Fuelled by a dangerous brew of faith,
ethnicity and politics, a tit-for-tat conflict is escalating between two of
Asia’s biggest religions
THE total segregation of Buddhist Arakanese
from Muslim Rohingyas is now a fact of life in the western Myanmar port-city of
Sittwe. Until June last year both communities lived side by side in the capital
of Rakhine state, but following several rounds of frenzied violence, the
Buddhist majority emptied the city of its Muslim population. The Rohingya
victims now scrape by in squalid refugee camps beyond the city boundaries. The
best that most of them can hope for is to escape on an overloaded fishing boat
to Malaysia. Many of them die trying.
The animosity between the Rohingya and the local Arakanese
in this remote corner of Myanmar is a consequence of colonial and pre-colonial
patterns of settlement. It is an old and very local affair, and there were
hopes that it would stay that way. Not any more. The assault on the Rohingyas,
which cost more than 100 lives and made over 100,000 homeless, sparked a
wildfire of sectarian violence across the rest of Myanmar which now seems to be
spreading to other parts of Asia, too. A tit-for-tat escalation is going on
which, with reason, worries many in the region.
While the actual bloodletting in Myanmar has abated, at
least for now, no let-up has taken place in the hateful rhetoric directed
against the country’s Muslim minority, which makes up about 5% of the 60m
population. Radical monks, led by a notorious chauvinist, Wirathu, from a
monastery in the northern city of Mandalay, have abandoned any claims to
Buddhism as a universal doctrine of compassion and non-violence. For them
Buddhism equates with a narrow nationalism. They argue, quite simply, that
unless the majority-Buddhist population fights back, Muslims, with alarmingly
high birth rates, will overrun the country. On July 22nd he claimed that a
small explosion in a car near where he was preaching was the work of Islamic
extremists. It all taps into old resentments against the big influx of Indians,
many of them Muslim, who came into the country on the coat-tails of British
colonialists during the 19th and early 20th centuries. They ran much of the
country’s finance and commerce, and were hated for it by the indigenous Burmans.
Race riots against Indians and Muslims in the 1930s in Yangon (then Rangoon,
the capital) and elsewhere were whipped up then, as now, by a chauvinist
Buddhist press.
The latest initiative of Mr Wirathu and his cohorts,
organised into a group calling itself “969”, alluding to three core tenets of
Buddhism, is to draft a law seeking to curb interfaith marriages in Myanmar.
They propose that Buddhist women must seek permission from local officials to
marry a man of another faith; meanwhile, the husband-to-be should convert to
Buddhism. Under Myanmar’s former military rule, such ideas had little chance of
becoming law, but with the onset of democracy all that has changed. The fear is
that minority parties, desperate to avoid being wiped out at the next general
election by Aung San Suu Kyi’s all-conquering National League for Democracy
(NLD), will take up the monks’ cause for the sake of electoral gain,
exploiting—and encouraging—anti-Muslim sentiment. The National Democratic
Force, an NLD offshoot, may introduce the draft law in parliament, supported by
the ethnic Rakhine party.
Another country where Buddhism is becoming conflated with a
growing ethnic and nationalist identity is Sri Lanka. There the Bodu Bala Sena
(BBS) organisation—literally, “Buddhist force”—made up of members of the
country’s ethnic Sinhalese majority, preaches a doctrine of intolerance against
a minority Islamic population (in this case, about 10% of the country), whose
birth rate, they also claim, is alarmingly high. Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara, a
BBS leader, argues that “This is a Sinhala Buddhist country. We have a Sinhala
Buddhist culture. This is not Saudi Arabia. But you must accept the culture and
behave in a manner that doesn’t harm it.”
The organisation has been campaigning against Islam on
specific issues, such as Halal labelling on food. More generally, it is accused
of inciting mobs to attack mosques and Muslim-owned shops. The BBS defends the
persecution of the Rohingyas in Myanmar, claiming that Buddhists are acting out
of self-preservation. As in Myanmar, plenty of politicians are ready to promote
the agenda of groups like the BBS by exploiting the ignorance, prejudices and
fears of the Buddhist population.
Already, however, a Muslim backlash is under way. In Mumbai
in India Muslims have marched in solidarity with the Rohingyas. Muslims may
have been responsible for the bombing on July 7th of one of India’s most
revered Buddhist sites, the Bodh Gaya in Bihar, where Gautama Buddha is said to
have obtained enlightenment.
As for Indonesia, easily the biggest majority-Muslim country
in the region, Muslims have been helping the Rohingyas through donations. Now
religious solidarity is taking a more violent turn in a country with a record
of Islamist terrorism. In early May two Muslim men were arrested for allegedly
planning to attack the Myanmar embassy in Jakarta, the capital, with
pipe-bombs. They may have been inspired by an imprisoned radical cleric, Abu
Bakar Basyir, who in April called for a jihad against Myanmar’s Buddhist
population.
Reports have also surfaced of a meeting in Jakarta on June
19th between one extremist Indonesian group, the Forum Umat Islam, and two
representatives of the Rohingya Solidarity Organisation (RSO). One Rohingya
leader, Abu Shafiya, said that his people are “weak and unarmed” and so need
bombs and training to strike back; he claims to have 300 people under arms. The
RSO is one of several shadowy groups from either side of the Bangladeshi border
with Myanmar that were active some decades ago. It seems logical that a few
desperate Rohingyas might now look for defence to other Islamist groups. Sidney
Jones, an expert on Islamist extremism in Jakarta, says that the RSO “would be
an organisation around which an armed resistance might coalesce.”
This sort of development is worrying, yet countervailing
pressures may prevent this kind of violence from spreading too far. On the
Muslim side, argues Ahmad Suaedy of Jakarta’s Abdurrahman Wahid Centre for
interfaith dialogue, some jihadist groups, reared on the fundamentalist
doctrines of the Arab world, would regard the Rohingyas’ brand of Islam as
unduly syncretic, even unIslamic, and thus unworthy of support. On the Buddhist
side, meanwhile, many argue that the aggressive chauvinism that now flourishes
among the monks in Sri Lanka and Myanmar could not take root, say, in Thailand.
That is despite an insurgency raging in Thailand’s four
southernmost provinces, where Muslims are in a majority. The conflict has cost
at least 5,000 lives since 2004. In fighting the Muslim insurgents, the Thai
army has become inextricably bound up with Buddhist monks. Temples are used as
army bases, and “soldier monks” are said to operate. Armed all-Buddhist
self-defence groups exist as well. For their part, Muslim insurgents have specifically
killed Buddhist monks, despite army protection, as symbols of Thai government
authority.
Yet it is remarkable that the armed struggle has aroused no
wider Buddhist backlash against the Muslim minority in the rest of the country.
Maybe this is because the insurgents target ethnic Chinese and Thais equally in
their battle for self-rule; their fight is not with Buddhism itself. Meanwhile,
Thailand’s Buddhist structure is more hierarchical. The monarch and the
political establishment keep the monks on a tight leash.
Indeed, the first official peace talks began earlier this
year between the Thai government and some Muslim groups in the south. The hope
is that the conflict in Muslim southern Thailand remains contained. It is not
fated to spill over into general sectarian violence. The Economist
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