They have toured razed Rohingya villages and offered benediction to Buddhist civilians who took part in the bloodshed. Monks associated with Ma Ba Tha receive financial support from Tatmadaw generals. The public largely supported the deadly campaign, which the United States has described as ethnic cleansing. When an army-led campaign of atrocities drove more than three-quarters of a million Rohingya Muslims into neighboring Bangladesh in 2017, monks were among the fiercest champions of the violence, echoing the military’s baseless claims that Buddhism was being threatened by a resurgent Islam. His army has instructed Buddhists that protecting the religion is a national duty, and that the Tatmadaw is the country’s ultimate spiritual guardian. General Min Aung Hlaing, who has ordered multiple pogroms against religious minorities, has deliberately fused faith to flag. “The military is one of the main culprits in tarnishing the image of Buddhism in Myanmar,” said U Ariyawuntha, an abbot in Mandalay.
The image of the general and the monk, which appeared in state media outlets, carried a clear message: In a deeply devout country, the army takeover had been sanctified by a higher authority. Spoiled rice was delivered in the morning in a plastic bag, which he had to use for other purposes because there was no toilet. On the way to his cell, he was forced to jump like a frog for hours, he said. U Mani Sara, a monk from Mandalay, spent a month in prison for attending anti-military rallies earlier this year. And though the government-run national clerical council mostly capitulated to the new order imposed in February, some monks have defied it. Even today, as security forces shoot protesters on sight and the coronavirus rips through the country, pockets of democratic rebellion have endured.įor centuries, Myanmar’s monks have taken bold political stands, from hunger strikes demanding independence from Britain to street protests against the army’s rule in 2007. Min Aung Hlaing, the army chief, ordered the jailing of elected leaders. Millions marched in the streets after Senior Gen.
The relative absence of monks from the protests, particularly in the first weeks after the coup, has not matched the broader mood in Myanmar. Some prominent monks have even given the generals their blessing. While a minority of monks have openly joined the protest movement, and hundreds have been imprisoned for it, clerics have not taken the leadership role that they were known for in past bouts of resistance to the military. 1 coup has laid bare deep divisions within Myanmar’s clergy. In an overwhelmingly Buddhist nation where monks are seen as the supreme moral authority, the political chaos since the Feb. “In the future, there should be no dictatorship at all,” read one sign held aloft by a monk on Monday. The military has dominated Myanmar for the better part of 60 years, most recently by staging a coup against an elected government and killing more than a thousand people for daring to oppose its power grab. The clerics’ demand is lofty: men in uniform, men who protest a bit too loudly that they are pious Buddhists, must exit politics. Their acts of dissent last only a few minutes, hasty candlelight vigils or flash-mob protests in the shadow of a monastery with gilded eaves. Day after day, despite a raging pandemic and the threat of snipers’ bullets, a small band of Buddhist monks in burgundy robes gathers in the city of Mandalay in Myanmar.
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