Militant monks / Carved up along religious lines, Southeast Asia bleeds

By: Lindsey Kennedy & Nathan Paul Southern - Posted on: April 25, 2019 | Current Affairs
A toxic mix of nationalism and religious extremism is leading to a wave of political violence across Southeast Asia

In 1998, when Thet Swe Win was in the ninth grade, he picked up a propaganda booklet at school in downtown Yangon. In it, he read that his race and religion were under threat. If Muslims were allowed to spread, the booklet claimed, it would not be long before Burmese Buddhists would vanish.

“After I read that, I was anti-Muslim,” says Thet Swe Win. He boycotted Muslim-owned businesses. He stopped eating biryani, one of his favourite foods. He regularly beat up the smaller of the two Muslim boys in his class. “The book said we had to do something about it,” he explains. “One teacher asked me why and I said, don’t you know this book? Muslims are very bad and we have to do this back to them.”

Meanwhile, 300 miles to the north in Rakhine State, 17-year-old Sujauddin Karimuddin was experiencing the increasingly militant fallout of this “hateful incitement”, as Thet Swe Win calls it. A member of the country’s Muslim Rohingya minority, Sujauddin first realised he was an outsider at age five, during enrollment on his first day of school in the small town of Kyauktaw. A teacher told him that his name was unacceptable; he should call himself the Burmese name Khin Maung Lay instead.

Full article: http://sea-globe.com/carved-up-along-re ... ia-bleeds/