Myanmar's Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and the Making of a Muslim 'Other' (Asian Arguments)

by Francis Wade

The targets of the resentment that fuelled those nationalist movements began, over the course of the 1920s and 1930s, to widen to include the country’s Muslims, particularly the new arrivals from the subcontinent. Hindus were spared much of the ire, for they were better able to assimilate, but local Buddhist women who married Muslim men often converted, and raised their children as Muslims. They were seen to be diluting the bloodline. But there was a second catalyst for the anger that began to be directed at them: these new communities were seen as stooges of the British – an additional foreign presence that might, if left unchecked, eat away at the Buddhist values that for so long had provided a bedrock for Myanmar society.

The frequency with which scholars of Myanmar attribute the consolidation of the Ayeyarwady Valley communities in the twelfth century to the beginnings of the country’s modern history speaks to the widespread belief, heavily reinforced by the junta after it took power in 1962, that Myanmar is and always was a Bamar Buddhist country – that to be Bamar, and therefore a true son of the soil, means to be Buddhist, and that a threat to one was a threat to the other.

Under the rein of King Pagan Min in the mid-nineteenth century, a Muslim served as governor of Amarapura, the old capital. Although they were never significant political movers and shakers, Muslims had been close to the centres of power, and the country had on the whole enjoyed a pluralistic society.

Grievances among the Buddhist population of Yangon only intensified as colonial rule dragged on and a feeling hardened that they were being subordinated to foreigners. And in time, a strange phenomenon began to occur: Muslim communities in Myanmar that could trace their roots back centuries suddenly came to be lumped together with the more recent arrivals, and all they stood for as threats to the “traditional” order that the early kings had crafted.

Partly in response to the campaigns of agitation led by predominantly Bamar figures, the British had drafted soldiers from the Kayin, the Kachin and other smaller ethnicities into their army, as well as Muslims, and awarded them positions above that of Bamar. They were seen as more trustworthy than these other dissenters who had led the charge against British rule. But that ill-thought-out policy of the British backfired in more ways than one. Not only were the flames of resentment towards them further fanned, but the independence movement of the 1920s and 1930s developed an ethnic and religious chauvinism towards non-Bamar and non-Buddhist that would carry well into the post-independence era, splitting the country along multiple lines and paving the way for decades of conflict.

What began after the coup in 1962 was a process of forced assimilation of different identity groups into the ethnic majority sphere, and the banishing of those that would never conform to the ideal nation. In doing so, the dangers posed by other races, internal or external, to the “national race” would lessen, and the sense of unity and harmony that had been so disrupted by foreign rule would be finally returned to the country.

if one could “become” another, perhaps by changing clothes or switching loyalties, then it brought into question a claim so often repeated by the nationalists of today: that members of each group were defined by innate characteristics that had remained unchanged across millennia and that established members of one as the natural ruler of the country, the master race, and all others as secondary citizens, or worse.

But because the group was absent from the list of 135 groups, so its members would be absented from the nation. In 1989, as their security grew increasingly imperilled, immigration officers went among Rohingya communities in Rakhine State demanding they turn in the Foreign Registration Cards they too had been given in the mid-1970s and await a new Citizenship Scrutiny Card. But those who still argued for a Rohingya identity, or who the government considered to be in the country illegally, were not given ID cards, and were refused re-registration. From that point on, the legal status of anyone who subscribed to the Rohingya identity began to crumble.

These were the first salvos in a popular revolt that the following year would crystallise into the Kachin armed rebellion. Also denied self-determination and the accompanying guarantees for respect of their cultural practices, the Kachin, a sizeable proportion of whom were Christian, understood that if Buddhism were to become the state religion in a country populated by multiple faith groups then it would codify the predominance of those who subscribed to Buddhism. The result would be to further push ethnic and religious minorities to the periphery.

When particular identity labels bring power and prestige, individuals often cleave tighter to them. But for others, like Hla Hla or anyone that comes from a subordinated group, there is often a compulsion to morph from one to another. Rather than this providing evidence of an innate superiority in the master ethnicity, this phenomenon shows that the identity, or identities, we subscribe to have less of a bearing on our inner nature than some might like to think. Our ability to move between groups is surely a reflection of that old dictum, that our similarities are more powerful than our differences.

