LONDON – When will the West take a stand on the persecution of Muslims?, aUnited Kingdom (UK) prestigious Magazine ‘Spectator’ reported in Featurestory here on Monday.According to the Magazine, the Anti-Christian persecution, for so long agreat untold story, has started to gain the world’s attention. But thesuffering of Christian communities, from Syria to Nigeria , is part of aneven broader phenomenon.
Religious conflict is on the rise across the globe, with ancient tensionsbeing raised by new political methods. And in many countries – Sri Lanka,India, the Central African Republic and elsewhere – it’s Muslims who havethe most reason to fear violence. In Burma, they may even have been victimsof genocide, the UK Magazine Spectators observed.
It further said that , at any rate, is what UN officials are trying toinvestigate after a wave of brutality which has forced 700,000 RohingyaMuslims to flee the coastal region of Rakhine State since last August.
Burmese soldiers, police and armed civilians carried out a campaign ofdiabolical violence, in which hundreds of villages were burned to theground and helpless civilians were machine-gunned and dumped in mass graves.The Spectator highlighted that there were warning signs — in 2012, 200Rohingyas were killed and more than 100,000 displaced — but Westernobservers missed them. Sanctions were lifted, foreign investment surged,Aung San Suu Kyi was hailed as her country’s saviour. As the human rightscampaigner Benedict Rogers observes, the international community was ‘tooquick to embrace positive signs. It was almost inconvenient to beconfronted with what was happening to the Rohingyas and others’.
Religion is not the only factor: hostility to the Rohingyas draws on thedubious historical claim that they are recent immigrants who should returnto Bangladesh. But it also relies on a deep-rooted and specificallyBuddhist idea of the state, which sees the health of the nation and thestrength of the religion as interdependent.
That idea has been spread since the 1980s by influential movements led byBuddhist monks, many of them given to incendiary language about the Muslimenemy.Sri Lanka has its own Buddhist troublemakers. One Buddhist group, the BBS,leads inflammatory campaigns, including one boycotting Muslim businesses.Such hostility sometimes boils over: earlier this month, the Sri Lankangovernment declared a national state of emergency after coordinatedanti-Muslim riots broke out in the central city of Kandy.
Sri Lanka’s troubles should not be exaggerated. It does not, for instance,compare to Thailand, where Malay Muslim separatists clash with securityforces in an armed conflict which has cost 7,000 lives in the past 15years. But there is the same dynamic: a Buddhist nationalist idea of thestate from which Muslims are easily excluded.The UK Magazine said that the persecution of Muslims, though not asglobally widespread as that of Christians, extends well beyond South Asia.
It highlighted that India’s 170 million Muslims, meanwhile, live against aconstant background of local violence, not exactly encouraged by theauthorities, but not much discouraged either. From 2011 to 2016, officialfigures record more than 4,000 incidents of ‘communal violence’ — mostlyHindu on Muslim — leading to nearly 600 deaths.
The Spectator Magazine said that why is anti-Muslim violence on the rise?It is a combination of some very old theories about religion and the state,and some very new political techniques.In Burma, for instance, there has always been a strain of thought thatBuddhism and Burma rise and fall together. But democracy has enabledradical monks, preaching the most aggressive version of that belief, togain a political foothold. One group, Ma Ba Tha, has offices in 250 of thecountry’s 330 townships, the UK Magazine reported.The internet has helped such organisations. In 2015 Buddhist nationalistsbegan to warn that Aung San Suu Kyi would betray the country’s identity.They spread images of her on social media wearing a hijab. Soon afterwardsSuu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy, conceded ground,refusing to run any Muslim candidates in the national elections.
The UK Magazine said that there is a similar combination of forces at workin Sri Lanka. Again, Buddhist thinkers have long defined national identityin religious terms and against Muslims. Anagarika Dharmapala, the20th-century pioneer of Buddhist nationalism, believed that Sri Lanka hadbeen ‘a paradise’ when the ‘Aryan Sinhalese’ (Buddhists) had dominated it.Other religions were a threat.
It further highlighted that the violent possibilities in this traditionhave been brought out by Sri Lanka’s present-day extremists. It is easy toexplain away all religious conflict as being really about wealthinequality, or race, or politics. But in Sri Lanka, as elsewhere, disputesover the sacred bring out the most uncontrollable passions. Anti-Muslimriots have been sparked by a rumoured attack on a monk, a public debateabout the regulation of halal meat and a dispute over whether a Mosque isbuilt on a land.
The UK Magazine said that in India, too, ancient tensions have beenemphasised by new movements, in this case Hindu ones. The RSS, a volunteernetwork of millions, sees India as a ‘Hindu nation’ and runs programmes toconvert Christians and Muslims. This tradition has its extremists — some ofwhom are close to power.The Spectator further said that officials from the ruling BJP party, anoffshoot of the RSS, have rewritten school textbooks to bring them closerto the nationalist story. (For example, the fact that Gandhi’s killer was aHindu fanatic goes unmentioned in some classrooms.) One of the party’s starcampaigners is the firebrand Hindu priest Yogi Adityanath, who once told anaudience: ‘If they kill one Hindu man, then we will kill 100 Muslim men.’The Magazine said that every few months someone is killed by a lynch mob onsuspicion of possessing beef. Hindi has recently gained a new word,gautankwad, which literally translates as ‘cow terrorism’.
A spokesman for Minority Rights Group International told Spectator thatthere are ‘degrees of state complicity’ in these incidents. And when theauthorities tighten legislation against cow slaughter and on ‘forcedconversions’, it can ‘provide a cloak of legitimacy to anti-minorityviolence and discrimination.The UK Magazine further said that yet, the plight of India’s Muslims — fourmillion of them in the Indian occupied Kashmir, where the Indian armystands accused of countless human rights abuses — goes un-remarked bywestern leaders uncomfortably aware of India’s economic clout.
In every country, social media makes propaganda significantly easier. Afterthe Kandy riots, the Sri Lankan government blocked Facebook and othernetworks; in Burma, UN officials have blamed Facebook for the speed withwhich violently anti–Muslim sentiment had spread. This is helped by statecontrol of the media: Burmese public opinion holds that the Muslims arelying and the gullible international media has been taken in.‘You hear that all the time there,’ says an academic specialist on theregion, who recently visited the country and who asked not to be named. ‘
The sheer propaganda through television and the very limited print mediahas even very well-intentioned people willing to say, “Well, we reallydon’t know what’s going on out there, there’s two sides to the story.” Ifind myself saying under my breath, “Tell me what the other side of thestory is to rape and murder as a methodology.”’,the UK Magazine said.
In many countries, religious identity politics has replaced older forms ofpolitical allegiance. In the Middle East, nationalism has fallen away andthe Sunni-Shia conflict has become the decisive one. Burma’s sectariantensions increased in the 1980s after the ‘Burmese Road to Socialism’,launched in 1962, turned out to have led nowhere. And the idea thateveryone is headed towards secular liberal democracy looks more and morelike a fantasy. The 21st century is going to be dominated by argumentsbetween believers — not least because the number of Muslims is likely toapproach three billion by 2060, and may even overtake the number ofChristians.“The West still needs to wake up to the extent of religious persecutionaround the world. If pity for excluded minorities isn’t enough of a motive,then sheer pragmatism should be. Isis social media accounts use photographsof the suffering Rohingyas to drum up support, and Islamist groups see arecruitment opportunity inthe persecuted Muslims of India and South Asia. The world’s conscienceshould be pricked by one constant theme of the militants’ propaganda. Itruns, roughly: Join us — everyone else has abandoned you”, the UK MagazineSpectator observed.