Burma Washes Its Hands of the Rohingyas

The piece reproduced below originally appeared at Asia Times Online on November 12, 2012 under the title Myanmar Fixates on Rohingya Calculation. Its thesis is perhaps better represented by the title of this blog post, Burma Washes Its Hands of the Rohingyas.  It can be re-posted if ATOl is credited and a link provided.  
 

ATOl has run some excellent stories on the Rohingya situation, including but not limited to Rohingya miss boat on development  by Syed Tashfin Chowdhury and Chris Stewart, and Nowhere to go for the Rohingya  by Phil Radford.

My ATOl piece tiptoes close to the TL:DR (too long didn’t read) danger zone since I wanted to go to considerable lengths to document the organized character of the anti-Rohingya pogrom and rebut the “ethnic strife” and “plague on both their houses” narrative that is being put out to Western audiences by almost every political and religious actor in Burma/Myanmar, up to and including Aung San Suu Kyi.

Anti-Rohingya racism has, to a certain extent, been ginned up by the military government; however, the government is building on a long-standing tradition of Buddhist/Burmese chauvinism—fueled in part by Burmese resentment at the Rohingyan role as an instrument of British political and economic penetration during the Raj times-- with communal violence between Rohingya and their local Rakhine/Arakan antagonists dating back to at least the 1930s.

The key factor in the current pogrom against the Rohingya appears to be the willingness of various key players in Burma, for a variety of sordid political and financial reasons described in the piece—a clutch of important votes in the national parliament and billions of dollars of expected revenue sharing to Rakhine state from its adjacent offshore natural gas fields-- to pander to the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party.

The RNDP controls Rakhine State (the home of the hapless Rohingya).  It has built its political fortune on Arakan chauvinism ( “Arakan” or “Rakhine” being alternative terms for the Buddhist but non-Burmese minority group on the shores of the Bay of Bengal) and its current campaign against the Rohingya may remind one of a ruthless and cynical campaign in the 1930s against a certain minority whose name begins with J by certain political party whose name began with N led by a certain guy whose name began with H in a certain European country whose name begins with G.  There!  Godwin’s Law safely evaded.

Arakans have also had a traditionally prickly relationship with the Burma nationality that dominates the Irrawaddy basin.  Arakan has a good case for calling itself the traditional Buddhist heartland of the region and is a reliable agitator for autonomy if not independence.  The historical Buddha allegedly paid a miraculous visit to  Arakan and personally breathed on a statue of himself cast at the order of the Arakan king, causing it to assume the Buddha’s physical form.  This priceless relic, the Mahamuni Buddha, was spirited away (actually sawn into pieces for convenient transport) by the Burmese to Mandalay in 1784 as war swag, where it was reassembled and resides to this day.  Every morning Buddhist faithful wash the statue’s face and brush its teeth.  The statue has been coated to a depth of 15 cm (6 inches) by donations of gold leaf.

 

Although the Arakans have to make do with a replica at the original temple site of Kyauktaw and probably harbor a grudge over the removal of their statue, it has not become a flashpoint for Arakan/Burmese conflict.  

Instead, the Mahamuni Buddha sparked  anti-Muslim riots in 1997, in an incident that looks like regime incitement to cover up a particularly egregious incident  of greed-driven Burmese junta sacrilege against the Arakanese artwork.  

I will outsource this story to the lengthy Wikipedia entry on Persecution of Muslims in Burma , written by an aggrieved Burmese Muslim.  Note that the ignition spark was provided by the alleged rape of a Buddhist girl by Muslims, just as the current violence in Rakhine State is traced to the alleged rape of a Buddhist girl by three men, two of whom were supposedly Rohingya :

The bronze Buddha statue in the Maha Myatmuni pagoda, originally from the Arakan, brought to Mandalay by King Bodawpaya in 1784 AD was renovated by the authorities. The Mahamyat Muni statue was broken open, leaving a gaping hole in the statue, and it was generally presumed that the regime was searching for the Padamya Myetshin, a legendary ruby that ensures victory in war to those who possess it.^[37]

On 16 March 1997 beginning at about 3:30 p.m., a mob of 1,000-1,500 Buddhist monks and others shouted anti-Muslim slogans.^{[citation needed]} They targeted the mosques first for attack, followed by Muslim shop-houses and transportation vehicles in the vicinity of mosques, damaging, destroying, looting, and trampling, burning religious books, committing acts of sacrilege. The area where the acts of damage, destruction, and lootings were committed was Kaingdan, Mandalay.^[38] The unrest in Mandalay began after reports of an attempted rape of a girl by Muslim men, although this was later disproved and led to speculation that the regime may have orchestrated the incident to deflect anger from the damaged statue. At least three people were killed and around 100 monks arrested.^[39]

In my piece I make a reference to "Burma's Buddhist Taliban" while comparing the remarkably similar trajectory of "fundamentalist" Theravada Buddhism in South Asia and the Taliban in Central Asia as expressions of chauvinist/nationalist/cultural/religious resistance to the challenge of British imperial assimiliation. As another passage from the Wikipedia entry indicates, the Taliban parallel is not just facile phrasemongering.  When challenged by Taliban Islamic extremism—in Afghanistan!—Burmese Buddhists, at least those egged on by the government, were keen to make sure they gave as good as they got in the destruction of heathen monuments department:

 

