Is Shared Hatred the Glue that Holds a Diverse Country Together?

Two months after the military overthrew the civilian government in Myanmar, the country is on the verge of civil war. Ethnic militias are gearing up for a fight against the increasingly violent military, which has resorted to shooting protestors to keep an increasingly tenuous peace. Protestors, not content at being shot at, have graduated from throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails to fleeing from the cities to join guerrilla groups in the mountains of the country's remote borderlands, hoping to take back their country by force. Conflicts have embroiled Burmese communities outside the country, with individual Burmese, not to mention diplomats and governments-in-exile, openly speaking out against the junta.

It is a time of unprecedented unity among the Burmese people. Ethnic minorities, the pro-Western youths, aging pro-democracy activists, and even some members of the Buddhist monkhood that embody the nation's traditional values have come together in speaking out against the military takeover. The prospects of the military against all the ethnic minorities, in particular, would be a new situation, given that, in the past decades, the different minorities have not only fought the military but each other in a bid to secure their own autonomy from all other players. The coup was the catalyst that got all the militias to point their guns in the same direction.

Such shared hatred, unfortunately, had a parallel during the brief democratic experiment that Myanmar went through. before the coup. At that time, the military, the civilian government, the monkhood, Buddhist minorities, and most Buddhist Buddhist citizens got together to drive out the Muslim Rohingya into exile in Bangladesh, triggering a refugee crisis that earned Aung San Suu Kyi, the country's Nobel Peace Prize-winning leader, international condemnation. Yet, Suu Kyi stayed silent on the crisis and even defended the military in its persecution of the Muslims on the international stage, sacrificing the positive image she built in the West over decades of activism.

But perhaps Suu Kyi understood something that neither the Western audience and the violent junta of today understand. And that something might be the need for a shared target for hatred among the vast majority for a country as culturally and ethnically diverse as Myanmar to not fall into the abyss of civil war. By sacrificing the Rohingya, Suu Kyi was not only saving her own political career but also preventing a fundamental split among the traditionalists in her country and those who are determined to open the country up to the Western world no matter the cost.

Indeed, but taking a tough stance on Rohingya, she still able to keep the pro-Western faction on her side, giving them the room to turn Myanmar into "Asia's last economic frontier" on the cusp of rocketing growth. At the same time, she was able to gain some form of legitimacy from the monkhood and the traditionalists, so that they do not work together to derail her plans to turn Myanmar into a modern economy. Her credibility with both the traditional and liberal Burmese gave her the political capital to keep talking to the ethnic minority militias to minimize disruptions from on-and-off low-intensity borderland wars.

Yet, even she miscalculated just how much unity she was able to create in the short period of time she spent at the top of Myanmar's political leadership. She thought she had enough popular backing to sideline the military completely. Yet, the military was able to quickly regain the upper hand by driving a wedge between the traditionalists and the liberals by painting the anti-coup protests as a Western plot seeking to undermine Myanmar. The military's ability to bring onside some high-level monks, in particular, showed that Suu Kyi's unity building was far from sufficient before she was toppled.

Contemporary Myanmar is not the only place that illustrates the need for shared hatred for a minority to drive unity in a diverse country. Abiy Ahmed, himself a Nobel Peace Prize winner, has used a war with Tigrayans not only to bring the other ethnicities of a diverse Ethiopia together but also to thaw the often tense relationship with next-door Eritrea. Similarly, China has used Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Taiwan to unify nationalists in a country that is often underappreciated for just how much regional diversity and a history of regional autonomy exists to weaken central authority. 

Of course, the shared hatred in all such cases has led to despicable violence against minorities and humanitarian crises that justifiably deserve condemnation. But before doing so, one has to consider how powerful of a political tool shared hatred can be in a diverse country with plenty of centrifugal forces at play. Unless the central government can comfortably know that the country is not at the risk of being pulled apart by different groups with fundamentally different, irreconcilable interests, shared hatred may not go away. And unless better alternatives to keep people together can be found, violence may still carry the day.