About Michael Jerryson

Michael Jerryson reports on the growing tension between Buddhists and Muslims in South and Southeast Asia, where senior Buddhist monks are actively inciting violence and intolerance despite outcries from the international community. Recent developments in Burma have brought the world’s attention to the ongoing conflicts between Buddhists and Muslims in South and Southeast Asia. But while the media may present the Buddhist–Muslim conflicts in Sri Lanka, southern Thailand, and Burma as fundamentally the same at their core, they are not. Far from this, these three conflicts stem from specific regional issues and politics. Furthermore, each conflict emerges out of an important historical context. However, through globalization, these conflicts are beginning to overlap. Sri Lanka: Emerging from Civil War. Sri Lanka is currently recovering from a twenty-six-year civil war (1983–2009) between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). While the civil war was principally over the LTTE’s desire for independence, it came to be infused with religious symbolism and importance since the vast majority of LTTE members were Tamil Hindus, and the Sri Lankan government and its military were—and still are—predominantly composed of Buddhists. Throughout the civil war, Buddhists and Buddhist monks pressed the state to take a stronger and more aggressive stance. One of the earliest examples of this came from the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (People’s Liberation Front), which in the 1980s counted Buddhist monks among its ranks. In addition to applying political pressure, their members were known to threaten political figures and engage in assassination attempts. Buddhist militant views on the civil war were quite pervasive. The well-known Sri Lankan monk–scholar Walpola Rahula, who taught for many years at Northwestern University, exemplified the Buddhist nationalist perspective on the war when he declared, “the sangha is ready to lay down their lives” to prevent the government from negotiating with the Tamil insurgents. For these Sri Lankans, their country supports the oldest surviving Theravada Buddhist tradition. A division of its land is a division of its Buddhist foundation. In 1997, Venerable Piyadassi Maha Thera explained to the Buddhist scholar Tessa Bartholomeusz, “You have to defend yourself. These are difficult questions. If someone goes to kill my mother, I’m going to stop him. So this could be a condition in which I am forced to kill.” For Piyadassi, “mother” clearly points to the motherland of Theravada Buddhism: Sri Lanka. His choice of hypothetical was designed to persuade people to side with his Buddhist nationalist vision. During the civil war, another Buddhist nationalist group developed that was even more conservative than the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna. In 2004, Buddhist monks formed the Jathika Hela Urumaya (National Heritage Party) and called on the government to eliminate the LTTE. Whether the government listened to the Jathika Hela Urumaya or not is unclear, but their brutal military actions indicate that they were not adverse to this suggestion. Shortly after the civil war, two Buddhist monks broke off from the Jathika Hela Urumaya and formed a new organization called the Bodu Bala Sena (Buddhist Power Force). Within a year, the Bodu Bala Sena had focused on a new nationalist threat: Muslims. When I interviewed the founders of the Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) in the summer of 2014, it had been only two weeks since cofounder Gnanasara Thero had delivered an emotional speech that triggered Buddhist riots and attacks on Muslims in the coastal town of Aluthgama. Gnanasara Thero’s colleague, Dilanthe Withanage, explained the BBS’s view of the Buddhist–Muslim tensions: We [Sinhala Buddhists] have two major political parties and [thus the] Sinhalese are divided. As a result, Muslims always join with one party and then [get to] join in governing the country. Muslims always do that—they get the advantage of being a minority…. We want the Sinhalese united and a Sinhalese government. We want protection; we [have protected] Theravada Buddhism for the last 2,300 years. Today, Theravada Buddhism is in the West and in Sri Lanka. But this will not last. For Withanage and other members of the BBS, although the Sinhala Buddhists may enjoy a 69 percent majority compared to the 8 percent Muslim minority, Sri Lankan Buddhism is a global minority. They see Islamic countries as helping out Muslims worldwide, and Western countries as coming to the aid of Christians. Who, they ask, is helping Sri Lankan Buddhists? For this reason, the BBS considers its efforts to defend the buddhadharma necessary to its very survival. Thailand: The Legacy of Warring Kingdoms. While Sri Lanka’s Buddhist–Muslim tensions emerged out of an extended nationalist agenda and a civil war, Buddhist–Muslim relations in Thailand have a much longer and more focused history. The region of the three southernmost provinces was