buddhist monk Wirathu went so far as to threaten those who would attack them: “And if the terrorist extremist Bengalis who call themselves Rohingya oppress the Kaman mark my words, Wirathu will never close his eyes to that. I won’t take things lying down. If there are attacks on the Kaman, beware.”4 Rather, and because racism must be explained rather than merely invoked, we analyze this dis-identification through an exploration of state violence in Myanmar, arguing that mass violence against Rohingya and other ethnic groups in Burma has taken two different forms in Myanmar’s broader symbolic and discursive context, with attendant effects. Specifically, the kind leveled against the Rohingya has been Valences of mass violence in Myanmar 43 expulsive, directed at their belonging and existence itself, while the violence against the other ethnic groups is, somewhat paradoxically, directed at incorporation – under conditions of domination – into the polity. The effect of the violence on other ethnic groups has interpellated them as members of the polity (in a diminished, graduated sense), meaning that they have been targeted as subjects, whereas Rohingya have been killed as objects, as others. Put another way, ethnic groups have been targeted as insiders to be governed (through a form of blunt domination; see Prasse-Freeman 2012) rather than outsiders to be eliminated (with extreme prejudice). The physically and symbolically expulsive violence suffered by the Rohingya both buttresses and secures the standing of the other ethnic groups, even as it justifies itself in the eyes of the broader polity as protective of the entire multi-ethnic nation. As political-cultural anthropologists of Myanmar – Prasse-Freeman studies Burman social movements and Rohingya ethnic identity, Ong the Wa polity and the country’s peace process – we draw here on our extended fieldwork to rethink mass violence in Myanmar. In the following section we advance a provisional theory of mass violence with wider implications. Our third section considers specific aspects of mass violence deployed against Myanmar’s different peoples – including tactical rape, forced relocation, and symbolic assault. The fourth section tackles hard cases – in particular, the use of rape in war – to demonstrate how similarly horrific material practices can have differential symbolic, and hence political, ramifications. Our conclusion considers mass violence in connection with other forms – such as “structural” violence – also occurring in Myanmar. The massive in mass violence The literature on mass violence is vast (inter alia, Kiernan 2007; Chalk and Jonassohn 1990), but much of it becomes a (non-)theorization of the radically exceptional. Even when some scholars focus on mass violence’s banality (Arendt 2006), it is still the radical horror that cannot be named or even spoken (Scarry 1987; Daniel 1996; for an analysis, Agamben 2002) that becomes the main object of exploration in the literature. Hence, the rendering of that violence as exceptional creates a caesura between it and “normal” state practices – even though such practices inevitably animate the mass violence. While the lack of connections between mass and “normal” state violence has been commented upon (Straus 2012), other scholars articulate different kinds of violence as connected over a “continuum” (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004), for instance through a relationship between structural and mass violence (Uvin 2004). While inspired by this research, we resist reducing all violence to a graded continuum. Such flattening of violence into a singular phenomenon is not consistent with the understandings of many relevant social actors who, by marking categorical differences in varying violent phenomena, determine political trajectories. For instance, the type of violence suffered by the Karen and that endured by the “average” unmarked Burman may sit on the same analytical continuum of violence, yet because their 44 Elliott Prasse-Freeman and Andrew Ong respective contours (their modes and intensities) are distinct, Burmese people interpret them as fundamentally unrelated phenomena. Hence we instead identify specific operations (what does the violence take as its object? how is it effected?) and functions (what effects does the violence have?), demonstrating how differences have critical ramifications on the political outcomes produced. We reinterpret the idea of “mass,” displacing it from two problems we see with its conventional enumerative assumption, where “massive” draws on implications of scale. First, it hinges on a quantitative calculus of bodies affected rather than considering overall symbolic collective effects. Second, while it refers to “large” in