Burma’s Spring: Real lives in turbulent times (26 page)

Like his grandparents, Maung Maung Myint was an optimist. When talking to me, he seemed to stretch every sinew to find hope amid the poisonous sectarian atmosphere that permeated the Burma of 2013. The loosening of the regime’s grip had provided a new outlet for extremist voices. Communal violence first broke out in Arakan state on the Bay of Bengal at the start of the 2012 rains. Sparked by the rape and murder of a Buddhist woman by Muslim men, Buddhist mobs went on the rampage, killing dozens of Muslims, and setting light to their mosques, businesses and homes. Violence flared again in October of that year, forcing tens of thousands of Muslim Rohingyas to flee their homes. Over the following months the violence spread, years of latent resentment boiling over into riots and massacres. In March 2013, in the central town of Meiktila, a heated argument between a Muslim jeweller and his Buddhist customer over a broken gold clip quickly escalated. Angry crowds thronged around the shop, dividing their allegiance along religious lines. A false rumour spread that the customer had died from her injuries after being attacked by the shopkeeper. Anti-Muslim gangs set about ransacking the gold shops of the market area; in revenge Muslim men knocked a Buddhist monk off his motorbike, beat him and stabbed him to death. The murder unleashed a three-day killing spree of Muslims – a thousand-strong Buddhist mob, armed with knives and iron bars, rampaged through town in a raging frenzy, unrestrained by police or any security forces. They
killed more than forty Muslims, burned down hundreds of homes and Muslim-owned shops, and razed five mosques.

The clashes seemed to be contagious, erupting in the market town of Lashio in the Shan hills, in Okkan in Lower Burma and in Thandwe, the gateway to many of Burma’s most beautiful beaches. But aside from some minor disputes and skirmishes, Rangoon had mainly escaped the violence when I sat opposite Maung Maung Myint on the cool, cream marble floor of the downtown mosque where his grandfather used to pray. Maung Maung Myint, who now ran the family’s pulse and bean business, was general secretary of the mosque and a respected leader of Rangoon’s 300,000-strong Muslim community. ‘Let us hope for the best,’ he said, with a tight smile, running his fingers lightly over the photographs of his Buddhist classmates on the floor between us, as if seeking reassurance that the bonds of friendship were still real and strong. ‘Among my friends, nothing has changed. Nothing has changed.’

But Maung Maung Myint knew the landscape had shifted, and he was nervous. The previous week an argument had broken out in his neighbourhood, a scenario similar to the dispute in Meiktila that triggered such terrible violence. Just after evening prayers Maung Maung Myint received a text message on the little Nokia phone he kept in a leather holster on his waist, urging him to come back quickly to his home suburb of Tamwe. Two women had got into a fight, a crowd had gathered and it looked like things could escalate. A Buddhist customer had accused a Muslim shopkeeper of short-changing her in her weekly purchase of rice and spices. ‘She said the quality wasn’t good. The shopkeeper said everything was the same as usual, she said her customer was just looking for a fight.’ It was eight o’clock in the evening by the time he arrived. The power was out, as it often was, and the night was inky black. He took aside some of his young nephews, told them to make sure the Muslim women
and children in the neighbourhood were at home, behind locked doors. Then he set about defusing the argument, negotiating between the two women in an atmosphere of excruciating tension and rising hostility. Five hours later he returned home, having gently resolved the dispute to the grudging satisfaction of both sides. He sat down at the kitchen table, head in his trembling hands, exhausted. His eighty-five-year-old mother, his wife and his daughter had been waiting up for him behind their bolted apartment door. His wife put the kettle on the stove, and lit the gas with a match. ‘I didn’t sleep after that,’ he said. ‘It was life or death.’

*

Muslims account for between 4 and 8 per cent of the population in overwhelmingly Buddhist Burma. The figures are disputed. Community leaders say the Muslim population is at the higher end of that range, but the government does not recognise Muslims as an official minority, so the statistics are difficult to verify. While their numbers swelled dramatically in the colonial era, the Muslim presence in Burma predates the British occupation. Islamic influence stretches back centuries – the fifteenth-century Arakanese kings in Mrauk-U encouraged a mixed Buddhist–Muslim court, and in the nineteenth century, King Mindon, a devout Buddhist, defended and supported Mandalay’s large Muslim community. Today, Muslim communities are scattered all over the country, with their biggest concentrations in Arakan, now known as Rakhine, and Rangoon. But while Maung Maung Myint was loath to admit it, the image of Buddhists and Muslims living harmoniously side by side for years was not an accurate reflection of history. Enmity towards Muslims was rooted in the mass migration of the colonial period, of which Maung Maung Myint’s grandparents were a part. The steady stream of immigration from the mid-nineteenth century reached a flow of nearly half a million per year by the late 1920s. The influx of both Hindus and
Muslims from across the subcontinent was unchecked, even encouraged, by Burma’s British occupiers, stirring fear and resentment among the native Burmese.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the
Chettyar
moneylenders from southern India were hated caricatures. The main source of credit for desperate rice farmers suffering the collapse of global prices, they laid claim to vast tracts of mortgaged land when their debtors defaulted. In the docks of Rangoon, unskilled Indian workers took jobs that were once the preserve of Burmese, and a 1930 strike by Indian dockers led to a dispute that fuelled deadly anti-Indian riots. In 1938, the publication of a book by a Muslim author that allegedly contained material offensive to Buddhists sparked another wave of bloody sectarian clashes. The 1930s marked the height of the Indian presence in Burma; during the Second World War, around half a million members of the Indian community in Burma fled the invading Japanese army, most of them trekking on foot through rain forest to Assam. And from 1964, hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the subcontinent were expelled by General Ne Win to India and Pakistan, a dramatic, forced exodus much greater than Idi Amin’s expulsion of Ugandan Asians, but one that was barely noted in history.

