Myanmar - The Tribal Self Hunts the Stateless Rohingya Other

Event Baseline: Al Jazeera has exposed atrocities committed against the Rohingya ethnic minority during Myanmar's ongoing civil war, revealing the military's targeting of the stateless group.

The Rohingya are not seen as human because they have been defined as foreign by the dominant ethnic self. The military, driven by a mythology of pure nationhood, hunts the other as if erasing a stain. This is the extreme result of thought dividing humanity into sacred and profane identities. The Rohingya's statelessness is not a legal fact but a psychological projection: the Burmese self needs an enemy to maintain its fragile coherence. The violence is not about security; it is about the desperate attempt to keep an image of self intact by destroying anything that mirrors its own fragmentation. When there is no fixed border, the mind invents one with blood. The observer, identified with the nation, cannot see that the observed is its own denied shadow. Until the illusion of 'Burmese' and 'Rohingya' as separate realities dissolves, the killing will continue as a ritual of self-deception.