Ahmed Mahmood looks at the spot in Myo Thu Gyi village, in Myanmar's Rakhine state, where he saw the Myanmar Border Guard Police executing three villagers, on March 19, 2017 Photo: Antolin Avezuela Aristu

A convoy of the Myanmar police patrols the streets of Maungdaw Town during the night curfew on in Maungdaw, Myanmar, on March 19, 2017 Photo: Antolin Avezuela Aristu

Asia is 8 months pregnant as she stands for a photo with her son in the Balu Kali refugee camp in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, on Jan. 17, 2017. Allison Joyce—Getty Images

Friends and relatives prepare for a wedding at the Baw Du Pha Rohingya displacement camp in Rakhine state, Myanmar, on March 12, 2017 (Photo: Aung Naing Soe)

A Rohingya Muslim woman and her son cry after being caught by Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) while illegally crossing at a border check point in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, on Nov. 21, 2016 (Photo: Mohammad Ponir Hossain—REUTERS)

A patrol of Bangladeshi Border Guards attempts to prevent Rohingya refugees from crossing into Bangladesh from Burma, on the banks of the Naf River, near Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, on Nov. 22, 2016 (Anik Rahman/NurPhoto/Sipa USA)

A Rohingya refugee woman with her boy in a refugee camp at Teknaf, Bangladesh, on Nov. 27, 2016 (Photo: K M Asad—LightRocket/Getty Images)

Rohingya Muslims who have fled from violence in Burma take shelter at the Leda unregistered Rohingya camp in Teknaf, Bangladesh, on Dec. 5 2016 (Zakir Hossain Chowdhury—Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

By Simon Lewis
TIME
July 15, 2016

However, long rooted anti-Muslim sentiment shows few other signs of abating

The rise of a sometimes violent anti-Muslim movement has tarnished Burma’s transition from a military dictatorship toward democracy. But the country’s hard-line nationalists now find themselves isolated.

Members of the ruling National League for Democracy (NLD) have openly criticized the most prominent group responsible for spreading Islamophobia. And the country’s officially sanctioned council of monks this week declared that the group — the Organization for the Protection of Race and Religion, known by the Burmese-language initials Ma Ba Tha — should be disbanded. Could Burma finally be squaring up to its bullying Buddhists?

Tensions between Buddhist and Muslim communities in Burma, formally known as Myanmar, have heightened since a military junta began handing over power to civilian leaders. In 2012, violent clashes in the west of the country saw scores killed and about 140,000 people displaced, mostly from the Muslim Rohingya community whose claims to citizenship in the country are angrily contested. As outbreaks of communal violence then spread to towns across the country, a contingent of Buddhist monks — claiming the country’s dominant faith was under threat from Islamic interlopers — used their sermons to call for a boycott of Muslim-owned businesses and to push legislation restricting religious conversion and inter-faith marriage. Some of those monks, most prominently the cherubic-faced Wirathu (who featured on a TIME cover story titled “The Face of Buddhist Terror”), formed Ma Ba Tha to organize this movement.

After setting up branches nationwide, the group had success in getting the military-backed administration of former President Thein Sein to pass four “race and religion” laws that clearly targeted Muslims (one law allowed the government to attempt to stem population growth; the nationalists’ hallmark scare story is that Muslims will eventually outnumber Buddhists in parts or the whole of the country). But when Ma Ba Tha threw its weight behind the then ruling party at elections last November, most people ignored its call to vote for candidates who “will not let our race and religion disappear.” After the elections, a senior Ma Ba Tha monk left the group, denouncing its political activities. Anti-Muslim sentiment has continued to simmer, however. The NLD and its leader, Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, have been accused of not standing up for the Muslim minority. The party purged Muslim candidates from its lists ahead of the polls and, since it came to power in late March, has been labeled “cowardly” for its approach to the Rohingya issue. In just the past few weeks, mobs in two separate areas of the country attacked mosques, setting one on fire.

But the tide appeared to turn earlier this month when Phyo Min Thein, the NLD’s new chief minister of Rangoon, was recorded during a trip to Singapore openly criticizing Ma Ba Tha. The group responded by calling for the official to be punished. (In the not too distant past, an NLD official wasjailed for “insulting religion” after he criticized the group.) But a senior NLD member said the party would not heed Ma Ba Tha’s demands. And when Phyo Min Thein, arrived at Rangoon’s airport last week, greeted by reporters and a handful of pro–Ma Ba Tha demonstrators, he refused to roll back on his statements. He had meant what he said: Ma Ba Tha was unnecessary, given the existence of the State Sangha Maha Nayaka Committee, a panel of 47 of Burma’s most senior monks that oversees the practice of Buddhism in the country. On Tuesday, the committee itself came to the same conclusion, throwing the future of the saffron-robed nationalists into doubt.

