March 24, 2013
Asia Tribune
Dr. Habib Siddiqui
It was not too long ago that we witnessed the grisly massacre of
minority Rohingya Muslims in the Arakan (Rakhine) state of Myanmar
(Burma). Many of the western observers who grew up seeing the smiling
face of Dalai Lama were simply shocked to see armed Buddhist monks
participating in that ethnic cleansing of the unarmed Rohingya Muslims.
Not only had the monks participated in those violent criminal acts
with their fellow Buddhist Rakhine zealots terrorizing the minority
Muslims of the western frontier state but they were also guilty of
providing the very rationale – a criminal one - for such inhuman crimes
against the members of a non-Buddhist faith who were different
ethnically, culturally and religiously.
In that pogrom, while we may never know the exact casualty figure
because of government complicity in the tragedy – Rohingyas probably
died in thousands, and hundreds remain unaccounted for even after nine
months. With international pressure, and worldwide condemnation, while
that pogrom of last year (May-October, 2012) against the minority
Rohingyas has stopped, albeit temporarily, there were many ominous signs
for any keen observer to predict of a troubling future awaiting the
non-Buddhists living inside Myanmar.
The Buddhist monks in Myanmar with very few exceptions have
essentially become not only the collaborators of the quasi-military
regime that runs the country but also the vanguards of a new Myanmarism
in which people who are different are increasingly marginalized and/or
dehumanized. Buddhist monks, dependent on begging and handouts, have had
always thrived on donations and gifts made by others, esp. the rich
patrons and Buddhist kings. That benevolent role is now filled in by the
government. (As the Muslim and Hindu lands are confiscated, their homes
and shops, religious centers, shrines and mosques burnt down or razed
to the ground often times Buddhist pagodas are built on such confiscated
or evicted and destroyed places.)
The level of collaboration runs so deep that when last year the
so-called reform minded President Thein Sein called for expelling the
Rohingyas to a third country and that the UN should take charge of them,
it was the Buddhist monks who were at the forefront of the processions
demanding such expulsion. They have hitherto called upon the government
to creating apartheid zones for the Muslim minorities, away from the
Buddhist majority people, let alone demanding the exclusion of Muslims
from jobs, and even enacting laws that prohibit selling to and buying
from Muslims. It is an all-out apartheid system that they have been
promoting against the much-discriminated and despised non-Buddhist
minorities in the Buddhist-majority Myanmar.
As a result, in recent months tens of thousands of Rohingya Muslims
have become the ‘boat people’ of the Southeast Asia braving the
scorching sun and tumultuous seas hoping to find a place under the sun
in this vast planet of ours to live without being slaughtered like lambs
in the slaughterhouse of Myanmar. Hundreds have died and many have
ended up in prisons. The Christian-majority Kachin state to the north is
also bleeding because of marauding attacks from the Myanmar government
forces there. Nearly a quarter million internally displaced persons of
the Christian and Muslim faiths now live in sub-human conditions in
Kachin and Rakhine states, respectively. Buddhist monks and politicians
have also barred necessary relief items from reaching the intended
victims.
Tomas Ojea Quintana, U.N. Special Rapporteur for human rights in
Burma, recently told the U.N. Human Rights Council that rights
violations linked to the Kachin conflict—along with ethnic tensions
between Rohingya Muslims and Rakhine Buddhists in western Burma—remain
unresolved in Myanmar. “While the process of reform is continuing in the
right direction, there are significant human rights shortcomings that
remain unaddressed, such as discrimination against the Rohingya in
Rakhine state and the ongoing human rights violations in relation to the
conflict in Kachin state,” said Quintana, who visited Burma last month.
Obviously, Buddhism has failed and is failing miserably or so it
seems when it comes to enlightening the savage and non-enlightened souls
amongst its own people inside Myanmar. The word ‘non-violence’ has lost
its meaning in Myanmar. One only has to be different, the ‘other’
people – racially or religiously – to see the ugly side of such pogroms,
which have sadly become the norms and not exceptions.
So, it was not a question of why but when we would be revisited by a
new violence. As the recent events in Meikhtila, a town roughly 80 miles
north of the capital Naypyidaw, showed Myanmar is increasingly becoming
difficult and almost impossible for non-Buddhists to live in this once
multi-racial and multi-religious country.
Last Wednesday, a heated argument between a Muslim gold shop owner in
Meikhtila and his Buddhist customers erupted, which spiraled into a
street brawl. Soon thereafter Buddhist mobs roamed the streets with
sticks and swords and set Muslim buildings ablaze. Rioting and arson
attacks spread on Friday to villages outside Meiktila, as mobs of
Buddhists, some led by monks, continued a three-day rampage through
Muslim areas. Several mosques were burned down. Hundreds of Muslim homes
were ransacked first and then set on fire.