2001 Anti-Muslim Riots in Taungoo

In 2001,Myo Pyauk Hmar Soe Kyauk Sa Yar (or) The Fear of Losing One's Race and many other anti-Muslim pamphlets were widely distributed by monks. Many Muslims feel that this exacerbated the anti-Muslim feelings that had been provoked by the destruction in Bamiyan, Afghanistan.^[40] On May 15, 2001, anti-Muslim riots broke out in Taungoo, Pegu division, resulting in the deaths of about 200 Muslims, in the destruction of 11 mosques and the setting ablaze of over 400 houses. On May 15, the first day of the anti-Muslim uprisings, about 20 Muslims who were praying in the Han Tha mosque were killed and some were beaten to death by the pro-junta forces. On May 17, Lt. General Win Myint, Secretary No.3 of the SPDC and deputy Home and Religious minister, arrived in Taungoo and curfew was imposed there until July 12, 2001.^[41] Buddhist monks demanded that the ancient Hantha Mosque in Taungoo be destroyed in retaliation for the destruction in Bamiyan.^[42] On May 18, however, Han Tha mosque and Taungoo Railway station mosque were razed to the ground by bulldozers owned by the SPDC junta.^[43] The mosques in Taungoo remained closed as of May 2002. Muslims have been forced to worship in their homes. Local Muslim leaders complain that they are still harassed. After the violence, many local Muslims moved away from Taungoo to nearby towns and to as far away as Yangon. After two days of violence the military stepped in and the violence immediately ended.^[44]

Emphasis added.  To round out this post on outrages against various religious monuments, I hoped to include a picture of the Han Tha Mosque, but was unable to locate one.

A few points of interest. 

First, the two colossal Bamiyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan, one 55 meters tall and the other 38 meters tall, which the Taliban obliterated at great effort and expense amid international execration, were already missing their faces in 2001.  That particular act of vandalism was committed by Abdur Rahman Khan, the “Iron Amir” of Afghanistan during his campaign to subjugate the Hazara minority, whose homeland is around the town of Bamiyan, in the late 19^th century.  Abdur Rahman Khan’s job was to preserve Afghanistan’s role as an independent buffer state against Russia for his own benefit and for the sake of his British backers.  When the Hazara rebelled, he subdued them with supreme violence to prevent Britain from perceiving a dangerous power vacuum and intervening, and used his artillery to deface the statues.

The Hazara could be termed the Rohingya of Afghanistan.  They are Turkic, Persian-speaking Shi’ites whose name apparently derives from the Persian word for a force of 1,000 men, perhaps a reference to a Mongol military unit.  According to the study of the notoriously ubiquitous Central Asian "star cluster" Y chromosome identified with male line descendants of Genghis Khan, the population with the highest percentage of this gene (even higher than Mongolia and Inner Mongolia!) is the Hazara.  

 

The Hazara are treated as outcasts and face disenfranchisement and savage repression  from the Pashtun (both Abdur Rahman Khan in the 19^th century and the Taliban in the 20^th/21^st declared jihad on the Hazara).  It appears that whenever the Pashtun gain the upper hand in Bamiyan they took a knock at the Buddhist statues in order to advertise the subjugation of the Hazara, even though the Hazara are not Buddhists and the statues predate their arrival in central Afghanistan by several centuries.    

There is nothing to take a knock at now.  Only two hollow niches remain (though the destruction serendipitously revealed a treasure trove of Buddhist grottos hidden at the back of the statues) and UNESCO has decided it is impractical to try to rebuild the statues from the remaining rubble.  Ironically, I suppose, the largest statue represented Vairocano, the Buddha of Emptiness (the other was Buddha Sakyamuni).

Second, that hotbed of Theravada Buddhist fundamentalism, Sri Lanka, made considerable efforts to save the Bamiyan statues and subsequently to buy the rubble.  Sri Lanka then declared it would duplicate the destroyed statues in Sri Lanka. (Heroic efforts to preserve Buddhist relics are a hallmark of Theravada kingship and government legitimacy to this day, and Sri Lanka is no exception.  Another notable example is the king of Burma's attempt to rescue Ceylon's precious Buddha’s tooth from destruction by the Portugese Inquisition in Goa in 1561.)

Eventually, a one-third replica of the larger Bamiyan statue was erected in the coastal town of Peraliya in 2006, with Japanese financial support.  Instead of serving as an as a monument to Sri Lanka’s Theravada Buddhist assertiveness, it became a moving commemoration of the thousands of victims of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami who perished in Peraliya and the vicinity.  

Apparently in response to the destruction of the Bamiyan statues, China erected a 128-meter statue of Vairocana, now the largest statue in the world, in Henan Province.  The “pedestal” beneath the colossus in the photograph to the left is a four-story Buddhist monastery.

In China, a replica of the smaller Bamiyan statue of Sakyamuni Buddha is being carved into a mountainside near the monumental Buddha sculpture at Leshan. 

Somewhat unexpectedly, at least to the Western observer, it is possible to push the modern South Asian Buddhist’s hot buttons with invocations of “jihad” and “the Muslim threat to Buddhism” and, in Burma at least, this hot button is pushed with dismaying frequency.

 Unfortunately, recent events have shown that anti-Rohingya bigotry is far from a monopoly of what Westerners would term “anti-progressive and anti-democratic forces” a.k.a. the regime and its goons.  It happens to be part and parcel of deeply-felt Burmese Buddhism chauvinism, chauvinism that was supercharged by the challenge of British imperialism, is now directed against the People’s Republic of China, but may be redirected at a later date against Burma’s would be benefactors/exploiters in the West.

Photo credits:

Photo of devotees applying gold leaf to Mahamuni Buddha by mrolin 

Photo of Bamiyan Vairocano Buddha from phenomenalplace.com

Photo of empty Bamiyan niche from Smithsonian Magazine 

Photo of Peraliya Buddha by “Buddhika De Silva”        

Photo of China Vairocano Buddha from Wikipedia

From Asia Times

Myanmar Fixates on Rohingya Calculation
By Peter Lee

To outside observers, the carnage inflicted on the Rohingya minority - a five-month spasm of violence and de fact ethnic cleansing ostensibly stemming from the rape of a Buddhist woman by three Rohingya men - in Rakhine Province is indefensible and inexplicable.

What is even less understandable to Westerners is the virtually universal closing of ranks among local and national governments, pro and anti-government Buddhist monks, junta apologists and pro-democracy activists, President Thein Sein and Aung San Suu Kyi, all uniting to deny the apparently undeniable fact that an old fashioned pogrom is taking place against Rohingya minority and other Muslims.

