As you can read in my piece, I point out that the MFA contradicts existing laws in Burma, I’m not denying is silly, I’m saying it reflects actual practice more accurately than Thein Sein’s statement, which reflects actual laws. The MFA statement reveals how the 1982 Citizenship Law was enforced in Arakan, in the late eighties and nineties. The overwhelming majority of Rohingya were stripped of citizenship because they were treated as “illegal immigrants” according to the definition contained in the statement, not in the actual law. It was assumed that most, if not all, of them had arrived during colonial times and after independence, without distinguishing between both categories, and consequently treated as “illegals”. Thein Sein’s statement may reflect accurately the existing legal framework but, again, there hasn’t been no effort to apply it to reinstate citizenship to the Rohingya. The only effort was the pilot program in Myebon, a drop in the ocean, as I have already said. Out of 2,916 Muslims there, only 97 were granted full citizenship and 969 [sic] were granted naturalized citizenship. That’s only around one third of the total, are we going to believe that two thirds of Muslims in Myebon are “illegal migrants” (or their descendants)? I repeat: Muslims in Arakan are treated by default as “illegals” who have to demonstrate they are entitled to citizenship, which may happen to individuals of other groups in Burma, but not to the communities as a whole (excepting, of course, other Muslims regarded by default as “Indians”). And it may be extremely difficult for most Rohingya to prove their claims for citizenship because, as Mr Tonkin knows well, their documents were snatched by the authorities when the Citizenship Law was (mis-) applied in the late eighties and early nineties. In short: the Rohingya were rendered stateless by violating the 1982 Citizenship Law, but their statelessness has been perpetuated either by inaction or by following scrupulously the letter of this very same law. Given all the confusion and bad faith in which the 1982 Citizenship Law was enforced in the case of the Rohingya, the only way to begin to correct the historical wrong done against them would be, in my view, to give back full citizenship to each and every Muslim in Arakan (and now in Bangladesh), even at the risk of granting it to those “illegals” arrived after independence (whose numbers are quite small anyway, whatever Mr Tonkin says). Of course, I’m not holding my breath expecting that such thing will happen anytime soon…
The MFA statement of 21 February 1992 is silly because it states: “Since the First Anglo-Myanmar War in 1824, people of Muslim faith from the adjacent country illegally entered Myanmar Naing-Ngan, particularly Rakhine State.”. Thein Sein corrects this error in his statement of 11 July 2012 by pointing out that they came legally during British rule. Indeed, the British positively encouraged this migration into Arakan, where there was so much surplus land. The official English text of this sentence is not that provided by Mr Galache, but that quoted by Amnesty International. The full statement in English as issued by the MFA appeared in the Working People’s Daily of 22 February 1992 and may be found on the Network Myanmar website.
Thein Sein’s statement could well be the passport to the reconfirmation of the citizenship of those who today say they are Rohingya.
Mr Tonkin seems to be unable to see his own inconsistencies, and he contributes to create more confusion in an already terribly complex matter. He, who has relied so much on censuses for his assessments, now suddenly decides to cast doubts on their accuracy because they contradict a narrative he has chosen to believe with zealous faith. When my (provisional and admittedly faulty) analysis showed 15% of post-independence immigration, he accepted the 1983 census’ results; when a more complete and thorough analysis shows a smaller percentage of “illegal immigrants”, suddenly he becomes skeptical of the very same results. Now, I have never claimed any censuses conducted in Burma, or many other countries for that matter, perfectly account for each and everyone of the people living in the territory covered in them, but, as I said in the text, they can provide decent orders of magnitude. The 1983 census is not an exception. I find extremely unlikely that a huge number of Muslims in Arakan were uncounted in 1983 for a variety of reasons: in contrast with other territories in Burma, it covered the whole of Arakan, and it came after operation Naga Min (and the return of most of the refugees who had fled to Bangladesh), it was conducted when the state had asserted more control in the area than never before and insurgencies in Arakan (from the formerly active there CPB, Rakhine nationalists or Rohingya armed groups) were extremely weak, and there is no mention anywhere in the census of the possibility that any significant number of individuals could have not been enumerated. It defies logic that 30%, or even 15%, “illegal immigrants” would have passed unnoticed by the government,. That would be a huge number of people, around 100,000, playing an extremely successful game of seek and hide with the authorities to avoid the census within Arakan itself or fleeing to Bangladesh-but there was no exodus when the census was conducted. To claim that such a high number of “illegal migrants” would have escaped the net of the state at a moment when the Ne Win regime had reached the peak of its paranoia about “illegal immigration” is simply ridiculous.
There is also the issue that most Muslims were incongruously classified as “Bangladeshis”. For Mr Tonkin that seems to be a mere anecdote without much relevance, but the classification reveals the crux of the issue: Muslims in Arakan were overwhelmingly regarded as foreigners.
When Operation Naga Min was conducted, the number of “illegal immigrants” apprehended was extremely low, a little bit more than 1,000 in Sittwe, less than 600 in Buthidaung and 230 in Maungdaw. Of course, the government claimed that most (if not all) of those who fled to Bangladesh were “illegals”, but that’s just an ex post facto justification of the operation itself and the brutality with which it was conducted (here I see Mr Tonkin coming with the argument that most fled to Bangladesh out of fear, rather than because they were victims of real violence, and it is likely that not all of them suffered violence, but violence there was, and many would have heard of it and decide to flee before the troops arrived to their villages). When the repatriation process began, people were able to prove residency in Burma with their NRCs cards (the most extended document at the time throughout the country). Mr Tonkin can find all this information in the paper by Nyi Nyi Kyaw “Unpacking the Presumed Statelessness of
Rohingyas”, published last year in the Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies.
Also, we shouldn’t forget that, for all the talk about migration to Arakan in the first three decades after Burma’s independence, there was also migration from Arakan to East Pakistan/Bangladesh. In December 1951, the New York Times reported that 250,000 Muslims had fled to East Pakistan in the previous three years. In 1959, it reported an exodus of 10,000, reportedly some were forced out by the government itself. Perhaps 250,000 refugees between 1948 and 1951 is not an accurate figure, but it shows that there was substantial post-independence emigration from Arakan too.
The documents Mr Tonkin presents in his comments to prove that “illegal immigration” was a big problem prove very little beyond showing contemporary perceptions of the “problem”. But they show clearly the confusion prevalent at the time, and now, about the Muslim population in Arakan, artificially classified as Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Bengali and of foreign origins. That’s the result of a no less artificial border between Arakan and East Pakistan/Bangladesh. As I have argued on several occasions, culturally, historically and anthropologically, Arakan and Chittagong are not separated entities, but part of a continuum. Muslims belong in Arakan as much as Buddhists, and have only come to be regarded as foreigners when the modern nation-state arrived in the region, belonging to which came to be seen as ethnically defined in the case of Burma as in many other places for reasons too long and complex to get into here.
