Читать книгу The Burmese Labyrinth - Carlos Sardiña Galache - Страница 13

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‘We Will Build a Fence With Our Bones if Necessary’

During late 2012 and early 2013, a seemingly innocuous symbol began to spread in cities and villages throughout Burma. Thousands of stickers appeared in shops, street stalls and taxis in cities and villages showing the multi-coloured Buddhist flag in the background, the wheel of Dhamma at the centre, the pillars of Asoka – an Indian king who spread Buddhism throughout the Indian subcontinent in the third century BC – with three lions at the top, and 969 in Burmese numerals. This number stood for the attributes of the three jewels of Buddhism: Buddha, the Dhamma (his teachings) and the Sangha (the monastic community). The stickers were used to signal that the owners of the business were Buddhists, but the underlying message, which everybody implicitly understood, was to make clear that they were not Muslims. The stickers were part of what came to be known as the ‘969 Movement’, a somewhat loose association of Buddhist monks and lay people devoted to protecting their religion against the purported threat of Islam.

The logo was launched by some monks on 30 October 2012, on the full-moon day of Thadingyut, one of the main festivals of the Buddhist calendar, in Moulmein, the capital of Mon State, in the east of the country. A few months later, I interviewed its designer and the secretary of the organization, Ashin Sada Ma, the abbot of Mya Sadi monastery. A soft-spoken man in his late thirties, he claimed that the campaign was intended to educate the youth about the value of their Buddhist heritage: ‘In the modern age, the young people don’t know the jewels of Buddhism; this logo is designed to remind them.’ He made an effort during our interview to present the movement in the most positive light and dissociate it from any anti-Muslim message. He denied that the recent conflict in Arakan had anything to do with the decision to launch the campaign, but it was evident that the issue worried him.

At one point he argued that the ‘Bengalis’ were fuelling conflict by ‘migrating’ to Burma. ‘If they come, they can easily influence our country. They are trying to improve their lives in our country and our lands. So this symbol and campaign is intended to defend ourselves. I fear that some Bengali Muslims are terrorists and have a mission to Islamise our country’, he said. ‘Only small parts of Asia are Buddhist now; in the past Indonesia, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and many other places, including Turkey and Iraq, were Buddhist countries, but now they are lost’, he added, showing me a map of Asia that I had seen in one of the corridors of the monastery and would see again in many places, with the majority religion in each country. ‘We will build a fence with our bones if necessary’, was its slogan.

Ashin Sada Ma and a few other monks were the prime movers and organizers of the 969 Movement, but its most famous and vociferous representative was Ashin Wirathu, the abbot of the sprawling Ma Soe Yein monastery in Mandalay, the country’s second-biggest city. Wirathu had been arrested in 2003 for inciting anti-Muslim riots in his hometown, Kyaukse, which had left eleven dead and fourteen injured.¹ He had been sentenced to twenty-five years in jail, but was released in early 2012 as part of a series of amnesties ordered by President Thein Sein to boost his reformist credentials. Wirathu visited Maungdaw, in northern Arakan, after the riots in June.² Unsurprisingly, he focused solely on the violence committed by the Rohingya, placing all the blame on the ‘Bengalis’. When he returned to Mandalay, he organized a three-day-long march in Mandalay supporting the president’s proposal to expel the Rohingya from the country.³ The protests went unhindered by the authorities, while that very same month the government brought charges against the organizers of a march in Rangoon calling for peace in Kachin State.⁴ Wirathu and the 969 Movement were also instrumental in organizing a series of protests in various Burmese cities against the government’s decision to allow the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to open an office in the country. Those protests were successful, and Thein Sein announced in October 2012 that he would revoke the decision.⁵

The government was highly selective as to which popular demands it would meet and which it would suppress. In this way, it was contributing to the shaping of what was acceptable and what was not when it came to participatory politics in the country, and at the same time could shield itself behind a nebulous idea of ‘popular will’ to deflect responsibility for discrimination against the Rohingya and other Muslims. This emboldened Wirathu and the 969 Movement to carry their message throughout Burma, which was directed not only against the Rohingya, but against Muslims in general. Apart from the increasingly ubiquitous stickers designed by Ashin Sadama, monks associated with the movement toured the country giving sermons about the need to protect Buddhism from the Muslim threat, and VCDs with those sermons, often accompanied by gruesome images of brutal crimes purportedly committed by Muslims, were made widely available in markets throughout the country.

