WhirledView

The Rohingya Tragedy: Why and Why Now?

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Most Western observers have attributed the ongoing tragedy in Myanmar’s Rakhine province to ethnic and religious intolerance: a Buddhist majority zealously reclaiming its land from Muslim interlopers. Is this the whole story? I don’t think so. For reasons that have received more attention in non-Western media, it makes more sense, I believe, to consider economic motives.

First, let’s agree that Myanmar’s military and civilian leaders are guilty of a thoroughgoing ethnic cleansing of the coastal province of Rakhine. Slaughter. Rape. Village burning. The terrified, desperate flight of those left alive to Bangladesh. There’s plenty of evidence for charging Burmese leaders with crimes against humanity, but the applicability of the term genocide is still being debated. Why might it not apply? Because the goal of this horrendous policy is not to wipe out an entire culture, but “only” to clear the land of its long-despised Muslim inhabitants so that big money can be made by the right people, meaning those already running the country: the military brass, drawn largely from the Bamar Buddhist majority. Think of graft and real estate deals on a scale to make even a Donald E.Trump blush.

Anyone accustomed to thinking a nation’s army should exist only for defense against foreign threats needs to understand that the army in Myanmar is very much a business enterprise with a good grip on the national wealth. Lumber, for instance. And the jade trade across the border with China. So far as I know, Rakhine, until recently, offered little of interest to anyone who didn’t live there.

That wasn’t always the case. Historically, this stretch of coastal land with trade-attracting, wealth-creating deep water ports has known Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist rulers, but the openness to the world that commerce requires ended shortly after Myanmar (then Burma) achieved independence from the British. A grim period of military dictatorship ensued. So thoroughly was an increasingly impoverished population sealed away from the world that foreign aid was largely refused even after a high casualty typhoon swept through. Only in recent years has the Army been constrained to allow a carefully limited civilian role in governance and to invite foreign investment.

At that point, Rakhine was back on the map, and soon it was attracting the attention of a rapacious military.

But first, it seems to have attracted the attention of China.

China, as I have noted elsewhere, has been developing a “string of pearls,” investing in harbor-building and port-leasing ventures creeping along the Southern perimeter of Asia and coming mighty close to connecting with—you guessed it!—the South China Sea, to which China strenuously lays claim these days. This has not filled Indian maritime strategists with glee. Rakhine, therefore, has also attracted the attention of India.

Voila! A real estate boom in the making!

So here’s what India has been up to: (1) Having already built and turned over to Myanmar a deep water port at historic Sittwe at the mouth of the Kaladan river, India now plans a Special Economic Zone 60 kilometers upstream. (2) A highway of economic and strategic importance will connect the port to the interior of Myanmar as well as to India’s landlocked, hard-to-reach Northeastern states. ( 3) Finally, there is a proposal to build a 1575 km long pipeline from the Sittwe gas field to Gaya in the North Indian state of Bihar via Mizoram and Assam. Before this vision is wholly realized, there’s much work to do, but if I were a general I’d be grabbing up that increasingly vacant Rakhine land.

As India’s Commerce and Industry Minister Nirmala Sitharaman noted this past February, “If Sittwe is connected with our Bay of Bengal ports [like Kolkata], a lot of trade from India can... land in Sittwe and from there go to Myanmar or CLMV.” That’s Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam. Road building and trade. Oh, the money to be siphoned off from big bucks contracts! Oh, the traffic to be milked for safe, rapid passage!

Meanwhile, here’s what China has been doing just 80 kilometers south of the Indian SEZ: establishing a port and setting up a Chinese Special Economic Zone at Kyaukphyu.  For what purpose? “To provide China with a direct overview of busy shipping lanes of the Indian ocean,” according to the Economic Times. Plus, equally at Kyaukphyu, “an oil and gas pipeline that connects to China’s Yunnan province.”

Thai and Japanese investors are also developing port facilities in Rakhine. And so, as the Economic Times further observes, “A great game is unfolding in the region.”

Noting all these ambitious plans and projects, Atsuko Mizuno, a Japanese scholar from Kyushu University, warned this past spring of inevitable slips between cup and lip as well as another little  obstacle. “Beyond taking a long time, there are other problems lurking for India’s planned SEZ, similar to that of the Chinese," he writes,"such as issues with relocating residents [my emphasis].”

Indeed!

Which is why I’m smelling a rat. The scorched earth retribution for two police station raids by alleged Rohingya terrorists has gone beyond any normal, rational response to such incidents. It’s been collective punishment on an indiscriminate, horrendous scale. SO: What if the “insurgents” weren’t Rohingya? What if the attacks were schemes devised to provide a pretext for seizing valuable lands occupied by politically marginal people? It’s worth considering.

Hillary Rodham Clinton RIP (Politically)

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Dear Hillary: 

You made two earnest runs for president.  You've been Secretary of State.  You represented New York in the Senate.  You spent two terms in the White House as a very active presidential spouse.  That’s quite a life.  Now it’s time to retire. Gracefully—and quietly.

I voted for you twice. In 2008, it was a really hard choice. You and Barack. Both promising. But I wanted desperately to put a woman in the White House.  As President.