Mr Tonkin dismisses the MFA statement in 1992 about “illegal immigrants” too easily and gives too much importance to statement made by Thein Sein in 2012 on the same issue. The MFA statement may be “silly”, and Thein Sein might be higher in the hierarchy, but there is a crucial difference between both: the MFA statement is a more faithful reflection of the Burmese government actions than Thein Sein’s words. The overwhelming majority of the Rohingya at the time of the MFA Ministry’s statement were treated as if they were “illegals” and stripped of their citizenship, while the Thein Sein administration didn’t put his words into action, except for the pilot citizenship verification program conducted in Myebon in 2014, a drop in the ocean clearly conducted in bad faith, in which only a very tiny percentage were granted citizenship. See my report here: http://sea-globe.com/forever-lost-meet-the-rohingya-who-sacrificed-their-identity-for-myanmar-citizenship/ In both cases, the stripping of citizenship from the Rohingya in the late eighties and early nineties and the pilot program in 2014, the Rohingya are regarded by default as foreigners, regardless of when their ancestors may have arrived to Arakan and the laws themselves that the Burmese state claims to follow.
Again, Mr Tonkin’s naive faith in the goodwill of the Burmese government on this issue is extremely puzzling, coming from a “well-traveled octogenarian” (as he defined himself in his Twitter account). I stand with what I said: successive Burmese governments have greatly exaggerated the “problem of illegal immigration” as a smokescreen for a project of nation-building in which it has decided that the Rohingya have no place.
There are limitations to the reliability of Census statistics in estimating the extent of illegal migration. By their very nature, illegal immigrants do not report for registration at the local Immigration Office on arrival, and in Rakhine State they might well think twice about staying at home when the Annual House Registration Lists are compiled; even the occasion of full Censuses could be a risky time to be listed or even noticed.
Mr Galache has clearly studied in depth the 1921, 1931 and 1983 census reports. But I wonder whether he has also examined the 1953-54 or the 1973 Census reports. As regards the 1953-54 Census, Professor Hugh Tinker notes on Page 357 of his 1957 book “The Union of Burma”, where he examines the pressures in the late 1940s for the cession of Maungdaw and Buthidaung to Pakistan: “In Buthidaung town about 60 per cent of the population are classified according to the current census as Pakistanis; in Maungdaw town about 45 per cent are Pakistanis (see Census, Release No. 3, 1953).” I cannot say whether the term “Pakistanis” should be interpreted in terms of citizenship, or geographic origin. In the same context, page 21 of the 1973 Census Report notes that 98.9% of all those enumerated during the Census were Myanmar nationals.
More specific still was a report by ‘The Scotsman’ Special Correspondent Michael Davidson dated 18 May 1949 from Akyab (Sittwe): “The great majority of Arakan Moslems are said to be really Pakistanis from Chittagong, even if they have been settled here for a generation. Of the 130,000 Moslems here, 80,000 are still Pakistani citizens.” Davidson seems to be referring to the entire Muslim population of Northern Arakan, and not just to the population around Sittwe.
A despatch to London by the British Ambassador in Rangoon dated 3 July 1979, reporting on the repatriation of Arakan Muslims who had fled to Bangladesh in the wake of Action Naga Min, noted: “Leading up to the formation of Bangladesh in 1971-72, some 100,000 Muslims moved illegally into Burma…..This illegal flow has stepped up in the last few years. Muslims now predominate in the border areas of two townships (Maungdaw and Buthidaung), each of which is equivalent in size to an English county. They comprise 90% of the 400,000 population compared with only 35% ten years ago.” [This 35% is clearly an error, possibly typographic, as Muslims predominated in Maungdaw and Buthidaung townships from late 1942 onwards after the expulsion of Buddhist communities.] Emphasizing the problem of illegal immigration, British Ambassador Booth concluded a report to London dated 12 May 1982 on the draft Citizenship Law by observing that: “Its immediate concern, I assume, is with illegal Bengali immigration into Arakan”.
Mr Galache asked about my sources. Those I have quoted above are enough to justify my initial guesstimate of 30%, but my gut feeling now is that this may be too high, especially as Ambassador Scholl’s reference in 1965 to 250,000 Arakan Muslims with unclarified citizenship may refer to the status of Arakan Muslims as a whole. What my sources all show though is that illegal immigration into Arakan from Bengal was a serious problem between 1948 and 1978. Successive British Ambassadors reported on this, including Ambassador Whitteridge who in a despatch dated 28 January 1964 noted: “The Moslems in that portion of Arakan which adjoins the border with East Pakistan number about 400,000 and have lived there for generations and have acquired Burmese nationality. But they are patently of Pakistani origin and occasionally some Pakistanis cross into Arakan illegally and mingle with the local population.” The Ambassador made no attempt to quantify the extent of this illegal migration, but its importance as an irritant in Pakistani-Burmese relations is undoubted.
I agree with Mr Galache that the report in December 1975 of the Bangladeshi Ambassador asserting that there were “upward of ½ million Bangalee trespassers” in Arakan is very likely a nonsense. It is not Ambassador Kaiser who was wrong, but Ambassador O’Brien, who when dictating a record without notes on return to his Embassy may have forgotten exactly what his Bangladeshi colleague had said. More than 500,000 surely represents the entire non-Kaman Muslim population in Arakan at the time. All Ambassador Kaiser was saying, I suggest, was that in this community of over 500,000 persons there were undoubtedly some who were there illegally and whom the Burmese had “some right” to deport. The 1983 Census puts the “Bangladeshi” community in Arakan at 497,208 which may be taken as a base figure for non-Kaman Arakan Muslims, and is totally compatible with Mr Kaiser’s 1975 figure of “upward of ½ million”.
Mr Galache makes a lot – far too much – out of the silly comment by the Myanmar MFA in 1992 that Muslims have been entering the country “illegally” since 1824. This comment was made over 25 years ago. Mr Galache needs to come up with something said this Century to set against what President Thein Sein said in July 2012. A statement by a Head of State as recently as 2012 surely takes precedence over a fatuous press release issued 20 years previously by a government department. Thein Sein’s statement is of crucial importance. It has hitherto been widely misinterpreted if not ignored internationally. It is entirely consistent with the provisions for citizenship in the 1948 Citizenship Acts which should have benefited the vast majority of Arakan’s Muslims – who de jure may not have been stripped of their citizenship by the 1982 Law, whatever their lamentable de facto status.
Mr Galache may think that illegal immigration into Rakhine State has never been all that much of a problem and he argues that it has been much exaggerated for domestic political reasons. My view is that it was a serious issue between 1948 and 1978, that it has continuing negative consequences and that exaggerated talk about “illegal Bengalis” has come overwhelmingly from social media and not from government pronouncements.
Interesting observational piece. Im sure there was good and questionable behaviour from tourists and locals alike. The bad rich tourists vs good poor locals angle is a bit simplistic. I can understand tourists wanting to leave at all costs – they were on holidays and justed wanted to get out.
Mr Tonkin is not entirely wrong when he asserts that none of us really knows how many “illegal immigrants” crossed to Arakan since independence. But, as I have said in the text, it’s possible to get rough orders of magnitude by looking at the censuses and comparing the growth of different populations. The exercise shows clearly that the demographic growth of the Rohingya population is not high enough to warrant massive waves of migrants.