The rhetoric of Wirathu was particularly virulent. In April 2013, I went with two other colleagues to interview him in his monastery. Sitting beneath several huge portraits of himself, he spoke with a calm demeanour and a boyish, expressionless face that sometimes showed an elusive smile, or even a grin of pain when explaining the ‘Muslim conspiracy’ that he claimed was threatening to engulf Burma. A man of contradictions – there was a portrait of Aung San Suu Kyi behind him, but he accused her and her party of being controlled by Muslims and supported Thein Sein – he seemed consistent only in his loathing of Islam. At one point he claimed that all rapes in the country were committed by Muslims, a ludicrous accusation for which he only referenced vague reports he assured us he had in his possession.

‘If Burmese Buddhists do not take action, by 2100 the whole country will resemble the Mayu region of Arakan State’, he explained, referring to northern Arakan. His solution was a simple formula: ‘Buddhists can talk with Muslims, but not marry them; there can be friendship between them, but not trade.’ In this formulation, Wirathu condensed how he and other 969 monks portrayed the alleged Muslim threat as that of a monstrous horde bent on economic and demographic domination. What motivated Wirathu to get involved in his personal anti-Muslim crusade was something of a mystery, as he had given conflicting accounts to different interviewers. But, sincere or not, the explanation that he gave us was revealing of his ideology and that of the 969 Movement. He claimed that two decades before, a Muslim who had converted to Buddhism had given him a ‘secret message’ circulated among Burmese Muslims with the plans to Islamise the country: the alleged strategy was to take over the economy in order to lull as many poor Buddhist girls as possible into marrying Muslim men and converting them, and thus slowly to make Burma an Islamic country.

The origins of both 969 and Wirathu’s personal crusade, which seemed to have the blessing of the military regime, can probably be traced back to the early 1990s. According to an investigation by the British journalist Andrew Marshall, the movement was inspired by Kyaw Lwin, a former monk and government official who died in 2001.⁶ In 1991, the military junta created the Department for the Promotion and Propagation of the Sasana (‘religion’ in Pali) (DPPS), under the Ministry of Religion, and appointed Kyaw Lwin as its head. One year later, the DPPS published Kyaw Lwin’s book, How to Live as a Good Buddhist. The book was republished in 2000 under the title The Best Buddhist, with a cover showing an early version of the 969 logo. Kyaw Lwin, who had close relations with the military junta, including its highest authority, Senior General Than Shwe, met Wirathu and other future 969 leaders, and stayed in touch with them over the years. It was after his death that Wirathu started the anti-Muslim preaching that would send him to jail. But incarceration did not deter him. A few months later, I would meet a former political prisoner who had shared some time in jail with him in Obo prison, in Mandalay. According to the former political prisoner, who at that time was working as a teacher for Burmese migrant workers and refugees in Mae Sot (Thailand), Wirathu had access to materials that other prisoners could not possess, such a mobile phones and books, enjoyed a degree of freedom of movement between the parts of the jail, and continued preaching in jail, often to hardened criminals.

It is unclear whether the 969 monks and Wirathu were supported by the military, but there are strong suspicions that this was the case. In any case, most of the extremist monks seemed to be true believers in their cause, rather than cynical opportunists. And the phenomenon of Buddhist monks engaging in nationalist politics, stoking anti-Muslim or xenophobic sentiments, was not new in Burma.

Not all Buddhist monks adhered to the principles of the 969 Movement. Many stayed away from politics, and there was a small minority of monks who vocally opposed 969; but they seemed to have less means to voice their message of tolerance. One of them was Ashin Pum Na Wontha, the fifty-six-year-old abbot of a monastery in Rangoon with a history of political activism dating back to 1988. He was a member of the Peace Cultivation Network, an organization established to promote understanding between different faiths. In an interview in his monastery, he told me that Ashin Wirathu was merely a puppet ‘motivated by his vanity and thirst for fame.’ He was convinced that Wirathu and the 969 Movement received financial support from the ‘cronies’, a group of businessmen who had gotten wealthy during the military dictatorship through their connection with the generals. According to him, some Muslim businessmen had huge assets, and the ‘cronies’ were trying to get their hands on them. Those claims were impossible to verify, but it appeared evident that wealthy people were donating to the 969’s propaganda juggernaut. With the political opening and the increasing availability of mobile phones and access to the internet, the message of 969 was spreading dangerously fast and wide. Moreover, the recent violence in Arakan, and the way it had been framed by the local media, provided the movement with plausibility in the eyes of many Burmese Buddhists.