“It’s another sign that Ma Ba Tha has probably overreached its self-importance and overestimated its public appeal,” says David Mathieson, a senior researcher on Burma with Human Rights Watch. “Chastised by their weak showing of political clout around the election, the movement has tried to move back to some … nationalist and defender-of-the-faith credibility, but [they] are seriously hobbled by some of their prominent monk leaders and their shrilly racist and clearly unspiritual messages.”

Although Ma Ba Tha may be weakened, that doesn’t mean Buddhist nationalism is going away, Mathieson says. Tensions between Buddhist and Muslim communities stretch back to when Burma was under British colonial rule, and later were fanned by dictators seeking legitimacy. There’s no reason to think anti-Muslim sentiment has vanished overnight, in recent years there has been a drastic uptick in Islamophobic messages spread onsocial media, and by other means. Mathieson says that a network of schools giving nationalistic instruction to Buddhist children also warrants concern. The Dhamma School Foundation — which has links to 969, a movement focused on identifying Buddhist businesses, in contrast to Muslim-owned ones — is setting up schools all over the country. An even more virulent anti-Muslim movement also remains in the country’s western Arakan state, where local Buddhists continue to seek further marginalization of the Rohingya.

As for Ma Ba Tha’s front man, Wirathu has indicated that he won’t go quietly. In a Facebook post on Wednesday, he branded Suu Kyi, the country’s de facto leader, “a woman dictator,” according to Agence France-Presse. “I have seen that the ruling party and the new civilian government is stepping forward to target me as ‘enemy No. 1’ to destroy the whole Ma Ba Tha group to the end,” Wirathu wrote.

By Francis Wade

TIME

December 16, 2015

Sectarian hatred shown by Burma's Buddhist extremists toward the country's Muslim minority has become so pronounced that activists and politicians appear unable to stop it

The first text message came through several days after Myo had ended his workshop. “F—g kalar,” it read, using a slur that Burmese ultra-nationalists like to apply to Muslims or others of South Asian appearance. “Why don’t you stop your work?”

It was late July, exactly one year on from a deadly bout of communal violence between Buddhists and Muslims in the northern Burmese city of Mandalay. The young activist, whose name has been changed to protect his identity, had been working on a series of peace-building initiatives between the two communities, which had fissured in the wake of several waves of violence since 2012.

The workshop had gone relatively smoothly, or so he thought. A second message, the following day, caused even more alarm. “You want to die? Why are you pressuring our monks?” Myo grew increasingly agitated. As someone openly advocating interfaith harmony in a deeply divided society he was already too conspicuous for comfort.

He thought back on the workshop. Among the group were a number of progressive monks, and he was sure the tone of the meeting chimed with their own desires for religious accord. But there had been one nun present who had seemed resentful toward him. After a session on the Buddhist concept of “right speech” — defined by Buddha as words promoting peace and happiness — she fell quiet. He knew the nun had close ties to Wirathu, the abbot of a monastery in Mandalay, who is known not for his right speech but hate speech towards Muslims.

Myo told TIME that he decided to postpone future workshops. But later that day, a third message was received. “Who the hell are you to teach our monks? Motherf—r kalar, you’re going to die,” it warned. When a final message arrived on July 26, he decided to flee Mandalay and go into hiding. “We will see you tomorrow,” it read.

During its nearly half-century of military rule, the world tended to view Burma — formally known as Myanmar — as a black-and-white case of bad junta vs. good opposition, whose most visible luminaries were Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and many of the country’s saffron-robed monks. But the democratization process, supported by Western countries eager to draw resource-rich Burma out of China’s hands and into theirs, has brought into the open communal divides that had previously been hidden from view. Monks, whose leadership of the September 2007 uprising against military rule won them international admiration, have become among the most vocal proponents of a view of Islam as a foreign religion whose faithful posed an existential threat to Burmese Buddhism.

Particular venom has been reserved for the stateless Muslim Rohingya minority in western Burma, who were branded interlopers from Bangladesh and subjected to several campaigns of violence since 2012 that left hundreds dead and close to 150,000 in squalid displacement camps. Suu Kyi, a world-renowned icon of democracy, has been roundly criticized for failing to condemn the pogroms — fearful that to do so would be considered tantamount to support for an increasingly maligned Muslim community in Burma, and could affect support for her among a population that has shown an alarmingly anti-Muslim streak.

Inside Burma, the upshot has been broader disenfranchisement of Muslims, with no Muslim candidates standing for Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy, in its victorious showing at the November elections that were considered such a major step in bringing democracy to Burma. Outside of the country, particularly among Western backers of the transition, many have questioned exactly what brand of democracy Suu Kyi and her colleagues, who have been largely silent on the persecution of Muslims, have fought all these years for.