I don’t know how Mr Tonkin reached his initial conclusion that 30% of Muslims in Arakan were “illegal migrants”, he has never cared to explain it. But I do know how he reached his estimate of 15%, because I persuaded him in a private exchange some months ago that such percentage was more accurate. At that time, I used exactly the same methodology I have used here, comparing the growth of different populations between two censuses. But then I did it using the censuses conducted in 1921 and 1983. The data I had at hand from the 1921 census at that time only included the Muslim population in Akyab District, not the whole of Arakan. I was not satisfied with that and I didn’t try to publish the results. The data I’m using here is both more complete and more pertinent. More complete because the data I have from the 1931 census includes the whole of Arakan, and more pertinent because the date, 1931, is closer to the year of independence, 1948. I find puzzling that now Mr Tonkin accuses me of cherry-picking and distorting my sources to assess the extent of “illegal immigration” when I’m using exactly the same methodology that I used to successfully persuade him that it was 15%, but now analyzing a more complete and relevant census.
Mr. Tonkin seems to be possessed by a strange faith in the good intentions of successive Burmese governments . He argues that the notion of “waves of illegal immigrants” has been spread only in social media, and not by the government itself, as if such narrative had suddenly appeared out of the blue. But the government has touted such dangerous tale for years. I give an example from a government think-tank (Myanmar-ISIS), but there is more. Four years before being appointed State Counselor, Aung San Suu Kyi was already framing the conflict in Arakan as pertaining to illegal immigration, albeit in a somewhat oblique (but clear) manner. When asked about the issue in an interview with an Indian media outlet in 2012, she replied:
“Of course we are concerned. I think in many ways the situation has been mishandled. For years I have been insisting, and the National League for Democracy also, that we have to do something about the porous border with Bangladesh because it is going to lead some day or the other to grave problems.” http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/interview/lets-not-be-overoptimistic-about-burma/article4091223.ece
In 1992, after an exodus of up to 250,000 Rohingya refugees to Bangladesh, and at a time when most of them had recently been stripped of citizenship, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a press statement containing the following words:
“In fact, although there are 135 national races residing in Myanmar today, the so-called Rohingya people are not among them. Historically, there has never been a Rohingya race in Myanmar. The very name Rohingya was a creation of a group of insurgents in the Rakhine State. Since the First Anglo-Burmese War in 1824, people of the Muslim faith from the adjacent country have entered Myanmar illegally [sic!], particularly Rakhine State. Being illegal immigrants, they do not hold any immigration papers like the other nationals of the country. With the passage of time, the number of people who entered Myanmar illegally has greatly inflated.”
(I have a copy of the full statement, but this sentence, albeit with a slightly different translation can be found in this AI report: https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/92000/asa160052004en.pdf )
The most astonishing thing here is that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs branded as “illegal immigrants” those people who arrived during colonial times, without making any distinction between them and those arrived after independence, a distinction clearly established by the laws in effect at that time! Was the Ministry of Foreign Affairs ignorant of the laws in its own country? Perhaps, but I tend to think that it was merely reflecting the actual policies of the Burmese government. On paper, the law says that those Muslims arrived during colonial times are entitled to citizenship; in actual practice, they are treated as illegal interlopers, and the Ministry was just reflecting what the actual practice was. Focusing on what Thein Sein may have said two decades after the fait accompli of rendering stateless virtually all Rohingya population in Arakan, as Mr. Tonkin does, is what I would really describe as cherry-picking…
The Rohingya have been for decades the victims of a series of injustices at the hands of Burmese governments willing to ignore and even violate their own laws in order to get rid of them. That would be true whether 30% or 15% of them were “illegal immigrants”. But such injustice is based on a lie, the gross exaggeration of the numbers of “illegals”. Mr Tonkin’s dogmatism, of which he seems prone to accuse others, prevents him from seeing that, as it prevents him from seeing many other things.
The writer has effectively debunked the notion, spread on Burmese social media rather than in Government statements, that Arakan’s Muslim population are “illegal immigrants”. Former President Thein Sein indeed confirmed in a statement published on the Presidential website on 12 July 2012, recording a conversation on 11 July 2012 with the then UNHCR Antόnio Guterres (now UN Secretary-General), that migrants from Bengal who arrived during British rule did so legally and that their descendants are entitled to Burmese citizenship. But Thein Sein gave no indication of the numbers who might have arrived illegally after independence, and whom he described as “Rohingya”, thus seeking to distinguish them from the bulk of settled Muslim residents (who nowadays say they too want to be called “Rohingya”, which might well cause some confusion in Myanmar itself).
Nonetheless, I believe that the writer’s conclusion that the number of post-1948 migrants “couldn’t have surpassed 5%” underestimates the reality. He is right to challenge what the West German Ambassador wrote in 1965, but the Ambassador was reporting from Pakistan, not Burma, and one literal interpretation of his report could imply that he believed there were only 250,000 Muslims in Arakan altogether, as he uses the words “der ca. 250 000 in der burmesischen Provinz Arakan ansässigen Moslems, deren Staatsanghörigkeit ungeklärt ist” and there is most unlikely to have been an estimate from Pakistani sources of some 250,000 outstanding cases. Likewise, however generally unreliable the British Ambassador in 1975 may have thought his Bangladeshi colleague, on this particular occasion the British Ambassador also noted that: “Today, however, he was in a more subdued mood and seemed anxious to talk in a relaxed manner about the alarming developments which had engulfed him during recent weeks.” The discussion of the situation in Arakan was only a minor element in a much broader conversation.
Indeed, the writer tends to cherry-pick and even misinterpret his sources for alleged post 1948 illegal migration. He might have commented, for example, on what Virginia Thompson and Richard Adloff wrote in 1954 (Page 154 – Minority Problems in Southeast Asia”): “The postwar illegal immigration of Chittagonians into that area was on a vast scale, and in the Maungdaw and Buthidaung areas they replaced the Arakanese, who had to withdraw because of wartime bombings. The newcomers were called Mujahids (crusaders), in contrast to the Rwangya or settled Chittagonian population…..”. This contemporary analysis, and indeed other contemporary records, need to be taken into account.
You only need to read diplomatic and press reports of meetings between Pakistani/Bangladeshi and Burmese officials and politicians during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s to know that the problem of illegal migration from Bengal into Arakan was a continuing issue which both sides sought to contain and resolve, and even to downplay in public statements. But there can be no doubt that there was a problem, and a serious one at that, during the thirty years after Burmese independence in 1948, and it was in my view rather greater, perhaps two or three times greater, than the 5% which is the author’s conclusion.
However, an earlier estimate I had made of 30% I reduced some months ago to “not significantly exceeding 15%”, and this under the influence of the writer’s persuasive arguments elsewhere. It behoves us all, though, not to be dogmatic on this issue. None of us really knows.
[…] It has received a lot of attention due to its use of a notorious section of an ancient Buddhist text, the Mahavamsa. I have written about the context of the sermon in an my essay Sitagu Sayadaw and justifiable evils in Buddhism. […]
[…] oppressive. It suppresses free speech and individual rights. It invites abuse and enforcement by vigilante groups. But that does not mean Indonesian democracy is destined to become a theocracy in which […]
There have always been conservative factions within NU, and among groups and individuals sharing its basic religious teachings.
It is important to keep the fact that there is not a causal relationship, or even a strong correlation between basic religious orientations and positions on contemporary issues including the politics of pluralism.
