Burma's Identity Crisis
Burma’s identity crisis How ethno-religious nationalism has led to religious intolerance, crimes against humanity and genocide May 2019 Daniel Sinclair/CSW February 2019 For public use Burma’s Identity Crisis Explanatory note CSW has always used the name ‘Burma’, rather than the official name of the country, ‘Myanmar’, and continues to do so. Ever since the military regime changed the name to Myanmar in 1989, one year after the bloody suppression of pro- democracy demonstrations, Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy (NLD), and many of the country’s ethnic nationalities, requested the international community not to adopt the military’s name, arguing that the regime had no mandate to change the name of the country. Although Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD are now in government, it is unclear what their wishes are, and so we tend to use Burma and Myanmar interchangeably, depending on the context. In this report we use Burma throughout, except when directly quoting sources which themselves use Myanmar. Similarly we use the name ‘Rangoon’ for the country’s formal capital and major city, except where the official name ‘Yangon’ is used in direct quotations. Much of the research for this report was conducted first hand by CSW, through visits to Burma and its borders, interviewing ethnic and religious minorities, Buddhist monks, civil society and refugees. However, given the scale of the topic, and limitations on access to some areas, we have referred to information researched and published by other human rights groups and international organisations, notably the United Nations, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Fortify Rights and the Burma Human Rights Network.
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