1982 Citizenship Law of Myanmar and Myanmar’s Popular Racism

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by Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service

Burma’s military-controlled State rests on the country’s official racism towards Burmese
of ‘impure blood’.

Scholars and policy analysts of Myanmar need to stop characterizing violence and racism
against Muslims, ‘Kalars’ and Tayoke (Chinese) as simply ‘sectarian’ or placing undue
emphasis on the society’s role in the unfolding racist mass violence against the Rohingya and
all Myanmar Muslims.

Yes, there have been prejudices among different communities.  But it is the State that
modulates, mobilizes and facilitates these prejudices as some prejudices, for instance,
anti-Muslim sentiments, are mobilized through state Ministries of Information and Home and
Religious Affairs, as well as private media outlets such as the Voice and Eleven, two
crony-owned ‘news’ groups, into proactively violent, neo-Nazi racism under the disguise of
Buddhism.

As clearly spelled out in this official English translation of Ne Win’s speech to his top deputies at
his Presidential Residence in Rangoon in 1982, racism against Burmese citizens and residents
of mixed or all Chinese and Indian sub-continent ancestries, was  pursued as a matter of
national policy.  This speech further sheds light on the deeply racist nature of 1988 Citizenship
Act.  For no fault or deeds of their own, Myanmar residents and citizens who have been in the
country for generations, and for many, for centuries, as settlers, migrants, courtly advisers,
king’s men, queen’s women, have been made to suffer officially by racist rulers the likes of
generals Ne Win, Than Shwe, Maung Aye, and presently Thein Sein.  As Ne Win made it very
clearly in 1982 that these ‘tayoke’ and ‘kalars’ cannot be entrusted with any important positions
in Myanmar’s officialdom – that is, the bureaucracy and the Armed Forces.  Today,  successive
military leaders have succeeded in cleansing their power base – the Armed Forces – of officers
of Chinese and Indian ancestry, notwithstanding a few exceptions out of an estimated
400,000-strong military.

In addition to this nonsense of ‘pure bloodedness’, religion other than Buddhism has been made
an issue on which strategic and political exclusion is anchored.

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The running joke among the official corps in the military is there are two viruses on grounds of
which the rank and file members of the Armed Forces will be – and have been discharged:  B
virus and C virus.  An officer tested ‘Hepatitis B positive’ will be discharged, just as officers of
Christian faith, that is, Christian or C virus will be forced to retired or be placed on the margins,
with no prospects for career advancement.  The joke does not include the Muslim officers
because Ne Win and his ideological heirs in the military leadership made Burmese officers with
Islamic background extinct.  Out of 10,000 army cadets in various military academies there will
be found none or few Muslim cadets or any cadets with ‘impure bloodedness’.

Reflecting the army-controlled state’s official racism on which 1982 Citizenship Act rests, as
recent as July 2013, at the Chatham House in London, UK, the current President and nominal
state power holder ex-general Thein Sein, a handpicked lackey of the now officially retired
Senior General Than Shwe, simply reiterated Myanmar’s official racist stance on ethnic groups
considered ‘aliens’ and ‘impure bloods’ and committed yet another official act of Rohingya
ethnocide, that is, Myanmar President blatantly denied the official and historical presence of the
Muslim Rohingya in the country, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.

In the current system of governance in Burma only racists are rewarded, promoted and
anointed to top most positions – from President to Commander in Chief to Ministers.

The only problem is Ne Win, the initiator and institutionalizer of official racisms in Myanmar was
a ‘non-pure’ Bama or any other ‘son’ of the land, or Tai-yin-tha. As a matter of fact, General Ne
Win and many of his racist deputies himself were ‘tayoke’ or Chinese or Chinese origin.

This whole ‘blood’ and ‘purity’ is common among monster racists in history: Stalin was no
‘pure-blooded’ Russian, but a Georgian. Hitler was known to be part Jewish, and so was the
head of SS, Himmler.   In fact, Professor Greg Stanton at George Mason University has
correctly observed that potentially genocidal societies and political systems do not have, respect
or appreciate mixed ethnic categories.   Myanmar’s nightmarish backsliding into this ‘ethnic and
religious purity’ stands in sharp contrast with the multiculturalist, post-blood and Big Tent
national vision and the idea of a post-colonial country widely shared by the martyred Aung San,
Aung San Suu Kyi’s father, and his multiethnic and inter-faith comrades.

In spite of their advanced liberal and/or technical training in some of the world’s finest

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universities abroad, Burma’s western-educated intellectuals and professionals who should know
better have succumb to their petty interests as they have as a class lent credence and
legitimacy to the militarists’  personal racism and bigotry.   Among the drafters of the 1982
Citizenship Act were British, Dutch Australian and American trained legal scholars, historians
and other experts such as the late Dr Maung Maung, Dr Aye Kyaw, etc.  Likewise, Thein Sein’s
Presidential Inquiry Commission the Violence in Rakhine State which in effect whitewashed the
organized and state-backed mass violence against the Rohingya in 2012 were stacked with Ivy
League and Oxbridge-trained Burmese scholars and professionals.
Dr Nyi Nyi, a tayoke or Chinese himself who rapidly climbed Ne Win’s socialist ladder by
offering advise on how to effectively combat anti-military student activism, from being a geology
professor at the time of the coup in 1962 to #2 in the Education Department/Ministry by 1968 to
the minister of mine in the early 1970′s before being sacked for being ‘too ambitious’, told me
during a taped interview in New York in the fall of 1994, “I had seen him Ne Win in shorts at
home. His (yellow) complexion was a full proof of his Tayoke-ness (or Chinese in Burmese
language).”   In order to compensate for his Chinese ancestry, it was Dr Nyi Nyi himself who
proposed ultra-nationalist racist educational policies barring any academically qualified
Myanmar students with one ‘alien, tayoke or kalar, parental background’ from the studies of 
professional subjects medicine, engineering, vet science, etc, then lucrative and highly sought
after in the Burmese context.

Earlier this spring, his former geology student at Rangoon University – Dr Yin Yin Nwe, PhD in
geology Cambridge and Ne Win’s ex-daughter in law, was simply upholding her old teacher’s
ugly racist legacies, as well as her family’s racist and classist outlooks.   In her VOA Burmese
TV interview widely popular with the country’s neo-Nazi racists, the geologist came out with all
kinds of racist observations serving on President Thein Sein’s Inquiry Commission, including
her resounding endorsement of the 2-child policy for the Rohingya woman, saying how
expensive it was for her to raise her only child, one of the late despot Ne Win’s grand children.

As recent as 19 August this year, on Britain’s flagship BBC Radio 4, one of the London-based
senior most staff at BBC Burmese, Mr Soe Win Than, a 3-times Buddhist monk, former
Myanmar Ministry of Information bureaucrat and UC-Berkeley-trained Burmese journalist, had
irresponsibly and unprofessionally weighed in on the side of the neo-Nazi racists in the country,
denying the official and verifiable existence of the Rohingya as ‘an ethnic group and citizens’
while refuting the State’s well-documented direct and indirect involvement in the mass violence
against the Muslims and the Rohingya ethnic cleansing.

In contrast to this racism in the BBC Burmese Service in London, Britain’s Speaker of the
House the Rt Honorable John Bercow publicly slammed emphatically as ‘racist’ the Burmese
who deny the ethnic background of the Rohingya and who refer to the latter as ‘Bengali’, a
derogatory word in the local Burmese context.  How such anti-Rohingya racist and ethnocidal

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views are tolerated, if not actively encouraged, in the world’s most prestigious and influential
BBC is a matter that the British citizens and license fees payers ought to take up with the BBC
Trust that set the editorial guidelines (against racism, among other things).

All these institutionalized and personal racisms in Myanmar, have now spread like a wild fire,
thanks to the official patronage at the highest level of government and to the traditionally illiberal
and racist Buddhist Order, most specifically the neo-Nazi 969 campaign.  The country’s leading
democrats – including Aung San Suu Kyi and former student leaders – have proven to be
infested with racism, especially towards the Muslims.  While the population remains soaked in
anti-Chinese racism, given China’s international protection and the economic dominance in the
country’s economy of Chinese commercial interests the racist militarized State in Myanmar is
too clever to let the popular anti-Chinese racism turn violent.  While Ne Win’s military state felt
comfortable enough to let the economically frustrated Burmese – ‘pure blooded’ and Buddhist?
– in 1967 take their pent-up frustrations out on the entrepreneurial class of Chinese residents
and citizens in places like Rangoon when Maoist China was weak and on the verge of
starvation.

Now times have changed.

Since the 8888 Nationwide Uprising in 1988, the fall of Berlin Wall and the West’s shift in
policies towards its dodgy allies such as Ne Win’s ‘socialist Burma’, the military leadership had
heavily relied on the international protection of the (Big) Brother – Pauk Hpaw – next door in
Beijing, until Washington’s Asian Pivot a few years ago.   And China is the country’s largest
foreign investor with its hand in too many major economic projects.  The popular fear is that the
country is being swallowed by the Chinese and China.

