The Political Theatre of the "Buddhist bin Laden"

On the 28^th May, The Myanmar government issued a warrant for the arrest of the ultra-nationalist Buddhist monk Ashin Wirathu. Wirathu, who has referred to himself as the “Buddhist bin Laden”, has been widely criticised by the international community for his racist, inflammatory, and dangerous rhetoric aimed at the Rohingya minority of Rakhine State. Wirathu’s Islamophobic speeches are absolutely an incitement to violence against the Rohingya, pouring fuel on the fire of the “textbook ethnic cleansing” undertaken by the military in 2017 and continuing today. Acting as a mouthpiece for the campaign of hatred directed towards the beleaguered minority group, Wirathu has claimed he is proud of being referred to as “a radical Buddhist”.

This is a title that he has made sure he earned. In various speeches dating back to 2012, he has laid plain his disdain for the Rohingya through many hateful and dehumanising comments. In 2013 he compared Muslims in Myanmar to a “mad dog”. In a 2018 interview he claimed that the 1 million displaced Rohingya “don’t exist”, and that the images of destitute and starving refugees in camps across the border in Bangladesh were staged for the camera. In a 2017 interview with the Guardian, where he was asked about the allegations of the widespread rape of Rohingya women in the government-led ethnic cleansing, he responded that it was impossible, because “their bodies are too disgusting”. In 2012, a riot broke out following one of his speeches in Meiktila, resulting in the burning of a mosque and over 100 dead.

And yet none of these incidents led to the issuing of the warrant of Wirathu’s arrest. Instead, the warrant has been issued under article 124(a) of the legal code. This covers sedition, defined as “attempts to bring into hatred or contempt, or excites or attempts to excite disaffection towards the government” [emphasis my own]. He is to be arrested for supposed inflammatory remarks made regarding allegations of corruption by de-facto government leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Not only has he been a vocal proponent of the military-led crackdown on the Rohingya, but he has repeatedly accused Aung San Suu Kyi of not being hard-line enough in her repression of the group. This is despite the fact that she has overtly, and repeatedly, demonstrated her explicit consent and complicity in the violence. Now, his accusations of her supposed corruption has finally seen him fall foul of law enforcement.

The message is clear: Allegations of corruption against a disgraced government official with murky political connections are a crime. Deliberately inflammatory incitements to violence against a persecuted minority are not.

That criticism of the civilian government of Myanmar would result in such a swift backlash is unsurprising. The response to Wirathu echoes the treatment of the two Reuters journalists, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, who were sentenced to seven years imprisonment for their role in uncovering a massacre of 10 Rohingya men by the Myanmar military and Buddhist villagers in September 2017. Though they were later released after international condemnation of the arrest, this action sent an important message at a time of great political upheaval in Myanmar. Accusations of wrongdoing against the government will not be tolerated.

This sort of reaction is to be expected from a government that cares only about retaining the power it has. As Myanmar’s first civilian government following the brutal military regime that imprisoned Suu Kyi herself for decades, it could be argued that the current ruling party has every right to be nervous about threats to their leadership. But it is becoming increasingly clear that such self-interested political manoeuvring directly contributes to the marginalisation of the Rohingya.

I wrote in 2017 that Aung San Suu Kyi had been forced into a corner by the military action to remove the Rohingya from Rakhine because to condemn such action would be an unpopular move in a political climate defined by mistrust of Muslim groups within the majority-Buddhist country. Such a political climate has been curated by extremists like Wirathu, meaning that since her rise to power in 2016 he has been quietly pulling the strings as she makes decisions designed to consolidate and solidify her position.

Now, with her political future challenged by allegations of corruption, she is forced to act against a figure who has at least to some degree dictated her tenure in office so far. The ugly head of the Burmese ruling class emerges as the ultra-nationalists and the government butt heads. The tit-for-tat attacks between the populist hate-monger Wirathu and atrocity-apologist Suu Kyi plunges Myanmar deeper into turmoil and confusion as the military continues its ethnic cleansing unimpeded.

The rich and powerful scramble for supremacy whilst the Rohingya die.

Suu Kyi will let them die for as long as it is politically expedient to do so. She will also continue to let the likes of Wirathu spew their vile hatred, providing they leave her name out of it.

It may be the military that are acting with genocidal intent. But it is the words of Ashin Wirathu and the complicity of Aung San Suu Kyi that make their actions possible. Now that they have turned on each other the waters of political discourse in Myanmar become murkier and the complicated web of conditions that allow this violence to continue becomes more impenetrable.

