Report by the Burmese Muslim Association (BMA)
Summary
This report prepared based on the information received from a Burma based monitoring network. The report mainly focused on the activities of anti Muslim Buddhist extremist groups and anti Muslim political parties such as Race and Faith Defence League (RFDL), Myanmar National Network (MNN), Peace and Diversity Party (PDP) and other incidents that effect minority Muslims in Burma.
Race and Faith Defence League is also known as Ma Ba Tha in Burmese acronym. Among these organisations and parties, RFDL is the largest organisation, which has a nation wide network, hierarchically structured, functioned by the monks, and supported by government. This is the organisation that proposed four discriminative laws – marriage law, birth control law, religious conversion law and polygamy law that President Thein Sein and the Parliament approving without hesitation. So far, the organisation has about 30000 members across Burma and a very strong network in grassroots level. Its members are available at every town, village, and streets.
The organisation has been working on various projects and its aims and objectives are clearly to demonise Muslims. It is running Damma School courses across Burma, under the pretext of teaching culture and norms of Buddhism to the children, in contrary, the courses are more focusing on anti Muslim sentiments.
The organisation also encouraging Buddhist communities to form a small business groups to operate a small businesses in order to compete local small Muslim businesses. The organisation also instructed local Buddhist communities not to engage any economic transaction with Muslims such as prohibited from selling or renting properties to Muslim. In a process of capacity building, the organisation also offering media and law courses to
train anti Muslim activists. There are three Buddhist extremist print medias and all of them belong to RFDL, Aung Zayyar Tu, Tharki Thway and Atu Ma Shi journals. These print media reach to every corner of Burma and publishing anti Muslim rhetoric regularly. The organisation also supported to produce an anti Muslim movie aiming to advocate Buddhist women against Muslim men.
U Wirathu has been traveling at least more than 20 different places every month to create RFDL network and gave anti Muslim hate speeches. It is a worrying sign that he is increasingly getting more supporters and receiving more response than before. Noticeably, more people attend his speeches than before.