For example, NU and FPI share many basic religious principles including adherence to one of the four recognized Sunni legal schools, Asharite or Maturidite theology and the Sufism of al-Ghazzali and al- Junaid and ritual practices including tahlilan (prayers for the departed) and ziyarah (pilgrimage to the graves of saints.) As far as the politics of pluralism is concerned they could not be more different. On this issue NU Garis Lurus has moved towards the FPI position. As was evident in a February 2018 speech by Sobri Lubis, FPI has soften its rhetoric and no longer calls for killing its opponents. The conservative coalition also includes Salafi oriented groups strongly opposed to the theological and ritual orientations of NU (including NU Garis Lurus) and FPI.
There is also a strong pluralist movements in Muhammadiyah, which also differs fundamentally from NU on core religious teachings and practices. Muhammadiyah’s teachings are influenced by Salafism including that of Ibn Taymiyyah. Muhammadiyah rejects many devotional practices dear to NU.
The politics of Islam in the 2019 election will be about the politics of pluralism, not the politics of theology and ritual. In the long run this is a positive development and a sign of a maturing democracy. An alliance based on the politics of pluralism can extend across sectarian lines and also appeal to non-Muslims.
Clay Fuller article “The international sand market, dictators, and criminals”..
“From 2012 to 2016, Cambodia reported exports of only $275,606 worth of all types of sand to Taiwan. Taiwan meanwhile, reported imports of $32 million worth of silica sand from Cambodia during that same period. The same pattern appeared with other countries. Singapore reportedly imported $752 million in Cambodian sand during that time, but Cambodia claims it only exported $5 million to Singapore.
The descrepancies above are a gugantic amount of corruption….
[…] Timor-Leste is a good example of how a closed-list system discourages politicians from adopting vote-buying strategies. Although East Timorese voters’ willingness to engage in vote buying was high during the 2017 election, little evidence of vote buying has been found. Only 4 per cent of East Timorese report having individually been the target of such handouts. […]
Thank you for this report. Readers might find this paper of some interest: David J.H. Blake & Keith Barney, “Structural Injustice, Slow Violence? The Political Ecology of a ‘Best Practice’ Hydropower Dam in Lao PDR,” Journal of Contemporary Asia. This article is currently available for free download: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00472336.2018.1482560
Thank you for this illuminating article. I’ve worked in a CSO in Laos for several years, and while reading this, one of my main thoughts was “ah, so it’s not just us”. We are really feeling the crush of the forces you describe: international donors turning away from rights-based advocacy work in favour of politically safe topics, while concurrently there are ever-increasing domestic restrictions and bureaucracy. So it was with sadness and frustration that I read that others across the region are facing the same thing. I’m also seeing that the new priority of donors / IFIs is to create an “enabling environment” for the private sector – which often comes with huge funding attached. But none are so interested in creating an enabling and safe environment for civil society. As a consequence (as mentioned in the comment above) many CSOs are indeed ‘rushing’ to maintain funding by following a market-oriented approach, and engaging more with the private sector. But instead of a ‘rush’ I would say many organisations are reluctant – or even forced – to take this path, because the reality is that securing funding is the difference between whether a CSO can continue to exist or has to shut its doors. @DrRosalia I would be happy to discuss further about NGO practices if you’re writing about this topic in a future article.
This is an incisive examination of Cambodia’s election scene harking back to 1993, as indeed I do with 1998 the first election I observed and worked on. There is one big difference this year from all of those previous election years. There is no hope or optimism, no vision of a better future. Instead the electorate is entreated to “stick to what we have” as to flirt with any other will bring untold disaster. Sadly the CNRP leadership has not risen to the occasion again. The “boycott” tactic is not thought through – again – as anyone with rudimentary knowledge of how Cambodia’s election machinery operates will tell you. All that does is to leave even more unused blank ballot-papers (beside the usual surplus printed ones) available to be marked and counted for the expected results to emerge.
Such rigging as been observed in previous elections. This year there are no independent trained observers to detect such discrepancies.
CNRP is of course not the only one to be guilty of the childish “boycott” mentality of a bad loser, even if there is some justification because of being cheated. As this article describes CPP in 1993 adopted the same tactic, as did FUNCINPEC (and Sam Rainsy) in later polls. At least this year there is no cheated losing party to mount demonstrations to be suppressed violently.
CNRP though does need to recognize that it has a serial boycotting problem. It kept doing the same at the National Assembly. Instead of attending, debating, putting forward amendments, then voting for them – being active before national televised audiences, what did they do? Boycott! In one case they all took off down to the sea-side in Sihanoukville instead of doing the job they were elected for and paid for. That is not leadership. It is not democracy. They should have tried their best to engage, even if bound to lose the vote. That’s how Parliaments work. Then they should return to their constituencies – few Cambodian Parliamentarians do much of this – to explain why they took the line they did; why it matters to constituents, and why the only way to put it right, is to make sure fewer people vote for the ruling party next time round.
That is grass-roots mobiliisation of democracy. Mu Sochua recently accepted that CNRP ought to have done more of that. In fact that is exactly the advice US advisers gave to Kem Sokha as to how to gain power. He is held in prison on charges of fomenting a revolution on the basis of an audio-tape that doesn’t tell the full story. The only witnesses – the US Advisers – have still not been called as witnesses nor have they spoken up. They should.
As I said CNRP should try to stay engaged. It is wrong that their party was banned, the same fate of Thaksin Shinatwatra’s successive parties in Thailand, from which CPP got the idea. But there the party re-emerged and will do so again. CNRP could have thrown its lot behind the Grassroots Democracy Party but instead it chose to refuse to come out to play.
PM Hun Sen will be returned to power. That will be enough for some easing-up of restrictions. More relaxations will surely follow due to pressure from the US and Europe that will have some effect. The question is “Do CNRP leaders have the wherewithal to re-group and to adapt to the new realities?” Or will they stay disengaged and sulk?
This is entirely consistent with what I observed in Cambodia (especially Sihanoukville, which the Chinese all but own outright, and with what I am told is occurring (with Duterte’s blessing) in The Philippines (where the Chinese have a military base — and therefore their Navy and Air Force — on Philippine soil). It takes local, grass-roots outrage to counter Chinese encroachment, as the cancellation of the dam projects in Myanmar demonstrates.
