May 8, 2013
Mustafa Akyol
Burma, a country that has been tyrannized by a military junta since
1962, is being terrorized by an additional force these days: Buddhist
militants, who carry out systematic arsons, tortures and massacres
against the country’s tiny Muslim minority.
First, a few facts: 89 percent of the population of Burma is Buddhist.
Muslims only make up some 4 percent of the society. But they are a
relatively affluent community, which has led to resentment against them
by the militants of the majority. In Arakan (a.k.a. Rakhine), the only
state where Muslims make up a majority, the Burmese government and the
militants allied with them have initiated an “ethnic cleansing of
Muslims” as the Human Rights Watch have put it. (See HRW Report titled,
“Crimes Against Humanity and Ethnic Cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in
Burma’s Arakan State.”)
In the past two years, the campaign against Burmese Muslims has
intensified. It is spearheaded by a militant Buddhist movement called
“969.” Their leader is a monk named Ashin Wirathu, who proudly called
himself “the Burmese Bin Laden.” He simply advocates a Muslim-free
Burma, as he once proudly explained to the BBC: “Around the world there
are many Muslim countries. They should go there. The Muslim countries
will take care of them. They should go to countries with the same
religion.”
To make sure that Muslims really go, Wirathu’s followers routinely
terrorize them, in pogroms similar to what Jews went through at the hand
of European anti-Semites. Just last week, for example, Buddhist mobs
attacked mosques and burned more than 70 homes in the Rangoon province,
after a Muslim girl on a bicycle collided with a monk. In many similar
instances of Buddhist violence, the HRW reports: “[Muslim] Rohingya men,
women, and children were killed, some were buried in mass graves, and
their villages and neighborhoods were razed. While the state security
forces in some instances intervened to prevent violence and protect
fleeing Muslims, more frequently they stood aside during attacks or
directly supported the assailants, committing killings and other abuses…
Buddhist monks have [even] protested against international aid for
Rohingya, physically blocked aid deliveries, and threatened aid
workers.”
But isn’t this a bit confusing? Isn’t Buddhism a religion of poor
pacifist monks and yoga-loving hip Westerners? How can this “religion of
peace,” as it is often seen, be the driving force for such horror?
That was a question also asked by Alan Strathern, an academic expert on
Burma, in a recent BBC piece titled, “Why are Buddhist monks attacking
Muslims?” His answer was rooted less in theology, and more in politics:
Burmese Muslims, he argued, are simply “a religious minority used as the
scapegoat for the frustrated aspirations of the majority.” The peace
preached in Buddhist texts did not mean much, in other words, once you
had Buddhists enraged in their socio-political context.
For long, I have been arguing that the same thing is true for Muslims as
well: The Bin Ladens of the world (the original versions, not the
Buddhist version) arise from the political troubles of the Muslim
societies rather than the texts of Islam. Yet there are many who like
selling Islamophobia (the argument that “Islam is the problem”), and
there are many who like buying it. Taking a look at Burma is a sobering
corrective to their worldview.
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