Historically, there had been five groups of Muslims in Burma: the Rohingya, the Kaman, the Panthay (Chinese Muslims who mostly settled in Shan State), Muslim immigrants from the Indian subcontinent during the colonial period, and less numerous Burman Muslims. The overwhelming majority of all of these groups are Sunni, with only a tiny proportion of Shia Muslims in central Burma. The largest group is the Rohingya, who – as a consequence of the apartheid regime imposed on them by the state since the late 1970s – are also the least integrated into Burmese socioeconomic life. Muslims elsewhere in the country are comparatively well integrated, but they have also suffered discrimination. Many of the descendants of Indian migrants have kept their distinctive culture, dress and customs, and sometimes even the languages of their ancestors; but it would be extremely difficult to find one who does not speak Burmese, as most have attended public schools and universities.

Many others are of mixed descent, whether Indo-Burman, Indo-Karen or Indo-Shan; and others still are simply Burman, or Shan, or belong to other groups. These Muslims are basically indistinguishable from the rest of the Burmese, their religion being their only distinguishing characteristic. But ethnicity is so intertwined with religion in Burma that, in informal conversations, the ‘Muslims’ are often counterposed to ‘Burmese’ or ‘Burmans’ – a conflation of religious and ethnic/national categories reflected in the old adage that ‘to be Burmese is to be Buddhist’.

This conflation also works at the official level. The Citizen Scrutiny Card that all Burmese citizens have to carry includes both their ethnicity and their religion. Thus, Burma’s state polices contribute to fixing the identities of its citizens; though all of them are supposed to have the same rights,⁷ the cards make it easier to discriminate based on ethnicity or religion. Moreover, the authorities often arbitrarily ascribe ethnicity on the basis of religion. The cards were originally issued by the Ministry of Migration and Population (later renamed as Ministry of Labour, Immigration and Population by the Suu Kyi administration), whose motto is: ‘A race does not face extinction by being swallowed into the earth, but from being swallowed up by another race.’ Muslims, regardless of their ethnicity, are routinely classified as ‘Indians’, ‘Pakistanis’ or ‘Bengalis’, depending on the whim of the official who issues their card. Theirs is always defined as a foreign ancestry. In some cases, the process of classification may reach absurd extremes. In one example reported by the Burmese scholar Sai Latt, two different siblings were classified as ‘India + Burmese + Islam’ and ‘Pakistan + Shan + Burmese + Islam’ respectively, even though they shared the same parents, neither of whom had any connection with India or Pakistan.⁸

The intercommunal tensions between Muslims and Buddhists are very different in central Burma from those in Arakan. In the two cases, religion and ethnicity play a different role. Yet the conflicts have fed each other over the years. The 2012 riots in Arakan reverberated throughout Burma, contributing to rising hostility against Muslims elsewhere. Conversely, the anti-Muslim wave largely provoked by the 969 Movement contributed to a hardening of anti-Rohingya sentiment in Arakan. The living conditions of Muslims are also generally different. In Arakan, most of the Muslim population is rural, and largely concentrated in the north. There have been urban Muslims in places like Sittwe, and even a Rohingya middle class of traders and merchants; but the overwhelming majority of Rohingya are extremely impoverished farmers. Both Rakhine and Rohingya claim the same territory as their ancestral land, based on divergent historical narratives. In central and upper Burma, most of the Muslim population live in cities like Rangoon and Mandalay. They may concentrate in certain neighbourhoods in the cities, but they are scattered throughout the country.

Most Muslims in central and upper Burma are far from wealthy, but they are overrepresented in trade, as a consequence of strong networks and having inherited a somewhat advantageous – though later increasingly precarious – position from the colonial period, while Buddhists are mostly impoverished farmers. Real economic domination in the country is exercised by the generals, Chinese companies and businessmen, and the billionaire ‘cronies’; but the country’s wealthiest people are out of sight of the general population. Muslim traders, usually owners of shops of small and middle size, are more visible to the general Burmese population than the super-rich businessmen, and their marginally better economic position has sometimes caused resentment among the Buddhist population. Chinese traders and small businessmen have flooded several cities in upper Burma in recent decades, most conspicuously in Mandalay, where they exercise huge control over the economy that is resented by many of its Burmese citizens.⁹ But there has not recently been any sustained anti-Chinese campaign comparable to the 969 Movement against Muslims. Due to the strong links that the military government has maintained with China and Chinese corporations, it has been in its best interests to avoid anti-Chinese sentiment from exploding into violence. In short, the fact that Muslims have a certain degree of control over small trade in towns and cities may make the notion of a Muslim economic threat peddled by the 969 Movement plausible to many Buddhists in central Burma.

