The fault lines of conflict are often spiritual, one religion chafing
against another and kindling bloodletting contrary to the values
girding each faith. Over the past year in parts of Asia, it is friction
between Buddhism and Islam that has killed hundreds, mostly Muslims. The
violence is being fanned by extremist Buddhist monks, who preach a
dangerous form of religious chauvinism to their followers.
Yet as this week’s TIME International cover story notes, Buddhism has tended to avoid a linkage in our minds to sectarian strife:
“In the reckoning of religious extremism — Hindu nationalists, Muslim
militants, fundamentalist Christians, ultra-Orthodox Jews — Buddhism
has largely escaped trial. To much of the world, it is synonymous with
nonviolence and loving kindness, concepts propagated by Siddhartha
Gautama, the Buddha, 2,500 years ago. But like adherents of any
religion, Buddhists and their holy men are not immune to politics and,
on occasion, the lure of sectarian chauvinism.
When Asia rose up against empire and oppression, Buddhist monks, with
their moral command and plentiful numbers, led anticolonial movements.
Some starved themselves for their cause, their sunken flesh and
protruding ribs underlining their sacrifice for the laity. Perhaps most
iconic is the image of Thich Quang Duc, a Vietnamese monk sitting in the
lotus position, wrapped in flames, as he burned to death in Saigon
while protesting the repressive South Vietnamese regime 50 years ago. In
2007, Buddhist monks led a foiled democratic uprising in Burma: images
of columns of clerics bearing upturned alms bowls, marching peacefully
in protest against the junta, earned sympathy around the world, if not
from the soldiers who slaughtered them. But where does social activism
end and political militancy begin? Every religion can be twisted into a
destructive force poisoned by ideas that are antithetical to its
foundations. Now it’s Buddhism’s turn.”
(PHOTOS:In Burma, Religious Riots Flare Up Again)
Over the past year in Buddhist-majority Burma, scores, if not
hundreds, have been killed in communal clashes, with Muslims suffering
the most casualties. Burmese monks were seen goading on Buddhist mobs,
while some suspect the authorities of having stoked the violence — a
charge the country’s new quasi-civilian government denies. In Sri Lanka,
where a conservative, pro-Buddhist government reigns, Buddhist
nationalist groups are operating with apparent impunity, looting Muslim
and Christian establishments and calling for restrictions to be placed
on the 9% of the country that is Muslim. Meanwhile in Thailand’s deep
south, where a Muslim insurgency has claimed some 5,000 lives since
2004, desperate Buddhist clerics are retreating into their temples with
Thai soldiers at their side. Their fear is understandable. But the close
relationship between temple and state is further dividing this already
anxious region.
As the violence mounts, will Buddhists draw inspiration from their
faith’s sutras of compassion and peace to counter religious chauvinism?
Or will they succumb to the hate speech of radical monks like Burma’s
Wirathu, who goads his followers to “rise up” against Islam? The world’s
judgment awaits. Click here to read Hannah Beech’s full story on the violence between Buddhism and Islam in Asian countries.
Burma’s quasi-civilian
government has been hit by allegations of “ethnic cleansing” and “crimes
against humanity” this week as Human Rights Watch (HRW) released its report
into the sectarian violence that ravaged the country’s eastern Arakan
state last year. At least 200 people were killed and more than 125,000
made homeless as mass arson, looting and cold-blooded murder erupted
between ethnic Rakhine Buddhists and stateless Muslim Rohingya. HRW
accuses Rakhine groups of instigating the bloodshed and the state
authorities of allowing them to continue unabated. Fresh and seemingly
unconnected Muslim-Buddhist violence then hit elsewhere last month,
posing serious questions regarding the state’s ability — or willingness —
to maintain order as the country emerges from half a century of brutal
junta rule. The report was released the same day that the country’s
President, Thein Sein, was awarded a peace prize by the International Crisis Group, and the E.U.lifted trade, economic and individual sanctions on Burma.
According to HRW, Rakhine mobs attacked Muslim communities in four
townships in June and then nine townships in October, razing villages
and burying “hog-tied” corpses in mass graves. The 153-page report
details how at least 70 Rohingya were killed in a single daylong
massacre in Yan Thei village in Mrauk-U township. “First the soldiers
told us, ‘Do not do anything, we will protect you, we will save you,’ so
we trusted them,” a 25-year-old survivor told HRW. “But later they
broke that promise. The Arakanese beat and killed us very easily. The
security did not protect us from them.”
The Rohingya are a stateless people numbering around 800,000, primarily
in western Burma. Although many have lived inside the country for
generations, they are not included on the list of 135 official ethnic
groups as set out by xenophobic former dictator General Ne Win in the
1982 Citizenship Law. The government’s official position is that the
Rohingya are illegal Bengali immigrants from neighboring Bangladesh who
exploit the porous 300-km border to steal scarce land. They face severe
restrictions on travel, marriage and reproduction, and Bangladesh
similarly shuns them. Scaremongering Buddhist propaganda also accuses
the Rohingya of raping Buddhist women and trying to “Islamify” Burma,
now officially known as Myanmar, by taking multiple wives to sire scores
of Muslim children.
Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at HRW, accused the Burmese
government of engaging “in a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the
Rohingya that continues today through the denial of aid and restrictions
on movement.” The new report details how government authorities
destroyed mosques, conducted violent mass arrests and blocked aid to
displaced Muslims following last year’s strife. The initial clashes were
sparked by the rape and murder of a young Buddhist woman, allegedly by
three Muslim men, and then the mob slaughter of 10 Muslim pilgrims on a
bus in retaliation. HRW alleges that during the following months,
“Buddhist monks, political-party operatives and government officials
organized themselves to permanently change the ethnic demographics of
the state” by removing every trace of the Rohingya. “They have their
strategy, and they have done all these things as a planned,
well-designed operation,” says Kyaw Myint, president of the National
Democratic Party for Human Rights, a Rohingya political group, and a
former political prisoner.
NGOs warn that conditions in the displacement camps are atrocious, with
disease rampant and scarce supplies dwindling. This squalor has played
no small part in forcing several thousand Rohingya to risk their lives
by undertaking the perilous voyage in rickety craft to resettle in third
countries, particularly Malaysia. Rohingya must pay the equivalent of
$350 for the privilege, of which most goes to Rakhine human traffickers —
ironically the same people they are fleeing. Nay San Lwin, a Rohingya
activist now living in Germany, lost eight family members in the June
violence and tells TIME that he is “100% sure” that the government is
behind the killing. “If [the government] had the will to, they could
stop [the violence] immediately,” he says. “If they continue like this,
you will not find any Rohingya inside the country in five years’ time.”
Humanitarian groups that help the Rohingya are also under threat. The
U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and Doctors Without Borders (MSF)
both had staff detained by the authorities in Arakan state last year,
and MSF general director Arjan Hehenkamp told a press conference in
February that his organization was being intimidated by the Rakhine for
working in Rohingya camps. “In pamphlets, letters and Facebook postings,
[MSF] and others have been repeatedly accused of having a pro-Rohingya
bias by some members of the Rakhine community. It is this intimidation,
rather than formal permission for access [to the camps], that is the
primary challenge,” he said in a statement.
Increasingly, the violence has not been limited to Rohingya Muslims. In
the wake of last year’s violence, the Kaman, a distinct Muslim ethnic
group, was also targeted. And last month, a wave of rioting hit the town
of Meiktila, around 500 km north of Rangoon. Clashes were sparked by a
seemingly innocuous dispute at a Muslim-owned gold shop, yet soon spread
across the region with 43 people killed, at least 800 homes and five
mosques torched, plus around 12,000 people sent to ramshackle
displacement camps. The violence spread to a further 11 townships, all
tellingly without any Rohingya populations. A shocking new video released by the BBC
shows Burmese police officers standing idly by while Buddhist mobs
ransack Muslim-owned buildings, and saffron-clad monks participating in
the bloodshed. It should be noted, however, that many Buddhists put
their lives on the line to protect Muslim neighbors and hide them from
the rampaging mobs.
A militant Buddhist organization known by the symbol 969 seems to be at
the heart of this resurgent religious animosity, with outspoken monk
Wirathu at the helm. Based in Mandalay’s Masoyein Monastery, his bizarre
and baseless accusations
that Muslims are “waging a jihad war on the Rakhine,” “doping young
children with drugs to make them fight” and “disguising themselves as
women to get involved in fights” have taken hold. Now 969 stickers are
common to denote Buddhist businesses around the country.
The domestic Burmese media has not helped the situation. The derogatory
term kalar — used for any dark-skinned person of South Asian appearance —
has appeared in print frequently, as has the term Bengalis, which gives
credence to the specious notion that the Rohingya are in fact illegal
immigrants. But the strongest criticism has been reserved for Aung San
Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and former political prisoner, who
has steadfastly refused to condemn the appalling treatment of the
Rohingya, preferring instead to blame a lack of “rule of law.” The
former human-rights champion appears unwilling to alienate her Buddhist
support base in preparation for the looming general election in 2015.
For Burma’s Muslims, that date looks very far off.
An ethnic Rohingya man climbs aboard his boat in Sittwe, Burma on Jan. 31, 2013
(Photo - Jason Motlagh)
February 18, 2013
Jason Motlagh
TIME
A large chunk of Abdul Rahman’s home is gone, and so is his oldest son,
Shakur. The ethnic Rohingya farmer tore down nearly half his home for
scrap needed to secure his son’s passage on a boat bound for Malaysia.
In the wake of bloody sectarian violence last year that left hundreds
dead and forced tens of thousands of minority Muslim Rohingya into camps
outside the coastal city of Sittwe, Rahman, 52, insists his people are
being “strangled” by a Burmese government that does not want them. While
foreign donors have supplied basic food rations, checkpoints manned by
armed guards prevent the displaced from returning to the paddies and
markets their livelihoods depend on. “Even animals can move more freely,” says Rahman.
