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Racial and religious conflicts in Asia
Anti-Muslim riots in Meikhtila, Myanmar on March 20-22 left many buildings destroyed and thousands of Rohingya people displaced
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nti-Muslim riots in Meikhtila, Myanmar on March 20-22 left many buildings destroyed and thousands of Rohingya people displaced. The conflict claimed more than 40 lives, injured hundreds of others and saw houses, mosques and Islamic schools or madrasah burned down.
Although the situation seems to have improved, debate has loomed about what really happened. The most shocking report is the alleged involvement of a group of Buddhist monks, who provoked the riots.
Compared with other religions, Buddhism historically has a lower record of violence and conflict. The situation in Myanmar, therefore, shows a new face of Buddhism. On YouTube, Wirathu, a 45-year-old Buddhist monk, proudly called himself a 'Burmese bin Laden'. Wirathu and his group of monks provoked a movement against Muslims in Myanmar, including marking stores belonging to Muslims just to remind local Buddhists not to do business with the store owners.
'It is our right to only make business with our own people. If you buy from Muslim stores, your money doesn't just stop there. It will eventually go toward destroying your race and religion,' he said in a late February speech that is available on CD sold in markets across Myanmar.
Wirathu and his monks believe that Myanmar businesses are controlled by Muslim groups and well supported by Saudis and the pro-democracy party led by Aung Sang Suu Kyi, LND.
Wirathu and his followers support President Thein Sein's statement that Rohingya is not part of Myanmar. Despite the fact that Muslims in Myanmar account for less than 5 percent of the population, Wirathu and the monks believe that the minority Muslims will be a future problem for the majority Buddhists.
The religious violence is not new in Asia Pacific. In Bangladesh, for example, conflict between Hindu followers, who account for 16 percent of the population, and Muslims, who make up nearly 83 percent of the population, is commonplace. In neighboring India, Hindu extremists have accused minority Muslims of running for a majority. The hardliners suspect that Muslims who live in India support Pakistan.
In Indonesia, radical Muslims also believe that Christians are stepping up a 'Christianization' movement toward turning Indonesia into a predominantly Christian country. In fact, followers of all religions other than Islam only account for 20 percent of the country's population.
The May 1998 tragedy is evidence of racial violence against Chinese ethnics, which Indonesia is still prone to. Chinese Indonesians have been stigmatized as lacking nationalism and commitment to national interests.
Racial conflict has been a popular phenomenon in the post Cold War period, e.g. ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, Tutsis in Rwanda, Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, Kurds in Iraq and in many other parts of the world. It actually refers to the demographic control of specific ethnic groups, religions or social classes, with an objective to keep those groups' minority status intact.
In Asia Pacific, social and economic changes may play a major role behind the racial and religious conflicts. For example, a radical Hindu group developed in India along with the financial reform that changed India into a liberal economy, led by then Finance Minister Manmohan Singh (currently the Indian prime minister) in 1991.
In Indonesia, one of the most notorious religious conflicts occurred in Ambon at a time when the reform movement spread across the country, changing the authoritarian regime into a democratic society. In a similar mode, the Muslim-Buddhist conflict in Myanmar peaked when the country was changing its political landscape by allowing the opposition to participate in the national election.
It seems that political-economic changes contributed to religious and racial conflicts. Tracing the historical background of Myanmar, India and Indonesia, we may find the embryo of racial and religious conflict during the colonialism period. Colonialists helped these nations identify their people through categories based on social strata, religion and race. Then, they took it for granted as their identity.
In India, the British colonial rulers were excited with a census in 1871 to define India by religious categories, to define religions by their potential to support colonial capitalism or revolt against colonialism. In Indonesia, the Dutch in 1866 introduced Wijkenstelsel, which segregated housing for minority Chinese and Arabs, to separate them from pribumi or indigenous people solely to maintain social order.
In 1799 a report by Francis Buchanan-Hamilton helped to establish Rohingya as non-Burmese based on language, later on by physical appearance that defines Arakan Muslims and Rohingya as Bengalis.
In post-independence, many countries maintained colonial administrative terms to govern an independent state. In its early independence, Indonesia preserved almost 75 percent of colonial laws, while Myanmar is using a social-geographical map created by the British, including racial terms.
Indeed, to generate social order regulations are needed, but 'order' in the post-colonial era was a term that was coined by the colonialists to reach specific interests.
Sometimes, the interests were very discriminative as in the case of the Wijkenstelsel policy, which unfortunately is maintained in segregated housing for the Shia minority in Sampang on Madura Island and in the case of Wirathu and Buddhist monks, who engineered an anti-Muslim movement to justify Buddhist control of Myanmar.
It is therefore pivotal to deconstruct the logic of religious and racial discrimination inherited from the colonialists if we are to put an end to conflict and violence once and for all.
The writer is a researcher and analyst and chief editor of Islamic journal As-Syiasah.
