Extremism Rises Among Myanmar Buddhists Wary of Muslim Minority
By THOMAS FULLER
Amid hate-filled speeches and violence, a nationwide fundamentalist
movement has grown with an agenda that now includes boycotts of
Muslim-made goods.
Adam Dean for The New York Times
By THOMAS FULLER
Published: June 20, 2013
TAUNGGYI, Myanmar — After a ritual prayer atoning for past sins, Ashin
Wirathu, a Buddhist monk with a rock-star following in Myanmar, sat
before an overflowing crowd of thousands of devotees and launched into a
rant against what he called “the enemy” — the country’s Muslim
minority.
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“You can be full of kindness and love, but you cannot sleep next to a
mad dog,” Ashin Wirathu said, referring to Muslims.
“I call them troublemakers, because they are troublemakers,” Ashin
Wirathu told a reporter after his two-hour sermon. “I am proud to be
called a radical Buddhist.”
The world has grown accustomed to a gentle image of Buddhism defined by
the self-effacing words of the Dalai Lama, the global popularity of
Buddhist-inspired meditation and postcard-perfect scenes from Southeast
Asia and beyond of crimson-robed, barefoot monks receiving alms from
villagers at dawn.
But over the past year, images of rampaging Burmese Buddhists carrying
swords and the vituperative sermons of monks like Ashin Wirathu have
underlined the rise of extreme Buddhism in Myanmar — and revealed a
darker side of the country’s greater freedoms after decades of military
rule. Buddhist lynch mobs have killed more than 200 Muslims and forced
more than 150,000 people, mostly Muslims, from their homes.
Ashin Wirathu denies any role in the riots. But his critics say that at
the very least his anti-Muslim preaching is helping to inspire the
violence.
What began last year on the fringes of Burmese society has grown into a
nationwide movement whose agenda now includes boycotts of Muslim-made
goods. Its message is spreading through regular sermons across the
country that draw thousands of people and through widely distributed
DVDs of those talks. Buddhist monasteries associated with the movement
are also opening community centers and a Sunday school program for
60,000 Buddhist children nationwide.
The hate-filled speeches and violence have endangered Myanmar’s path to
democracy, raising questions about the government’s ability to keep the
country’s towns and cities safe and its willingness to crack down or
prosecute Buddhists in a Buddhist-majority country. The killings have
also reverberated in Muslim countries across the region, tarnishing what
was almost universally seen abroad as a remarkable and rare peaceful
transition from military rule to democracy. In May, the Indonesian
authorities foiled what they said was a plot to bomb the Myanmar Embassy
in Jakarta in retaliation for the assaults on Muslims.
Ashin Wirathu, the spiritual leader of the radical movement, skates a
thin line between free speech and incitement, taking advantage of
loosened restrictions on expression during a fragile time of transition.
He was himself jailed for eight years by the now-defunct military junta
for inciting hatred. Last year, as part of a release of hundreds of
political prisoners, he was freed.
In his recent sermon, he described the reported massacre of schoolchildren and other Muslim inhabitants in the central city of Meiktila in March, documented by a human rights group, as a show of strength.
“If we are weak,” he said, “our land will become Muslim.”
Buddhism would seem to have a secure place in Myanmar. Nine in 10 people
are Buddhist, as are nearly all the top leaders in the business world,
the government, the military and the police. Estimates of the Muslim
minority range from 4 percent to 8 percent of Myanmar’s roughly 55
million people while the rest are mostly Christian or Hindu.
But Ashin Wirathu, who describes himself as a nationalist, says Buddhism
is under siege by Muslims who are having more children than Buddhists
and buying up Buddhist-owned land. In part, he is tapping into
historical grievances that date from British colonial days when Indians,
many of them Muslims, were brought into the country as civil servants
and soldiers.
The muscular and nationalist messages he has spread have alarmed Buddhists in other countries.
The Dalai Lama, after the riots in March, said killing in the name of
religion was “unthinkable” and urged Myanmar’s Buddhists to contemplate
the face of the Buddha for guidance.
