Suu Kyi's Muslim Moral Dilemma
By Dr Akbar Ahmed and Harrison Akins
American University
Washington, DC
"When you leave a seed from a tree to grow in a pagoda, it seems so small at first. But you know you must cut it out before it grows and destroys the building."
These spoken words are a metaphor for the destruction of Myanmar's minority Muslim community. Such a threatening statement of intent would be ominous when spoken by anyone. But when the speaker is a pleasant-looking Buddhist monk with a shaved head and wrapped in saffron robes giving an interview to the BBC in the peaceful surroundings of a temple, the words contain the surreal threat of potential genocide.
At a critical political and social juncture, Myanmar is on a slippery slope of ethnic and religious violence. The March 2013 riots against the Muslim population in which reports indicate at least 43 deaths and more than 1,300 burnt homes is evidence that the violence against minorities is only worsening and expanding with the government and international community doing little to stop it.
Buddhist monks reportedly instigated and participated in the violence, which targeted mosques and Muslim neighborhoods. Images have surfaced of Muslims with raised hands being forced out of the town of Meiktila in central Myanmar with local monks standing by, weapons in hand. A movement led by monks has encouraged local people to shop only in Buddhist-owned stores that display the number 969, a symbol of Buddhist teachings, and to boycott trade with Muslims, whom they have bizarrely blamed for dominating the local economy.
The similarities between these actions and the treatment of minority Jews in Germany during the 1930s are striking, actions which if left unchecked could result in a similar sort of genocide. And yet the one voice of promise and hope for these people, Aung San Suu Kyi, the heroine of democracy and human rights, remains largely silent. The oppression of the Muslim community, particularly the Rohingya of western Myanmar, represents the latest challenge for a country still struggling to emerge from the darkness of decades of authoritarian military rule.
Over the past three decades, Muslim Rohingya have been systematically pushed out of their homes by government authorities and subjected to widespread violence that has led to the complete negation of their rights and identity. They have become a stateless minority facing what can only be described as a form of genocide. Many hundreds of thousands have fled as refugees to neighboring countries, where they are met with neglect or outright hostility.
For over a year, the authors have attempted to raise a clarion call of justice for these people. If Myanmar is sincere about its democratic reform program, the government must begin to move towards integrating its diverse population into becoming an inclusive state. To date, this has not happened as the divide between the majority and minority has widened in the reform environment.
Hostility against the Rohingya led by the neighboring Buddhist Rakhine erupted in widely reported violence in June 2012, leading to over 1,000 Rohingya deaths and massive displacement according to Rohingya human rights groups. (The official 180 death toll is considerably lower.) Entire villages were burned to the ground and an estimated 125,000 Rohingya were forcibly displaced without access to humanitarian aid.
A Human Rights Watch report released last week described the campaign as state-supported "ethnic cleansing", noting that local police and security forces "assisted the killings by disarming the Rohingya of their sticks and other rudimentary weapons they carried to defend themselves''.
President Thein Sein said in July 2012 that he would not recognize the Rohingya as Myanmar nationals and stated his desire to turn over the entire ethnic group to the United Nations' High Commissioner for Refugees for resettlement in other countries. Despite such statements, he has won high international praise for his democratic reforms, including receipt earlier this week of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group's top peace prize award.
Reflecting the government's perspective, the international press has widely projected the situation as a symmetrical clash between two groups, variously Buddhist versus Muslim or Rakhine versus Rohingya. That simplistic characterization, however, masks the truth. The situation is better framed in the context of a sustained campaign of government oppression against the Rohingya where security forces have been complicit in attacks.
Despite their widespread persecution and suffering, the perspective of Rohingya is largely ignored in the Burmese-language media - or they have even been blamed for their own plight. The government's perspective and unwillingness to effectively arrest the violence has worsened the problem, witnessed last month in the brutal Buddhist monk-instigated riots that killed at least 43 Muslims in the country's central region.
Role reversal
Amid the most recent slaughter of innocent Muslim men, women and children, the local media published photographs of Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and pro-democracy darling of Western governments, fraternizing with military generals at the annual Armed Forces Day parade. Now a member of parliament, Suu Kyi is increasingly more associated with the military-led political establishment than democratic resistance.
Despite her moral authority and international fame, Suu Kyi has remained curiously silent on the ethnic cleansing of Muslim Rohingya and the denial of their rights and citizenship, a campaign of violence which is now spreading to other Muslim communities across the country.
When asked about the situation of the Rohingya in a BBC interview last year, Suu Kyi responded, "I am urging tolerance but I do not think one should use one's moral leadership, if you want to call it that, to promote a particular cause without really looking at the sources of the problems." In the interview, she also said that she had not seen any "statistics" showing that the Rohingya had been denied Myanmar citizenship.
Speaking at Yangon University during an official visit last November, US President Barack Obama acknowledged the "dignity" and suffering of the "innocent" Rohingya people, a position few inside of Myanmar have been willing to take. Instead, they are frequently labeled by the majority as "illegal immigrants''.
In times of crisis, the great leaders of history have spoken out to challenge popular opinion. Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela all possessed a moral vision and stood up publicly for their ideals, some at the expense of their lives. Like Suu Kyi, Mandela spent significant time in prison for his political beliefs.
Unlike her, Mandela was able to transcend personal politics upon his release and through his work towards national reconciliation for all of South Africa's people emerged as more than a political leader. By vacillating on the spreading ethnic and religious violence, Suu Kyi's status as a source of moral authority has become vulnerable. If she does not make an effort to reach out to the country's many minority communities, including persecuted Muslims, which group will next be targeted with impunity?
For a country with 135 different ethnic groups and various other religious communities, this is a dangerous game that threatens to undermine efforts to create a stable and open democracy. The cycle of animosity and violence between the Buddhist-Burman majority and marginalized minority communities, which was systematically built up in divide-and-rule fashion under military rule, will be difficult to break in Myanmar without a Mandela-like figure.
Myanmar remains a land of paradoxes. It is a largely Buddhist nation, a faith known above all for its teachings of peace and tranquility. Yet in recent weeks Buddhist monks have led violent riots against minority Muslim communities. The country's greatest force for human rights and democracy, Suu Kyi, was imprisoned by the previous military junta for her political activities but now sits among them viewing a military parade while minority Muslims are targeted in outrageous pogroms.
This current dilemma represents an important test for Suu Kyi, and how she responds will significantly influence the country's future direction. Many hope that she will choose to transcend her own political position and, like Mandela, work to peacefully unite all of the country's diverse people. Her silence amid the ongoing and systematic violence against the minority Rohingya and other Muslims has so far been deafening.
( Akbar Ahmed is the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at American University in Washington, DC and former Pakistani High Commissioner to the United Kingdom. Harrison Akins is the Ibn Khaldun Chair Research Fellow at American University's School of International Service. He assisted Akbar Ahmed on his latest book The Thistle and the Drone: How America's War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam , Brookings 2013)
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