As I was finishing this book, religiously motivated violence against Muslims broke out in Burma. (I will follow Antony Copley in using the geographic designation “Burma,” because the new name “Myanmar,” which historically just covered that part of the country where most of the Buddhists live, is excessively nationalistic as it excludes 32 percent of population.) In his incendiary sermons Ashin Wirathu, abbot of the 2,500-strong Ma Soeyein Monastery, has called for a boycott of Muslim businesses, a ban on interfaith marriages to preserve “racial purity,” and the prosecution of forced conversions to Islam. (A non-Buddhist, however, would have to convert to Buddhism to marry a Buddhist.) In 2002 Hindu nationalists in Gujarat marked Hindu homes with Hindutva flags so that sword-carrying fanatics could find Muslims, and sword-carrying Burmese Buddhists have now done the same by tagging co-religionist homes with the national flag so as to preserve them from attack. In 2002, even more parallel to Gujarat time-wise, the Burmese government destroyed forty mosques in Arakan State; and in some cases, just as with the new Rāma temple in Ayodhya, new Buddhist monasteries or pagodas have been built in their place.
The Venerable Wirathu, who spent eight years in prison (2002–2010) for his anti-Muslim campaign, has been called a “bald Bin Laden,” and he admitted that he called himself that “as a joke.”[1] Wirathu accuses Muslims of being “crude and savage” and having raped Buddhist women and girls. In an interview with Tin Aung Kyaw, Wirathu declared: “Islam is a dangerous and fearful poison that is severe enough to eradicate all civilization. . . . Muslims are like the African carp. They breed quickly and they are very violent and they eat their own kind.”[2] In a perverse application of Buddhist ethics to Muslims, he stated: “You can be full of kindness and love, but you cannot sleep next to a mad dog.”[3] Incredibly, Wirathu has a strong following among students and professors at the nation’s Buddhist universities. His videos are wildly popular, and he reaches 60,000 children with religious lessons that teach Buddhist chauvinism and hate for Muslims.
Wirathu’s sermons have inspired armed Buddhists to kill Muslims and burn their businesses and mosques. Pogroms against Muslims have been happening consistently since 2001, but earlier the army launched its own attack on Muslims in 1978, and, according to the Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence, “scores of people were killed, raped, looted, and arrested.”[4] The targets then and now are Muslims in Arakan State, adjacent to Muslim Bangladesh, where 1.1 million Rohingya Muslims live. The Burmese government has denied citizenship to those Muslims who are unable to offer the nearly impossible proof that their ancestors were in the country before 1823. On November 21, 2003 the United Nations passed a resolution urging the government to grant the Rohingyas full citizenship.
Government repression and denial of basic rights is outright brutal: the Rohingya are not allowed to travel or to marry, and incredibly enough, not permitted to give birth to children. Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine state used to have 75,000 Muslims, and now their numbers are fewer than 5,000, and the last Muslim enclave Aung Mingalar is under attack. Matthew Smith of Human Rights Watch has reported that “not only did they fail to intervene, but [Burmese] government security forces and authorities destroyed mosques, effectively blocked humanitarian aid to [Muslim] Rohingya populations and . . . acted alongside [Buddhist] Arakanese to forcibly displace Muslims.”[5]
The current round of sectarian violence started when a Buddhist mob killed ten Muslims to avenge the alleged rape and death of a Buddhist woman by a Muslim. (Some Hindu nationalists also spread fear by claiming that all Muslim males are rapists.) Anti-Muslim attacks have now claimed the lives of at least 1,000 (the government says only 192) and have left 140,000 Muslims homeless. In the town of Meiktila a Thai newspaper reports: “For three days, security forces let roaming gangs of armed Buddhists burn down nearly 1,000 buildings, including mosques, Muslim-owned businesses and houses.”[6] Muslim school children were included in the over 100 killed, and Kate Linthicum reported that Muslims “were forced to eat pork and to pray Buddhist-style during the siege.”[7] The 1,000 Muslims who still remain in Meiktila have taken refuge on an Islamic university campus surrounded by razor wire. Rather than condemning the attack Wirathu said that it was a “show of strength” of his anti-Muslim movement: “If we are weak,” he said, “our land will become Muslim.”[8] Even though the government issued a report condemning “ethnic hatred” against Muslims and promulgating a “zero tolerance” policy against violence, Burmese president Thein Sein has praised Wirathu as “a son of Lord Buddha.”[9]
The parallels between religious violence in Sri Lanka and Burma are instructive and worrisome. Just as in Sri Lanka, the Burmese monarchy traced its ancestry back to a legendary Hindu King Abhiraja, a prince of the future Buddha’s Sakya clan, who traveled from Northeast India and settled in the Irrawaddy River valley. Burmese legends explain that then Prince Abhiraja chose to leave India because the King of Kosala went to war and defeated Abhiraja’s Panchalas over a disputed marriage. Historian Thant Myint-U writes that Abhiraja’s “elder son . . . ventured south and founded his own kingdom of Arakan. The younger son succeeded his father and was followed by a dynasty of thirty-one kings.”[10] Until the British came to Burma in the eighteenth century, Muslims and Buddhists, the former having arrived as early as the ninth century, lived in relative peace. In southern Burma Muslims at one time outnumbered Buddhists, and, over the centuries, unlike recent times, there were only occasional acts of persecution and killing of Muslims.
Ancient Burmese chronicles tell the story of the Buddha and some of his disciples, using the same miraculous means by which he reconnoitered Sri Lanka, flew over Burma. During the aerial surveillance, they looked down at ancient Pegu on the Gulf of Martaban, and the Buddha predicted that Buddhism would flourish in this place. There is also a story about two Burmese merchants, Tapussa and Ballika, who, while traveling in North India, claimed to have met the Buddha and received from him eight hairs from his head. These sacred relics now reside in the Shwedagon Pagoda, the tallest in the world and now covered with sixty tons of gold, some of which was brought back from military expeditions to Thailand. Additional gold came from Burmese kings and queens, who would donate their weight in gold to the pagoda.
Legend becomes history in the Buddhist kingdom of Prome, whose kings claimed to have descended from Abhiraja and his roots back to pre-Buddhist India. During the fourth century CE the Buddhism of these kings of Prome and surrounding city states came from South India, just as it did for Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Indonesia. One of many Chinese travelers, who gave us the first outside reports of early Buddhism, described the Buddhists in Prome as follows: “It is their custom to love life and hate killing. . . .They do not wear silk because, they say, it comes from silkworms and involves injury to life.”[11] Although Pāli scriptures never refer to the Buddha as divine, omniscient, or coming in a future form, the Buddhist kings of this period promote the idea that, if they attained sufficient merit, they would become an omniscient Buddha. At the royal inaugurations of the Pagan kings, they would be sitting between statues of Sakka (Hindu Indra) and Brahmā, and they would, according to Aung-Thwin, become “the [future] Buddha Metteyya (Maitreya in Sanskrit).” Not only were the kings of Prome blessed by Hindu deities, they also took Hindu names such as Vikram and Varman; and they guided their city state through a brilliant and prosperous millennium until the Pagan king Aniruddha came down from the north and conquered them in the ninth century.
In the seventh century CE the Buddhism that came to Burma through North India and Tibet was a tantric sect known as Ari Buddhism, which mixed animism, serpent (nāga) worship, and Hinduism. Temples were dedicated to the great Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara, the goddess Tārā (a Tibetan adaptation of the Hindu goddess Pārvatī), the five Dhyāni Buddhas, and the wrathful deity Hayagrīva. The palace of Pagan King Kalancacsā (1084–1111) had four towers and an additional one in the center, which most likely represents the five Dhyāni Buddhas: Vairocana in the center, Amitābha in the west, Akṣobhya in the east, Amoghasiddha in the north, and Ratnasaṃbhava in the south.
Syncretism with Hinduism was even more extensive than in Tibet. Aung Thwin states that Avalokiteśvara “came even to resemble Brahmā,” and drawing on the great Buddhist scholar Edward Conze, he notes that he “became a magician, and adopted many of Śiva’s characteristics.”[12] Black and white magic was used, as William Koeng relates, by Burmese court wizards “for neutralizing or overcoming a rival, or even the superior power of the king.”[13] As far as my sources indicate, it was never to the extent that specific tantric rituals were used in Tibet, where it can arguably be termed “war” magic. As the influence of the Theravāda school increased, the tantric lamas were looked upon with more disfavor, primarily because they ate beef and drank alcohol. More conservative Buddhists have always been suspicious of the tantrics’ claim that their techniques made them so spiritually pure that they could eat or do all forbidden things.
The Pagan King Aniruddha (1044–1078) was an Ari Buddhist, but one of his generals was a Muslim named Byatta. Byatta’s two sons were elevated as nats, deities whom Aniruddha included in Buddhist worship even after he converted to the more “orthodox” Theravāda school. To this student of Buddhism the most amazing fact about this celestial hierarchy is that Māra, the great tempter of Sakyamuni during his Enlightenment, is a deity higher than the nats. As Michael Aung-Thwin explains: “[Māra’s] past merits were so good that even all his subsequent evil deeds could not bring him lower.”[14] In Hindu mythology the asuras, incorrectly translated as “demons” only because they are always in conflict with devas, also gain great merit by practicing yogic austerities, and some of them—for example, Bali and Rāvaṇa—rule as righteous kings.