Around the same time that Myo began receiving threats, a fellow interfaith activist in Mandalay was being stalked by Burmese authorities. On a Tuesday in mid-July, the cell phone of Zaw Zaw Latt, 31, a member of the Mandalay Interfaith Social Volunteer Youth Group, began to ring. The caller identified himself as a policeman and told Zaw Zaw Latt to head to a café in downtown Mandalay at 8 p.m. that evening. Several officers from the Criminal Investigation Department were waiting, and started to question him about a photo on social media of him holding a rifle. The photo dated from 2013, when Zaw Zaw Latt had traveled as part of an outreach trip to camps for displaced persons rebel-held territory in Kachin state. While there, he posed with the firearm for show.

Unhappily for Zaw Zaw Latt, the photo was picked up two years later, and he was detained and later charged under a law banning association with “unlawful” groups. Less than a week later, two other colleagues, Pwint Phyu Latt and Zaw Win Bo, from the same Mandalay interfaith network that was set up in the wake of another round of anti-Muslim violence in March 2013, were arrested on spurious charges of illegal border crossing several months before, and sent to the same jail as Zaw Zaw Latt. Border officials had testified at one hearing that the two had been permitted to cross into India, but judges dismissed their testimony.

A relative of Zaw Zaw Latt explains to TIME that at every court appearance since his arrest in July, members of an ultra-nationalist monk-led movement known locally as Ma Ba Tha had been present. “They come and observe, and they put pressure on the mother of Pwint Phyu Latt and tell her he could be in prison for seven years,” she says of an encounter she had witnessed outside a court hearing in November.

By Rishi Iyengar
TIME
October 29, 2015

The long-persecuted ethnicity is on the verge of "mass annihilation," say experts, with new evidence indicating government complicity

Despite the U.S.-led rolling back of economic sanctions and internationally backed national elections taking place early next month, more than a million people in Burma are facing state-sponsored genocide, according to a new report.

The Rohingya Muslim community of the military-dominated Southeast Asian nation, which is now officially known as Myanmar, has been systematically persecuted and expunged from the national narrative — often at the behest of powerful extremist groups from the country’s majority Buddhist population and even government authorities — to the point where complete extermination is a possibility, according to a damning new study by the International State Crime Initiative (ISCI) at the Queen Mary University of London.

“The Rohingya face the final stages of genocide,” concludes the report.

ISCI uses noted genocide expert Daniel Feierstein’s framework of the six stages of genocide, outlined in his 2014 book Genocide as Social Practice, as a lens through which to view Burma. Through interviews with stakeholders on both sides of what it describes as ethnic cleansing, as well as media reports and leaked government documents, the report enumerates how the Rohingya have undergone the first four stages — stigmatization and dehumanization; harassment, violence and terror; isolation and segregation; systematic weakening — and are on the verge of “mass annihilation.” The sixth stage, which involves the “removal of the victim group from collective history,” is already under way in many respects, the report says.

Stricken from Burma’s 135 officially recognized ethnicities in 1982, the Rohingya have undergone decades of discrimination and disenfranchisement, albeit never to the degree they currently face. The Burmese government’s official position is that the Rohingya are interlopers from neighboring Bangladesh, despite many having lived in the country for generations, and it refuses to even acknowledge their collective name, preferring the loaded term “Bengali.” The report documents a systematic deterioration of the Rohingya’s situation since communal violence broke out in June 2012 in Burma’s Rakhine (formerly Arakan) state.

Although the Burmese government has painted the strife — which saw hundreds of people, mainly Muslims, slaughtered during two main waves of violence that June and October — as a spontaneous outbreak of long-mounting religious tensions following the reported rape of a Buddhist woman, the ISCI report presents compelling evidence that the attacks were premeditated and possibly even organized by local authorities.

Interviews with some of the perpetrators — none of whom have been prosecuted because of a supposed lack of concrete evidence — reveal that they were bused into Rakhine state’s capital city Sittwe from nearby villages, provided two free meals a day and told it was their “duty as Rakhine to participate in an attack on the Muslim population.”

There are also strong indications that the government not only allowed the violence to take place unabated for almost a week, but that police, military and other state security forces participated in the attacks themselves, the report says.

Since then, close to 140,000 Rohingya have been sequestered in squalid camps outside the state’s capital, heavily guarded and prevented from leaving by security forces. The 4,500 that remain in Sittwe reside in a run-down ghetto with similar restrictions on movement. A majority of the Rohingya, numbering about 800,000, are spread out across two townships in northern Rakhine state — another region completely blocked off from the outside world by the military.

A lot of the food rations sent by international aid organizations never make it to the Rohingya camps, and denial of access to adequate health care have turned them into hotbeds for malnutrition and disease. As a result of the apartheid-like conditions, the inhabitants of these camps are also largely prevented from receiving an education and earning any sort of livelihood.

“The abuses that the Rohingya are experiencing are at a level and scale that we have not seen elsewhere in Southeast Asia,” Matthew Smith, the founder and executive director of Bangkok-based nonprofit Fortify Rights, tells TIME. The human-rights organization has been documenting abuses in Burma, and Smith echoes the assertion that there is a strong reason to believe state-enabled ethnic cleansing is taking place in the country.

“The Rohingya don’t have to be annihilated for someone to be held responsible for the crime of genocide,” he says. “They [Burmese authorities] are creating conditions of life for over a million people that are designed to be destructive.”

Children rest at a refugee camp in Bayeun, outside of Langsa, Indonesia, May 20. They were among the 25,000-plus Rohingya Muslim migrants who have fled reported persecution in Burma and Bangladesh this year by crossing the Indian Ocean in search of refugee status in Indonesia and Malaysia. (Photo: JAMES NACHTWEY)

There are more than just physical aspects to the Rohingya’s plight — they have been stripped of their citizenship, with their children no longer being issued birth certificates and laws restricting their marriage and birth rate. The government also excluded the community from the 2014 census unless they registered as “Bengali.”

They have also been denied the right to participate in the upcoming Nov. 8general elections, a complete reversal from the last election in 2010 when Rohingya voted in large numbers and some were elected to the legislature, as the military-backed government yoked their animosity to the Rakhine to see of the challenge of ethnic parties aligned with the latter.

No political party has countered the Islamophobic national narrative, with even the liberal National League for Democracy (NLD) of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi going to the polls without a single Muslim candidate, and the Rohingya’s deplorable situation will likely endure no matter the election’s result.

“There will be no change for the Rohingya,” says Shwe Maung, a Rohingya lawmaker from northern Rakhine state who has been barred from re-election. “The government is totally denying our community, totally denying our ethnicity,” he tells TIME. “Whatever is happening is with the ultimate objective of genocide or cleansing, which is to finish these people … and to drive them out.”

In the absence of a light at the end of the tunnel, there is a growing likelihood that Rohingya will take to the seas en masse in order to flee their country — like thousands did earlier this year — in the coming months, falling pray to people-smugglers with often deadly consequences.

“Many Rohingya tell us that their options are to stay in Rakhine state and face death or flee the country,” Smith says. “Many of them know that attempting to flee the country is in itself life-threatening, and they’re willing to take those risks because the situation in Rakhine state is as bad as it is.”

The previous exodus, which reached its height this June, was not only enabled and encouraged but also enforced by government authorities, interviews conducted by al-Jazeera for its new documentary Genocide Agenda reveal.

“They said, ‘You are Muslim and you are not allowed to live in Rakhine state. Get on the boat and flee wherever you want,’” an elderly Rohingya man says, recounting the presence of members of Burma’s security forces, army and police who forced them into the vessels. When his elder brother tried to resist, Rakhine Buddhists hacked him to death with a sword on the spot, he tells al-Jazeera before breaking down in tears.

The documentary, released on Monday, is the culmination of a yearlong investigation by al-Jazeera and contains stark evidence of government intent to, at the very least, promote an anti-Muslim sentiment among the Burmese population. Classified government documents obtained by the news channel’s investigative unit warn of “countrywide communal violence between Muslims and Burmans” being planned at a mosque in Burma’s capital, Rangoon, (violence that ultimately did not take place), and a presentation given to new army recruits contains sections on the “Fear of Extinction of Race” detailing how “Bengali Muslims … infiltrate the people to propagate the religion” and aim to increase their population and wipe out the Burmese Buddhists.

The film’s findings, as well as Fortify Rights’ research, were also the subject of an eight-month analysis by the Lowenstein Clinic at Yale Law School. The clinic examined the Rohingya’s circumstances according to the 1948 International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and precedents set by international law, and concluded that “strong evidence” exists to substantiate the claim that genocide is being carried out in Burma with intent to destroy the Rohingya.

The clinic’s report, released on Thursday, calls for a commission of inquiry by the U.N. Human Rights Council to conduct an “urgent, comprehensive and independent investigation” into alleged genocidal acts perpetrated against the Rohingya.

“The international community needs to understand in a deeper way, in a clearer way, that the abuses being perpetrated against the Rohingya are widespread, systematic and a matter of state policy,” Smith tells TIME. “The international community needs to take action. These abuses have been going on for decades.”

Neither TIME nor al-Jazeera was able to obtain a response to the allegations from the Burmese government despite repeated attempts, though Deputy Information Minister Ye Htut told us last year: “We never pay attention to organizations such as Fortify Rights, which are openly lobby groups for the Bengalis.”

Such attitudes do not bode well for the Rohingya, whose plight is grimly summed up by a woman living in one of the camps interviewed by ISCI.

“If the international community can’t help us, please drop a bomb on us and kill all of us,” she says.

By Charlie Campbell

TIME
October 3, 2015