'As I look at Myanmar today, I weep'

THE TABLET
Benedict Rogers
28 MARCH 2021,

Yesterday, the Myanmar military attacked protesters with rubber bullets, live ammunition, tear gas and sound bombs.Theint Mon Soe/Sopa

Eight years ago today, on Palm Sunday 2013, I was received into the Catholic Church in St Mary’s Cathedral, Yangon, Myanmar, by the city’s Archbishop – who two years later became his country’s first Cardinal – Charles Bo.

At the time, it was a scene of serenity. Surrounded by friends from Myanmar’s different ethnic and religious groups – Buddhists, Muslims, Protestants as well as Catholics – as well as several foreign friends of no particular practicing religion, including a couple of lapsed Catholics who had not set foot in a church for decades, I felt a deep peace as Cardinal Bo poured the waters of baptism over my head and the cathedral bells rang out in welcome at my spiritual homecoming.

Myanmar's future must be peace

UCAnews 
Benedict Rogers
Myanmar
May 22, 2019

The country has an identity crisis; this is the heart of the failure to bring decades of civil war to an end 

 A boy rides a bicycle near the Maungdaw town market in the restive Myanmar’s Rakhine State on Jan. 24. Maungdaw was the epicentre of a brutal military crackdown in 2017 that forced some 720,000 Rohingya Muslims to flee over the border to Bangladesh. (Photo by Richard Sargent/AFP)

Myanmar has an identity crisis. At the very heart of its conflict, which has stretched over 70 years since independence, is a conflict over identity.

That is reflected in the political conflict over the very name of the country. Should we call it Myanmar, the name the military regime changed to in 1989, a year after slaughtering thousands of pro-democracy protestors in the streets? Or should we keep using Burma, in defiance of the military, even though the person who for years asked us to do so, Aung San Suu Kyi, is now in government and uses both terms interchangeably?