The Hindu deities Viṣṇu and Śiva were evident in Burma as early as the first century CE, and Hindu priests were invited to instruct in Sanskrit and perform rituals for royalty but not for the laity. As a gesture to his resident Hindus, King Aniruddha made the warrior god Indra the Lord of the thirty-three nats. (In neighboring Thailand the Hindu creator god Brahmā sits at the top of every Buddhist house or business shrine.) A Tamil merchant was allowed to build, just south of the capital city of Pagan, a temple to Viṣṇu with the name Nānādēsi Viṇṇagar Ālvār, which means “Viṣṇu temple of those coming from various countries.”[15] Aniruddha’s name has the word deva (god) added at the end, and “Aniruddha” is Sanskrit for “uncontrolled.” There is a connection to Aniruddha, the grandson of Kṛṣṇa.
During the Pagan period, the Burmese language evolved out of Pyu, a tongue closely related to Brāhmī, an Indic language found, for example, on the rock edicts of Indian Buddhist Emperor Aśoka. A growing scholarly consensus is that the script was originally derived from the yet undeciphered language of the Indus Valley civilization. Scholars are now divided, however, about whether the Burmese script is derived from Pyu or Mon, a language that dominated the culture and literature of pre-twelfth century Pagan. At its zenith (ca. 1200 CE) the Pagan Empire had a population of upwards of 2.5 million with those in the capital numbering as many as 200,000 people attending 10,000 Buddhist temples and pagodas.
Under Aniruddha’s wise rule, Burma flourished culturally, administratively, and agriculturally, but his generous patronage of Buddhism led to more and more tax exempt land being owned by the Saṅgha. Burmese kings earned great merit by supporting temple and pagoda building (2,500 of Aniruddha’s pagodas still remain), and this great store of merit could be bestowed—Bodhisattva-like—on the general population. However, scholars argue that the main reason for the decline of Burmese dynasties through the centuries was this loss of tax revenue. It is estimated that Pagan could once rely on 600,000 cultivated acres, but that area had declined to 250,000 acres of taxable land during the late years of the empire. During Aniruddha’s reign, his armies conquered an area that is almost as large as Burma’s current boundaries. Some of his principal rivals were the Khmer kings of Anghor, whom he fought for territorial reasons and not because they were Hindus. The Khmers had a formidable navy, which sailed down the Mekong River to engage the Hindu kingdom of Champa in present day Vietnam. Their ships sailed as far as South India, and their navy landed troops on the southeast coast of Burma, where Aniruddha’s forces defeated them.
In contrast to Tibet, where religion and state were fused in the rule of high lamas (sometimes with negative consequences), Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Burma never had priest-kings, although the elevation of Burmese kings to level of nats clearly indicated their semi-divinity. Southeast Asian Buddhist kings did wield much power as protectors of the Buddhist faith and the Saṅgha. Burmese kings would occasionally “purify” the Saṅgha, which was usually justified on the basis of monastic corruption and immorality, which led to the defrocking of monks; but also indirectly done to check monastic power by expropriating Buddhist property. The Burmese kings also had the prerogative of “purifying” scripture, and Aniruddha undertook a “righteous conquest” of Lower Burma because, as Aung Thwin reports, “he was refused the ‘correct version of the [Pāli canon]’ that he wanted.”[16] Aung-Thwin continues: “[Aniruddha’s] unsuccessful attack on the [northern] Nanchao area was ‘to seek the [Buddha’s] holy tooth,’ rather than to secure his strategic military bases.”[17] His destruction of the ancient capital Śrī Kṣetra was also done to obtain a Buddhist relic. In contrast to the non-religious conflict with other countries, Aniruddha, ironically, went to war against his fellow Buddhists for religious reasons.
During the early medieval period in Burma, Buddhism was primarily, just as it was in eighth- and ninth-century Tibet, the religion of the ruling class. Although personally favoring Theravādin Buddhism, the Pagan King Kalancacsā tolerated both Hindus and Muslims, and he also brought together all of Burma’s principal ethnic cultures. Under Kalancacsā’s patronage, the minority Mon scholars and artisans became dominant, and their language was adopted by the court. As Aung Thwin states: “Art and architecture, religion, language and literature, ethnic plurality—in effect the whole society during Kalancacsā’s reign, reflected assimilation and syncretism.”[18] This is the premodern “social solidarity,” which, according to Robert H. Taylor, was dissolved by a modernist and destructive “reified ethnicity” introduced by British colonialism.[19] In the previous chapters we saw that this cultural, ethnic, and religious mutuality, not completely devoid of conflict but nonetheless generally harmonious, was also the case in medieval India and Sri Lanka.
Under the command of the future Chinese emperor Kublai Khan, Mongol armies took advantage of Pagan’s weaknesses, and the empire, already in decline, officially ended on December 17, 1297. During the ensuing 250 years of fragmentation and tension among small principalities, the purely Buddhist nationalist line was interrupted, just as it was with the Tamil kings of Sri Lanka. In the fourteenth century Turkish and Afghan forces from East Bengal (present day Bangladesh) invaded Burma. In 1430 King Naramithla, exiled from the western coastal region of Arakan returned home to Burma, and, with the aid of primarily Afghan soldiers, established a hybrid Buddhist-Islamic dynasty at Mrauk-U. Mrauk-U grew to become a large cosmopolitan trading city of 160,000. Historian Myint-U lists Mrauk-U’s inhabitants as a “mix of Arakanese, Bengalis, Afghans, Burmese, Dutch, Portuguese, Abyssinians, Persian, even Japanese Christians from Nagasaki.”[20] Succeeding Arkanese kings grew even more powerful as the Bengali Sultanate’s rule waned, and they were the last to fall to the military juggernaut of Buddhist King Bayinnaung (1516–1581). It is significant, as Aung San Suu Kyi reports in her history of her country, that from the fifteenth century onward the Arakanese kings “used Islamic titles, although they and the majority of their subjects remained Buddhist.”[21] Further enriching the religious syncretism of the state is the fact Arakanese marriage customs reflect strong Muslim influence.
Although the Burmese chronicles attempt to trace all royalty back to Pagan and earlier, Bayinnaung’s father was a lowly toddy tree climber. His mother, however, became nursemaid to Prince Tabinshwehti, and a strong bond developed between the young prince and his nursemaid’s son. At the age of fourteen Tabinshwehti became the King of Toungoo and took one of Bayinnaung’s sisters as his queen. Bayinnaung became one of the kingdom’s must successful military officers. In 1539, at the age of twenty-three, he led his troops to a great victory at the Battle of Nuangyo, which gave them control of the Mon city of Pegu. As a reward, Tabinshwehti bestowed upon him the honorific “Bayinnaung,” which means “king’s elder brother.”
The Toungoo dynasty had its capital in Pegu, whose previous inhabitants spoke Mon and had experienced their own golden age of culture, literature, and world trade. Pegu was a thriving port city until its access to the Gulf of Martaban had silted in. After conquering Pegu, Bayinnaung went on to take Martaban, whose prince had Portuguese allies with artillery. Over the next forty years, Bayinnaung would establish the largest empire in Southeast Asian history. Crowned king in Pegu in 1554, Bayinnaung was known as a chakravartin, a Dharma-wheel-turning king, and the Thais, even though Bayinnaung finally defeated them decisively and arrogated himself as Emperor of Siam, still refer to him as the “Conqueror of the Ten Directions.”
The most dramatic incident of anti-Muslim violence was during the reign of the Arakan King Sanda Thudhama (1652–1674), who initially welcomed Mughal Prince Shah Shuja, who was seeking refuge from his brother Aurangzeb. When Emperor Shah Jahan died, Shah Shuja crowned himself emperor. As he moved his army and navy out of Bengal and up the Ganges, where Shah Shuja had been governor, he was defeated by his younger brother Dara Shikoh near the present day Varanasi. As we learned in chapter 2, Dara was much less fortunate against Aurangzeb in battle. Shah Shuja marched all the way to Fatehpur near Agra where Aurangzeb defeated him decisively in January 1659. Shah Shuja fled east to Arakan by a road that still bears his name, but the gold, silver, and jewels carried on Shah Shuja’s camel train were too much of a temptation for the Arkanese. Shah Shuja’s daughter was raped by King Sanda Thudhamma and his three sons were beheaded, but their father was able to escape back to India. The details of this incident demonstrate that the principal motivation here was not religious differences but greed. There was good reason for historians to label Sanda Thudhamma the “pirate king.”
In the middle of the eighteenth century several factions were attempting to take advantage of the weaknesses of Bayinnaung’s waning Toungoo Empire. A rising Vaiṣṇava kingdom in Manipur, intent on enforcing caste rules, raided along the Mu River in the northwest in 1739, and, uncharacteristic for any Hindu army, destroyed pagodas and monasteries. Historian Myint-U describes the attempts at conversion by a Manipuri priest: “In 1743 the famed Manipuri teacher Maha Tharphu arrived in person at Ava, intending to instruct the Burmese king in the ways of the Hindu faith.”[22] In the south the Mons were more successful. They gained strength under the leadership of Bannya Dala, and he brought all the cities of that area, including Pegu and Ava, under his rule. Burmese chiefs in the north were not pleased with this development, and they unified around a charismatic warrior Aung Zeyya from an obscure village sixty miles north of Ava. In 1754 he entered Ava victorious, and by 1759 he, now called Alungpaya (a Burmese name for the future Buddha), had gained control over a reunited Burma second in size only to Bayinnaung’s.
