[Buddha-l] comment on illustration in Zarni's Todays Thoughts

[Jo]

In the 1980s Amnesty International was drawing attention to Buddhist attacks
on Muslims in Burma; their concern at the time was that the attacks were
condoned by the government and represented a systematic policy of
marginalizing Muslims. What was unclear, and perhaps still is, was whether
the the attacks were primarily racially motivated or religiously motivated.
Of course, any attacks on anyone for any reason are objectionable, so
there's a sense in which it doesn't matter whether it was a case of ethnic
Bamans making life difficult for ethnic Bangla people or whether it was
Buddhists pushing Muslims around. Ethnic tension in Burma has always
existed, and the British both exploited it using the old divide-and-conquer
strategy and cited ethnic tension among the colonized natives as a
justification for imposing British rule. When the British quit Burma, all
hell broke loose. Memories of the ugly violence among Burma's thirty-some
ethnic groups in the 1950s have fueled the to!
 talitarian governments ever since. The feeling seems to be that anything
but a strong military government will set up the conditions for an ethnic
bloodbath. For much of Burma's recent history, the Buddhist bhikkhu-sangha
has had a pretty cozy relationship with the military regimes, although there
have been times when relations have not been so cordial. When Buddhists are
benefitting from the policies of the military regime, it tends not to make
the news in the West. When the military is cracking Buddhist heads, it makes
the front pages, and the default assumption is that peace-loving Buddhists
are being persecuted by power-hungry generals. When the military is cracking
Muslim heads, on the other hand, the default assumption is that rambunctious
jihadis have gotten out of control, and the nice generals are trying to
restore peace. The reality seems to be considerably more messy than the
stereotypes that Western newspapers foist off on their readers would
suggest. As in most!
  human situations, it's hard to distinguish the heroes from the villains in
Myanmar.

Richard Hayes
_______________________________________________

I would just add to Richard's comments that Burma has had a long history of
communal inter-ethnic violence, starting after Independence when hundreds of
Indians of all faiths, long resident in Burma, fled back to India. Not all
of them, as is often alleged by the Burmese media, worked for the British
Raj! 

Richard seems to think that the non-Burman ethnics are still fighting one
another. Contrary to what Burmese officials say, it's worth pointing out
that today the ethnic hill tribes, who used to fight one another, stopped
doing it eventually in the 80's and worked on making joint revolutionary
organizations to fight Ne Win's Tatmadaw (his military police force, before
Ne Win died). They still don't fight each other, but some of them, the
Kachins up north and a segment of the Karens, for ex., are fighting for
autonomy within a longed-for federal system that is not in the constitution
as written by the military rulers.  They are trying to preserve their zones
as occupied by them and their non-Burman cultures.  For info on the Kachin
fight, see   www.projectmaje.org/airwar.htm .

Richard is right often about it being hard to distinguish heroes from
villains in Burma.

Joanna