the sense of approaching world historic, this relies on the pronouncements of observing publics of (typically Western) ratifiers. Taking Myanmar’s case, the violence against the Karen for instance, has typically not qualified as a case of “mass violence” (note its absence in this volume) because it was not enumerated and recognized by external observers, a function of the moment and duration of its occurrence and the extant media technologies. Indeed, what is commonly understood as “mass,” by way of historic scale and audiencing, is highly subjective, dependent not just on the social group who finds itself the violence’s object, but on the often divergent perspectives of various members within a group. Consequently, we reframe mass violence provisionally as a form of violence distributed indiscriminately by taking non-combatants as its object (Valentino 2014), as tokens representative of a common (ethnic) type, generating new sociopolitical relationships with that type and with other observing publics. In particular, we highlight the semiotic dimensions of mass violence: diverse interpretations of the event by those both directly and indirectly subject to it mean that its scattered and diffuse objects are symbolically massified into a collective group. Specifically, mass violence (as a sign event) uses attacks on individuals (singular tokens) as symbolic assault on the broader community (the type), which spurs a recursive and interactional process, in which (a) the type becomes constructed or illuminated; (b) membership of that type becomes clarified as subjects assess whether they qualify as tokens of it; (c) the relationship between the source of violence and the new object is articulated; and (d) the broader socio-political field in which the violence operates is transformed, as tangential political actors reassess their own positions and identities based on interpretations of the violence against others. Through this analytic, hate crimes, mob violence directed against particular minority groups, and political “terrorism” all have the seeds of mass violence within them, but can be considered varied scales or reduced forms of mass violence, depending on their repetition and effects. A hate crime, for instance, is mass violence singularized, that is, committed by a single person or group on a single person or group. Of course, any violent event may hail additional observers, potentially impelling them to reconsider their relationship to the violence’s source and the broader political environment. But the mass violence we describe here nearly always contains additional discourse that attempts to control and direct the meaning of the sign (Kockelman 2007). This can be observed in commentary on the acts committed when Burmese soldiers prevented the burial of a raped and murdered Shan woman, Valences of mass violence in Myanmar 45 reportedly saying: “She must be kept like this as an example for your people of Shan State to see” (SHRF 2002). Much is conveyed in these sign events: what a raped Shan body signifies to Shan collectivities may be radically different from what a raped Rohingya body signifies to Rohingyas – meanings are co-constructed by both authors and recipients. This definition will become clarified in the next section, which explores cases of violence in Myanmar. Cases of mass violence in Myanmar Rohingya The case of the Rohingya demonstrates in contemporary historical time the power of mass violence to construct a broad object out of the specific tokens of enacted physical assault. Internecine and state-led violence have intersected with discursive representations to resubjectivize both Rohingya individuals and other members of Myanmar’s polity. Although the sheer scale of the atrocities against the Rohingya during the 2017 expulsion would alone have warranted significant international media attention, the fallen-hero story of Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi took center-stage as she endorsed the military’s conduct, downplayed Rohingya suffering, disclaimed independent reporting as biased, impugned the motives of humanitarian workers, supported the incarceration of journalists who uncovered atrocities, and declared rape allegations to be “fake.” Ensuing morality parables contrasting Suu Kyi’s earlier lionization with her apparent self-betrayal inadvertently encapsulate much of the semiotic content of the mass violence: on display are both the brutal events and the equally brutal interpretation of them. As a long-installed icon of the nation, Suu Kyi stands as a distilled embodiment of “the people” she represents.5 Hence her prevarications and dismissals act not as counterpoints to Tatmadaw generals (who have variously claimed that the “only