Insight Myanmar
“I am not talking as a representative of Anya [Myanmar’s central “dry zone”]. I am just a normal person from Anya,” says Saw Bosco, a Myanmar peace process practitioner, grassroots educator on federalism, and researcher of political economy. In this interview, he reflects in on decades of personal history, national failure, and ongoing struggle, weaving together faith, identity, violence, and economics into a single argument: peace in Myanmar cannot exist without dignity, inclusion, and material survival for ordinary people.
Saw Bosco was raised in a small Catholic community in central Myanmar, part of the Bayingyi people, who were descendants of Portuguese settlers who had been exiled centuries earlier and absorbed into Burmese culture. While the community spoke Burmese, farmed like their neighbors and identified culturally as local, their Catholic faith marked them as different. Growing up, Bosco lived the reality of being a “double minority”: Christian in a Buddhist-majority state and culturally peripheral within a political system that rigidly tied race, religion, and citizenship together. These early experiences formed his understanding that marginalized groups in Myanmar have to try to blend in to survive, even if that does not mean a commensurate level of protection within society and under the law.
Bosco expands on this point, explaining that Christian identity in Myanmar is experienced differently depending on where one lives. In ethnic-majority Christian states—such as Chin, Kachin, and parts of Karen—religious life can be practiced more publicly, though still under state constraint. Elsewhere, the experience is more fraught and complex. In practice, Myanmar’s administrative system operates as though ethnicity and religion are fixed, mutually reinforcing categories. Those whose identities do not align with these expectations often become administratively suspect; Bamar or mixed-heritage Christians, in particular, do not fit the state’s standardized race-religion templates, leading to recurring bureaucratic scrutiny. National identity cards, citizenship status, passports, university access, and employment eligibility are frequently questioned, delayed, or denied when religious identity does not correspond with the ethnicity the system expects. While similar obstacles exist in Christian-majority ethnic states, recognized ethnicity there provides an administrative legibility that makes Christian identity more intelligible to the system—and therefore less fraught.
After the 2021 coup, this general vulnerability of non-Buddhist Bamar or mixed heritage Christians intensified into targeted violence. Christian villages in Sagaing were burned not only for resisting military control but also because religious differences became an excuse for soldiers to justify more destructive action, even if the victims shared ethnicity or kinship with them. Boscois careful to note that military brutality has affected communities across religious and ethnic lines, and often in more deliberate, overt and brutal ways, most famously the terrible violence against the Rohingya; at the same time, however, he wants to highlight this lesser known kind of violence against non-Buddhist Bamar/mixed-heritage Burmese, which has affected him and his family directly.
Bosco then turns to identity politics more broadly. He situates authorities’ obsession with race and religion within colonial-era classification systems that were later weaponized by the military. Over time, the state promoted rigid ethnic categories, encouraging communities to cling to identity for survival while simultaneously denying protection. Mixed-heritage individuals, like Bosco, often found no political home. He recalls hesitating to work under any single ethnic banner during peacebuilding efforts, aware that mistrust could surface at any moment.
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