Reviving spirit of Panglong from the heart of Bangkok
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Rohingya leader Maung Kyaw Nu sees hope for a more perfect union of Myanmar
Down a dimly lit corridor in a hardscrabble neighbourhood, the noble spirit of revolutionary leader Aung San still stirs in the Thai capital.
Seventy years ago Burma’s independence hero met with Rohingya leaders ahead of a conference designed to weave the country’s many ethnic threads into a patchwork Union of Burma.
“He told the Rohingya he was giving them a blank cheque and pledged his support, says Maung Kyaw Nu, who for the last few years in Bangkok has dedicated his life to kindling greater international awareness of the calamity affecting his people.
“This was just before the Panglong Conference,” adds the president of the Burmese Rohingya Association in Thailand, a former prisoner of conscience.
Never implemented but still cherished and championed by minority groups in the country now known as Myanmar, the landmark 1947 agreement pledged a large degree of autonomy to ethnic states. Instead, the country’s unity is still being consolidated by military campaigns notorious for human-rights abuses, despite the recent shift onto a democratic path.
“The Rohingya are forgotten by the world,” says Maung Kyaw Nu, during an interview in his bare flat, where the door is left wide open to visitors.
Up on the roof, he points to a sacred bo tree lending green tranquillity to the urban jungle, while talking of how Buddhists and Muslims can live more peaceably in both Myanmar and Thailand. “Our former centre in Bang Kapi was much nicer, with a beautiful garden full of trees.”
In words chosen carefully but delivered at a clip, he details a past spent in and out of jail for his part in a decades-long armed struggle waged by the Rohingya, who have lived in Myanmar for centuries but are euphemistically called “ethnic Rakine” by the government and systematically denied many legal rights.
“The Rohingya need a leader that can handle a storm like we face today, a person like Nelson Mandela or Yasser Arafat who can offer resistance but is not afraid to make peace in difficult times,” says Nu.
When ethnic cleansing flared up in Rakhine state four years ago, the long-time activist lead a protest outside the United Nations ESCAP in Bangkok.
“Delay is unacceptable. We need urgent action,” he tersely told a UN official, having realised how rapidly the situation was deteriorating.
After a week on the pavement demanding a peacekeeping force be sent to the affected region, the demonstrators agreed to disperse when ESCAP submitted a letter to Ban Ki-moon, which Nu says helped convince the Secretary-General to send a high-ranking representative to Rakine.
Seven decades earlier the crucial role of the UN had also been invoked by Aung San, as he helmed a newly independent post-war Burma.
“In the last decades there have been violent upheavals. We all hope now that the peace that the United Nations will safeguard may be positive and creative, a living, prosperous peace, and not the peace of the dead graveyard,” the leader said.
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, famous for its policy of non-interference, has so far skirted the Rohingya issue.
Nu shares his concern over what then-Asean secretary-general Surin Pitsuwan said at a meeting of the grouping in Phnom Penh a few years ago.
“Surin expressed his concern that the Rohingya issue would be radicalised in the near future. The Rohingya issue is one that Asean delegates don’t discuss in the open.”
Nu says that following set procedures of international organisations and countries such as Malaysia is crucial. Visiting a camp for Rohingya in the southern Thai province of Satun a few years ago, he became concerned at evidence of “brainwashing”.
“The youth there were scared. Some of the children were too scared to tell me what they were being taught there.”
He says local Muslim groups had strong day-to-day influence in the operation of the camps, in contrast to the more direct role taken by the government and UN in camps for the Rohingya in Malaysia.
“I asked a UNHCR official once why the Rohingya didn’t have proper ID, and he said just said it was difficult to get them and that they could live here without the cards. But the UNHCR isn’t supposed to work under any government. They need to operate more freely. There should be clearer implementation of the law.”
Attired in the formal collarless Burmese men’s shirt and longyi, Nu gestures towards his untidy flat.
“U Gambira stayed with me here for a short while,” he says, referring to the leader of Myanmar’s 2007 Saffron Revolution .
Aung San’s dwellings were often similarly dishevelled, according to historical records.
“He said he felt like I was his guardian,” Nu says of U Gambira, who, released from another stint in jail last month, helped inspire Myanmar to live up to the ideals of Aung San, which led in turn to the formation of the current government under his daughter. Though far from perfect, Suu Kyi’s administration is a leap forward after decades of junta rule.
While he notes that leaders of the pro-democracy 8888 uprising “remain on a blacklist”, Nu retains hope for better relations among the peoples of the Union of Myanmar.
“U Gambira’s mother called the other day to say he’d just got his passport. He has a noble character.”
Carleton Cole teaches Asian studies and journalism at Mahidol University International Demonstration School.
