Craig Lewis Buddhistdoor Global
| 2015-09-18
|
Since late last
year, members of Myanmar’s radical nationalist Committee for the
Protection of Nationality and Religion, known as Ma Ba Tha, a
collective of Buddhist abbots and influential monks, have been
calling for cattle abattoirs in the country to be shut down. The
campaign has forced the closure of dozens of Muslim-owned abattoirs
and beef-processing facilities across the Ayeyarwady Region, where
the Muslim population relies heavily on the beef trade.
Thousands of cows
have been seized from their owners, and the Buddhist activists have
received government permission to transport hundreds of the cows to
Rakhine State in western Myanmar—the scene of violent unrest
between Buddhist residents and mostly stateless Rohingya Muslims in
2012—where the animals are donated to Buddhist farmers who have
resettled from eastern Bangladesh.
Myanmar’s mainly
Buddhist farmers traditionally keep cows and bullocks as draft
animals and only sell them to slaughterhouses to raise funds for
major one-off expenses such as a wedding or medical treatment. The
Ma Ba Tha-backed campaign has not called on farmers to stop selling
cattle, but has instead started buying up government-issued
abattoir licenses to prevent their use by business operators. The
subsequent shortage of cattle prevented Muslim communities in the
delta from celebrating last year’s Eid al-Adha festival, during
which cows are slaughtered in accordance with Islamic
tradition.
"This activity
constitutes a direct violation of our fundamental religious
rights," said Al Haji Aye Lwin, chief convener of Yangon’s Islamic
Centre. "I estimate (Muslim) businesses in general are losing about
30 percent of their profits.” (Myanmar Now)
Ma Ba Tha spokesman
Kyaw Sein Win observed that saving lives was central to Buddhist
philosophy. “We are not deliberately targeting [Muslim] businesses.
They would kill animals as they believe this is how they gain
merit. That’s the main difference between us and them,” he said.
(Myanmar Now)
This is not the
first time in the country’s history that the issue has been raised
as a result of a clash of cultures. At the turn of the 20th
century, Buddhist abbot Ledi Sayardaw called on his compatriots to
stop killing cattle as the livelihoods of farmers depended on them
as beasts of burden, perceiving a threat from British colonial
administrators.
“The idea was
that nwas (cows), they work in the fields, they
sustain [farmers] with milk and they are the capital for the
Burmese,” said Dutch anthropologist Gustaaf Houtman. “The idea was
that the British would come in and set up abattoirs, and they would
kill all the buffaloes in the fields [to eat them]. He didn’t
target Muslims. On the contrary, because it was the British that
they were worried about . . . They might kill all the working
capital of the people.” (Myanmar Now)
Promoted by other
monks, the movement became very successful and took on
particular significance for Burmese nationalists seeking
independence from Britain.
In modern-day
Myanmar, many restaurants in the country serve beef and many
people, including Buddhist monks, eat it, with opinions within
Myanmar’s Buddhist sangha divided on the subject of abstinence from
meat in general. Some monks cite the Theravada Buddhist canon,
interpreting it to state that one can eat anything as long as it is
done “with awareness” and “without attachment to the taste.”
(Myanmar Now)
Even within Ma Ba
Tha, opinion is not united. At a nationalist monks convention in
Yangon in June, U Wirathu, a prominent monk and a vocal figure in
Ma Ba Tha, asked whether the mass slaughter of animals for
religious purposes should be banned. A Buddhist nun in the audience
responded that she was a strict vegetarian in accordance with
Buddhist principles and asserted that animals should not be killed
and meat should not be served during religious meetings. Her
remarks raised eyebrows among the hundreds of Ma Ba Tha monks and
abbots who had just been served a meal of pork curry. The
discussion became heated as some monks began to argue that banning
a ritual of a different faith would be a violation of fundamental
human rights.
According to the
Washington, DC-based Pew Research Center, Buddhists make up about
80 per cent of Myanmar’s population, and Muslims just 4 per cent.
Religious tensions have simmered in Myanmar for almost half a
century of military rule, but came to a head in 2012, a year after
a nominally civilian government came to power. Ma Ba Tha, founded
in June 2013, asserts that Myanmar’s Buddhist population and
culture is under threat from Islam. Critics of Ma Ba Tha say the
group’s policies are not representative of the country’s sangha,
which has 250,000 members according to a government estimate, and
that they do not reflect the essence of Buddhism.