Thank you for your comment and indeed I was trying to show how the two are interlinked. In a next article, I hope to pay attention to NGOs practices. On philanthropy (and development aid) in SEA you may want to see this special issue of the Austrian Journal of SEA studies I curated https://aseas.univie.ac.at/index.php/aseas/issue/view/186
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‘Illegal migration’ in Arakan: myths and numbers
As you can read in my piece, I point out that the MFA contradicts existing laws in Burma, I’m not denying is silly, I’m saying it reflects actual practice more accurately than Thein Sein’s statement, which reflects actual laws. The MFA statement reveals how the 1982 Citizenship Law was enforced in Arakan, in the late eighties and nineties. The overwhelming majority of Rohingya were stripped of citizenship because they were treated as “illegal immigrants” according to the definition contained in the statement, not in the actual law. It was assumed that most, if not all, of them had arrived during colonial times and after independence, without distinguishing between both categories, and consequently treated as “illegals”. Thein Sein’s statement may reflect accurately the existing legal framework but, again, there hasn’t been no effort to apply it to reinstate citizenship to the Rohingya. The only effort was the pilot program in Myebon, a drop in the ocean, as I have already said. Out of 2,916 Muslims there, only 97 were granted full citizenship and 969 [sic] were granted naturalized citizenship. That’s only around one third of the total, are we going to believe that two thirds of Muslims in Myebon are “illegal migrants” (or their descendants)? I repeat: Muslims in Arakan are treated by default as “illegals” who have to demonstrate they are entitled to citizenship, which may happen to individuals of other groups in Burma, but not to the communities as a whole (excepting, of course, other Muslims regarded by default as “Indians”). And it may be extremely difficult for most Rohingya to prove their claims for citizenship because, as Mr Tonkin knows well, their documents were snatched by the authorities when the Citizenship Law was (mis-) applied in the late eighties and early nineties. In short: the Rohingya were rendered stateless by violating the 1982 Citizenship Law, but their statelessness has been perpetuated either by inaction or by following scrupulously the letter of this very same law. Given all the confusion and bad faith in which the 1982 Citizenship Law was enforced in the case of the Rohingya, the only way to begin to correct the historical wrong done against them would be, in my view, to give back full citizenship to each and every Muslim in Arakan (and now in Bangladesh), even at the risk of granting it to those “illegals” arrived after independence (whose numbers are quite small anyway, whatever Mr Tonkin says). Of course, I’m not holding my breath expecting that such thing will happen anytime soon…
‘Illegal migration’ in Arakan: myths and numbers
The MFA statement of 21 February 1992 is silly because it states: “Since the First Anglo-Myanmar War in 1824, people of Muslim faith from the adjacent country illegally entered Myanmar Naing-Ngan, particularly Rakhine State.”. Thein Sein corrects this error in his statement of 11 July 2012 by pointing out that they came legally during British rule. Indeed, the British positively encouraged this migration into Arakan, where there was so much surplus land. The official English text of this sentence is not that provided by Mr Galache, but that quoted by Amnesty International. The full statement in English as issued by the MFA appeared in the Working People’s Daily of 22 February 1992 and may be found on the Network Myanmar website.
Thein Sein’s statement could well be the passport to the reconfirmation of the citizenship of those who today say they are Rohingya.
‘Illegal migration’ in Arakan: myths and numbers
Mr Tonkin seems to be unable to see his own inconsistencies, and he contributes to create more confusion in an already terribly complex matter. He, who has relied so much on censuses for his assessments, now suddenly decides to cast doubts on their accuracy because they contradict a narrative he has chosen to believe with zealous faith. When my (provisional and admittedly faulty) analysis showed 15% of post-independence immigration, he accepted the 1983 census’ results; when a more complete and thorough analysis shows a smaller percentage of “illegal immigrants”, suddenly he becomes skeptical of the very same results. Now, I have never claimed any censuses conducted in Burma, or many other countries for that matter, perfectly account for each and everyone of the people living in the territory covered in them, but, as I said in the text, they can provide decent orders of magnitude. The 1983 census is not an exception. I find extremely unlikely that a huge number of Muslims in Arakan were uncounted in 1983 for a variety of reasons: in contrast with other territories in Burma, it covered the whole of Arakan, and it came after operation Naga Min (and the return of most of the refugees who had fled to Bangladesh), it was conducted when the state had asserted more control in the area than never before and insurgencies in Arakan (from the formerly active there CPB, Rakhine nationalists or Rohingya armed groups) were extremely weak, and there is no mention anywhere in the census of the possibility that any significant number of individuals could have not been enumerated. It defies logic that 30%, or even 15%, “illegal immigrants” would have passed unnoticed by the government,. That would be a huge number of people, around 100,000, playing an extremely successful game of seek and hide with the authorities to avoid the census within Arakan itself or fleeing to Bangladesh-but there was no exodus when the census was conducted. To claim that such a high number of “illegal migrants” would have escaped the net of the state at a moment when the Ne Win regime had reached the peak of its paranoia about “illegal immigration” is simply ridiculous.
There is also the issue that most Muslims were incongruously classified as “Bangladeshis”. For Mr Tonkin that seems to be a mere anecdote without much relevance, but the classification reveals the crux of the issue: Muslims in Arakan were overwhelmingly regarded as foreigners.
When Operation Naga Min was conducted, the number of “illegal immigrants” apprehended was extremely low, a little bit more than 1,000 in Sittwe, less than 600 in Buthidaung and 230 in Maungdaw. Of course, the government claimed that most (if not all) of those who fled to Bangladesh were “illegals”, but that’s just an ex post facto justification of the operation itself and the brutality with which it was conducted (here I see Mr Tonkin coming with the argument that most fled to Bangladesh out of fear, rather than because they were victims of real violence, and it is likely that not all of them suffered violence, but violence there was, and many would have heard of it and decide to flee before the troops arrived to their villages). When the repatriation process began, people were able to prove residency in Burma with their NRCs cards (the most extended document at the time throughout the country). Mr Tonkin can find all this information in the paper by Nyi Nyi Kyaw “Unpacking the Presumed Statelessness of
Rohingyas”, published last year in the Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies.
Also, we shouldn’t forget that, for all the talk about migration to Arakan in the first three decades after Burma’s independence, there was also migration from Arakan to East Pakistan/Bangladesh. In December 1951, the New York Times reported that 250,000 Muslims had fled to East Pakistan in the previous three years. In 1959, it reported an exodus of 10,000, reportedly some were forced out by the government itself. Perhaps 250,000 refugees between 1948 and 1951 is not an accurate figure, but it shows that there was substantial post-independence emigration from Arakan too.
The documents Mr Tonkin presents in his comments to prove that “illegal immigration” was a big problem prove very little beyond showing contemporary perceptions of the “problem”. But they show clearly the confusion prevalent at the time, and now, about the Muslim population in Arakan, artificially classified as Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Bengali and of foreign origins. That’s the result of a no less artificial border between Arakan and East Pakistan/Bangladesh. As I have argued on several occasions, culturally, historically and anthropologically, Arakan and Chittagong are not separated entities, but part of a continuum. Muslims belong in Arakan as much as Buddhists, and have only come to be regarded as foreigners when the modern nation-state arrived in the region, belonging to which came to be seen as ethnically defined in the case of Burma as in many other places for reasons too long and complex to get into here.
Mr Tonkin dismisses the MFA statement in 1992 about “illegal immigrants” too easily and gives too much importance to statement made by Thein Sein in 2012 on the same issue. The MFA statement may be “silly”, and Thein Sein might be higher in the hierarchy, but there is a crucial difference between both: the MFA statement is a more faithful reflection of the Burmese government actions than Thein Sein’s words. The overwhelming majority of the Rohingya at the time of the MFA Ministry’s statement were treated as if they were “illegals” and stripped of their citizenship, while the Thein Sein administration didn’t put his words into action, except for the pilot citizenship verification program conducted in Myebon in 2014, a drop in the ocean clearly conducted in bad faith, in which only a very tiny percentage were granted citizenship. See my report here: http://sea-globe.com/forever-lost-meet-the-rohingya-who-sacrificed-their-identity-for-myanmar-citizenship/ In both cases, the stripping of citizenship from the Rohingya in the late eighties and early nineties and the pilot program in 2014, the Rohingya are regarded by default as foreigners, regardless of when their ancestors may have arrived to Arakan and the laws themselves that the Burmese state claims to follow.
