Thais yet to 'love their neighbour'
source : The Nation
19,January,2001
BY MIN ZIN.
THE spectre of Bang Rachan and a century of nation building still cast shadows over Thais' perception of Burma and the Burmese.
Watching the Thai film "Bang Rachan" is an uncomfortable experience for Burmese as the story portrays the sacrifice of brave Siamese villagers fighting to the death against superior Burmese invaders. When the two forces engage each other, resulting in the death of the "evil" Burmese, the Thai audiences respond with enthusiastic hurrahs and applause. And as the corpses of Siamese pile up and are set aflame, Thai girls start sobbing. "You can hardly feel any sense of humanity in the theatre, where instead all negative feelings are predominantly overwhelmed," says Ko Myo, a Burmese who has seen the movie.
Though there is little historic evidence to support the film's narrative, it succeeds in reinforcing deep-seated Thai prejudice against Burmese. The plot is in fact derived from a well-known national myth which students are exposed to in school. The project was filmed without consulting any historians.
"We intended to [film without consulting historians] for fear that a dramatic element of story telling would be destroyed by factual information and subsequently all enjoyment would be lost. We made it real only to convince the audiences," says the director, Thanit Jitnulkul.
Pornpol Sarnsamak, 23, a senior student of history at Chiang Mai University, is unimpressed. "Invented nationalism has been commercialised again in a highly sophisticated manner. It is not a healthy thing to instil patriotism among people through the use of distorted accounts. I don't think we should be that biased," he says.
The roots of such bias are surprisingly shallow, but nonetheless complexly interwoven. Although most Siamese and Thais have always tended to regard Burma as their enemy, the national identities of both countries are relatively recent creations. The pre-modern kingdoms that covered much of their present territories did not fully encompass either country, and there was considerable overlapping. In some Siamese chronicles, for instance, the city and province of Chiang Mai, now known as Thailand's "second capital", was identified as part of the Burmese Empire. According to the "Ayutthaya Chronicles", Lan Na (present-day Chiang Mai) had sided with the Burmese virtually from the beginning of their 1563 invasion of Siam.
Not only politically but also culturally the two countries were not so easily distinguished from each other. Both were - and still are - extremely heterogeneous in terms of ethnicity, further blurring the line between them. In the Chiang Mai region, which remained an important vassal state of Burma from 1558 to 1774, cultural and religious influences especially ran deep in both directions. It was only with the sacking of the Siamese capital of Ayutthaya in 1767 that the Siamese began to draw a strong black line between "us" and "them".
The destruction of Ayutthaya, the pride of classical civilisation, was an unmitigated disaster for relations. It would be difficult to over-estimate the impact of this episode on the subsequent development of Siamese perceptions of Burma.
Krom Phrarawangboworn Mahasurasrihanat, a chronicler of Siamese history, gave full vent to the sense of outrage that still simmers in the hearts of many Thais: "The sinful Burmese ravaged our villages and cities. A great number of our citizens [were killed], and many temples were . . . ruined. Our peaceful kingdom was abandoned and turned into forest. The Burmese showed no mercy to the Siamese and felt no shame for all the sins they had committed."
A leitmotif of much Siamese historical commentary since Ayutthaya has been the image of the cruel and ineffably evil Burmese. Even in other genres, such as the writings of learned monks, the Burmese emerge as dangerous enemies of all that is precious to the Siamese, including their Buddhist faith, something that even now is an integral part of both nations' identities.
By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, such stereotypes had become fodder for the cause of nationalism, the ideological underpinning of Siam's efforts to build a modern nation state. Anti-Burmese sentiment was systematically inculcated in the mind of every Siamese, through oral tradition, historical literature, textbooks, plays, music and movies, in order to instil a sense of national pride. Thus ancient battles between rival rulers suddenly became wars between nations.
"The negative attitude toward the Burmese does not occur solely as a result of the past relationship," says Dr Sunait Chutinatranond of the Institute of Asian Studies at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. "It is, rather, the outcome of political manoeuvres by Thai nationalist governments, especially military regimes. It is an attempt to stir up a sense of nationalism and at the same time legitimise their ruling authority by claiming that they, like all their brave ancestors who fought against Burma, take as their primary concern the task of protecting the nation, religion and monarchy from external invasion."
In more recent years, other factors besides nationalist propaganda have also contributed to Thais' negative view of Burma. The steady deterioration of social and economic conditions in Burma after decades of misrule under successive military regimes has added a sense of worldly, as well as moral, superiority to many Thais' self-image vis-à-vis their neighbour. With the fall of the Burmese currency, the kyat, from three times the value of the baht in the 1970s to just one-tenth of its value since the late 1980s, Burma's degradation as a nation seems complete. Thai businessmen, setting their watches back 30 minutes as they fly to Burma, may feel that they have in fact regressed 30 years upon reaching their destination.
The shades of discrimination that Burmese now face in Thailand are far more nuanced than in the past. According to Pornsuk Koetsawang, author of "In Search of Sunlight", a book about the plight of Burmese illegal immigrants living in Thailand, "regarding discrimination against Burmese, [legal] status is far more determinant than being Burmese". But in the minds of many Thais the words "illegal" and "Burmese" are almost inextricably connected, as not only "illegal" people, but also illegal substances such as yaa baa (methamphetamines) continue to flow across the border in torrents.
As the "illegal Burmese" supersedes the "evil Burmese" in popular imagination, even educated Thais are often incredulous when they meet Burmese who don't fit the "illegal" image.
"Whenever I introduce myself as a Burmese student of Assumption University, many Thais just can't believe it," says one 20-year-old Burmese with a valid passport and a student visa who attends classes at the prestigious Bangkok university.
Despite a tendency to attribute their neighbour's troubles to some inherent flaw in the Burmese character, there is a growing recognition amongst Thais that all is not rotten in Burma. The emergence of Aung San Suu Kyi as the courageous and charismatic leader of the pro-democracy movement has done much to inspire admiration and sympathy for the Burmese struggle. This, coupled with their own bitter but relatively brief experience of military rule, has made many Thais realise that the use of sheer brute force by the government, rather than a lack of will on the part of ordinary citizens, has been the major impediment to Burma's desire to rejoin the ranks of civilised nations.
Burma has also become more attractive to Thai investors. With their own natural resources greatly depleted after decades of high growth, Thais have discovered the enormous potential of the land beyond their western frontier. Indeed some Thai analysts believe that as globalisation takes hold of Thailand and the country enters the international economic mainstream history itself is losing its significance. Education and culture are seen increasingly in terms of their commercial value and less as a means of constructing national identities based upon interpretations of the past.
King Chulalongkorn (1868-1910), the father of modern Thailand, once mentioned that his ancestors had put a curse on future generations of the royal family to prevent them from forming close ties with Burma. This curse, it seems, still has hold over many Thais, whether they acknowledge it or not. Even Pornsuk admits legal status alone would not make much of a difference to her own family's perceptions of the Burmese: "If I had a Burmese boy-friend, my family and relatives would feel very bad even if he had legal status." Perhaps nothing short of a miracle - or a radical change in the political realities of modern-day Burma - will redeem the country and its people in the eyes of its closest neighbour.