In the climate of intercommunal distrust fostered by the 969 Movement, violence did not take long to explode. The first place to fall was Meiktila, a commercial town with a population of around 100,000 in Irrawaddy Division, 140 kilometres south of Mandalay. Wirathu had mentioned Meiktila in one of his sermons, which was uploaded to YouTube during the violence, saying that the NLD office in town was controlled by Muslims – though it is unclear when and where he gave the sermon, and how many people in the town had heard it.¹⁰ In the weeks before the violence, a pamphlet was distributed around the town in the name of ‘Buddhists who feel helpless’. The pamphlet claimed that strange ‘kalars’ (a derogatory term used to refer to people of South Asian origin) had been seen around town and that ‘using money Saudi allocated to mosques, they have been buying land, farm and houses both in and out of the town with incredible amount of money under the Burmese names’. These mysterious Muslims were allegedly bribing officials to gain control over the city and marry Buddhist women.¹¹ Such accusations may have had a ring of truth for many because the retail trade in Meiktila was mostly in the hands of Muslims.

The trigger for the violence took place in one of those Muslim-owned shops. Everything started with the breaking of a gold hair-clip.¹² On 20 March 2013, a Buddhist woman from a village near Meiktila went with her husband and sister to a downtown gold shop to sell a gold hair-clip. When they were bargaining with the owner of the shop, the hair clip got broken, and a quarrel ensued in which the owner slapped the woman. According to several witnesses, the clients were expelled from the shop and beaten up in the street by three clerks. The police detained the owner and the woman; but a crowd of Buddhists gathered around, soon becoming enraged and attacking the shop, shouting anti-Muslim slurs. Tensions mounted as the story of the incident quickly became known everywhere in the town. That same evening, four Muslims allegedly attacked a Buddhist monk travelling on the back of a bike. They hit him in the head, and when he fell they doused him with fuel and set him on fire. He died in hospital a few hours later. That evening, the Muslim-majority quarter of Mingalar Zay Yone was in flames, when Buddhist mobs attacked the Muslim population in retaliation.

Mon Hnin, a twenty-nine-year-old Muslim woman, told me a couple of weeks later that she had spent the night when everything had started with her daughter and mother-in-law, hiding in terror in the bushes on the fringes of that neighbourhood. Her house had been destroyed by a Buddhist mob, and she and her relatives had to take refuge in the first place they could find. The bushes where they had hidden are in front of a local madrasa, where the worst atrocity of that pogrom took place. According to several eyewitnesses, the next morning a mob of Buddhists attacked the madrasa and killed at least twenty students and four teachers.¹³ Mon Hnin told me that she saw about thirty policemen arriving in trucks in the morning. From her hiding place, she saw how the students and teachers of the madrasa gave up the weapons they had improvised to defend themselves. A group of them was offered the chance to be evacuated from the area in police trucks, but they were attacked by the mob before reaching the vehicles. One of them was her husband, a halal butcher who was stabbed to death. The policemen in the area did nothing to stop the carnage. Shortly afterwards, Mon Hnin, her daughter and her mother-in-law were given shelter in the house of a Buddhist neighbour.

Win Htein was then the local MP for the NLD. A former army officer who had spent several years in jail for his political activities, he had been the man responsible for the security of Aung San Suu Kyi after she was released from house arrest on November 2010. ‘I saw with my own eyes two people already dead and five more put to death in front of me’, he told me a few weeks later in the ramshackle local NLD office, explaining what he had witnessed in the madrasa. He assured me that he had tried to protect the Muslims, but the mob had threatened him. Then he called the chief minister of Mandalay Division, General Ye Myint, imploring him to stop the riots. ‘He said he’d already given orders to the police to take action, but there was no action at all’, he told me.