The first British contacts with Burma were made by the East India Company in the seventeenth century; but, after having lost Madras to the French in 1746, they sought to renew trade across the Bay of Bengal. In Burma they also met French resistance, but they held on tenaciously to the island port of Negrais. Because the French had supported Bannya Dala, Alungpaya was more inclined to forge an alliance with the British, so he again attempted to dislodge the French from Syriam. An elite force of ninety-three Burmese commandos was able to break through the defenses. With this loss and even more in India, and then facing defeat in the Seven Years’ War in America and Europe, the French left the British in control of most of Burma and South Asia.
King Bodawpaya, the fourth son of Alungpaya, took a great interest in Buddhism, but, in an unprecedented move, the Saṅgha rejected his claim to be Maitreya, the Buddha of the Future.[23] The king’s support of religion extended to Islam, which he patronized by ordering the translation of the works of Abhisha Husseini, a Sufi missionary from the Indian city of Aurangabad. A considerable number of Muslims had come from India as mercenary musketeers and artillery men. The city of Amarapura had a population of perhaps 9,000 Muslims and they attended forty mosques there. Many of these men married Burmese women, and a British visitor described Muslim women as follows: “Their women of all ranks go unveiled and clothed as scantily as the rest of their countrywomen; they marry for love and women even pray in the same mosques as men.”[24] Muslims were the mayor and governor of the royal city Ava and Pagan respectively. (Arab speaking Jewish traders became so influential that both Rangoon and Panthein had Jewish mayors in the early 1900s.) During most of the nineteenth century, Burma continued a centuries-long tradition of welcoming Muslims and non-Buddhists in their midst, but that would change dramatically as the British tightened their colonial control by bringing in laborers and administrators from India.
It is unlikely that Bodawpaya’s attempts to purify Buddhism, with a focus on the actual words of the Buddha (à la “red letter” editions of the New Testament), was the result of any British or missionary influence. It was Maung Myo, Prince of Mekaya and Bodawpaya’s youngest son, who was the first Burmese royalty to embrace European learning. British linguist Charles Lane and the prince collaborated on the first English-Burmese dictionary. One British author described the prince as a “great metaphysician, theologian, and meddler in ecclesiastical affairs.”[25] Maung Myo was especially interested in European science and this was the beginning of, as Myint-U states, “a long relationship between modern science and Theravāda Buddhism.”[26] In the previous chapter we learned that Sri Lankan Buddhists, adopting a Reverse Orientalism, not only heralded Buddhism as superior because of its Aryan origins, but also supreme because the Buddha’s “radical empiricism,” as I term it, anticipated the modern scientific method. For later Neo-Buddhists or “Protestant” Buddhists it was yet another way to demonstrate the truth of their faith, and a reason to claim that Christians, Tamils, or Muslims had no rights in their countries.
Bodawpaya’s successor King Bagyidaw inherited the largest Burmese empire since Bayinnaung, but it proved to be difficult to hold, especially on the western frontier with British Bengal. Tensions there led to the first Anglo-Burmese War, which resulted in a decisive British victory. The initial phases of the war on eastern border’s difficult terrain went in Bagyidaw’s favor, but a naval assault on Rangoon turned the tide in favor of the British. A most dramatic anti-Christian action occurred under Bagyidaw’s rule. An American Baptist missionary Adoniram Judson was struggling with a very small number of converts (eighteen in twelve years), a process made more difficult because a law that proscribed Burmese from converting from Buddhism. Judson arranged an audience with the king, hoping that he could convince him to change the anti-conversion law. Myint-U describes the unfortunate result of Judson’s overtures: “On his first trip to Amarapura he had taken a beautifully bound and wrapped Bible together with a brief summary of Christianity in Burmese; the king . . . , a somewhat doctrinaire Buddhist, read the first couple of lines of the summary and then tossed it back.”[27] This is the first official anti-Christian action with obvious religious intent that my research in Burmese history has uncovered. Judson had much better luck with the Karens, and he would be pleased to know that there are now one half million Baptists in Burma.
Despite these close intellectual connections to the British, anti-colonial sentiments were growing stronger. Bagyidaw’s successor King Tharawaddy (1837–1846) had two Muslim advisors—Ali Khan and Agha Hussein—and they informed him of the success of the Sikh empire of Ranjit Singh. They also stoked anti-British feelings by telling the king that the British were headed for defeat in Afghanistan. Although as crown prince Tharawaddy had led his troops to defeat in the First Anglo-Burmese War, he was emboldened to break the 1826 Treaty of Yandabo ending that conflict. As Myint-U reports: “In an interview with Muslim traders, Tharawaddy stated his intention to retake Tennasserim [far southeast Burma held by the British] and even make a grab for Calcutta through Arakan [in the southwest].”[28] Returning to the chapter’s focus, it is significant to note that Muslims still occupied a place of trust at the highest levels of Burmese society. Nevertheless, there was a growing Burmese nationalism, which expressed itself in denigrating all outsiders as kalaars, and within a century Indians—both Hindu and Muslim—would be condemned as the unwanted dark-skinned ones.
From 1853 to 1878, King Maung Lwin Mindon successfully modernized Burma, in spite of the fact that the British had taken over the lower half of his country and had backed a failed coup by his two youngest sons in 1866. He was also thwarted by a revolt of the Karens, many of whom had been converted by Christian missionaries and encouraged to assert their independence. The Karens had stories of a great flood and the first woman born from a man’s rib, and they also believed that, as Myint-U states, “messengers from across the seas would one day bring them a ‘lost book.’”[29] With this background missionaries were able to convince the Karens that they were one of the lost tribes of Israel.
The Karen National Union has fought a sixty-year battle against the central government, even refusing to participate in the first election of an independent Burma in 1947. The KNU’s military wing is the Karen National Liberation Army, the nucleus of which included soldiers trained by the British, and it is the largest insurgent army in Burma. The KNLA has waged a war for an independent Karenistan, a conflict that has experienced several cease fires, the most recent in 2012. Significantly, in 1994 Buddhist soldiers in the KNLA left the army in protest because of what they called too much Christian domination. Karen religious nationalism is the reason why the plural “nationalisms” appears in this chapter’s title.
King Mindon was a great supporter of Buddhism, and in 1871 he arranged the Fifth Great Buddhist Synod in Mandalay. The entire Pāli canon was chanted by attending monks over six months, much in the same way as the First Council soon after the Buddha’s death, and the scriptures were meticulously inscribed on 700 marble slabs. Following his predecessors, Mindon continued his religious tolerance, even patronage, of other religions. Min Aung Zaw states that under Mindon “mosques were built and thousands of Muslims served in Burmese infantry and artillery divisions. Mindon even helped build a hostel in Mecca for Burmese Muslims making the pilgrimage, or hajj.”[30] Mindon’s successor King Thibaw (1878–1885) and the last Burmese monarch continued the modernization program, but, primarily because of French expansion in Cambodia and Vietnam, it was inevitable that the British would take all of Burma as a buffer against them. Again the Burmese military was no match for the British, and the Third Anglo-Burmese War lasted only a week. As with most pacification programs, however, the British, even with Indian and Karen troops, experienced Burmese resistance that continued until their independence in 1948.
As we have learned, the Burmese call Indians kalaars, a derogatory term that refers to dark-skinned people from India and Africa. Europeans were sometimes called bayingyi kalaars, and Myint-U explains that “bayingyi was a Burmese corruption of the Arab feringhi or “Frank,”[31] a legacy of Arab dealings with the Crusaders. The British were sometimes called tho-saung kalaars, because tho-saung means “sheep wearing,” and the Burmese elite copied the British by adopting wool clothing instead of the traditional, and of course, cooler cotton dress. The Burmese no longer used the term kalaar for the British after they joined with them to drive the Japanese out of their country. Significantly enough, the kalaar religion was not Christianity or Hinduism, but Islam. Burmese have a saying that when faced with a Muslim Rakhine kalaar and a cobra, you should kill the kalaar first. Long before Venerable Witharu, a song from the 1930s claimed that Indians were “exploiting our economic resources and seizing our women, [and] we are in danger of racial extinction.”[32] Therefore, current anti-Muslim violence has both racial and religious origins and motivations.
Indian immigration reached its peak in 1927, when the British brought 500,000 Indians to Burma. At one time 55 percent of the population of Rangoon was Indian (in 1872 it was 67 percent Burmese), and they worked in the rice fields (greatly expanded) and on the docks. The British believed that the Burmese were even more lazy and shiftless than the Indians, except of course for the Sikhs and the Gurkhas. Michael Charney writes that the Burmese were considered “too backward for equal treatment with the Indians, as well as too lazy to compete with them for manual labor, and too inept to compete commercially with the [24,000] Chinese.”[33] Adding to Burmese resentment were thousands of British-trained bureaucrats, who supplanted the quite efficient national administration that the Burmese kings had set up. (Burmese civil service exams during this time were taken in Hindi.) On May 8, 1930, 5,000 South Indian workers at the docks in Rangoon went on strike, and the British ship owners hired Burmese to replace them. As the Indians came back to work on May 26, fights broke out between them and the Burmese replacements. Over 200 Indians were killed that day in Rangoon, and violent Burmese reaction spread throughout the country.
