Warning: If you live or have family in Myanmar, do not open, share, or hit the like icon; the junta has executed people for liking a Facebook post. To be identified as a critic of the junta is to be targeted for assassination and torture, your family murdered and your village burned.
Not for very much longer, as the line in Rocky Horror Picture Show goes; we are winning this one.
Resist, and remain anonymous and invisible; offer the enemies of liberty no target to repress, silence, and erase.
A Day of Silence and national strike made silent the cities of Myanmar today, the second such anniversary, in the face of threats of death and arrest by the regime of tyranny and state terror which has captured the state for three years now, after a morning of mass protests and defiant marches, and while these performances of liberty and guerrilla street theatre valorized resistance and democracy and unified the peoples of Myanmar in solidarity against those who would enslave them, liberation forces took the fight to the enemy in direct actions against police and military targets as demonstrations of the powerlessness of carceral states of force and control against a people not divided by sectarian and ethnic hierarchies of otherness and belonging or driven in to submission by learned helplessness and brutal repression, but united in the cause of liberty and refusal to submit.
Once the enforcers of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and the beneficiaries of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil could sleep secure from the will of the people and the reckoning of their victims, confronted by a human rights protest movement robbed of its force as revolutionary struggle because it was yoked to a parallel and interdependent democracy movement which under the leadership of its fallen heroine accepted co-optation by the military-oligarchic system which remains its enemy, a once shining hope and path of liberation tarnished by silence in the face of the genocide of the Rohingya and ethnic minorities, and reduced by appeasement and a millennia old kleptocratic state to limited political goals and no true threats to the cabal of monarchists, oligarchs, and militarists which have ruled their nation since the fall of the colonial empire of Britain here in 1948; but with the seizure of direct power by the military as a tyranny of force and control and the birth of a new Resistance as its counterforce, those who would enslave the peoples of Burma awake to a new day in which all of this has changed forever, for the Revolution has come to Myanmar.
Democracy fell three years ago in Myanmar, the junta’s name and one I use to disambiguate between their regime as a state and Burma as a historical nation, to a military coup by tyrants of brutal repression and theft of citizenship and perpetrators of genocide and ethnic cleansing in an ongoing campaign against ethnic and religious minorities, often tribal peoples living in areas the junta wishes to plunder of natural resources.
The capture of Myanmar by the junta is paralleled by its seizure by a Buddhist theocracy of xenophobic nationalism which unites tyranny with faith weaponized in service to power as fascisms of blood, faith, and soil; a theocracy which controls the nations of Sri Lanka and Myanmar in mobilization against Islamic and other minorities as ethnic cleansing. Here an organization of faith has formed these twin Buddhist states as an exoskeleton through which to exert social power; in exchange the state receives ideological and organizational services, much as Pat Robertson and the Gideonite-Pentecostal fundamentalists served Ronald Reagan or the Inquisition served the Spanish Empire.
Here is a litany of woes repeated endlessly throughout history and the world, of the conquest of indigenous peoples and the inquisitions and holocausts of those whom divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of elite belonging dehumanize as monsters to be cast out.
Gathering forces of change have swept the nation these past years, mobilizing not only tribal armies of the Chin, Karen, Shan, Arakan, and other peoples but also mass protests in every major city organized by the Civil Disobedience Movement, national strikes- especially that of hospitals and doctors, a boycott of the military, the emergence of a National Unity Government, pressure from both Catholic and Buddhist organizations, actions of international solidarity by President Biden and Pope Francis, and the resurgence of the Communist Party of Burma’s People’s Liberation Army after thirty years.
This in resistance to state terror and tyranny, in which about 12,000 democracy activists have been arrested and about 1400 killed by the military and police in the first two years since the coup, and a campaign of ethnic cleansing which in 2021 alone created 400,000 refugees and killed several thousand. We have seen death and state terror on this scale in Burma during the Rohingya Genocide in 2017, which in a few months killed 25,000 and drove a million refugees to Bangladesh and another million to North Africa.
But the use of social force obeys the Third Law of Motion, and for every act of oppression there are equal and opposite forces of resistance.
A regional democracy movement, the Milk Tea Alliance, has emerged to unify action in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, and Burma, and has now become a global liberation movement in the Philippine Islands, India, Malaysia, and Indonesia, with important networks and organizations in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, and allied movements in Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and Iran.
The three finger salute from The Hunger Games adopted by the Thai democracy revolution in 2014 was embraced years ago in Burma, and one week after the coup was seen among the mass protests in Yangon. As the Thai democracy leader Sirawith Seritiwat described it in The Guardian; “We knew that it would be easily understood to represent concepts of freedom, equality, solidarity.”
This is what we must offer the peoples of Burma now, and wherever men hunger to be free, all those throughout the world whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, and to whom our Statue of Liberty offers a beacon of hope to the world with the words of a poem written by a Jewish girl, Emma Lazarus, in reference to the Colossus of Rhodes;
“Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Freedom, Equality, Solidarity; let us reclaim America as a guarantor of liberty and redeem our promise to the world and to the future of humankind.
In Myanmar on this third anniversary of the Revolution, the people are marching toward victory in a unified front of tribal armies, the Brotherhood Alliance, and the urban democracy movement, the People’s Defense Forces allied with the National Unity Government. It has become the model for a new kind of revolutionary struggle, which now propagates outward throughout the world. And those who would enslave us now fear us.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
As the state of the Revolution is described by anonymous sources reported by Reuters, in an article entitled Insight: Rebel fire and China’s ire: Inside Myanmar’s anti-junta offensive; “Generals from Myanmar’s junta held peace talks in June near the border with China with representatives of three powerful ethnic armies. They sat across a wide table covered with blue cloth and decorated with elaborate bouquets.
But the rebels were playing a double-game.
Secretly, the ethnic armies – collectively called the Three Brotherhood Alliance – had already laid the groundwork for Operation 1027, a major offensive launched in October that has become the most significant threat to the regime since it seized power in a 2021 coup.
“We were already preparing for the operation when we met them,” said Kyaw Naing, a spokesman for the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA), a largely ethnic-Chinese group that is part of the rebel coalition.
Reuters interviewed a dozen resistance officials with knowledge of the operation, as well as analysts and other people familiar with the matter. Some spoke on condition of anonymity because the offensive is ongoing.
They disclosed previously unreported elements of the planning, including details of the formation of a unified battlefield brigade and the extent of China’s impatience toward the junta, which some analysts believe emboldened the militias.
Operation 1027, named after the date it began in late October, has delivered nationwide victories for the alliance and other groups fighting the military, which unseated Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s civilian-led government in February 2021.
The junta cracked down on protests after the coup, sparking a grassroots rebellion and re-igniting conflict with some ethnic armies. The military, known as the Tatmadaw, has ruled Myanmar for five of the past six decades, and its soldiers are feared for their brutality and scorched earth tactics. The army says tough measures are required to fight groups it considers “terrorists.”
Two members of the Three Brotherhood Alliance together with five other armed groups formed the new Brigade 611 in early 2022, four rebel officials told Reuters. The formation’s strength numbers in the “thousands”, one of them said.
