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Re: QUERY> Burma crisis, Buddhist crisis
by Magnus Fiskesjö
Hello, -- breaking news: A colleague just sent this link to a report on a minority group of decent Burmese Buddhists who dare to oppose the dominant current trend of hate, violence incitement, and anti-Muslim rhetoric from the Buddhist ultra-nationalist monks who have set the current trend and clearly enjoy support from the armed forces that just implemented the expulsion of 600,000-700,000 people from their country.
The brave group is called the "Anti-False Buddhist Doctrine Committee" (အဓမ္မ ဝါဒ ဆန့်ကျင်ရေး ကော်မတီ)
I was hoping this kind of evidence of upright, decent people would come to light.
The article:
"Fighting the 'cancer' of extreme nationalism in Myanmar: A small but growing group of Buddhists is fighting a determined campaign against the extreme nationalist rhetoric and hate speech that it says is a violation of what the Buddha taught." By Htun Khaing. FRONTIER, Thursday, November 02, 2017.
https://frontiermyanmar.net/en/fighting-the-cancer-of-extreme-nationalis...
And, one other older report on this brave group which I had missed:
"Group Targets Rangoon Division for Next Petition Against U Wirathu" By Zue Zue & Htun Htun. The Irrawaddy, 17 May 2017. https://www.irrawaddy.com/news/burma/group-targets-rangoon-division-next...
BTW -- I thought "U" was a honorific in Burmese! which does not seem to fit the propagandist Mr. Wirathu, who, monk robe and all, in his rhetoric reminds us of other similar hate-mongerers in history, ... and who has been spectacularly successful in promoting hatred and inciting violence. Wirathu, while temporarily banned from preaching, seem to have mainly used the American multinational company "Facebook"'s platform for spreading their vitriol.
On the use of Facebook, a company which is apparently happy with Wirathu's genocide rhetoric (which does not violate their company rules in any way?), see:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/29/business/facebook-misinformation-abro...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/world/asia/myanmar-government-faceboo...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/technology/facebook-fake-content-empl...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/24/world/asia/myanmar-rohingya-ethnic-cl...
Facebook, as the main platform of hate speech from the identitarian Buddhists, is very much implicated in the monumental Burmese ethnic cleansing campaign completed since August: The company has even closed off accounts of Rohingya activists, after the genocidaire Buddhists in Burma shout them down ("dislike" them!):
http://www.thedailybeast.com/exclusive-rohingya-activists-say-facebook-s...
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-41364633
And see not least this astute analysis from a freethinking Burmese scholar:
https://asia.nikkei.com/magazine/20171019/Politics-Economy/A-resurgent-n...
But now, this minority-Buddhist group is trying to mount a case against the genocidaires, on Buddhist grounds! Yay! So is there hope for Buddhism, for Burma in the long run?
Don't know. The ethnic cleansing campaign is a fait accompli; Bangladesh now has close to one million people expelled from Buddhist Burma and the hatred clearly runs deep. And, after the ethnic cleansing the civilian government is now preparing to annex the burned villages. It looks more and more like a classic, "textbook" case of an ethnic-cleansing campaign, of a million people, a crime that is a fait accompli -- and one that will make the Rohingya the new Palestinians:
https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Rohingya-crisis/Tensions-over-Rohingya...
ps. Thanks for the pointers to Leider. I have seen his writings, and I would recommend them, but only with the qualifier that he paints an incomplete picture. Also, even his most recent piece has now been superseded by events. He focuses predominantly on the violent crimes of Rohingya insurgents, and has little to say about the atrocities perpetrated on a historic scale by Burma's army, enabled by Buddhist propagandists, and effectively condoned by the civilian government. Anyone can see, that the deprivation of citizenship of Rohingya civilians, and the horrific discrimination against them over several decades, including by putting them in hopeless camps since 2012, was bound to engender violence at some time. Kofi Annan warned of it. Many observers warned of it.
But the Aug 25 outbreak of violence by a few angry young men may also have been exactly what the Burmese army and their friends, the Buddhist monk Wirathu and his comrades-in-arms in monk robes, were hoping for. That day, Rohingya armed elements shot several Burmese policemen and soldiers. But if their effort was to fight back, it is clearly hopeless in the face of the Burmese military machine -- which took their August 25 attack as the pretext of one of the worst ethnic cleansing campaigns in history.
The history of the support and enabling of this campaign by Burmese Buddhists, willingly amplified by Facebook, is yet to be written. The stain and the judgment of history will be permanent, of course, but I would like to hope that, just like Germany and other countries caught up in vicious scapegoating of minorities have been able to do afterwards, Burma can emerge as a decent nation by admitting the wrongs, and work for true return of the refugees, and reconciliation.
The news that there really are Burmese Buddhists coming forward to oppose the vicious rhetoric of the Buddhist genocidal propagandists is one hopeful sign, however fragile.
ps. on the historical background to the crisis in Burma which led to the expulsion of the Rohingya, I recommend Nick Cheesman's writings:
Cheesman, Nick. How Myanmar’s ‘national races’ trumped citizenship. New Mandala, 1 May, 2017. http://www.newmandala.org/myanmars-national-races-trumped-citizenship/
Cheesman, Nick. How in Myanmar “National Races” Came to Surpass Citizenship and Exclude Rohingya. Journal of Contemporary Asia Volume 47, 2017 - Issue 3: Interpreting Communal Violence in Myanmar), Pages 461-483. Published online: 15 Mar 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00472336.2017.1297476
Magnus Fiskesjö
nf42@cornell.edu
ps. Here at my university, after a successful, very moving event with Gayatri Spivak on Oct 30 addressing the Rohingya crisis in global context, we are having a second event next week:
Michael Charney, The Long and Short Term Roots of the Rohingya Crisis: The Eradication of a Myanmar Ethnic Group. With discussion with Eaint Thiri Thu, and Magnus Fiskesjö
November 7, Tuesday, 4:30pm, Rawlings Auditorium, Klarman Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca NY 14850
http://events.cornell.edu/event/einaudi_center_roundtable_the_roots_of_t...
The following week after that, student clubs are organising a Rohingya week to draw even more attention to the crisis.
