We managed to talk on the phone with Zaw Htay, the director of the president’s office, and he echoed this argument. ‘The Home Affairs Ministry has all the evidence on these activities, but we can’t make it public because this is a national security issue’, he told us. To the question of how the defendants would be able have a fair trial when the evidence against them was not produced, he simply replied, ‘They have the right to appeal in upper courts.’ He justified the arrests by saying, ‘There are many activities outside the country and they want to promote their terrorist attacks with some people inside the country, so right now we are doing a pre-emptive strike to protect ourselves against any possible attack.’ The talk about a ‘pre-emptive strike’ had echoes of the rhetoric used by the US government in its war on terror, like Zaw Htay’s assertion that ‘we have to balance our security with the defence of our freedoms’. Eventually, the twelve accused were sentenced to seven years in jail for belonging to an armed group whose existence was never proved.17
Meanwhile, Wirathu was acquiring international fame. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine under the headline ‘The Face of Buddhist Terror’.18 The cover provoked the fury of Buddhists in Burma, with demonstrations against the magazine, and even managed to offend some of Wirathu’s most vocal detractors, including the former monk Ashin Gambira. A leader of what was internationally known as the ‘Saffron revolution’ in 2007, Gambira did not defend Wirathu, but found it insulting to find the words ‘terror’ and ‘Buddhism’ in the same sentence.19 The president defended both Buddhism and the controversial monk. After describing Wirathu as a ‘son of Buddha’ and a ‘noble man’ committed to peace in a post in his Facebook page, he said, ‘The article in Time magazine can cause misunderstanding about the Buddhist religion, which has existed for millennia and is followed by the majority of Burmese citizens.’20 As was already happening in relation to the conflict in Arakan State, domestic and international perceptions about the country and its intercommunal tensions were steadily diverging, leading to a belated discovery abroad that followers of Buddhism – widely seen in the West as a peaceful faith – were also capable of committing violence in the name of their religion. Within Burma itself, a growing siege mentality among Buddhists, who began to feel that foreigners did not understand the country’s culture and challenges, was slowly setting in. This attitude would grow in the following years, helping to entrench a xenophobic variety of nationalism increasingly prevalent in Burma.
It was unclear to what extent the ethno-nationalist monks had been directly involved in the anti-Muslim pogroms. Surely monks like Wirathu had contributed to the creation of a climate of intercommunal tension, but they had been careful to distance themselves from the violence. Wirathu invariably placed the blame on the Muslims themselves, refusing to acknowledge that his sermons had stoked the flames of anti-Muslim hatred, and insisting that he was ‘just informing the public’. But there was one case in which there was little doubt that his words had contributed to unleashing deadly riots. On 30 June 2014, Wirathu posted on his Facebook page a denunciation of an alleged rape by three Muslims of a Buddhist girl working for one of them in the coffee shop they owned in Mandalay.21
The next day, according to several witnesses, a group of twenty-five to thirty unknown men roamed around the Muslim quarter downtown, hurling insults at Muslims and damaging vehicles and shops, all unimpeded by the riot police who were already present in the area. Some Buddhist monks managed to bring the crowds under control, and three days later the police stopped the riots. Two men had been killed: one Buddhist and one Muslim. It turned out that the rape allegations were false. Even then, Wirathu found a chance to blame Muslims. ‘The rape of Ma Soe Soe on June 28, 2014 at the hands of Sun Cafe owners Nay Win and San Maung is not just a criminal offence but an offence aimed at instigating violence in our country. The July 1 and 2 incidents in Mandalay are not a clash of religions or races but a Jihad. They are gathering in mosques in Mandalay under the guise of Ramadan but in reality they are recruiting and preparing for Jihad against us’, Wirathu posted when the riots were over. He was never prosecuted by the authorities for instigating these riots, as he had been in 2003.
After the riots in Mandalay, episodes of intercommunal violence receded in central Burma; by this time the 969 symbol had almost disappeared from view. The Sangha Maha Nayaka Committee – a body of senior monks appointed by the government to regulate the monastic community – banned its political use in September 2013. But that did not put an end to the activities of nationalist monks like Ashin Sada Ma or Wirathu. In January 2014, in a massive conference of monks in Mandalay, they founded a new organization that replaced the 969 Movement. It was named A-myo Batha Thatana Saun Shauq Ye a Pwe, or Association for the Protection of Race and Religion, better known by the Burmese acronym Ma Ba Tha.22 The Association helped to organize Buddhist ‘Sunday school’ classes for children throughout Burma, selling curriculum books to any interested Buddhists. The aim of the schools was to impart Buddhist values to the new generations. Their teachings were usually not explicitly anti-Muslim, but the underlying message was clear: it was necessary to protect Buddhism and, as many Ma Ba Tha monks made clear, the main threat was Islam.23
The crowning achievement of Ma Ba Tha was the passing of four ‘Race and Religion Protection Laws’ in 2015.24 The first law bans polygamy. The second makes religious conversion dependant on obtaining approval from a Registration Board for religious conversion at the township level, and punishes forced conversions. The third law regulates the marriages of Buddhist women to non-Buddhist men, mandating local registrars to post marriage applications for fourteen days in public, in order to determine whether there are any objections to the proposed unions – and the couple may marry only if there are no objections. The fourth law imposes a limit on the number of children a woman can bear, but only in certain regions. Muslims are not mentioned explicitly in the laws, but it was clear to everybody that they were directed at them, while the Population Control Bill was to be applied in Arakan to the Rohingya community exclusively. The laws had wide popular support.
A draft of the interreligious marriage law was circulated in the summer of 2013, and monks organized demonstrations in support. A campaign to gather signatures was launched around that time, with stalls set up all around the country, and it was claimed that 2.5 million people signed. There was opposition from some quarters – especially from women’s groups, who regarded the laws as inimical to women’s rights.25 Ma Ba Tha responded with a condemnation of ‘those critics, who are backed by foreign groups, for raising the human rights issues and not working for the benefit of the public and not being loyal to the state’, and some of the critics received death threats.26 But many women had also participated actively in the promotion of the laws, as they now had an opportunity to take a public role.27
The nationalist monks not only succeeded during this period in getting their laws passed, but also managed to determine to a large degree the issues that were considered of national importance and would take centre-stage in public debates throughout Burma.
Meanwhile, other kinds of mobilizations, for workers’ rights or against rampant land-grabbing, were virtually relegated to the margins. Some of them acquired brief prominence, including a series of student protests in early 2014 against a new education law that was to give the government tight control over the universities. The students organized nationwide, coordinating a big march to Rangoon. But they were blocked by the police in Letpadan, 100 kilometres north of the city, and were eventually beaten with great brutality. Many of them were arrested and put in jail for two years.28 The new education law was eventually passed with overwhelming parliamentary support, including that of Aung San Suu Kyi, who during the protests had done little to hide her annoyance, saying: ‘Whether it is in this country