According to the New York Times (NYT), witnesses reached by phone
said security forces did little to stop the violence. “Mobs were
destroying buildings and killing people in cold blood,” said U Nyan
Lynn, a former political prisoner who witnessed what he described as
massacres. “Nobody stopped them — I saw hundreds of riot police there.”
“Images from Meiktila showed entire neighborhoods burned to the
ground, some with only blackened trees left standing. Lifeless legs
poked from beneath rubble. And charred corpses spoke to the use of fire
as a main tool of the rioting mobs,” writes Thomas Fuller of the NYT.
“I can’t handle what I saw there,” said Daw Nilar Thein, a human
rights activist. She described the violence as anarchic and unspeakable.
One video posted to Facebook by Radio Free Asia on Friday showed
Muslim women and men cowering and shielding their heads from flying
objects as they fled their attackers. Onlookers are overheard shouting,
“Oooh! Look how many of them. Kill them! Kill them!”
On Friday, a group of Buddhist monks threatened news photographers,
including one who works for The Associated Press, with a sword and
homemade weapons. With a monk holding a blade to his neck, U Khin Maung
Win, the A.P. photographer, handed over his camera’s memory card. “We
are trying to leave the town,” Mr. Khin Maung Win said by telephone.
“They are now after journalists, too.”
Just as in Arakan the past year, those Buddhists behind the violence
in Meiktila are trying to stop images of the destruction from getting
out.
The exact numbers of those killed and injured since Wednesday in
Meikhtila are still unknown, but the numbers may reach more than 100.
Whatever the figure, the culture of impunity surrounding ethnic
violence must end in Myanmar. Who would have thought that a failed sales
negotiation in a jewelry shop would trigger a religious riot? The whole
episode smells of the Hitler-era Nazism in which Jewish homes and
businesses were targeted by his dreaded SS. In Myanmar’s context, the
Buddhist monks and their inspired zealots within the Buddhist population
are increasingly behaving like those criminal SS thugs of the Nazi era.
It is, thus, not difficult to understand why in such pre-planned
sinister riots the security forces behave more as spectators -- if they,
of course, choose not to join the Buddhist mob -- than as law
enforcing government agents.
As I have maintained before, these kinds of targeted violence against
Muslims and other religious minorities do enjoy wider popular support
within this Buddhist-majority apartheid state and are endorsed from the
top echelon in politics. Shamelessly, therefore, the lawmakers like
opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi have remained silent on how to the
end ethnic violence racking the country in recent months.
Like many human rights advocates and activists, Mark Farmaner of
Burma Campaign UK has condemned such sinister silence. Recently he said,
"Staying silent is clearly not working, because in that vacuum, those
who are inciting more violence are free to operate when they need to be
challenged and tackled head on." "There needs to be a change of approach
not just from Suu Kyi,” he says, “but from all the political and
religious leaders in the country to acknowledge that there is this
growing anti-Muslim feeling in the country."
The Euro-Burma Office, a respected Brussels-based advocacy group,
warned on Friday of a "Rwandan-like genocide" of Myanmar's Muslims.
As we have noticed previously with the Rakhine state, President Thein
Sein has issued a state of emergency on Friday. The state-run New Light
of Myanmar newspaper has urged the public to expose those who led and
attempted to instigate.
Muslims have been put in Meiktila’s sports stadium, where food and
water are scarce. Photographs showed frightened-looking people rushing
to the stadium, clutching belongings and carrying their children and the
elderly, amid jeering Buddhist crowds.
The state of emergency is a half-hearted reactive measure that will
not prevent Muslims and other vulnerable minorities from becoming
objects of ethnic cleansing and religious riots in the future.
"Governments are meant to guarantee rights, ensure that people are
treated equally before the law, that nondiscrimination is the rule of
the land, and that minorities have their rights protected," said Phil
Robertson of Human Rights Watch. "After seeing this [violence in
Meikhtila], would anyone be confident in saying that the government is
doing a good job?"
Surely not! But with western appetite for Myanmar’s natural resources
on the rise, human rights have taken a back seat. And thus, none of the
veto-wielding countries are stopping this extermination campaign
against the Muslims of Myanmar, and punishing the regime for its
monumental failure, or worse yet collusion, to safeguarding their lives
and properties. In their failure, the notion of Buddhists, especially
monks, rampaging through Muslim neighborhoods with weapons is becoming a
recurring phenomenon. And this specter must stop not only for the
health of Buddhism but also for greater good of humanity.
Source:Here
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