As hundreds of thousands of Rohingya flee across the border from Myanmar to Bangladesh, stories of terror and suffering continue to mount: tales of torched villages and gang rape, of soldiers stabbing babies and cutting off heads. U.N. human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein has called the violence — allegedly committed by Myanmar’s security forces and local mobs — ” textbook ethnic cleansing.”
In the case of Myanmar, a Buddhist-majority country, the attacks are fueled by a radical form of Buddhist nationalism. While most of the world’s Buddhists would never condone such extremism, violence in the name of the faith has a long history, experts say. Yet for many people, images of monks in saffron robes inciting riots seem counterintuitive.
“In popular culture and many academic works, Buddhists are not known as violent or advocates of conflicts or wars,” says Michael Jerryson, a professor of religious studies at Youngstown State University. “Rather, Buddhists are presented as pacifists. In this way, the vast and diverse world of over 1.3 billion people who practice Buddhist rituals are collectively associated with meditation and tranquility.”
That can be chalked up to a mix of factors, Jerryson says, including how Buddhism was first introduced to the U.S., the Free Tibet campaign and the influence of the beatnik movement and Hollywood.
Though the killing in Myanmar, the Southeast Asian nation formerly known as Burma, is grabbing headlines, it’s actually one of several primarily Buddhist countries where nationalists are encouraging violence. Here are the ones that should be on your radar:
Myanmar
More than 600,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled to Bangladesh since late August, when Myanmar’s security forces launched an operation which rights groups say involved mass atrocities in the western state of Rakhine. The government says the crackdown was in response to attacks by Rohingya militants on a military camp and security forces outposts.
The military claims it was only targeting insurgents, yet, according to witnesses who spoke to The New York Times, many of those killed were unarmed and had their hands bound. While the campaign in Rakhine state has significant public support, many Buddhists reject the violence in other parts of the country against Muslims, whom Buddhists may not accept as indigenous but acknowledge as Myanmar citizens.
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Buddhist nationalism in Myanmar, like in many parts of Southeast Asia, can be traced to a complex set of circumstances, including bouts of significant political or economic upheaval that have left some Buddhists feeling threatened. Most scholars attribute its rise in part to British colonialism, during which Buddhism was forcibly separated from the state, and the government facilitated the immigration of Indian moneylenders and landholders — Hindus and Muslims — angering local elites.
“The Burmese have a long history of saying ‘To be Burmese is to be Buddhist’ and for the most part that model, that vision has endured since independence,” says Juliane Schober, director of the Center for Asian Research at Arizona State University.
Myanmar’s recent spike in Buddhist nationalism and anti-Muslim sentiment took off after the country’s military junta dissolved in 2011, according to a recent report by the International Crisis Group, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit group dedicated to preventing conflict. In 2013, Buddhist monks incited mob violence against Muslims that left more than 20 dead.
The Association for the Protection of Race and Religion, also known as MaBaTha, is the most well-known of the country’s ultra-nationalist groups. While the government has tried to crack down on the organization, which is known and respected by many for providing social services, it has had limited success.
Some members of the group, made up of monks, nuns and laypeople, believe Myanmar’s Muslims are “hoarding capital, buying up real-estate in town centres, using their wealth to woo and marry Buddhist women, then forcing their wives and children to convert to Islam through physical or economic pressure,” according to the ICG report.
Sri Lanka
On June 15, 2014 anti-Muslim riots broke out in the Sri Lankan coastal town of Aluthgama. For two days, rioters desecrated and damaged mosques and burned and looted hundreds of Muslim-owned houses and businesses. At least 80 people were injured and four died in the worst anti-Muslim violence in almost a century.
The perpetrators? Sinhalese Buddhists, likely inspired by a radical monk who spoke violently against Muslims during a rally shortly before the attacks.
Since 2012 — about the time Buddhist nationalism was gaining steam in Myanmar — militant Buddhists in Sri Lanka began using hate-speech and violence against Muslim and Christian minorities. The most well-known of the groups is the Bodu Bala Sena, or Buddhist Power Force, an organization among several that has close ties to Myanmar’s militant Buddhists.
While Buddhist attacks on Muslims virtually disappeared after Sri Lanka’s current government was elected in 2015 — in part due to overwhelming support from Muslim voters — “2017 has seen a worrisome return of violence and hate speech,” says Alan Keenan, Sri Lanka senior analyst for ICG. He worries that events in Myanmar, and the impunity with which Muslims have been killed and expelled from the country, “could further empower radical Buddhists groups in Sri Lanka.”
Although that might already be happening. In September, a mob led by Sri Lankan Buddhist monks stormed a U.N. shelter for Rohingya Muslims on the outskirts of the capital, demanding that they be sent back to Myanmar.
Buddhist nationalism has long been a political force in Sri Lanka, an island nation off the southern coast of India. While Sinhalese Buddhists make up about 70 percent of the country, many believe Buddhism and Sinhalese identity are under threat. The Sri Lankan constitution gives Buddhism the “foremost place” in the nation, and the nationalist cause was often invoked during the country’s nearly 30-year civil war with the Tamil Tigers, most of whose fighters came from the Tamil, mostly Hindu minority.
After the end of the war in 2009, attention turned toward Muslims, who make up about 10 percent of the country. Like in Myanmar, some nationalistic Buddhists worry that Muslims will outpace them in population growth and marry and convert their women. Some Sri Lankans, along with some like-minded Buddhists in Myanmar and Thailand, also share the belief that Theravada Buddhism — the form of Buddhism practiced in those countries — is under threat from a powerful global Islamic community, says Keenan.
That community is perceived to have a great deal of commercial power and to have used violence to extend its influence — “not just recently, but for centuries, producing the Islamification of previously Buddhist areas like Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia,” he says.
Thailand
While anti-Muslim sentiment in Thailand has some overlapping roots with Sri Lanka and Myanmar, it can also be attributed to another force: an ongoing Muslim separatist movement.
For about 13 years, Malay-Muslim militants have been waging an insurgency in the country, where about 95 percent of the population is Buddhist.
For most of that time, the conflict, which has killed around 7,000 people, has been limited to Thailand’s southernmost provinces — the area which militants consider to be their historical homeland. But in 2016 they expanded their campaign well beyond the deep south, targeting resort areas.
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The southern insurgency angers many Buddhist nationalists in Thailand, a dynamic that has potential to fuel sectarian conflict, says Matt Wheeler, senior Southeast Asia analyst with ICG.
In 2015, Buddhists held large protests against a halal-industry zone and the construction of a new mosque in the north, he notes. And in October of 2015, a since defrocked monk in Bangkok grabbed headlines after calling on his social media followers to burn a mosque for every monk killed in the south — a move, according to Newsweek, that only attracted more followers.
Social media isn’t only being used to fan the flames of Buddhist nationalism in Thailand. Experts say radical Buddhist nationalists in all three countries have begun to connect on the internet to a worrying degree — swapping conspiracy theories and mimicking each other’s fiery rhetoric.
“The ways in which these Buddhist nationalist individuals and communities interact with each other via Facebook, via Twitter, it amplifies false narratives about particular events and supports what might have been thoughts in the backs of people’s minds,” says Daniel Webster Kent, an assistant professor of religion at Whitman College. “It encourages those thoughts to grow into strong beliefs that may ultimately lead to violence.”
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Buddhist Nationalism Reaches Beyond Myanmar originally appeared on usnews.com
