Myanmar’s Religious Malaise Goes Online
A few weeks
ago, I stumbled into a protest on the streets of Yangon, the cultural capital
of Myanmar. The march itself was a relatively tame affair, with around 500
people braving the afternoon heat to walk to downtown Sule Pagoda. Despite the
calm mood, though, the protest provided a telling glimpse of how an exclusivist
anti-Muslim nationalism is mushrooming across Myanmar.
I had
already witnessed a few rallies during my month in Myanmar, but this one was a
little different. As my taxi approached I could see that a majority of the
protesters were wearing the maroon-coloured robes of Buddhist monks. The sangha,
or monastic institutions, famously led the 2007 “Saffron Revolution” after
runaway inflation caused an economic and political crisis. The government’s
brutal response to those protests destroyed the moral credibility of the ruling
military junta. With the inflation figure running at well over 7 per cent this year, and anecdotally much
higher in Yangon, I wondered if this was the beginning of a similar moment of
uprising.
As we drew
closer to the marching crowd, I began to make out the signs and banners. Rather
than focusing on cost-of-living issues, this protest had a different and very
specific target: the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, or OIC, the
international body led by the foreign ministers of the world’s Muslim-majority
countries. An OIC delegation was scheduled to visit the conflict-wracked region
of Rakhine the following week to investigate the impact of violence on Muslim
communities. These monks were opposed to the OIC’s “undue influence,” as one
protester put it, in the “internal affairs” of Myanmar.
As the
International Crisis Group noted in October, communal violence between ethnic
Arakanese Buddhists and stateless Muslim Rohingya communities in Rakhine has
spiralled into broader religious tension throughout the country. In March,
brutal anti-Muslim violence broke out in the central city of Meiktila –
hundreds of kilometres from Rakhine State – killing forty-three people and
destroying more than 1300 homes in Muslim neighbourhoods. This was the first
time that the broader category of religion – rather than the Rohingya issue in
particular – had become the primary focus of communal mobilisation. Now,
protests have evolved through word-of-mouth and online social networks to focus
on a target, the OIC tour, somewhere between the two issues.
I wondered
whether the religious tone of the protest was obvious to my driver. As the
traffic slowed to a crawl, I asked him if he knew what the OIC was. He shook
his head in the negative. “Oh-Eye-See…?” he muttered to himself as we sat in
the traffic jam, as if solving a maths problem.
I jumped out
of the taxi and, jogging beside the march, read some of the English-language
posters: “NO OIC,” said one of the larger posters. “Respect the Sovereignty of
Myanmar,” said another. Others were more inflammatory: “Get out Bengalis!”
suggested a mass-produced A4 poster, referring to the frequent claim that
Muslim Rohingya are migrants from Bangladesh. “STOP Terrorist proxy!” said
another.
After a few
minutes, the traffic began to speed up again. I hopped back in the taxi to find
my driver loading Facebook on his Huawei smartphone. He posted two photos of
the protesting monks, along with a comment railing against the OIC. Barely five
minutes before, he had never heard of the organisation.
Posters and
stickers featuring the number “969” were the most visible evidence of communal
tension I encountered while travelling through eight of Myanmar’s fourteen
states and divisions, interviewing ethnically, religiously, economically
diverse populations. That auspicious sequence of numerals, which represents the
core tenets and practices of Buddhism, has become the symbol of a prominent anti-Muslim social movement with clear
links to the regime. The number is usually accompanied by the Buddhist flag and
dharma wheel, lending heavy-handed moral credibility to the sociopolitical proclamations
of the movement’s leaders. Across Myanmar, from Lashio near the border with
China, and Sagaing outside the northern city of Mandalay, to Hpaan a hundred or
so miles from Thailand, I saw 969 stickers everywhere – in restaurants and
taxis, on street stalls and motorbike helmets.
Beneath the
highly visible campaign, I found wide acceptance and coy endorsement of the 969
movement’s key messages. The vast majority of around seventy Buddhists I
interviewed expressed some form of anti-Muslim sentiment. Many repeated claims
made by 969 leaders: that Muslims dominate Myanmar’s economy; that they refuse
to socially and culturally integrate; that they “cause trouble”; and that
Islamic terrorists from “Arab countries” are flooding into Myanmar to wage religious
warfare. Such sentiment was more common or more vicious in some areas than
others, but the themes and the phrases were consistent.
Few were
willing to speak with me about the objectives of the 969 movement, however.
“It’s complicated,” said a shopkeeper who had hung a 969 poster out the front
of his stall in Hpaan. A taxi driver in Mawlamyine, who supported the movement,
was reluctant to give specifics. “You should really ask a monk – they could
tell you more,” he said. When I raised the issue with monks directly, they
changed the subject or gave answers that glossed over the movement’s political
character: “969 is a symbol of peace,” said one in Yangon, echoing similar
statements made by Myanmar’s president Thein Sein earlier this year.
