With my local aid worker friend I also discussed the interactions that are currently possible between polarized communities in Rakhine State. In Sittwe and in IDP camps nearby, options are clearly very limited. Rohingya Muslims live in Sittwe’s Aung Mingalar quarter and in camps. Rakhine Buddhists live everywhere else. Security barriers keep the groups apart. In remote Rohingya towns and villages there is also little inter-communal contact. Indeed, often the only non-Muslims in the vicinity are state employees: teachers, healthcare workers, local officials, security personnel.

In between, though, some townships still contain both Buddhists and Muslims. They tend to pursue separate lives, and from time to time incidents flare up between them. While both peoples are thus present, they are not integrated but rather distinct communities living side by side. They thereby illustrate perfectly the notion of the plural society famously devised by British colonial official J S Furnivall at the time of Burmese independence. In Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India, published in 1948, he described such a society in this way: “It is in the strictest sense a medley, for [the peoples] mix but do not combine. Each group holds by its own religion, its own culture and language, its own ideas and ways. As individuals they meet, but only in the market-place, in buying and selling.”

There is, though, in Furnivall’s plural society that single point of contact: the marketplace. Similarly, in plural townships across Rakhine State today this is often the one location where Buddhists and Muslims still interact. Held daily in large towns, and rotating weekly through small ones, markets have for many people become the sole context in which talk and exchange are possible across a forbidding cultural divide.

Moreover, this experience mirrors others around the world. In the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, ethnic cleansing drove communities wide apart and made bringing them back together enormously difficult. Gradually, though, cracks began to develop in the walls that separated them. Going Nowhere Fast: Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons in Bosnia and Herzegovina, an ICG report issued in May 1997, made this point about those cracks: “The first, and in many ways the most important, was the rebirth of commercial ties exemplified by the establishment of the so-called Arizona Market in the [Zone of Separation] near Brcko only a few days after the [Dayton Peace Agreement] was signed. Citizens of all three ethnic groups, and of the nearby states, began flocking to the Arizona Market to do business and make money.”

It’s not much to go on, and at a time of 969 Buddhist boycotts of Muslim traders it may not offer much hope. Nevertheless, it does seem that if these two communities could be helped to maintain the trading links that continue to function, and perhaps even to rebuild those that have collapsed, tensions between them might start to diminish.