In a number of Buddhist- majority
states in Asia- Burma (Myanmar),
Thailand, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, etc. -the Muslim minorities are under siege.
Both the State agencies and the Buddhist chauvinists are driving the anti-Muslim
hate campaigns and consequent violence against the hapless minorities. The unspeakable
horrors committed by the Buddhist marauders against the Rohingya Muslims of
Burma have caught international attention in the recent months.
In the latest issue of the
international newsweekly Time Magazine
of the United States, one may read a graphic portrait of Buddhist Terrorism in
Burma and Thailand, where a Muslim-majority province in the deep south of the
country is under siege of the Buddhist army of Thailand. Sri Lanka on
Tuesday (July 02, 2013) banned the
sale of this issue of Time magazine because of the newsweekly’s feature article
on Buddhist terrorism. We publish below the Full text of the cover
story “The Face of Buddhist Terror” in July 01, 2013 TIME magazine.
The Face of Buddhist Terror
It’s a faith famous for its
pacifism and tolerance. But in several of Asia’s Buddhist-majority nations,
monks are inciting bigotry and violence — mostly against Muslims
By Hannah Beech / Meikhtila,
Burma, And Pattani, Thailand
His face as still and serene as a
statue’s, the Buddhist monk who has taken the title “the Burmese bin Laden”
begins his sermon. Hundreds of worshippers sit before him, palms pressed
together, sweat trickling down their sticky backs. On cue, the crowd chants
with the man in burgundy robes, the mantras drifting through the sultry air of
a temple in Mandalay, Burma’s second biggest city after Rangoon. It seems a
peaceful scene, but Wirathu’s message crackles with hate. “Now is not the time for calm,” the monk intones, as he spends 90
minutes describing the many ways in which he detests the minority Muslims in
this Buddhist-majority land. “Now is the
time to rise up, to make your blood boil.”
Buddhist blood is
boiling in Burma, also known as Myanmar–and plenty of Muslim blood is being
spilled. Over the past year, Buddhist mobs have targeted
members of the minority faith, and incendiary rhetoric from Wirathu–he goes by
one name–and other hard-line monks is fanning the flames of religious
chauvinism. Scores of Muslims have been killed, according to government
statistics, although international human-rights workers put the number in the
hundreds. Much of the violence is directed at the Rohingya, a largely
stateless Muslim group in Burma’s far west that the U.N. calls one of the world’s
most persecuted people.
The communal bloodshed has spread to central Burma, where Wirathu, 46,
lives and preaches his virulent sermons. The radical monk sees Muslims, who
make up at least 5% of Burma’s estimated 60 million people, as a threat to the
country and its culture. “[Muslims] are
breeding so fast, and they are stealing our women, raping them,” he tells
me. “They would like to occupy our
country, but I won’t let them. We must keep Myanmar Buddhist.”
Such hate speech threatens the
delicate political ecosystem in a country peopled by at least 135 ethnic groups
that has only recently been unshackled from nearly half a century of military
rule. Already some government officials are calling for implementation of a
ban, rarely enforced during the military era, on Rohingya women’s bearing more than two children. And many
Christians in the country’s north say recent fighting between the Burmese
military and Kachin insurgents, who
are mostly Christian, was exacerbated by the widening religious divide.
Radical Buddhism is thriving in other parts of Asia too. This year in
Sri Lanka, Buddhist nationalist groups with links to high-ranking officialdom
have gained prominence, with monks helping orchestrate the destruction of
Muslim and Christian property. And in Thailand’s deep south, where a Muslim insurgency has
claimed some 5,000 lives since 2004, the Thai army trains civilian militias and
often accompanies Buddhist monks when they leave their temples. The commingling
of soldiers and monks–some of whom have armed themselves–only heightens the alienation felt by Thailand’s minority
Muslims.
Although each nation’s history dictates the course radical Buddhism has
taken within its borders, growing access to the Internet means that prejudice
and rumors are instantly inflamed with each Facebook post or
tweet. Violence can easily spill across borders. In Malaysia, where hundreds of
thousands of Burmese migrants work, several Buddhist Burmese were killed in
June–likely in retribution, Malaysian authorities say, for the deaths of
Muslims back in Burma.
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 other 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 political 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.
