The monk Ashin Wirathu, preacher of hatred in saffron homespun, is back. Like other ultranationalists and extremist Buddhists, he was co-opted by the Burmese junta to mobilize his supporters. Wirathu – a pseudonym which means “hero” – received the title of “Thiri Pyanchi”, the highest honor in the country, from the hands of the putschist general Min Aung Hlaing at the beginning of January, during the anniversary of independence.
On January 18, he fought off foreign interference in front of a crowd gathered in Hpa-An, the capital of Karen State, in the east of the country. A month later, in the central region of Bago, where he arrived escorted by military trucks, the monk was encouraging young people to form armed militias, to “defend the country against terrorists”that is to say the resistance that took up arms after the February 2021 coup.
Galvanizing auxiliaries is clearly one of the new missions of Ma Ba Tha, the movement for the defense of race and religion, of which Wirathu was the torchbearer in the middle of the previous decade. He then stirred up hatred against Muslim traders in the center of the country, most of them descendants of Chinese or Indians (4% of the Burmese population is of the Muslim faith).
Diatribes against Aung San Suu Kyi
The extremist organization, registered in 2013, was banned by Myanmar’s high clergy in 2017. It then took on another name, the Buddha Dhamma Charitable Foundation. In 2019, Wirathu was charged with publicly defaming Burmese leader at the time, former dissident Aung San Suu Kyi, now imprisoned: he accused her, among other things, of being “lustful” and of “wiggle your ass in front of strangers”.
His support within the army enabled him to flee. During his run, he continued on social networks his diatribes against the National League for Democracy (NLD), the party of Mme Suu Kyi, before surrendering to the police just before the November 2020 elections. A poll denounced by the junta as “fraudulent” and whose result, a landslide victory for the NLD, served as a pretext for the military to regain power . Released by the junta in September 2021, Wirathu initially kept a low profile, then raised his voice. His return to the fore coincides with the initial plan of the junta, finally shelved, to organize elections in August.
“Videos of Daech’s throats were circulating, we were told that the Muslims were going to invade us”, explains Hein Wai Yan, ex-member of a small group linked to the monk Wirathu
You have 65.3% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.