Article

2017-11-10 Southeast Asia

[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] Of a total population of less than 1 million Rohingya present in Myanmar in mid August this year, more than 600,000 have already been pushed out of the country by a concerted military operation led by the Myanmar military authorities.
As a backgrounder, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army staged a series of concerted attacks on the Burmese army. Unwilling to tolerate another Moslem jihad, the Rohinyas have been expelled to Bangla, where live some of those funding and leading ARSA. Saudi Arabia is too far away to dump them.
These military operations included the burning down of villages (visible from satellite imagery), widespread reports of extensive use of rape as a weapon of war, the extrajudicial killing of civilian men, women, and children, as well as laying down mines on the paths taken by those fleeing the carnage towards the border with Bangladesh.

The UN, in its characteristic conservative tone has described the ongoing intervention by the Myanmar army as ‘textbook ethnic cleansing’, while other world leaders such as French President Emmanuel Macron have more accurately described it as ‘genocide’.
The number of corpses hasn't been that overwhelming. The Karens, Kachins, and Shans have been similarly suppressed by the ethnic Burmans occasionally. I realize that being dead is overwhelming to the person departing this Vale of Tears. I also realize that jihad has a habit of sprouting where local Moslem majorities (or near so) coexist next to non-Moslems. We can probably take the Philippines as a case study. You can also chart the decline of the Christian population in Paleostine, and then ask the Yazdis and the Zoroastrians of Iraq for details.
As for the international response? My conversations with Western diplomats circles seem to have conceded as inevitable that the entire remaining Rohingya population in Myanmar will be pushed over the border, and everyone is resigned to just waiting for it to be over and done.
Thanks to ARSA.
But one group of people who are not quite so complacent are those who are perpetrating this genocide and those who are urging them on. Their goal is within reach, but they will not take their success for granted until they see it accomplished.

So what do these people fear if obviously not the wrath of the international community or censure from the West? Apparently, the unwelcome intervention of human empathy and remorse. On 30 October, a revered Burmese Buddhist monk by the name of Sitagu Sayadaw has given a rather telling sermon to army officers at the Bayintnaung garrison and military training school in Kayin.

The Pali chronicle
The sermon is 3 hours long but the translated transcript of one small section of it is certainly worth reading (here). It involves a tale from the Pali chronicle the Mahavamsa, detailing a 5th Century CE civil war in Sri Lanka between Pali Buddhists and Tamil non-Buddhists.
Hmmm... Sri Lanka? Sounds familiar...
The conflict kills ‘millions’ of Tamils,
Who're a different ethnic groups from the Singhalese, mostly Hindoos, and speak Tamil dialects.
and after his victory, the triumphant Pali Buddhist king Duttagamani is unable to savor his achievement of winning the conflict and politically reuniting the country due to remorse over the loss of life.
Did what he needed to do, and didn't like that he had to do it...
But the king is swiftly released from his anguish by eight helpful Buddhist ‘saints’, who show up at his palace and proceed to put his mind at ease: yes, millions of beings have been destroyed in the conflict, but only one and a half of the millions of Tamils were in fact humans: one of the Tamils had adopted the 5 precepts of Buddhism, and another one accepted the precepts and “taken the three refuges in the Buddha, the Dhamma and the Sangha”.
I'd have my quibbles with the translation. Theravada Buddhism, as far as I can recall, doesn't regard any humans as non-human, nor even as "infidels." They use the word "unenlightened."
The death of those two was unfortunate, but the slaughter of millions of non-Buddhists is in no way a problem, and will not impede king Duttagamani’s ascent to heaven upon his death.
More likely it won't impede the king's possible achievement of Nirvana.
So if you are one of those foot soldiers in the Myanmar army who is ordered to rape a young Rohingya girl for religion and country, you need not consult your conscience: she’s a Muslim, ergo not a human being. You are doing the work of a Buddhist saint.
Thais, Laos, Burmese (more properly Burmans or even more properly Bamar), Shans, and Mons spent many happy years fighting periodic wars with each other. They once fought a war over a lacquered box that somebody filled with elephant poop. More recently the Laos, who are normally a pretty gentle folk, did terrible things to the Hmong in the vicinity of the Plain of Jars. They weren't religious conflicts, but wars over politics or territory and sometimes for looks.
If you are one of the officers ordering wanton extrajudicial killings of unarmed civilians, you are doing nothing more than your solemn duty for the protection of the sanctity of the Buddhist state. These ‘beings’ are not Buddhist, and therefore pose a threat to the religious purity of the state and need to be removed and/or destroyed.
That's a part of Islam, not Buddhism. I'm not a Buddhist, but I was pretty interested in it when I was in Southeast Asia. I not only read up on it, but discussed it with practitioners.
Western audiences are accustomed with the idea of using the Christian religion or Islam to encourage and justify mass murder (crusades, jihads, the European Wars of Religion etc.), but genocide in the name of nirvana by and towards beings which expect to be reincarnated is a much more bizarre proposition.
It's also one the author pulled out of his butt. The Tamil Tigers weren't religiously motivated, but ethnically. There are something like 165 different ethnic groups in the country. Burmans make up not quite 70 percent of the population of Myanmar. The Shan are just under 10 percent, then the Karens and Kachins. Others are Mon, Chinese, and Indians. Hill tribes are four percent of the population. Rakhine are three and a half percent. The groups split mostly by language, to include the Rohingya, who are of Indian ethnicity, and don't make up the majority in Rakhine state. Even though the country's mostly Lesser Vehicle Buddhist, there's no religious homogeneity. A large number of Karens, for example, are Lutherans. Nobody cares except Moslems -- except when the Moslems decide it's time for jihad. Three and a half percent of the population declaring jihad against the other 96.5 percent will not end well.
Still, there we have it. Zen masters
... are Japanese, a part of their particular strain of Greater Vehicle Buddhism...
inciting and justifying genocide to soldiers who are in the middle of carrying out a genocide.
Expelling a population is now called ethnic cleansing...
And we are all failing to identify the religious bigotry dimension of a genocide carried out under the auspices of holy and revered Buddhist monks.
Despite the occasional lunatic Buddhist holy man, I still call it an ethnic war. Or maybe you could call it a counter-jihad, which is how I think most people with even a passing knowledge of the subject see it. Myanmar's not sinless by any means -- it was Ne Win, back in the Upper Paleolithic (1962, I think) who instituted the policy of "Burmanization."

Posted by Fred 2017-11-10 00:00|| || Front Page|| [10 views ] Top
File under: Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army

#1 What goes around

Posted by g(r)omgoru 2017-11-10 02:20|| 2017-11-10 02:20|| Front Page Top

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