It was a display of unprecedented cooperation among outfits that come from different parts of Myanmar, speak different languages and traditionally have had different priorities, according to a November report from the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), a Washington-based think-tank focused on conflict prevention and resolution.
The operation came amid rising anger in Beijing with the junta over rampant crime on the border, which created conditions that supported the blitzkrieg, according to two analysts.
China, a key junta ally that also has close relations with some ethnic Chinese militias in the borderlands, has been riled by Myanmar’s inability to shut down online scam centres along the frontier that have become a scourge across Southeast Asia.
As of October, more than 20,000 people, mainly Chinese, were being held in over 100 compounds in northern Myanmar, where the workers – many of them trafficked – defraud strangers over the internet, according to a USIP estimate.
The centres have become a major public security challenge for China and Chinese officials delivered an ultimatum in Beijing this September to their Myanmar counterparts: eliminate the compounds or China would do so, according to a person briefed on their meeting.
Numerous scam centres were caught up in the recent fighting, allowing many foreign nationals who had been trapped to flee.
Myanmar’s junta, as well as China’s Ministry of Public Security, did not return requests for comment.
In a Nov. 29 speech, junta leader Gen. Min Aung Hlaing said the fighting near the border originated from long-standing issues and the military was focused on combating insurgents “for peace and stability in the region.”
The regime has since held China-facilitated talks with the Three Brotherhood Alliance, a junta spokesman said on Dec. 11 without providing further details. Beijing said it supports such talks, while the alliance said on Wednesday it remains determined to defeat the “dictatorship”.
A senior Chinese diplomat said in November that Beijing doesn’t interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, but urged Myanmar to protect Chinese residents and personnel, and to cooperate in ensuring stability along the border.
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in response to questions that it has deepened its cooperation with Myanmar on targeting telecoms fraud and that the campaign has been successful, with many suspects sent back to China.
“China will continue to severely crack down on transnational criminal activities such as cyberscams with relevant parties, and uphold order and tranquility in both countries’ border regions,” it added.
BRIGADE 611
Operation 1027 began in northern Shan State, abutting the border with China, where troops led by the Three Brotherhood Alliance – which comprises MNDAA, the Ta’ang National Liberation Army and the Arakan Army (AA) – said they captured around 150 military outposts, five towns and four border gates within a month.
Independent analysts consider those figures reliable and the junta, which has not addressed specifics about battlefield defeats, has acknowledged some loss of control.
Among the rebel forces was the multi-ethnic Brigade 611, said MNDAA’s Kyaw Naing.
The formation includes troops from entities supported by the parallel civilian government as well as fighters from the AA, one of Myanmar’s most powerful ethnic armed forces, and the Bamar People’s Liberation Army (BPLA), a newer militia drawn mostly from the country’s majority Bamar people, officials from those groups confirmed.
Photos of Brigade 611 posted by an MNDAA-affiliated outlet in January show hundreds of troops in battle fatigues gathering for a graduation ceremony. Officials watched from a marquee, under a red banner with Burmese script and Chinese characters.
Some Brigade 611 troops drilled in using drones ahead of the operation, said BPLA spokesperson Lin Lin.
Rebel ground troops often launch attacks following drone strikes, a tactic that has “become a game changer” for them, said Khun Bedu, leader of Karenni Nationalities Defence Force (KNDF), which now controls parts of the frontier with Thailand and also contributed to Brigade 611.
The closer coordination means the rebels have risen “up everywhere and the junta doesn’t have enough military forces to handle them,” said Zhu Jiangming, a security consultant who writes regularly about the border situation for Chinese state media.
Rebels aided by “foreign drone experts” used over 25,000 drone-dropped bombs during the offensive, forcing some military posts to be abandoned due to “excessive strength” of resistance fighters, Min Aung Hlaing said in November.
The Three Brotherhood Alliance did not respond to a request for comment on whether they used foreign experts.
Despite these setbacks, the Myanmar military – one of the largest in Southeast Asia – has sizeable resources and a “determination to prevail at all costs,” said Richard Horsey, a senior adviser at the non-profit International Crisis Group.
Anti-junta operations have since rapidly expanded to other parts of Myanmar, with battles in the central region of Sagaing as well as in states near India and Bangladesh.
In several areas, rebel groups are supported by the People’s Defence Forces (PDF), a movement backed by the civilian National Unity Government (NUG) that includes representatives of Suu Kyi’s administration.
The NUG claims control over parts of the country and has worked on diplomatically isolating the junta. Suu Kyi remains in detention in the capital, Naypyidaw.
In Mandalay, a major city that is the gateway to the northern territories, the local PDF is tasked with stalling military reinforcements to the frontline, its spokesman said.
The NUG supports over 300 PDF units under its command using money raised by taxation, bond sales and other methods, Finance Minister Tin Tun Naing told Reuters.”
As written by Rebecca Ratcliffe in The Guardian, in an article entitled Myanmar at standstill as silent strike marks third anniversary of coup: Towns and cities empty during protest on anniversary of military takeover and arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi; “Cities and towns across Myanmar have come to a standstill as people took part in a silent strike to signal defiance against the military junta on the anniversary of the 2021 coup.
Three years since the military detained political leaders including Aung San Suu Kyi, its grip on power is more uncertain than at any point in the last six decades, according to analysts. The UN says two-thirds of the country is experiencing conflict.
Images taken by independent media on Thursday morning in Yangon showed normally busy intersections empty. Similar scenes were shared on social media from Mandalay, Mawlamyine and Monywa.
“Myanmar people don’t accept the military’s participation in politics, or their human rights violations,” said Nann Linn, a pro-democracy activist currently hiding in Myanmar. “That’s why there is no way other than the complete surrender of the military. We will accelerate our movement more.” The military coup had failed because the junta has been unable to govern, she added.
On the eve of the coup anniversary, the junta extended a state of emergency by six months, while the US announced further sanctions.
The UN secretary-general, António Guterres, called for “sustained international and regional attention and coherent collective action to support the people of Myanmar”.
The coup, which has been strongly opposed by the public, provoked huge street rallies in 2021 that were brutally suppressed. Many people subsequently joined civilian defence forces to fight back against military oppression, fleeing to the jungle to train to fight, and receiving support from and fighting alongside older, ethnic armed groups seeking independence. Myanmar has since been gripped by spiralling conflict, leaving more than 2.6 million people internally displaced.
In October, an alliance of ethnic armed groups launched a new operation to seize junta territory, which resulted in humiliating defeats for the already overstretched military.
It has lost swathes of territory along the border with China, as well as on the other side of the country, in Chin and Rakhine states, and thousands of soldiers have surrendered. Progress by anti-junta groups elsewhere has been mixed.
“Three years on from the Myanmar coup, the military’s hold on power is more uncertain than at any time in the last 60 years,” said Richard Horsey, senior Myanmar adviser to Crisis Group. But, he added, the military seemed determined to fight on “and retains an enormous capacity for violence, attacking civilian populations and infrastructure in areas it has lost, using air power and long-range artillery”.