A local video journalist from Mandalay went immediately to Meiktila. When she arrived at the scene of the massacre in the madrasa, she saw a pile of several dozen corpses a few metres away. When she went back four hours later, the pile had been set on fire. In the meantime, in the intersection of the main road, she filmed a group of Buddhists slit the throat of a Muslim man before dousing him with petrol and setting him on fire while he was still alive. The police were there, but they did nothing. She continued recording despite being told to stop, but eventually had to flee the scene on a motorbike when several men chased her. According to her, during the time she spent recording the riots in Meiktila, she saw only Buddhists carrying weapons, and the violence was fundamentally one-sided, the Muslims being always on the receiving end.

Win Htein told me that the attacks were spontaneous and perpetrated by the Buddhist residents of the city; but other witnesses said that the attackers were unknown to them, and seemed to be following a well-coordinated plan. It is difficult to know exactly who carried out the violence, but it is possible that some mobs from outside had led the riots, with local residents joining in. Some of the perpetrators seemed to be Buddhist monks; many Burmese, horrified with the violence, were adamant that those could not have been monks, but must have been thugs dressed as such.

Amid the carnage, there were also stories of heroism, as some monks gave shelter to Muslims in their monasteries. But for two days, Buddhist mobs roamed free through the city, destroying hundreds of houses and killing, according to official figures, at least forty-two people, until the military intervened and restored a semblance of order. Some members of the 88 Generation visited the town to calm the situation down. Ashin Wirathu also visited the city when order had largely been restored, and called for an end to the violence.

The landscape in Meiktila after the violence looked eerily similar to the razed quarters I had seen in Sittwe and Kyaukphyu the previous year. The Muslim quarter was another landscape of ruins and ashes as far as the eye could see. Around 12,000 people, most of them Muslims, had lost their houses and were sheltered in temporary camps. Among them was Mon Hnin, the woman who had seen a mob kill her husband, living with her family in an unofficial camp ten kilometres away from town. In the immediate aftermath of the violence, the government announced it had plans to rebuild the destroyed houses within two months, but few believed in its ability or even willingness to do so. Many Muslim refugees feared their situation might become permanent, as had happened to Muslims in Arakan.

The violence soon spread to other towns and villages in central Burma. In the coming weeks, around twenty towns and villages saw anti-Muslim pogroms of lower intensity, tracing a line that threatened to reach Rangoon, the country’s biggest city. When I visited the country I interviewed some refugees who had been displaced to Rangoon from Minhla, a town 160 kilometres to the north. A group of eighty Muslims were sheltering in a derelict building owned by a Muslim. Maung Win, a teacher at the local madrasa, recounted how a mob of Buddhist extremists had attacked the mosque shortly after afternoon prayers. He and other refugees from Minhla told me that the attacks had come out of the blue, without any prior threat or warning. But they also said that relations between the two communities had steadily soured after a monk had visited the city one month before, when he had given a sermon telling Buddhists to shun Muslims and their shops.

The violence never reached Rangoon, but its Muslim residents feared that the worst could also come to them. Residents told me that people roamed the streets in cars at night, shouting threats and anti-Muslim slurs. After the attacks in Meiktila, the residents of Mingalar Taungyungnunt, the main Muslim quarter in Rangoon, were on edge. The community had taken charge of its own security. At night, men patrolled the streets, and every entrance to the neighbourhood from the main streets was blocked with makeshift barricades. Nobody seemed to trust that the authorities would protect them if what they called ‘Buddhist terrorists’ attacked them.

Many Muslims felt that Aung San Suu Kyi had also abandoned them. Muslims throughout Burma have long supported her in the hope that she would strive to stamp out discrimination against them. Win Htein, the NLD lawmaker who had tried to calm the situation during the riots in Meiktila, denounced the violence in subsequent weeks, and he was denounced by Buddhist extremists as a ‘friend of the kalar’. Meanwhile, Suu Kyi kept silent. A few days after the riots, on 27 March, she surprised observers and Burmese citizens alike by attending a military parade in Naypyidaw for the first time, as part of a celebration of Armed Forces Day.

When I asked Win Htein about her silence, he said that the party was willing to ‘accept the blame for not taking the necessary steps on behalf of the Muslims’, and he added that they would ‘repair the damage later, by getting involved in religious ceremonies and asking committees to get together, but it will be a hard task’. He also told me that he had told Suu Kyi not to go to Meiktila during the riots. ‘I advised her not to come here, because people were blaming me when I supported the Muslims.’ After admitting that this decision was born out of political calculation, he added, ‘She wouldn’t be able to give a reasonable answer to the conflict – that’s why I told her not to come.’ It seemed that he was shielding her from the political damage that defending Muslims might bring.

