by David Eimer
One month before I arrived, Pyay was the scene of the latest confrontation between Buddhism and Islam in the region. It was a Sunday and the town’s Muslims were preparing to celebrate the birthday of Muhammad, the founder of their religion. Around 10 per cent of Pyay’s population are Muslims, a big community for the Ayeyarwady valley. Almost all are the descendants of Indian labourers imported by the British, for whom Pyay was an important riverine link between lower and central Burma.
Less keen on the celebration were a shadowy faction of extreme Buddhist activists and monks calling themselves the Nationalist Coalition Group. They arrived from Yangon the day before and complained about the event to the local government. In response, officials asked the organisers to limit the party to thirty minutes. But that wasn’t enough for the protestors, who decided that they would stop it from going ahead at all.
‘Eight cars and two trucks full of monks arrived outside the Eid Ka Mosque at eight in the morning, maybe a hundred people in all,’ Kaung Myat Min, a local journalist, told me. ‘Most of the Muslims were already inside and the celebration was about to start. The nationalists went in and forced them to cancel it. The nationalists were very angry and the Muslims were worried that there would be fighting. Some of them were crying and saying, “We do this every year.” They couldn’t understand why this was happening.’
Kaung Myat Min tried to interview some of the monks to find out why they were stopping the party. ‘They refused to speak to me. They said the media were all liars. They were very aggressive. Some of the younger Muslim men were obviously angry too, but their leaders told them to go home, that they had to show their love and not fight.’ I asked if there had been police present. ‘Yes, about fifteen of them,’ said Kaung Myat Min. ‘But they were just sitting on their motorbikes playing with their phones.’
Everyone who was present at the Eid Ka Mosque knew about Pyay’s history of religious conflict over the last three decades. Less than a mile from the Shwesandaw Pagoda, the Eid Ka dates back to the nineteenth century and the reign of Thibaw, Burma’s last king, but its salmon-pink minarets are much newer than that. ‘The mosque was destroyed in 1988 and again in 1997. The Buddhists just came in and tore it down,’ one of the caretakers told me when I visited.
Later I discovered that the hotel I was staying in had been Muslim-owned, until it was attacked by monks from one of Pyay’s monasteries in another bout of violence in 2001. After that, the owner sold up and moved to Yangon. ‘Pyay is a very Buddhist place and it has a history of incidents between Buddhists and Muslims. I think that is why the nationalists from Yangon chose to come here last month,’ said Wai Yan, a 21-year-old Muslim engineering student and friend of Kaung Myat Min’s.
We were talking at a restaurant by the Ayeyarwady. Below us the river was fat and sluggish, its green-brown waters lapping softly on the sandy banks along which barges and dredgers were moored side by side, anchored for the night. The red disc of the sun was slipping behind the Arakan Hills on the opposite side of the river, where Kaung Myat Min pointed out the Shwebontha Muni Pagoda, which he said was a favourite of Khin Nyunt, the much-feared chief of military intelligence during the junta era.
Close to the restaurant, occupying prime position as they looked down on the Ayeyarwady, were still-fine teak and brick mansions from the colonial period. ‘A lot of them are empty,’ said Kaung Myat Min. ‘People think they are haunted.’ Stout in a longyi and striped shirt and sporting a 1950s-style rocker’s quiff, Kaung Myat Min was in his early thirties, the son of a Chin father who had served in the Tatmadaw and a Bamar mother. He had worked for Radio Free Asia in India, before returning to his hometown of Pyay in 2012 after the generals stepped down.
Both he and Wai Yan believed that the disruption of the celebration of Muhammad’s birthday was a political decision. ‘There were no protests last year,’ pointed out Wai Yan, floppy fringed, his hair fashionably shaved at the sides. ‘But since the NLD won the election there are people who want the government to fail and so they are stirring up trouble. They can say the NLD is protecting Muslims.’
Wai Yan was adamant that relations between Buddhists and Muslims in Pyay were better now than when the last communal riots broke out in 2001. ‘I have many Buddhist friends at college and I did at school. It is the people coming from outside the town who are making trouble.’ But Wai Yan was also eager to see some legal safeguards for non-Buddhists. ‘There should be proper laws banning discrimination against all religions. A law on freedom of worship.’