Rights experts have previously accused the military of committing war crimes, including indiscriminate attacks on civilians from aerial bombing, mass executions and the large-scale and intentional burning of homes.
On Wednesday, the junta head, Min Aung Hlaing, said the military would do “whatever it takes” to crush opposition. It has denied abuses against civilians, saying its operations were designed to tackle terrorists and in the interests of security.
Aung San Suu Kyi, who was detained in the early hours of 1 February 2021, is serving a 33-year sentence over charges that have been widely dismissed as politically motivated. She has not been seen in public since, other than in images taken in a courtroom in Naypyidaw.
Her son Kim Aris, who lives in the UK, told Sky News he had received a letter from his mother in prison, the first communication he has had from her in three years. It said she was generally well but suffering from dental problems and spondylitis, a condition that inflames the joints of the backbone. The letter, which would have been read by the military, contained little detail.
Almost 20,000 political prisoners are detained across Myanmar, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma), a local monitoring group.
Ko Tayzar Sann, an activist in central Myanmar, said: “The main message that we would like to deliver is that the Myanmar people will never be cowed by the terrorising, power-stealing junta. We rang our bell to the whole world – including the military.”
He recalled the confusion on 1 February 2021, as news of the coup emerged. “We didn’t have phone line and internet, but we could confirm the news in the afternoon,” he said. “Everyone was sad and angry. No one accepted this action.”
Since then, lives have been turned upside down. “We have experienced the terrorist killings, torture and devastation carried out by the military,” he said. At the same time he had also seen the dedication and determination of the public to overthrow the military.
Many people were taking part in the silent strike, despite the military’s intimidation, Ko Tayzar Sann said. “What we have understood from these three years past, is that it is impossible for the military to rule or control the country. “The revolution side must prove that with action.”
As written by Rebecca Ratcliffe in The Guardian, in an article entitled Three years on from Myanmar’s military coup, the junta is struggling to assert control: Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing facing criticism after months of battlefield losses, with an estimated two-thirds of the country gripped by conflict; “Three years after seizing power, Myanmar’s junta is struggling to assert control, with humiliating losses in recent months and growing criticism of its leader, Min Aung Hlaing, by pro-military figures.
Images shared across social media show hauls of weapons seized from overrun military outposts in the north, exhausted soldiers surrendering en masse and even a military jet plunging from the sky after it was shot down. In one unprecedented image, brigadier general commanders are pictured raising a glass – apparently with their former enemies – after they were forced to concede defeat in the key town of Laukkai in northern Shan state, along with almost 2,400 men.
The UN says about two-thirds of the country remains gripped by conflict.
The junta has lost key territory in the north along the border with China, and in the west, near the Indian border. Elsewhere, where progress by anti-coup groups has been slower, the military remains stuck in fierce battles, unable to quash a persistent resistance movement.
On social media, pro-military commentators have voiced dissatisfaction at the leadership.
Earlier this month, an ultranationalist monk, Pauk Sayardaw, called for Min Aung Hlaing to resign at a protest in Pyin Oo Lwin, a town in Mandalay region that has a large military presence and is home to the elite Defence Services Academy, BBC Burmese reported.
Myanmar has been gripped by protracted conflict since 2021, when the military seized power in a coup, ousting the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi. The coup, which enraged the public, prompted huge street protests calling for the return of democracy. When junta violence meant rallies were no longer safe, people took up arms to fight against military oppression, often equipped with little more than homemade weapons.
There are a multitude of different groups fighting against the junta – including newer, civilian pro-democracy groups that took up arms after the coup, which are known as people’s defence forces (PDFs). Many of these are aligned with the National Unity Government (NUG), which was set up to oppose the junta.
Some older, ethnic armed groups, which have long fought against the military for independence, are also fighting against the junta. While they all oppose the military, their specific goals, and the extent to which these groups are coordinated varies.
For a long time the conflict has been stuck in stalemate – with the military unable to control its opponents, and relying on airstrikes and scorched earth tactics to push back, with devastating consequences for civilians.
The conflict shifted on 27 October, however, with the launch of operations by several groups of experienced ethnic armed groups, known as the Brotherhood Alliance. The operation in coordination with newer anti-coup groups, aimed to seize territory from the junta in the north of the country.
The rapid success of the Brotherhood Alliance campaign prompted renewed offensives elsewhere in the country and gave a major morale boost to the pro-democracy resistance. Progress in other areas, including the south of the country, has been slower, and hopes that a domino effect could deliver a decisive blow to the military have since been tempered.
Analysts also caution that while the groups involved in the Brotherhood Alliance have identified as part of the wider pro-democracy movement, they have their own territorial ambitions.
Yun Sun, senior fellow and co-director of the east Asia Program at the Stimson Center, said China – frustrated with the junta over its failure to clamp down on booming scam operations that target Chinese nationals – had given tacit approval for the Brotherhood Alliance operation.
“China was intending to punish the junta,” says Sun. But it has since made it clear to such groups that it wants a return to stability, she adds.
The NUG says 60% of the country is now controlled by opponents of the junta. But measuring who controls which areas of the country is difficult, due to the highly complex and fluid nature of the conflict.
“In many areas where PDFs or groups linked to the NUG are operating, they may be the main service providers … but they can’t prevent military incursions. Is that control?” says Morgan Michaels, research fellow for south-east Asian politics and foreign policy at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “In many cases it’s mixed control and contestation, and that is fluid and changing over time.”
Ye Myo Hein, executive director of the Tagaung Institute of Political Studies (TIPS), and a global fellow with the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, says that, regardless, the military faces unprecedented battlefield challenges.
“For the first time in history, the military now faces simultaneous attacks from armed resistance of various types, ranging from conventional warfare to guerrilla tactics and from overt to covert operations, in 12 out of Myanmar’s 14 states and regions,” he says.
There are reports that at senior levels there is growing frustration at the military leadership.
Despite this, Ye Myo Hein says it is highly unlikely that Min Aung Hlaing could be ousted as junta chief. “The military’s institutional culture, nurtured over seven decades, has established a feudal system with its top leader in the most powerful position,” he added.
Even if there were to be a change of leadership, some fear the alternative could be even more violent.
The troops fighting the junta’s war are demoralised and exhausted and the brutal campaigns it has launched across the country, in Bamar-majority heartland areas, have left it unable to recruit.
“Everyone wants to leave,” one recent defector told the Guardian. “Maybe soldiers would still love the military. But they don’t love the leaders any more.”
As written at the beginning of the great struggle now unfolding in Myanmar by Myra Dahgaypaw in Common Dreams; “On the morning of August 25, 2021, I woke up on the floor with my lungs gasping for breath. My heart was racing, my hands and legs were shaking from adrenaline, and I was sweating from running. It took me about a minute to realize it was just a nightmare, one where I had to jump off a six-step ladder to run away from Burmese soldiers. Except it wasn’t a nightmare.
It was January 28, 1995—the day I was forced to leave my beautiful village and never see it again. It’s just a nightmare for me now, but it’s a reality for so many people back home.