Friends of Myanmar are puzzled and dismayed that the progressives they have championed have joined forces with the country's most reactionary forces to deny the overwhelming evidence that Rohingya - a dark-skinned Muslim ethnic minority with cultural and linguistic ties to neighboring Bangladesh - are being driven out of their homes by a campaign of intimidation, arson, and violence in 2012 that builds upon years of marginalization and demonization.

Seventy-five thousand Rohingya IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons) have been herded into camps on the outskirts of the state capital, Sittwe, and other towns.

In a sign of how bad things are, thousands of Rohingya are trying to flee to Bangladesh, even though they are not welcome there and their only possible refuge if they aren't turned back are two squalid UN-run camps surrounded by a ring of miserable unsanctioned huts.

Exasperated by Myanmar denialism, Human Rights Watch published a satellite photo showing most of the Muslim quarter of a sizable town, Kyak Pyu, burned to the ground. [1]

(As is usual in these matters, nomenclature follows political inclination. The official government identifiers are Myanmar and Rakhine State. People disinclined to legitimize the regime's terms use Burma/Arakan).

The local Rakhine government and its dominant political party, the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party, or RNDP, have been at the forefront of the anti-Rohingya campaign, according to Rohingya advocate Nay San Lwin.

Writing in Turkey's Today Zaman, he asserted:

The tragic cruelty and the carnage of Rohingyas that occurred in Sittwe, the capital of Arakan (now known as Rakhine) state, is assumed to have been caused by Dr Aye Maung, member of parliament and chairman of the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party (RNDP) because in his interview with Venus News Journal on June 14, 2012, he said, "The Rakhine state should be established in the way Israel was initially established." That's the dream of the Rakhine people. They want to drive out Rohingya Muslims from the Rakhine (Arakan) state, their current leader Dr Aye Maung asserted in that interview.

In the last week of last month, a RNDP statement indicated, "Bengalis must be segregated and settled in separate, temporary places so that the Rakhines and Bengalis are not able to mix together in villages and towns in Rakhine state." "Repatriating non-citizen Bengalis to a third country in a short period of time must be discussed with the United Nations and the international community," the statement added. The RNDP also issued a statement early this year against a job announcement by CARE International in Myanmar, an NGO working in Arakan state, for using the term "Rohingya." [2]

Local Arakanese monks have been pitching in as well, according to Democratic Voice of Burma:

A group of Arakanese monks have called for Rohingya "sympathizers" to be targeted and exposed as "national traitors" while tensions again flare between Buddhists and Muslims in Burma's westernmost state.

In a document seen by DVB, the All-Arakanese Monks' Solidarity Conference have urged locals to distribute images of anyone alleged to be supporting the stateless minority group to all townships in the region, potentially opening them up to violent attacks by nationalist extremists. …
Many Arakanese monks have repeatedly called on local Buddhists to sever all relations with the Rohingya community, including trade and the provision of humanitarian aid. [3]

Another ugly message was delivered courtesy of some Rakhine Buddhist university students:

Hundreds of Buddhist university students in Sittwe in Rakhine State rallied on Wednesday against Rohingya Muslims as communal tension was at a heightened pitch in western Burma, according to news service reports.

More than 800 students joined a rally to call for an end to "studying with terrorist Bengalis" and for the removal of Muslim villages on the road to the university. [4]

In addition, the RNDP embarked on an active political and public relations campaign to reframe the pogrom as "sectarian clashes" in order to present its supporters - the rioters - as the injured party, especially if foreign diplomats show up to commiserate over the plight of the Rohingya.

In June, the Secretary General of the RNDP complained:

Q : We have knowledge that UN Secretary General's Special Advisor on Myanmar Mr. Vijay Nambiar visited the town of Sittwe through Buthidaung and Maungdaw Townships of Rakhine state and head back straight to Yangon. However, during his trip, he did not meet the representatives of ethnic Rakhine. What's your say on this?

A: I would so much like to talk about this issue. … We feel highly upset about Mr. Nambiar's failure to meet [Rakhine ethnic representatives] despite coming to Rakhine state. That makes us wonder about the stance of UN. There was no press conference either. And that is purely a totally unpleasant situation.

Therefore it makes us wonder the true motives of Mr. Nambia, is he being bias against those of ethnic Rakhine? So, by looking at this event, it's obvious that there are people who are pulling the strings from behind; otherwise, there is no reason for such a high ranking diplomat like him to dare not to call for a press conference. For an organization like UN, which is the de-facto representative of world's democratic societies, such a big failure is a heinous diplomatic mistake. [5]

When the Organization for Islamic Cooperation proposed setting up a humanitarian liaison office in the state capital of Sittwe, local "offended Buddhist" women marched through the streets of the state capital, wearing mass produced T-shirts and brandishing mass-produced banners. [6]

That's bad enough. But there was more. The national government of Thein Sein endorsed the position of the Rakhine State government and declared that the best deal for the Rohingya would be to herd them into UN camps for their own safety and then deport them to whatever third country would take them.

At the national level, the anti-Rohingya wave was not limited to the callous, knuckle-dragging authoritarians associated with the Myanmar military junta (now the pro-Western reformist regime in Nyapyidaw).

Buddhist monks and democracy activists piled on, excoriating the international community for daring to care about the Rohingya.

The leadership of the 8888 student democracy movement, while vigorously and commendably deploring the violence against the Rohingya, adamantly declared its disdain for the persecuted group:

Rohingya is not one of the ethnic groups of Myanmar at all. We see that the riot happening currently in Buthedaung and Maungdaw of Arakan State is because of the illegal immigrants from Bangladesh called "Rohingya" and mischievous provocation of some international communities. Therefore, such interfering efforts by some powerful nations on this issue (Rohingya issue), without fully understanding the ethnic groups and other situations of Burma, will be viewed as offending the sovereignty of our nation. Genetically, culturally and linguistically Rohingya is not absolutely related to any ethnicity in Myanmar … Taking advantage of our kindness and deference, if the powerful countries forced us to take responsibility for this issue, we will never accept it. Concerning with the sovereignty, if we are forced to yield by any country, we, the army and democratic force will deal the issue together as a national issue. [7]

From the Western liberal perspective, the worst was the studied disdain of Aung San Suu Kyi- whose official title in the Western press appears to be "democracy icon and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi- for the plight of the Rohingya.

