The government was highly selective as to which popular demands it would meet and which it would suppress. In this way, it was contributing to the shaping of what was acceptable and what was not when it came to participatory politics in the country, and at the same time could shield itself behind a nebulous idea of ‘popular will’ to deflect responsibility for discrimination against the Rohingya and other Muslims. This emboldened Wirathu and the 969 Movement to carry their message throughout Burma, which was directed not only against the Rohingya, but against Muslims in general. Apart from the increasingly ubiquitous stickers designed by Ashin Sadama, monks associated with the movement toured the country giving sermons about the need to protect Buddhism from the Muslim threat, and VCDs with those sermons, often accompanied by gruesome images of brutal crimes purportedly committed by Muslims, were made widely available in markets throughout the country.
The rhetoric of Wirathu was particularly virulent. In April 2013, I went with two other colleagues to interview him in his monastery. Sitting beneath several huge portraits of himself, he spoke with a calm demeanour and a boyish, expressionless face that sometimes showed an elusive smile, or even a grin of pain when explaining the ‘Muslim conspiracy’ that he claimed was threatening to engulf Burma. A man of contradictions – there was a portrait of Aung San Suu Kyi behind him, but he accused her and her party of being controlled by Muslims and supported Thein Sein – he seemed consistent only in his loathing of Islam. At one point he claimed that all rapes in the country were committed by Muslims, a ludicrous accusation for which he only referenced vague reports he assured us he had in his possession.
‘If Burmese Buddhists do not take action, by 2100 the whole country will resemble the Mayu region of Arakan State’, he explained, referring to northern Arakan. His solution was a simple formula: ‘Buddhists can talk with Muslims, but not marry them; there can be friendship between them, but not trade.’ In this formulation, Wirathu condensed how he and other 969 monks portrayed the alleged Muslim threat as that of a monstrous horde bent on economic and demographic domination. What motivated Wirathu to get involved in his personal anti-Muslim crusade was something of a mystery, as he had given conflicting accounts to different interviewers. But, sincere or not, the explanation that he gave us was revealing of his ideology and that of the 969 Movement. He claimed that two decades before, a Muslim who had converted to Buddhism had given him a ‘secret message’ circulated among Burmese Muslims with the plans to Islamise the country: the alleged strategy was to take over the economy in order to lull as many poor Buddhist girls as possible into marrying Muslim men and converting them, and thus slowly to make Burma an Islamic country.
The origins of both 969 and Wirathu’s personal crusade, which seemed to have the blessing of the military regime, can probably be traced back to the early 1990s. According to an investigation by the British journalist Andrew Marshall, the movement was inspired by Kyaw Lwin, a former monk and government official who died in 2001.6 In 1991, the military junta created the Department for the Promotion and Propagation of the Sasana (‘religion’ in Pali) (DPPS), under the Ministry of Religion, and appointed Kyaw Lwin as its head. One year later, the DPPS published Kyaw Lwin’s book, How to Live as a Good Buddhist. The book was republished in 2000 under the title The Best Buddhist, with a cover showing an early version of the 969 logo. Kyaw Lwin, who had close relations with the military junta, including its highest authority, Senior General Than Shwe, met Wirathu and other future 969 leaders, and stayed in touch with them over the years. It was after his death that Wirathu started the anti-Muslim preaching that would send him to jail. But incarceration did not deter him. A few months later, I would meet a former political prisoner who had shared some time in jail with him in Obo prison, in Mandalay. According to the former political prisoner, who at that time was working as a teacher for Burmese migrant workers and refugees in Mae Sot (Thailand), Wirathu had access to materials that other prisoners could not possess, such a mobile phones and books, enjoyed a degree of freedom of movement between the parts of the jail, and continued preaching in jail, often to hardened criminals.
It is unclear whether the 969 monks and Wirathu were supported by the military, but there are strong suspicions that this was the case. In any case, most of the extremist monks seemed to be true believers in their cause, rather than cynical opportunists. And the phenomenon of Buddhist monks engaging in nationalist politics, stoking anti-Muslim or xenophobic sentiments, was not new in Burma.
Not all Buddhist monks adhered to the principles of the 969 Movement. Many stayed away from politics, and there was a small minority of monks who vocally opposed 969; but they seemed to have less means to voice their message of tolerance. One of them was Ashin Pum Na Wontha, the fifty-six-year-old abbot of a monastery in Rangoon with a history of political activism dating back to 1988. He was a member of the Peace Cultivation Network, an organization established to promote understanding between different faiths. In an interview in his monastery, he told me that Ashin Wirathu was merely a puppet ‘motivated by his vanity and thirst for fame.’ He was convinced that Wirathu and the 969 Movement received financial support from the ‘cronies’, a group of businessmen who had gotten wealthy during the military dictatorship through their connection with the generals. According to him, some Muslim businessmen had huge assets, and the ‘cronies’ were trying to get their hands on them. Those claims were impossible to verify, but it appeared evident that wealthy people were donating to the 969’s propaganda juggernaut. With the political opening and the increasing availability of mobile phones and access to the internet, the message of 969 was spreading dangerously fast and wide. Moreover, the recent violence in Arakan, and the way it had been framed by the local media, provided the movement with plausibility in the eyes of many Burmese Buddhists.
Historically, there had been five groups of Muslims in Burma: the Rohingya, the Kaman, the Panthay (Chinese Muslims who mostly settled in Shan State), Muslim immigrants from the Indian subcontinent during the colonial period, and less numerous Burman Muslims. The overwhelming majority of all of these groups are Sunni, with only a tiny proportion of Shia Muslims in central Burma. The largest group is the Rohingya, who – as a consequence of the apartheid regime imposed on them by the state since the late 1970s – are also the least integrated into Burmese socioeconomic life. Muslims elsewhere in the country are comparatively well integrated, but they have also suffered discrimination. Many of the descendants of Indian migrants have kept their distinctive culture, dress and customs, and sometimes even the languages of their ancestors; but it would be extremely difficult to find one who does not speak Burmese, as most have attended public schools and universities.
Many others are of mixed descent, whether Indo-Burman, Indo-Karen or Indo-Shan; and others still are simply Burman, or Shan, or belong to other groups. These Muslims are basically indistinguishable from the rest of the Burmese, their religion being their only distinguishing characteristic. But ethnicity is so intertwined with religion in Burma that, in informal conversations, the ‘Muslims’ are often counterposed to ‘Burmese’ or ‘Burmans’ – a conflation of religious and ethnic/national categories reflected in the old adage that ‘to be Burmese is to be Buddhist’.
This conflation also works at the official level. The Citizen Scrutiny Card that all Burmese citizens have to carry includes both their ethnicity and their religion. Thus, Burma’s state polices contribute to fixing the identities of its citizens; though all of them are supposed to have the same rights,7 the cards make it easier to discriminate based on ethnicity or religion. Moreover, the authorities often arbitrarily ascribe ethnicity on the basis of religion. The cards were originally issued by the Ministry of Migration and Population (later renamed as Ministry of Labour, Immigration and Population by the Suu Kyi administration), whose motto is: ‘A race does not face extinction by being swallowed into the earth, but from being swallowed up by another race.’ Muslims, regardless of their ethnicity, are routinely classified as ‘Indians’, ‘Pakistanis’ or ‘Bengalis’, depending on the whim of the official who issues their card. Theirs is always defined as a foreign ancestry.