Since February 1, 2021, I have heard the words “February coup,” “attempted coup,” “civil disobedience movement,” “People’s Defense Force,” and “National Unity Government” countless times. Every time these words are used, I only hear the sounds of war. Most importantly, I hear the screams of civilians, whether they are fleeing for their lives or crying for the loss of their loved ones. I feel as though the international community does not hear the desperate cries for help from Burma’s civilians.
When I saw the picture of the Karen civilians carrying their belongings and their children while crossing the Moi River, I saw myself being carried on my mother’s back when we fled in the late 1970s. When I saw the picture of the Karenni civilians that were notoriously burned to death on December 24, I saw my aunt hanging upside down and my uncle’s skin was flayed and covered with salt and chilli after he was tortured to death. When I watched the news about Thangtlang burning as a result of bombings in Chin state, I saw my village and church burned to the ground when the Burmese military dropped bombs in late January 1995.
I did foresee a day like the February 1 coup. I felt hopeless at one point as I watched world leaders, including the United States, lift economic sanctions, the only leverage we had to bring Burma a step closer to a stable and inclusive democracy. Now, after a decade, we are back to square one. Our people are indiscriminately killed and used as human shields. Their homes are burned and landmines are planted in and around villages. The intense armed conflict forced civilians to flee for their lives, increasing the numbers of displaced people.
It’s been almost a year since the Burmese military coup. We have greater than 320,000 displaced civilians in addition to 340,000 people already displaced due to conflicts prior to 2021. More than a million refugees are seeking refuge in neighboring countries. The most powerful international body, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), still condemns the Burmese military for its actions. However, condemnations only embolden the Burmese military to continue committing crimes with impunity. There is no accountability let alone justice for the victims and their surviving families. The junta is using all possible methods to wipe out anyone who fights back against its rule.
It’s time for the international community to act decisively.
We ask that the international community stop selling weapons to the Burmese military. We implore the UNSC to refer the junta to the International Criminal Court and impose a global arms embargo and targeted sanctions, including gas revenue that brings in billions of dollars that the junta uses to buy weapons. And we ask that other nations follow the example of Argentina and bring forward universal jurisdiction cases against the junta.
Now the people of Burma, including all ethnic groups across the country, are fighting back to regain their rights. It is time for the international community to stand with us in our struggle instead of standing by. The people of Burma are not asking too much, only to hold the Burmese military accountable for the unspeakable crimes they have been committing. We ask the international community to help stop selling weapons to the Burmese military and to stop funding them.”
As I wrote in my post of February 2 2021, The Myanmar Coup: a Legacy of State Terror and Tyranny; When last I was in Burma, I was fleeing for my life from a special death squad of the Burmese Army with a small band of companions, across the Kumon Range to India by trails used by Stillwell and Merrill’s Marauders in World War Two, possibly the first outsider to do so since, and guided by Kachin headhunters as were they.
I suppose we must call it Myanmar now, as the junta renamed the nation in the wake of the 1989 seizure of power from the democracy movement that cast Ne Win down from his throne; but as with changing the actors in the same roles as we have with the armies of the Japanese conquest and those of the Chinese Communist Party’s client state of tyranny in Myanmar, changing what we call a thing does not change what it is.
A military junta has once again seized power in Myanmar in a coup against the democratic government and imprisoned Aung San Suu Kyi, who once gave the nation a fig leaf of legitimacy before her implication in the army’s genocide of the Muslim Rohingya.
The ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya is portrayed to the world as an anomaly, a vast crime against humanity of racist and sectarian hate which happened in 2017 and is unrelated to Myanmar’s current apartheid ethnic and religious policies. But this is a lie.
Here is how I came by accident to be fighting more than three decades ago with indigenous peoples in the Shan States of northern Burma against a campaign of slave raiding and ethnic cleansing by the Burmese government; I awoke on the veranda of my stilt house one morning to what was later tallied as eight hundred rounds of one hundred millimeter Russian mortar fire, and mounted my elephant to escape, who panicked and went the wrong way, uphill to the enemy positions. I was yelling “Run away!” when one of the Karen tribesmen handed me a spear and shouted in S’gaw; “The American is attacking the enemy! Take the mortars! Charge!” and we became more than a dozen elephants leading a human wave assault.
After participating in a cavalry charge on the back of an elephant carrying a spear and our capture of the mortars, I discovered we were behind the lines of the advancing Burmese Army in one of their annual campaigns of slave raiding, brigandage, and ethnic cleansing against the indigenous tribes, exactly where I belong and prefer to be if there is no escape from conflict, and ideally positioned to disrupt their advance. To run amok and make mischief in the enemy’s rear area of operations is a special joy not to be wasted.
The policy of genocide and its periodic campaigns of death and fear have been part of the fascist tyranny of the Burmese state since the fall of the British Raj in 1948, one designed to provide a pretext for military rule through the creation of a national identity of religious and racial purity. In the case of the Karen, a Christian ethnic minority and former British allies, as with the Islamic Rohingya who immigrated from India, all three fascist boxes of exclusionary otherness are checked; blood, faith, and nationality.
Its possible this bears the force and authority of tradition, and has long been a key strategy of state power in Burma as it has to a degree in virtually all human civilizations. As George Washington once said; “Government is about force; only force.”
Fear, power, force; it is a universal circle of dehumanization and subjugation by authoritarian elites. So pervasive and endemic is the Ring of Power that it seems a human constant.
But it need not be so. From all that I have seen and all that I have learned, from all that I am and for all that we may become, I tell you this one true thing; our addiction to and captivity by the Ring of Power is not a flaw of our natural condition or of an evil impulse, and neither a sign of the innate depravity of man or its form as the doctrine of original sin, and absolutely not a personal evil for which individuals must be held solely responsible under the law or dehumanized as monsters to be driven out, but a sum of our history and of choices we have made over time about how to be human together.
Our addiction to power is systemic and historical, but we may escape its legacies through seizures of power from authorized identities and through those truths written in our flesh as the powers of love, hope, and faith which define what is human, and like refusal to submit cannot be taken from us.
As Wagner illustrates with his great theme of renunciation of wealth and power and abandonment of force in Der Ring des Nibelungen, only those who foreswear love can seize dominion over others. This principle has a negative space which is also true; love and hope can redeem and heal the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
I hope that one day humankind will discover that such things as love, compassion, mercy, loyalty, trust, and faith in one another are not weaknesses but strengths, and awaken to the beauty of our diversity and the necessity of our interdependence.
As I wrote in my post of March 9 2021, Tyranny and Resistance in Myanmar; It has been a month of fire and of fear in the streets of Myanmar’s cities, of state terror and the repression of dissent which has escalated from rubber to live bullets and from protests of thousands to tens of thousands against the military coup and the fall of democracy, thin though its veneer was over the fascism and brutality of xenophobic nationalism and the dominion of oligarchic elites, an illusion of liberty and equality which has been exposed as a lie before the stage of the world in the genocide of the Rohingya.
Open street fighting between democracy resistance fighters and military and police units engulf the major cities of Yangon, Mandalay, Bagan, Monywa, and in the Shan States capitol of Taunggyi and the township of Lashio, which still proclaim their independence as they did decades ago when I fought with Shan and Karen Free Forces.