When pressed on the issue at Harvard University, she went Ice Queen, according to Global Post:

The forum at Harvard's Kennedy School Thursday evening was little shy of a lovefest …Until someone mentioned the "R" word.

Thanking Suu Kyi for "being our inspiration," a student from Thailand said: "You have been quite reluctant to speak up against the human-rights violations in Rakhine State against the Rohingya … Can you explain why you have been so reluctant?"

The mood in the room suddenly shifted. Suu Kyi's tone and expression changed. With an edge in her voice, she answered: "You must not forget that there have been human-rights violations on both sides of the communal divide. It's not a matter of condemning one community or the other. I condemn all human rights violations." [8]

A Game of Inches

Chinese Condom-Maker Sizes Up Obama and Romney

The caption on this post on the China Weibo blog of the Durex condom company reads “The difference between Obama and Romney is…”

Actually, I think the PRC regime-meisters might have a slight preference for President Obama as “the devil you know.”  Mitt Romney, on the other hand, is a protean shape-shifter and it was never clear where he might come down on the reckless-feckless-clueless continuum in China affairs.

I would like to share a few observations.

A common emotion on the Democratic side, other than elation, is amazement at the fact that the Romney team was genuinely surprised and dumbfounded by its defeat, which to them was “a bolt from the blue.”  Mr. Romney had apparently not even considered the contingency of a concession speech, which is perhaps why his remarks were mercifully short and relatively engaging.

I, like most observers, had always seen a Republican campaign with some extremely shaky fundamentals, to whit:

• a weak candidate going up against an incumbent with decent if not outstanding approval ratings;
• 
  a near exclusive reliance on conservative white voters who account for a shrinking percentage of the electorate;
• 
  half-hearted outreach at best to black, Hispanic, and female voters;
• 
  a significant disadvantage in the key state of Ohio because of Mr. Romney’s opposition to the auto industry bailout.

The vast majority of polls indicated a comfortable lead for Mr. Obama in the race that counted—for the electoral college.  

The only Republican-friendly poll results were achieved by “unskewing”—jacking up the assumed percentage of white voters to bring it in line with the white turnout in the congressional election year of 2010.  This was a risky and questionable assumption since a) off year elections traditionally attract a higher turnout of older whites, while young people and minorities show up for the presidential election and b) 2010 was the annus mirabilis for the Tea Party movement, with a white turnout of 78%, and unlikely to be duplicated for a Republican standard bearer as moderate, Mormon, and boring as Mitt Romney.

In the end, only 72% of 2012 voters were white, of whom 59% broke for Romney.  72 x 59 gives you 43%, which was too far away from victory for Mr. Romney.

As I said, the big surprise was that Republicans were surprised.

A couple thoughts I haven’t seen elsewhere.

First, perhaps Mitt Romney was blindsided because he came of age in a place and time when black equality with whites was—for him—inconceivable.

I am not referring to the state of affairs in American society at large; I’m referring to the situation within the Church of Latter Day Saints, whose essential doctrine was, for many years, explicitly racist.  Blacks bore the mark of Cain (“flat nose and dark skin” as Brigham Young helpfully pointed out) and their role in the Mormon heaven was to act as servants.  In the Mormon Church, black men could not enter the LDS priesthood until 1978, when the church leadership decided—after a revelation bestowed on Prophet Spencer Kimble, despite some pretty clear doctrinal precedents established by their founding fathers, and perhaps, just perhaps, because the church had been put on notice that it risked loss of its tax-exempt status if it continued to practice overt discrimination—to discard the policy.

Mitt Romney grew to maturity and received his  endowment (formal reception into the temple and bestowal of “the garments” a.k.a. “garmies”, the ritual underwear that represents the individual’s covenant with the church and must be worn at all times except when bathing and—for more liberal believers—engaging in conjugal relations) under the racist dispensation.  By 1981, at the age of 34 and only three years after the change in policy, Romney was already a bishop overseeing a Mormon ward in Boston.  In 1986, he was summoned by the LDS leadership to serve as “stake president” overseeing 4000 Mormons in a number of Massachusetts wards, a position he held until 1994.

“Stake president” is a relatively exclusive LDS office.  There are 3000 stake presidents worldwide, and the position is often described as analogous to that of bishop in the Catholic church.

Mitt Romney was a loyal member of the church and apparently concerned that the demands of conservative LDS doctrine on issues like gay rights would render him unelectable in liberal Massachusetts.  He frequently consulted with the church leadership concerning the political/moral dilemma presented by his polling

. 

According to Romney biographer R.B. Scott, the church leadership decided to cut him some slack in order to give Romney a shot at the governorship, and maybe more:

“[The church leadership] realized it would serve no purpose to quibble—the greater good was to get him elected and give him a shot at realizing the victory his father booted 40 years earlier,” Scott writes. “Did they see him as a future presidential candidate? Did he? Do the statues of Angel Moroni atop every Mormon temple always face east?”

In other words, Scott is contending that the church in effect licensed Romney’s better-than-Kennedy promises on gay rights…

(Mr. Romney subsequently displayed a hostility to gay equality more in keeping with the teachings of his church, and secreted funneled $10,000 to the California Proposition 8 anti gay marriage initiative through an Alabama PAC.  There is some talk that the LDS conceived its anti gay marriage campaign as a bonding opportunity with the Christian evangelical churches which would be crucial to Mr. Romney’s electoral fortunes, but usually abhorred the Mormon church as a sect.)


Romney’s ability to thread the theological needle in Massachusetts perhaps hooked him on the serial practice of flipflopperai in the service of the greater good i.e. getting Mitt Romney elected, which he has displayed for the balance of his political career.

