Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (66 page)

The first recent outburst against the Rohingyas, in June 2012, was triggered by the rape and murder of a Buddhist woman, allegedly by Rohingya Muslims. The next round, later that year, sprang from extremism and political expediency stoked by the Buddhist monk Ashin Wirathu, who exhorts his followers to “rise up” and “make your blood boil” to quash a supposed international Muslim conspiracy to destroy the “golden Burmese” way of life. In sermons, interviews, and a logorrhea of online postings, he refers to Muslims as
kalar
(the Burmese equivalent of “niggers”), “troublemakers,” and “mad dogs.” Pamphlets distributed at one sermon warned, “Myanmar is currently facing a most dangerous and fearful poison that is severe enough to eradicate all civilization.” In the Western press, he has been compared to Hitler. Wirathu initiated the 969 movement to mark stores and houses and even taxis where Muslims are unwelcome. The name of the movement played on Muslims’ use of the number 768 to identify stores that sold halal meat—which Wirathu labeled an act of separatism (although halal grocers never excluded non-Muslims). Practically every taxi in Myanmar displays a 969 sticker; one driver ranted to me that the fact that Muslims may take more than one wife proves that Buddhist women were being abducted and forced to bear Muslim children.

While the paranoia is absurd, the basic concern can be tied to historic events. Muslims forced Buddhists out of Afghanistan a thousand years ago; the Taliban more recently destroyed ancient Buddhist holy sites in Pakistan; and radical Islamists have denounced Burma’s “savage Buddhists” to encourage Indonesia’s acceptance of Rohingya refugees. Relaxed censorship means that marginal opinions are more openly circulated, to incite prejudice as much as to promote pluralism. Nay Phone Latt said, “Some think that the lifting of censorship is a mandate to insult one another.”

Wirathu and his camp have waged an aggressive campaign on Facebook. In Myanmar, those who do not have Internet access get their news from those who do. Allegations go viral even among those who have never seen a computer. Wirathu had been sentenced for inciting hatred, but was freed in 2012 under the general amnesty and went straight back to his rabble-rousing, claiming that the new freedom of expression had made his crusade legal. Monks in Rakhine began to distribute pamphlets asking Buddhists not to associate with Rohingyas. Neither the government nor, significantly, Aung San Suu Kyi has denounced the genocidal stirrings in Rakhine. It appears clear that doing so would imperil votes.

As Rohingya neighborhoods in Rakhine towns have been burned and looted, Rohingyas have been moved to refugee camps, where they live in appalling conditions. A sixty-year-old Rohingya teacher described seeing a student she had taught and liked setting fire to her home. Rakhine Buddhists suspected of doing business with Rohingyas have had their houses burned down. The hospital in Sittwe, capital of Rakhine, has only ten beds for Muslims. In the city’s overcrowded camps, medical attention consists of one doctor visiting once a week for an hour. Ambassador Mitchell described seeing children dying from easily curable illnesses.

Internecine violence has also broken out in the Rohingya camps. One UN aid worker said he had observed rape, incest, and alcoholism among these desperate people, though the violence from guards was far worse. Many are starving; some have seen their children killed. The camps are mostly in low-lying areas that flood during the summer monsoon, when it rains more than three feet a month; even in
January, when I visited, they were muddy and squalid. Because these camps are adjacent to the Rohingya neighborhoods, many refugees can see their former homes and their mosques from them; the old Muslim ghetto is now cordoned with barbed wire. Many Rohingyas have fled Myanmar, but no neighboring country wants to give them asylum, so a good number are dying on overloaded boats as they seek a safe port. Their desperate wanderings have become an international crisis. Meanwhile, the price of fish in the province has doubled, given that half the fishermen are in detention camps. Likewise, no lower-wage workers are available to harvest the rice paddies.