once part of a Buddhist kingdom called Langkasuka, during an historical period many southern Buddhists reflect on with pride. However, it later became the Islamic kingdom of Patani. Southern Thailand’s current demographic reflects this diverse past; while the country is over 90 percent Thai Buddhist, the three southernmost provinces are more than 85 percent Malay Muslim. Over the centuries, Malay Muslims have struggled to regain their political autonomy from Thailand. Whenever the central government was weak, southern Thai resistance flared. Since January 2004, the region has been under martial law. Violence is pervasive in the region; people live in constant fear. The Thai government has militarized Buddhist temples, authorized clandestine military monks, and enforced brutal counterinsurgent directives and interrogation techniques, oftentimes on Buddhist temple grounds. It is within this context that the current conflict resides. Over the last eleven years, the central Thai government has undergone several military coups. Concurrent with this weakened central government, Thai Malay Muslims have waged a grassroots resistance. As early as the 1960s, groups such as the Pattani United Liberation Organization (PULO) and Barisan Revolusi Nasional (BRN) engaged in armed resistance and then attempted to negotiate with the Thai government. These organizations opposed the policy of requiring Muslims to bow to Buddhist statues, take Thai surnames, and abandon their Malay heritage and language of Bahasa Melayu. The Malay Muslim organizations called for changes to these regional policies and for limited autonomy. While the Thai government capitulated with some of their requests, the changes did not last long. Malay Muslim ambassadors who sought to negotiate with the Thai government, such as the religious leader and scholar Hajji Sulong, went missing and later were found dead. It is through these experiences that the Malay Muslim community developed a deep distrust of the Thai government and its promise of negotiations, a perspective shared by Thailand’s southern neighboring country Malaysia, which had tried to broker peace negotiations. When violence broke out in 2004, no attempts were made to negotiate with the Thai government. Thousands have died in sporadic bombings, random shootings, and public beheadings by insurgents, yet during the last eleven years, no group has claimed responsibility for the violence or issued political requests. In response, the Thai government has militarized Buddhist temples, authorized clandestine military monks, and enforced brutal counterinsurgent directives and interrogation techniques (oftentimes on Buddhist temple grounds). These actions have only worsened Buddhist–Muslim relations. Buddhist military monks (tahanphra) are soldiers who are selected during training to covertly operate as both monks and soldiers. After they undergo a full ordination ceremony, military monks perform the typical duties of a monk but are armed and receive a monthly salary from the military. Military monks see their work as imperative to the survival of Buddhism in southern Thailand and the legacy of the Buddhist kingdom of Langkasuka. At one Buddhist temple in the conflict zone, I met a military monk who pulled back his saffron robes to show me his Smith & Wesson. When I asked him why military monks exist, he replied: Military monks in the three southern provinces of Thailand are like guardians that protect Buddhism from deterioration. If there are no soldiers to help take care of the wat [temple], the wat will become deserted and untended. We are here to protect the religion, encourage the people, and raise the morale of local Thais. This nation can survive because there is religion... If there is no Buddhism to teach and guide the people, we will become a nation of chaos filled with selfish people. He and many other Buddhists in the region believe that military monks are essential to protecting Buddhism in southern Thailand, and that if Muslims drive the Buddhists out of southern Thailand, order and morality will be pushed out as well. Burma: Pushing the Rohingya Muslims Out. The recent violence in Burma began in 2012, when the western Burmese state called Rakhine saw widespread Buddhist riots and violence against the Rohingya Muslims. Tensions in the state had risen prior to this, largely due to the rising population of the Rohingya and the decline in the Rakhine Buddhists, the majority population. The violence rippled across the country and brought global exposure to the Burmese Buddhist nationalist organization called the 969 Movement. The name of the organization is numerical shorthand for the nine supreme qualities of the Buddha, six traits of the dharma, and nine traits of the sangha. Buddhist traditions are inundated with numbers and categories that stretch back for hundreds of years; however, the significance of 969 in Burma is quite recent. In the 1990s, the Burmese monk U Kyaw Lwin used 969 as a...

About Michael Jerryson

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