"My interest in Myanmar goes back to the 1950s when the country was called Burma. I first visited it in 1967 but did not begin focusing on it as a scholar until 2007. For the past ten years, it has been my primary policy research project at Brookings. I’ve made about 20 trips from my home in Washington, DC to Myanmar since then and have written many op-eds, research papers, and reports on the country. Whenever I speak to a group about Myanmar, however, one of the first things I say is that if you don’t speak the Burmese language you don’t know what’s going on in this country and you can’t know. And I don’t speak Burmese. So take the words that follow with a grain of salt. They are just my best guess. I have been asked to write about “genocide and violence that has plagued Myanmar.” I’m not an expert on genocide, but I don’t see anything in Myanmar’s post-independence (in 1948) history that looks like an attempt by the government to exterminate by death any group of people living within the country’s borders. What I do see is a pattern of violence by the Buddhist ethnic Bamar majority (at least 60 percent of the population), with the armed forces (Tatmadaw) as its instrument, to forcibly assimilate or subjugate most if not all of the ethnic minority groups, or drive them out into neighboring countries. No other country in the world today is experiencing a civil war that has continued without interruption for this long – 70 years..."