Buddhist Monks Incite Muslim Killings in Myanmar

“You have the right to defend yourselves. But you don’t have the right to kill or destroy,” he said in the interview.

 

Wirathu said he was in Meikhtila to persuade monks not to fight. At one point, he delivered a speech on a car roof. A first-hand account of what he said was not available.

 

He acknowledged spreading 969 and warned that Muslims were diluting the country’s Buddhist identity. That is a comment he has made repeatedly in speeches and social media and by telephone in recent weeks to a large and growing following.

 

“With money, they become rich and marry Buddhist Burmese woman who convert to Islam, spreading their religion. Their businesses become bigger and they buy more land and houses, and that means fewer Buddhist shrines,” he said.

 

“And when they become rich, they build more mosques which, unlike our pagodas and monasteries, are not transparent,” he added. “They’re like enemy base stations for us. More mosques mean more enemy bases, so that is why we must prevent this.”

 

Wirathu fears Myanmar will follow the path of Indonesia after Islam entered the archipelago in the 13th century. By the end of the 16th century, Islam had replaced Hinduism and Buddhism as the dominant religion on Indonesia’s main islands.

 

Wirathu began preaching the apartheid-like 969 creed himself in 2001, when the U.S. State Department reported “a sharp increase in anti-Muslim violence” in Myanmar. Anti-Muslim sentiment was fueled in March that year by the Taliban’s destruction of Buddhist images in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, and in September by al Qaeda’s attacks in the United States.

 

The monk continued until he was arrested in 2003 and sentenced to 25 years in prison for distributing anti-Muslim pamphlets that incited communal riots in his birthplace of Kyaukse, a town near Meikhtila. At least 10 Muslims were killed in Kyaukse by a Buddhist mob, according to a U.S. State Department report.

 

Wirathu has a quick answer to the question of who caused Meikhtila’s unrest: the Buddhist woman who tried to sell the hair clip. “She shouldn’t have done business with Muslims.”

 

Wirathu should be arrested, said Nyi Nyi Lwin, a former monk better known by his holy name U Gambira who led the “Saffron Revolution” democracy uprising in 2007 that was crushed by the military. “What he preaches deviates from Buddha’s teachings,” he said. “He is a monk. He is an abbot. And he is dangerous. He is becoming very scary and pitiful.”

 

But Gambira said only the government can stop the anti-Muslim mood.

 

“In the past, they prevented monks from giving speeches about democracy and politics. This time they don’t stop these incendiary speeches. They are supporting them,” he said. “Because Wirathu is an abbot at a big monastery of about 2,500 monks, no one dares to speak back to him. The government needs to take action against him.”

 

Hla Thein, a witness to the massacre in Meikhtila, said authorities did surprisingly little to stop the violence. “It was like they were waiting for an order that never came,” he said.

 

One senior policeman told Reuters he expected to be ordered to forcibly restrain the riotous mob, but was told not even to use truncheons.

 

That pattern echoes what Reuters reporters found last year in an examination of October’s anti-Muslim violence in Myanmar’s western Rakhine State. There, a wave of deadly attacks was organized, according to central-government military sources. They were led by Rakhine Buddhist nationalists tied to a powerful political party in the state, incited by Buddhist monks, and, some witnesses said, abetted at times by local security forces.

 

The latest bloodshed could have been nipped in the bud, said NLD lawmaker Win Htein, a former army captain who spent 20 years as a political prisoner. He said the region’s military commander, Aung Kyaw Moe, could have stopped the riots with a few stern orders—especially given that thousands of soldiers are permanently stationed in Meikhtila and nearby.

 

Aung Kyaw Moe insisted authorities did their job. “It is like a battle. When it first starts you can’t really guess the manpower needed or how big it is going to be. But there was protection.”

 

Min Ko Naing, a former political prisoner revered by Burmese nearly as much as Suu Kyi, was in Meikhtila as the violence began. After the massacre, he said, the mob looked well organized. Cell phones in hand, monks inspected cars leaving town, he said. A bulldozer was used to destroy some buildings. “The ordinary public doesn’t know how to use a bulldozer,” he said.