Tag Archive for: Burma

The Bay of Bengal and the growing Buddhist–Muslim divide

Buddha headThis is the last post of The Strategist’s series on the Bay of Bengal. As noted in previous posts, the Bay suffers from many trans-regional security issues—including separatist conflicts, piracy and people smuggling—which will increasingly require states in the region to cooperate in order to maintain regional security and stability. One issue that has received scant attention in Australia is the growing fault-line between Islam and Buddhism.

The Bay area represents one of the world’s most important concentrations of Buddhists. There are more than 120 million in the region, mostly of the Theravāda sect, concentrated in the Buddhist-majority states of Thailand, Myanmar and Sri Lanka. There are also more than 500 million Muslims, mostly in Indonesia, India, Bangladesh and Malaysia. In recent years there have been growing conflicts involving Buddhist majority and Muslim minority communities.

For decades, Thailand has seen Muslim-Malay separatist violence in its southern provinces abutting Malaysia result in the death of more than 6,000 people. Although the conflict has ebbed and flowed over the years, attacks by militants increased significantly in 2014, apparently as part of a campaign by separatists to ethnically cleanse the southern provinces of Buddhists. That provoked an often heavy-handed response by the Thai Army working in coordination with Buddhist monks and local vigilantes. The new military regime in Bangkok will likely take an even stronger response. Read more

The Sheriff comes to town

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President Obama’s decision to visit Thailand, Myanmar and Cambodia later this week is a surprising but welcome affirmation of the US’s continuing commitment to its Asian ‘pivot’. It’s surprising because Americans will overwhelmingly think that Obama’s primary task right now should be to negotiate an outcome with Congress to prevent billions of dollars of programmed spending cuts from being implemented in early January 2013. By comparison, spending eighty hours in three Southeast Asian countries will seem like an odd priority to an American audience. It demonstrates just how personally Obama is committed to the Asia-Pacific and America’s engagement with it.

For Southeast Asia, the visit is deeply significant and all the more so because Obama has picked three countries in the region that fall closest to China’s orbit of influence. I take as my text here Sergio Leone’s magnificent spaghetti western, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.True, the film is not often referenced on Asian security matters but stick with me, dear reader.

Obama will first visit Thailand—the Good in my analogy, because Thailand is a treaty ally of the United States. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta will also visit Bangkok on Thursday after AUSMIN. Reportedly, Thailand will announce a decision to join the Proliferation Security Initiative. The US will seek to reinvigorate an alliance relationship which has somewhat atrophied. We should expect an announcement highlighting increased cooperation to facilitate Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Response (HADR) operations—these days the preferred way to initiate military cooperation at the softer end of the defence scale. Read more