Technically, Burma’s constitution does protect religious freedom. But it also emphasises that Buddhism has a ‘special position’ as the faith practised by most people. In 1961 the then prime minister U Nu attempted to make Buddhism the state religion. The law was never passed. Nevertheless, after the 1962 coup new decrees ensured the religion’s supremacy. Missionaries were expelled, the religious schools of other faiths nationalised and Muslims were barred from serving in the Tatmadaw, making the institution even more Buddhist and Bamar than it already was.
More recently it has become near-impossible for any new church, mosque or Hindu temple to gain the official approval needed for their construction. And despite Ne Win’s policy of keeping what he described as the ‘bearded fellows’ (Muslims) away from the ‘bald-headed fellows’ (Buddhists), the junta era saw numerous bouts of violence between the two communities and not just in the Ayeyarwady valley. Mawlamyine in the south of the country and Mandalay experienced serious rioting in 1983 and 1997 respectively.
Clashes between Buddhists and Muslims have been taking place since the seventeenth century, when fighting erupted in what is now Rakhine State, and probably well before that. But there is little doubt that the end of military rule and the rise of social media have allowed extreme Buddhist nationalists more space to operate in. Facebook is by far the most favoured means of communication in Burma, and it seethes with hate speech after any incident that can be construed as a criticism or attack on Buddhism.
Anti-Islamic propaganda has increased noticeably since 2012, when the first of a series of outbreaks of violence in Rakhine State resulted in an exodus of Rohingya Muslims to Bangladesh and the confinement of most of those left behind in ghettos or squalid camps for the internally displaced. But the Rohingya have long been vilified and persecuted in Burma, where the majority of people regard them as recent illegal immigrants, despite evidence suggesting that they have been present in the country for hundreds of years.
Muslims in Burma, though, cannot be lumped together into one entity, just as Buddhists are a diverse crowd, with some more secular than others and many living side by side with Muslims and disavowing the diktats of the radicals. Arabs and Persians started coming here in the ninth century ce. Other Muslims were encouraged to move from India by the British or arrived from China. Many have intermarried over the years and identify themselves as Bamar.
Unlike the stateless Rohingya, the rest of Burma’s Muslims are supposed to be full citizens of the country. They served as soldiers for Burma’s kings and played a role in the struggle for independence. U Raschid was a close friend and associate of Aung San’s at Rangoon University, and later a cabinet minister in the 1950s. And when Aung San was assassinated in 1947, his Muslim bodyguard died with him. Another Muslim, Maung Thaw Ka, was a co-founder of the NLD with Aung San Suu Kyi. Many others were early supporters.
But the NLD did not field a single Muslim candidate in the 2015 election, leaving around 4 per cent of the population completely unrepresented in parliament. Nor has Aung San Suu Kyi’s government overturned a highly controversial 2014 law that requires any Buddhist woman to seek official permission before she can marry a man of a different faith. Another law passed at the same time allows the authorities to interview those wishing to convert to another religion.
That pernicious legislation, and much of the increased tension between Buddhists and Muslims in recent years, can be attributed to the activities of an organisation called Ma Ba Tha. Taking its name fro
m a rallying cry of the 1930s independence movement – Amyo Batha Thathana, or ‘Race, Religion and the Teachings of the Buddha’ – Ma Ba Tha grew out of the earlier 969 movement, which emerged in the 1990s prompted by the belief that an Islamic plot was underway to eradicate Buddhism in Burma.
Now defunct, after the Sangha’s leadership criticised some of their activities, Ma Ba Tha has splintered into other organisations like the Nationalist Coalition Group, the people who ended the celebration of Muhammad’s birthday in Pyay. Its former leader and the most public face of Islamophobia in Burma is a Mandalay monk named U Wirathu. He has a long history of Muslim-baiting, insisting that they are marrying Buddhist women, forcing them to convert to Islam and then breeding like crazy, so that one day Muslims will outnumber Buddhists.
There is no truth in that. Burma’s 2014 census revealed that the number of Muslims has barely increased in the last forty years. The Rohingya were excluded from the census, but the Muslim presence in Burma has declined significantly since it was taken, following the involuntary departure of so many Rohingya to Bangladesh. In fact, it is Christians who are on the rise, their numbers swelling by almost 2 per cent since the 1970s.