I visited Meiktila again one year later, and the situation had not changed substantially. Little reconstruction had been undertaken in the Muslim quarter, and around 8,000 people, including Buddhists and Muslims, remained in camps for the displaced. Muslims enjoyed a freedom of movement that was denied to their coreligionists in Arakan, but it was more difficult for them to return to their homes than it was for Buddhists. Even many of those whose houses had not been destroyed were unable to return. The local authorities did not give them permission to go back to Buddhist-majority quarters, arguing that their presence might exacerbate tensions between the communities. The house of War War, a forty-two-year-old mother of four, still stood in downtown Meiktila. Her husband commuted every day from the camp outside Meiktila to work, but the chairman of the quarter refused to grant them permission to live in their home again. ‘We have been asking him for months if we can go home, but he says that the Buddhist people there don’t want us to return. He said there had been an incident involving another Muslim family. But we have visited the old quarter and our neighbours have told us that they want us to come back’, she told me.

The chairman was a sixty-year-old man called U Chaw. ‘Muslims cannot come back because this is a Buddhist-majority neighbourhood’, he said. ‘But they will be allowed back when everything has been rebuilt.’ He claimed that he was following both orders from above and the requests of the Buddhist population of his quarter to prevent Muslim families returning home. ‘People are afraid that returning Muslims will do something. It will take a long time to rebuild trust between the two communities’, he said.

When I visited the quarter and talked with its Buddhist residents, their sentiments turned out to be more complicated. One of them was Kyaw Myaing, a middle-aged man who assured me that he did not blame their Muslim neighbours for the violence, and claimed that it was the local authorities who did not wish to see the Muslims returning. But, like many of his neighbours, he was not pressing the issue, and he thought that ‘there might be trouble’ if Muslims returned to the quarter. Talking with him and other neighbours, I came to the view that they did not harbour any hatred towards the Muslims with whom they had lived in close proximity for many years, but were afraid of a repetition of the riots – and the government and local authorities were not doing anything to dispel such fears. Meanwhile, some people had given up and left. Among them was Mo Hnin, the woman who I had interviewed the previous year. When I tried to find her, the leader of the camp told me that she had left the country and was living in Qatar, working in a textile factory. ‘She couldn’t stand the sadness of living here and had to move away. She now sends money home to her family’, he explained.

Most of the displaced people have returned home over the years. The communities have gradually come to live together again, thanks to the initiatives of local civil society organizations working on interfaith dialogue.¹⁴ As in Arakan, Buddhists and Muslims had lived side by side and interacted for generations; but, unlike in Arakan, after the violence the authorities had not kept the communities apart.

Muslims in Burma have not only been demonized by the 969 Movement, but also actively persecuted by the authorities. They have been falsely portrayed by the Burmese government as a potential terrorist threat since the US Bush administration launched its ‘war on terror’ after 9/11, in what was probably a desperate attempt to curry international favour at a time when the Western powers were isolating the military regime. During the Thein Sein administration, that insidious association between Islam and terrorism came back with a vengeance. In May 2015, the police arrested twenty Muslims who were going to attend a wedding in Taungyyi, in southern Shan State. They were eventually sentenced to several years in jail on terrorism charges, including a seven-year term for a fifteen-year-old boy. No evidence was produced by the prosecution at the trial.¹⁵

That same year, with the journalist Veronica Pedrosa, I investigated a similar case in Mandalay.¹⁶ At least a dozen people had been accused of belonging to a hitherto unknown organization called ‘Myanmar Muslim Army’. There was a powerful reason why nobody had heard of such a group: it did not exist. One of the defendants was Soe Moe Aung, a twenty-four-year-old man. He was arrested in November 2014 and held incommunicado, and without access to a lawyer, for ten days during which, according to his mother and his lawyer, he was tortured to extract a confession that was used in the subsequent trial. ‘They accuse him of undergoing training in a camp, but I don’t think that’s possible’, her mother said in an interview in Mandalay. ‘He’s sick – he suffers from gout – so how could he have received any training?’ While investigating the case, we were able to obtain the authorization for the one of the arrests signed by the minister of home affairs, indicating that the case was, at the very least, given the green light from the highest authority. ‘That’s a big burden for the accused, because the court is afraid of not following orders from the minister himself’, Aung Naing Soe, the lawyer of another accused, told me.