Whoever wins, humanity loses.  

The International War on Women

A report from the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack, released on the 20^th May, has shed light on the devastating consequences of the violence in the Kasai region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo on girls and young women in schooling. Between 2016 and 2017, dozens of schools across the region were attacked by militia groups, and children were massacred, recruited as child soldiers, or forced from their homes.

Whilst the fighting affected all children in the area, girls were particularly harmed. As the report states, girls were abducted and “used as “magical” forces that would ward off bullets despite being unarmed, and raped and forcibly “married” to troops”. Spiritual beliefs on the part of militia fighters led them to believe that the kidnapped girls would protect them in fighting with the government forces. As a result, these girls were gunned down, having been used as human shields. Those that survived were more likely to suffer with psychological consequences of the trauma, less likely to return to school, and more likely to have suffered other medical consequences such as sexually transmitted infections than their male counterparts.

Sexual- and gender-based violence is prevalent in all conflicts globally. From the high-profile cases of SGBV such as the kidnapping of girls by Boko Haram in Nigeria, down to the fundamentally different experiences of male and female civilians in warzones, the fact remains that women and girls are more exposed to threats and vulnerable to harm in times of crisis. They are also drastically underrepresented in peacebuilding and development activities, despite the fact that increased female participation in such programmes consistently leads to longer, more sustainable peace.

But the restriction of the agency of women is not unique to warzones. Over the last few weeks, the US state of Alabama has been making headlines for all the wrong reasons. State Governor Kay Ivey passed the Alabama Human Life Protection Act into law on the 15^th May 2019. The law is the toughest piece of anti-abortion legislation in the country, punishing abortion doctors with up to life in prison for performing the procedure, with no exemptions for women who are victims of rape or incest. The Bill was passed with a majority of 25 – 6 in the Alabama state legislature. All 25 Republicans who voted on the Bill were men.

Eric Johnston, Chair of the Alabama Pro-Life Coalition, explained that the inclusion of victims of rape and incest in the legislation was acceptable because the Bill needed to send a message, saying: “If this exception was added to the bill, it would have killed the bill. Whether you were raped or a victim of incest or get pregnant by consent or accident or even artificial insemination, [the foetus is] still a person. We could not argue to the court with a straight face that it’s a person in one instance but not in another.” But what about the person who will now be forced to carry the baby of their rapist?

In Alabama, Missouri, Georgia, and other US states trying to pass these laws, the fertilised egg and developing foetus are given more rights than the woman bearing them. But it would appear that the right of the egg doesn’t matter unless there is a woman who can be punished as well. In response to a question regarding the fate of IVF clinics under the new law, Senator Clyde Chambliss responded that the destruction of fertilised eggs in clinics would not result in criminal conviction, saying “The egg in the lab doesn’t apply. It’s not in a woman. She’s not pregnant”. So this really isn’t about the fertilised egg or the foetus that will grow into a person at all. This is about the woman’s body in which the egg resides.

Much like the militiamen in Kasai, the female body is viewed by these legislators as something spiritual and sacred, inextricably linked to life itself. In the Congo, the body of a girl can save you from bullets. In Alabama, the body of a woman is the factor that decides if a fertilised egg is a human life or not. In both cases, this seemingly makes the body far more important than the person inside it.

The issues women and girls face in Kasai and Alabama are vastly different, and in many ways incomparable. But they both stem from a desire to control a body without the effort to understand it. They are symptoms of a system built by and for men, in which women play a role to create life and to protect it, without regard for their own.

When a girl is considered a “magical force” that can protect a man from death, she has been dehumanised.

When a girl is abducted and forced to marry a soldier, she has been dehumanised.

When a woman is viewed as a vessel for a new human life, without regard for that woman’s own feelings, she has been dehumanised.

When women are legislated against, discriminated against, and ultimately told that their own experience does not matter, that is dehumanisation.

If we value the rights of human beings to control their own destinies, then we must acknowledge that 50% of the global population are systematically prevented from taking ownership of the things they should have control over; their own body and their own future.

From boardrooms, to battlefields, to government offices, women’s perspectives are drastically underrepresented and misunderstood. For a world striving for peace, justice, and fairness, this is a failure.

An Attack on the Amazon's Indigenous Population

A recent UN report has confirmed many of our worst fears concerning the effect that human activity is having on the natural world. A tenfold increase in plastic pollution since 1980. A doubling of greenhouse gas emissions in the same period. 1 million new species at risk of extinction. More than a third of the world’s land surface and nearly 75% of freshwater resources are now devoted to crop or livestock production.

