30, monk
ETHNICITY: Rakhine
BIRTHPLACE: Arakan State, Burma
INTERVIEWED IN: Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh
At twenty-seven years old, U Khama Inda was one of thousands of Buddhist monks who marched in the 2007 Saffron Revolution, Burma’s monk-led uprising that grabbed the attention of global media and was brutally suppressed by the SPDC. Today, U Khama Inda lives in a makeshift monastery in Bangladesh with a handful of other exiled Burmese monks. U Khama Inda fears that if he returns to Burma, he will be arrested and tortured.
I am a monk, and since 2003 I have opposed military rule, after a student was brutally beaten in public for protesting a soldier’s actions.
In 2003, I was twenty-three years old. At that time, I had been in the monkhood for six years—three years as a novice monk and another three years as a fully ordained monk. I was living in Ponnagyun, Arakan State. In the monastery that day, we had heard about a protest happening in town, but the abbot prevented us from going outside. He said everyone had to stay in. As a monk, my daily activities included meditation, gathering alms from the people, and teaching people about the tenets of Buddhism. I was reading and doing my lessons in the monastery, when five student leaders came to ask for the monks’ help. They said that soldiers were unfairly beating the students at the protest, and asked that the monks help deal with the situation.
They explained why they had started the protest. They were students at a high school near Ponnagyun Pond, on the same street as a military compound. It was examination time and one student couldn’t do his exam well, so he went outside and sat in front of a restaurant to try to relax. There was a crazy boy sitting in front of the restaurant too. People usually gave snacks and money to the boy and asked him to dance. The student gave some money to him and asked the boy to dance, but a drunk SPDC soldier came and started beating the boy. The student tried to stop the soldier but the soldier got angry and started beating the student with a brick and broke some of his ribs. The crazy boy was okay, but the student had to be hospitalized.
It was around 2 p.m. when that happened, and many students were leaving the school building. When they saw that the student had been brutally beaten, they were immediately united in their anger at the soldier. They decided to protest the soldier’s brutal actions at the army battalion base later that afternoon. They wanted to demand that the military take action against the soldier and pay the medical costs for the injured student. Before this incident, the relationship between students and soldiers had been calm.
About 300 students started to gather in front of the army base at around 5 p.m. There were a number of soldiers in the compound, but only about fifteen soldiers equipped with guns were guarding the entrance. The students were about to enter the compound with the intention of asking the military leaders to resolve the problem, but the soldiers shot their guns in the air to frighten them. This made the students even angrier. They started to throw pieces of brick at the soldiers, who responded with slingshots and abusive language, ordering the students not to come any closer. The soldiers used small stones and marbles to shoot the students. Some of the students were hit in the head, face, and other parts of their body. Many of them were injured, and some had to be hospitalized.
I always obeyed the abbot in my monastery, but when the students came and asked for our help, I felt very strongly that I could not stay in the monastery while this situation was happening in town. I was very shocked by the SPDC’s behavior, but I had also witnessed the government and military’s oppression of the people since I was a little boy. The abbot was worried that the monks could get injured, but we were young and active—when we heard about such an atrocity, rather than being afraid, our dissatisfaction grew. That’s why more than 100 monks decided to follow the students back to the army base to participate in the protest. We went there for justice. It was the first time we had opposed the authorities.
When we approached the base, the soldiers tried to attack the protestors by using slingshots and shooting guns into the air. Police officers came to try and settle the problem, but they retreated after they were beaten by the soldiers. People realized then that the police didn’t have as much authority as the military.
We pulled back and tried to re-organize the protesters. As this was happening, a soldier approached us and threatened, “If someone is courageous, they can come forward.”
After breaking up the protest, the senior SPDC commander came to negotiate with the monks and try to settle the problem. “We are all Buddhists here, so we will settle the problem very peacefully,” he told us. The monks responded strongly. We said, “Okay, if you’d like to settle the problem, what will you do with the injured students who are in the hospital now? You have to take care of everything. You have to pay for all of their medical expenses.”
The senior commander promised to settle the problems peacefully and take care of the students. The military promised to cover the medical costs for the student who had been initially wounded, as well as those injured in the protest. They provided all the medical costs, but some students had to treat their wounds at home after being discharged from the hospital before they had completely recovered.
But after one month, the soldiers tried to arrest both the townspeople and the students who had been involved in the protest, especially those who had taken leading roles. More than forty people were arrested, and I learned that some of them had been sentenced to twenty years with hard labor. In prison, they were forced to break stones and cut wood for the army. Some students were able to flee from the labor camp and they told me what happened when I met them again. But some of them are still in prison.
In my opinion, the government sentenced the students like that to show that the regime can do anything it wants. They really can do anything; there is no justice. It was shocking to see the oppression happening before my own eyes. The night of the arrests, I thought about all the people who suffered and who were injured that day, and I felt very sad about how it had all happened. I thought about how we have no justice, no rights. We, normal citizens, had nothing, not even the right to speak out. It made me feel like I wasn’t human. Whatever the military wants, we have to do.
After the protests in 2003, I made the decision to do something for my people and to work against the SPDC’s oppression. That was my first time participating in a protest, and since then, I have been committed to working for the people. This is how I changed my thinking and became involved in the democracy movement.
CHILDHOOD WAS LIKE A BAD DREAM
As a child, I thought soldiers were bullies. I saw soldiers and police come to our village to call people for portering and forced labor. When I heard they were coming, I used to hide in my home, or in the forest behind my house.
The economic situation was getting worse and worse at the time. Villagers were unable to trade freely. Taxes were higher. Farmers were forced to sell rice to the military, and land confiscation happened more and more frequently. Three acres of my family’s farmland was confiscated by the government in November 1992. The military confiscated the land to establish a rice-buying center. The government bought paddies from the villagers to store in a barn, and decided that they wanted to make their barn on our land.11
Boys as young as fourteen or fifteen years were forced to join the army. Some of my friends were taken by the army, and others joined because they were young men who didn’t have jobs.
When I recall my childhood, I think that what happened to the people in my village was very inhumane. People, even children such as myself, had to run away from our own homes. It was very frightening. Sometimes I feel it is following me like a bad dream.
IT’S ALL I’VE EVER WANTED TO BE
I started my monastic education when I was five years old. I went there because the government school didn’t offer a good education; the teachers didn’t come to school regularly, and the schools had days off most of the time. It’s still like this in Arakan State today.
When I was seventeen, I started to live in the monastery and I became a novice monk. I was initiated as a novice monk along with my brothers and my cousins in a big, traditional ceremony held by our two families at the monastery. It is our Rakhine tradition to invite all the villagers and monks to the big pavilion beside the monastery for the initiation ceremony. Before the novice initiation, the novices-to-be must make a procession through the village with Rakhine drums in the front of the group, and then the parents offer all different things such as food, robes, furniture, and medicine to monks in the village monastery and nearby villages. People around the village make donations to the monks as the procession goes through the village, and they also provide food to guests who come from nearby villages. The people also come to see the monks at the monastery, where the monks deliver Buddhist scripture to the people. My initiation ceremony lasted two days.
I felt happy during my novice ceremony because my parents made a big donation to the monks. Even though I had to live away from my family in order to be a novice monk, my parents agreed to it because a monk’s life is peaceful. I missed my family, but I would say prayers for them in the monastery.
In 1999, when I was about nineteen years old, the abbots sent me to Ponnagyun to pursue my higher monastic education.
So far in my life, I’ve decided to be a Buddhist monk and it is all I have wanted to be. I choose this life because I find Buddhism and life as a Buddhist monk to be very peaceful. As for the future, I am not sure—I cannot tell you if maybe I’ll change or something. Before 2003, I never thought I would be an activist in an underground movement. I never thought of myself as someone who was actively against the SPDC. But as I’ve been getting older, and as I’ve witnessed brutal oppression and thought very deeply about it, my mind has become more and more determined every day to oppose the military government.
