Randy Rosenthal's Articles on Lion's Roar

How have Buddhists become implicated in one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world? Randy Rosenthal looks through history to understand how a religion of peace has become a justification for violence. “It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.” – Aung San Suu Kyi Understanding the Crisis in Myanmar. The scriptures of Judaism, Hinduism, and Islam condone, justify, and even sometimes encourage the use of violence. In Buddhist texts, it’s just the opposite. Chapter ten of the Dhammapada, an anthology of verses attributed to the Buddha, reads: “All tremble before violence. All fear death. Having done the same yourself, you should neither harm nor kill.” Another verse reads: “In this world hostilities are never appeased by hostility. But by the absence of hostility are they appeased. This is an interminable truth.” A line from the Metta Sutta reads: “Toward the whole world one should develop loving-kindness, a state of mind without boundaries—above, below, and across—unconfined, without enmity, without adversaries.” This principle of non-violence, consistent throughout the Pali Canon — the collection of early Buddhist teachings — is partly why many Buddhists are deeply troubled by the current situation in Myanmar — a majority-Buddhist country — where, particularly in Rakhine State, massive human rights violations are systematically being committed against the Muslim Rohingya people. Hugging the Bay of Bengal on Myanmar’s western coast, and separated from central Myanmar by the Arakan Mountains, Rakhine State is home to over a million Muslims, most belonging to the Rohingya ethnic group, and over two million Buddhists of the Rakhine ethnic group, who are ethnically distinct from the country’s Bamar majority. The state’s capital is Sittwe, where communal violence erupted in 2012, and relations between Rakhine and Muslims were severed. Things have gotten exponentially worse since then; recent articles published in The New York Times and Al Jazeera exposed mass graves of Rohingya massacred by Burmese troops in September 2017, with acid apparently used to disfigure the bodies beyond recognition. In December 2017, Doctors Without Borders estimated that over 10,000 Rohingya had been killed in the most recent upsurge of violence, and that about 700,000 are living in exile in neighboring Bangladesh and India, causing the UN Human Rights chief to state the situation was “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing." There is not enough evidence to declare genocide is occurring, but there is evidence of systematic rape, forced labor, restrictions of movement, restrictions on marriage and reproduction, and prevention from access to medicine and food rations. International observers say the situation will soon come to genocide if the international community does not immediately intervene. As the Holocaust demonstrated, ethnic cleansing can swiftly become genocide. Prior to 1941, the Nazi effort to expel all Jews from the Reich qualified as ethnic cleansing. The subsequent concentrating and then exterminating of Jews that began in earnest after the US entered the war was clearly genocide. As Penny Green, Director of the International State Crime Initiative (ISCI) at London’s Queen Mary University, states, “Genocide can begin many years before actual extermination.” In April 2018, Green and the ISCI released a report arguing that the Myanmar government is “guilty of genocidal intent toward the Rohingya." Whether ethnic cleansing or genocide, it is clear that human rights violations against the Rohingya are occurring in Myanmar, which is enough to invoke the Responsibility to Protect principle, in accordance with Chapters VI, VII, and VIII of the United Nations Charter, authorizing the international community to intervene in Myanmar’s national sovereignty. For those of us observing from afar, the crisis forces us to ask questions about the role of Buddhism in world politics. In The New York Times article “Why Are We Surprised When Buddhists Are Violent?,” Dan Arnold and Alicia Turner write, “How, many wonder, could a Buddhist society—especially Buddhist monks!—have anything to do with something so monstrously violent as the ethnic cleansing now being perpetrated on Myanmar’s long-beleaguered Rohingya minority? Aren’t Buddhists supposed to be compassionate and pacifist?” To understand the issue more fully, we must first start with the narrative of Buddhist nationalism — the driving ideological force behind the Islamophobia fueling the violence against the Rohingya. From the perspective of a Buddhist nationalist, the story goes like this: Over the course of decades, Muslim Rohingya slipped over the border from Bangladesh at the point where it meets Rakhine State, and settled on Rakhine land. They grew in number and diluted the Buddhist population, forming the vanguard of a crusade to turn Myanmar into a Muslim country. Therefore, unlike other Muslims in