Despite their depleted numbers, hostility towards Muslims bubbled under the surface during Burma’s long years of military rule. Freedom of expression was restrained, but ill feeling had not evaporated. It flared up in occasional outbreaks of violence, such as the anti-Muslim riots, which erupted in the usually sedate port city of Moulmein in 1983, forcing hundreds of Muslim families to flee across the border to Thailand. In 1997, a Buddhist mob in Mandalay attacked mosques and Muslim businesses, and in 2001, when the Taliban blew up the ancient Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, angry Buddhists in the Burmese town of Taungoo exacted revenge on their Muslim neighbours. But the Muslim group that suffered most under the rule of
the generals was the Rohingya of Arakan state. In a country infamous for mistreating its own citizens, the Rohingya, who number some 800,000, have long been at the bottom of the heap, their persecution unmatched possibly anywhere in the world.

Rohingya leaders say they have lived in Arakan, a strip of land along the Indian Ocean and close to the border with Bangladesh, for centuries. Indeed, evidence of a Muslim population in the territory, which in its heyday was a wealthy centre of trade and scholarship, dates back hundreds of years. But Burma’s military government, and the civilian-led administration that followed, claimed that most of the Rohingya – an Islamic people darker skinned than most Burmese – were in fact recent immigrants from Bangladesh. Following the coup of 1962, Ne Win’s regime introduced policies that denied citizenship status to the majority of the Rohingya people. Their lives, already blighted by poverty, became increasingly intolerable. A large Tatmadaw contingent was deployed to Arakan, and soldiers confiscated land, levied arbitrary taxes and imposed forced labour on villages. The Rohingya suffered daily humiliations, with every aspect of their lives, from marriage to education, tightly controlled. If a Rohingya man wanted to travel from one village to another, even a distance of a few miles, he had first to obtain a permit from the local SPDC office. Rohingyas needed permission to marry that would cost several months’ wages in bribes and could take many years. Young Rohingyas faced discrimination at school from both Buddhist Arakanese students and their teachers, and even the brightest pupils were barred from studying the most prestigious subjects at university, such as medicine or engineering. Thanks to the brutality of the pogroms against the Rohingya and their desperate escape bids on rickety boats across the Indian Ocean, the plight of these stateless people has received considerable media attention and their treatment has drawn rebuke from foreign governments. By late 2013, around 140,000 Rohingya
were living in desperate conditions in squalid camps, their homes either destroyed or too unsafe to return to. Their children were dying of malnutrition and disease. Troublingly, the persecution of the Rohingya seemed to be blithely accepted on the streets of Rangoon, even among the most educated and well informed. ‘Those
kalars
,’ one bright young masters student and Fulbright candidate told me, ‘they are dogs. I hate them.’

*

Maung Maung Myint led me up a wooden staircase with a heavily lacquered banister to the roof of the mosque. We stepped out into the hot glare of the afternoon, the western sun glinting off the golden stupa of Sule Pagoda, a stone’s throw away. Loudspeakers set in the arched windows of the mosque’s blue-and-white-tiled minaret were trained on the speakers on the roof of the pagoda, just metres apart. Beyond that, slightly fuzzy in the afternoon haze, were the slim white spires of St Emmanuel’s Church. Maung Maung Myint looked out at the view, little changed from the vista his grandfather had enjoyed in the late 1920s. The fusion of the muezzin’s call, the chant of Buddhist sutras and the peal of church bells, overlain with the rumble of traffic and diesel generators, was the comforting soundtrack to Maung Maung Myint’s life. ‘We have good relations with the pagoda. They use their loudspeaker; we use ours. There have never been complaints between us, never one problem,’ he said wistfully.

