‘We thank the Lord Buddha’
ACROSS MYANMAR, DENIAL OF ETHNIC CLEANSING
The Buddhist abbot tucked his legs under his r obes and began to explain.
Rohingya Muslims do not belong in Myanmar, and they never have, he said. Their fertility allowed them to overwhelm the local Buddhist population. But now, somehow, many Rohingya seemed to be gone.
“We thank the Lord Buddha for this,” said Thu Min Gala, the 57- year- old abbot of the Damarama Monastery in Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine state in western Myanmar. “They stole our land, our food and our water. We will never accept them back.”
An overwhelming body of published accounts has detailed the Myanmar army’s campaign of killing, rape and arson in Rakhine, which has driven more than 600,000 Rohingya out of the country since late August, in what the United Nations says is the fastest displace- ment of a people since the Rwanda genocide.
But in Myanmar, and even in Rakhine itself, there is stark denial that any ethnic cleansing is taking place.
Government officials, opposition politicians, religious leaders and even local human- rights activists have become unified behind this narrative: The Rohingya are not rightful citizens of Buddhist-majority Myanmar, and now, through the power of a globally resurgent Islam, the minority is falsely trying to hijack the world’s sympathy.
Social media postings have amplified the message, claiming international aid workers are siding with the Rohingya. Accordingly, the Myanmar government has blocked aid agencies’ access to Rohingya still trapped in Myanmar — about 120,000 confined to camps in central Rakhine and tens of thousands more in desperate conditions in the north.
The official answer to UN accounts of the military’s mass burning of villages and targeting of civilians has been to insist that the Roh- ingya have been doing it.
“There is no case of the military killing Muslim civilians,” said Dr. Win Myat Aye, the country’s social welfare minister and the governing National League for Democracy’s point person on Rakhine. “Muslim people killed their own Muslim people.”
The Rohingya, who speak a Bengali dialect and tend to look distinct from most of Myanmar’s other ethnic groups, have had roots in Rakhine for generations. Tensions between the Rohingya and ethnic Rakhine Buddhists exploded during the Second World War, when the Rakhine aligned themselves with the Japanese, while the Rohingya chose the British.
Although many Rohingya were considered citizens when Myanmar, also known as Burma, became independent in 1948, the military junta that wrested power in 1962 began stripping them of their rights. In 1982, most Rohingya became stateless.
Even the name Rohingya has been taken from them. The Myanmar government usually refers to the Rohing- ya as Bengalis, implying they belong in Bangladesh. The public tends to call them an epithet used for all Muslims in Myanmar: kalar.
Sentiment against Muslims — about four per cent of Myanmar’s population, encompassing several ethnic groups, including the Rohingya — has spread beyond Rakhine. A couple of hours outside Yangon, the country’s largest city, Aye Swe, an administrator for Sin Ma Kaw village, said he was proud to oversee one of Myanmar’s “Muslim-free” villages.
Social media has driven much of the rage. For many people, Facebook is their only source of news.
One widely shared message on Facebook, from a spokesman for Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s office, emphasized that biscuits from the World Food Program had been found at a Rohingya militant camp. The UN called the post “irresponsible.”
The Myanmar government, however, insists the public needs to be guided. In Yangon, Pe Myint, the na- tion’s information minister, this month gathered local journalists to discuss what he called “fabricated news” and a “political war” in which aid groups favoured the Rohingya.
Throughout the state, ethnic Rakhine have been warned by community leaders not to break the aid blockade. Last month in Myebon Township women’s activists prevented aid groups from delivering assistance to an internment camp.
But Tun Tin, a Rakhine trishaw driver, needed the money and delivered food to the Rohingya camp. Shortly after, his wife, Soe Chay, said she was accosted by a crowd that forced her to a nearby monastery. Inside the compound, they beat her and sheared her hair. Then the mob marched her through Myebon, wearing a sign calling her a “national traitor.”
Despite his wife’s ordeal, Tun Tin said he did not regret having sent supplies to the camp. “They are human,” he said. “They need to eat, just like us.”