Long before Islam became the dominant threat in the Rakhine imagination, the independence of the Rakhine people, and their freedom to follow their own customs and traditions, was snatched from them. Their once mighty kingdom, encompassing much of present-day eastern Bangladesh as well as the western flank of Myanmar, was annexed by a king who sat on a throne hundreds of miles away and ruled with little regard for the traditional norms of his new subjects. They came to be managed by his people, under his strictures. Yet the power of this new and remote authority, projected from afar, had a curious effect, for it began to erode the tradition of inclusivity that had once been a marker of Rakhine culture.

In an environment such as that shaped by the military in Myanmar, where ethnic groupings reified by the colonial power were cemented as primordial “facts,” the longevity of a particular identity label was seen to determine, quite wrongly, the individual lineages of those who subscribed to it.

Great use of reified

The architects of Rohingya statelessness would know this too. The alienation of this community from the once-plural society of Rakhine State, and the nation more broadly, and the loss of dignity that accompanied the stripping of their basic rights fuelled a process that, over the decades, has come to see the group dehumanised and ostracised altogether.

The regime’s rescue plan took shape in the elaborate model village scheme, which over the years would see Buddhists, invariably the poor or condemned, shifted out from their hometowns and organised into new communities. They would correct the demographic imbalance, one that was considered proof enough that Islam was gaining strength in Myanmar. Buddhists had by then become a minority in northern Rakhine State, and for the regime, that meant a weakening of its ability to project its power there. So the Buddhist prisoners were brought out of their cells to begin new lives far away.

Among other strategies listed was the denial of higher education to Rohingya and a ban on construction, even repair, of mosques and madrasas. But Rohingya would also be persistently referred to as insurgents in order to strengthen justification for their denial of citizenship after 1982, while marriages would be restricted “and all possible methods of repression and suppression [used] against them … to reduce the population growth.”

By swamping the area with a new demographic, the regime hoped to exercise greater control over a region where its authority was weak. The only quality required of participants was that they be Buddhist. It mattered little that some were violent criminals, or that they might hold no sympathy towards the regime’s expansionist aims. Religion, like ethnicity, had long before become a principal barometer in determining, if not allegiance to, then affiliation with, the state, and the recruits would play the role of purifiers of a land being steadily swallowed up by Muslims. These villages, like the Israeli settler enclaves in the West Bank, would become the “facts on the ground” that served as proof that Buddhism was alive and well there.

Amid the maelstrom that followed World War Two in Myanmar a Muslim insurgency developed in Rakhine State, focused predominantly in the north. Known as the Mujahids, many of its members had been trained by the British during the war to battle the Japanese and their erstwhile Rakhine collaborators. Fearful of the prospect that the British would soon leave Myanmar, and aware that nearby Muslim-majority regions like Chittagong in present-day Bangladesh would soon join East Pakistan, they too demanded the inclusion of northern Rakhine State in the newly formed Muslim nation. Some even called for an entirely independent Muslim country.

By 2011, 29 schools had been built across the country, a third of which were in Chin State. But reports quickly began to surface of the forced conversion to Buddhism of the Christian students who were induced to enrol by the incentives offered – cheap or free education, food and board in a region of Myanmar where nearly three-quarters of the population live below the poverty line12 and where hunger is endemic.

It seemed the “advancement” of the communities in Myanmar’s periphery, pledged by the Ministry for the Development of Border Areas and National Races years before, wasn’t all encompassing. Except for the soldiers it deployed to battle insurgents and its project to convert Christians to Buddhism, Chin State remained off the radar of the regime, its roads, like its people, entirely neglected.

Then the village leader threw bricks at my house and villagers beat me and my wife. They said you have no right to stay here. A monk told me that if I converted back to Buddhism then I would be accepted; if not I would never be accepted. But I had already decided to become a Baptist.

Shadowy agents of the regime were dressed in robes and planted in monasteries across the country, while monastic committees were organised right from the village level to the state level to monitor “misbehaviour” among their fellow monks. It is likely from this committee and its ancillary networks that the missionary monks sent to Chin State were chosen, for their loyalty to the regime had already been certified.

