in October, they would say that Kaman had the right to stay in Arakan, but that many of them were ‘fake Kaman’, and in fact ‘illegal Bengali immigrants’ who had somehow managed to bribe officers to obtain documents. It seemed that the circle of the ‘undesirable’ population had been widened from a specific ethnic group to include all members of the Muslim religion. And that circle would be widened even further in the coming months, extending beyond the mountains that mark the border between Arakan and the rest of the country.
‘We Will Build a Fence With Our Bones if Necessary’
During late 2012 and early 2013, a seemingly innocuous symbol began to spread in cities and villages throughout Burma. Thousands of stickers appeared in shops, street stalls and taxis in cities and villages showing the multi-coloured Buddhist flag in the background, the wheel of Dhamma at the centre, the pillars of Asoka – an Indian king who spread Buddhism throughout the Indian subcontinent in the third century BC – with three lions at the top, and 969 in Burmese numerals. This number stood for the attributes of the three jewels of Buddhism: Buddha, the Dhamma (his teachings) and the Sangha (the monastic community). The stickers were used to signal that the owners of the business were Buddhists, but the underlying message, which everybody implicitly understood, was to make clear that they were not Muslims. The stickers were part of what came to be known as the ‘969 Movement’, a somewhat loose association of Buddhist monks and lay people devoted to protecting their religion against the purported threat of Islam.
The logo was launched by some monks on 30 October 2012, on the full-moon day of Thadingyut, one of the main festivals of the Buddhist calendar, in Moulmein, the capital of Mon State, in the east of the country. A few months later, I interviewed its designer and the secretary of the organization, Ashin Sada Ma, the abbot of Mya Sadi monastery. A soft-spoken man in his late thirties, he claimed that the campaign was intended to educate the youth about the value of their Buddhist heritage: ‘In the modern age, the young people don’t know the jewels of Buddhism; this logo is designed to remind them.’ He made an effort during our interview to present the movement in the most positive light and dissociate it from any anti-Muslim message. He denied that the recent conflict in Arakan had anything to do with the decision to launch the campaign, but it was evident that the issue worried him.
At one point he argued that the ‘Bengalis’ were fuelling conflict by ‘migrating’ to Burma. ‘If they come, they can easily influence our country. They are trying to improve their lives in our country and our lands. So this symbol and campaign is intended to defend ourselves. I fear that some Bengali Muslims are terrorists and have a mission to Islamise our country’, he said. ‘Only small parts of Asia are Buddhist now; in the past Indonesia, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and many other places, including Turkey and Iraq, were Buddhist countries, but now they are lost’, he added, showing me a map of Asia that I had seen in one of the corridors of the monastery and would see again in many places, with the majority religion in each country. ‘We will build a fence with our bones if necessary’, was its slogan.
Ashin Sada Ma and a few other monks were the prime movers and organizers of the 969 Movement, but its most famous and vociferous representative was Ashin Wirathu, the abbot of the sprawling Ma Soe Yein monastery in Mandalay, the country’s second-biggest city. Wirathu had been arrested in 2003 for inciting anti-Muslim riots in his hometown, Kyaukse, which had left eleven dead and fourteen injured.1 He had been sentenced to twenty-five years in jail, but was released in early 2012 as part of a series of amnesties ordered by President Thein Sein to boost his reformist credentials. Wirathu visited Maungdaw, in northern Arakan, after the riots in June.2 Unsurprisingly, he focused solely on the violence committed by the Rohingya, placing all the blame on the ‘Bengalis’. When he returned to Mandalay, he organized a three-day-long march in Mandalay supporting the president’s proposal to expel the Rohingya from the country.3 The protests went unhindered by the authorities, while that very same month the government brought charges against the organizers of a march in Rangoon calling for peace in Kachin State.4 Wirathu and the 969 Movement were also instrumental in organizing a series of protests in various Burmese cities against the government’s decision to allow the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to open an office in the country. Those protests were successful, and Thein Sein announced in October 2012 that he would revoke the decision.5
The government was highly selective as to which popular demands it would meet and which it would suppress. In this way, it was contributing to the shaping of what was acceptable and what was not when it came to participatory politics in the country, and at the same time could shield itself behind a nebulous idea of ‘popular will’ to deflect responsibility for discrimination against the Rohingya and other Muslims. This emboldened Wirathu and the 969 Movement to carry their message throughout Burma, which was directed not only against the Rohingya, but against Muslims in general. Apart from the increasingly ubiquitous stickers designed by Ashin Sadama, monks associated with the movement toured the country giving sermons about the need to protect Buddhism from the Muslim threat, and VCDs with those sermons, often accompanied by gruesome images of brutal crimes purportedly committed by Muslims, were made widely available in markets throughout the country.
The rhetoric of Wirathu was particularly virulent. In April 2013, I went with two other colleagues to interview him in his monastery. Sitting beneath several huge portraits of himself, he spoke with a calm demeanour and a boyish, expressionless face that sometimes showed an elusive smile, or even a grin of pain when explaining the ‘Muslim conspiracy’ that he claimed was threatening to engulf Burma. A man of contradictions – there was a portrait of Aung San Suu Kyi behind him, but he accused her and her party of being controlled by Muslims and supported Thein Sein – he seemed consistent only in his loathing of Islam. At one point he claimed that all rapes in the country were committed by Muslims, a ludicrous accusation for which he only referenced vague reports he assured us he had in his possession.
‘If Burmese Buddhists do not take action, by 2100 the whole country will resemble the Mayu region of Arakan State’, he explained, referring to northern Arakan. His solution was a simple formula: ‘Buddhists can talk with Muslims, but not marry them; there can be friendship between them, but not trade.’ In this formulation, Wirathu condensed how he and other 969 monks portrayed the alleged Muslim threat as that of a monstrous horde bent on economic and demographic domination. What motivated Wirathu to get involved in his personal anti-Muslim crusade was something of a mystery, as he had given conflicting accounts to different interviewers. But, sincere or not, the explanation that he gave us was revealing of his ideology and that of the 969 Movement. He claimed that two decades before, a Muslim who had converted to Buddhism had given him a ‘secret message’ circulated among Burmese Muslims with the plans to Islamise the country: the alleged strategy was to take over the economy in order to lull as many poor Buddhist girls as possible into marrying Muslim men and converting them, and thus slowly to make Burma an Islamic country.
The origins of both 969 and Wirathu’s personal crusade, which seemed to have the blessing of the military regime, can probably be traced back to the early 1990s. According to an investigation by the British journalist Andrew Marshall, the movement was inspired by Kyaw Lwin, a former monk and government official who died in 2001.6 In 1991, the military junta created the Department for the Promotion and Propagation of the Sasana (‘religion’ in Pali) (DPPS), under the Ministry of Religion, and appointed Kyaw Lwin as its head. One year later, the DPPS published Kyaw Lwin’s book, How to Live as a Good Buddhist. The book was republished in 2000 under the title The Best Buddhist, with a cover showing an early version of the 969 logo. Kyaw Lwin, who had close relations with the military junta, including its highest authority, Senior General Than Shwe, met Wirathu and other future 969 leaders, and stayed in touch with them over the years. It was after his death that Wirathu started the anti-Muslim preaching that would send him to jail. But incarceration did not deter him. A few months later, I would meet a former political prisoner