In 1938 Burmese Buddhists were understandably upset about a book written by a Muslim, which contained libelous statements about Buddhism and its founder. On July 26 thousands of Buddhists attended a meeting at the Shwedagon Pagoda, where they decided to vent their anger in the Surati Bazaar, the center of Rangoon’s Muslim population. A riot broke out and the military intervened. The official death toll was 204 and 1,000 injured. A British judge banned the anti-Buddhist book, but he also proscribed any newspaper from reporting on the event. The stage was set for the development of an ever militant Buddhist nationalism. As historian Myint-U explains: “A powerful ethnic nationalism, based on the idea of a Buddhist and Burmese speaking people, one that saw little need to accommodate minority people, took root. At the centre of this nationalism would be a desire for a new martial spirit.”[34]
During the twentieth century there were non-sectarian and non-violent protests in Burma, most of them led by students and/or monks, and, before the British left, inspired by the Indian National Congress and Gandhi. (In 1992 Thai students, with the support of their Buddhist king, brought down a military dictatorship.) At the beginning of the century it was the Young Men’s Buddhist Association, founded in 1906 and obviously modeled on the YMCA, which initiated the first political reforms in 1915. The YMBA’s goals were modest: they wanted Buddhist holidays to be recognized in British calendars and they wanted more access to education. The latter goal was reached by a student strike in 1920, which led to the establishment of Buddhist schools and universities. Previously, the University of Rangoon was simply an extension of the University of Calcutta.
The YMBA led the way to the General Conference of Burmese Association (GCBA), the original “B” standing for “Buddhist,” which, according to Yeshiva Moser-Puangsuwan, was “changed to ‘Burmese’ in order to be more inclusive.”[35] Under the leadership of U Ottama, who carried on a correspondence with Gandhi, the GCBA encouraged the Burmese to boycott British goods, and, inspired by Gandhi’s khadi campaign, to wear homespun clothing. U Ottama was imprisoned repeatedly by the British in the 1920s, and, in a show of support, Gandhi visited Burma three times during that decade. During the 1930s, fractures formed within the GCBA, and one of its leaders, U Saya San, deserted. Described as a “disrobed monk and mystic pretending to be the heir to the Burmese monarchy,” San formed an armed militia, and he led a “massive rural rebellion that still remains a major mark of nationalist pride. . . .”[36] The Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence states: “The harsh repression devised by the British colonial authorities, but mostly handled by Indian, Karen, Chin, and Kachin police, left between 1,700 and 3,000 dead after 18 months of unrest.”[37] Just as in India, the British established four different electorates (Burmese, Indians, Anglo-Indians, and Karens) in the late nineteenth century. Time and time again, British colonial authorities all over the world used the principle of “divide and conquer” among ethnic and religious groups, and the long-term negative effects of that policy rebound to this day.
Aung San, the father of Aung San Suu Kyi and father of an independent Burma, was a student activist at Rangoon University during the 1930s. Together with U Nu, who would later become prime minister twice before the military took over in 1962, Aung San led a student strike that spread to Mandalay. Aung San extended his political activism nation-wide as general secretary of the anti-imperialist Our Burma Union. The leaders called themselves “Thakins” (Lords), a powerful linguistic move that usurped the Hindi term that the Indian British administrators used for themselves. In March of 1940, renewing a connection made by U Ottama’s GCBA, Aung San attended a meeting of the Indian National Congress, but he eventually rejected Gandhi’s non-violent political solution. The British issued a warrant for his arrest and he fled the country on August 14, 1940, hidden on a Norwegian ship bound for Amoy, China.
As a founding member of the Burmese Communist Party, Aung San intended to seek aid from the Chinese Communists. However, he was intercepted by the Japanese, taken to Tokyo, and was persuaded to join their anti-imperialist war against the Western powers. Myint-U quotes his enthusiastic conversion to Fascism: “What we want is a strong state administration as exemplified in Germany and Japan. There shall be one nation, one state, one party, one leader . . . there shall be no nonsense of individualism.”[38] (Aung San was not the only one tempted by Fascism; some private militias in the 1930s goose-stepped as Burmese Brown Shirts.) Aung San secretly returned to Burma, contacting a number of Thakins (later to be known as the “Thirty Comrades”), who joined him in Japanese military training on the Chinese Island of Hainan. These men would become the core of the Burmese Independence Army (BIA), which, under General Aung San’s leadership, would take on legendary status, a quality on which the later military dictatorship capitalized heavily.
In 1942, the BIA marched right behind the first Japanese troops to spearhead the invasion of Burma. As the Germans did in Europe and the Japanese did in Manchuria, the latter appointed Ba Maw, as their “quisling” prime minister and he acted for the Japanese from 1943–45. In 1931 Ba Maw gained prominence as one of the attorneys defending the rebel Saya San. Even with this anti-British background he was nevertheless appointed premier of the Crown Colony of Burma (1937–39). In a speech in Japan, Ba Maw, alluding to typical fascist terms, declared that Burmese, Japanese, and other Asians should unite under “one blood.” (The BIA’s motto then and national army now is “One Blood, One Voice, One Command.”) Ba Maw styled himself as a Burmese king, and Myint-U reports that “he had a field day in designing pseudoroyal outfits . . . [but] many soon tired of the show. . . . There was a gnawing sense that history was about to favor a different side.”[39] For all the talk of “one blood” the Japanese generally treated the Burmese worse than the British did.
As the world war turned against the Axis powers, many Burmese began to look at their former British oppressors and their Indian lackeys more favorably. The hill tribes, such as the Kachins and Karens, had never cut their ties with the west. Kachin guerrillas, working with both British and American intelligence in the northern jungles, were able to kill twenty-five Japanese for every fighter lost. Burmese Communists, who had never joined the Japanese, were also active and courageous. In 1944 British forces, with the aid of full Indian divisions and African contingents, led the military advance to retake Burma. Quietly switching sides, Aung San became the leader of the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League, and, going against the opinion of British generals, Lord Mountbatten decided not to press charges against Burmese who had sided with the Japanese. Aung San’s sincerity and bold behavior finally won over the British authorities.
As Burma prepared for independence, Aung San lost one important ally: Than Tun, one of the Thirty Comrades and the leader of the “white flag” Burma Communist Party. This group should not be confused with the “red flag” Stalinist Communist Party of Burma, which refused to collaborate with the Japanese. In May 1948, Than Tun initiated anti-government actions after Aung San attempted to arrest the party’s leadership. Than Tun’s army of 20,000 soldiers would cause trouble for the Burmese government for decades. The Communists feared that British business interests would prevent the Burmese from determining their own future. They were right to be suspicious, because the Burmese Chamber of Commerce, dominated by Scots, insisted that the Indian laborers and the hated Chettyar moneylenders return. When they did, the resentment against Indians would simmer for years and flare up as it has recently. During the run-up to the April 1947 elections, the provisional Executive Council decided that Burma would not be a member of the British Commonwealth. To his credit Aung San had persuaded the Shans, the Karens, and a Muslim leader from Mandalay to join the Executive Council. On April 9, 1947, the Burmese people voted in their first free and fair election, and they gave Aung San’s Anti-Fascist League an overwhelming parliamentary majority. But, on July 19, 1947, men dressed in army uniforms made their way unhindered into the Secretariat Building shooting Aung San dead. Only three members of the Council survived. U Nu, Aung San’s close friend from their student days, was absent that day and he was appointed the new prime minister.
Burma finally won its independence on January 4, 1948, but it was already embroiled in a bitter civil war, a conflict that would continue in the tribal regions for sixty years. In 1948 the contending factions were many: the Stalinist Red Flag Communists, Than Tun’s White Flag Communists, the Karen Defense Organization, the Kachin militia, left-wing BIA soldiers, and an Islamic insurgency in the Arakan. During the Partition of India, Muslims in the far west of Arakan State wished to join the newly created state of East Pakistan. At first their desires were expressed politically, but when the Burmese government resisted, militant Muslims declared jihad. They were initially successful and soon had control over the entire Mayu region. In 1954 “Operation Monsoon,” spearheaded by the Fifth Burmese Rifles and a Chin battalion, was a success, and these forces were able to pacify the region and restore it to government control. By 1970 the Arakan Mujahideen were reduced to a few dozen rice smugglers on the Pakistan border.
The Communists, the Kachins, and the Karens were a much tougher enemy. The two Communist armies made significant advances along the Irrawaddy valley, and U Nu responded with socialist proposals which he thought would satisfy them. He believed that a socialism that respected Buddhism was better than the Communists’ rejection of religion. General Ne Win, also one of the Thirty Comrades, enhanced U Nu’s program by creating socialist units in the army that he called Sitwundan. The rebellion, however, continued as thousands of soldiers deserted from the BIA, so much so that the 4th Burmese Rifles, Karen, and Kachin battalions were the only effective counter force. Many Burmese, however, did not trust the Karens, and Burmese soldiers turned on them. In response three Karen battalions counterattacked. They were on the verge of taking Rangoon, but Gen. Ne Win’s 4th Burmese Rifles just barely held the city. Ironically, Karen and Communist forces took Mandalay and set up a temporary government, and Kachin troops were within 100 miles of Rangoon. Fearing a Communist take-over, western leaders sent financial aid and supplies. Burmese pilots in British Spitfires and American pilots in Catalina Flying Boats began pounding rebel positions. The tribal armies were eventually pushed back into the hills, and the Communist forces were also scattered. By the skin of their teeth, General Ne Win and Prime Minister U Nu were able to hold the new government together.