Romney’s liberal campaign position, electoral success, and generally uncontentious tenure in Massachusetts (in 2004, two years into his term he lame-ducked himself by announcing “his work was done” and he would not run for a second term, and began laying the groundwork for his first run at the presidency) seems to have inoculated him against challenging scrutiny of the role of his religion in his racial attitudes.

One of the few times the subject came up was in 2007, as an article by Edward Wyckoff Williams relates:

Romney has claimed that he was so moved when the church finally allowed blacks into the priesthood that he broke into tears. Yet he was a full grown man in his 30s and there is no evidence whatsoever that he previously objected to or campaigned against the blatantly racist policies.

…
Romney was confronted on this issue in a December 2007 appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press. The late Tim Russert brought up the ban on blacks and the fact that Romney was an adult before the ban was lifted. Russert pointedly asked if Romney had a problem with associating himself with an organization that was seen as racist. Romney answered, “I’m not going to distance myself in any way from my faith.” 

Russert asked if Romney was willing to disavow the Church’s earlier teachings, and Romney refused — choosing instead to cite examples of how his father supported civil rights. Mitt even claimed that his father, George Romney, marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. — a statement that was later proven false and that Romney recanted.

Afterwards, Mr. Romney was presumably considered “vetted” on the Mormon race issue, at least in the mainstream secular quadrant of the media.

Mr. Romney's loyalty to the doctrines of his church as set forth by its current leadership is, I think, unquestioned.  But one wonders to what extent the attitudes of his upbringing, education, and early adulthood during the era when overt racism was embedded in church doctrine were reversed by the largely tactical shift of LDS policy on racial discrimination in 1978.

When it came time for him to run against Barack Obama the question of whether he considered it conceivable that that a black man—bearing the mark of Cain—could cast down a senior member of the Mormon church was not considered a subject for elevated political discourse.

The question of whether Mr. Obama’s race contributed to Mr. Romney’s oblivious overoptimism may never be answered but it is probably a significant one.

The other possible source of Republican delusions of victory was perhaps the unbalanced political and funding mechanism created by the Citizens United case and the headlong development of Super PACs.

Karl Rove’s American Crossroads/Crossroads GPS raised $300 million dollars from billionaires such as casino mogul Sheldon Adelson (last seen despondently motoring out of a Boston banquet hall on a personal mobility scooter) and was legally obligated to dispense this cash hoard without coordination with the Romney campaign.

Perhaps Karl Rove had both accountability and agency problems.  

On the accountability side of the ledger, disposal of the cash mountain was at the discretion of Karl Rove, and he was legally enjoined from engaging in feedback with the Romney campaign as to where the money was going and what it was accomplishing.

On the agency side of the question, Mr. Rove might have had a good idea of where the polling was actually headed, but had little incentive to share this news with his donors.  Perhaps he was happy to keep the money rolling in with “unskewed” poll-stroking that kept the plutocrats—ostensibly a hardheaded, cleareyed bunch, but in this case desperately intoxicated by the secret, billionaires’ reserve happy sauce cannily dispensed by Mr. Rove—deluded with the mirage of a Romney landslide.

Perhaps Rove’s ostentatious hissy fit on Fox News concerning the call of Ohio for Obama—and the subsequent effort to hang the blame for Romney’s failure around the necks of Romney’s campaign team and New Jersey governor Chris Christie--were simple if brazen exercises in misdirection meant to distract attention from Mr. Rove’s own dismal and equivocal role in the proceedings. 

Anyway, Mr. Obama’s electoral achievement was not inconsiderable.

He was an incumbent, yes, but with a lackluster economic record.  And he was black.  That still counts for something in America.  Whites, many of whom consciously or unconsciously regard  the United States project as an exclusive achievement of Christian Caucasians, with minorities filling the role of tolerated but unproductive hangers-on (or, in this year’s argot, “takers” not “makers”) broke for Mr. Romney 59% to 39% for Mr.Obama.

Mr. Obama’s second term was opposed by an intensely motivated core of opponents and a formidable aggregation of billionaires, bigots, and character assassins .  A weary and dubious electorate was willing to give Mr. Romney a long, serious look.

But when it came down to November 6, the Obama campaign poured its money and manhours into the election machinery, turned the crank, and churned out enough votes to carry every swing state.

The Romney machine, with the same resources of cash and conviction, simply ground its gears.

The CCP leadership might look at the US presidential election and decide that it’s crazy to roll the dice 100 million times, at a cost of $2 billion dollars, on the country’s future every four years.

If all this titanic process yields is another four years of gridlock, alienation, and shredding of the US political and social fabric, maybe they’re right.  But if America’s changing demographics results in meaningful political shifts on issues such as immigration reform…well, given the Republican Party’s overpowering, clumsy lust for the Hispanic vote and determination to obstruct on every other issue, maybe immigration reform will be the only significant social advance to come out of this election.

However, the very fact of the immense cost and slow, halting progress of democratic development should be a warning to the CCP that political integration requires decades of effort and contention in order to achieve even incremental progress. 

 

It’s a game of inches.

The longer it’s delayed, the more difficult it becomes.

China better get started down the same road…the sooner the better.

For information on the Durex image, please refer to this article at Huffington Post

China 'pivot' trips over McMahon Line

[This piece originally appeared at Asia Times Online on November 6, 2012.  It can be reposted if ATOl is credited and a link provided.  Rehashing the Sino-Indian War, with India's unwise fetishizing of the McMahon Line and the principle of sovereignty over genuine national interests that are strategically and tactically viable, has interesting implications for the current Senkakus/Diaoyutai confrontation between the PRC and Japan, as reflected in the closing paragraph: India drew the line in the Himalayas - but it turned out to be the wrong line. As for the Senkakus/Diaoyus ...?  PRL 11-8-12]

China is looking for a "Western" pivot to counter the United States' diplomatic and military inroads with its East Asian neighbors such as Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Myanmar.

