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?