The true seat of power is not in the capitol of Yangon but in the temple city of Bagan, key to control of the Buddhist organizations which can authorize or delegitimate a government and have themselves become a ground of struggle since the capture and realignment of the state under Myanmar’s Buddhist social welfare network Ma Ba Ta, the Association for the Protection of Race and Religion, which advocates genocidal violence against the Rohingya, and led by Myanmar’s Pat Robertson or Osama bin Ladin, the monk Ashin Wirathu who has provided the ideology of blood, faith, and soil and the base of mass action for junta leader and army chief Min Aung Hlaing’s campaign against the Rohingya and coup against the government of the oft-imprisoned Aung San Suu Kyi.
The Rohingya Genocide campaign of 2017 created 750,000 refugees who escaped to Bangladesh and left 600,000 to the terror directed by Min Aung Hlaing; mass organized rape, arson, and murder. The purpose of Hlaing’s coup is primarily to protect the perpetrators of the genocide from criminal prosecution and create a Buddhist-ethnic Burmese state under a return to the military rule which it had for fifty years, and secondarily to protect the vast wealth of Hlaing and his plutocratic-oligarchic junta and cabal. Myanmar is now truly in the lion’s mouth, to borrow a phrase from Winston Churchill, captured by a regime which meets all major conditions of fascism; authoritarian state terror and tyranny coupled with plutocratic and oligarchic capitalism, and built on a national identity of ethnic and religious purity.
Hlaing’s Buddhist-Burmese fascism parallel’s Modi’s Hindu-Indian fascism, with one important difference; India is still a democracy. Both Myanmar and India use anti-Islamic hysteria and violence as an instrument of state power, and the situations of Kashmir and the Rohingya are comparable. An alliance between the two nations in the centralization of wealth and power to authorized elites and the ethnic cleansing of minorities is a terrifying possibility, and one which would make the Restoration of democracy to the region far more difficult. Such an alliance as now exists between the two nations operated as fronts for Buddhist Nationalism, Sri Lanka and Myanmar. The international community must act now, while there is still time.
There can be but one reply to fascism; Never Again.
The historical rise of Buddhist Nationalism in Myanmar is described by Randy Rosenthal writing of 2018 in Lions Roar, What’s the connection between Buddhism and ethnic cleansing in Myanmar?; “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
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 1920s and 30s a popular anti-colonial rallying cry was “Amyo, Batha, Thathana!” — which roughly translates to “Race, language, and religion!” The Ma Ba Tha organization derived its name from this slogan, of which it is an acronym.
This 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 first instance of this shift can be seen in a rally of 10,000 Burmese at Rangoon’s Shwedagon Pagoda, in 1938, to protest the writing of Muslim intellectuals who were accused of insulting Buddhism. The protests resulted in attacks on Muslim communities across the city. In addition to anti-Muslim movements, the 1930s and 1940s also saw the rise of anti-Christian and anti-Hindu sentiments, the latter culminating in a series of anti-Indian riots. All of these incidences arose as part of anti-colonial movements and strengthened the idea that one must be Buddhist in order to be truly Burmese.
An important contributing factor to the current crisis in Rakhine occurred during WWII. Under Japanese occupation, Buddhists in Rakhine (then called Arakan) were recruited to fight as proxies for the Japanese. Local Muslims, in contrast, were armed and mobilized by the British as independent militias who performed guerilla-attacks on Japanese forces. This meant that Buddhists and Muslims were fighting against each other, which resulted in the groups becoming geographically separated and “ghettoized,” with Muslims fleeing north to avoid the anti-Muslim violence of the Japanese offensives, and Buddhists fleeing south to avoid the anti-Buddhist violence of the guerilla counter-offensives. After the war, waves of government violence against Rohingya occurred in 1954, 1962 (during the military takeover), 1977-78 (when the military forced the Rohingya to carry Foreign Registration Cards, and over 200,000 were driven into Bangladesh), 1992, 2001 (in response to the Taliban’s destruction of Buddhist statues in Bamiyan), and 2003.
We can trace the history of the current crisis in Rakhine State to the military takeover of the country in 1962. Burma achieved independence in 1948, but after fourteen years of constitutional rule, the military junta took over in 1962. The junta systematically stoked fears of the demise of Buddhism and the break-up of the nation to cultivate loyalty among a resentful population. But they also held a monopoly on violence and prevented citizens and monks like Wirathu from encouraging social disturbance. (In 2003, Wirathu was arrested along with forty-four other monks for using hate-speech to promote attacks on Muslims and a mosque, and spent eight years in prison.) Ironically, it was only with the ostensible transition to democracy that began in 2011 that public religious tension between Buddhists and Muslims surfaced again. As Francis Wade writes, the idea was that “the stirrings of democratic change in Myanmar might level the playing field, allowing communities who felt long disenfranchised by the military to assert great claims to the nation.” It was feared that Muslims in particular would take advantage of democratic freedom, and if they did, Buddhists would suffer.
A crucial moment came in 1982 with the Citizenship Law, when the government issued an official list of 135 ethnic groups, or “national races” that held Myanmar citizenship. The list excluded the Rohingya, cementing their stateless status. A census in 2014 was then designed to exclude “alien” minorities from voting, and the 2015 elections resulted in Aung San Suu Kyi becoming State Councilor, with great gains for her National League for Democracy (NLD) — and also in the total absence of Muslims from Myanmar’s parliament for the first time since independence.
With the internet, Islamaphobic fanatics can connect the old Burmese narratives about Islam with the contemporary narrative of global jihad.
Suu Kyi has received widespread criticism for her silence on the Rohingya issue — especially in light of her earlier writing and speeches. In a 1989 open letter to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, for example, Suu Kyi wrote, “The chief aim of the National League for Democracy (NLD) and other organizations working for the establishment of a democratic government in Burma is to bring about social and political changes which will guarantee a peaceful, stable and progressive society where human rights, as outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are protected by rule of law.” Then, in a speech she gave in Kachin State on April 27, 1989, Suu Kyi declared, “If we divide ourselves ethnically, we shall not achieve democracy for a long time.” Despite the apparent achievement of democracy in Myanmar, violent ethnic divisions continue to occur under Suu Kyi and the NLD’s leadership.
The latest upsurges of violence are also aided by globalization. With the internet, Islamaphobic fanatics can connect the old Burmese narratives about Islam with the contemporary narrative of global jihad. In The Venerable W. —shot before the 2016 election — Wirathu says, “In the USA, if the people want to maintain peace and security, they have to choose Donald Trump.” Through such comments, and his aggressive use of social media and DVD propaganda, Wirathu demonstrates his awareness of rising xenophobic nationalism around the world. He’s aware of 9/11; the attacks in Paris, Berlin, Nice, and Brussels; Brexit; Marine Le Penn in France; neo-Nazis in Germany; and the right-wing nationalist governments ruling in Hungary, Poland, and elsewhere in Europe. He knows he is tapping into a larger global vilification of Islam — a world vs. Muslim jihadist narrative. This framing is made possible by the internet, which only became widely available in Myanmar in 2011. Wirathu seems to be committed to connecting his regional crusade to a broader global movement. In 2014, he traveled to Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka, to sign a memorandum of understanding between Sri Lanka’s own Islamophobic monk group, Bodu Bala Sena (Army of Buddhist Power), and 969 (the precursor to Ma Ba Tha).
