“They are not even real monks, Buddhist monks are the most tolerant people in the world,” says Mr. Tin, a Muslim social activist, as we sit down in a café in central Yangon, Myanmar’s former capital.
He is talking about the Committee to Protect Race and Religion, better known as Ma Ba Tha. The organization was officially founded in 2014, and since then it has become a political force to be reckoned with, organizing various xenophobic rallies against the Muslim community and releasing incendiary statements.
Last year, a monk named Wirathu – who has risen to be the movement’s most popular member – called UN Special Rapporteur for Myanmar Yanghee Lee a “bitch” and a “whore” for daring to criticize his organization. In other occasions, he branded Muslims “mad dogs” and accused them of raping Buddhist women.
Ma Ba Tha’s ascent was favored by the tensions between the Buddhist and Muslim communities. This may seem counterintuitive in a city like Yangon, where different faiths coexist one next to the other: within a mile radius of the city center there are mosques, churches, Hindu temples, Chinese shrines and, naturally, Buddhist pagodas.
But underneath this apparent calm seethes an intolerance rooted in decades of propaganda by former military rulers, says Dr. Maung Zarni, a Burmese activist in exile and researcher with Cambodia’s Sleuk Rith Center.
“Religious and racial prejudices are common across the world, but turning prejudices into a genocidal strain of racism is the result of mobilization by politicians, leaders and demagogues,” he wrote in an email to East, referring to the Rohingyas, a small Muslim minority living in Rakhine State which has been victims of interreligious tensions in recent years.
The Rohingyas were deprived of their right to citizenship in 1982 and have been the target of various violent attacks – like the bloody communal violence that erupted in 2012 – which forced hundreds of thousands to move to internally displaced people’s camps. It is what Dr. Maung Zarni calls a “slow genocide” (a definition that other commentators find excessive).
While claiming they stand for peace, Ma Ba Tha members deal with these issues by posing as the protectors of both the Buddhist faith and the country’s unity. According to Chris Lewa of the Arakan Project, a NGO which works with the Rohingya community, “there is a prejudice among the public, it is nothing new. And the Ma Ba Tha has played into this kind of sentiment, especially at a time of change.”