For China's strategists, as an interesting analysis in the Indian Express tells us, the "Western" pivot means nurturing the PRC's continental Asian relationships with the interior stans and, across the Himalayas, India. Pakistan's descent into basket-case status and the PRC's concurrent anxiety about Islamic extremism in Xinjiang indicates that the old China/Pakistan lips and teeth united front against India (and offsetting threats of destabilization in Kashmir and Tibet) may be past its sell-by date. [1]

But, if Inner Asia lacks disputed islands and the Seventh Fleet, it has disputed borders and an aggravated Sinophobe faction in India eager to spurn China and strengthen ties with the United States.

This is Sino-Indian friendship year, a good omen for rebooting Sino-Indian relations. Unfortunately for Beijing, it is also the fiftieth anniversary of the Sino-Indian war, a golden opportunity for refighting the battles of 1962.

Sino-Indian relations, like Sino-Japanese relations are potentially hostage to territorial disputes. The disputes date back to imperial escapades from the turn of the 20th century. In the case of Japan, it goes back to the seizure of the Senkakus as war spoils in 1895. For India, it is the McMahon Line, first drawn in 1914, and the grim precedent of the 1962 war.

Although the Sino-Indian border war of 1962 is largely forgotten by Chinese - a Global Times poll apparently showed that 80% of Chinese youth didn't even know it had happened - it is still an occasion for handwringing in India that borders on the masochistic. [2]

That is because India, though it only suffered 7,000 casualties and lost no effective control of territory, lost the brief war in as complete and humiliating a fashion as can be imagined.

The short-form version of the war is that the Indian government escalated its border disputes with the People's Republic of China by establishing military outposts north of the McMahon Line, the Line itself a piece of unilateral boundary-making mischief executed by the British Raj.

The Nehru government calculated that its exercise in establishing "facts on the ground", combined with diplomatic backing from the Soviet Union and the United States and India's position of moral authority, would cause Beijing to back down and accept Indian claims in Aksai Chin (a bleak desert north of Kashmir) and the North East Frontier Administration (the southern face of the Himalayas east of Nepal; now Arunachal Pradesh).

In one of many ghastly miscalculations, the Nehru government had concluded that the PRC would not respond militarily to the encroachment of military posts into the disputed territories.

Unfortunately, Nehru's crystal ball, especially when it came to Chinese supremo, Mao Zedong, was remarkably foggy, especially as it related to the PRC's touchiness over Tibetan issues, the equivocal Indian stance over Tibet and, critically, Nikita Khrushchev's delight in rubbing the Chairman's nose in the debacle of his Tibet policy.

In his study China's Decision for War with India in 1962, John Garver (currently professor of international relations at the Georgia Institute of Technology) describes the encounter:

The question of responsibility for the crisis in Tibet figured prominently in the contentious talks between Mao Zedong and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in Beijing on 2 October 1959. After a complete disagreement over Taiwan, Khrushchev turned to India and Tibet, saying: "If you let me, I will tell you what a guest should not say - the events in Tibet are your fault. You ruled in Tibet, you should have had your intelligence [agencies] there and should have known about the plans and intentions of the Dalai Lama" [to flee to India].

"Nehru also says that the events in Tibet occurred on our fault," Mao replied.

After an exchange over the flight of the Dalai Lama, Khrushchev made the point: "If you allow him [the Dalai Lama] an opportunity to flee to India, then what has Nehru to do with it? We believe that the events in Tibet are the fault of the Communist Party of China, not Nehru's fault."

"No, this is Nehru's fault," Mao replied.

"Then the events in Hungary are not our fault," the Soviet leader responded, "but the fault of the United States of America, if I understand you correctly. Please, look here, we had an army in Hungary, we supported that fool Rakosi - and this is our mistake, not the mistake of the United States."

Mao rejected this: "The Hindus acted in Tibet as if it belonged to them."

Mao was determined to assuage his feeling of embarrassment (and his jealousy of Nehru's leadership of the Non-Aligned Movement and his anger at Khrushchev's pro-Delhi tilt) by knocking India off its perch.

Nehru apparently misread the conciliatory stylings of Zhou Enlai as an accurate representation of China's military determination, and the Indian military was completely unprepared in every conceivable way - manpower, materiel, logistics, conditioning, positioning, tactics, or strategy - to withstand the People's Liberation Army when it attacked on October 20, 1962.

Actually, Indian failures were not limited to diplomatic and military tunnel vision. They also extended to profound conceptual shortcomings, ones that have relevance to today's standoff between the PRC and Japan over the Senkakus/Diaoyu Islands.

Nehru leaned on the McMahon Line for his definition of the PRC-Indian boundary. The McMahon Line, originally designed to contain China, turned out to be a generous gift to the PRC.

In the early years of the 20th century, protecting India by creating a Tibetan buffer zone between China and Russia and the precious Raj was a priority for imperial British thinkers. To this end, the British government took advantage of China's post-1911 disarray to convene a conference of representatives of China, Tibet, and Britain in New Delhi in 1914 to negotiate the Simla Accord.

Its key objective was to partition Tibet into Chinese-governed Outer Tibet and locally governed Inner Tibet "under Chinese suzerainty" and define a border between India and ethnic Tibetan regions that had the buy-in of the largely autonomous Tibetan government in Lhasa. The Tibetans were eager to sign, since the Accord implied the ability of the Lhasa government to conduct its own foreign policy and conclude treaties; the Chinese government repudiated the treaty.

The British Foreign Office did not support Tibetan independence, however, and was more mindful of maintaining cordial relations with China; it let the initiative fade away. The Accord was published in the official compendium of Indian treaties, Charles Umpherston Aitchison's Collection of Treaties, Engagements, and Sanads, with the notation that no binding accord had been reached at Simla.

The Accord and the McMahon Line languished in obscurity until Olaf Caroe, a strategist in the Indian Foreign Office, decided to invoke them in 1937 as a binding precedent for settling persistent border tiffs between India ... and Tibet.