Again, Mr Tonkin’s naive faith in the goodwill of the Burmese government on this issue is extremely puzzling, coming from a “well-traveled octogenarian” (as he defined himself in his Twitter account). I stand with what I said: successive Burmese governments have greatly exaggerated the “problem of illegal immigration” as a smokescreen for a project of nation-building in which it has decided that the Rohingya have no place.
‘Illegal migration’ in Arakan: myths and numbers
There are limitations to the reliability of Census statistics in estimating the extent of illegal migration. By their very nature, illegal immigrants do not report for registration at the local Immigration Office on arrival, and in Rakhine State they might well think twice about staying at home when the Annual House Registration Lists are compiled; even the occasion of full Censuses could be a risky time to be listed or even noticed.
Mr Galache has clearly studied in depth the 1921, 1931 and 1983 census reports. But I wonder whether he has also examined the 1953-54 or the 1973 Census reports. As regards the 1953-54 Census, Professor Hugh Tinker notes on Page 357 of his 1957 book “The Union of Burma”, where he examines the pressures in the late 1940s for the cession of Maungdaw and Buthidaung to Pakistan: “In Buthidaung town about 60 per cent of the population are classified according to the current census as Pakistanis; in Maungdaw town about 45 per cent are Pakistanis (see Census, Release No. 3, 1953).” I cannot say whether the term “Pakistanis” should be interpreted in terms of citizenship, or geographic origin. In the same context, page 21 of the 1973 Census Report notes that 98.9% of all those enumerated during the Census were Myanmar nationals.
More specific still was a report by ‘The Scotsman’ Special Correspondent Michael Davidson dated 18 May 1949 from Akyab (Sittwe): “The great majority of Arakan Moslems are said to be really Pakistanis from Chittagong, even if they have been settled here for a generation. Of the 130,000 Moslems here, 80,000 are still Pakistani citizens.” Davidson seems to be referring to the entire Muslim population of Northern Arakan, and not just to the population around Sittwe.
A despatch to London by the British Ambassador in Rangoon dated 3 July 1979, reporting on the repatriation of Arakan Muslims who had fled to Bangladesh in the wake of Action Naga Min, noted: “Leading up to the formation of Bangladesh in 1971-72, some 100,000 Muslims moved illegally into Burma…..This illegal flow has stepped up in the last few years. Muslims now predominate in the border areas of two townships (Maungdaw and Buthidaung), each of which is equivalent in size to an English county. They comprise 90% of the 400,000 population compared with only 35% ten years ago.” [This 35% is clearly an error, possibly typographic, as Muslims predominated in Maungdaw and Buthidaung townships from late 1942 onwards after the expulsion of Buddhist communities.] Emphasizing the problem of illegal immigration, British Ambassador Booth concluded a report to London dated 12 May 1982 on the draft Citizenship Law by observing that: “Its immediate concern, I assume, is with illegal Bengali immigration into Arakan”.
Mr Galache asked about my sources. Those I have quoted above are enough to justify my initial guesstimate of 30%, but my gut feeling now is that this may be too high, especially as Ambassador Scholl’s reference in 1965 to 250,000 Arakan Muslims with unclarified citizenship may refer to the status of Arakan Muslims as a whole. What my sources all show though is that illegal immigration into Arakan from Bengal was a serious problem between 1948 and 1978. Successive British Ambassadors reported on this, including Ambassador Whitteridge who in a despatch dated 28 January 1964 noted: “The Moslems in that portion of Arakan which adjoins the border with East Pakistan number about 400,000 and have lived there for generations and have acquired Burmese nationality. But they are patently of Pakistani origin and occasionally some Pakistanis cross into Arakan illegally and mingle with the local population.” The Ambassador made no attempt to quantify the extent of this illegal migration, but its importance as an irritant in Pakistani-Burmese relations is undoubted.
I agree with Mr Galache that the report in December 1975 of the Bangladeshi Ambassador asserting that there were “upward of ½ million Bangalee trespassers” in Arakan is very likely a nonsense. It is not Ambassador Kaiser who was wrong, but Ambassador O’Brien, who when dictating a record without notes on return to his Embassy may have forgotten exactly what his Bangladeshi colleague had said. More than 500,000 surely represents the entire non-Kaman Muslim population in Arakan at the time. All Ambassador Kaiser was saying, I suggest, was that in this community of over 500,000 persons there were undoubtedly some who were there illegally and whom the Burmese had “some right” to deport. The 1983 Census puts the “Bangladeshi” community in Arakan at 497,208 which may be taken as a base figure for non-Kaman Arakan Muslims, and is totally compatible with Mr Kaiser’s 1975 figure of “upward of ½ million”.
Mr Galache makes a lot – far too much – out of the silly comment by the Myanmar MFA in 1992 that Muslims have been entering the country “illegally” since 1824. This comment was made over 25 years ago. Mr Galache needs to come up with something said this Century to set against what President Thein Sein said in July 2012. A statement by a Head of State as recently as 2012 surely takes precedence over a fatuous press release issued 20 years previously by a government department. Thein Sein’s statement is of crucial importance. It has hitherto been widely misinterpreted if not ignored internationally. It is entirely consistent with the provisions for citizenship in the 1948 Citizenship Acts which should have benefited the vast majority of Arakan’s Muslims – who de jure may not have been stripped of their citizenship by the 1982 Law, whatever their lamentable de facto status.
Mr Galache may think that illegal immigration into Rakhine State has never been all that much of a problem and he argues that it has been much exaggerated for domestic political reasons. My view is that it was a serious issue between 1948 and 1978, that it has continuing negative consequences and that exaggerated talk about “illegal Bengalis” has come overwhelmingly from social media and not from government pronouncements.
The fault lines between rich and poor in Lombok quake
Interesting observational piece. Im sure there was good and questionable behaviour from tourists and locals alike. The bad rich tourists vs good poor locals angle is a bit simplistic. I can understand tourists wanting to leave at all costs – they were on holidays and justed wanted to get out.
‘Illegal migration’ in Arakan: myths and numbers
Mr Tonkin is not entirely wrong when he asserts that none of us really knows how many “illegal immigrants” crossed to Arakan since independence. But, as I have said in the text, it’s possible to get rough orders of magnitude by looking at the censuses and comparing the growth of different populations. The exercise shows clearly that the demographic growth of the Rohingya population is not high enough to warrant massive waves of migrants.
I don’t know how Mr Tonkin reached his initial conclusion that 30% of Muslims in Arakan were “illegal migrants”, he has never cared to explain it. But I do know how he reached his estimate of 15%, because I persuaded him in a private exchange some months ago that such percentage was more accurate. At that time, I used exactly the same methodology I have used here, comparing the growth of different populations between two censuses. But then I did it using the censuses conducted in 1921 and 1983. The data I had at hand from the 1921 census at that time only included the Muslim population in Akyab District, not the whole of Arakan. I was not satisfied with that and I didn’t try to publish the results. The data I’m using here is both more complete and more pertinent. More complete because the data I have from the 1931 census includes the whole of Arakan, and more pertinent because the date, 1931, is closer to the year of independence, 1948. I find puzzling that now Mr Tonkin accuses me of cherry-picking and distorting my sources to assess the extent of “illegal immigration” when I’m using exactly the same methodology that I used to successfully persuade him that it was 15%, but now analyzing a more complete and relevant census.