We are no longer blind to the effect we are having on our planet. The global climate strike movement, led by the inspirational Greta Thunberg, has resulted in an increased pressure on governments across the world to take measures to meet climate targets, and connected disparate climate activists and ordinary citizens in a way previously unseen. But as international attention turns towards finding solutions to this crisis, the fate of one of the planet’s largest and most precious natural resources grows increasingly precarious.

A few days before the release of the UN paper, Amnesty International reported on an imminent risk of violent clashes with Indigenous people in the Brazilian Amazon unless illegal logging and land seizures are curtailed in the area. The Amazon, home to 10% of the world’s wildlife species, is at greater risk of the effects of land degradation and climate change than almost anywhere else in the world, and little is being done to protect it. About 3,050 square miles of the world's largest rainforest was destroyed between August 2017 and July 2018 – an area roughly equivalent to five times the size of London – mostly due to illegal logging.

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who now controls the 60% of the Amazon which falls into Brazilian territory, is no friend to the climate activist movement. Rising to power on a platform supported by what he refers to as the “Three Bs” – beef, bullets, and bibles, representing his base of supporters in the agribusiness industry, military, and religious right – Bolsonaro quickly moved to position himself as a pro-business leader. In a Tweet shortly after his inauguration he stated that “More than 15% of national territory is demarcated as indigenous land... Less than a million people live in these places, isolated from true Brazil, exploited and manipulated by NGOs. Together we will integrate these citizens” [emphasis my own]. In doing so, he not only aligned himself with the agribusiness industry but very firmly in opposition to the Indigenous people of the Amazon. The suggestion that such groups are not a part of “true Brazil” demonstrates a political stance based on identity politics set to divide the urban majority from the Indigenous tribal population.

Bolsonaro’s attitudes towards Brazil’s Indigenous peoples are well documented. In a 1998 interview he compared the Brazilian situation with that of the United States, saying “It’s a shame that the Brazilian cavalry hasn’t been as efficient as the Americans, who exterminated the Indians”. His attitude did not become more conciliatory as he began his assent to power in Brazil. In 2015, he stated in an interview with Campo Grande News “There is no indigenous territory where there aren’t minerals. Gold, tin and magnesium are in these lands, especially in the Amazon, the richest area in the world. I’m not getting into this nonsense of defending land for Indians”.

Such rhetoric empowers agribusiness to take more extreme action in achieving its goals. As Amnesty describes, Indigenous leaders have reported receiving death threats for defending their land from developers. One incident noted in the report is as follows: “Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau people told Amnesty International that on 11 January 2019 they confronted about 40 invaders, who were armed with sickles and machetes, cutting a path into their territory... When told to leave, the intruders allegedly replied that more intruders would be coming and threatened to kill the Indigenous children.” In April, the intruders returned, this time with numbers estimated at around 500 people. The Indigenous groups no longer feel they can rely on the government to protect them from illegal loggers, as Bolsonaro has promised to allow continued exploitation of lands near their homes and to rollback Indigenous rights.

This is a two-pronged attack on the lands of the Brazilian Amazon, against its wildlife and resources through the loosening of regulations around agribusiness and against its people through an increasingly toxic discourse aimed at turning public sentiment against them. As some environmentalists have noted, thanks to the coalition government in Brazil it is unlikely that Bolsonaro will be able to convert all of his campaign promises into policy, but the language he uses to attack Indigenous people only serves to embolden the illegal loggers that threaten their homes, who now have ever-less reason to fear reprisals.

If Bolsonaro cannot enact his deforestation policies himself, it seems he will simply turn his back while the Amazon burns.

In another territory, a 26-year-old Karipuna man told Amnesty “If government doesn’t act, we might lose our territory, it might be the end of the Karipuna. I don’t know if there are new paths, because we don’t patrol so often to avoid contact with intruders. They are armed with guns.”

This is an attack on a civilian population who are now afraid to stay in their own homes.

But this is also an attack on all of us.

The Amazon is one the great wonders of the world. It is home to over a million Indigenous people who just want to live. It is home to 10% of the world’s biodiversity. Its 5.5 million square mile landmass absorbs a massive amount of global CO2 emissions, helping reduce the effects of climate change.

It must be protected.

See what can be done to protect the Amazon here. Find out more about the ongoing global climate strikes here.