Here the racially and religiously manipulative military leadership in Myanmar has found a
convenient diversion from its key strategic pursuits including the regime survival, the political
and economic primacy in and control over society and economy, the continued refusal to
address legitimate ethnic grievances, the issues of leadership and policy accountability, fear of
popular reprisal under a genuinely representative government, and so on: the Muslims of
Myanmar and the Rohingya of Western Myanmar are sitting ducks, most vulnerable, with no
international protectors, near or far.

The Organization of the Islamic Cooperation/Conference or OIC is no China.  That is, it has very
little leverage with Myanmar’s racist ruling generals and ex-generals, unlike Beijing. And

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ASEAN has no Muslim Brotherhood that inspires the Muslim wretched of Myanmar. On its part,
Iran is too preoccupied with its own problems at home, and in the region.  India that intervened
in and effectively ended  the genocide of the Bangladeshi Hindu in the civil war of 1971 by West
Pakistani military and militants, has a radically different policy priority in the presently genocidal
Myanmar: resource grab for Indian interests and curbing the Chinese influence.

The ethno-mobilization by the State has also been found in other transitional societies, for
instance, post-Yugoslavian states or Indonesia and Malaysia in Myanmar’s Southeast Asian
neighborhood.  As an extreme example, Milosevic and his genocidal Serbian ultra-nationalist
mobilization springs to mind.  But democratic openings do not automatically and inevitably
trigger this kind of genocidal racism and racist violence against Cultural and Religious Other.

It is only the combination of popular and institutionalized racisms and the mobilization and
manipulation of those racisms for strategic purposes designed to advance the goals of the ruling
power holders.

In the final instance, it is not the down-trodden society which has long been accustomed to
economic and political  uncertainties which is the primary culprit behind the rise of neo-Nazi
“Buddhism” and “Buddhist” mass violence.  Rather it is Naypyidaw’s widespread sense of
uncertainties and insecurities that best explains the regime’s documented involvement in
whipping up ultra-nationalism among the country’s “Buddhist” masses.

For a regime that has, out of its strategic calculations and for its survival needs, opted to play
the politics of free-marketizing the economy while attempting to keep the political and
institutional lid on the long-oppressed society of Myanmar, scapegoating Muslims and the
Rohingya for the country’s ills and the popular frustrations – is far more strategically appealing –
and convenient – than focusing on the genuine democratization and ethnic reconciliation.  No
regime with mountains of skeletons in its closet and scattered on the streets will embrace
genuine democratic transition.

Romanticization of Buddhists as naturally and philosophically peace-loving people has not also
advanced the international understanding of neo-Nazi “Buddhist” violence and Rohingya
genocide either.

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Myanmar’s 969 monks, Rakhine ultranationalists and Bama racists have proven beyond the
shadow of the doubts.  Historically and empirically speaking, Buddhists all over the world are as
capable of both entertaining and pursuing home-grown ‘Final Solutions’ to annihilate human
communities that they have demonized and de-humanized as ‘viruses’ ‘animals’ ‘sub-humans’
and so on as any Western and Eastern Europeans.

No amount of debates and discussions about the canonical Buddhism, or historical examination
of ‘Buddhist’ violence or warfare will really shed light on the dangerous mass violence and the
Rohingya genocide.  Whatever the texts or claims of what the Buddha taught or not taught,
Buddhists whatever their nationalities – Thai/Siamese, Buddhist or Sinhalese are of secondary
importance.  It’s in the political economy and historical and social foundations of these violent
racist societies with outwardly Buddhist manifestations  such as temples, pagodas,
monasteries, monks and rituals.

Likewise, no Burma or Myanmar analysis can be treated as credible or accurate unless it is

examined through the prism of this dialectical interface between the popularly racist society and
the officially bigoted State that has mid-wived the birth of Burma’s homegrown neo-Nazism with
the “Buddhist” face.

Any peaceful attempts to effectively address this two-fold neo-Nazi problem in Myanmar must
factor in both the military leadership that is officially and unashamedly racist and the
un-conscious civilization that talks the talk of Buddhism, but doesn’t walk the Buddhist walk.

Ne Win’s Speech – 1982 Citizenship Law

____________________

Dr. Maung Zarni is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and
Environment, founder and director of the Free Burma Coalition (1995-2004), and a
visiting fellow (2011-13) at the Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit,
Department of International Development, London School of Economics. His
forthcoming book on Burma will be published by Yale University Press. He was educated
in the US where he lived and worked for 17 years. Visit his website
www.maungzarni.com.

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