All of these conditions — the colonial history, the emergence of the internet, the global anti-Islamic narrative — provide a ripe ground for violence and persecution. The question that remains: are the crimes against humanity in Myanmar a tragic byproduct of random circumstances unabated by the peaceful doctrines of Buddhism, or is the violence part of some concerted effort by an as-of-yet unnamed actor, Buddhist or otherwise?
Behind the Current Crisis
The current crisis started in 2012. Here’s a brief timeline of events:
May 28, 2012: Twenty-six-year-old Rakhine woman Ma Thida Htwe was gang-raped and murdered by three men the state media identified as “Bengali Muslim” or “Islam Followers.” These men were promptly arrested.
June 3, 2012: A few days later, three hundred Rakhine men attacked a bus carrying Muslims in the town of Taungup, beating ten passengers to death. These Muslims were not Rohingya, but missionaries from northern areas not in Rakhine State.
June 9, 2012: Mobs of Rohingya retaliated by attacking Rakhine properties in Maungdaw, torching houses. Mobs of Rakhine in turn burned Sittwe’s Muslim quarter of Nasi to the ground, chasing tens of thousands of the Rohingya inhabitants out of Rakhine and into camps or exile in Bangladesh (some estimate up to 120,000). These mobs were reportedly bussed in from elsewhere in Rakhine State. They were reported to be drunk and/or high on drugs.
October 2012: A second wave of violence occurred, with apparently organized mob attacks on Muslim communities in nine townships across Rakhine State.
There were close-quarter machete attacks and torching of houses on both sides, but only Rohingya violence was “constructed as terrorism,” and ascribed to “jihad.” In this way, these small, local disturbances—of inter-community slaughter, not uncommon in South Asia—suddenly became part of a global crisis.
Wirathu and other monks from his 969 group organized a complete Muslim boycott, prohibiting Buddhists from having any interaction with Muslims whatsoever. Any Muslim “sympathizer” would also be persecuted, and one Buddhist who continued to do business with Muslims was beaten to death. The monks’ ban of Muslims set the precedent for an Islamophobia that went beyond the Rohingya to include officially recognized citizens of Myanmar.
March 2013: Extreme violence erupted in the central Myanmar town of Meikhtila—where both Muslim and Buddhist communities are largely Bamar—after a Buddhist couple claimed a Muslim jewelry store owner sold them a fake golden hairpin and a brawl started between them. While police watched, Muslim-owned shops were burned and Muslims were attacked; later, a group of Muslims knocked a Buddhist monk off of his bike, beating him as he lay on the ground, and then set his body on fire. This led to outright carnage, with outside groups again bused in to lead a full pogrom against Muslims in the town, resulting in a death toll of forty-three people, mostly killed by sticks and knives, and 830 buildings destroyed. (Again, the men making up the mobs were reported to be drunk and/or high on drugs.)
June 2013: After the report of a rape of a Buddhist woman by Kaman Muslim men in Thandwe, violence erupted again, not just against Kaman but also against Rohingya far away from the incident.
August 2017: Armed Rohingya rebels—of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA)—launched a coordinated attack on thirty border police posts, killing a dozen security forces. This caused the Burmese army to retaliate against the Rohingya throughout Rakhine State with a “scorched earth campaign.”
March 2018: By March, more than 6,000 Rohingya had been killed and more than 655,000 had fled to Bangladesh. Over fifty-five villages had been completely bulldozed, removing traces of buildings, wells, and even vegetation. Here we can see the Myanmar army has learned from the Israeli Army, which many Myanmar officials admire; when asked how to respond to the Rohingya, Dr. Aye Maung, head of Rakhine Nationalities Development Party, said, “We need to be like Israel.”
Today 2018: Amnesty International says those Rohingya who remain in their villages and camps are being systematically starved, to force them to flee the country. It is a situation ripe for genocide.
In all cases of violence against Muslims, reports of police participation in the attacks raised suspicions of a link between the mobs and the government. In Azeem Ibrahim’s 2016 book The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide, Ibrahim says that the violence in Myanmar is closely related to inter-ethnic tension in Sri Lanka and Thailand. The key difference in Myanmar, he writes, is that several prominent Buddhist groups are actively driving the anti-Muslim violence, such as Ma Ba Tha. Then Ibrahim makes the shocking assertion that “there is growing evidence that the Ma Ba Tha Buddhist extremist organization was set up by the military as an alternative power base.” He suggests the group is a “front organization” for the military. He continues, “In effect, the military is directly backing two different groups in contemporary Myanmar,” the USDP (their political party) and “its own organization of Buddhist extremists who both offer the means to channel electoral support to the USDP and to create violence that can later be used to justify a military intervention.”
Ibrahim explores the origin of the connection between the government and the Ma Ba Tha. The organization did not exist before the opening up of the country in 2011. Ibrahim writes that the monks who were arrested during the Saffron Revolution in 2007 were later offered money and state patronage to join the Ma Ba Tha and promote its core message of hatred of all Muslims. These revelatory claims are based on an article by Emanuel Stoakes, “Monks, Powerpoint Presentations and Ethnic Cleanings,” published in Foreign Policy on October 26, 2015.
Based on the evidence presented, it appears that the eruptions of violence against the Rohingya and other Muslim groups across Myanmar were organized and planned.
In his article, Stoakes interviews an anonymous monk who claims that after his release from prison, he had a meeting with three government officials and was offered money to join Ma Ba Tha and preach anti-Muslim rhetoric. He is one of four monk leaders of the Saffron Revolution who claim the government made similar offers to them. Stoakes also produced an investigative documentary with Al Jazeera, “Genocide Agenda,” which aired in October 2015. In the film, one anonymous monk leader explains the situation bluntly: “Gradually, monks from the Saffron Revolution ended up in Ma Ba Tha.” He further clarifies exactly what anyone trying to understand the situation needs to know: “Ma Ba Tha is controlled by the military. When it wants to start a problem at any time, it’s like turning on a tap. They will turn it on or turn it off when they want.”
The Al Jazeera documentary presents other monk leaders of the Saffron Revolution who claim Wirathu works for the government. These monks specify that Wirathu called them at their monasteries after they were released from prison in 2011, and invited them to come see him. When they went, they say he attempted to recruit them to join his anti-Muslim crusade with the offer of an office, complete with an Internet-connected laptop, a telephone, and a payment of $1,000 (in a country with a per capita income of $1,195). The film also shows a secretly taped mobile phone recording of a meeting between government officials and Ma Ba Tha clerics. Then, an anonymous acquaintance of Wirathu claims that Yangon’s Special Branch agency (undercover police) works closely with Wirathu, saying he has seen its members at Wirathu’s monastery in Mandalay. Further evidence is seen in a Powerpoint presentation used by members of the military at a training session in 2012 in the capital city of Naypyidaw, titled “Fear of Losing One’s Race,” a presentation in which the very same anti-Muslim language used by Ma Ba Tha is found, including the conspiracy of a Muslim plot to make Buddhism and Buddhists extinct. Other documents circulated among government officials and obtained by Al Jazeera warn of Muslim plots to rape Buddhist women, start riots, and carry out terrorist acts, including intentions to “cut off the heads of departmental staff members.”
