It was very difficult to ascertain exactly what had happened from the contradictory accounts. But the notion that the Muslims would torch their own houses – a trope often repeated in Burma – supposedly to get access to the camps and the international aid they would receive there, seemed absurd. It fitted too neatly into the preconceived discourse circulated by many Rakhine of the Rohingya as abject ‘beggars’. People holding these views seemed to think that Muslims in the camps were well provided for, but very few Rakhine ever set foot there. Complete segregation, again, nourished stories about the other group that served to further demonize it.
While it was difficult to find out with certainty what had happened during the violence, it was clear that the authorities were dispensing very different treatment to the displaced from the different communities. Most of the displaced Rakhine in Kyaukpyu had been sheltered in a Buddhist monastery, Than Pyu, while others stayed in the houses of relatives and friends. There were 150 people sheltered in the monastery, and the government had sent two military doctors and two nurses to attend to them.
In contrast, healthcare was woefully inadequate in the vast zone of camps for Muslims near Sittwe. According to IDPs in one of the camps, the government sent just one doctor once a week, and he only provided paracetamol to treat any ailment. In Tat Kal Pyin, a village surrounded by a camp, there was a makeshift clinic staffed by seven volunteers from Rangoon who were overstretched attending hundreds of patients every day. Some international NGOs, including Médecins Sans Frontières, were visiting the camps, but they were facing hostility from the local Rakhine population, and could not go every day. At that stage, aid in the camps was not yet well organized, and Muslim people in the camps were dying of preventable diseases. Malnutrition was also rife.
The violence in October had not only affected the Rohingya. Most of the Muslim victims, particularly in Kyaukpyu and Myebon, but also in other townships, had been Kaman – a Muslim ethnic group that arrived in Burma in the late seventeenth century and that, in contrast to the Rohingya, is officially recognized as one of Burma’s 135 ‘national races’. As citizens, the Kaman had until then been able to participate in Burma’s social and political life, but they were starting to share the fate of the Rohingya. Among the Kaman affected by the violence was Khin Shwe, a forty-six-year-old mathematician who had until then been the only Muslim professor at Sittwe University. She was originally from the township of Pauktaw, where she found herself during the riots in October. When the violence broke out, she tried to escape in a commercial boat, but the army did not allow her to embark, alleging that it was not safe for her. She then decided to take one of the rickety boats that Muslims were using to flee what was virtually a war zone. The boat sank on the way to Sittwe, and thirty-eight of its fifty passengers perished, including her. One of the survivors was her younger brother, Mohammed, who I spoke to in one of the camps in Sittwe, where he told me what had happened to her.
Khin Mar Saw was another Kaman woman displaced by the violence. This small, dignified forty-two-year-old woman hailed from the devastated quarter in Kyaukpyu I had seen a few days before. She had previously worked as a clerk in the local police station, but during the violence in June, feeling unsafe, she decided to take leave, and moved with her two children to Shan State, in the north of the country, where she had some relatives. She returned in October, thinking that the situation in Arakan had calmed down. A few days later her neighbourhood was in flames. When she was fleeing, she was told by a cousin that her son had been shot while he was trying to put out the flames in the local mosque. While I was interviewing her, her husband was on a beach near Sittwe with other displaced people. They had been stranded there, surrounded by the military, for days. Bursting into tears, she asked me how she and her family could get asylum in Europe. ‘We Muslims have no future in this country anymore’, she said.
A few months before, when I had visited Sittwe for the first time, Rakhine ethno-nationalists had been adamant that they did not have any problem with Muslim people, only with ‘Bengali’ people, pointing out that there had not been any clash with Kaman people. After the violence in October, they would say that Kaman had the right to stay in Arakan, but that many of them were ‘fake Kaman’, and in fact ‘illegal Bengali immigrants’ who had somehow managed to bribe officers to obtain documents. It seemed that the circle of the ‘undesirable’ population had been widened from a specific ethnic group to include all members of the Muslim religion. And that circle would be widened even further in the coming months, extending beyond the mountains that mark the border between Arakan and the rest of the country.
‘We Will Build a Fence With Our Bones if Necessary’
During late 2012 and early 2013, a seemingly innocuous symbol began to spread in cities and villages throughout Burma. Thousands of stickers appeared in shops, street stalls and taxis in cities and villages showing the multi-coloured Buddhist flag in the background, the wheel of Dhamma at the centre, the pillars of Asoka – an Indian king who spread Buddhism throughout the Indian subcontinent in the third century BC – with three lions at the top, and 969 in Burmese numerals. This number stood for the attributes of the three jewels of Buddhism: Buddha, the Dhamma (his teachings) and the Sangha (the monastic community). The stickers were used to signal that the owners of the business were Buddhists, but the underlying message, which everybody implicitly understood, was to make clear that they were not Muslims. The stickers were part of what came to be known as the ‘969 Movement’, a somewhat loose association of Buddhist monks and lay people devoted to protecting their religion against the purported threat of Islam.
The logo was launched by some monks on 30 October 2012, on the full-moon day of Thadingyut, one of the main festivals of the Buddhist calendar, in Moulmein, the capital of Mon State, in the east of the country. A few months later, I interviewed its designer and the secretary of the organization, Ashin Sada Ma, the abbot of Mya Sadi monastery. A soft-spoken man in his late thirties, he claimed that the campaign was intended to educate the youth about the value of their Buddhist heritage: ‘In the modern age, the young people don’t know the jewels of Buddhism; this logo is designed to remind them.’ He made an effort during our interview to present the movement in the most positive light and dissociate it from any anti-Muslim message. He denied that the recent conflict in Arakan had anything to do with the decision to launch the campaign, but it was evident that the issue worried him.
At one point he argued that the ‘Bengalis’ were fuelling conflict by ‘migrating’ to Burma. ‘If they come, they can easily influence our country. They are trying to improve their lives in our country and our lands. So this symbol and campaign is intended to defend ourselves. I fear that some Bengali Muslims are terrorists and have a mission to Islamise our country’, he said. ‘Only small parts of Asia are Buddhist now; in the past Indonesia, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and many other places, including Turkey and Iraq, were Buddhist countries, but now they are lost’, he added, showing me a map of Asia that I had seen in one of the corridors of the monastery and would see again in many places, with the majority religion in each country. ‘We will build a fence with our bones if necessary’, was its slogan.
Ashin Sada Ma and a few other monks were the prime movers and organizers of the 969 Movement, but its most famous and vociferous representative was Ashin Wirathu, the abbot of the sprawling Ma Soe Yein monastery in Mandalay, the country’s second-biggest city. Wirathu had been arrested in 2003 for inciting anti-Muslim riots in his hometown, Kyaukse, which had left eleven dead and fourteen injured.1 He had been sentenced to twenty-five years in jail, but was released in early 2012 as part of a series of amnesties ordered by President Thein Sein to boost his reformist credentials. Wirathu visited Maungdaw, in northern Arakan, after the riots in June.2 Unsurprisingly, he focused solely on the violence committed by the Rohingya, placing all the blame on the ‘Bengalis’. When he returned to Mandalay, he organized a three-day-long march in Mandalay supporting the president’s proposal to expel the Rohingya from the country.3