Mr. Tonkin seems to be possessed by a strange faith in the good intentions of successive Burmese governments . He argues that the notion of “waves of illegal immigrants” has been spread only in social media, and not by the government itself, as if such narrative had suddenly appeared out of the blue. But the government has touted such dangerous tale for years. I give an example from a government think-tank (Myanmar-ISIS), but there is more. Four years before being appointed State Counselor, Aung San Suu Kyi was already framing the conflict in Arakan as pertaining to illegal immigration, albeit in a somewhat oblique (but clear) manner. When asked about the issue in an interview with an Indian media outlet in 2012, she replied:
“Of course we are concerned. I think in many ways the situation has been mishandled. For years I have been insisting, and the National League for Democracy also, that we have to do something about the porous border with Bangladesh because it is going to lead some day or the other to grave problems.”
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/interview/lets-not-be-overoptimistic-about-burma/article4091223.ece
In 1992, after an exodus of up to 250,000 Rohingya refugees to Bangladesh, and at a time when most of them had recently been stripped of citizenship, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a press statement containing the following words:
“In fact, although there are 135 national races residing in Myanmar today, the so-called Rohingya people are not among them. Historically, there has never been a Rohingya race in Myanmar. The very name Rohingya was a creation of a group of insurgents in the Rakhine State. Since the First Anglo-Burmese War in 1824, people of the Muslim faith from the adjacent country have entered Myanmar illegally [sic!], particularly Rakhine State. Being illegal immigrants, they do not hold any immigration papers like the other nationals of the country. With the passage of time, the number of people who entered Myanmar illegally has greatly inflated.”
(I have a copy of the full statement, but this sentence, albeit with a slightly different translation can be found in this AI report: https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/92000/asa160052004en.pdf )
The most astonishing thing here is that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs branded as “illegal immigrants” those people who arrived during colonial times, without making any distinction between them and those arrived after independence, a distinction clearly established by the laws in effect at that time! Was the Ministry of Foreign Affairs ignorant of the laws in its own country? Perhaps, but I tend to think that it was merely reflecting the actual policies of the Burmese government. On paper, the law says that those Muslims arrived during colonial times are entitled to citizenship; in actual practice, they are treated as illegal interlopers, and the Ministry was just reflecting what the actual practice was. Focusing on what Thein Sein may have said two decades after the fait accompli of rendering stateless virtually all Rohingya population in Arakan, as Mr. Tonkin does, is what I would really describe as cherry-picking…
The Rohingya have been for decades the victims of a series of injustices at the hands of Burmese governments willing to ignore and even violate their own laws in order to get rid of them. That would be true whether 30% or 15% of them were “illegal immigrants”. But such injustice is based on a lie, the gross exaggeration of the numbers of “illegals”. Mr Tonkin’s dogmatism, of which he seems prone to accuse others, prevents him from seeing that, as it prevents him from seeing many other things.
‘Illegal migration’ in Arakan: myths and numbers
The writer has effectively debunked the notion, spread on Burmese social media rather than in Government statements, that Arakan’s Muslim population are “illegal immigrants”. Former President Thein Sein indeed confirmed in a statement published on the Presidential website on 12 July 2012, recording a conversation on 11 July 2012 with the then UNHCR Antόnio Guterres (now UN Secretary-General), that migrants from Bengal who arrived during British rule did so legally and that their descendants are entitled to Burmese citizenship. But Thein Sein gave no indication of the numbers who might have arrived illegally after independence, and whom he described as “Rohingya”, thus seeking to distinguish them from the bulk of settled Muslim residents (who nowadays say they too want to be called “Rohingya”, which might well cause some confusion in Myanmar itself).
Nonetheless, I believe that the writer’s conclusion that the number of post-1948 migrants “couldn’t have surpassed 5%” underestimates the reality. He is right to challenge what the West German Ambassador wrote in 1965, but the Ambassador was reporting from Pakistan, not Burma, and one literal interpretation of his report could imply that he believed there were only 250,000 Muslims in Arakan altogether, as he uses the words “der ca. 250 000 in der burmesischen Provinz Arakan ansässigen Moslems, deren Staatsanghörigkeit ungeklärt ist” and there is most unlikely to have been an estimate from Pakistani sources of some 250,000 outstanding cases. Likewise, however generally unreliable the British Ambassador in 1975 may have thought his Bangladeshi colleague, on this particular occasion the British Ambassador also noted that: “Today, however, he was in a more subdued mood and seemed anxious to talk in a relaxed manner about the alarming developments which had engulfed him during recent weeks.” The discussion of the situation in Arakan was only a minor element in a much broader conversation.
Indeed, the writer tends to cherry-pick and even misinterpret his sources for alleged post 1948 illegal migration. He might have commented, for example, on what Virginia Thompson and Richard Adloff wrote in 1954 (Page 154 – Minority Problems in Southeast Asia”): “The postwar illegal immigration of Chittagonians into that area was on a vast scale, and in the Maungdaw and Buthidaung areas they replaced the Arakanese, who had to withdraw because of wartime bombings. The newcomers were called Mujahids (crusaders), in contrast to the Rwangya or settled Chittagonian population…..”. This contemporary analysis, and indeed other contemporary records, need to be taken into account.
You only need to read diplomatic and press reports of meetings between Pakistani/Bangladeshi and Burmese officials and politicians during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s to know that the problem of illegal migration from Bengal into Arakan was a continuing issue which both sides sought to contain and resolve, and even to downplay in public statements. But there can be no doubt that there was a problem, and a serious one at that, during the thirty years after Burmese independence in 1948, and it was in my view rather greater, perhaps two or three times greater, than the 5% which is the author’s conclusion.
However, an earlier estimate I had made of 30% I reduced some months ago to “not significantly exceeding 15%”, and this under the influence of the writer’s persuasive arguments elsewhere. It behoves us all, though, not to be dogmatic on this issue. None of us really knows.
Sitagu Sayadaw and justifiable evils in Buddhism
[…] in New Mandala. 13 NOV, […]
Sitagu Sayadaw and justifiable evils in Buddhism
[…] It has received a lot of attention due to its use of a notorious section of an ancient Buddhist text, the Mahavamsa. I have written about the context of the sermon in an my essay Sitagu Sayadaw and justifiable evils in Buddhism. […]
Justice by numbers
[…] oppressive. It suppresses free speech and individual rights. It invites abuse and enforcement by vigilante groups. But that does not mean Indonesian democracy is destined to become a theocracy in which […]
Nahdlatul Ulama is home to its own hardliners
There have always been conservative factions within NU, and among groups and individuals sharing its basic religious teachings.
It is important to keep the fact that there is not a causal relationship, or even a strong correlation between basic religious orientations and positions on contemporary issues including the politics of pluralism.
For example, NU and FPI share many basic religious principles including adherence to one of the four recognized Sunni legal schools, Asharite or Maturidite theology and the Sufism of al-Ghazzali and al- Junaid and ritual practices including tahlilan (prayers for the departed) and ziyarah (pilgrimage to the graves of saints.) As far as the politics of pluralism is concerned they could not be more different. On this issue NU Garis Lurus has moved towards the FPI position. As was evident in a February 2018 speech by Sobri Lubis, FPI has soften its rhetoric and no longer calls for killing its opponents. The conservative coalition also includes Salafi oriented groups strongly opposed to the theological and ritual orientations of NU (including NU Garis Lurus) and FPI.