By 2016 my motivation had changed. I desperately wanted to prevent Donald Trump from dishonoring the presidency.

We lost both elections.

Good Try, but No Banana

You didn’t disgrace yourself last year, Hillary. You won the popular vote. Russian interference and the fumblings of James Comey clearly made inroads on your lead.  To say nothing of Julian Asange and Wikileaks.  But those chunks of bad luck don’t wholly explain your loss of key states. Your tactics, in short, were ill-conceived, as Donna Brazile clearly explains in her recent exposé with the superb title Hack. Yes, she was out to rescue her own reputation, but what she writes about your campaign tactics explains a lot. For instance, she noticed, again and again, the lack of wild enthusiasm in the boonies despite the wildly favorable polling data. Tsk! Tsk!  Your quants should have listened to Donna. Others also sensed the lack of passion. The Electoral College system is a disgrace. Like many others I want it nullified or reformed. But to ignore its political implications is truly stupid.

Yes, I read your book. Or rather, I read 2/3 of your book. The problem: it sounded just like you. Remote. Consider the title: What Happened. Totally impersonal, as if you had nothing to do with the whole long electoral process. I believe you would have put together the left-of-center administration I was hoping for, and I've never seen you as a reckless hawk, Bengazi notwithstanding. To me your program sufficed.  Others weren't turned on.  The spark that sets things alight was lacking, a fatal flaw, since you were up against two men who elicited passionate support, Bernie Sanders on the Left and Donald Trump on the Right. Yet the disappointing election taught you nothing. Your book is a reincarnation (!) of that lifeless campaign. I have a friend who wants news presentations to be exciting. All I want is comprehensiveness and accuracy. But campaigns and campaign biographies cry out for fervor, which isn't your thing.   So you lost.

Another Post Mortem

Admittedly there was this albatross called Bill Clinton hanging around your neck. When Bill was facing impeachment, you faced a “can’t win” situation. If you hadn’t stood up for your man, half the female population would have criticized you for lack of loyalty. The other half, meanwhile, felt pretty queasy about that loyalty. This is one reason why so many left-leaning women found it hard to back you enthusiastically in 2016, even against a pussy-grabbing womanizer.

The Clinton Foundation didn’t help either, although stubborn efforts to find something nefarious keep coming.  And keep coming up with nothing  close to criminal.   But you weren't ready with straight-shooting answers, just as you failed quickly and candidly to quench the over-hyped email story. Whatever its financial and political nuances, one thing is clear: the Clinton Foundation has done some good in the world, while the Trump Foundation, now defunct, served only its namesake. There was a positive story there. But you never told it. Why? More wifely loyalty?

So it wasn’t just the Russians (or James Comey) who cost you the election.

The Paradox

Yes, I’ve also read Joe Biden’s Promise Me, Dad. His ideas aren’t so different from yours, but he has the passion and warmth that inspire trust.  Some say the book is too much of a tear-jerker.  Maybe so, but the sentiment never seems put on.  That's what counts.  This very personal narrative also suggests that his competence in handling world affairs would have made him strongly competitive with an ex-Secretary of State during the Democratic primaries in 2016.  Unfortunately Joe, too, is forever scarred by the dying gasps of patriarchy: the Anita Hill hearings, which demeaned a woman to put a man on the Supreme Court.

Paradoxically, with you still licking wounds from mortal combat with a sexist bigot (to put it mildly), the zeitgeist seems ready to change. Shaming, the not-so-benign American version of honor killing, is losing its silencing power. Women are speaking publicly of the abuse and humiliation they had to endure to get or keep jobs.  Big name molesters are losing their jobs.  We’ll see if the momentum holds and the scope of remediation  embraces the harassment of ill paid women as well as professionals.  

The Absolutely Essential Task

Meanwhile, like Lady Macbeth scrubbing and rescrubbing her bloody hands, Donald Trump finds it hard to leave the election behind. It’s pathetic. And maybe a little sick. As for you, Hillary, you were true to yourself.  But you couldn't energize enough Obama enthusiasts, so it’s time to move on. Except for one thing. All of us must demand that our representatives and the Mueller inquiry to get to the bottom of Russian interference, allowing political chips to fall where they may.  (1) If there are Americans who have invited or colluded in that interference, they must be prosecuted.  (2) Election officials must make it technically impossible for foreigners to meddle massively and clandestinely in future elections at any level.

Weighing the harm of stealthy Russian electronic border-crossing and that of border-crossing undocumented Mexican workers, I think I’d put a lot more zeal into preventing the former than the latter, contrary to the Trump administration.

Thank You and Farewell

Dear Hillary, thank you for all your good works: working for children early on, standing up for women internationally, getting the universal health care ball rolling.  And more.  But do cancel your speaking tours and your interviews.  I know.  It’s hard to step down. Everyone who has occupied a position of some influence knows the agony of handing the reins over to a new generation. But it has to be done. Your books claim that you delight in the presence of your grandchildren. Did you mean it? Or were those merely words thrown in to showcase your humanity?