Since the historical record showed that the British government itself did not acknowledge the validity of the Simla Accord, some unseemly imperial legerdemain was called for. A new version of Aitchison was commissioned; instead of noting the Accord was not binding on any of the parties, it stated that Britain and Tibet, but not China, had accepted the Accord.

As Steven A Hoffmann wrote in his India and the China Crisis:

The Aitchison changes were allowed to appear in 1938. In order to publish them quickly, and to give a greater sense of authenticity to the new entry without having it attract undue notice, the India Office (and possibly Caroe) contrived to issue an amended version of the appropriate 1929 Aitchison volume, without giving it a new publication date. Copies of the original 1929 volume - located in offices and libraries in India, England, and elsewhere - were then replaced by request and discarded.

Perhaps only three original versions of the relevant 1929 Aitchison volume exist in the entire world (including one at Harvard University). The McMahon Line found its way onto India Survey maps and never left.

After Indian independence, Nehru inherited the now-sacrosanct McMahon Line, largely by default, and used it as the baseline for many of his boundary discussions with the People's Republic of China. (Caroe's deception was not discovered until 1964, after the war, when a British diplomat compared the two versions of the Aitchison volume at Harvard.)

But the McMahon Line had a fatal flaw: it was in a terrible, terrible place.

The line was conceived as a series of heroic outposts strung along the bleak Himalayan ridgeline. The vision of a hundred fists of stone raised in defiance against the enemies from the north on the edge of the Tibetan plateau perhaps enthralled armchair strategists, but fortifying and defending the McMahon Line demanded that troops and supplies had to be pushed from the southern valleys up to the 4,000- and even near 5,000-meter commanding heights.

For the purposes of a military commander defending Indian territory, it would have been infinitely preferable to have the boundary at the base of the foothills, within reach of reasonably expeditious resupply and reinforcement, and leave to the enemy the glory of clambering across the jagged mountains and battling out of the valleys.

Neville Maxwell, the London Times South Asia correspondent at the time and author of India's China War, a widely-read (and, in India, widely-resented) depiction of the 1962 war as Nehru's folly, described the military state of affairs in an interview:

The very idea of a strategic frontier was out of date by the 1930s. Any sensible soldier will tell you if China is going to invade India from the Northeast the place to meet them and to resist them is at the foot of the hills. So when the invaders finally come panting out of breath and ammunition, you can meet them from a position of strength. The last place, strategically, to meet the Chinese was along the McMahon alignment. Caroe is very much the guilty party in all of this. [3]

In an atmosphere of escalating tensions and distrust between India and the People's Republic of China in the aftermath of the Tibet rebellion and the Dalai Lama's flight to India, Nehru compounded his geographic disadvantage by sending troops beyond the McMahon Line to establish outposts on the Chinese side - the so-called "Forward Strategy".

The PLA pounced, and the result was a humiliating defeat followed by a unilateral Chinese withdrawal to north of the "Line of Control", the unofficial but effective boundary that divides India and the People's Republic of China even today.

On the 50th anniversary of this debacle, it is hard for Indian nationalists to find silver linings. One noteworthy example was an article describing the closer integration of the tribes of Arunachal Pradesh into the Indian linguistic, cultural, and political mainstream: "India Lost War With China But Won Arunachal's Heart"

When the Dalai Lama thinks of India's consolidation of Arunachal Pradesh, however, he probably feels little joy and more than a twinge of bitter melancholy in his heart, relating to the great religious town and market center of Tawang, which occupies a thumb of territory sticking out on the northwest corner of the state and which has always been the critical pivot upon which the northeast Indian version of the Great Game has revolved.

Tawang is triple-Tibetan: it is in a Tibetan cultural area, it has been a major center of Gelugpa Tibetan Buddhist practice for centuries (the 6th Dalai Lama was reincarnated there; the town hosts a large monastery); and it holds a special place in the history of the modern Tibetan resistance. The Dalai Lama entered India from the PRC at Tawang in 1959, and actively patronizes the monastery and the town.

In addition to its ethnically Tibetan residents, Tawang also hosts a considerable number of Tibetan refugees.

In 1914, at Simla, the Tibetan government had acquiesced to the inclusion of Tawang into British India by endorsing the McMahon Line. However, as the Simla Accord languished, it was subsequently understood on both sides of the McMahon Line that Tawang was under the administration and effective control of Tibet - if not by Lhasa, then by the local monastery.

In 1935, a British botanist/spy Frank Kingdon-Ward was arrested in Tawang; the Tibetans compounded their error by complaining to a British mission in Lhasa. This disturbing state of affairs came to the notice of Olaf Caroe and led to the resurrection of the Simla Accord and the McMahon Line - and the Indian claim on Tawang.

In 1947, after Indian independence, the government in Lhasa appealed to the new government to acknowledge its rule over Tawang.

Didn't happen.

The India-friendly Wikipedia entry on Tawang states:

[Tawang] came under effective Indian administration on February 12, 1951, when Major R Khating led Indian Army troops to relocate Chinese squatters. India assumed control and sovereignty of the area and established democratic rule therein to end the oppression of the Monpa.

An article in the Guardian provides an interesting picture of the political dynamic that the Indian government found and exploited in Tawang:

Pema Gombu says he has lived under three flags: Tibetan, Chinese and Indian. Although his living room is decked with pictures of the current Dalai Lama, the 81-year-old says the Tibetan administration in the early 20th century was the worst.

"The [Tibetan] officials in that time were corrupt and cruel. I am sure his holiness did not know this. In those days if a Tibetan stopped you they could ask you to work for them like a slave. They forced us to pay taxes. Poor farmers like me had to give over a quarter of our crops to them. We had to carry the loads 40km [25 miles] to a Tibetan town as tribute every year."

It was this treatment that turned Tawang away from Tibet. Mr Gombu said he helped guide Indian soldiers into the town in 1950 who carried papers signed by the Tibetan government which transferred Arunachal's 35,000 square miles [90,000 square kilometers] to India. "It was the happiest day of my life."