Phra Paisal Visalo, a Buddhist scholar and prominent monk in neighboring
Thailand, says the notion of “us and them” promoted by Myanmar’s
radical monks is anathema to Buddhism. But he lamented that his
criticism and that of other leading Buddhists outside the country have
had “very little impact.”
“Myanmar monks are quite isolated and have a thin relationship with
Buddhists in other parts of the world,” Phra Paisal said. One exception
is Sri Lanka, another country historically bedeviled by ethnic strife.
Burmese monks have been inspired by the assertive political role played
by monks from Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese majority.
As Myanmar has grown more polarized, there have been nascent signs of a backlash against the anti-Muslim preaching.
Among the most disappointed with the outbreaks of violence and hateful
rhetoric are some of the leaders of the 2007 Saffron Revolution, a
peaceful uprising led by Buddhist monks against military rule.
“We were not expecting this violence when we chanted for peace and
reconciliation in 2007,” said the abbot of Pauk Jadi monastery, Ashin
Nyana Nika, 55, who attended a meeting earlier this month sponsored by
Muslim groups to discuss the issue.
Ashin Sanda Wara, the head of a monastic school in Yangon, says the
monks in the country are divided nearly equally between moderates and
extremists.
He considers himself in the moderate camp. But as a measure of the
deeply ingrained suspicions toward Muslims in the society, he said he
was “afraid of Muslims because their population is increasing so
rapidly.”
Ashin Wirathu has tapped into that anxiety, which some describe as the
“demographic pressures” coming from neighboring Bangladesh. There is
wide disdain in Myanmar for a group of about one million stateless
Muslims, who call themselves Rohingya, some of whom migrated from
Bangladesh. Clashes between the Rohingya and Buddhists last year in
western Myanmar roiled the Buddhist community and appear to have played a
role in later outbreaks of violence throughout the country. Ashin
Wirathu said they served as his inspiration to spread his teachings.
The theme song to Ashin Wirathu’s movement speaks of people who “live in
our land, drink our water, and are ungrateful to us.”
“We will build a fence with our bones if necessary,” runs the song’s
refrain. Muslims are not explicitly mentioned in the song but Ashin
Wirathu said the lyrics refer to them. Pamphlets handed out at his
sermon demonizing Muslims said that “Myanmar is currently facing a most
dangerous and fearful poison that is severe enough to eradicate all
civilization.”
Many in Myanmar speculate, without offering proof, that Ashin Wirathu is
allied with hard-line Buddhist elements in the country who want to
harness the nationalism of his movement to rally support ahead of
elections in 2015. Ashin Wirathu denies any such links.
But the government has done little to rein him in. During Ashin
Wirathu’s visit here in Taunggyi, traffic policemen cleared
intersections for his motorcade.
Once inside the monastery, as part of a highly choreographed visit, his
followers led a procession through crowds of followers who prostrated
themselves as he passed.
Ashin Wirathu’s movement calls itself 969, three digits that monks say
symbolize the virtues of the Buddha, Buddhist practices and the Buddhist
community.
Stickers with the movement’s logo are now ubiquitous nationwide on cars,
motorcycles and shops. The movement has also begun a signature campaign
calling for a ban on interfaith marriages, and pamphlets are
distributed at sermons listing Muslim brands and shops to be avoided.
In Mawlamyine, a multicultural city southeast of Yangon, a monastery
linked to the 969 movement has established the courses of Buddhist
instruction for children, which it calls “Sunday dhamma schools.”
Leaders of the monasteries there seek to portray their campaign as a
sort of Buddhist revivalist movement.
“The main thing is that our religion and our nationality don’t
disappear,” said Ashin Zadila, a senior monk at the Myazedi Nanoo
monastery outside the city.
Yet despite efforts at describing the movement as non-threatening, many Muslims are worried.
Two hours before Ashin Wirathu rolled into Taunggyi in a motorcade that
included 60 honking motorcycles, Tun Tun Naing, a Muslim vendor in the
city’s central market, spoke of the visit in a whisper.
“I’m really frightened,” he said, stopping in midsentence when customers
entered his shop. “We tell the children not to go outside unless
absolutely necessary.”
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