solution” is to expel Rohingya to “a third country” or that Rohingyas must be treated as “unfinished business”6), but as their ratification. Likewise in the case of the 2012 violence between members of Rakhine and Rohingya communities in Sittwe, which sparked displacement of hundreds of Rakhine and 140,000 Rohingya: the representation of the conflict by Burmese leaders and in the media was of local Buddhist Rakhine fighting against invading Muslims. Suu Kyi endorsed this narrative: “Global Muslim power is very great and certainly, that is a perception in many parts of the world and in our country as well” (Siddique 2013). The military and other state officials’ rhetoric also massifies the Rohingya into a collective vector of invasion, pollution, and threat. As the UN’s recent Fact Finding Mission (FFM) reports, “Myanmar authorities actively associated Rohingya identity with terrorism. Rohingya are typically only referred to as terrorists or suspected terrorists, often in sweeping phrases implying that the entire group is terrorist or violent in nature” (UNHRC 2018, 335). The FFM draws a helpful contrast with 46 Elliott Prasse-Freeman and Andrew Ong Myanmar’s treatment of other ethnicities, pointing out the constant reinscription of alterity in the state’s Rohingya treatment, and its implication of the entire group: “It is important to note the systematic inclusion of the word ‘Bengali’, which positions the Rohingya as outsiders from Bangladesh, and erases their claim to a separate ethnicity by subsuming them into an ethnic majority across the border. In relation to other insurgencies or armed conflicts in the country, the military never adds an ethnic affiliation when referring to its opponent or an alleged perpetrator. For example, in relation to the Kachin Independence Army, it refers to ‘KIA insurgents’ or ‘KIA terrorists’ but not to ‘Kachin insurgents’ or ‘extremist Kachin terrorists’” (337), adding that the state mouthpiece The Global New Light of Myanmar included children in its publication of “names and photographs of approximately 1,300 so-called ‘ARSA terrorists’” (337). Even as the military and state massified the Rohingya, it has done the same for the in-group, but for different ends. A week into the expulsion, the army’s commanderin-chief entitled a Facebook post: “Entire government institutions and people must defend the country with strong patriotism” (FFM, 337), later calling for mass mobilization in “security” efforts, encouraging the people to join “hands with the administrative bodies and security forces in oneness” (FFM, 340). Likewise, Wirathu, as well as many in the ultra-nationalist Buddhist organization to which he belongs, Ma Ba Tha, have cast the genocide as a necessary defense of the nation, enjoining the polity not only to physically fight the invaders, but to defend the procreative potential of the population (Prasse-Freeman 2017). And yet, while the words of military men, monks, and matriarchs are obviously important, it is not just elite commentary that excludes the Rohingya. Ordinary Burmese, through the relatively open platform of social media, are reading texts circulated by their peers about the Rohingya: Phandeeyar, a Yangon-based tech firm, reports that social media users feel “that news posted by trusted community members was more reliable than news posted to pages ostensibly dedicated to keeping people in the know” (2019, 29). Elite statements become politically resonant when appropriated and re-entextualized into (digitally) localized discourses. There is a recursivity here worth stressing, in which these virtual publics are both objects of discourse and then participative subjects fueling the reproduction, circulation, and intensification of hate speech about the Rohingya.7 Scholars have begun tracing the effects of the violence and its representation on Rohingya people. Nursyazwani (in review) in her research with stateless Rohingya communities in Malaysia finds “a number who did not know they were Rohingya until they arrived,” identifying simply as Muslims from Rakhine. Nursyazwani presents an informant who conveyed her pride in being Rohingya yet nonetheless acknowledged that while living in Myanmar “she did not know she was Rohingya then.” Nursyazwani ascribes the transformation as “deriving from war, conflict … and forced migration.” Prasse-Freeman (in revision) describes how even those who had not necessarily understood themselves as Rohingya before the events of violence subsequently came to understand themselves as Rohingya, and particularly as Rohingya under (imminent) attack, as the assaults occurred. He records a half-dozen Valences of mass violence in Myanmar 47 Rohingya who relay “Rohingya realization moments” proximate to