Civilians, such as the Chin of Naing Ki’s village whose own ethnic identity had long before put them in the crosshairs of the military, began to pursue in their own ways the objectives of a state of whose methods of manipulation they too had been victims.

They had already been the target of a major pogrom in 1978, under the name Operation Nagamin, or King Dragon. Ne Win had ordered immigration officials and soldiers to scrutinise all those living in the border regions of Myanmar to determine who were citizens and who were “foreigners who have filtered into the country illegally.”15 But it mainly focused on Rakhine State, and its principal target was the Rohingya.

The restrictions on movement began in Sittwe in 1997, and then rippled out across the state. Along the east–west road between Maungdaw and Buthidaung in the north are a series of checkpoints where police inspect the identity papers and travel documents of passing Rohingya.

The only university in a state long neglected by the central government is in Sittwe, and before the violence the two communities studied there side by side. But with Rohingya blocked from leaving the camps around Sittwe and the ghettos inside of it, and forbidden to board the boat at Buthidaung jetty that once ferried them down to the state capital, their access to higher education was completely severed and another zone of cultural and intellectual exchange eliminated.

The routine stop-and-search of vehicles to check for Rohingya passengers greatly amplified the perception of the group as a security threat. This in turn fed the narrative, made so explicit by their denial of citizenship in 1982, that they were a lesser people. The process of distinguishing them so drastically from other groups in Rakhine State, not only in a religious or ethnic sense, but now legally, criminally, would provide more robust grounds for the violence that eventually erupted in 2012.

By October Sittwe had become entirely segregated. Nasi had long since been emptied, and the only Rohingya communities still in the town were confined to two quarters, Bumay and Aung Mingalar. Armed police manned the barricades that had been erected at the entrances to both quarters after the June violence, and it was with them that I had needed to negotiate access. Families in Aung Mingalar were struggling to bring food and medicine in. No one could walk to the market in Sittwe any longer. Police allowed limited provisions to pass through the checkpoints, but it had to all intents and purposes become a barricaded ghetto.

Other accounts of police violence emerged from the June 2012 attacks, fuelling speculation of official complicity in what unfolded in Rakhine State that year. They would also circulate in the violence that came the following year, in towns in central Myanmar where security forces were caught on camera standing and watching inert as Buddhist mobs attacked Muslims. By then it was clear that both Rakhine political parties and the government had little intention of safeguarding the lives of Rohingya, for they had long been denied even the meagre protections afforded to others. But the accounts of police actually participating in attacks further raised suspicions of a higher hand in the violence.

The tensions continued to mount, and on 21 October 2012, a Rakhine man in Mrauk U was caught selling rice to a Muslim customer. A group of fellow Rakhine descended on his stall with clubs and beat him to death.

When the reactions to the violence of June 2012 began to be aired, it wasn’t merely the extent of anti-Rohingya hostility that surprised at first, but rather that hostility towards the group wasn’t locked to a particular political orientation. There is often a tendency to associate xenophobic sentiment with a far right mentality, but that didn’t seem to hold true for Myanmar in those years.

Over and again, when questioned on the matter, Suu Kyi pointedly refused to be drawn. She was evasive, never using the name “Rohingya,” lest hardline nationalists viewed that as recognition of the group.

had unthinkingly equated the concept of democracy with the principle of tolerance for all, but in the harsh light of 2012, this seemed woefully misinformed. And the surprise wasn’t reserved only for that movement. When monk groups began to fan the flames of violent chauvinism in Rakhine State, and in time elsewhere in the country, the narrative of Buddhism as inherently peaceful began to stretch at the seams.

In November 2012, a month after the second wave of violence hit Rakhine State, the RNDP ran an editorial in its magazine, the Development Journal. It read: Hitler and Eichmann were the enemy of the Jews, but they were probably heroes to the Germans … In order for a country’s survival, the survival of a race, or in defense of national sovereignty, crimes against humanity or in-human acts may justifiably be committed … So, if that survival principle or justification is applied or permitted equally (in our Myanmar case) our endeavors to protect our Rakhine race and defend the sovereignty and longevity of the Union of Myanmar cannot be labeled as “crimes against humanity,” or “inhuman” or “in-humane.”

