Myanmar's Enemy Within by Francis Wade

Author:Francis Wade
Language: deu
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783605309
Publisher: Zed Books
Published: 2017-07-10T04:00:00+00:00

8

“We came down from the sky”: the Buddhist preachers of hate

Three years on from U Win Htein’s remonstration with the chief minister in Meikhtila, I went to visit him in his small, spartan one-room apartment in the capital, Naypyidaw. It was late March 2016, and much had changed since the day the mobs levelled Mingalar Zayone. The National League for Democracy had won a resounding victory in nationwide elections in November the previous year and was preparing to take over government. U Win Htein, still a close aide of Suu Kyi, had been appointed spokesperson for the party.

The nature of the movements agitating against the country’s Muslim population had also evolved. In the aftermath of the Meikhtila bloodshed, the 969 movement had faded. In August 2013, the State Sangha Maha Nayaka Committee, the government-appointed body charged with regulating the monkhood, issued a directive stating that it was illegal for monastic networks to organise around the principles of 969, and told its leaders that they were forbidden to use the 969 emblem as a symbol for Buddhism. The stickers began to disappear from the shop fronts and taxi windows they once adorned, and its followers melted back into anonymity. No longer were they so evident among the everyday public.

But in the meantime, another equally divisive monk-led movement arose. It displayed a high capacity for organisation, with millions of supporters and an ability to wield influence at the highest rungs of government. Its leaders, some of whom came from the ranks of 969 – U Wirathu, U Wimala, Ashin Kawi Daza, the abbot in Kayin State that circulated the boycott order in October 2012, and others – preached a similarly exclusionary brand of nationalism that fixed on Islam as the overarching threat to the health of the nation. But like 969, these leaders also appeared immune to criticism from politicians – even Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD had refused to condemn the sermons of the men in robes that so often appeared to precipitate attacks on Muslims.

The party seemed to have cowered in the face of this new movement that formed in June 2013, as 969 began to wind down. Its official name, the Organisation for Protection of Race, Religion, and Sa¯sana echoed the mantra of the nationalists of the 1930s. Those were the three pivots around which the discourse on belonging revolved. In time it had come to be known by its acronym, Ma Ba Tha, and its leaders spoke of it as a deity.

“We are a two-year-old boy,” U Wirathu once said,1 “but we came down from the sky, not like a normal person. We are brilliant people.”

In comprising both monks and laypeople it was able to circumvent the restrictions that had been the downfall of 969. With its own Education and Propagation Department, led by U Wirathu, a Legal Affairs wing, an accounting department and a clutch of savvy media officers, it had become a well-resourced organisation with a nationwide presence. It included more considered monks alongside the firebrand figures in the leadership.

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