moments of violence. One long-term informant described how the occasion of the 2012 violence led not simply to apprehension of himself as a Rohingya, but then to a corresponding pursuit of additional information about Rohingya, particularly on the topic of historical Rohingya origins. Prasse-Freeman describes the somewhat counter-intuitive outcome in which the symbolic violence against the name “Rohingya” cohered an affiliation with it: as information on violence against specific bodies was circulated and organized under the sign “Rohingya,” although many certainly relinquished or rejected the identity, quite understandably passing into other identity categories (such as Kaman) not targeted by the state and polity, others nonetheless felt interpellated by it. Although Rakhine nationalists in particular, and Burmese nationalists in general, rejected the name Rohingya – by insisting on the appellation “so-called Rohingya” (as in Wirathu’s quotation above) – they installed the defaced name as indexing the particular supra-local identity of Muslims of Northern Rakhine state. Moreover, while communities of Rohingya across Rakhine state demonstrate noteworthy ethnolinguistic and cultural differences, being excluded as the same type has helped cohere them, massifying them into Rohingya in a literal lifeand-death way. Having shown how the type first becomes illuminated and then membership in it clarified, we turn to the third element: the relationship between the object and the source of the violence. As the Rohingya became objects of mass violence, they have also been compelled to interpret what it meant to be Rohingya in conjunction with the state expelling them. Prasse-Freeman (in revision) relays how Rohingya convey their belonging to the land, and lament the gradual erosion of their incorporation in the polity (Rohingya elites point to their recognition as Rohingya by the Burmese post-independence pre-military state of the 1950s), yet now, as refugees in Bangladesh, they resist repatriation to the Burmese state because of its express desire to annihilate them. While the desire to return under safe – which is to say totally transformed – conditions is widespread, they interpret the ongoing mass violence as exclusionary and expulsive in a way that differs, as we will see, from other ethnic groups’ experiences with mass violence. Finally, violence against the Rohingya compels other members of the Burmese polity to reassess their socio-political standing. The 2012 statement by the ethnicities federation denying Rohingya’s co-status as indigenous to Myanmar suggests that some ethnic groups either fear any affiliation with the Rohingya,8 or have capitalized on the Rohingya violence to buttress their own claims to belonging. The Rakhine are instructive here, as national statespersons across the ethnic spectrum have celebrated Rakhine defense of the country’s “western gate,” elevating their status. On the other hand, the violence against Rohingya conversely allows violence against other ethnic groups to continue less noticed – as indexed by a recent Irrawaddy headline: “All But Forgotten” (Lawi Weng 2018). 48 Elliott Prasse-Freeman and Andrew Ong Karen In contrast with the expulsive violence inflicted on the Rohingya, the Myanmar state’s violence against other ethnic groups might tentatively be called “incorporative.” A case in point is that of the Karen, one of Myanmar’s largest ethnic minority groups, constituting seven percent of the country’s population. Karen identity often appears self-evident, articulated forcefully by Christian missionaries who promoted Karen myths, which Karen elites then transposed into a quasi-history (Rajah 2002). A nascent Karen consciousness was promoted through the development of “a literate tradition” (including a writing system and the mass production of texts). This consciousness diffused to Karen masses through schools, hostels, and churches that allowed the Karen “to organize … translocally” (Rajah 2002, 526), further developing ethnonationalist identification through the circulation of ethnic markers. They “deliberately created national symbols – a national coat-of-arms based on bronze frog drums, Karen dress, a national flag, a national anthem and Liberation Day parades” (ibid, 529). Others note how this narrative has elided the fact that all “peoples known as ‘Karen’ do not share a common language, culture, religion or material characteristics” (Cheesman 2002, 199), subsuming the drastically divergent experiences of “the other Karen” who live in the country’s Ayeyawaddy Delta or in cities, are often Buddhists rather than Christians, practice lowland farming, and – critically – have not experienced the state violence suffered by those Karen in the eastern highlands (Thawnghmung 2011). Cheesman argues that a certain strain of “Karen identity … is manifest in structural opposition to the state,” a stance that has been exacerbated by a “reporting of gross human rights abuses” that “has been co-opted into the ethnic-nationalist framework” (2002, 208).9 As with the Rohingya, mass violence, it appears, has played a critical role in Karen identity formation. However, violence against Karen has largely not been considered as rising to the level of “mass violence,” even though it would seem to qualify: military assaults have included “1) attacking civilians; 2) displacing civilians and forcible transfer; 3) destroying or seizing the adversary’s property; 4) pillage; 5) murder and execution without due process; 6) enslavement; 7) torture and other inhumane acts; 8) rape; and 9) persecution.” The principle of civilian distinction was not adhered to, as Karen villagers were “subject to being shot-on-sight” (MacLean 2018, 16), though “only” if they strayed from the forced relocation villages imposed on them by the state. This violence was slow burning, such that “large-scale combat was not a defining feature of the offensive” (MacLean 2018, 52). Instead, hundreds of thousands were displaced, as the NGO Karen Human Rights Group records (KHRG 2007, 2008, 2009, 2015), a military strategy deployed against other ethnic groups across Myanmar (Bosson 2007; Woods 2011). And while famine was deployed, the “Tatmadaw’s strategic intent was not to kill large numbers of civilians, as some have claimed … [but] to starve villagers out of contested areas” (MacLean 2018, 53). It seems incongruous to suggest that such tactics were implemented as part of a broader strategy of incorporation through reterritorialization, given the horrendous Valences of mass violence in Myanmar 49 offences of weaponizing famine and destroying villages. This is especially true given that hundreds of thousands of Karen were effectively expelled to Thailand. But within the broader politico-semiotic context, the Karen have been recognized as one of the nation’s constituent eight ethnicities (with the Shan, Mon, Burman, Kachin, Chin, Kayah, and Rakhine), in contrast to the Rohingya, who have been symbolically excluded. In many contexts of symbolic representation they even stand in ratified positions of structural equality: at the country’s National Races museum (Girke 2013), at the University for the Development of National Races (Taylor 2005, 281), or on the National Museum’s fourth-floor exhibit of national races, all taingyingtha stand shoulder to shoulder. Critically, however, these moments of equality are perpetually punctured by symbolic subjugations that serve to remind the Karen and ethnic groups of their dominated status, whether in school textbooks (Salem-Gervais and Metro 2012, 29), in public spaces of ethnic states where statues of Burman generals are erected (Lawi Weng 2019), or on the first floor of that same National Museum (monopolized by Burman dynastic regalia).10 This helps explain the strange double consciousness observed when Karen ethnonationalists consider the apparent similarities between their suffering and that of the Rohingya. As one Karen social media user commented, “If the war begins with Myanmar and Bangladesh, these Bangili [sic, “Bengali”] people … [will] they choose to stand and fight for Myanmar? or Bangladesh? … if someone ask me like that same question, I will always stand with not only my Karen people but also my country” (quoted in Delle 2017). Even as they manage the ambiguity, many ratified participants of the nation-state seem beckoned by the moments of symbolic equal standing, and make peace with a domination that is distributed differently to all average people across the country in one way or other. Wa The case of the Wa offers intriguing comparison. Included in the 135 taingyingtha and numbering approximately 450,000, the ethnic Wa live in two swathes of territory on the Chinese and Thai borders. They have never been pillaged or attacked by the Burmese military, given their protection by the mountainous terrain, their military might, and preoccupations of the Tatmadaw elsewhere. Their United Wa State Army (UWSA), formed in 1989, has historically been the strongest insurgent armed group, with 30,000 troops controlling their de facto autonomous territories (partially recognized as a “Self-Administered Division”), never once engaging in open conflict with the Burmese state since its formation (see Ong 2018). On the contrary, the UWSA fought alongside the Tatmadaw against Shan armed groups in the 1990s and against Thai military forces in the early 2000s. Despite this, it now maintains an uneasy truce with the Tatmadaw, following its refusal to sign the Nationwide Ceasefire. Military might and its ambivalent stance in negotiations have given it a front seat in any future peace talks. It now builds alliances with other armed groups against the Tatmadaw and has been rumored to provide them with weapons. 50 Elliott Prasse-Freeman and Andrew Ong Yet, even while defending its population, the UWSA has meted out mass violence, in the form of a forced relocation of peoples from the Wa highlands on the Chinese border to “South Wa” on the Thailand border, over a span of seven years from 1999 to 2006. “South Wa” was a territory given to the UWSA in 1996 by the Tatmadaw, for its assistance in fighting the Shan “druglord” Khun Sa during a period of better relations. The relocation of villagers from North to South Wa was a steady process meant to ease population pressure in the highlands in order to wean rural inhabitants off opium growing. The UWSA declared plans for its area to be poppy- and “drugfree” by 2005, and relocations began in 1999, with hundreds of Wa villagers dying of exhaustion and disease in the weeks-long journey south. The official figure relocated was put at 50,000 by the UWSA, but other accounts gave numbers as high as 126,000 (Sai Lone 2008; LNDO 2002). Uprooted from their homes, with no warning in some cases, they were allowed to bring only minimal possessions, leaving behind their houses, livestock, and grain. After arrival, the struggles did not cease. “Malaria and other diseases” caused 4,000 deaths in 1999 and “a Thai military source reported that 10,000 Wa died in 2000” (Fiskesjo 2017, 17). Local Shan in South Wa areas also bore the brunt of the relocation, with 48,000 affected, losing houses, land, and possessions, with many jailed for complaining to UWSA authorities. Scores fled to Thailand in response (LNDO 2002), while others were reportedly extorted or conscripted. The land in South Wa, widely rumored to have been “sold” by Tatmadaw General Khin Nyunt to the UWSA, fueled local grievance against the Tatmadaw. Shans reported: “[T]hey take everything they want, pigs, chickens, ducks and so on, saying, ‘Gen. Khin Nyunt has given us this country. If you want it back, go and ask him’” (ALTSEAN 2001, 15). UWSA officials justified this movement through blood they had shed in fighting Khun Sa, and the promises of Khin Nyunt. Even as various masses suffered, the dynamics of the mass relocation interpellated the UWSA as a potential Tatmadaw ally and a ratified participant in the Myanmar state’s program of violence – co-opted, dominated, or targeted according to the particularities of the “security situation.” Wa villagers in South Wa, protected by the UWSA, yet themselves the victims of forced relocation, allegedly acted with impunity among the Shan locals, stealing and extorting, fomenting historical stereotypes of the “bogeyman in the hills,” a reference to their headhunting past. The Wa people were produced as the invading Other, with the Shan as triply subject to the Myanmar state, an armed Wa group, and other Wa non-combatants. Despite taingyingtha status, without armed protection their claims to their land and property were insecure. A tripartite relation of mass violence emerged, with Wa and Shan villagers’ ethnic affiliations re-entrenched amidst coercion and contestations between the armies. Wa villagers were reportedly forced to stay by the UWSA as part of the resettlement; those who tried to flee were arrested and beaten, some allegedly killed, marking a semi-coercive and ambivalent membership in the Wa polity. Few media outlets and activist groups were present to bear witness, so the Wa resettlement did not reach a wider audience. Since 2010, the Burmese government has demanded that the South Wa territory be vacated and returned to the state, Valences of mass violence in Myanmar 51 with military blockades and counterblockades in and around South Wa. The lowburning but constant threat of armed skirmishes has remained ever-present, embedding Wa villagers in a dependent relationship with the UWSA. During the violence against the Rohingya, however, many Wa people changed their Facebook profile pictures to that of Aung San Suu Kyi, in a show of support against the aspersions of the international community. An interlocutor justified it in this way: “she is the hope for reconciliation in the nation, only she has the authority to bring all the nationalities together.” Naturally, the Rohingya were excluded from this aspirational community, though perhaps not with the same fervor as the Karen interlocutor quoted above, given the greater socio-political distance between Wa and the Myanmar state, and Wa affinities and connections with China. The Wa interlocutor’s vision of the Myanmar Union was an aspiration