There is also a strong pluralist movements in Muhammadiyah, which also differs fundamentally from NU on core religious teachings and practices. Muhammadiyah’s teachings are influenced by Salafism including that of Ibn Taymiyyah. Muhammadiyah rejects many devotional practices dear to NU.
The politics of Islam in the 2019 election will be about the politics of pluralism, not the politics of theology and ritual. In the long run this is a positive development and a sign of a maturing democracy. An alliance based on the politics of pluralism can extend across sectarian lines and also appeal to non-Muslims.
Singapore’s insatiable hunger for sand
Clay Fuller article “The international sand market, dictators, and criminals”..
“From 2012 to 2016, Cambodia reported exports of only $275,606 worth of all types of sand to Taiwan. Taiwan meanwhile, reported imports of $32 million worth of silica sand from Cambodia during that same period. The same pattern appeared with other countries. Singapore reportedly imported $752 million in Cambodian sand during that time, but Cambodia claims it only exported $5 million to Singapore.
The descrepancies above are a gugantic amount of corruption….
http://www.aei.org/publication/the-international-sand-market-dictators-and-criminals/
Election impressions from Timor-Leste
[…] Timor-Leste is a good example of how a closed-list system discourages politicians from adopting vote-buying strategies. Although East Timorese voters’ willingness to engage in vote buying was high during the 2017 election, little evidence of vote buying has been found. Only 4 per cent of East Timorese report having individually been the target of such handouts. […]
The Lao dam collapse: a tragedy long in the making
Thank you for this report. Readers might find this paper of some interest: David J.H. Blake & Keith Barney, “Structural Injustice, Slow Violence? The Political Ecology of a ‘Best Practice’ Hydropower Dam in Lao PDR,” Journal of Contemporary Asia. This article is currently available for free download: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00472336.2018.1482560
Wielding the purse strings of Southeast Asian civil society
Thank you for this illuminating article. I’ve worked in a CSO in Laos for several years, and while reading this, one of my main thoughts was “ah, so it’s not just us”. We are really feeling the crush of the forces you describe: international donors turning away from rights-based advocacy work in favour of politically safe topics, while concurrently there are ever-increasing domestic restrictions and bureaucracy. So it was with sadness and frustration that I read that others across the region are facing the same thing. I’m also seeing that the new priority of donors / IFIs is to create an “enabling environment” for the private sector – which often comes with huge funding attached. But none are so interested in creating an enabling and safe environment for civil society. As a consequence (as mentioned in the comment above) many CSOs are indeed ‘rushing’ to maintain funding by following a market-oriented approach, and engaging more with the private sector. But instead of a ‘rush’ I would say many organisations are reluctant – or even forced – to take this path, because the reality is that securing funding is the difference between whether a CSO can continue to exist or has to shut its doors. @DrRosalia I would be happy to discuss further about NGO practices if you’re writing about this topic in a future article.
Going forward, looking back: observations on the 2018 Cambodian election
This is an incisive examination of Cambodia’s election scene harking back to 1993, as indeed I do with 1998 the first election I observed and worked on. There is one big difference this year from all of those previous election years. There is no hope or optimism, no vision of a better future. Instead the electorate is entreated to “stick to what we have” as to flirt with any other will bring untold disaster. Sadly the CNRP leadership has not risen to the occasion again. The “boycott” tactic is not thought through – again – as anyone with rudimentary knowledge of how Cambodia’s election machinery operates will tell you. All that does is to leave even more unused blank ballot-papers (beside the usual surplus printed ones) available to be marked and counted for the expected results to emerge.
Such rigging as been observed in previous elections. This year there are no independent trained observers to detect such discrepancies.
CNRP is of course not the only one to be guilty of the childish “boycott” mentality of a bad loser, even if there is some justification because of being cheated. As this article describes CPP in 1993 adopted the same tactic, as did FUNCINPEC (and Sam Rainsy) in later polls. At least this year there is no cheated losing party to mount demonstrations to be suppressed violently.
CNRP though does need to recognize that it has a serial boycotting problem. It kept doing the same at the National Assembly. Instead of attending, debating, putting forward amendments, then voting for them – being active before national televised audiences, what did they do? Boycott! In one case they all took off down to the sea-side in Sihanoukville instead of doing the job they were elected for and paid for. That is not leadership. It is not democracy. They should have tried their best to engage, even if bound to lose the vote. That’s how Parliaments work. Then they should return to their constituencies – few Cambodian Parliamentarians do much of this – to explain why they took the line they did; why it matters to constituents, and why the only way to put it right, is to make sure fewer people vote for the ruling party next time round.
That is grass-roots mobiliisation of democracy. Mu Sochua recently accepted that CNRP ought to have done more of that. In fact that is exactly the advice US advisers gave to Kem Sokha as to how to gain power. He is held in prison on charges of fomenting a revolution on the basis of an audio-tape that doesn’t tell the full story. The only witnesses – the US Advisers – have still not been called as witnesses nor have they spoken up. They should.
As I said CNRP should try to stay engaged. It is wrong that their party was banned, the same fate of Thaksin Shinatwatra’s successive parties in Thailand, from which CPP got the idea. But there the party re-emerged and will do so again. CNRP could have thrown its lot behind the Grassroots Democracy Party but instead it chose to refuse to come out to play.
PM Hun Sen will be returned to power. That will be enough for some easing-up of restrictions. More relaxations will surely follow due to pressure from the US and Europe that will have some effect. The question is “Do CNRP leaders have the wherewithal to re-group and to adapt to the new realities?” Or will they stay disengaged and sulk?
Workers say no to Vietnam’s ‘Special Exploitation Zones’
Brilliant article, thank you so much.
I think there are parallels in Cambodia, with Chinese investment raising costs, creating a form of gentrification, and generating resistance.
https://www.ft.com/content/79faf14a-15f5-11e8-9376-4a6390addb44
https://www.phnompenhpost.com/national/analysis-cambodia-signing-chinese-billions-price
https://www.phnompenhpost.com/post-depth-business/big-trouble-little-china-0
Workers say no to Vietnam’s ‘Special Exploitation Zones’
This is entirely consistent with what I observed in Cambodia (especially Sihanoukville, which the Chinese all but own outright, and with what I am told is occurring (with Duterte’s blessing) in The Philippines (where the Chinese have a military base — and therefore their Navy and Air Force — on Philippine soil). It takes local, grass-roots outrage to counter Chinese encroachment, as the cancellation of the dam projects in Myanmar demonstrates.
Wielding the purse strings of Southeast Asian civil society
Thank you for your comment and indeed I was trying to show how the two are interlinked. In a next article, I hope to pay attention to NGOs practices. On philanthropy (and development aid) in SEA you may want to see this special issue of the Austrian Journal of SEA studies I curated https://aseas.univie.ac.at/index.php/aseas/issue/view/186
Malaysia’s political transformation(s): preliminary reflections
Currently only Perlis and Pahang remain under “BN”. Sarawak is under the newly formed GPS.