Wirathu, Buddhism’s new face
July 27, 2013
Fears of a
new religious strife
Fuelled by a
dangerous brew of faith, ethnicity and politics, a tit-for-tat conflict is
escalating between two of Asia’s biggest religions
THE total
segregation of Buddhist Arakanese from Muslim Rohingyas is now a fact of life
in the western Myanmar port-city of Sittwe. Until June last year both
communities lived side by side in the capital of Rakhine state, but following
several rounds of frenzied violence, the Buddhist majority emptied the city of
its Muslim population. The Rohingya victims now scrape by in squalid refugee
camps beyond the city boundaries. The best that most of them can hope for is to
escape on an overloaded fishing boat to Malaysia. Many of them die trying.
The animosity
between the Rohingya and the local Arakanese in this remote corner of Myanmar
is a consequence of colonial and pre-colonial patterns of settlement. It is an
old and very local affair, and there were hopes that it would stay that way.
Not any more. The assault on the Rohingyas, which cost more than 100 lives and
made over 100,000 homeless, sparked a wildfire of sectarian violence across the
rest of Myanmar which now seems to be spreading to other parts of Asia, too. A
tit-for-tat escalation is going on which, with reason, worries many in the
region
While the actual
bloodletting in Myanmar has abated, at least for now, no let-up has taken place
in the hateful rhetoric directed against the country’s Muslim minority, which
makes up about 5% of the 60m population. Radical monks, led by a notorious
chauvinist, Wirathu, from a monastery in the northern city of Mandalay, have
abandoned any claims to Buddhism as a universal doctrine of compassion and
non-violence. For them Buddhism equates with a narrow nationalism. They argue,
quite simply, that unless the majority-Buddhist population fights back,
Muslims, with alarmingly high birth rates, will overrun the country. On July
22nd he claimed that a small explosion in a car near where he was preaching was
the work of Islamic extremists. It all taps into old resentments against the
big influx of Indians, many of them Muslim, who came into the country on the
coat-tails of British colonialists during the 19th and early 20th centuries.
They ran much of the country’s finance and commerce, and were hated for it by
the indigenous Burmans. Race riots against Indians and Muslims in the 1930s in
Yangon (then Rangoon, the capital) and elsewhere were whipped up then, as now,
by a chauvinist Buddhist press.
The latest
initiative of Mr Wirathu and his cohorts, organised into a group calling itself
“969”, alluding to three core tenets of Buddhism, is to draft a law seeking to
curb interfaith marriages in Myanmar. They propose that Buddhist women must
seek permission from local officials to marry a man of another faith;
meanwhile, the husband-to-be should convert to Buddhism. Under Myanmar’s former
military rule, such ideas had little chance of becoming law, but with the onset
of democracy all that has changed. The fear is that minority parties, desperate
to avoid being wiped out at the next general election by Aung San Suu Kyi’s
all-conquering National League for Democracy (NLD), will take up the monks’
cause for the sake of electoral gain, exploiting—and encouraging—anti-Muslim
sentiment. The National Democratic Force, an NLD offshoot, may introduce the
draft law in parliament, supported by the ethnic Rakhine party.
Another country
where Buddhism is becoming conflated with a growing ethnic and nationalist
identity is Sri Lanka. There the Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) organisation—literally,
“Buddhist force”—made up of members of the country’s ethnic Sinhalese majority,
preaches a doctrine of intolerance against a minority Islamic population (in
this case, about 10% of the country), whose birth rate, they also claim, is
alarmingly high. Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara, a BBS leader, argues that “This is
a Sinhala Buddhist country. We have a Sinhala Buddhist culture. This is not
Saudi Arabia. But you must accept the culture and behave in a manner that
doesn’t harm it.”
The organisation
has been campaigning against Islam on specific issues, such as Halal labelling
on food. More generally, it is accused of inciting mobs to attack mosques and
Muslim-owned shops. The BBS defends the persecution of the Rohingyas in
Myanmar, claiming that Buddhists are acting out of self-preservation. As in
Myanmar, plenty of politicians are ready to promote the agenda of groups like
the BBS by exploiting the ignorance, prejudices and fears of the Buddhist
population.
Already, however, a
Muslim backlash is under way. In Mumbai in India Muslims have marched in
solidarity with the Rohingyas. Muslims may have been responsible for the
bombing on July 7th of one of India’s most revered Buddhist sites, the Bodh
Gaya in Bihar, where Gautama Buddha is said to have obtained enlightenment.
As for Indonesia,
easily the biggest majority-Muslim country in the region, Muslims have been
helping the Rohingyas through donations. Now religious solidarity is taking a
more violent turn in a country with a record of Islamist terrorism. In early
May two Muslim men were arrested for allegedly planning to attack the Myanmar
embassy in Jakarta, the capital, with pipe-bombs. They may have been inspired
by an imprisoned radical cleric, Abu Bakar Basyir, who in April called for a
jihad against Myanmar’s Buddhist population.
Reports have also
surfaced of a meeting in Jakarta on June 19th between one extremist Indonesian
group, the Forum Umat Islam, and two representatives of the Rohingya Solidarity
Organisation (RSO). One Rohingya leader, Abu Shafiya, said that his people are
“weak and unarmed” and so need bombs and training to strike back; he claims to
have 300 people under arms. The RSO is one of several shadowy groups from
either side of the Bangladeshi border with Myanmar that were active some
decades ago. It seems logical that a few desperate Rohingyas might now look for
defence to other Islamist groups. Sidney Jones, an expert on Islamist extremism
in Jakarta, says that the RSO “would be an organisation around which an armed
resistance might coalesce.”
This sort of
development is worrying, yet countervailing pressures may prevent this kind of
violence from spreading too far. On the Muslim side, argues Ahmad Suaedy of
Jakarta’s Abdurrahman Wahid Centre for interfaith dialogue, some jihadist
groups, reared on the fundamentalist doctrines of the Arab world, would regard
the Rohingyas’ brand of Islam as unduly syncretic, even unIslamic, and thus
unworthy of support. On the Buddhist side, meanwhile, many argue that the
aggressive chauvinism that now flourishes among the monks in Sri Lanka and
Myanmar could not take root, say, in Thailand.
That is despite an
insurgency raging in Thailand’s four southernmost provinces, where Muslims are
in a majority. The conflict has cost at least 5,000 lives since 2004. In
fighting the Muslim insurgents, the Thai army has become inextricably bound up
with Buddhist monks. Temples are used as army bases, and “soldier monks” are
said to operate. Armed all-Buddhist self-defence groups exist as well. For
their part, Muslim insurgents have specifically killed Buddhist monks, despite
army protection, as symbols of Thai government authority.
Yet it is
remarkable that the armed struggle has aroused no wider Buddhist backlash
against the Muslim minority in the rest of the country. Maybe this is because
the insurgents target ethnic Chinese and Thais equally in their battle for
self-rule; their fight is not with Buddhism itself. Meanwhile, Thailand’s
Buddhist structure is more hierarchical. The monarch and the political
establishment keep the monks on a tight leash.
Indeed, the first
official peace talks began earlier this year between the Thai government and
some Muslim groups in the south. The hope is that the conflict in Muslim
southern Thailand remains contained. It is not fated to spill over into general
sectarian violence.
From the print
edition: Asia
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