Francis Wade is a freelance journalist and analyst specialising in Burma and Southeast Asia. His work has been published in The Guardian, Al Jazeera English, Asia Times Online, Foreign Policy, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He previously worked as an editor and reporter for the Democratic Voice of Burma, an exiled Burmese news organization based in Thailand.
摘要
For decades Myanmar has been portrayed as a case of good citizen versus bad regime – men in jackboots maintaining a suffocating rule over a majority Buddhist population beholden to the ideals of non-violence and tolerance. But in recent years this narrative has been upended.
In June 2012, violence between Buddhists and Muslims erupted in western Myanmar, pointing to a growing divide between religious communities that before had received little attention from the outside world. Attacks on Muslims soon spread across the country, leaving hundreds dead, entire neighbourhoods turned to rubble, and tens of thousands of Muslims confined to internment camps. This violence, breaking out amid the passage to democracy, was spurred on by monks, pro-democracy activists and even politicians.
In this gripping and deeply reported account, Francis Wade explores how the manipulation of identities by an anxious ruling elite has laid the foundations for mass violence, and how, in Myanmar's case, some of the most respected and articulate voices for democracy have turned on the Muslim population at a time when the majority of citizens are beginning to experience freedoms unseen for half a century.
目次
Prologue 1 The first wave : the murder, the smoke and the ruins 7 Sons of whose soil? Britain and the birth of a fractured nation 17 The art of belonging: a peculiar transaction in Yangon 33 Us and them : making identities, manipulating divides 58 Ruling the unruly : social engineering and the village of prisoners 69 2012 : season of violence 98 At first light the darkness fell : Myanmar's democratic experiment falters 123 "We came down from the sky" : the Buddhist preachers of hate 164 Apartheid state : camps, ghettos and the new architecture of control 199 U Maung Soe : an outcast in disguise 229 In the old cinema hut : fear, hope and the heroes we forget 241 NOTES 272