Returning to the focus of this chapter, government soldiers did murder Karen civilians—some in their own churches on Christmas Eve, 1948—and Karen neighborhoods in Rangoon were set on fire. Soldiers from the 4th Burmese Rifles had also burned down a Baptist mission in the city of Maubin. Violence against the Karens also occurred during the Japanese occupation. In 1942 the BIA learned of a Karen plan to rescue their own from the town of Mayungmya, and they started executing Karens—perhaps as many as 2,000. They also destroyed the town’s Catholic Mission. A short history of the Karen people relates that “in many Karen areas the BIA massacred entire Karen villages, and in Papun (Mutraw) District Karen women were herded into camps where they were systematically raped by BIA soldiers.”[40] One bright spot in the otherwise dark Japanese occupation was the intervention of Colonel Suzuki Keiji, who was able to contain BIA atrocities.[41] Each BIA battalion had Japanese officers and advisers.
Only 25 percent of the Karens are Christians, but their leadership is heavily so, and the Buddhist Karens have begun to assert their autonomy as a protest against the Christian militants. During the 1948 attacks, some Karen preachers declared that their people should save themselves from Buddhist “unbelievers,” but it may be difficult to separate political and religious motivations in this war-time violence. However, the military dictatorship has continued its attacks on Karens, other Christians, and Muslims, and in 2013 the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom placed Burma among the top fifteen violators of basic religious freedoms. (The group includes Saudi Arabia, Iraq, China, Vietnam, Nigeria, Egypt, Pakistan, North Korea, and Sudan.) The Commission’s report states that “most religious freedom violations occurred against ethnic minority Christian and Muslim communities, with serious abuses against mainly Christian civilians during military interventions in Kachin State and sectarian violence by societal actors targeting Muslims in [Arakan] State.”[42] The Commission also accused the government of violating the rights of Buddhist monks who have engaged in anti-government activities.
U Nu was a charismatic leader, who led a simple life and made a positive impression in international political circles. India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru once said that U Nu’s “radiant personality . . . wins him friends wherever he goes.”[43] He patched up relations with the British, and, during a visit to Moscow, he personally challenged the Soviets to respect the rights of Jews. In the presence of Nikita Khrushchev, U Nu also boasted about how his troops had made progress against the Burmese Communist guerillas. U Nu and his personal secretary U Thant (historian Thant Myint-U’s grandfather) experienced a whirlwind tour of the United States, where they were awestruck by that country’s great morale and prosperity. Under U Nu’s wise leadership, Burma was one of the first nations to recognize the state of Israel. He appointed U Thant as Burma’s UN ambassador, and he would later become the UN’s third Secretary General, serving in that position from 1961–71. In their travels U Thant and U Nu would become international celebrities as they polished the image of a poor, struggling country, which suffered as much war damage as had many European nations. U Nu skillfully led Burma through the beginnings of the Cold War and was a respected leader in the neutral Non-Aligned Movement.
U Nu was a devout Buddhist and his generous patronage of the faith led many Burmese to see him in the mold of the great merit-bearing kings. In July of 1948, during the chaotic conditions after independence, the married U Nu took a vow of celibacy that he never broke. One is reminded of a similar vow that Gandhi made in 1906, one that also lasted for the rest of his life. Both Gandhi and U Nu did it for the same reason: true political leadership requires the purification of the soul. In order to counter the charge that U Nu should not be compared to a saint such as Gandhi, let me quote Hugh Tinker: “Amdist unceasing trials and upheavals he has emerged a selfless being, completely relaxed, without tension, inspired by vision and compassion; and his driving is Buddhism which permeates his every thought and action.”[44] Donald Smith relates that, after stepping down as prime minister in 1958, U Nu “divested himself of all personal possessions . . . , renounced the secular world, put on the yellow robe of the monk, and spent a week in a monastery.”[45] U Nu’s reputation as a statesman who had successfully fused spirituality and political vision is well attested by this accolade at the World Fellowship of Buddhists in 1954: “[U Nu is] unique among the world’s statesman, by his unparalleled piety and the embodiment of the ideal of rajarsi, the ruler who is also a sage.”[46] For many U Nu had attained the status of a wheel-turning king (chakravartin).
Taking on the royal prerogative of the protector of Buddhism, U Nu organized the Sixth Great Buddhist Council, whose deliberations went on for two years (1955–56). He also exercised the traditional sovereign’s right to “purify” the Saṅgha by passing the 1949 Vinasaya Act, which required that all monks register and submit to discipline. The Act established monastic courts where monks could be punished for violations of their vows and the rules of Saṅgha. U Nu and a great many citizens were concerned about the immoral or outright criminal conduct of some monks. In a column for a newspaper, U Nu wrote that “everybody who puts on a yellow robe is not a pongyi [monk]. . . . If he indulges in all sort of evil deeds, like having an affair with a woman, gambling, and drinking, then . . . he is just a rogue in a yellow robe.”[47] As Aung-Thwin states: “Monks . . . were involved in all sorts of serious crimes, including forgery, sedition, opium smuggling, armed robbery, destruction of private property, rape, assault with deadly weapons, and murder.”[48] For example, in 1951, 150 monks tore down a theater because two of them had been denied free admission. Without any central monastic authority and a lapse in monastic exam taking, monasteries became a refuge for shiftless young men. There were battles within monasteries about the naming of new abbots, and at least four monks were killed. Aung-Thwin writes that “another group of monks in Mandalay . . . destroyed several Indian shops . . . stormed a police station . . . , and flogged three men who had been detained.”[49] Newspapers that dare criticize monks were threatened with retaliation. In 1961 U Nu ordered the construction of 60,000 sand pagodas as a means to right the disorder that was spreading across his country.
While the teaching of Buddhism was a required school subject, the government also allowed lessons in the Bible and the Qur’an. The monks objected, but as Charney states: “Nu, arguing that if the Bible and the Qur’an could not be taught, then the Buddhist scriptures could not be taught either.”[50] Debates such as these led monks, especially from the more politically engaged Thudhamma Saṅgha, to request that U Nu declare Buddhism the state religion, and he promised that he would do so. After handily winning the 1960 election, U Nu believed that he was in a strong position to submit an amendment to the 1947 constitution, which simply stated that “the State recognizes the special position of Buddhism as the faith professed by the great majority of the citizens of the Union.” Christians and Muslims reminded U Nu of Aung San’s strong preference for a secular state, and the National Muslim Affairs Committee proposed, as Charney reports, that the prime minister “act as the Defender of the Faiths rather than making Buddhism the state religion.”[51]
Despite these objections the Burmese Parliament, on August 26, 1961, passed the State Religion Act by a vote of 324 to 28, a law that made Buddhism the state religion. Militant monks were emboldened by the law and seized a partially finished mosque north of Rangoon, where they thought there were too many Muslim places of worship. When the police came, as Charney describes it, “the monks inside the mosque set fire to it and other mosques in the area.”[52] This is yet another piece of evidence to demonstrate the truth of my hypothesis that the fusion of state and religion is a sure recipe for religious violence. Presumably in order to return to Aung San’s vision of a secular state, Ne Win ordered the repeal of this law soon after he and his generals brought down the government on March 2, 1962.
In 1958 U Nu’s Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League experienced a schism from which it never recovered. As the leader of the “clean” faction, U Nu released political prisoners and legalized the Communist Party. Fearing a Communist take-over in this political chaos, the government’s war office consulted with restive generals, and they persuaded U Nu to agree to an interim military government under Ne Win. During their two years in control, Ne Win was praised for cleaning up the cities, rooting out corruption, reducing crime, and making progress against various rebel groups. Ne Win had turned to well-trained technocrats to achieve these successes; but after the coup in 1962, he put his generals in charge, with disastrous results for the economy, and many well-educated Burmese left the country. Ne Win had sided with the anti-Nu faction and he was disappointed that, after governing so well in the interim, U Nu won by a large majority in the 1960 election. However, political bickering among the parties continued, and the lawless behavior of many monks, mentioned above, simply reflected the general chaos in their society as a whole. Furthermore, tribal rebellions had intensified and posed a further threat to an independent but fragile Union of Burma.
Except for shooting the son of Burmese President Sao Shwe Thaik, as he tried to protect his father, the military take-over was, as Myint-U describes it, a “bloodless textbook coup d’état,” and “this time there was no promise of future elections.”[53] In addition to arresting U Nu, Sao Shwe Thaik, and five government ministers, Ne Win also detained thirty Shan and Karen chiefs. In addition to declaring himself president, he made himself defense chief and head of finance and revenue. International airlines were told to leave, as well as international foundations and NGOs, and English language schools were shut down. The students at Rangoon University led protests, but the army shot fifteen of them dead and then blew up the Student Union Building, a symbol of free speech since the 1930s. All of Burma’s universities were closed for two years.
Ne Win had a personal grudge against Indians, because, after dropping out of Rangoon University in 1931, he went into the coal business where he found that he could not compete with well-entrenched Indian traders. Most Burmese had their own anti-Indian prejudices, so there was little protest when Ne Win nationalized Indian businesses and gave their owners a one-way ticket “home,” an alien land for many, who had been in Burma for decades if not centuries. In 1964, 300,000 hard-working entrepreneurs left Burma, and well-stocked Indian shops were replaced by poorly run state stores, which soon had rationed goods in them. (The Indian population of Burma declined from a high of 16 percent to 2 percent today.) Ne Win introduced “the Burmese Way to Socialism,” and this called for nationalizing the banks and major industries. The economy was soon in shambles and industrial production dropped 40 percent.