The conflict triangulates among the Bamars, the Rakhines, and the Rohingyas. The Bamars believe they are the natural rulers of an empire that includes the Rakhines; the Rakhines, mostly Theravada Buddhists, believe they should have dominion over the Rohingyas. The Rakhines, whose ancestral Arakan empire encompassed much of Burma, hate the Bamars almost as much as they do the Rohingyas. Theravada Buddhism, like many ideological doctrines, claims religious and racial superiority, but it was also the basis for the Saffron Revolution, which proposed that the military government had violated the precepts of Buddha
sasana
, or righteous moral rule. Suu Kyi uses Buddhist rhetoric in her speeches and draws on Buddhist ideals in her quest for democracy. Her politics and her religion are inseparable. In what appears to be an electoral calculation, she has refused to condemn the mistreatment of Rohingyas outright. What would be the place of Muslims in such a vision?

Western aid organizations have tried to help the Rohingyas, but Rakhines have often impeded aid. The Rakhines are poor, and scarce resources do not engender amicable relations. Rakhine State is the second least developed in Myanmar, and many people don’t have access to latrines or clean water. To function at all, global charities have had to assure a kind of parity, even though the Rakhines live freely while the Rohingyas languish in camps.

Though the Rohingyas are experiencing the worst of it, rage against all Muslims has escalated. Most of Yangon’s construction companies are Muslim-owned, and Buddhists have started refusing to hire them. Mandalay, the country’s second-largest city, has seen anti-Muslim riots.
When I was in Myanmar, curfews had been imposed in areas of Yangon with sizable Muslim populations. “We had gangs in cars going down the streets near where I live warning the Muslims that they would be killed. People were cowering behind locked doors,” said Lucas Stewart, who works for the British Council in Yangon, and who called the 969 movement “nearly a terrorist organization.”

The Muslims in Myanmar can be divided into four categories. Bamar Muslims settled in the area some twelve hundred years ago; on ancient monuments, historians have found inscriptions to Muslims who served the early kings. Horse traders, artillery soldiers, and mercenaries who arrived in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries assimilated into this group. Second are Chinese Muslims in the northeast, who trace their origins mostly to Yunnan Province and are descended from Turkic settlers from Mongol times onward. Third are those whose nationality changed when Arakan was subsumed into Burma by the British. Fourth are the immigrants from India or Bangladesh over the past two hundred years. “There is ethnic prejudice, and there is religious prejudice from the monkhood,” Thant Myint-U said. “They affect the same people, but for somewhat different reasons.”

Schoolmaster Aye Lwin, who won gold for his country overseas as a volleyball player on Myanmar’s national team, is the leader of the Bamar Muslims. An elegant man, he lives in a pleasant apartment in central Yangon. He believes that the violence in Rakhine State has been incited by entrenched interests that oppose the slackening government control. “There are people behind a screen who are trying to undermine democratization,” he said, “because if there is full-fledged democracy, there will be rule of law. Rule of law will have repercussions on the current ruling class. Crime is happening every day, rapes are happening every day, but these people manipulate it into a religious conflict. They could have nipped the burning of houses in the bud; they could have constrained the hate speech. But nationalism can be used to exhaust people’s energy; it slows down the reform process.”

Misuu Borit pointed out that people in poverty reproduce fastest all over the world, and that while
minority population growth was driving majority prejudice, majority prejudice was likewise driving minority population growth. Then a rumor that a Buddhist woman had been raped and murdered by Muslims kindled genocidal episodes. Rape has been used throughout history as an impersonal act of aggression in ethnic, religious, and nationalist wars, and Borit finds it sinister that these cross-ethnic rapes have received so much attention, especially given the “shameful” lack of police interest in rape among the Bamar or the Rohingya. “Someone is cooking something between the Muslims and Buddhists,” she said. “When things spin out of control, the rulers call in the army and say that they are ‘saving the country’ and we are the weaklings. They make that true.”

Ma Thida sees a more profound, generalized resentment finding expression in the anti-Muslim atrocities. “The generals did not discriminate in their cruelty,” she said. “It was a democratic cruelty.” She believes that people who never believed that the law was intended to protect them are taking their revenge on authority itself. “So this Muslim situation is not simply communal violence nor religious violence nor racial violence,” she said. “It’s a manifestation of something deeper: of undemocratic violence.”

