By Dr. Habib
Siddiqui
MARCH 23, 2013
It was not too long
ago that we witnessed the grisly massacre of minority Rohingya Muslims in the
Arakan (Rakhine) state of Myanmar (Burma). Many of the western observers who
grew up seeing the smiling face of Dalai Lama were simply shocked to see armed
Buddhist monks participating in that ethnic cleansing of the unarmed Rohingya
Muslims. Not only had the monks participated in those violent criminal acts
with their fellow Buddhist Rakhine zealots terrorizing the minority Muslims of
the western frontier state but they were also guilty of providing the very
rationale – a criminal one - for such inhuman crimes against the members of a
non-Buddhist faith who were different ethnically, culturally and religiously.
In that pogrom, while
we may never know the exact casualty figure because of government complicity in
the tragedy – Rohingyas probably died in thousands, and hundreds remain
unaccounted for even after nine months. With international pressure, and
worldwide condemnation, while that pogrom of last year (May-October, 2012)
against the minority Rohingyas has stopped, albeit temporarily, there were many
ominous signs for any keen observer to predict of a troubling future awaiting
the non-Buddhists living inside Myanmar.
The Buddhist monks in
Myanmar with very few exceptions have essentially become not only the
collaborators of the quasi-military regime that runs the country but also the
vanguards of a new Myanmarism in which people who are different are
increasingly marginalized and/or dehumanized. Buddhist monks, dependent on
begging and handouts, have had always thrived on donations and gifts made by
others, esp. the rich patrons and Buddhist kings. That benevolent role is now
filled in by the government. (As the Muslim and Hindu lands are confiscated,
their homes and shops, religious centers, shrines and mosques burnt down or
razed to the ground often times Buddhist pagodas are built on such confiscated
or evicted and destroyed places.) The level of collaboration runs so deep that
when last year the so-called reform minded President Thein Sein called for
expelling the Rohingyas to a third country and that the UN should take charge
of them, it was the Buddhist monks who were at the forefront of the processions
demanding such expulsion. They have hitherto called upon the government to
creating apartheid zones for the Muslim minorities, away from the Buddhist
majority people, let alone demanding the exclusion of Muslims from jobs, and
even enacting laws that prohibit selling to and buying from Muslims. It is an
all-out apartheid system that they have been promoting against the
much-discriminated and despised non-Buddhist minorities in the
Buddhist-majority Myanmar.
As a result, in
recent months tens of thousands of Rohingya Muslims have become the ‘boat
people’ of the Southeast Asia braving the scorching sun and tumultuous seas
hoping to find a place under the sun in this vast planet of ours to live
without being slaughtered like lambs in the slaughterhouse of Myanmar. Hundreds
have died and many have ended up in prisons. The Christian-majority Kachin
state to the north is also bleeding because of marauding attacks from the
Myanmar government forces there. Nearly a quarter million internally displaced
persons of the Christian and Muslim faiths now live in sub-human conditions in
Kachin and Rakhine states, respectively. Buddhist monks and politicians have
also barred necessary relief items from reaching the intended victims.
Tomas Ojea Quintana,
U.N. Special Rapporteur for human rights in Burma, recently told the U.N. Human
Rights Council that rights violations linked to the Kachin conflict—along with
ethnic tensions between Rohingya Muslims and Rakhine Buddhists in western
Burma—remain unresolved in Myanmar. “While the process of reform is continuing
in the right direction, there are significant human rights shortcomings that
remain unaddressed, such as discrimination against the Rohingya in Rakhine
state and the ongoing human rights violations in relation to the conflict in Kachin
state,” said Quintana, who visited Burma last month.
Obviously, Buddhism
has failed and is failing miserably or so it seems when it comes to
enlightening the savage and non-enlightened souls amongst its own people inside
Myanmar. The word ‘non-violence’ has lost its meaning in Myanmar. One only has
to be different, the ‘other’ people – racially or religiously – to see the ugly
side of such pogroms, which have sadly become the norms and not exceptions.
So, it was not a
question of why but when we would be revisited by a new violence. As the recent
events in Meikhtila, a town roughly 80 miles north of the capital Naypyidaw,
showed Myanmar is increasingly becoming difficult and almost impossible for
non-Buddhists to live in this once multi-racial and multi-religious country.
Last Wednesday, a
heated argument between a Muslim gold shop owner in Meikhtila and his Buddhist
customers erupted, which spiraled into a street brawl. Soon thereafter Buddhist
mobs roamed the streets with sticks and swords and set Muslim buildings ablaze.
