Dr. Habib Siddiqui
In today’s Myanmar
denials of the Muslim heritage and culture, their dexterous roles in the
independent Arakan (today’s Rakhine state) under the Mrauk-U dynasty
(1430-1784) have become staples of a toxic Myanmarism that is criminal,
divisive and murderous. Not only are the Muslims killed and their women
raped, and their homes, businesses, schools, shrines and mosques
destroyed, even the towns and villages bearing Muslim names are changed
to Rakhine names to erase their Muslim root.
No less problematic
are the attitudes of and roles played by some of the pseudo-scholars and
academics who like Julius Streicher of the Hitler’s Nazi era are
selling the poison pills of racism, ultra-nationalism and bigotry to
deny the Rohingya people their basic human rights as rightful citizens
in Myanmar enjoying equality. Puffed up in obnoxious arrogance and a
criminal vision of a race-and-religion-purified Rakhine state minus the
Muslims, they twist and distort facts, and deny the existence of the
Rohingya people before the British moved into Burma.
As if suffering
from a serious case of selective amnesia, these Buddhist zealots and
their agents – purporting sometimes to be researchers – forget to
educate their cadre that the Arakanese Muslims were probably a majority
in the last years of independent Arakan before Bodawpaya’s invasion.[i]
Rather than explaining what had happened to those Arakanese Muslims of
the pre-Bodawpaya era, they manufacture ludicrous theories about Muslim
influx. [ii] By so doing, they try to deceive others and create an
environment of intolerance against the Rohingya Muslims.
As I have
noted elsewhere, the authors of this revisionist history to deny
citizenship rights are some of the Rakhine ultra-racists and
pseudo-scholars like (late) Aye Kyaw and Aye Chan, who, interestingly,
did not and do not have any bites of conscience to become naturalized
citizens in the USA.[iii] In our world there are hardly such dastardly
examples of moral bankruptcy by academics! The sad fact is their willful
distortions of facts and their absolutely evil thesis about the
so-called (Rohingya) Influx Virus has been accepted as a Rakhine ‘Mein
Kampf’ and interpreted as a green signal to exterminate the Rohingya and
other Muslim minorities in a frontier territory that is anything but
homogeneous.
Since June of this year, in a very premeditated manner
with full support of the government forces, the local politicians and
monks, towns after towns and villages after villages with Muslim
population have simply been burned down and Muslims butchered to death,
while the racist Rakhine Buddhists gave a hero’s welcome to Aye Chan as
their savior.[iv] Government denies that it’s an ethnic cleansing
campaign. In October, 2012, exasperated by Myanmar denialism, Human
Rights Watch had to publish a satellite photo showing most of the Muslim
quarter of a sizable town, Kyak Pyu, burned to the ground.[v]
In his
evaluation of the treatment of the Rohingya people inside Myanmar,
Professor William Schabas, the former president of the International
Association of Genocide Scholars, says: "When you see measures
preventing births, trying to deny the identity of the people, hoping to
see that they really are eventually, that they no longer exist; denying
their history, denying the legitimacy of their right to live where they
live, these are all warning signs that mean it's not frivolous to
envisage the use of the term genocide."
In my cautious evaluation of
the case, I have also reached the same conclusion.[vi] I am sure Daniel
Jonah Goldhagen would also agree. And there are many other scholars and
individuals who concur that what the Rohingyas are facing today is a
genocidal campaign to eliminate them from Myanmar. As I have noted
earlier,[vii] this eliminationist campaign has become a national project
with willing participation from top to bottom with closing of ranks
among local and national governments, pro and anti-government Buddhist
monks, junta apologists and pro-democracy activists, President Thein
Sein and Aung San Suu Kyi.[viii] They are all united to deny the
apparently undeniable fact that an old fashioned genocidal program is
taking place against Rohingya minority and other Muslims.