Anti-Muslim
sentiment in Myanmar is not new. Indeed, along with anti-Chinese and
anti-Indian prejudice, it has been stoked by successive regimes since
independence in 1948. The question is whether this sentiment is used to
organise for violence.
Disturbingly,
patterns of carefully planned mobilisation can be
seen in most incidences of anti-Rohingya and anti-Muslim violence so far.
Street scuffles or other triggers for conflict occur in towns; rumours
apportioning blame circulate through offline and online social networks; mobs
appear, demanding retribution; and then, inevitably, comes the violence. While
each side experiences casualties and damage to property, Muslim families and
neighbourhoods are disproportionately affected.
These
patterns have been seen repeatedly in Rakhine State as well as in the March
2013 Meiktila violence, lending credence to those who believe that “dark forces” linked with military elements are organising or at least condoning communal violence
to disrupt the transition to civilian government.
Perhaps underrecognised
amid the rush to apportion blame is the role of Myanmar’s infant information
culture in spreading vicious rumours that compound conflict dynamics. Few
Burmese consume news and information from independent media sources, a legacy
of the censorship regime that only formally ceased in August 2012. The result
is that more than twice as many people have a Facebook account (800,000) as purchase even the most popular weekly
newspapers (300,000). The majority of Myanmar’s estimated
population of sixty-five million people hears about political developments by
word-of-mouth from family, friends, neighbours and monks.
Even without
the direct involvement of military or monastic forces, these are ideal
conditions for identity-based violence to spread and escalate. Studies of
Hindu–Muslim communal riots in India suggest that the rampant transmission of
rumours within cities, with little elite intervention to calm tension, quash
rumours and quell mobilisation, is the strongest predictor of communal violence.
Indian cities without intercommunal associations such as sports clubs or
business groups have tended to experience much more severe riots over time.
With 80 per cent of Myanmar’s population projected to
own a mobile phone by 2015, whether and how the rapid growth of
already-dominant networking tools such as Facebook will affect the dynamics of
rumours and prejudice is unclear. Certainly, the speed with which the Rakhine
violence and Rohingya issue has morphed into broader anti-Islamic sentiment,
often through social media, has spooked Muslims throughout the country.
Many of the
Muslims I interviewed talked darkly of the bloody images and videos of the
Meiktila violence their friends had sent them or they had seen on their
smartphones. Alarmed by these images and the visual spread of the 969 movement,
dozens of them told me that they see the writing on the wall. “We will become
the target,” one Muslim teacher in Mandalay Division said guardedly. “Actually,
we already are,” his neighbour interjected.
Around half
of the Muslims I met are hoping to seek asylum elsewhere in the region prior to
the 2015 election, fearing that the 969 movement will successfully pressure
parliamentarians to pass more severe anti-Muslim laws, such as a proposed ban on intercommunal marriage.
The security
implications of continued escalation in anti-Muslim sentiment could be immense.
There is a strong possibility that worsening of religious tensions could create
new opportunities for regional terrorist networks such as Jemaah Islamiyah to
fundraise and recruit for violent jihad in Myanmar, a senior Indonesian public
official told a colleague of mine recently. Such organised communal violence
would polarise Buddhist–Muslim relations across Myanmar for decades, possibly
irreparably.
Out of an
estimated two million Muslims in Myanmar, many may choose to flee to a
neighbouring country where Muslims are the majority if intercommunal relations
continue to deteriorate. The flight of thousands of Rohingya to Bangladesh and
Thailand over the past eighteen months has already tested the willingness of
Myanmar’s neighbours to cope with its displaced populations. As Myanmar takes
on the presidency of the Association of South East Asian Nations, or ASEAN, and
prepares to host major annual meetings of regional leaders in the new capital,
Naypyidaw, in early 2014, the bubbling of Muslim–Buddhist tension will be fresh
in the minds of delegates.
Myanmar’s
political transition has been a major success story for ASEAN. Yet it’s almost
certain that the poor performance and potential complicity of
police and military in previous incidences of anti-Rohingya and anti-Muslim
violence – not to mention the absence of any meaningful grassroots or
national-level process of inter-religious peacebuilding and dialogue, the
reluctance of most Burmese politicians, including Aung San Suu Kyi, to discuss the
Rohingya or 969 issues, and potentially even the rampant prejudice of Burmese
social media – will be raised at the meeting in Naypyidaw, especially by those
most likely to bear the brunt of asylum seekers, including Muslim-majority
Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei.
With Myanmar
heading towards elections in November 2015, the contest over national identity
is only likely to intensify. In the medium term, sensible, plural and well-moderated media are
necessary to curb incendiary hate speech, as are offline and online
interventions aimed at quelling rumours and urging non-violence at both
the elite and grassroots level. If concrete actions are not taken to moderate
the extremes of Myanmar’s infant information culture and manage religious
tensions, more serious questions about regional resettlement of Muslim asylum seekers
will begin to be asked.
By Gerard McCarthy
is Director (Asia-Pacific) at TechChange and a PhD candidate at the
Australian National University.