Rioting and arson attacks spread on Friday to villages outside Meiktila, as
mobs of Buddhists, some led by monks, continued a three-day rampage through
Muslim areas. Several mosques were burned down. Hundreds of Muslim homes were ransacked
first and then set on fire.
According to the New
York Times (NYT), witnesses reached by phone said security forces did little to
stop the violence. “Mobs were destroying buildings and killing people in cold
blood,” said U Nyan Lynn, a former political prisoner who witnessed what he
described as massacres. “Nobody stopped them — I saw hundreds of riot police
there.”
“Images from Meiktila
showed entire neighborhoods burned to the ground, some with only blackened
trees left standing. Lifeless legs poked from beneath rubble. And charred
corpses spoke to the use of fire as a main tool of the rioting mobs,” writes
Thomas Fuller of the NYT.
“I can’t handle what
I saw there,” said Daw Nilar Thein, a human rights activist. She described the
violence as anarchic and unspeakable.
One video posted to
Facebook by Radio Free Asia on Friday showed Muslim women and men cowering and
shielding their heads from flying objects as they fled their attackers.
Onlookers are overheard shouting, “Oooh! Look how many of them. Kill them! Kill
them!”
On Friday, a group of
Buddhist monks threatened news photographers, including one who works for The
Associated Press, with a sword and homemade weapons. With a monk holding a
blade to his neck, U Khin Maung Win, the A.P. photographer, handed over his
camera’s memory card. “We are trying to leave the town,” Mr. Khin Maung Win
said by telephone. “They are now after journalists, too.”
Just as in Arakan the
past year, those Buddhists behind the violence in Meiktila are trying to stop
images of the destruction from getting out.
The exact numbers of
those killed and injured since Wednesday in Meikhtila are still unknown, but
the numbers may reach more than 100.
Whatever the figure,
the culture of impunity surrounding ethnic violence must end in Myanmar. Who
would have thought that a failed sales negotiation in a jewelry shop would
trigger a religious riot? The whole episode smells of the Hitler-era Nazism in
which Jewish homes and businesses were targeted by his dreaded SS. In Myanmar’s
context, the Buddhist monks and their inspired zealots within the Buddhist
population are increasingly behaving like those criminal SS thugs of the Nazi
era. It is, thus, not difficult to understand why in such pre-planned sinister
riots the security forces behave more as spectators -- if they, of course,
choose not to join the Buddhist mob -- than as law enforcing government agents.
As I have maintained
before, these kinds of targeted violence against Muslims and other religious
minorities do enjoy wider popular support within this Buddhist-majority
apartheid state and are endorsed from the top echelon in politics. Shamelessly,
therefore, the lawmakers like opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi have remained
silent on how to the end ethnic violence racking the country in recent months.
Like many human
rights advocates and activists, Mark Farmaner of Burma Campaign UK has
condemned such sinister silence. Recently he said, "Staying silent is
clearly not working, because in that vacuum, those who are inciting more
violence are free to operate when they need to be challenged and tackled head
on." "There needs to be a change of approach not just from Suu Kyi,”
he says, “but from all the political and religious leaders in the country to
acknowledge that there is this growing anti-Muslim feeling in the
country."
The Euro-Burma
Office, a respected Brussels-based advocacy group, warned on Friday of a
"Rwandan-like genocide" of Myanmar's Muslims.
As we have noticed
previously with the Rakhine state, President Thein Sein has issued a state of
emergency on Friday. The state-run New Light of Myanmar newspaper has urged the
public to expose those who led and attempted to instigate.
Muslims have been put
in Meiktila’s sports stadium, where food and water are scarce. Photographs
showed frightened-looking people rushing to the stadium, clutching belongings
and carrying their children and the elderly, amid jeering Buddhist crowds.
The state of
emergency is a half-hearted reactive measure that will not prevent Muslims and
other vulnerable minorities from becoming objects of ethnic cleansing and
religious riots in the future.
"Governments are
meant to guarantee rights, ensure that people are treated equally before the
law, that nondiscrimination is the rule of the land, and that minorities have
their rights protected," said Phil Robertson of Human Rights Watch.
"After seeing this [violence in Meikhtila], would anyone be confident in
saying that the government is doing a good job?"
Surely not! But with
western appetite for Myanmar’s natural resources on the rise, human rights have
taken a back seat. And thus, none of the veto-wielding countries are stopping
this extermination campaign against the Muslims of Myanmar, and punishing the
regime for its monumental failure, or worse yet collusion, to safeguarding
their lives and properties. In their failure, the notion of Buddhists,
especially monks, rampaging through Muslim neighborhoods with weapons is
becoming a recurring phenomenon. And this must stop not only for the health of
Buddhism but also for greater good of humanity.