The main point of the documentary is that, despite the apparent movement toward democracy, ethnic violence is engineered by the government in an attempt to keep its grip on power. Based on the evidence presented, it appears that the eruptions of violence against the Rohingya and other Muslim groups across Myanmar were organized and planned, not spontaneous, communal, or unintended consequences of democratization. While the government has dismissed any allegations of its links to the violence as “nonsense,” Stoakes writes, “Evidence obtained by Al Jazeera shows conclusively that the recent surge of anti-Muslim hatred has been anything but random. In fact, it’s the product of a concerted government campaign clearly aimed at promoting instability and undermining the opposition by stirring up the forces of militant nationalism.”
Stoakes responsibly notes that none of this evidence is clear proof of the connection between the government and Ma Ba Tha, but it is nevertheless illuminating. If the government has been corrupting men wearing the robes of a monk, then Buddhism is not being used as a rallying cry of hatred and exclusion, but merely as a veil for it.
In this crisis, the term “Buddhist” is used to designate cultural identity, not a religious belief or practice. Someone who identifies as a Buddhist doesn’t necessarily follow the teachings of the Buddha. Even back in the Buddha’s time, there were “bogus monks” who tried to join the sangha. These were not true monks but merely “men in yellow robes,” and were ejected from sangha gatherings. We should understand the situation in Myanmar as a cultural conflict rather than a religious conflict. As Azeem Ibrahim wrote, it is the exclusive nature of the Theravada tradition that often leads to “violent inter-ethnic tension in Sri Lanka and Thailand, as well as Myanmar,” not Buddhism itself.
The military government of Myanmar is cynically using Buddhism to manipulate people to behave with violence and hatred, rather than compassion and generosity. In my experience, conversations about Myanmar tends to get mired in debate about whether Buddhism is a non-violent religion. Perhaps we should leave Buddhism out of the conversation. In order to focus on addressing the actual situation more effectively and responsibly, it’s important to understand the complex political and ethnic issues more deeply. With a deeper understanding, we might be able to engage with the situation more effectively.“
What happens next? It depends on the international response to fascist tyranny and terror. As written by Vasuki Shastry in The Guardian; “Four weeks after he deposed Myanmar’s democratically elected government, General Min Aung Hlaing must be getting that sinking feeling. His carefully orchestrated retirement plan (he was due to retire in July this year, before leading the coup on 1 February) has faced sustained protests from the street and international condemnation, even from vocal members of the normally staid Association of South-east Asian Nations (Asean). The general has also over-played the army’s tried-and-tested strategy of deploying brutal firepower. The protesters are not backing down, and the time has come for the international community to call the general’s bluff and insist on the restoration of the National League for Democracy’s (NLD) rightful claim to power.
Achieving this will require an unusual degree of global cooperation and consensus, both in short supply at the moment. However, this may prove to be just the kind of global leadership that presidents Biden and Xi may wish to exercise, with the support of regional players Japan, India, Singapore and Indonesia.
During Myanmar’s previous periods of military rule, the country’s neighbours have either looked the other way (Asean, which held on to its stated policy of non-interference until some members decided to break ranks after the 1 February coup) or tacitly supported the generals (China notably) as they stripped a once rich country of mining resources and set back economic and political progress by decades. The army’s architecture of terror was built on the brazen belief that they could carry on their repression because the street could be easily silenced, and the impact of the international community’s outrage and sanctions was largely borne by ordinary people. By turning the clock back during successive decades of repression, the generals succeeded in making Myanmar one of the poorest countries in Asia.
Min Aung Hlaing’s calculus may have been something similar when he assumed charge in early February, but he and his fellow generals have made a major miscalculation. They underestimated the positive impact that a decade of democracy and economic liberalisation has had on the country’s 54 million citizens. Democracy, however flawed and tarnished it may be in Myanmar, has the notion of checks and balances, and the NLD’s historic election victory last year was a rude wake-up call for Min Aung Hlaing and his cohort, fearful that their power and privileges would only reduce over a period of time.
This historical context is useful because restoring democracy in Myanmar is very different from previous (and futile) international efforts to do the same elsewhere. For a start, international sanctions led by the Biden administration, however targeted they might be, will simply not work in the Myanmar context. Reducing the international travel and banking access of a small group of generals will embolden them further to shun the world and take the country back to the dark times of the 1960s and 1970s. There is another approach possible, which will require the US to work closely with China and prominent Asean members. The fact that leading lights of Asean, such as Indonesia and Singapore, have shunned contact with the new regime and are openly calling for dialogue and restoration of civilian rule should be a sign for Min Aung Hlaing that the game is up. Beijing could play a hugely constructive role by recognising that its long-term strategic interests are aligned with having a stable Myanmar on its borders.
How would such an international alliance work in practice? A possible model is the original six-party talks to negotiate and resolve the North Korean nuclear issue. Myanmar does not possess nuclear weapons and is not a geopolitical threat to its neighbours, as Kim Jong-un’s murderous regime surely is. This fact alone should reduce the potential for regional rivalries and jockeying, which have plagued the North Korean process from the start. As strategic competitors, the US and China should regard Myanmar as an early test of their ability to collaborate on areas of common global interest, while competing fiercely on issues such as trade and security. The involvement of other countries in the process would send a powerful signal of resolve by the international community.
Min Aung Hlaing and his minions should face consequences for the coup and the killings of peaceful protesters, a legal process that should be led by the democratic government. At the same time, any international intervention should include a settlement for the return of the estimated 1 million Rohingya refugees and for a fair process to resolve longstanding disputes with other ethnic minorities in the country, many of whom have taken to the jungle in the last few decades.
What about Aung San Suu Kyi herself? It is clear she enjoys broad public support and is regarded by many in Myanmar as the guardian of newfound democracy and economic freedoms. During her last stint as a guest of the army, Daw Suu, as she is known, become an icon of democracy through her stubborn resistance and refusal to bend to the will of the generals. Democracy has exposed a different side to the leader, who is revered at home and reviled in many parts of the world. She has proven to be a calculating politician and has doubled down on a strategy to diminish the suffocating influence of the generals in all aspects of Myanmar society. This is a worthy cause for which she received much initial international support, until she sacrificed Rohingya rights to prove her credentials as a Bamar nationalist. Should the international community come to Myanmar’s rescue, it will be interesting to see which Daw Suu will show up – the nationalist since 2011 or the defender of freedoms from an earlier phase.”
As I wrote in my post of May 24 2021, Tyranny and Terror in Myanmar; The mass democracy movement in Myanmar against the junta’s coup and brutal repression of dissent has been joined by a coalition of minority separatist forces from states which never recognized the claims of Myanmar to dominion over them, and have been in a state of war of liberation and independence since 1949. It has been called a civil war, but it is also a war of survival between indigenous tribal peoples, most especially former British allies the Karen, Shan, Kachin, and Chin, versus Myanmar, successor state to the British Empire unified by the ideology of Buddhist Nationalism and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
The task before us now is to unite the democracy movement with the forces of the indigenous tribes in solidarity to liberate Myanmar from the tyranny and error of its racist and sectarian regime.
