former political prisoner, who at that time was working as a teacher for Burmese migrant workers and refugees in Mae Sot (Thailand), Wirathu had access to materials that other prisoners could not possess, such a mobile phones and books, enjoyed a degree of freedom of movement between the parts of the jail, and continued preaching in jail, often to hardened criminals.
It is unclear whether the 969 monks and Wirathu were supported by the military, but there are strong suspicions that this was the case. In any case, most of the extremist monks seemed to be true believers in their cause, rather than cynical opportunists. And the phenomenon of Buddhist monks engaging in nationalist politics, stoking anti-Muslim or xenophobic sentiments, was not new in Burma.
Not all Buddhist monks adhered to the principles of the 969 Movement. Many stayed away from politics, and there was a small minority of monks who vocally opposed 969; but they seemed to have less means to voice their message of tolerance. One of them was Ashin Pum Na Wontha, the fifty-six-year-old abbot of a monastery in Rangoon with a history of political activism dating back to 1988. He was a member of the Peace Cultivation Network, an organization established to promote understanding between different faiths. In an interview in his monastery, he told me that Ashin Wirathu was merely a puppet ‘motivated by his vanity and thirst for fame.’ He was convinced that Wirathu and the 969 Movement received financial support from the ‘cronies’, a group of businessmen who had gotten wealthy during the military dictatorship through their connection with the generals. According to him, some Muslim businessmen had huge assets, and the ‘cronies’ were trying to get their hands on them. Those claims were impossible to verify, but it appeared evident that wealthy people were donating to the 969’s propaganda juggernaut. With the political opening and the increasing availability of mobile phones and access to the internet, the message of 969 was spreading dangerously fast and wide. Moreover, the recent violence in Arakan, and the way it had been framed by the local media, provided the movement with plausibility in the eyes of many Burmese Buddhists.
Historically, there had been five groups of Muslims in Burma: the Rohingya, the Kaman, the Panthay (Chinese Muslims who mostly settled in Shan State), Muslim immigrants from the Indian subcontinent during the colonial period, and less numerous Burman Muslims. The overwhelming majority of all of these groups are Sunni, with only a tiny proportion of Shia Muslims in central Burma. The largest group is the Rohingya, who – as a consequence of the apartheid regime imposed on them by the state since the late 1970s – are also the least integrated into Burmese socioeconomic life. Muslims elsewhere in the country are comparatively well integrated, but they have also suffered discrimination. Many of the descendants of Indian migrants have kept their distinctive culture, dress and customs, and sometimes even the languages of their ancestors; but it would be extremely difficult to find one who does not speak Burmese, as most have attended public schools and universities.
Many others are of mixed descent, whether Indo-Burman, Indo-Karen or Indo-Shan; and others still are simply Burman, or Shan, or belong to other groups. These Muslims are basically indistinguishable from the rest of the Burmese, their religion being their only distinguishing characteristic. But ethnicity is so intertwined with religion in Burma that, in informal conversations, the ‘Muslims’ are often counterposed to ‘Burmese’ or ‘Burmans’ – a conflation of religious and ethnic/national categories reflected in the old adage that ‘to be Burmese is to be Buddhist’.
This conflation also works at the official level. The Citizen Scrutiny Card that all Burmese citizens have to carry includes both their ethnicity and their religion. Thus, Burma’s state polices contribute to fixing the identities of its citizens; though all of them are supposed to have the same rights,7 the cards make it easier to discriminate based on ethnicity or religion. Moreover, the authorities often arbitrarily ascribe ethnicity on the basis of religion. The cards were originally issued by the Ministry of Migration and Population (later renamed as Ministry of Labour, Immigration and Population by the Suu Kyi administration), whose motto is: ‘A race does not face extinction by being swallowed into the earth, but from being swallowed up by another race.’ Muslims, regardless of their ethnicity, are routinely classified as ‘Indians’, ‘Pakistanis’ or ‘Bengalis’, depending on the whim of the official who issues their card. Theirs is always defined as a foreign ancestry. In some cases, the process of classification may reach absurd extremes. In one example reported by the Burmese scholar Sai Latt, two different siblings were classified as ‘India + Burmese + Islam’ and ‘Pakistan + Shan + Burmese + Islam’ respectively, even though they shared the same parents, neither of whom had any connection with India or Pakistan.8
The intercommunal tensions between Muslims and Buddhists are very different in central Burma from those in Arakan. In the two cases, religion and ethnicity play a different role. Yet the conflicts have fed each other over the years. The 2012 riots in Arakan reverberated throughout Burma, contributing to rising hostility against Muslims elsewhere. Conversely, the anti-Muslim wave largely provoked by the 969 Movement contributed to a hardening of anti-Rohingya sentiment in Arakan. The living conditions of Muslims are also generally different. In Arakan, most of the Muslim population is rural, and largely concentrated in the north. There have been urban Muslims in places like Sittwe, and even a Rohingya middle class of traders and merchants; but the overwhelming majority of Rohingya are extremely impoverished farmers. Both Rakhine and Rohingya claim the same territory as their ancestral land, based on divergent historical narratives. In central and upper Burma, most of the Muslim population live in cities like Rangoon and Mandalay. They may concentrate in certain neighbourhoods in the cities, but they are scattered throughout the country.
Most Muslims in central and upper Burma are far from wealthy, but they are overrepresented in trade, as a consequence of strong networks and having inherited a somewhat advantageous – though later increasingly precarious – position from the colonial period, while Buddhists are mostly impoverished farmers. Real economic domination in the country is exercised by the generals, Chinese companies and businessmen, and the billionaire ‘cronies’; but the country’s wealthiest people are out of sight of the general population. Muslim traders, usually owners of shops of small and middle size, are more visible to the general Burmese population than the super-rich businessmen, and their marginally better economic position has sometimes caused resentment among the Buddhist population. Chinese traders and small businessmen have flooded several cities in upper Burma in recent decades, most conspicuously in Mandalay, where they exercise huge control over the economy that is resented by many of its Burmese citizens.9 But there has not recently been any sustained anti-Chinese campaign comparable to the 969 Movement against Muslims. Due to the strong links that the military government has maintained with China and Chinese corporations, it has been in its best interests to avoid anti-Chinese sentiment from exploding into violence. In short, the fact that Muslims have a certain degree of control over small trade in towns and cities may make the notion of a Muslim economic threat peddled by the 969 Movement plausible to many Buddhists in central Burma.
In the climate of intercommunal distrust fostered by the 969 Movement, violence did not take long to explode. The first place to fall was Meiktila, a commercial town with a population of around 100,000 in Irrawaddy Division, 140 kilometres south of Mandalay. Wirathu had mentioned Meiktila in one of his sermons, which was uploaded to YouTube during the violence, saying that the NLD office in town was controlled by Muslims – though it is unclear when and where he gave the sermon, and how many people in the town had heard it.10 In the weeks before the violence, a pamphlet was distributed around the town in the name of ‘Buddhists who feel helpless’. The pamphlet claimed that strange ‘kalars’ (a derogatory term used to refer to people of South Asian origin) had been seen around town and that ‘using money Saudi allocated to mosques, they have been buying land, farm and houses both in and out of the town with incredible amount of money under the Burmese names’. These mysterious Muslims were allegedly bribing officials to gain control over the city and marry Buddhist women.11 Such accusations may have had a ring of truth for many because the retail trade in Meiktila was mostly in the hands of Muslims.
The trigger for the violence took place in one of those Muslim-owned shops. Everything started with the breaking