Myanmar, such as the Kaman people, the Rohingya have never been Burmese citizens and do not deserve citizenship status. This narrative is known as “the Muslim problem.” To cement the view that the Rohingya are not Burmese citizens, the Rohingya are referred to as “Chittagong Bengalis.” From the nation’s start, Burma was a Buddhist and Bamar-ethnic majority. There’s no escaping the fact that men wearing the robes of Buddhist monks are promoting this narrative. The most infamous of these is Ashin Wirathu, the 49-year-old Burmese monk who was on the cover of TIME magazine in 2013 and was the subject of the 2017 documentary film The Venerable W. by French filmmaker Barbet Schroder. As the film shows, Wirathu has led hundreds of thousands of followers in a hate-fueled, violent campaign of ethnic cleansing by claiming that the Rohingya are “a Saudi-backed Bangladeshi insurgency whose purpose is to infiltrate the country, destroy Myanmar’s traditional Buddhism and establish a caliphate.” Wirathu is a leader of the Organization for the Protection of Race and Religion, commonly known by its Burmese acronym, Ma Ba Tha. This group was founded in June 2013, and quickly found the support of millions. Ma Ba Tha and other Buddhist nationalist groups—not only Myanmar but also in Sri Lanka—describe their purpose as the protection and promotion of Buddhism through preaching about the importance of Buddhist values, history, education, sacred sites, and ceremonies. Yet accompanying this benign rhetoric is their insistence on neutralizing threats to Buddhism, which they claim come from Muslims. In the 2016 book Myanmar’s Enemy Within, author Francis Wade talks with a lay member of this group, who shares the narrative fueling the group’s thinking. “If the Buddhist cultures vanish,” the member said, “Yangon will become like Saudi and Mecca … It can be the fall of Yangon. It can be the fall of Buddhism. And our race will be eliminated.” Though Buddhism is not a race, Ma Ba Tha often conflates race and religion, demonstrating that the group’s deeper concern is one of ethnicity. Those who believe this narrative see verification of it in the history of other formerly Buddhist nations — like Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan — having been “overrun” by Muslims. Myanmar remains 90% Buddhist, with no evidence of that changing. So where did the idea that Buddhism will vanish originate? The Rise of Burmese Nationalism. Buddhism has been used to consolidate the national identity in Burma for centuries. In the twelfth century, King Anawratha used Buddhist scriptures to unite the disparate people of the Ayeyarwady Valley and form the Bagan Empire. From the nation’s start, Burma was a Buddhist and Bamar-ethnic majority. From then on, kings would support the order of monks—the sangha—and in return the monks endowed the monarchy with legitimacy. The monks encouraged loyalty to the nation, but they also served as the conscience of the government, making sure that it ruled in accordance with Buddhist ethical principles. When it did not, the monks revolted. An example of this was seen in the Saffron Revolution of September 2007. When the government allowed gas subsidies to expire, the price of goods rose 500%, and citizens protested. When the protesters were violently suppressed, the monks joined the protest by overturning their begging bowls on their alms round, disallowing government officials from earning merit by giving alms. The protest was a seriously embarrassing gesture, and the military government violently cracked down on the protests, beating and arresting thousands of monks. The narrative that the Burmese people need to protect Buddhism from enemy foreign invaders has persisted for over a century, though the perceived enemy has changed from British to Muslim. The 800-year connection between the monarchy and the sangha was severed in 1885, when the British invaded Upper Burma and incorporated it into its Indian colony. Dissolving the border between the countries, Indian Hindus and Muslims moved en masse — voluntarily or forcefully — into Burma, permanently altering the demographics of Rangoon in particular, where many found success in trade. With the loss of a Buddhist king and the loss of favor of the Buddhist education system, due to the British promotion of Christianity, 1885 saw the emergence of the first Buddhist nationalist movements. The modern movement of Vipassana meditation arose out of this anti-colonial movement, with monk Ledi Sayadaw spreading the idea that it was the duty of every Buddhist to protect and preserve Buddhism by meditating and studying Buddhist scripture, both of which were previously only practiced by a small portion of monastics. Ledi Sayadaw’s movement was pacifist, but monks also led armed rebels to attack British troops in upper Myanmar during the British invasion. Nationalistic independence movements rose over the following decades, and in the...

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