The lawyer of Soe Moe Aung and four other people accused of belonging to the ‘Myanmar Muslim Army’ was a Muslim woman named Nandar Myint Thein who had received threats for taking up the case. She assured me that no evidence beyond the confessions was ever submitted during the trial. ‘When I asked the prosecution’s witnesses [all of them members of the police] for evidence about the Myanmar Muslim Army, they answered that they couldn’t speak about it before the court, that this information came from above’, she said. She and Aung Naing Soe, lawyer of others accused of belonging to the same ghost organization, said that the accusation alleged that the evidence for the defendants’ involvement with the ‘Myanmar Muslim Army’, or even proof of the group’s very existence, was withheld on the basis that revealing it in court would jeopardize ‘national security’, making any defence virtually impossible.

We managed to talk on the phone with Zaw Htay, the director of the president’s office, and he echoed this argument. ‘The Home Affairs Ministry has all the evidence on these activities, but we can’t make it public because this is a national security issue’, he told us. To the question of how the defendants would be able have a fair trial when the evidence against them was not produced, he simply replied, ‘They have the right to appeal in upper courts.’ He justified the arrests by saying, ‘There are many activities outside the country and they want to promote their terrorist attacks with some people inside the country, so right now we are doing a pre-emptive strike to protect ourselves against any possible attack.’ The talk about a ‘pre-emptive strike’ had echoes of the rhetoric used by the US government in its war on terror, like Zaw Htay’s assertion that ‘we have to balance our security with the defence of our freedoms’. Eventually, the twelve accused were sentenced to seven years in jail for belonging to an armed group whose existence was never proved.¹⁷

Meanwhile, Wirathu was acquiring international fame. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine under the headline ‘The Face of Buddhist Terror’.¹⁸ The cover provoked the fury of Buddhists in Burma, with demonstrations against the magazine, and even managed to offend some of Wirathu’s most vocal detractors, including the former monk Ashin Gambira. A leader of what was internationally known as the ‘Saffron revolution’ in 2007, Gambira did not defend Wirathu, but found it insulting to find the words ‘terror’ and ‘Buddhism’ in the same sentence.¹⁹ The president defended both Buddhism and the controversial monk. After describing Wirathu as a ‘son of Buddha’ and a ‘noble man’ committed to peace in a post in his Facebook page, he said, ‘The article in Time magazine can cause misunderstanding about the Buddhist religion, which has existed for millennia and is followed by the majority of Burmese citizens.’²⁰ As was already happening in relation to the conflict in Arakan State, domestic and international perceptions about the country and its intercommunal tensions were steadily diverging, leading to a belated discovery abroad that followers of Buddhism – widely seen in the West as a peaceful faith – were also capable of committing violence in the name of their religion. Within Burma itself, a growing siege mentality among Buddhists, who began to feel that foreigners did not understand the country’s culture and challenges, was slowly setting in. This attitude would grow in the following years, helping to entrench a xenophobic variety of nationalism increasingly prevalent in Burma.

It was unclear to what extent the ethno-nationalist monks had been directly involved in the anti-Muslim pogroms. Surely monks like Wirathu had contributed to the creation of a climate of intercommunal tension, but they had been careful to distance themselves from the violence. Wirathu invariably placed the blame on the Muslims themselves, refusing to acknowledge that his sermons had stoked the flames of anti-Muslim hatred, and insisting that he was ‘just informing the public’. But there was one case in which there was little doubt that his words had contributed to unleashing deadly riots. On 30 June 2014, Wirathu posted on his Facebook page a denunciation of an alleged rape by three Muslims of a Buddhist girl working for one of them in the coffee shop they owned in Mandalay.²¹

The next day, according to several witnesses, a group of twenty-five to thirty unknown men roamed around the Muslim quarter downtown, hurling insults at Muslims and damaging vehicles and shops, all unimpeded by the riot police who were already present in the area. Some Buddhist monks managed to bring the crowds under control, and three days later the police stopped the riots. Two men had been killed: one Buddhist and one Muslim. It turned out that the rape allegations were false. Even then, Wirathu found a chance to blame Muslims. ‘The rape of Ma Soe Soe on June 28, 2014 at the hands of Sun Cafe owners Nay Win and San Maung is not just a criminal offence but an offence aimed at instigating violence in our country. The July 1 and 2 incidents in Mandalay are not a clash of religions or races but a Jihad. They are gathering in mosques in Mandalay under the guise of Ramadan but in reality they are recruiting and preparing for Jihad against us’, Wirathu posted when the riots were over. He was never prosecuted by the authorities for instigating these riots, as he had been in 2003.