Five months after the second wave of violence in Rakhine, attacks on Muslims erupted in towns across central Myanmar. They took a similar course: a small trigger incident followed quickly by the arrival of mobs that levelled neighbourhoods and sent Muslims fleeing to camps. Other similarities also emerged: the circulation of leaflets beforehand warning of the Muslim threat, except that this threat wasn’t now limited to Rakhine State but to Myanmar more broadly.

junta. In July 1988, as resentment towards Ne Win’s rule simmered, attacks on Muslims occurred in Pyay and Taunggyi, with claims that the junta at the time had orchestrated them to divert attention from protests breaking out across the country. There had been similar claims following anti-Chinese riots in the late 1960s and 1970s that coincided with soaring inflation and growing public disquiet. There seemed to be a logic to the claims: splitting communities perceived to be united in their opposition to the military allowed the focus of anger to be redirected horizontally, rather than towards the oppressive military apparatus that had brought these communities close to economic ruin.

The suspicion among residents of Meikhtila that the violence had been planned in advance was heightened by the arrival of mobs composed of people unfamiliar to locals there. “When I saw them they seemed totally drunk – they had lost their senses,” Sandar said of the men that stalked the streets of the town. Despite their condition, they had still managed to destroy more than 800 houses in less than 72 hours, and without inviting intervention from security forces. Vijay Nambiar, UN Special Envoy to Myanmar at the time of the Meikhtila violence, had spoken of a “brutal efficiency” to the killings14 – that these weren’t the work of blind rage alone, but something more organised.

“Those Buddhists in jail I spoke with were hired; they were not from Lashio,” he explained. “They were just workers going from one township to another. People approached them from outside the township, saying ‘Come with me, we will do this and this’. But they wouldn’t say who these people were. They were silent and of course they were frightened.”

But there evidently had been an organised effort to block information about the violence from reaching the UN, and the nearby policeman who did nothing to intervene was culpable in that. Why exactly it wasn’t clear, but theories began to circulate that perhaps civilian-on-civilian violence could prove beneficial for the military, which controls the police via the Home Affairs Ministry. One supposition that gained traction among those watching the events of 2012 and 2013 went that factions of the regime that were nervous about the potential for the transition to eat away at their influence might either manufacture, or allow to take hold, violence that appeared communal in nature. Greater political bargaining rights could be dangerous in a society with such deep fissures, so it went, for the populace was apparently already prone to conflict and this would only drive violent competition for the spoils of a democratic state. The scenes that emerged from Meikhtila and elsewhere would show that Myanmar was not ready for the military to step back. As a result, it could remain in a position that allowed it to protect its substantial political and economic interests.

After Meikhtila there was more violence, and it moved in mysterious ways. There is a highway that runs north from Yangon towards Pyay, and if you were to plot on a map the sites of unrest that occurred along that route in the eight days during and after Meikhtila then a neat line would form, starting in the small town of Thegon and ending in Tharawaddy. Somehow it travelled along that road, striking 11 towns, each roughly five kilometres from one another, in little over a week.

In the years after the violence I spoke with numbers of Muslims, and even Buddhists with Muslim relatives, who said that obtaining an ID card had become increasingly difficult. Officials at the immigration offices where they went to renew their IDs were refusing to register them as Bamar Muslims, as they had done before. Even the offer of a bribe no longer worked, and new nationalities were being forcibly added to the cards: Indian, Bangladeshi or Pakistan, for surely no Muslim could be purely Bamar. The violence had further Othered the Muslims of Myanmar in a legal sense too, for it was authorities who were questioning with greater intensity the claims to belonging of people who before had been recognised as indigenous.

