[Buddha-l] Buddhist warfare

[JKirkpatrick]

Some time ago, Amnesty International was running information on
Buddhist persecution of Muslims in Myanmar. It was not clear
whether the reported maltreatment of the people in question was
religiously motivated or (as is so often the case in Myanmar)
ethnic/linguistic tension. The Muslims allegedly being maltreated
were Bangla; the people giving them a hard time were Buddhists of
some ethnicity other than Baman, but I now forget which. What
concerned AI was that the government, which tends to have a cozy
relationship with the Buddhist establishment, was doing nothing
to intervene and protect the non-Buddhist people reportedly being
attacked.

There are so many dimensions involved in the tensions in that
part of Asia that it is almost always a misleading
over-simplification to isolate one factor, such as religion, as
the cause of the tensions. What is usually going on is just that
a bunch of really unhappy people are abusing other really unhappy
people, because human beings seem to love to share their misery
with as many other people as possible. Perhaps that dynamic works
even in Bangladesh.

Richard
_______________

The Burma situation is indeed more ethnic rather than a matter of
religious persecution. Since the junta took over, they have been
trying to get the Rohingyas (the Muslims of the Arakan area) to
leave, on the basis that they are not "real Burmans" but
Bengalis. However, indeed the history of perecuting Muslims in
Burma is a long one, starting long before the British Raj. Most
of the time the persecutions were political but there had also
been attacks on the basis of religion.
The Rohingya Muslims, as well as others in Burma, had a long
history of being forced into labor and of doing menial jobs,
unless they also were able to do subsistence farming. Since 1978
there have been two enormous migrations of refugee Rohingyas to
Bangladesh, Thailand, and Pakistan with mixed results on their
well-being. 

The Chittagong hill people are Buddhist minority ethnic groups in
Bangladesh. Since the inception of the new state of Bangladesh,
they have been regularly robbed of their lands by Muslim majority
flatlanders looking for farm land, despite signed treaties with
Dhaka. So far I am not aware of their monks or pagodas being
attacked by Muslims on the basis that they are "kaffirs", but
wouldn't put it past some of the radical fanatic groups that have
risen in the past 3 decades, who have attacked every Muslim
minority, such as the Shias and the Ahmadhiyyas.

Joanna