Many
outsiders are simply perplexed by the role of Myanmar’s so-called
Buddhist Talibans, i.e., the militant Buddhist monks.[ix] For years,
Buddhism has skipped the kind of scrutiny that is commonly reserved for
other religions. People in the West have held a romantic view about
Buddhism, imagining, rather mistakenly, that it is a non-violent
religion. Forgotten in that make-belief is centuries of Buddhist
violence against others from one part of Asia to another, where millions
were killed ruthlessly.[x] While compassion is considered central to
Buddhist faith, the sad fact is most Buddhists have been failing on this
yardstick since the days of Emperor Ashoka. Worse yet, most of them are
unaware of their racism and bigotry. And a study of the history of
Buddhist Burma is sufficient to reveal that it has been a hellish den of
prejudice and intolerance for more than a millennium.[xi]
In the
context of Bangladesh and Arakan, for centuries the southern Bengal
(today’s Bangladesh) was ravaged and devastated by Buddhist terrorism
when hundreds of thousands of Bengali Muslims and Hindus were forcibly
abducted, their palms pierced and enslaved to work inside Arakan.[xii]
It is not difficult to guess how many Bengalis were killed and women
raped by those marauding Buddhist Maghs (Rakhines). Many of those
abducted did not even make it alive at the end of their abduction. And
the greatest tragedy is while the descendants of former slaves from
Africa to the Americas have been recognized as citizens in those
territories of their captivity, the descendants of those Bengalis
enslaved in Arakan and Burma continue to be denied their rights to
citizenship. We hardly have a parallel of that travesty of fairness and
justice in our time!
To some historians, the worsening of
Muslim-Buddhist relationship originated in 1942 when Japan occupied
Burma. But the truth is: it is much older. As Charney has rightly noted,
Muslim-Buddhist relationship took a downward trend since Shah Shuja’s
visit to Arakan in 1660 when he was betrayed by the Arakanese ruler and
killed. Some of the latter rulers, encouraged by monks, tried a
Buddhicization of the kingdom. By the end of the 18th century some
groups in Arakanese Buddhist society had begun to call for social
exclusion (apartheid) on the basis of popular religious
affiliation.[xiii]
With Bodawpaya’s annexation of Arakan in 1784,
the relationship simply worsened. From 1787, the “Rakhine Arei-taw-poun”
(popularly known as the “Danra-waddy Arei-taw-poun”) composed by a
Buddhist missionary (known as sasana-pru or ‘propagator of religion’)
monk based in San-twei, emerged as a highly pro-Buddhist and anti-Muslim
epic. Among other things, it cast aspersions on Muslims and warned
Arakanese kings that the ‘dangers’ of the Muslims posed to the
‘Arakanese’ way of life. “The Arakanese are Maramas (Burmans), the text
suggested. In the 19th century, these sentiments began to influence the
popular notions of group identification,” Charney noted.[xiv]
Many of
the today’s Buddhist monks in Myanmar are spiritual students of that
18th century highly chauvinist Rakhine monk. It is no accident that they
are the greatest backers of expulsion and exclusion, and have been the
catalysts within the broader society inciting intolerance against and
providing moral justification for extermination of Muslims. [xv] Within
the Buddhist society they have always played a major role, since every
Buddhist male must embrace monkhood at least once in his lifetime. It
would be naïve to assume that extremist Buddhist monk Wirathu, who heads
the Burmese monks and is leading the crusade, is an exception in the
racist Burmese society. He spent more than 10 years in jail for his
direct involvement in clashes between Buddhists and Muslims in 2001 in
the city of Mandalay. He was released late last year as part of the new
government's round of amnesties, and soon visited by Aung Thaung, a man
known to be close to former dictator Than Shwe.[xvi] So, with the racist
monks holding the leash, and ties with the government, it is highly
unlikely that Buddhist violence against the minority Muslims, esp. the
Rohingya will stop anytime soon.
Is there a way out of these
Buddhist acts of inhumanity which are soiling the image of Buddhism? Can
our generation tolerate another genocide?
The sad reality is
prejudice dies hard. For the Buddhists in Myanmar, esp. in the Rakhine
state, it would take years of de-programming to shun old myths and
prejudices about the ‘other’ peoples, esp. the Rohingyas who have no
less of a claim to citizenship than them. However, the government can
accelerate this process of learning, if it is sincere about moving
forward. It must also rein on the racist elements so that they cannot
have an abrasive effect on racial-religious relationships. It must learn
like many others in our world who have learned through their bitter
experiences that racism and bigotry are not acceptable in our world
which is increasingly becoming globalized and diverse. The sooner the
better!