Much of the power that U Wirathu wields stems from the links between Buddhist nationalists and the USDP, the main, army-backed opposition party. The USDP has a vested interest in pressuring the NLD regarding any perceived failure to protect Buddhism, while disorder between different communities reinforces the generals’ favourite narrative that only military rule can guarantee stability. Daw Suu’s silence on Muslim issues is a reflection of the NLD’s fear of extremists inflaming public opinion against her government.
Most Muslims believe that the ire directed towards them over the last few decades is inspired by political manoeuvring. Ko Min Nyo, who witnessed the 1988 violence in Pyay, is convinced of that. ‘It escalated into a riot because of the army,’ he told me. ‘The situation was so bad with the Ne Win government that the army was always looking for excuses, something to distract people. We all saw so-called monks with green trousers under their robes taking part in the attacks. They were soldiers masquerading as monks.’
Similar reports of soldiers posing as monks, or gangs of toughs wearing jeans under crimson robes, have emerged whenever there has been violence against Muslims in recent years. Often the Buddhist mobs are outsiders in the towns and neighbourhoods where they strike, like the nationalists from Yangon who showed up suddenly in Pyay, and observers have noted how some appear to be drunk. ‘There are lots of unemployed, poorly educated people who can be paid to cause problems,’ Wai Yan had told me.
A fight between a Muslim man and a Buddhist over a prostitute prompted 1988’s rioting. ‘The Muslim guy hit the Buddhist hard. The Buddhist was a fireman and he came back later with his friends for revenge. They didn’t find the Muslim,’ said Ko Min Nyo, in between digging a spoon into the bony Ayeyarwady fish we were sharing. ‘But the next day they were joined by monks and they started destroying Muslim houses and the Eid Ka Mosque.’
Firemen in Burma are officially part of the Tatmadaw, adding credence to Ko Min Nyo’s claim that the army played a role in the subsequent four days of attacks on Muslim homes across Pyay, their residents having mostly fled. ‘It only stopped when a curfew was imposed,’ said the 48-year-old. ‘But by then, lots of houses had been destroyed and looted.’
Ko Min Nyo might have his own reasons for blaming the junta for the riots. He had been involved with the All Burma Students’ Democratic Front, an armed opposition group formed after the failure of the 1988 pro-democracy protests. Arrested in 1996, he served seven years as a political prisoner. ‘Military intelligence came for me. They said I was going to bomb the Kaba Aye Pagoda in Yangon and that I was in touch with the All Burma Students and the Karen. I did have contact with them, but I am not a terrorist and not violent.’
He could have been lying. As a Muslim, though, I suspected Ko Min Nyo would have been kept in jail for much longer if he was truly planning to blow up one of Yangon’s better-known temples. But he didn’t give the impression that he cared what I thought. Ko Min Nyo shielded himself with an invisible carapace, a manufactured self-assurance expressed in his cool, deliberately vague recollection of his militant youth.
Along with many Muslims, his faith in the NLD has been shattered by the party’s unwillingness to speak out against the Buddhist nationalists and their blatant lies. ‘I used to support the NLD, but no longer,’ he said. ‘I still like Daw Suu. I trust her. I think she is honourable. She isn’t doing anything for Muslims, but she can only do so much with a quarter of the parliament army officers. At least now there is some freedom and democracy.’
South of Pyay a narrow two-lane highway curves towards Yangon, running roughly parallel to the eastern banks of the Ayeyarwady. The river is an unseen presence from the buses that hurtle along the road, but its waters feed the irrigation ditches that slice through the fields all around, nurturing the crops of rice and beans. To the east is a railway line, bordered by banana trees and tangles of bushes that threaten to overwhelm the track.
Villages of wooden houses and the odd concrete construction indicating a government building go by, shrouded by mesquite trees, palms and thick-trunked tamarinds standing sentry along the highway. Red and yellow archways beckon towards pagodas and monasteries. The horizontal stripes of the six-coloured Buddhist flag fly on bamboo poles outside homes, while women hold metal bowls up to the bus windows in some of the settlements, fundraising for the local temples.