In the beginning Ne Win had the advantage of fresh Burmese memories of his achievements in his 1958–60 “care taker” period; and, even more so, the reputation of the Burmese Army as “saviors of the nation” from the days of Aung San and the Thirty Comrades. The Burmese generals would take Bayinnaung and other warrior kings as their model rulers. (The parade grounds at the new capital Naypyidaw are dominated by huge statues of Kings Aniruddha, Bayinnaung, and Alaungpaya.) The strict discipline and brutality that the army’s original core had learned from the Japanese would, unfortunately, continue under the forty-eight-year dictatorship. In stark contrast, U Nu had made Indian King Aśoka his hero. Aśoka pulled his troops back from the borders and established a qualified non-violent regime with no offensive war, no royal hunts, and establishment of animal hospitals. U Nu was much more in line with earlier kings, who, even though they led armies, also looked to Aśoka for inspiration. Myint-U writes that in 1853 “when [King Mindon] ordered irrigation repairs to be undertaken around Shwébo, he also ordered that no fish were to be harmed as a result. . . . In 1864, all hunting and trapping of animals in the lower Dhindwin was banned.”[54] King Mindon, Prince Mekkaya, and the Myoza of Myothit all established animal sanctuaries throughout the country. The State Religion Act of 1961 contained a ban on cow slaughter, which was soon repealed by the military government.
While U Nu had allied himself with the liberal Thudhamma Saṅgha (the largest sect), the ruling generals favored the conservative Shwegyin Saṅgha (second largest), which stayed out of politics. Furthermore, as Jon Wiant suggests, “the ascetic qualities of the fundamentalists complemented the austerity and disciplines of the military ideologues.”[55] In 1965 the government attempted to nationalize the Saṅgha, claiming that 80 percent of the monks supported this measure. The military rulers miscalculated the monastic backlash from this power grab. Charney reports that “the Revolutionary Council’s plans resulted in an uprising, mainly among monks in Mandalay, characterized by the torching of army trucks and government buildings.”[56] The generals promised that they would support religious freedom for all religions, but, as Charney states: “The last foreign Baptist missionaries and foreign Catholic priests and nuns left Burma, as the government either refused to renew their stay permits or explicitly ordered them out of the country.”[57] Persecution of Christians continued throughout the dictatorship, and from 2011 to 2013, sixty churches were razed by Burmese military units. Kachin Christians have been especially hard hit. Kachins, 90 percent Christian, have been especially hard hit. The Revolutionary Council is filled with conservative Buddhist generals, so the charge of religiously motivated violence can at least be suggested.
In 1980 the military government undertook a thorough “purification” of the Saṅgha with strict controls down to the village level. Initially, the generals relied on the smaller Shwegyin Saṅgha, but now they turned to the much larger Thudhamma Saṅgha. Charney writes that “ecclesiastical courts were set up to try hundreds of monks, including forty senior monks, for violating the monastic code, some on the charge of having sexual intercourse with women.”[58] The government prohibited monastic political activities and also reigned in appropriations for religious purposes. Charney lists some of these measures: “the freezing of state funds intended for the construction of nat shrines . . . , the suspension of the printing and distribution by the government of Buddhist texts, drastic reductions in the broadcast of Buddhist sermons on state radio, and the abolition of the Buddhist Sasana Council.”[59] It is significant to note that, aside from medieval Tibet, Burma has always had the most monks per capita of any Buddhist country. In 2009 there were about twice as many monks and novices (500,000) as there were soldiers in the military (280,000).
During the military dictatorship, the Burmese Army continued its fight against Communist, tribal, and Muslim insurgents. By the early 1970s in northern Arakan, the Muslim National Liberation Party was second only in strength to the forces of the Stalinist Communist Party of Burma. In 1978 the Burmese Army launched a major campaign in the Arakan, in which soldiers served as census workers. It was brutal harassment, because most of the Muslim Rohingya did not (and still do not) have identity cards. More than 200,000 Muslims fled across the border as the operation, as Fredholm described it, turned into “abuse and murder.”[60] Fredholm continues: “By purging the Muslims, the [Burmese Army] attempt[ed] to appease the Rakhine [Buddhist] nationalists of Arakan.”[61] In August of 1983, in response to anti-Muslim riots in Lower Burma, Mohammed Zaid, a former Burma Airways employee, founded the Kawthoolei Muslim Liberation Front (KMLF). At its strongest the force had only about 200 soldiers (about the same as those in the Arakan), and, as Fredholm states: “The organization did not last long, however. By March 1987, it had begun to fall apart because of disagreements between Sunni and Shiite leaders.”[62] Again in 1991 in the Arakan, according to a report of the UK’s Islamic Human Rights Commission, “the government reportedly contributed to or instigated . . . anti-Muslim violence, and over 250,000 fled to neighbouring Bangladesh. . . . The government reportedly also contributed to or instigated anti-Muslim violence in Shan state and Yangon in 1996.”[63] It is significant to note that, while Burmese mujahideen traveled abroad to request help during this period, they received only moral support not weapons. As we shall see at the end of this chapter, major supporters of international jihad have now changed their minds.
In 1988 Ne Win stunned his political party—the Burma Socialist Programme Party—and the rest of the nation by announcing that he was stepping down and calling for elections. Students immediately started organizing, and, as Myint-U writes, “on 8 August 1988, at eight minutes past eight in the morning, a day and time deemed auspicious [astrology is widely used all over Asia], . . . dockworkers along the Rangoon River walked off their jobs.”[64] All across the country the Burmese people marched in the streets carrying banners and pictures of Aung San. The army did not respond until 11:30 PM, and then it opened fire on the demonstrators and dozens were killed. “Rather than curtail the demonstrations,” as Myint-U explains, “the bloodshed incited people further, and for the next five days the death toll rose.”[65] The people were still not deterred: labor unions and uncensored newspapers suddenly appeared, and even housewives marched with their pots and pans. Myint-U reports that “in ministry after ministry civil servants and clerical workers left their offices and joined the throngs.”[66] The police and public media workers went on strike, and plans were made for a nation-wide work stoppage. On September 18, 1988, the army returned for two days of killing, and newly engaged citizens of Burma gradually went back to their daily lives. One estimate of those killed in the 1988 protests was 3,000.
In the absence of a leader, the 1988 protestors had used Aung San as their hero; and, misusing a Buddhist metaphor just a bit, one might say that his good karma “ripened” in the form of his daughter Aung San Suu Kyi. (As readers will learn, I will insist, in my critique of Tibetan Buddhism, that karma is earned and “ripens” individually not collectively.) During the 1988 demonstrations, Suu Kyi gave her first speech to a huge crowd on August 25, 1988 at the Shwedagon Pagoda. She had not returned to Burma in 1988 for political reasons; rather, she was there to take care of her ailing mother. At the age of fifteen, Suu Kyi joined her mother when she was appointed ambassador to India and Nepal. In 1964 she obtained her bachelor’s degree in politics at Lady Sri Ram College in New Delhi, and then went to get an Oxford degree in philosophy, politics, and economics in 1969. She worked for the United Nations for three years and then married Michael Aris, an expert on Tibetan Buddhism, in 1971. (I will rely on Aris’ scholarly authority frequently in the next chapter on Bhutan.) In the 1980s she was working on a doctoral degree on Burmese literature at the London School of Oriental and African Studies.
While in college in New Delhi, Suu Kyi studied the writings of Gandhi, and Copley describes Suu Kyi as a “pragmatic” but “strongly committed Gandhian.”[67] Her commitment to Gandhian political ethics comes out especially in this passage: “Some have questioned the appropriateness of talking about such matters as metta (loving-kindness) and thissa (truth) in the political context. But politics is about people and what we had seen . . . proved that love and truth can move people more strongly than any form of coercion.”[68] In her survey of the virtues of the Buddhist king he states that “while a private individual may be bound only by the formal vows he makes, those who govern should be wholly bound by the truth in thought, word, and deed.”[69] Her commitment to Gandhian principles is also seen in her belief that without a “quintessential” revolution of spirit, “merely. . . changing official policies and institutions with a view to an improvement in material conditions has little chance of success.”[70]
In my own work on Gandhi, I have argued that he stands in contrast to the Jain absolutist nonviolence and Hindu relative nonviolence. What I mean by relative nonviolence is that it is “relative” in cases, for example, such as the caste duty to fight or the animal consecrated in the Vedic sacrifice is not harmed. I argue further that the Buddha and Gandhi agree on a pragmatic application of ahiṃsā. The Buddha firmly rejected the ritual sacrifice of animals, but his death due to poisoned pork (not mushrooms as vegetarian Buddhists claim) proved that he at least believed that he could not refuse anything placed in his begging bowl; or, at most, that he was a meat eater. A great many Buddhists believe that consumption of meat is allowed if they themselves are not the butchers. Buddhist farmers can eliminate pests who are destroying crops, but they must perform atoning rites afterward. While pacifism is the ideal, Buddhists may kill in self-defense. As we shall see in the next chapters on Bhutan and Tibet, Bodhisattvas may kill persons who will, if not stopped, murder others in the future. Appealing to consequentialist arguments, these Mahayana Buddhists, including the Dalai Lama himself, justify such preemptive strikes, because Bodhisattvas accrue merit that they then can bequeath to others, and the would-be murderers are saved from the horrors of hell.
