Myanmar’s Enemy Within

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.

In 2017, Myanmar's military launched a campaign of violence against the Rohingya minority that UN experts later said amounted to a genocide. More than seven hundred thousand civilians fled to Bangladesh in what became the most concentrated flight of refugees since the Rwanda genocide of 1994. The warning signs of impending catastrophe that had built over years were downplayed by Western backers of the political transition, and only when the exodus began did the world finally come to acknowledge a catastrophe that had been long in the making.In this updated edition of the book that foreshadowed a genocide, Francis Wade explores how the manipulation of identities by an anxious ruling elite laid the foundations for mass violence. It asks: who gets to define a nation? How can democratic rights be weaponised against a minority? And why, at a time when the majority of citizens in Myanmar had begun to experience freedoms unseen for half a century, did much-lauded civilian leaders like Aung San Suu Kyi become complicit in the most heinous of crimes?

Written by a high profile journalist and based on extensive visits to the region

Prologue1. A Popular Massacre: Rallying to a Lethal Cause2. The First Wave: Widening the Communal Divide in Western Myanmar3. Songs of Whose Soil? Britain and the Birth of a Fractured Nation4. The Art of Belonging: A Peculiar Transaction in Yangon5. Us and Them: Making Identities, Manipulating Divides6. Ruling the Unruly: Social Engineering and the Village of Prisoners7. 2012: The Making of a Catastrophe8. At First Light the Darkness Fell: Myanmar's Democratic Experiment Falters9. 'We Came Down from the Sky': The Buddhist Preachers of Hate10. Apartheid State: Camps, Ghettos and the New Architecture of Control11. U Maung Soe: An Outcast in Disguise12. In the Old Cinema Hut: A Delicate Thread is Cut13. Bystanders: Quiet Diplomacy and a 'Glaringly Dysfunctional' UN14. Rebirth: After the Killings