A call to arms for Sri Lankan monks. Ethnic
cleansing of the Rohingya in Myanmar. A Buddhist faith known for pacifism is
taking its place in a new age of nationalism.
By Hannah Beech
 |
|
Thousands
of Buddhists listening to Sitagu Sayadaw, one of Myanmar’s most revered Buddhist
leaders,
also known by his monastic name Ashin Nyanissara, in Paleik, Myanmar,
in November 2017.
Credit Minzayar Oo for The New York Times |
GINTOTA,
Sri Lanka — The Buddhist
abbot was sitting cross-legged in his monastery, fulminating against the evils
of Islam, when the petrol bomb exploded within earshot.
But the abbot, the Venerable Ambalangoda
Sumedhananda Thero, barely registered the blast. Waving away the mosquitoes
swarming the night air in the southern Sri Lankan town of Gintota, he continued
his tirade: Muslims were violent, he said, Muslims were rapacious.
“The aim of Muslims is to take over all our
land and everything we value,” he said. “Think of what used to be Buddhist
lands: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir, Indonesia. They have all been destroyed
by Islam.”
Minutes later, a monastic aide rushed in and
confirmed that someone had thrown a Molotov cocktail at a nearby mosque. The
abbot flicked his fingers in the air and shrugged.
His responsibility was to his flock, the Buddhist
majority of Sri Lanka. Muslims, who make up less than 10 percent of Sri Lanka’s
population, were not his concern.
Incited by a politically powerful network of
charismatic monks like Sumedhananda Thero, Buddhists have entered the era of
militant tribalism, casting themselves as spiritual warriors who must defend
their faith against an outside force.
Their sense of grievance might seem unlikely:
In Sri Lanka and Myanmar, two countries that are on the forefront of a radical
religious-nationalist movement, Buddhists constitute overwhelming majorities of
the population. Yet some Buddhists, especially those who subscribe to the
purist Theravada strain of the faith, are increasingly convinced that they are
under existential threat, particularly from an Islam struggling with its own
violent fringe.
As the tectonic plates of Buddhism and Islam
collide, a portion of Buddhists are abandoning the peaceful tenets of their
religion. Over the past few years, Buddhist mobs have waged deadly attacks
against minority Muslim populations. Buddhist nationalist ideologues are using
the spiritual authority of extremist monks to bolster their support.
“The Buddhists never used to hate us so
much,” said Mohammed Naseer, the imam of the Hillur Mosque in Gintota, Sri
Lanka, which was attacked by Buddhist mobs in 2017. “Now their monks spread a
message that we don’t belong in this country and should leave. But where will
we go? This is our home.”
Last month in Sri Lanka, a powerful Buddhist
monk went on a hunger strike that resulted in the resignation of all nine
Muslim ministers in the cabinet. The monk had suggested that Muslim politicians
were complicit in the Easter Sunday attacks by Islamic State-linked militants
on churches and hotels in Sri Lanka, which killed more than 250 people.
In Myanmar, where a campaign of ethnic
cleansing has forced an exodus of most of the country’s Muslims, Buddhist monks
still warn of an Islamic invasion, even though less than 5 percent of the
national population is Muslim. During Ramadan celebrations in May, Buddhist
mobs besieged Islamic prayer halls, causing Muslim worshipers to flee.
Because of Buddhism’s pacifist image — swirls
of calming incense and beatific smiles — the faith is not often associated with
sectarian aggression. Yet no religion holds a monopoly on peace. Buddhists go
to war, too.
“Buddhist monks will say that they would
never condone violence,” said Mikael Gravers, an anthropologist at Aarhus
University in Denmark who has studied the intersection of Buddhism and
nationalism. “But at the same time, they will also say that Buddhism or
Buddhist states have to be defended by any means.”
Given that Theravada Buddhists constitute
overwhelming majorities in the five countries where their faith is practiced —
Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand — it might seem strange that
they feel so besieged. But Buddhism, whose adherents make up only 7 percent of
the global faithful, is the only major religion whose population is not
expected to grow in absolute numbers over the next few decades, according to
the Pew Research Center.
Meanwhile, the number of Muslims, who make up
just under one-quarter of the world’s population, is growing quickly, buoyed by
youthful demographics and high fertility rates. By 2050, Pew projects that
there will be nearly as many Muslims in the world as there are Christians.
Buddhist monks have made much of that trend
in their rhetoric, portraying their faith to be under existential threat.
Sitting in his walled temple compound in
Gintota, Sumedhananda Thero gave a bleak prophecy. “If a man dies, it is
acceptable,” he said. “But if a race or religion dies, you can never get it
back.”
