FACT SHEET
While Buddhism is often regarded as an intrinsically peaceful religion, it also has a recent history of communalist violence, particularly in Sri Lanka and Myanmar.
History
From 1983 to 2009, Sri Lanka was wracked by a civil war between the government as tne the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ellam. This, originally a conflict framed along ethnic lines, shifted to towards tensions between religious groups, feeding on lingering anti-Muslim sentiment.
In Myanmar, after five decades of international isolate and repressive military rule, Myanmar began a halting transition to democracy, married by multiple forms of interethnic and interreligious prejudices. Successive governments sought legitimacy through reference to Buddhist symbols. The majority of Myanmar’s non-Burmese population live on the borders of neighbouring countries, with an estimated 4% Christians and 3% Muslims (not counting the Rohingya Muslims who were not recorded). In June 2012, riots of communalist violence began to erupt in Rakhine state which culminated in the genocide of 2016-17, and its aftermath, creating a huge refugee crisis.
Ideology
Like all extremist religions, extremist Buddhism emerges as a reaction to a secular state, more assertive competing ethno-religious minorities, and as a defence of a religious way of life which is perceived as coming under threat; it also assumes the supremacy of its own positions over others. The historic growth of Islam across Bangladesh, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and others is understood as an existential threat to Buddhism, which had previously practised in these regions. Hence Buddhists feel at risk from Muslim minorities, positioning them as exploiting Buddhist generosity in order to take political control. They also position Muslims as ‘killers of cows and eaters of beef.’ They also raise communalist fears of inter-marriage as cultural erasure, generating cultural anxieties around the survival of Buddhist culture.
Impact
Anti-Muslim intolerance has been been promulgated by extremist Buddhist monks, and the organisations Bodu Bala Sena, Ravana Balaya and Sihala Ravaya in Sri Lanka. The most influential of these, Bodu Bala Sena, is headed by Galagoda Atte Gnansara, who gave a speech in 2017 which is said to have led to an anti-Muslim riot which resulted in deaths and the widespread destruction of property, and called for the stoning to death of Muslims in 2019, claiming that eating in Muslim-owned restaurants could make customers sterile. In Myanmar, the leaderless 969 movement embodies hostility to Muslims. Extremist cleric U Wirathu led marches against the Rohingya population. The organisation MaBaTha works within the political system, and has some extremist elements.
In Sri Lanka, Buddhist monks have chased customers from Muslim-owned businesses. Buddhist shrines have been built in majority-Muslim regions as a means to stamp a unitary religious identity on Sri Lanka’s public space. Marriages between Buddhists and Muslims have been particular points of contention.
In Myanmar, it is estimated that 25,000 Rohingya people have been killed, 18,000 Rohingya women and girls have been subjected to sexual violence during the genocide. Refugees from Myanmar continue to seek safety in Indonesia and Bangladesh.