But down on the street, the proliferation of the brightly coloured 969 stickers told a different story. The 969 movement’s figurehead was the softly spoken Buddhist monk Wirathu. With his cherubic face, and toothy, childish smile, the militant preacher delivered his sermons on the Islamic peril afflicting Burma in a soporific monotone. A central narrative of his rhetoric was the contention that Muslim men were not only stealing jobs and resources that rightfully belonged to Buddhists, but
were chasing Buddhist women too, diluting the purity of Burmese Buddhist blood. In a country still blighted by poverty, where most had yet to feel any economic benefit of the country’s opening, Wirathu’s proffering of a scapegoat found resonance. He urged Buddhists to boycott Muslim shops and restaurants and to shun interfaith marriages. Followers of his campaign to vilify Islam, ever growing in number, looked for the 969 stickers on the doors of businesses – an assurance that the owners were Buddhist. Muslims found they were no longer welcome in their favourite teashop or at the corner store, and were aghast to find their own shops and enterprises shedding customers in droves.

Sitting cross-legged under a slowly beating fan, Maung Maung Myint claimed to be unperturbed by 969, this highly visible manifestation of ill-feeling towards Muslims. ‘I have no feelings about it. I still go into the same shops, and buy mohinga or whatever I feel like. I don’t care about 969. If a taxi has a 969 sticker, I just ignore it. I choose the one that will give me the cheapest fare, I get in and I say nothing.’ 969 professed to be a non-violent movement, but its hate speech echoed the racist rhetoric that accompanied the worst mass atrocities of the twentieth century, playing to the poorest and least educated at the very bottom of society. Maung Maung Myint believed poverty was powering extremism. ‘The people don’t have jobs. The cronies have all the money. Many Muslims work hard, they have small businesses, they are not rich but they get by. People see that and they are jealous.’ The downtown, the better-off part of Rangoon, had been spared violence, he noted, but skirmishes had already broken out in the impoverished quarters of Kungyangon, Shwepyithar and Thaketa. ‘It’s simple. Wages are low and prices are going up,’ Maung Maung Myint said. ‘When people are poor they will blame each other.’

*

Referring to Buddhism’s ‘three jewels’, the nine attributes of the Buddha, the six attributes of his teachings, and the nine attributes of the
sangha
, 969 was cloaked in Buddhist respectability. The movement was personified by the same maroon-robed monks whose image had just a few years earlier been associated only with courage and righteousness. The irony was not lost on Maung Maung Myint, who during the Saffron Revolution of 2007 marched shoulder to shoulder with the monks, his clenched fist raised with theirs, feeling part of their cause, part of the nation. He was with the monks as they streamed past Shwedagon Pagoda, and up Inya Road to the American Embassy. He shouted the same slogans as them, demanding democracy as they advanced down University Avenue towards the house of Aung San Suu Kyi. He was there when Suu Kyi, still under house arrest, had come to her gate, her hands pressed together in obeisance, to show her solidarity. ‘We were together then, and full of hope,’ he said. ‘Now I think, is this what we fought for? Democracy has not brought us freedom, it has not brought us anything.’ Maung Maung Myint used to travel regularly to Upper Burma, to Pakokku and Arakan state, to buy pulses for export. ‘Now I can’t go upcountry,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what would happened to me if I went there.’

In 2013, the black-slippered, red-robed monks were still marching. The news photographs looked identical to the pictures of the 2007 marches, when the monks called for freedom. This time, they were not protesting against army oppression; they were protesting against Muslims, seemingly against their very existence in Burma. New freedom of communication had allowed this movement to flourish; the Internet was their most powerful weapon. Extremist websites and posts on Facebook had helped to whip up anti-Muslim sentiment. Wirathu’s sermons were quickly posted online and distributed across the country on DVDs. In his quiet, mesmerising voice,
the diminutive monk warned that Muslims could outbreed Buddhists, steal away Buddhist women and take over Burma’s economy with injections of cash from sympathisers in the Arabian Gulf. ‘But once these evil Muslims have control, they will not let us practise our religion. We must be careful. These Muslims really hate us,’ Wirathu prophesised in a YouTube address. ‘If you buy from Muslim shops, your money doesn’t just stop there. It will eventually go towards destroying your race and religion.’ Facebook messages in support of 969 were laden with patriotic sentiment. ‘I love my country and I love my race!! #969,’ read one post. Another Facebook page, ‘Islam Virus’, had attracted 11,875 ‘likes’, posting slogans such as ‘Oppose Islam: They breed like rabbits.’ Even more sinister messages called for ‘Kalar Beheading’, while status updates purportedly posted by Muslims also sought to incite violence. ‘Facebook is a problem,’ said Maung Maung Myint. ‘Some people write things under Muslim names. But in fact they are extremist Buddhists. Extremists stir this up. The people go out, they want their revenge on Muslims.’