The
military-monastic complex
Thousands of people gathered in Yangon,
Myanmar’s largest city, in May as Ashin Wirathu, a Buddhist monk who was once
jailed for his hate speech, praised the nation’s army.
Since August 2017, more than 700,000 Rohingya
have fled Myanmar for Bangladesh. Behind it all was a campaign of ethnic
cleansing by the army and its allies, with Buddhist mobs and the country’s
security forces subjecting Rohingya Muslims to slaughter, rape and the complete
erasure of hundreds of their villages.
Ashin Wirathu has rejected the nonviolent
teachings of his faith. Military-linked lawmakers deserved to be glorified like
Buddha, he said at the rally. “Only the military,” he continued, “protects both
our country and our religion.”
At another protest last October, Ashin
Wirathu slammed the decision by the International Criminal Court, or I.C.C., to
pursue a case against Myanmar’s military for its persecution of the Rohingya.
Then the monk made a startling call to arms.
“The day that the I.C.C. comes here is the day I hold a gun,” Ashin Wirathu
said in an interview with The New York Times.
Experts at the United Nations say top Myanmar
generals should be tried for genocide. Yet few members of Myanmar’s Buddhist
clergy, who have long served as the nation’s moral conscience, have condemned
the bloodshed. Instead, they refer to the Rohingya as subhuman invaders
despoiling a golden Buddhist land.
In late May, the civilian government of
Myanmar, which shares power with the military, issued an arrest warrant for
Ashin Wirathu. The charges were not for hate speech against a minority
religion. Instead, the monk is being accused of seditious comments against Daw
Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel laureate who is the nation’s de facto civilian
leader.
Even though Ashin Wirathu has not made much
of an effort to hide, and continues to post videos on social media, the police
say they cannot find him and will try him in absentia.
Monks like Ashin Wirathu inhabit the
extremist fringe of Buddhist nationalism. But more respected clerics are
involved as well.
At 82 years old, the Venerable Ashin
Nyanissara, known more commonly as Sitagu Sayadaw, is Myanmar’s most
influential monk. In 1988, Sitagu Sayadaw was one of a coterie of monks who
blessed the nation’s democracy movement, which sent hundreds of thousands of
people to the streets in peaceful protest. Myanmar’s military rulers responded
by massacring hundreds.
That act of violence stained the junta.
Another round of crushed pro-democracy protests led by the country’s monks, in
2007, hastened a political transition in which some power is now shared with
Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s civilian government.
After the 1988 crackdown, Sitagu Sayadaw
slipped into exile in Tennessee before returning home to open Buddhist
academies and a monastic university. President Obama and Pope Francis have met
with him. Sitagu Sayadaw sits on interfaith councils, and his missionary society
runs meditation centers in Texas, Florida and Minnesota.
But just as hundreds of thousands of Rohingya
were fleeing their torched villages, Sitagu Sayadaw sat in front of an audience
of army officers and said that “Muslims have almost bought the United Nations.”
The army and monkhood, he continued, “could
not be separated.”
Sitagu Sayadaw was pictured in May on a
Facebook page linked to the Myanmar military, grinning among soldiers. He has
offered up his faith’s greatest sacrifice: an army of spiritual soldiers for
the national cause.
“There are over 400,000 monks in Myanmar,” he
told the commander of Myanmar’s armed forces. “If you need them, I will tell
them to begin. It’s easy.”
“When someone as respected as Sitagu Sayadaw
says something, even if it is strongly dismissive of a certain group, people
listen,” said Daw Khin Mar Mar Kyi, a Myanmar-born social anthropologist at the
University of Oxford. “His words justify hatred.”
There are some monks, albeit a minority, who
are countering the monastic hate speech.
In Yangon in recent weeks, peace advocates
handed out white roses to Muslims in order to promote interfaith harmony.
“The extremists are only a small part of
Buddhism in Myanmar, but they have loud voices,” said Ashin Sein Di Ta, the
abbot of the Asia Light monastery. “We should say clearly that if any monk,
even respected ones like Sitagu Sayadaw, advocate killing, they should be
defrocked.”
But in a country where senior monks are so
respected, it remains hard to question their authority.
Prevailing anti-Muslim sentiment worldwide
has heightened prejudice, with social media playing a corrosive role. During
the height of the junta’s power, unauthorized fax machines were illegal in
Myanmar, and the media was censored. Today, much of the population is on
Facebook, ill-equipped to sift hyperbole from fact.
“I’ve been interviewing so many monks, and it
is clear that Facebook is what has been driving their hate,” said Ms. Khin Mar
Mar Kyi of the University of Oxford. “Monks learned that Islamophobia existed
in the West, and they felt like it justified their feelings.”