But as we went, the translator exclaimed that she had been impressed with the wealth of information the monk had. I was surprised. My thoughts had been moving in the opposite direction. Many of the statements U Wirathu made appeared so obviously baseless that it felt almost pointless to question them. Did she believe the claim that Muslims were responsible for all rapes in the country? She wasn’t sure, but had come to understand the significance of the threat facing Buddhism in Myanmar. We reached the road and parted ways. I returned to Yangon several days later. Soon afterwards a message came through on my phone. “I watched Wirathu CD. I feel very angry – they take our air, water, land; they make terrorism!” It had come from the young man who had organised our meeting. Only days before he had thought the monk to be a dangerously provocative figure. All it had taken was a DVD to flip him and to bring to his attention the supposed enemies in his midst.

U Win Htein had also grown suspicious of the reasons for police inaction. The officers deployed to Mingalar Zayone that morning appeared to have allowed armed men to pass between them and pick out Muslims hiding in the house, before taking them outside and beating them to death. There may have been a number of motives, he thought. One is that the police were ordered not to do anything. The second is that they were not given any specific instructions. I don’t know which. Why might the first possibility have happened? Because the government wanted the problem to get bigger and bigger. The MPs, especially me, represent the people from Meikhtila, and they want those people to think that I didn’t do enough to solve the problem. They want to blame me.

Monks like U Wirathu and U Wimala continued to tour the country and disseminate anti-Muslim propaganda through Facebook and other social media websites, meaning the potential for violence remained present.

Ma Ba Tha’s success with the laws reinforced a feeling of symbiosis between the nationalist monks and the military-aligned Union Solidarity and Development Party.

Exiled media organisations, once a key pillar of the pro-democracy movement, soon came to be targeted too. Their shortwave radio and television broadcasts that were beamed into the country from outside had comprised the only independent, uncensored source of information during military rule, but they came to be slandered as “pro-Bengali” for reporting on atrocities committed by Buddhists in Rakhine State. Very quickly, the importance of the nationalist cause had outflanked that of the democratic cause among a sizeable portion of the Buddhist population. Not only that, but the nationalist movement had become a chief threat to the transition, for its hostility towards calls for inclusivity played so neatly into the hands of regressive forces that had no desire to see the democratic opening come to fruition.

Once again it was triggered by reports of the rape of a Buddhist girl by two Muslim teashop owners. The allegations were first published on a Myanmar-language news aggregation website, Thit Htoo Lwin, but with the help of U Wirathu’s by then prominent social media presence, the report circulated quickly. On his Facebook page, the abbot named the teashop, and the next day a mob gathered outside. But the allegations had been cooked up, authorities later stated – the girl had been paid by two local men to fabricate the story.

The monastic order in Myanmar wasn’t the monolithic entity it sometimes appeared from afar; there were many monks within it who, as the violence spread, began to articulate Buddhist responses to the posturing of the ultra-nationalist monks,

It wasn’t the first time Ma Ba Tha had been able to influence a legal case so effectively. In October 2014, Htin Lin Oo, an information officer in the NLD, had given a speech in which he decried the fusion of violent nationalism and Buddhism. A video of the speech circulated on social media, and two months later he was arrested and charged with “outraging religious feelings.” He underwent a seven-month trial, and from time to time when he was taken from his cell to face the judge there would be monks outside the courthouse demanding the strongest sentence possible. That was eventually realised. In June the following year he was given a two-year prison term with hard labour.

The Myanmar National Network toured schools in rural areas of the country, and in front of audiences of young children explained the horrors committed by Muslims elsewhere in the world. At one gathering that was caught on film, a teacher holds up a banner showing images of the bloodshed in Syria and asks, “Who is committing these violent murders?” In unison, the children shout “Islam!”

U Parmoukkha leant forward, speaking slowly, each word clearly enunciated: “That is radicalism.” I paused. But what about cases when Buddhists attack Buddhists on the street? In Buddhist teaching it is taught that you cannot harm other people. So the person who harms is not someone who follows Buddhist teaching. There cannot be radical Buddhists. I don’t know whether the people who say they are Buddhist and then attack only temporarily follow Buddhism, or whether they do not follow it at all. He seemed to be suggesting there was an on–off switch available to Buddhists; that for the time taken to commit an act that violated the sanctity of their belief, they could step outside of their faith. It was in stark contrast to narratives of violence committed by Muslims, which were underpinned by a sense that theirs was an inborn evil, a constant – something core to their very being, and thus ineradicable.