After the riots in Mandalay, episodes of intercommunal violence receded in central Burma; by this time the 969 symbol had almost disappeared from view. The Sangha Maha Nayaka Committee – a body of senior monks appointed by the government to regulate the monastic community – banned its political use in September 2013. But that did not put an end to the activities of nationalist monks like Ashin Sada Ma or Wirathu. In January 2014, in a massive conference of monks in Mandalay, they founded a new organization that replaced the 969 Movement. It was named A-myo Batha Thatana Saun Shauq Ye a Pwe, or Association for the Protection of Race and Religion, better known by the Burmese acronym Ma Ba Tha.²² The Association helped to organize Buddhist ‘Sunday school’ classes for children throughout Burma, selling curriculum books to any interested Buddhists. The aim of the schools was to impart Buddhist values to the new generations. Their teachings were usually not explicitly anti-Muslim, but the underlying message was clear: it was necessary to protect Buddhism and, as many Ma Ba Tha monks made clear, the main threat was Islam.²³

The crowning achievement of Ma Ba Tha was the passing of four ‘Race and Religion Protection Laws’ in 2015.²⁴ The first law bans polygamy. The second makes religious conversion dependant on obtaining approval from a Registration Board for religious conversion at the township level, and punishes forced conversions. The third law regulates the marriages of Buddhist women to non-Buddhist men, mandating local registrars to post marriage applications for fourteen days in public, in order to determine whether there are any objections to the proposed unions – and the couple may marry only if there are no objections. The fourth law imposes a limit on the number of children a woman can bear, but only in certain regions. Muslims are not mentioned explicitly in the laws, but it was clear to everybody that they were directed at them, while the Population Control Bill was to be applied in Arakan to the Rohingya community exclusively. The laws had wide popular support.

A draft of the interreligious marriage law was circulated in the summer of 2013, and monks organized demonstrations in support. A campaign to gather signatures was launched around that time, with stalls set up all around the country, and it was claimed that 2.5 million people signed. There was opposition from some quarters – especially from women’s groups, who regarded the laws as inimical to women’s rights.²⁵ Ma Ba Tha responded with a condemnation of ‘those critics, who are backed by foreign groups, for raising the human rights issues and not working for the benefit of the public and not being loyal to the state’, and some of the critics received death threats.²⁶ But many women had also participated actively in the promotion of the laws, as they now had an opportunity to take a public role.²⁷

The nationalist monks not only succeeded during this period in getting their laws passed, but also managed to determine to a large degree the issues that were considered of national importance and would take centre-stage in public debates throughout Burma.

Meanwhile, other kinds of mobilizations, for workers’ rights or against rampant land-grabbing, were virtually relegated to the margins. Some of them acquired brief prominence, including a series of student protests in early 2014 against a new education law that was to give the government tight control over the universities. The students organized nationwide, coordinating a big march to Rangoon. But they were blocked by the police in Letpadan, 100 kilometres north of the city, and were eventually beaten with great brutality. Many of them were arrested and put in jail for two years.²⁸ The new education law was eventually passed with overwhelming parliamentary support, including that of Aung San Suu Kyi, who during the protests had done little to hide her annoyance, saying: ‘Whether it is in this country or in any country, the best method to resolve problems is to discuss and negotiate.’²⁹ In the context of those protests, of the demonstrations against the Letpadaung Copper Mine, and other mobilizations, the government of Thein Sein was sending a clear message: only movements to protect race and religion were to be allowed in the new ‘disciplineflourishing democracy’. For the rest, the old apparatus of repression was still very much in place.

Ahead of the elections in November 2015, Ma Ba Tha threw its support behind the party in government, the USDP, and actively campaigned against the NLD, accusing it of being controlled by Muslims and being too soft on defending ‘race and religion’. The NLD eventually won the elections, but it was not a victory over the Buddhist ethnonationalism expounded by Ma Ba Tha. The NLD had yielded to them; not wanting to endanger its chances of winning, the party did not file a single Muslim candidate. As a result, there would not be any Muslims in the new parliament.