One
nation, under Buddha
Spread on social media, this is how the tale
goes: Once, great Buddhist empires dominated Asia. Then, beginning in the 7th
century, Muslim invaders began tearing across the continent. Buddhist rulers in
present-day Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia succumbed to Islam.
The indignities continued into this century
when, in 2001, the Taliban blew up the giant Buddha statues at Bamiyan in
Afghanistan.
It is not just monks who feel the need to
guard their faith. This is a time of profound social change in Myanmar, and
some women, in particular, are yearning for a moral force to counter what they
see as a rising materialism among the nation’s youth. Monasteries, they fear,
are no longer as alluring as malls.
One group that has harnessed this anxiety is
the Committee for the Protection of Nationality and Religion, or Ma Ba Tha,
which runs Sunday schools and other community events popular across Myanmar.
Formed in 2014 with the aim of protecting Buddhism, Ma Ba Tha has pushed successfully
for laws that make it hard for Buddhist women to marry outside their faith.
In Myanmar, as in Sri Lanka — where Muslims
have been accused of manufacturing underwear that makes Buddhist women
infertile or of sprinkling birth control pills into curry consumed by Buddhists
— Buddhist figures have often expressed their hatred of Muslims in sexual
terms.
In 2012, reports that a Buddhist woman had
been raped by Muslim men triggered fatal communal clashes in Myanmar. Buddhists
in both countries claim that Muslims are waging a “reproductive jihad.”
“There is this idea of a hyperfertile Muslim
man with his many wives,” said Iselin Frydenlund, an associate professor of
religious studies at the Norwegian School of Theology. “Ma Ba Tha tapped into
this trope, and pure Buddhist women were held up as the symbols of the nation
who were in danger of rape by Muslim men.”
In fact, it is Myanmar’s armed forces that
have used rape as a weapon of war in its battles against various ethnic
insurgencies. The United Nations has blamed the Myanmar military for “sexual
atrocities reportedly committed in cold blood out of a lethal hatred for the
Rohingya.”
Ma Ba Tha monks reject such findings, and
they have been able to continue their hate-mongering even though the group was
technically outlawed in 2017. “I don’t think anyone would rape Bengali women
because they are ugly and disgusting,” said one Ma Ba Tha monk, U Rarza,
referring to the Rohingya by a pejorative term.
The
Buddhist right returns
When suicide bombers linked to the Islamic
State blew up churches and hotels in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday, Buddhist
nationalists felt vindicated.
“We have been warning for years that Muslim
extremists are a danger to national security,” said Dilanthe Withanage, a
senior administrator for Bodu Bala Sena, the largest of Sri Lanka’s Buddhist
nationalist groups.
“Blood is on the government’s hands for ignoring
the radicalization of Islam,” Mr. Withanage said.
After a few years of moderate coalition
governance, a fusion of faith and tribalism is again on the ascendant in Sri
Lanka. The movement’s champion is Gotabaya Rajapaksa, a former defense chief who
is the leading candidate for president in elections due this year.
Mr. Rajapaksa has pledged to protect religion
in the country with the longest continuous Buddhist lineage. He is determined
to reconstruct Sri Lanka’s security state, which was built during the country’s
nearly three-decade-long civil war with an ethnic Tamil minority.
From 2005 to 2015, Sri Lanka was led by Mr.
Rajapaksa’s brother, Mahinda Rajapaksa, an unabashed nationalist who justified
the brutal end to the civil war by portraying himself as the nation’s spiritual
savior.
Temples decorated their walls with pictures
of the Rajapaksa brothers. Money flowed for radical Buddhist groups that
cheered on sectarian rioting in which Muslims died. One of the founders of Bodu
Bala Sena, or the Buddhist Power Army, was given prime land in Colombo, the
capital, for a high-rise Buddhist cultural center. The national telecom service
added Bodu Bala Sena’s theme song to its collection of ringtones.
Last year, Bodu Bala Sena’s leader, Galagoda
Aththe Gnanasara Thero, was sentenced to six years in prison. But in late May,
amid a changing political climate, he received a presidential pardon. On
Sunday, he presided over a meeting of thousands of monks intent on making their
political presence felt in the upcoming elections.
Before his imprisonment last year, Gnanasara
Thero placed his campaign in a historical context. “We have been the guardians
of Buddhism for 2,500 years,” he said in an interview with The Times. “Now, it
is our duty, just as it is the duty of monks in Myanmar to fight to protect our
peaceful island from Islam.”
Dharisha Bastians contributed reporting from
Colombo, Sri Lanka and Saw Nang from Yangon, Myanmar.