Three hours driving brought us to Tharrawaddy. Unlike Pyay, Tharrawaddy is a relatively new town, established by the British. They built the still-functioning prison, where Ko Min Nyo served part of his sentence. The Tharrawaddy district was notorious for dacoity as far back as the 1850s and would experience a steep rise in crime during the early 1900s. But in 1887, just eighteen months after the British had completed the full annexation of Burma, it was the scene of an early rebellion against the new rulers.
Led by a monk named U Thuriya, a mixed force of dacoits and farmers angered by food shortages and new taxes set out to attack the colonial state. Tattooed with charms designed to protect them from British bullets, the rebels cut telegraph lines and damaged the railway line to Pyay that I had glimpsed from the highway I journeyed down. But that was all they managed to do before the gang was swiftly rounded up.
U Thuriya was one of the many monks politicised by the British takeover of his country. Some took to the hills of upper Burma, leading classic guerrilla resistance that started almost immediately after the overthrow of King Thibaw and would continue for ten years in some areas. Others, like Nga Hmun, who led a rebellion in Pakokku in 1894, and U Oktama, the organiser of a rising in Taungoo in 1906, operated in or close to the Ayeyarwady valley, where the increasing impact of Indian immigration on local livelihoods was another cause for discontent.
Motivated by the removal of the monarchy, which was tied intimately to the Sangha, and the subsequent decline of Buddhist influence on society, radical monks were the forerunners of the 1930s student leaders who led the campaign for independence. The most renowned remain household names in Burma today. In particular, U Ottama and U Wisara, who were both jailed in the 1920s, played pivotal roles in fomenting opposition to colonial rule.
Buddhism and the nationalist movement were inextricably entwined. Buddhist associations and patriotic societies sprang up across Burma from the late 1890s, becoming the focal points for defiance against the British. Monks toured the country advocating sedition. Increasing numbers began to be arrested. One hundred and twenty monks were imprisoned in 1928 and 1929, as much a source of anger for the locals as the beating of the three monks by the junta bullies in Pakokku in 2007 was.
In December 1930 the twin strands of Buddhist nationalism and rural despair over heavy taxation and the loss of land to Indian moneylenders came together to spark the Saya San Rebellion. Starting in Tharrawaddy, it spread across lower Burma and was the single biggest revo
lt against British rule, lasting almost two years. Tens of thousands of soldiers were required to put it down and thousands of rebels died, were wounded or jailed.
Leading the uprising was Saya San, a novice monk turned traditional medicine healer. He became involved with the Buddhist association movement in the 1920s, travelling the country on its behalf to observe rural conditions. Saya San noted the anger of farmers over taxes and the lack of respect for Buddhism among colonial officials. As the effects of the global depression reached Burma and rice prices dropped, conditions were ripe for a Buddhist peasant crusade with monks acting as the organisers and cheerleaders.
Saya San was hanged at Tharrawaddy prison in November 1931, a few months before his rebellion was finally crushed. But he has not been forgotten. A sign in Tharrawaddy proclaims that this is ‘Saya San Town’ and there is a statue of him. Most significantly, Saya San’s deployment of Buddhism as a weapon set an example to others. In July 1938 Muslims and Indians were the targets of prolonged attacks across lower and central Burma, after monks demanded a response to an anti-Buddhist tract written by a local Muslim.
Present-day nationalist monks like U Wirathu and his fellow Islamophobes are, in one sense, the heirs to the radicalised clerics of colonial times. But instead of resisting foreign invaders they work to provoke violence against citizens of their own country. Nor is the Ayeyarwady valley the birthplace of today’s extreme Buddhist ideology, for all its historical significance as the homeland of the Bamar and the incubator of Buddhism in Burma. To reach that dark place I would have to travel farther south to a monastery in Mawlamyine.
9
Mawlamyine
Six hours after leaving Yangon the bus ran onto the bridge that crosses the Thanlwin River, its metal plates clanking under the weight, the steel girders to the sides framing the view ahead of golden stupas on a jagged ridge. Below, the Thanlwin was a dirty blue as it made its way towards the Andaman Sea, the final part of a journey that began in the mountains of Tibet.