OUR LIVES ARE CONNECTED
After the incident in 2003, I became involved in educating the public and organizing the monks. I became involved in a secret movement of people within the country who oppose the SPDC. I joined the movement because of the people’s social difficulties. I wanted to save them from having to fear the government.
Several monks and I started by organizing locally first. We began by showing other monks how the people were being brutally oppressed and experiencing extreme poverty. We raised awareness about how the people’s suffering was having an impact on monks’ lives. The lives of monks and laypeople are closely related. Monks depend on donations and alms from the public to survive.
Other monks agreed with my ideas, and some of them also became involved in working to educate and help the people in their local areas. Monks started to organize and help the people in their local communities the best that they could. Some monks in other places weren’t receiving any donations, and they had no place to stay. We created links with different groups of monks in other towns and cities, and sometimes we would work together to educate people.
After the 2003 protest, we also started to monitor the military’s activities and the SPDC’s oppressive actions. Sometimes I would try to counter the actions of the SPDC officials. For example, in 2004, some SPDC officials came to make ID cards for the local people, but they asked the locals for money. The authorities are supposed to issue ID cards free of charge, and it is unfair that they force people to pay a lot of money for them. If you don’t have an ID card, you’re not able to travel anywhere. The people didn’t dare say anything to them, but I said, “Why are you asking for money from the people?” I tried to directly oppose the SPDC’s extortion. The officials didn’t listen to what I said; they just told me to stand aside.
When we started organizing, we had to do it very secretly. We had some difficulties because of the security situation, and we had to be very careful about who we talked to and who we invited to be part of the process. We were sure that if we organized openly, we would be arrested or something bad would happen. If the authorities knew we were organizing, they would crush our organization. So, we would use letters to secretly inform each other about meetings and then come together and discuss the situation in our town. In our discussions, we would secretly decide what actions we should take. We had some older monks who were more experienced in activism and organizing, and they guided us in what to do. Later, some activist laypeople also became involved in our organization and helped show us what to do. We secretly planned demonstrations targeting the military government. However, we decided that we had to wait for the right time to make our plans happen.
WE DO IT FOR PEOPLE, NOT FOR POWER
In 2006, I moved to Sittwe, in Arakan State, to continue my monastic education. The Saffron Revolution first began in Sittwe, and I actively participated. The Saffron Revolution got its name because the movement was led by monks who wear saffron-colored robes. In mid-August, 2007, a number of monks in Sittwe started to protest against the soaring price of petrol. After the fuel prices were hiked, the prices of different commodities also rose. The price of rice doubled. Before the petrol price hike, rice cost only 300 kyats per kilogram, but after the price hike, the price became 600 or 700 kyats.22 It became very difficult for people to survive daily.
This also impacted the monks very seriously because monks depend on people’s donations of food. When monks went out to collect their alms, the people could not donate anything, so the monks didn’t have any food to eat. The people would come out crying, “Reverend, sorry, we have nothing to donate to you today.” When we heard of these kinds of woes from the people, the monks felt upset. We decided we should do something for the people.
About a week later, the monks arranged a meeting to encourage people to join a protest. There were more than 200 monks, university students, and community members together. The reason for the meeting was to speed up people’s involvement.
During the meeting, we decided to protest the high fuel prices and the people’s poverty. We wanted the government to reduce the price of commodities in Arakan State. We decided to organize the protest not only for the local people, but for the nation—we knew that if we started, the nation would follow.33
We thought that with many people demonstrating, the government would be forced to become aware of the people’s suffering. We knew that protesting was very dangerous in Burma, but we thought that the peoples’ suffering was more dangerous because they didn’t have enough food. We worked to gather the people and start a demonstration.