In his dialogues with Suu Kyi, Alan Clements asked her to comment on Nelson Mandela’s belief, once he realized that nonviolence was not working against the apartheid regime, that nonviolence was a tactic and not a spiritual principle. Clements assumes that Suu Kyi believes that it is a principle, but one of her answers is: “Yes. He took out his whip, didn’t he? I don’t think one can afford to be dogmatic in politics.”[71] Earlier in the dialogue, however, she indicates that there are no exceptions to ahiṃsā. If, however, she becomes president of Burma in 2015 she may find herself embracing a more pragmatic position. She says that she will not condemn the students who wage violent protests, and she promises that “as long as I am part of a democratic organization I will have to abide by collective decisions.”[72] Even Gandhi believed that when people are confronted with the choice of cowardice and defending themselves with violence, refusing to fight is worse. In her response to Clements, Suu Kyi acknowledges this famous Gandhian qualification to ahiṃsā, and we may assume that that she will follow the Buddha’s pragmatism as well.
According to Copley, Suu Kyi believes that a theistic spiritual base for nonviolence is stronger, because the Buddhist view of “no self” (annata in Pāli) does not support political action and individual agency in general.[73] Copley gives no reference for this assertion, and, in her dialogue with Alan Clements, she refuses to support this alleged claim that she believes theists have such an advantage.[74] As a long-time student and disciple of Theravādin Buddhism, I would be surprised that Suu Kyi holds this view of the annata doctrine. The Pāli scriptures teach that the Buddhist self is “empty” only because there is no enduring soul substance, so there is no reason not to view it—the five skandhas working in unison as a unified self (jīva) (see the nun’s poem in Questions of Milinda)—as a robust moral agent in the world. David Hume, William James, and Alfred North Whitehead offer Euro-American philosophical equivalents, as they all have “bundle” theories of selves that are non-substantial, constantly changing, yet still carrying the same individual agency and personal identity. Clements eludes to this more positive view of the Buddhist self, when he defines annata as “interrelatedness.”[75]
In 1989 Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy won 82 percent of the vote, but the military did not honor her great achievement. From 1990 to 2013 Suu Kyi spent fifteen of those twenty-three years under house arrest or in prison. During this time, Suu Kyi devoted herself to correspondence, reading, and Buddhist studies and practice. She wrote that her political work was inspired by the example of the “hermit Sumedha, who sacrificed the possibility of early liberation for himself that he might save others from suffering.”[76] The story of Sumedha, an accomplished brahmin who became a Buddha named Dīpamkara, or more accurately a bodhisatta in this account in the Pāli Jātaka Tales. With regard to this lofty status, Copley states that Suu Kyi “jokingly . . . recognizes she has not yet become a Bodhisattva,”[77] a title to which so many Burmese kings had aspired. Suu Kyi admired a highly respected monk named U Pandita, who guided her in her Buddhist practice. He taught her the importance of “mindfulness” (sati), the one virtue for which there is no mean; it does not become a vice in excess, as courage does in foolhardiness. With the Buddhist virtues U Pandita had confidence that, at least in 1989, Suu Kyi could persevere in the face of attacks for “engaging in honest politics.”[78]
In September 2007, there were mass protests in Rangoon over huge price increases (up to 500 percent) for fuel and food. It was to become known as the “Saffron Revolution,” although some said that Burmese monks actually wear maroon robes. On August 19 and again on the 22nd, hundreds of protesters, led by student 8888 leaders, were beaten by government-paid thugs and many were arrested by police. On September 5, hundreds of monks near Mandalay marched, and equal numbers of students and general citizens joined them. The junta called out the troops, and a Human Rights Watch report relates that “the army reacted brutally, beating the monks and the bystanders with bamboo sticks,”[79] but they did not fire on the crowds until September 26. A new organization called the All Burma Monks Alliance (ABMA), claiming the support of their abbots, responded by turning over their begging bowls, a powerful gesture that denied the devout Buddhists in the government the opportunity to perform their daily meritorious acts. Human Rights Watch states that “a September 21 statement by the ABMA went even further, denouncing ‘the evil military dictatorship’ as the ‘common enemy of all our citizens’ and vowing to ‘banish the common enemy evil regime from Burmese soil forever.’”[80] Monks and civilians continued their protests all over the country, including daily vigils at the Shwedagon and Sule Pagodas, even though they were drenched in monsoon rains.
On September 22, protestors marched to Suu Kyi’s home and she gave them a tearful welcome. Later she was moved from house arrest to the Insein Prison. This high security institution is known as the “Hell-hole of Burma,” where Suu Kyi was imprisoned in 2003 and then again in 2009. Every day the marches drew more participants and spread to more cities, and on September 25 the number of protesters reached its apex. On September 26, the army and police came out in full force and started beating the monks severely, and one eye witness reported that one of them died. In the afternoon a group of protesters was trapped on Strand Road, and the army opened fire, killing four. After an attack on the Ngwe Kyar Yan Monastery in the early morning of September 26, there were 100 monks missing the next day, and eight confirmed deaths among civilians protecting the monks. The next day at least seven people, including high school students, were shot near High School #2, and even more were killed near High School #3. The total number killed and wounded is still unknown, but as I read through the detailed eyewitness report of Human Rights Watch, the deaths were easily in the low hundreds. By September 29 the streets of Rangoon were so full of police and soldiers that it was impossible for people to reassemble and protest.
One Burma scholar does not have a positive view of some of the monks involved in the 2007 protests. Aung-Thwin expresses his reservations: “Large numbers of monks were cordoned-off by hand-holding people as if ‘protecting’ them. . . . But when political opposition forces dressed in saffron robes and shaved heads high-jacked what had been a peaceful demonstration, it turned violent,”[81] and only then did the troops open fire. The abbots of the monasteries declared that all their monks were to return home immediately. Aung-Thwin cites sources that report that monastic robes had sold out in Rangoon, “so clearly there were secular politicos dressed up as monks with shaven heads.”[82] Many, however, were rogue monks from “fringe” monasteries, where “arms, ammunition, and pornography were subsequently said to have been found.”[83] Furthermore, Aung-Thwin concludes that, as all the monks (even the fake and rogue ones) had returned to their monasteries before the soldiers started firing, the later demonstrations were “largely not ‘saffron’ and certainly not a ‘revolution.’”[84]
Suu Kyi’s response to the most recent anti-Muslim attacks has been disappointing, but mostly to her international admirers, and not to a Burmese population that is largely anti-Muslim. Copley has made much of Suu Kyi’s comments to Clements about Burma’s ethnic minorities. She firmly rejects the politics of ethnic identity—“we cannot have the attitude of ‘I’m Kachin,’ ‘I’m Burman,’ ‘I’m Shan’”[85] —and the identity politics that sometimes accompanies such divisions. She appears to reveal an implicit nationalist bias when she admitted that she “can only talk about the ethnic Burmese majority. I’ve not studied the culture of the other ethnic peoples of Burma deeply enough to connect to them.”[86] This seems to put Suu Kyi in a bad light on one of Burma’s greatest problems. Copley, however, neglects to quote the entire sentence, which concludes: “My mother always taught me to think of them [ethnic minorities] as very close to us, emphasizing how loyal they were. She always spoke of them with great respect and warmth.” Furthermore, she states that “we do not think that this union can be built by the Burmese alone—it has to be built by all the ethnic groups.”[87]
During the election campaign of 1989, Suu Kyi traveled to even the most remote parts of Burma, and she was hailed as a national savior everywhere she went. We can assume that she did learn much about the ethnic minorities of her country; and furthermore, in 1985 she wrote at length and in depth about them in the chapter “My Country and People” in her collections of essays in Freedom from Fear. Nevertheless, on a 2012 trip to Europe she disappointed Kachin students when she refused to condemn government attacks on their people back home. One of the students, Ko Nawng, declared that “she should be a leader for all the ethnic nationalities and stand up for our rights like the moral icon and human rights defender she is.”[88] He could have referred to Suu Kyi’s own reference to the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, which “proclaims that ‘every individual and every organ of society’ should strive to promote the basic rights and freedoms to which all human beings regardless of race, nationality, or religion are entitled.”[89] It is significant to note that the rights mentioned in both the U.N. Declaration and the U.S. Declaration of Independence are natural rights, which demand protection regardless of citizenship. Even if, for example, the Royingya Muslims are not citizens, their basic rights should be respected.
During the same trip, Suu Kyi enraged Royingyas when she said that she was unsure that they are an ethnic minority, and she expressed doubts that they are Burmese citizens, a position roundly criticized by international human rights organizations. The International Crisis Group issued a statement in which it expected “her to break through partisanship and speak much more strongly and clearly against extremist rhetoric and violence.”[90] Suu Kyi has also rejected the charge, made by Human Rights Watch, that the attacks on the Rohingya Muslims are ethnic cleansing. Suu Kyi has laid blame on both Muslims and Buddhists, has warned about growing Muslim power world-wide, and has, incredibly enough, praised the work of the police and Burmese security forces. International observers, such as Tomás Ojea Quintana, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, countered this by saying he had witnessed government authorities “standing by while atrocities have been committed before their very eyes, including by well-organized ultranationalist Buddhist mobs.”[91]
Maung Zarni, a Burma expert and visiting fellow at the London School of Economics, says that Suu Kyi “is no longer a political dissident trying to stick to her principles. She’s a politician and her eyes are fixed on the prize, which is the 2015 majority Buddhist vote.”[92] A reporter from The Economist quotes one critic saying that she “has lost touch with the suffering of the people.”[93] To her credit she did object to the new government policy to limit Muslim parents, attacked world-wide by Islamophobs as “breeders,” to two children. Nevertheless, it may be concluded that Suu Kyi has departed from the Gandhian political ethics of truth and loving-kindness. With so much inclination to political compromise, it is not clear that she can even hold to her pragmatic view of nonviolence. Will Suu Kyi be able engage in the “honest politics” of which U Pandita found her eminently capable?
It is sadly ironic that the Venerable Wirathu jokingly compared himself with Osama bin Laden, because Muslim jihadis—Burmese, Bangladeshis, Indonesians, and Pakistanis—would be offended by any disrespect shown to their martyr, and they will intensify their efforts to respond to the anti-Muslim attacks. In May of 2013 jihadists were thwarted in their plans to bomb the Myanmar Embassy in Indonesia, where two representatives of the Rohingya Solidarity Organization were said to be requesting arms from jihadist there. There is evidence that foreign Islamic militants have already arrived in Burma. The Long War Journal has released unconfirmed reports that in July of 2013, a “group claims it killed seventeen Burmese soldiers in its first ambush of a military convoy,” and “a few days ago they slaughtered three men including a Buddhist monk.”[94] This jihadist group is called Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami Arakan, and it was founded by Maulana Abdul Quddus, a Burmese Muslim who has been associated with Al Qaeda since the early 1980s. Jihadists from around the world are rallying to a jihad in Burma because of what they call the “genocide” of Muslims there. One mitigating factor was reported by The Economist: “[Foreign jihadists] would regard the Rohingyas’ brand of Islam as unduly syncretic, even un-Islamic, and thus unworthy of support.”[95] Nevertheless, the prospects for religious harmony in both Sri Lanka and Burma do not bode well.
Fiona MacGregor, “Buddhist Bin Laden or a Man of Peace? Monk leads anti-Muslim Campaign in Myanmar,” accessed at http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/07/11/19395152–buddhist-bin-laden-or-man-of-peace-monk-leads-anti-muslim-campaign-in-myanmar?lite on January 16, 2014.
Tin Aung Kyaw, “Buddhist Monk Wirathu Leads Violent National Campaign against Myanmar’s Muslims,” Globalpost.com (June 21, 2013), accessed at www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/groundtruth-burma/buddhist-monk-wirathu-969–muslims-myanmar on April 30, 2014.
Thomas Fuller, “Extremism Rises Among Myanmar Buddhists,” The New York Times (June 20, 2013).
Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence, at www.massviolence.org/Burma-Myanmar, accessed on September 30, 2013.
Quoted in Daniel Schearf, “HRW Accuses Burma of Ethnic Cleansing,” Voice of America at www.voanews.com, accessed on September 29, 2013.
Maung Zarni, “Myanmar’s Extremist Buddhists Get Free Rein,” The Nation (Thailand) (April 10, 2013), accessed at www.nation.com.pk/international/10–Apr-2013/myanmar-s-extremist-buddhists-get-free-rein on May 1, 2014.
Kate Linthicum, “Myanmar Violence between Buddhists, Muslims threatens Reforms,” The Los Angeles Times (October 27, 2013).
Thomas Fuller, “Extremism Rises Among Myanmar Buddhists.”
Kate Linthicum, “Myanmar Violence between Buddhists, Muslims threatens Reforms.”
Thant Myint-U, The Rivers of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2006), 44.
Quoted in ibid., 52.
Michael Aung-Thwin, Pagan: The Origins of Modern Burma (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 1985), 37.
Willam J. Koenig, The Burmese Polity, 1752–1819: Politics, Administration and Social Organization in the Early Kon-baung Period, Michigan Papers on South and Southeast Asia, Number 34 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 1990), 44–45.
Aung-Thwin, Pagan: The Origins of Modern Burma, 24.
Ibid., 34.
Ibid., 57.
Ibid.
Ibid., 31.
Robert H. Taylor, "Pathways to the Present" in Kyaw Yin Hlang, Robert H. Taylor, Tin Maung Maung Than, 7.
Aung-Thwin, Pagan: The Origins of Modern Burma, 73–74.
Aung San Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear and Other Writings, ed. Michael Aris (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 63.
Myint-U, The River of Lost Footsteps, 88.
Roger Bischoff, Buddhism in Myanmar—A Short History (Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society, 1995), 110–118.
Quoted in Myint-U, The River of Lost Footsteps, 126.
Quoted in ibid., 101.
Ibid.
Ibid., 210.
Ibid., 102.
Ibid., 211.
Antony Copley, “Burmese Days: Past and Present,” Gandhi Marg 34:4 (January-March, 2013): 467.
Myint-U, The River of Lost Footsteps, 108.
Quoted in “The Dark Side of Transition: Violence Against Muslims in Myanmar” Asia Report 251 (October, 2013): 2. Published by the International Crisis Group at reliefweb.int/sites/ reliefweb.int/files/resources/251–the-dark-side-of-transition-violence-against-muslims-in-myanmar.pdf, accessed on December 14, 2013.
Michael W. Charney, A History of Modern Burma (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 23.
Myint-U, The River of Lost Footsteps, 197.
Yeshua Moser-Puangsuwan, “Burma: Civil Resistance in the Anticolonial Struggle, 1900–1940,” Gandhi Marg 34:4 (January-March, 2013): 383.
Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence, at www.massviolence.org/Burma-Myanmar, accessed on September 30, 2013.
Ibid.
Quoted in Myint-U, The River of Lost Footsteps, 229.
Ibid., 233.
The Karen People: Culture, Faith and History at www.karen.org.au/docs/ Karen_people_ booklet.pdf, 10, accessed on December 14, 2013.
Martin Smith, Burma: Insurgency and the Politics of Ethnicity (London: Zed Books, 1991).
U. S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, 2013. Report at www.uscirf.gov/ images/2013%20USCIRF%20Annual%20Report%20(2).pdf, accessed on December 14, 2013.
Myint-U, The River of Lost Footsteps, 269.
Hugh Tinker, The Union of Burma: A Study of the First Years of Independence (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 177; quoted in Donald E. Smith, Religion and Politics in Burma (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), 143.
Smith, Religion and Politics in Burma, 142.
Quoted in ibid., 147.
Ibid., 205–6.
Aung-Thwin, “Of Monarchs, Monks, and Men: Religion and the State in Myanmar,” Asia Research Institute (December, 2009): 14, at http://www.ari.nus.edu.sg/docs/wps/wps09_127.pdf, accessed on December 15, 2013.
Ibid.
Charney, A History of Modern Burma, 89.
Ibid., 103.
Ibid., 104.
Myint-U, The River of Lost Footsteps, 290, 291.
Myint-U, The Making of Modern Burma, 149.
Jon Wiant, “Tradition in the Service of Revolution: the Political Symbolism of the Taw-hlan-ye-khit” in F. K. Lehman, ed., Military Rule in Burma since 1962: Kaleidoscope of Views (Singapore: Maruzen Asia, 1991): 63; quoted in Charney, 116.
Charney, A History of Modern Burma,119.
Ibid.
Ibid., 140.
Ibid., 117.
Michael Fredholm, Burma: Ethnicity and Insurgency (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1993), 178.
Ibid., 180.
Ibid., 121.
Rianne ten Veen, “Myanmar’s Muslims: The Oppressed of the Oppressed” (London: Islamic Human Rights Commission, 2005), 9, at www.ihrc.org.uk/file/05OCTMyanmarProof.pdf, accessed on December 14, 2013.
Myint-U, The River of Lost Footsteps, 33.
Ibid., 34.
Ibid., 35.
Copley, “Burmese Days: Past and Present,” 467.
Aung San Suu Kyi, Letters from Burma, ed. Fergal Keane (London: Penguin Books, 1997), ix.
Aung San Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear, 171.
Ibid., 183.
Alan Clements, ed., Voices of Hope: Aung San Suu Kyi: Conversations with Alan Clements (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1997), 155.
Ibid., 152.
Copley, “Burmese Days: Past and Present,” 466.
Clements, Voices of Hope, 149–150.
Ibid., 149.
Suu Kyi, Letters from Burma, 160.
Copley, “Burmese Days: Past and Present,” 465.
Quoted in Suu Kyi, Letters from Burma, 161.
“Crackdown: Repression of the 2007 Popular Protests in Burma,” Human Rights Watch Report 19:18c (December, 2007), 29 pdf; accessed at www.refworld.org/docid/47594b4922b on December 21, 2013.
Ibid., 32.
Aung-Thwin, “Of Monarchs, Monks, and Men: Religion and the State in Myanmar,” 20.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 21.
Quoted in Copley, 465.
Clements, Voices of Hope, 195.
Ibid., 196.
William Lloyd-Georg, “Suu Kyi & the Contradictions of State,” The Diplomat (June 30, 2012), at http://thediplomat.com/2012/06/suu-kyi-and-contradictions-of-state/?allpages=yes, accessed on December 26, 2013.
Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear, 182.
Quoted in Peter Popham, The Lady and the Peacock: The Life of Aung San Suu Kyi (New York: The Experiment, 2013), 405.
Aung Zaw, “Are Myanmar’s Hopes Fading?” The New York Times (April 24, 2013).
Julius Cavendish, “Burma’s Rohingya Muslims: Aung San Suu Kyi’s Blind Spot,” The Independent (August 20, 2012).
“Myanmar: Twenty Painful Years,” The Economist (August 16, 2008), 46.
Bill Roggio, “Jihadists Seek to Open New Front in Burma,” Long War Journal (July 15, 2013), at www.longwarjournal.org, accessed September 23, 2013.
The Economist (July 27, 2013), at www.economist.com/news/asia/21582321–fuelled-dangerous-brew-faith-ethnicity-and-politics-tit-tat-conflict-escalating, accessed on December 20, 2013.