a bonobo humanity?

Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh

As an impoverished elder I only get to travel though reading, and it’s also safer. Currently I’ve been re-reading Thant Myint-U’s The hidden history of Burma: race, capitalism and the crisis of democracy in the 21st century, which I first read in 2021, and now I’m reading it again for the first time, if you know what I mean. I vaguely recall the place being something of a hot mess, with the very distinguished author ending on a hopeful ‘things can only get better’ note. It was all about generals ruling things – never a good sign – and a worry about China – always a bad sign. Still, the author was optimistic, because… why not?

I must say my renewed interest in the situation there is likely to do with the book Escape from Manus by the Burmese Rohingyan refugee Jaivet Ealom. I’m interested in finding out how thing are going, genocidally, for these Moslem people in the south-west coastal region of that predominantly Buddhist country. I’m not hopeful.

So, before we get to the Rohingyas, and the Arakanese (it’s quite confusing, and Arakan is now called Rakhine, bordered by the Arakan mountains to the east), Burma in general still seems a mess, and as far as I’m aware it’s quite an artificial country – but aren’t they all? Who created the borders of the sub-Saharan African countries? Of Afghanistan, with its Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks and such? Or the Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen of Iraq?

But getting back to the topic – Burma or Myanmar? They’re both quite ancient terms, used more or less interchangeably, perhaps within different contexts, but Myanmar recently has been associated with the stink of the military dictatorship, which has continually suppressed democratic movements, and even governments, so I prefer to follow Thant Myint-U’s lead in calling it Burma. Whatever, with a population around twice that of Australia, it continues to be the least developed country in the region. It was a British colony from the early-mid 19th century, and attained independence in 1948. I would say that, before British colonisation, it wasn’t so much a country, in our modern sense, as a region, containing many ethnic, language and religious cultures, as was Australia and the Americas before the arrival of the palefaces.

Anyway, since 1948, there has been very little in the way of peace and tranquility in the region/country, and the military under a series of blokes has been notoriously dominant in its politics. This no doubt has much to do with the near-impossibility of moulding together such a congeries of peoples without  a firm, manly and generally oppressive hand – or so the military think. Which brings me to the ups and downs of its most well-known citizen, the now 80-year-old Aung San Suu Kyi, currently serving an interminable sentence, apparently under house arrest for the time being, but things can always change at the whim of the military. Her global reputation has been tarnished in recent decades due to her attitude towards the Rohingya people, whom she refuses to recognise as Rohingya, or as a real Burmese ethnicity. It all seems to be about Buddhist-Islamic tensions. Sadly, her oddly inhumane response to this issue has lost her quite a few supporters in the west, but her treatment at the hands of the military, which continues to undermine democratic movements – the latest coup occurring in 2021 – has been unremittingly harsh. From Wikipedia:

According to reports published on Democratic Voice of Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi was moved to an undisclosed location from house arrest around October 2025. In December 2025, Aung San Suu Kyi’s son, Kim Aris, stated that nobody had heard from Aung directly since 2023, only being given second-hand information from the junta. As a result, he stated that he feared that she was dead.

On 17 April 2026, Aung San Suu Kyi’s sentence was reduced to 22.5 years as part of a general wave of amnesties and commutations by Min Aung Hlaing’s Union Government of Myanmar during Thingyan [Burmese New Year]. On 30 April, the military government reduced her sentence by one-sixth and commuted it to house arrest; she will continue to serve the remaining 18 years and 9 months of her sentence at a designated residence. A photo of her was also broadcast by state media for the first time in years.

Not that a photo proves anything. However, a tiny commutation of such a ridiculous sentence for an 80-year-old winner of the Nobel Peace Prize proves a great deal about Burma’s current regime.

Burma is a country of serious and widespread poverty, and income inequality due to successive corrupt military governments, and going back to the days of the British Empire. You could, of course, say that it’s more a region than a country, largely created by the British, but then all countries are human inventions, something we forget, what with all the palaver about passports and ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ immigrants, and sovereignty and the like.

Today, Burma is fake-democratic, as an election held earlier this year was won by the Union Solidarity and Development Party, a front for the all powerful and all corrupt military (heavily backed by China), which had seized power four years before, sending 3-4 million people packing, both within and outside its borders. It’s a terrible mess, in which scum has risen to the top and poverty and despair abounds.

And what about the Rohingyas? A huge proportion of them are now in Bangladeshi refugee camps, in flimsy makeshift dwellings subjected to powerful monsoon storms, though some half a million remain in Burma, where they have no status whatsoever. Many try to escape by sea, to parts unknown, to escape the violence visited upon them by the Buddhist majority. And in general the region – I mean the whole of Burma/Myanmar – has become so benighted and dangerous that many international aid organisations have given up on it.

References

Thant Myint-U, The hidden history of Burma: race, capitalism and the crisis of democracy in the 21st century, 2019

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myanmar

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aung_San_Suu_Kyi

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-31/myanmar-election-won-by-military-backed-usdp-party/106290376

https://www.unrefugees.org/news/rohingya-refugee-crisis-explained/