In the last week of August, we started protesting with more than eighty monks and two or three hundred laypeople. We decided to start the protest by reciting the Metta Sutra. The Metta Sutra is a special prayer and verse in the Buddhist scripture for the well-being of the people. We recite it for peace and happiness, and freedom from suffering for all beings. Wherever monks go, or whatever they do, such as participate in a ceremony, they must first show compassion for the people and all beings—so we used the Metta Sutra prayer to show compassion for the people in the 2007 protests. When you show compassion, others can understand you more easily. This was not the first time we had used the Metta Sutra prayer during protest. There were monks involved in the 1988 protests who had also used the Metta Sutra to show compassion for all beings.
We started to recite the prayer when we first started marching in the street. We chanted this: “May all living things live in peace and be free from danger, anger, and poverty.” We chanted this, aimed at all creatures in different directions of the universe by addressing “south, north, east, and west.” People encouraged the monks, first paying homage to us, and then joining us in the protest.
On that first day, the authorities didn’t give us any serious problems. They just warned the monks not to protest in the streets and to go back to their monasteries. But on the second day, the senior SDPC government officials sent the order to disperse the protests by beating us.
By the second day, there were maybe one or two thousand people marching on the streets of Sittwe. Students and ordinary people joined the protest and demanded democracy and human rights. As more people joined, we became more enthusiastic. It was surprising to see lots of people showing their support. We felt very courageous because we had the opportunity to say out loud what we had silently been keeping inside.
Then the military and police started breaking up groups of demonstrators by firing tear gas and beating them with canes. There were equal numbers of soldiers and police, and they arrested and beat the monks who were demonstrating. I was beaten. The soldiers and the police had no targets when they were beating people; they’d wave their stick and whatever they hit, it didn’t matter to them. They also threw stones and shot people with catapults. The protesters were dispersing with bleeding wounds on their heads and bodies. When the police started to get even more violent, I was forced to run away with the other monks. When we were running, I was fortunate that a cane didn’t hit me, but I fell down, and some other people stepped on me while they were running.
From what I saw, not all of the police came forward to beat the people. But some of the junior police had come forward because of pressure from the higher authorities. If they didn’t come forward to beat us, they would also be beaten or even arrested.
The authorities started trying to arrest the monks, especially those who were taking leading roles in the demonstration. The intelligence units and soldiers also came to raid monasteries very late at night. Some monks were arrested and no one heard anything about what happened to them. Later we heard that they were taken to remote prisons and interrogated, seriously beaten, and killed.
The authorities came looking for me because I was one of the leaders of the protest and I also reported information to exile media. But when the police came to raid my monastery, I was not there. I knew it wasn’t secure enough for me to stay inside, so starting from the first day of the protests I had decided to change locations and stay in a different place in the city. When I heard that they had come to find me, I decided that I had to flee completely from Sittwe. If they arrested me, they would force me to leave the monkhood, and they would beat and interrogate me. In Arakan State, monks were forcibly de-robed and imprisoned. Many had disappeared after arrest. I had no idea what to do to for my security other than escape from the SPDC’s hands as fast as possible. I fled to Bangladesh that day.
In Bangladesh, I heard on an overseas radio program that after the police had used violence against the demonstrators in Sittwe, more people became involved in the protests every day. The protests were spreading to Pakokku and Rangoon. I heard that police had arrested and beaten more monks involved in the demonstrations, and had used tear-gas bombs and guns on the crowd.
When monks throughout Burma heard the news about the beatings and killings, they demanded that the government apologize. The monks said that if the government didn’t apologize, they would launch a nationwide strike. This meant boycotting the offering of alms from the main authorities and military families. Burmese monks officially launched the strike on September 18, 2007, refusing to accept alms from military families and turning their alms bowls upside down. Monks in exile also actively demonstrated—including here in Bangladesh.
Nowadays, there are many monks who don’t accept offerings by the military authorities. Without an apology, we will never open our bowls to the government’s donations. Hundreds of monks were killed, and some of the monks’ leaders, such as U Gambira and U Ithariya, were sentenced to jail. They are still there now.
A REAL BUDDHIST COUNTRY
Burma is not a real Buddhist country. In Buddhist culture, men and women pay respect to monks and consider them sacred, because it is monks who have maintained and preached the Buddha’s teachings since he passed away. Although the ruling generals consider themselves as Buddhists, they are not following the non-violence teachings of the Buddha. They commit atrocities to maintain their power.
As a Buddhist monk, it is my responsibility to continue using non-violent means to fight for democracy. With compassion for all beings, we can overcome our difficulties and suffering. People might criticize our nonviolent movement, but as I am a Buddhist monk, I cannot use violence. When we started the Saffron Revolution, we felt compassion for the people’s suffering and felt we should do something to help free them from suffering. Like this, we started a movement. Now we also want to continue building this kind of movement for the future, because there will be no democracy in Burma without this.
There are many difficulties for me to survive in Bangladesh. There are very few Buddhists and monasteries here. The monasteries cannot accommodate even one more monk because they are in a difficult situation themselves. I have been registered with the UNHCR, but it has not provided any help. Although I am free from the military government, I am living with worry and a lack of security in everything. I want to go back to Burma. After I arrived here, I couldn’t have any contact with my family. I miss them. But if I go back, it is sure that I will get arrested. What will happen to me in the future is uncertain.
I wish I could study here in Bangladesh, but I can’t; I’m just trying to survive. I’m living with the help of the organization I work with, which is known as the IBMO—the International Burmese Monks Organization. We formed the IBMO in November 2007, after the Saffron Revolution, because so many monks had to leave Burma and were scattered everywhere, but we needed to be organized. The other name for our organization is Sasana Moli.44 The name relates to our mission, which is to safeguard and defend Buddhism in Burma. The Burmese military government has been beating and killing monks, and even now monks are continually monitored at monasteries, and when they travel. But despite the government’s restrictions, some monks are still trying to do what they can for the people.
We want to support the monks’ democracy movement in Burma, and also be able to launch the movement internationally, to protect the monks in exile—some monks are here in Bangladesh, others are in India and so on. Through the IBMO, we are able to connect with other monks to share critical information and organize. Even though I fled from Burma and am living in Bangladesh, I still oppose the Burmese government and I’m still involved in the movement against them. Sometimes we go to the Burmese embassy in Dhaka and demonstrate in front of it—we demand that the Burmese government stop oppressing its people.
The Saffron Revolution taught me that despite whatever violence is perpetuated by the SPDC, we should continue to fight and stand for our beliefs. We should protest peacefully and not withdraw. We should stand firm and go on. We need people from all walks of life to participate. Everyone should fight so that we can have democracy.
If all the people in Burma work together, then I think it is certain that we will have human rights and democracy. With the public’s participation in the movement, we can overthrow the military government. The democracy movement is not only for the Buddhist people in my country, it’s for every person—Muslims, Christians, everyone. We work for everyone.
I hope that international governments do something for the people of Burma, to help solve the problems we have. Right now we are suffering severely in all respects, while the government is trying to hold the 2010 election to prolong their rule. We need help—the people cannot overthrow the government alone.
1 The term “paddy” has a variety of uses; most commonly it refers to cultivated rice with intact husks, or to a lowland rice field.
2 300 kyats is approximately US$0.30; 600 and 700 kyats are approximately US$0.60 and US$0.70, respectively.
3 Sittwe was the first city that monks gathered in to demonstrate during the Saffron Revolution. Protestors from the 88 Student Generation group staged a protest in Rangoon on August 19, 2007.
4 Also known as the International Burmese Monks Organization, “Sasana Moli” translates as “the crown jewel of the monastic community.”