toward peace and stability (“hope for reconciliation”), yet ambivalent toward political inclusion into the nation-state. Ultimately, the Wa remain potential objects of Myanmar state violence themselves, despite the protection afforded them by the UWSA. Comparing through hard cases Rape as a method of war remains the most confounding phenomenon for our argument. The Shan Human Rights Federation perhaps does not go far enough when it writes, “sexual violence serves the multiple purpose of not only terrorizing local communities into submission, but also flaunting the power of the dominant troops over the enemy’s women, and thereby humiliating and demoralizing resistance forces” (SHRF 2002). If rape is an extreme bodily violation of a specific victim, it is also an indexical threat to others like her (typically a her), and a symbolic assault on the entire collective that cares for her. That symbolic violation is further inflected by the context of a chauvinist Myanmar state project of domination, making it difficult to imagine its object interpellated into the nation. And yet, we observe different metapragmatic commentary on the rape – both by the rapists and by other politicians – as well as different interpretations of it, that marks a distinction between the signification of mass rape in different Myanmar contexts. There is extensive documentation of rape as a weapon of war. Info Birmanie and the Swedish Burma Committee (2012) summarized incidents from the 1990s; KWO (2016) relays that “from 2005 to 2016, eleven women’s organizations from Burma, published at least 33 separate reports on the violence against women perpetrated by the soldiers of the Burma Army”; and Davies and True (2017) make a compelling case that rape is underreported in Myanmar. Yet there is not to our knowledge research on how people make sense of their relationship to the Myanmar nation after these kinds of assaults. For the Karen, at least, what we have encountered anecdotally are rumors of “secret” Tatmadaw orders for soldiers to use rape as a way to dilute their ethnic stock.11 This Karen interpretation sees rape conducted not to terrorize and expel the group from the polity, but rather to incorporate it under even more intensified conditions of domination. This is in contrast to the Rohingya, where systematic rape (Patten quoted in Selth 2018, 30) 52 Elliott Prasse-Freeman and Andrew Ong has been interpreted as conducted to punish, annihilate, and destroy the capacity of Rohingya women to reproduce (Kaladan News, quoted in ibid). The systematic sexual assault of Rohingya women is accompanied by not only denial but degradation. Generals and even monks have proclaimed Rohingyas are not attractive enough to rape. Even Suu Kyi singles out Rohingya rape victims as innately untrustworthy. When describing rape of ethnic women, Suu Kyi once declared forcefully that, “rape is used in my country as a weapon against those who only want to live in peace, who only want to assert their basic human rights, especially in the areas of the ethnic nationalities. Rape is rife. It is used as a weapon by the armed forces to intimidate the ethnic nationalities to divide our country.” Here Suu Kyi simultaneously reiterated their belonging in the country, and separated the Myanmar nation (indexed by the phrase “our country”) from the specific narrow source of the violence (the armed forces). When those same armed forces were accused of mass rape of Rohingya women, however, Suu Kyi’s responses proved different. Journalist Jonah Fisher reported that “for weeks Myanmar’s human rights icon turned leader … denied the allegations, insisting soldiers were adhering to the law, while at the same time refusing to allow independent journalists or observers to access the area” (Fisher 2017). When she finally acceded, Fisher describes how Myanmar state investigators threatened and verbally abused victims before declaring their claims of rape “fake,” a declaration that Suu Kyi splashed across her State Counselor Facebook page. While it is impossible to conclude that rape “means” (in an ultimate sense) different things to different groups and actors, the differences in commentary and interpretation shed light on different “logics of rape,” twisted as they are. While mass rape of other ethnic nationalities is implemented so as to dominate and dilute, mass rape of the Rohingya is perpetrated and denied so as to expel and annihilate. Conclusion Discussing these cases together has allowed for an introductory exploration of violence in Myanmar in its various forms. By comparing the spectacular nature of the expulsions of thousands with the slow-burning and longstanding nature of violence against communities (daily exclusion, rape as a method of