Some of my American Buddhist friends object that the Buddhist Nationalists in Burma are not Buddhists and should not be referred to as such, because the First Principle of Buddhism is do not kill.
To this I say; Yes, but it is what they call themselves, and it is a consequence of their unique history of anticolonial struggle, in which the British Empire used division against the people of Burma by hiring Islamic minorities as forces of state repression much as in India under the Raj. I say again; like nationalist tyranny as a transitional stage of revolution, fascist constructions of national identity are caused by the imposed conditions of anticolonial struggle, and this is the primary ground of struggle on which fascism and tyranny must be fought. The Nationalist violence in Myanmar is paralleled in Sri Lanka, which shares with it sectarian narratives of victimization leveraged by a common Buddhist organization which uses these two governments as fronts in a mission of dominion.
Herein I criticize not faith as a direct personal relationship with the Infinite, but organizations of faith as authoritarian structures. Who stands between each of us and the Infinite serves neither.
At the top of pyramids of elite hegemonies of wealth and power are the apex predators; priests and tyrants of faith whose job is to legitimize elites and authorize secondary authorities; to anoint brutal thugs as kings or tyrants to keep the slaves at their work.
To claim that Buddhist nationalists who kill Muslims are not Buddhists is like claiming the Nazis were not Christians despite the crosses they painted on their tanks and the key role Christian Identity ideology played in their subjugation of Germany, and it misses the point; sectarian division and fanaticism is a primary instrument of authoritarian tyranny and elite power. It operates much the same regardless of when or where, in what language or by whom it is perpetrated.
From the Crusades and the Inquisition to the Holocaust and the sectarian wars of today, there is always someone in a gold robe who weaponizes faith in the subjugation of others who are consigned to the hard and dirty work.
To achieve a free society of equals requires a nonsectarian secular state, and the principle of separation of Church and State. In much of the world which does not share Europe’s history and the ideals of the Enlightenment which emerged from it, the idea that the state and organizations of faith should have nothing to do with each other seems inexplicable and dangerous as well as wrong; but it is a principle which has proven itself in America and bears possibilities of healing, transformational change, and hope for many peoples under the hammer of sectarian conflict.
The Hunger Games Salute of the Revolution
Myanmar at standstill as silent strike marks third anniversary of coup
Three years on from Myanmar’s military coup, the junta is struggling to assert control
Insight: Rebel fire and China’s ire: Inside Myanmar’s anti-junta offensive
‘Why should I kill our own?’: Thousands of soldiers surrender as Myanmar junta shaken by rebel advances
Opponents vow ‘beginning of the end’ for Myanmar’s junta as resistance launches nationwide offensive
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/28/asia/myanmar-nationwide-offensive-junta-intl-hnk/index.html
Myanmar civil war (2021–present)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myanmar_civil_war_(2021%E2%80%93present)
Amnesty International Report on Myanmar
Two years after coup, Myanmar faces unimaginable regression, says UN Human Rights Chief
Myanmar Events of 2023 /Human Rights Watch
https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2024/country-chapters/myanmar
Myanmar: Who are the rulers who have executed democracy campaigners?/ BBC
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-55902070
Burma/Myanmar; a reading list
The White Umbrella, Patricia Elliott
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/733955.The_White_Umbrella
The State in Myanmar, Robert H. Taylor
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7535701-the-state-in-myanmar
The Burma Spring: Aung San Suu Kyi and the New Struggle for the Soul of a Nation, Rena Pederson
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22514246-the-burma-spring
Myanmar’s Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and the Making of a Muslim ‘Other’,
Francis Wade
Burma’s Mass Lay Meditation Movement: Buddhism and the Cultural Construction of Power, Ingrid Jordt
Modern Buddhist Conjunctures in Myanmar: Cultural Narratives, Colonial Legacies, and Civil Society, Juliane Schober
The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide, Azeem Ibrahim,
Muhammad Yunus (Foreword)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26717021-the-rohingyas
Burma: Insurgency and the Politics of Ethnicity, Martin Abbott Smith
Rebel Politics: A Political Sociology of Armed Struggle in Myanmar’s Borderlands, David Brenner
Repossessing Shanland: Myanmar, Thailand, and a Nation-State Deferred,
Jane M. Ferguson
Burma: A Nation at the Crossroads, Benedict Rogers
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15835679-burma
Than Shwe: Unmasking Burma’s Tyrant, Benedict Rogers, Václav Havel
(Foreword)
The Burma Road: The Epic Story of the China-Burma-India Theater in World War II, Donovan Webster
Burma: The Forgotten War, Jon Latimer
Forgotten Voices of Burma: The Second World War’s Forgotten Conflict, Julian Thompson
The River of Lost Footsteps: Histories of Burma, Thant Myint-U
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/112293.The_River_of_Lost_Footsteps
The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism, and the Crisis of Democracy in the 21st Century, Thant Myint-U
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44075878-the-hidden-history-of-burma
Until the World Shatters: Truth, Lies, and the Looting of Myanmar, Daniel Combs
Finding George Orwell in Burma, Emma Larkin
Karaoke Fascism: Burma and the Politics of Fear, Monique Skidmore
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/349777.Karaoke_Fascism
Freedom from Fear, Aung San Suu Kyi
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/106320.Freedom_from_Fear
The Perfect Hostage: A Life of Aung San Suu Kyi, Justin Wintle
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/950028.The_Perfect_Hostage
Moon Princess, Sao Sanda
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7141549-moon-princess
Peoples of the Golden Triangle, Paul Lewis, Elaine Lewis
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/107044.Peoples_of_the_Golden_Triangle
The Rebel of Rangoon: A Tale of Defiance and Deliverance in Burma,
Delphine Schrank
Burmese Looking Glass: A Human Rights Adventure and a Jungle Revolution, Edith T. Mirante
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1026514.Burmese_Looking_Glass
Down the Rat Hole: Adventures Underground on the Burma Frontier, Edith T. Mirante
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/389645.Down_the_Rat_Hole
True Love and Bartholomew: Rebels on the Burmese Border, Jonathan Falla
A Savage Dreamland: Journeys in Burma, David Eimer
In Search of Myanmar: Travels through a Changing Land, James Fable,
Chuu Wai Nyein (Illustrator)
Golden Parasol: A Daughter’s Memoir of Burma, Wendy Law-Yone
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17307352-golden-parasol
Irrawaddy Tango, Wendy Law-Yone, Amitav Ghosh (Foreword)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/303976.Irrawaddy_Tango
The Glass Palace, Amitav Ghosh
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/77103.The_Glass_Palace
The Burden of Being Burmese, ko ko thett
The Burma Cookbook: Recipes from the Land of a Million Pagodas,
Robert Carmack, Morrison Polkinghorne
Torch of Liberty 