Judging from Pema Gombu's references to Tibetans, he is presumably ethnic Monpa. Monpa are an ethnic group that adopted Gelugpa Tibetan Buddhism in the 17th century and center their religious practices on Tawang. They form the demographic backbone of Tawang. Although they are "Tibetan Buddhists" ie followers of the Gelugpa sect, they aren't Tibetans, as the history of Tawang makes clear.

It would appear that the Indian government used the same justification to take control of its Tibetan areas as Beijing did: to rescue the local inhabitants - the Monpa, in this case - from the corrupt and brutal rule of their Tibetan overlords - possibly the government in Lhasa, but more likely the overbearing bosses of the monastery in Tawang.

This history provides an interesting and melancholy perspective on the Dalai Lama's 2009 visit to Tawang.

The visit attracted an enormous amount of media interest because there was the Dalai Lama, going up to the Chinese border, stating that the contested territory of Arunachal Pradesh belonged to India, thereby sticking his finger (in a non-violent, Buddhist fashion) in the Chinese dragon's eye!

But for the Dalai Lama it must have been, at best, a bitter-sweet experience.

He is clearly unwillingly to accept that Tawang is Indian territory. In 2003, as the Times of India tells us, the Dalai Lama asserted that Tawang was part of Tibet, before backpedaling:

NEW DELHI: For the first-time, Tibetan spiritual leader Dalai Lama has said that Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh, a territory that's still claimed by China, is part of India.

Acknowledging the validity of the MacMohan Line as per the 1914 Simla Agreement in an interview to Navbharat Times, he said that Arunchal Pradesh was a part of India under the agreement signed by Tibetan and British representatives.

In 2003, while touring Tawang, the Dalai Lama had been asked to comment on the issue, but had refused to give a direct answer, saying that Arunachal was actually part of Tibet. China doesn't recognize the MacMohan Line and claims that Tawang and Arunachal Pradesh are part of its territory.

The statement is bound to impact the India-China dialogue, as Beijing has already stated that if Tawang is handed to it, it will rescind claim on the rest of Arunachal Pradesh. The Chinese proposal is strategically unacceptable to India, as Tawang is close not just to the northeastern states but also to Bhutan.

After the Dalai Lama's 2009 trips to Japan and Arunachal Pradesh, the Indian press reported that he had stated categorically that Arunachal Pradesh and Tawang are part of India.

In a rather bitter irony, amid the myriad failures of the McMahon Line in securing the borderlands, its only triumph is the modest advance Olaf Caroe intended in 1938: the alienation of Tawang from Tibet.

Nehru's unwise fetishizing of the McMahon Line has been carried on by many in India's political, military, and security elite. In an interesting inversion of the secretive Communists versus transparent democracy framing, the PRC has declassified many official documents relating to the war. The Indian government, on the other hand, has still classified the official inquiry into the war - the Henderson-Brooks report - presumably because it documents the shortcomings of Nehru, the civilian government, and the Indian military in embarrassing fashion.

The cock-up was so complete, in fact that the line between incompetent provocateur and innocent victim has blurred, to India's advantage. Plenty of self-serving assertions have filled the informational vacuum left by the continued classification of the Henderson-Brooks report, allowing nationalistically minded or Sino-phobic Indian commentators to describe the Chinese attack as unprovoked aggression and warn darkly that Chinese perfidy can and probably will be repeated.

On the 50th anniversary of the war, the Deccan Herald declared:

Make no mistake about it. That China is a hydra-headed monster with massive expansionist plans across South Asia is no longer a secret. It was Mao who termed Tibet as the "palm" of a hand with its five fingers as Ladakh, Sikkim, Nepal, Bhutan, and what has so long been as NEFA [North East Frontier Agency] that pertain to our north eastern states. [4]

Brahma Chellaney found a Western home for this particular brand of historiography at the Daily Beast, the electronic rump of the now-defunct Newsweek, in an article intended to use the Indian experience to educate the democracies of East Asia about how to protect their precious atolls from the PRC: Mr Chellaney declares: China gave India a "lesson" in 1962. Study it now.

My advice: by all means study the 1962, but please don't study Mr Chellaney, especially since he says things like:

China's generals believe in hitting as fast and as hard as possible, a style of warfare they demonstrated in their 1962 blitzkrieg against India. The aim is to wage "battles with swift outcome" (sujuezhan). This laser focus has been a hallmark of every military action Communist China has undertaken since 1949. [5]

In a spirit of scholarly skepticism, I presume to direct Mr Chellaney's attention to the PRC intervention in Korea: three years (1950-53), 500,000 casualties. 'Nuff said.

The key lesson from the 1962 is not that China's neighbors should muscle up in order to counter a PLA "blitzkrieg": rather that it is dangerous to fetishize territorial boundaries in order to make them into national rallying points. As Mr Hoffmann observed in his largely sympathetic account of the Indian government's border catastrophe:

[The] Indian government came to believe that the McMahon Line was not merely a British Invention ... the McMahon line itself constituted recognition that the watershed crest of the Assam Himalaya formed the natural geographical divide between Tibet and [the Assam Himalaya].

... the weight of all the evidence amassed by the Indians ... made for a plausible case ... But to the extent that India claimed absolute rather than relative worth for its border case, by holding that linear borders had been conclusively "delimited' by history and discovered through documentary investigation, the Indian case became vulnerable ...

India drew the line in the Himalayas - but it turned out to be the wrong line. As for the Senkakus/Diaoyus ...?

Notes:
1. China's new 'Look West' policy to give primacy to India: expert, The Indian Express, Nov 1, 2012.
2. Over 80 per cent Chinese have no knowledge of 1962 war: Survey, Niti Central, Oct 20, 2012.
3. China Was The Aggrieved; India, Aggressor In '62, Outlook India, Oct 22, 2012.
4. The Battle of Attrition, Deccan Herald, Nov 2, 2012.
5. How China Fights: Lessons From the 1962 Sino-Indian War, The Daily Beast, Oct 29, 2012.