Since Burma embarked on its transition from a military government to a nominally civilian-led one in 2010, ‘national reconciliation’ has become a ubiquitous concept amongst its politicians and advocates for peace. The 2010 election was seen as an important opportunity for dialogue and cooperation, as well as a potential catalyst for peace in a country torn apart by more than 60 years of civil war. With the National League for Democracy’s (NLD) historic electoral win in 2015, hope was further renewed for rebuilding Burma into a genuine democracy and uniting its fragmented society.

While many things have changed in Burma since those early days of guarded optimism, too much remains the same. The NLD, once a beleaguered pro-democracy group under Burma’s military government is now the governing party. Significant political and economic reforms have been introduced and the international community has begun to re-engage with the former pariah state. Yet, the ongoing rhetoric of ‘national reconciliation’ by Burma’s top politicians increasingly rings hollow, as violence in northern Rakhine State has recently pushed over half a million refugees into Bangladesh, and war in northern Kachin and Shan states rages on with civilians caught in the middle.

In addition to ongoing mass human rights violations, the new leadership in Burma’s government continues to exhibit strategies for denying its dark past— from the exercise of defamation laws such as Section 66(d) to arrest, detain, and imprison individuals critical of the NLD or military, to the recent arrest of journalists under 17(1) of the Unlawful Associations Act, and to Aung San Suu Kyi’s farcical statement that her government has never been “soft on human rights [violations]” during her disappointing televised address in September 2017. All this reveals an administration unwilling or unable to address its violent history.

The current narrative espoused by the NLD is one whereby the country can pursue national reconciliation without addressing its past. According to Aung San Suu Kyi, victims of human rights violations who are unable or unwilling to forget their past are a ‘hindrance’ to the democratic transition. As Veronica Collins rightly argued in an earlier Oxford Tea Circle article, “victims of the past are not ‘hindrances,’ but essential parts of Burma’s future.”

While some have even questioned whether ‘national reconciliation’ carries any significant meaning at all for those politicians who espouse it as Burma’s ‘prevailing narrative,’ entreaties to forget the past by figures such as Aung San Suu Kyi show a careless disregard for those who have suffered at the hands of the Burma Army and Ethnic Armed Groups (EAGs); such statements resort to blaming victims for the country’s  lack of progress, rather than addressing root causes for grievances and acknowledging and addressing past wrongs.

In addition, much of the current administration’s rhetoric surrounding ‘national reconciliation’ has been criticized for referring only to healing the hostile relationship between the NLD and the Burma Army or between the government and EAGs, while offering little in the way of substantive policy. The necessity of building trust between civilian populations and the government, particularly in communities which have suffered decades of grave human rights violations, is too often overlooked when this narrative of ‘national reconciliation’ is invoked.

What is lost in all the rhetoric of ‘national reconciliation’ is that many villagers are often unable to forget the violence inflicted upon them and do desire some form of justice for abuses endured, as is shown by research recently published by the Human Rights Foundation of Monland (HURFOM). For over 22 years, HURFOM has documented patterns of abuse, providing evidence of the widespread and systematic violation of human rights by the Burma Army and EAGs, particularly in the forms of arbitrary arrests, detention, and torture; extrajudicial killings and forced disappearances; rape and other forms of sexual violence; and land, property, and housing rights violations.