occupation), a more complete picture of the Burmese state’s violent practices emerges. But while this chapter has discussed the differential logics of mass violence on and between other ethnic groups, it did not address the Burmans, or other ethnic groups, who have not endured mass violence in the manner we have laid out. Indeed, although Myanmar’s military regime has turned on Burman protesters, their killing and abuse cannot fulfill our definition of mass violence, as they were targeted not as undifferentiated icons of the Burmese populace as a whole, but as exceptional political figures choosing to resist directly by entering the streets. These other subjects nonetheless exist in an environment of diffuse and perduring structural violence – what Uvin (2004) calls the agonizing if dull humiliation of inequality and exclusion. If mass violence produces mass objects, then structural violence, conversely, splits its object into ever-ramifying subgroups, down to the atomized individual struggling to Valences of mass violence in Myanmar 53 survive.12 What happens when they are combined in the same ecosystem? We suspect that a common structural violence experienced by all in Myanmar (under a state simultaneously rapacious and indifferent; see Prasse-Freeman 2012) is the bedrock on which the other forms of violence rest. A society saturated in structural violence then stands as the condition of possibility for Rohingya exclusion. This is because structural violence produces a fragmentation or foreclosure of solidarity among the polity, to differing degrees, such that poor ethnic groups and poor Burmans alike are treated like degraded members of the in-group, while Rohingya are the constitutive outsiders who are not treated as belonging at all. Notes 1 In 2012, an alliance of Myanmar’s ethnicities rejected any affiliation or solidarity with the Rohingya (RFA 2012). 2 Quoted in Schissler, Walton, and Phyu Phyu Thi 2015, 1. 3 While Western media often presents kala as a slur and equivalent to terms (such as the nword) that are always slurs, kala’s meanings in Burma are context dependent. 4 A transcript of the talk (Wirathu 2014) is in the authors’ possession. 5 While Prasse-Freeman (2014) describes both the process through which Aung San Suu Kyi became an icon of Burma and threats to that status, her populist stance toward the Rohingya has played well to Burma’s masses, reinstalling her into the iconic role. 6 Quoted in Selth 2018, 16. 7 For a development of this argument, see Prasse-Freeman (2021). 8 See Nyi Nyi Kyaw (2018) for a description of how the Kaman, Burma’s recognized Muslim group, have feared association with the Rohingya. 9 Thawnghmung (2011, xi), reflecting on her own family’s experiences of assimilation in Burmese life, illuminates how Karen have been “constantly re-interpreting and rearticulating their identities” (Campbell 2014, 241). 10 Scholars more sympathetic to the regime, such as Robert Taylor, also acknowledge the possibility of such interpretation given the context of domination: even if the Myanmar state enacted “a series of policies that were intended to play down ethnicity and religion in politics and society, thus having an integrating effect over time … as these policies were implemented by a Bamar majority army government, they were interpreted as an attempt at Bamar-ization, thus providing an argument for fighting for greater autonomy, if not independence” (2005, 280). 11 We thank Stephen Campbell and Shae Frydenlund for discussion on these issues. 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No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Zucker, Eve Monique, editor. | Kiernan, Ben, editor. Title: Political violence in Southeast Asia since 1945 : case studies from six countries / edited by Eve Monique Zucker and Ben Kiernan. Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020057608 (print) | LCCN 2020057609 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367675462 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367675592 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003131809 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Political violence--Southeast Asia--History--20th century. | Southeast Asia--Social conditions--20th century. | Southeast Asia--Politics and government--20th century. Classification: LCC HN670.3.Z9 V569 2021 (print) | LCC HN670.3.Z9 (ebook) | DDC 303.60959--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020057608 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020057609 ISBN: 978-0-367-67546-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-67559-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-13180-9 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Taylor & Francis Books