Mantra of Hate
Sitting cross-legged on a raised
platform at the New Masoeyein monastery in Mandalay, next to a wall covered by
life-size portraits of himself, the Burmese bin Laden expounds on his
worldview. U.S. President Barack Obama has “been
tainted by black Muslim blood.” Arabs have hijacked the U.N., he believes,
although he sees no irony in linking his name to that of an Arab terrorist.
About 90% of Muslims in Burma are “radical,
bad people,” says Wirathu, who
was jailed for seven years for his role
in inciting anti-Muslim pogroms in 2003. He now leads a movement called 969–the figure represents various
attributes of the Buddha–which calls on Buddhists to
fraternize only among themselves and shun people of other faiths. “Taking care of our own religion and race
is more important than democracy,” says Wirathu.
It would be easy to dismiss
Wirathu as an outlier with little doctrinal basis for his bigotry. But he is
charismatic and powerful, and his message resonates. Among the country’s
majority Bamar ethnic group, as well as across Buddhist parts of Asia, there’s
a vague sense that their religion is under siege–that Islam, having centuries ago
conquered the Buddhist lands of Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan and Afghanistan,
now seeks new territory. Even without proof, Buddhist nationalists
stoke fears that local Muslim populations are increasing faster than their own,
and they worry about Middle Eastern money pouring in to build new mosques.
In Burma, the democratization
process that began in 2011 with the junta’s giving way to a quasi-civilian
government has also allowed extremist voices to proliferate. The trouble began
last year in the far west, where machete-wielding Buddhist hordes attacked
Rohingya villages; 70 Muslims were slaughtered in a daylong massacre in one
hamlet, according to Human
Rights Watch. The government has done little to check the violence, which
has since migrated to other parts of the country.
In late March, the central town
of Meikhtila burned for days, with entire Muslim quarters razed by Buddhist
mobs after a monk was killed by Muslims. (The official death toll: two
Buddhists and at least 40 Muslims.) Thousands
of Muslims are still crammed into refugee camps that journalists are forbidden
to enter. In the shadow of a burned-down mosque, I was able to meet the
family of Abdul Razak Shahban, one of at least 20 students at a local Islamic
school who were killed. “My son was
killed because he was Muslim, nothing else,” Razak’s mother Rahamabi told
me.
Temple and State
In the deep south of Burma’s
neighbor Thailand, it is the Buddhists who complain of being targeted for their
faith. This part of the country used to be part of a Malay sultanate before
staunchly Buddhist Thailand annexed it early last century, and Muslims make up
at least 80% of the population. Since a separatist insurgency intensified in
2004, many Buddhists have been targeted because their positions–such as
teachers, soldiers and government workers–are linked with the Thai state.
Dozens of monks have been attacked too. Now the Buddhists have overwhelming
superiority in arms: the Thai military and other security forces have moved
into the wat, as Thai Buddhist temples are known.
If Buddhists feel more protected
by the presence of soldiers in their temples, it sends quite another signal to
the Muslim population. “[The] state is wedding religion to the military,”
says Michael Jerryson, an assistant professor of religious studies at
Youngstown State University in Ohio and author of a book about Buddhism’s role
in the southern-Thailand conflict. Muslims too are scared: more of them have
perished in the violence than Buddhists. (By proportion of population, more
Buddhists have died, however.) Yet Buddhists are the ones who receive the
greater state protection, and I listen to monk after monk heighten tensions by
telling me that Muslims are using mosques to store weapons or that every imam
carries a gun. “Islam is a religion of
violence,” says Phratong Jiratamo, a former marine turned monk in the town
of Pattani. “Everyone knows this.”
It’s a sentiment the Burmese bin Laden would endorse. I ask
Wirathu how he reconciles the peaceful sutras of his faith with the anti-Muslim
violence spreading across his Bamar-majority homeland. “In Buddhism, we are not allowed to go on the offensive,” he tells
me, as if he is lecturing a child. “But
we have every right to protect and defend our community.” Later, as he
preaches to an evening crowd, I listen to him compel smiling housewives,
students, teachers, grandmothers and others to repeat after him, “I will sacrifice myself for the Bamar
race.” It’s hard to imagine that the Buddha would have approved.
© 2013 Time Inc.
Read the article at the
TIME website: