(Mostly written in Yangon on our last day before leaving Burma.)
Canadians Registered Abroad
While travelling, we normally don't register with the Canadian consular service as "Canadians abroad," but here's a plug for doing so the next time you're out of the country. You can fill out a form online, then the feds will know you're in a region if there's an emergency there, and they'll automatically let you know if anything worrying happens where you are. We registered for Burma, given its history and present circumstances.
After our day-long boat cruise from Mandalay to Bagan, we checked into our hotel and Sarah got an automated email from the consular service, saying travellers should beware of "sectarian violence" in the Mandalay region of Myanmar. We were in the Mandalay region! We quickly looked up the news on the internet, and confirmed that there was trouble in and around Meikhtila, a city south of Mandalay (on the old road to Yangon). The service works!
The Riots
Now, about that violence. First of all, southeast Asia holds the only Buddhist-majority countries we've visited. Despite my limited experience and interaction with Buddhists, I was about to give a big thumbs-up to all Buddhists and the religion in general. Prayer is personal rather than through groups or intermediaries, and it emphasizes reflection and meditation, self-improvement and freedom from desire, charity, and peace. The temples are lovely and calm, and the Buddhists we've seen praying have all been "normal" nice people - not a drop of glassy-eyed religious fervor. On top of that, people have been lovely to us in the region - and the people in Burma have been the loveliest and friendliest across the board.
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| Nothing more relaxing than a walk around a Buddhist temple |
But like most things, I guess it's just not as simple as that. Burma is ethnically very diverse - an ethnic Burmese majority, but with significant south Asian and Chinese populations, and many non-Burmese tribal groups (like the Shan) among others. Similarly, Buddhism is the major religion, but there are significant minorities of Christians, Muslims and Hindus. There are ethnic rebel groups still very active in the border regions of Burma, and historically there has been simmering religious antipathy. Apparently the long-standing military government kept the Burmese-majority populace on its side by demonizing and stoking hatred towards ethnic and religious minorities. With Burma starting to open up and release its firm grip on its people, there might be less official demonization of minorities, but it continues among the civilian population (apparently some prominent, radical Buddhist monks speak strongly against minorities, in tandem with racist groups) and there is less police/military presence to enforce proper behaviour through force (I don't think it's to the level of "power vacuum," but a blind eye is often turned to actions taken against minorities). Suddenly people must be trusted to act properly of their own volition, after years of being told to hate other groups.
Which is perhaps expecting too much too soon, even of an ostensible Buddhist majority. For example, a year or two ago there were anti-Islamic riots in a western border region where up to 200 Rohingya (a stateless Muslim group) were killed. The government was criticized for its lack of intervention.
The day we took the train up to Mandalay, there was some kind of dispute in Meikhtila, between a Muslim gold shop owner and his Buddhist customers. Things turned ugly, and at some point a Buddhist monk was killed (among others) - we don't know who is responsible or what really transpired. Monks are revered and respected in southeast Asia, so a story probably spread like wildfire through the town: "a Muslim killed a Monk!" Radical Buddhist groups had been distributing anti-Muslim pamphlets and materials for weeks in the Meikhtila area, so tensions were high and waiting for a spark like this. This news set off a mob of people in the town, who went on a rampage, burning mosques, Muslim homes and entire neighbourhoods where Muslims lived. The mob (which included a significant number of monks, apparently) also scoured the town for the next couple of days, looking for Muslims to kill with machetes - the official toll is about 40 murdered to date, though "official" statistics in Burma are patently unreliable. Two days later (after standing by while half the town burned) the province declared a state of emergency in Meikhtila and some neighbouring towns the violence had spread to. Several hundred police moved in to Meikhtila and eventually restored some order through curfews and patrols of main roads. Many Muslims obtained refuge in the secured soccer stadium; they were afraid to return home as the police did not patrol the side streets (and its questionable how much protection they would really provide to a minority in the face of an angry mob).
Our (Burmese) horse cart driver/guide in Bagan was visiting friends in Meikhtila during the initial riots, and had only returned to Bagan the day before our tour with him. He said he spent two days not sleeping and not leaving their house, because they were so scared of the mobs.
While on our horse cart tour, we saw an American guy we had met while waiting in line for a Myanmar visa at the embassy in Bangkok. The previous day he had taken a bus from Inle Lake to Bagan, which stops in Meikhtila. He said that as far as he could see the police seemed to have things calmed down in the (significantly burned) town. However, once in the outskirts and surrounding areas, there was no government control. Their bus was forced to stop at a "checkpoint" set up by the mob groups just outside of town, and mob/paramilitary types boarded his bus with machetes, looked around, and then left. Obviously searching for Muslims. I would have dropped a load in my pants.
The (online, western) news reports mentioned how masked monks (!) accosted some journalists in Meikhtila and threatened them - one held a huge dagger to a journalist's throat until he gave up the memory card in his camera. This is incredibly ironic, given that during the monk-led protests of 5 years ago, Burma's military regime attracted international outrage (and began to modify its stance) when photos and film of its violent suppression of monks were filmed and broadcast by journalists, at great personal risk.
The violence continued to spread south toward Yangon over the next couple of days. This coincided with our bus trip back to Yangon from Bagan (gulp), which fortunately stayed on the new expressway, many kilometres from the old main road and the problem towns along it. So we avoided any difficulty.
While we were back in Yangon for a day before flying to Bangkok, the US State Department warned its citizens not to visit certain neighbourhoods in the city, where some disputes/confrontations had occurred and some shops had closed their doors for fear of unrest. (It was also a holiday, so some store closings were to be expected.) This made us uneasy, but on the main streets downtown everything appeared normal. We saw clearly-Muslim taxi drivers and shop owners, and nothing untoward was happening to them. But again our radar likely missed any subtle undercurrents.
- We found the first news of the riots through the New York Times and ABC News. We were able to monitor the unrest as it spread, including when the United States warned its citizens to avoid certain areas of Yangon while we were still in Yangon. Internet access was essential, though - otherwise we might not have heard anything before we left Burma.
- Be sure to review this excellent and essential reading on the situation: from the Vancouver Sun and the Associated Press.
WTF?
So much for our naive view of all Buddhists as pacifist zen masters! I'm confident that many/most people in Burma are frightened of these types of events, and at heart are peace-loving like the rest of us. But there's a level of religious and racial anger and mistrust among many that we obviously weren't picking up.
The transition to less-totalitarian rule will be tough, but dammit, come on people! It's essential you obtain balanced education and let go of old biases and hatreds. More freedom from state persecution doesn't give you a licence to persecute others. But this is easier said than done.
What really blows me away is the apparent participation of supposedly Buddhist monks in what appears to be genocide. And I don't use that term lightly - roving gangs were openly trying to murder every available person of a specific religion. While I suppose Buddhists aren't all inherently passive (after all, there were great Buddhist empires in this region 1000 years ago, which could not have existed without force), no true Buddhist would behave like this. I imagine many of the "monks" participating were likely of the young and/or temporary kind. In southeast Asia, many men become monks quite young in order to leave a life on the street, or to get an education along with a place to eat and sleep. In Thailand, all young men are expected to become monks sometime before they marry, for 1-3 months - it's considered honourable. So most monks one sees are "novices" - from pre-teens up to about 20 years old. After the early 20s, it appears many monks leave the monastery, as we saw very few monks in the 20+ age range - it takes real dedication to live your entire life so austerely. We also noted that the older monks (particularly ones in working monasteries and not on the monk speech-making circuit) seem to really have it together, while the novices were more likely to break the rules (actively begging money from tourists, smoking, other breaches of etiquette).
So my guess is that the "roving bands of monks" participating in these mobs are more likely to be young, poorly-educated, hot-blooded novices. But I have no way of knowing. It's hard to believe that certain popular, radical Buddhist monks have been fomenting hatred towards Muslims and other minorities, but they probably have a ready audience in young, disconnected novices fresh off the street. (I note that vulnerable young people also seem to be the main targets of recruitment by other infamously radical religious and political groups.) I think my own naive heart just wants some assurance that the friendly 80+ year old monk we met in Yangon isn't a heartbeat away from picking up a machete and stabbing someone for being Muslim.
It's tough to draw any conclusions from what we've heard. News is spotty and incomplete. I doubt there will be any sort of effective follow-up. It's unclear where the radical anti-minority groups come from, or who is behind them. And we can't read the Burmese alphabet or language, so we can't read, let alone identify, any pamphlets or signs as being anti-minority. Who knows?
Sigh. The world can be a wonderful place, and it can also be a scary place - following patterns of anger and violence that, as far as I have learned, are identical across cultures, geographies and religions, and across the centuries. We need to keep striving to show people the correct path, the peaceful path. Add education and a big dose of hope, and it's possible.
Good luck, people of Burma/Myanmar. Don't give up, don't lose hope, and try your best to do the right thing.
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