These days, more and more Rohingya are betting what little they still
have on a dangerous journey at sea. Community leaders and boatmen
involved in the exodus say the volume of passengers is unprecedented
because of enduring tensions and a total lack of mobility inside Burma,
also known as Myanmar,
where the Rohingya have faced decades of discrimination and neglect. The
growing sense of despair is borne out by the roughly 1,800 refugees who
washed up in Thailand in January. And they keep arriving, on overloaded
boats without navigational equipment, despite a voyage that can take up
to two weeks. If they’re lucky: of the 13,000 mostly Rohingya Muslims
who fled Myanmar and Bangladesh last year, the U.N. says at least 485
were known to have drowned.
“Now there is just one choice left for us: go and live with other
Muslims,” says Sayed Alam, 20, an unemployed shop worker, as he prepared
to leave Sittwe, the state capital, with two friends. “There is so much
fear in this place.”
The plight of Burma’s Rohingya minority continues to cast a pall on its
transition to democracy. Called one of the most-persecuted minorities in
the world, the Rohingya are considered illegal immigrants from
Bangladesh and denied citizenship though many families have lived in the
country for generations. Last June, their woes intensified after
reports that an Arakanese Buddhist woman was raped by three Rohingya men
set off a wave of communal clashes. Mobs of Buddhists and Muslims
rampaged through villages with swords and rods, burning homes and
beheading victims. In a damning report, Human Rights Watch alleged that
Burmese security forces committed killings, rape and mass arrests
against Rohingya Muslims after failing to protect them and Arakanese
Buddhists during the riots.
Eight months on, pockets of Rohingya that remain in rural Arakan state
are in serious trouble. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) announced in early
February that its field teams continued to face hostile threats from
Arakanese leaders and state forces that forced them to cut back medical
care. Moreover, the aid agency warned of a brewing “humanitarian
emergency” in the heavily restricted camps around Sittwe. Burmese
officials claim the camps are necessary to shield the Rohingya
population from further harm, but MSF says that acute malnutrition, skin
infections and other ailments caused by poor sanitation are on the
rise, especially among those uprooted by a second spasm of violence in
October and now live on the margins of established camps.
“My children are sick, they are hungry,” says Halima, 30, a pregnant
mother of five who arrived in late October and lives in a straw hut on a
dusty plain. She cooked a pot of rice over a dung fire — the family’s
only meal of the day. Her children wandered half-naked, their bellies
swollen with hunger, in view of a food depot where residents of a formal
camp collected rations of rice, beans and palm oil. Because Halima and
her family were not directly affected by the violence, they are not
registered as “displaced” people, and therefore ineligible for foreign
aid. This explains the absence of her husband. “He is away looking for
more food,” she says. “We must have something for tomorrow.”
While aid officials and activists debate how many are without
assistance, the urgent problems posed by the Rohingya’s near-total lack
of mobility are clear. Denied access to farmlands and town markets,
able-bodied men are unable to earn any money as day laborers, leaving
them fully dependent on aid, explains Carlos Veloso, country director
for the U.N. World Food Program in Burma. This is problematic, he points
out, since the international donors currently needed to feed legions of
displaced (and must renew funding due to expire in April) don’t want to
create permanent settlements.
Faced with stagnant conditions inside the camps and insecurity
everywhere else, greater numbers are taking their chances on the open
sea. Mohdi Kasim, a prominent Rohingya community leader living in one of
the camps, described how his neighbor, a veteran police officer, showed
up at his door earlier in the morning in tears asking for money to help
cover his boat fare. Both of his sons had already left. According to
Idriss, 35, a Rohingya boat builder with gold rings on his fingers, two
to three vessels are leaving the Sittwe area every night, often packed
with over 100 passengers. “We tell the people it’s not safe, but they
insist on going,” he says. “They are suffering so much here.”
But the risks do not end off the water. In January, more than 800
Rohingya were rescued in raids against human-trafficking networks across
southern Thailand, according to Thai media reports. An army colonel and
another high-ranking officer are under investigation for suspected
involvement, as well as a local politician. Abdul Kalam, a Rohingya
activist based in Thailand, took part in a Jan. 10 raid on a remote
compound in Songkhla province where about 300 refugees were being held.
Brokers were demanding more than $2,000 to smuggle them into Malaysia.
Several Rohingya were among the men arrested.
The Thai government has agreed to let the refugees stay for six months
before they are repatriated or sent to third countries. (Malaysia, for
its part, has been receptive to those who reach its shores.) In the
meantime, new arrivals are being held in detainment centers, unable to
make phone calls home to those they left behind. Kalam is hopeful that
the U.N. refugee agency and international pressure will move the Thais
to grant Rohingya amnesty. A return to Burma, he adds, is out of the
question. “So many people told me, ‘If you’re going to send me back to
[Burma], you should kill me now instead.’”
Abdul Rahman, the farmer, counts his son as “one of the lucky ones.”
Less than two weeks after his departure, he received a phone call from
Malaysia that he’d made the crossing successfully and was looking for
work. Another of his sons will soon follow, he says, meaning more money
had to be raised. Standing in front of what’s left of his home, he
reflected on what else he could sell.
— Motlagh reported with a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting
