houses had not been destroyed were unable to return. The local authorities did not give them permission to go back to Buddhist-majority quarters, arguing that their presence might exacerbate tensions between the communities. The house of War War, a forty-two-year-old mother of four, still stood in downtown Meiktila. Her husband commuted every day from the camp outside Meiktila to work, but the chairman of the quarter refused to grant them permission to live in their home again. ‘We have been asking him for months if we can go home, but he says that the Buddhist people there don’t want us to return. He said there had been an incident involving another Muslim family. But we have visited the old quarter and our neighbours have told us that they want us to come back’, she told me.
The chairman was a sixty-year-old man called U Chaw. ‘Muslims cannot come back because this is a Buddhist-majority neighbourhood’, he said. ‘But they will be allowed back when everything has been rebuilt.’ He claimed that he was following both orders from above and the requests of the Buddhist population of his quarter to prevent Muslim families returning home. ‘People are afraid that returning Muslims will do something. It will take a long time to rebuild trust between the two communities’, he said.
When I visited the quarter and talked with its Buddhist residents, their sentiments turned out to be more complicated. One of them was Kyaw Myaing, a middle-aged man who assured me that he did not blame their Muslim neighbours for the violence, and claimed that it was the local authorities who did not wish to see the Muslims returning. But, like many of his neighbours, he was not pressing the issue, and he thought that ‘there might be trouble’ if Muslims returned to the quarter. Talking with him and other neighbours, I came to the view that they did not harbour any hatred towards the Muslims with whom they had lived in close proximity for many years, but were afraid of a repetition of the riots – and the government and local authorities were not doing anything to dispel such fears. Meanwhile, some people had given up and left. Among them was Mo Hnin, the woman who I had interviewed the previous year. When I tried to find her, the leader of the camp told me that she had left the country and was living in Qatar, working in a textile factory. ‘She couldn’t stand the sadness of living here and had to move away. She now sends money home to her family’, he explained.
Most of the displaced people have returned home over the years. The communities have gradually come to live together again, thanks to the initiatives of local civil society organizations working on interfaith dialogue.14 As in Arakan, Buddhists and Muslims had lived side by side and interacted for generations; but, unlike in Arakan, after the violence the authorities had not kept the communities apart.
Muslims in Burma have not only been demonized by the 969 Movement, but also actively persecuted by the authorities. They have been falsely portrayed by the Burmese government as a potential terrorist threat since the US Bush administration launched its ‘war on terror’ after 9/11, in what was probably a desperate attempt to curry international favour at a time when the Western powers were isolating the military regime. During the Thein Sein administration, that insidious association between Islam and terrorism came back with a vengeance. In May 2015, the police arrested twenty Muslims who were going to attend a wedding in Taungyyi, in southern Shan State. They were eventually sentenced to several years in jail on terrorism charges, including a seven-year term for a fifteen-year-old boy. No evidence was produced by the prosecution at the trial.15
That same year, with the journalist Veronica Pedrosa, I investigated a similar case in Mandalay.16 At least a dozen people had been accused of belonging to a hitherto unknown organization called ‘Myanmar Muslim Army’. There was a powerful reason why nobody had heard of such a group: it did not exist. One of the defendants was Soe Moe Aung, a twenty-four-year-old man. He was arrested in November 2014 and held incommunicado, and without access to a lawyer, for ten days during which, according to his mother and his lawyer, he was tortured to extract a confession that was used in the subsequent trial. ‘They accuse him of undergoing training in a camp, but I don’t think that’s possible’, her mother said in an interview in Mandalay. ‘He’s sick – he suffers from gout – so how could he have received any training?’ While investigating the case, we were able to obtain the authorization for the one of the arrests signed by the minister of home affairs, indicating that the case was, at the very least, given the green light from the highest authority. ‘That’s a big burden for the accused, because the court is afraid of not following orders from the minister himself’, Aung Naing Soe, the lawyer of another accused, told me.
The lawyer of Soe Moe Aung and four other people accused of belonging to the ‘Myanmar Muslim Army’ was a Muslim woman named Nandar Myint Thein who had received threats for taking up the case. She assured me that no evidence beyond the confessions was ever submitted during the trial. ‘When I asked the prosecution’s witnesses [all of them members of the police] for evidence about the Myanmar Muslim Army, they answered that they couldn’t speak about it before the court, that this information came from above’, she said. She and Aung Naing Soe, lawyer of others accused of belonging to the same ghost organization, said that the accusation alleged that the evidence for the defendants’ involvement with the ‘Myanmar Muslim Army’, or even proof of the group’s very existence, was withheld on the basis that revealing it in court would jeopardize ‘national security’, making any defence virtually impossible.
We managed to talk on the phone with Zaw Htay, the director of the president’s office, and he echoed this argument. ‘The Home Affairs Ministry has all the evidence on these activities, but we can’t make it public because this is a national security issue’, he told us. To the question of how the defendants would be able have a fair trial when the evidence against them was not produced, he simply replied, ‘They have the right to appeal in upper courts.’ He justified the arrests by saying, ‘There are many activities outside the country and they want to promote their terrorist attacks with some people inside the country, so right now we are doing a pre-emptive strike to protect ourselves against any possible attack.’ The talk about a ‘pre-emptive strike’ had echoes of the rhetoric used by the US government in its war on terror, like Zaw Htay’s assertion that ‘we have to balance our security with the defence of our freedoms’. Eventually, the twelve accused were sentenced to seven years in jail for belonging to an armed group whose existence was never proved.17
Meanwhile, Wirathu was acquiring international fame. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine under the headline ‘The Face of Buddhist Terror’.18 The cover provoked the fury of Buddhists in Burma, with demonstrations against the magazine, and even managed to offend some of Wirathu’s most vocal detractors, including the former monk Ashin Gambira. A leader of what was internationally known as the ‘Saffron revolution’ in 2007, Gambira did not defend Wirathu, but found it insulting to find the words ‘terror’ and ‘Buddhism’ in the same sentence.19 The president defended both Buddhism and the controversial monk. After describing Wirathu as a ‘son of Buddha’ and a ‘noble man’ committed to peace in a post in his Facebook page, he said, ‘The article in Time magazine can cause misunderstanding about the Buddhist religion, which has existed for millennia and is followed by the majority of Burmese citizens.’20 As was already happening in relation to the conflict in Arakan State, domestic and international perceptions about the country and its intercommunal tensions were steadily diverging, leading to a belated discovery abroad that followers of Buddhism – widely seen in the West as a peaceful faith – were also capable of committing violence in the name of their religion. Within Burma itself, a growing siege mentality among Buddhists, who began to feel that foreigners did not understand the country’s culture and challenges, was slowly setting in. This attitude would grow in the following years, helping to entrench a xenophobic variety of nationalism increasingly prevalent in Burma.
It was unclear to what extent the ethno-nationalist monks had been directly involved in the anti-Muslim pogroms. Surely monks like Wirathu had contributed to the creation of a climate of intercommunal tension, but they had been careful to distance themselves from the violence. Wirathu invariably placed the blame on the Muslims themselves, refusing to acknowledge that his sermons had stoked the flames of anti-Muslim hatred, and