It is a five-hour boat ride from Sittwe, where I had seen the burned-out neighborhoods and the camps, to Mrauk-U, Arakan’s imperial capital from 1430 to 1785. In this northern part of Rakhine, the shadow of religious hatred seemed almost implausible. My first morning in Mrauk-U, I got up at four forty-five and drove through the eerily darkened byways of the impoverished town to the foot of a small mountain with steps carved into it. Mornings in Myanmar often find bewitching mists hovering over the valleys and around the hills, delineating what is small and close, and what is large and far. Temples and other monuments that look about the same size on first glance can be differentiated in scale by the blurring of their edges, which indicates greater distance. Visitors are enjoined to see all the great sites at sunrise, given the aesthetic appeal of the mists.

After a Rakhine breakfast of fish soup with rice noodles and a lot of spices and condiments, I went to visit some villages in the nearby state of Chin. The Burmese king used to take beautiful women for
his harem; to protect themselves, according to legend, Chin women began tattooing their faces with lines like spiderwebs to make themselves ugly to the Burmese, a custom that continued long after the threat had abated. Perhaps as a result, the most easily accessible Chin villages are inundated with tourists, and tattooed women pose for thousands of photographs. Here, a few miles from the border with Bangladesh, people from various ethnic groups seemed hardly aware of the crisis faced by the Rohingya. In a country with such poor communications infrastructure, radicalization spreads in fits and starts, bypassing whole districts. We didn’t see a single 969 sticker there.

There are more than a hundred ethnic groups in what is now Myanmar, and they have a long history of violence in the myriad shifting empires of the region. The students of 1988 proved to be nearly as ruthless as the junta that defeated them, staying rigid in their demands, building their own prison camps, and engaging in torture. The nation’s myriad partisans have an often unnerving relentlessness. But Theravada Buddhism points toward an implacable serenity, and that, too, was manifest in most of the activists and artists I met. At their suggestion, I headed across the country and visited the Golden Rock, among the country’s holiest shrines. High up a steep mountain, the sprawling site was mobbed with pilgrims, monks, and nuns. Street foods and ingredients for traditional medicines were being hawked everywhere: porcupine quills; a goat’s leg soaked in sesame oil; bunches of dried herbs. Many people were sleeping on bamboo mats or in makeshift tents. Thousands upon thousands of candles flickered, the hum of chanting was ubiquitous, and the air was heavy with incense and the redolence of food offerings. Young couples come here not only out of piety, but also for the chance to interact in the anonymity of the crowds. Flashing LED displays festooned the buildings, even the animist shrines. If I were to say that it made Grand Central Station at rush hour look like a meditation retreat, I’d be underselling the chaos. Yet for all of that, it felt peaceable.

The Golden Rock itself is an extraordinary sight: a boulder, nearly round, twenty feet in diameter, balanced on the edge of the mountain as if on the verge of plummeting. Legend holds that it remains on its precarious perch thanks to three hairs of the Buddha. The entire rock
is covered in gold leaf, to which pilgrims keep adding, so that in some places the gold is an inch thick and stands out in lumps. Atop the rock, far out of reach, is the Kyaiktiyo Pagoda. The gold orb glows at sunrise, in afternoon light, at sunset, in the floodlit nighttime. When the light changes, the effect shifts subtly, but it is never less than awe-inspiring. I climbed under it, stood beside it. From every vantage, one feels the fragility of its odd balance, the drama of its massive heft, and the tranquillity that holy places can achieve. It was both miraculously exciting and strangely reassuring. Like any great landscape, it holds the viewer’s attention even if he or she is not praying.

Myanmar has some half million monks and a large population of nuns—at least 1 percent of the country is in holy orders, and many others have served in the past. Most boys spend a while as monks, then return to their families. Even a casual visitor will pick up a bit of Buddhist arcana. To wit, the six types of religious structure are the pagoda or stupa (or
zedi
), a solid structure that often contains a relic; the temple, a hollow, square building for worship; the cave, which serves as a meditation center for monks; the ordination hall; the monastery, where monks live; and the library, where the Buddha’s scriptures are kept. Most figural monuments of the Buddha are made with a base of brick, or occasionally limestone, and covered with plaster and lacquer. The standard policy is to fix the plaster and lacquer as they fade or chip, which results in Buddhas that look newly reupholstered, without any patina of age. The eleventh-century reclining Buddha at Thaton, recently restored, looked as if it had been fashioned on Tuesday by a pastry chef.