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

by Francis Wade

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.