Junta, the Burmese Taliban
Ko Gay
4/10/2001
The Taliban has demolished the huge images of Lord Buddha in central Afghanistan''s Hindu Kush mountains that were carved in sandstone cliffs near the central city of Bamiyan in spite of the world's entreaties not to destroy them. The UN Secretary General Kofi Annan flew to Islamabad to make a last minute appeal. He met with Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, the Foreign Minister of Afghanistan who admitted that this destruction will not help the Taliban image abroad. He said they are bent on showing off what they can do within their own country giving a clear signal that they have no sentiment to other people?s feeling or respect for other religion?s edifice. A carbon copy of typical Burmese Generals?
mentality.
Mr Annan said, ?This will be the most lamentable decision that will do a great of disservice not only to them but to Islam itself in whose name they claim to be doing it?.
But to no avail. Truck-loads of dynamite were brought in as the local militia drilled holes, planted dynamite in them and shaved off layer after layer of rocks with a series of explosions. It took only 48 hours to destroy the two Buddha images 36.5 metres and 53 metres tall after Mullah Mohammed Omar issued an edict on Feb.26th of what had been standing for more than 2,000 years. The Taliban boast of turning history into rubble.
The Taliban did not even give a consideration, to the request of the Islamic scholars from the 53-nations Organization of Islamic Conference, not to mention the entreaties of several Buddhist nationsincluding Thailand, Sri Lanka, Cambodia and Japan.
But Burma, whose population is more than 80% Buddhists belonging to the Theravada school of thought, did not even lift a finger of protest or any other sort. Why? The reason is simple: because they themselves haddestroyed several Buddhist images and pagodas without anybody''s knowledge. They were able to achieve this in a much subtler way.
The Generals just hewed out the entombments of the holy sites at night, took their treasures and closed them without anybody seeing them. In 1997, the junta (SPDC) member General Ye Myint hewed the jewels from the entombment of the famous Mahamyatmuni Pagoda in Mandalay. Also in the 70s General Ne Win at the insistence of his wife Daw Khin May Than, ordered that the vane (hti) of Shwedagon Pagoda, the holiest of the Buddhist shrines be taken down with the intention of taking its jewels. Only an earthquake that shook his State house stopped him. Since then he has been living at his residence beside the Inya lake, another building that was forcibly taken from the BOC (Burma Oil Company, a British subsidiary). It is believed that Daw Khin May Than in her next existence is running around the Shwedagon Pagoda.
Not satisfied with this, the Junta has killed thousands of Buddhist monks in Mandalay. A great many were carted off to jail and tortured just for preaching their gospel of truth. In this sense they are worse than the Taliban, but the world knows very little of these heinous acts.
Their hypocrisy is also superb. Often than not they usually displayed themselves at the Pagodas and Buddhist shrines in the Burmese media to make the people believe that they are pious themselves and the defenders of the Buddhist faith. Thus they would go to great lengths to ask China to let Lord Buddha?s tooth come to Burma for the people to worship and pay respect to with much pomp and ceremony, while they took credit. But at the same time they secretly persecuted hundreds of the young Monks of Burma for opposing their tyrannical rule.
These two pariah governments have several things in common. Between them they monopolize the production of narcotic drugs, especially heroin No 4 producing more than 90% of the global supplies as according to the World Drug Report. The UN has estimated that over 180 million people are
addicted to narcotic drugs. Both the Burmese Junta and the Taliban have made no secret of this.
They reduced the historical sites to rubble with the intention of removing the people or the religion so completely as to erase the evidence that the people of another religion or ethnicity had once lived in a particular place. Thus the Junta deliberately destroyed the Saopha?s Haw (the Shan Chief?s palace) of Kengtung to completely obliterate the Shan?s heritage and subjugate the people into submission
as they had done earlier to Taing Ta Yar Kyaung (A big Karen Baptist Church in Bassein known as Taing Ta Yar because it had a hundred huge teak pillars). These pernicious act goes to the very marrow of the ethnic people who can neither forgive nor forget them. In the same way General Ne Win?s destroying of the Rangoon University Student?s Union was beyond redemption and generations of students have taken up the cudgels. General Ne Win, who has just celebrated his 91st birthday, is
still fearful of the young students who could even be called his great grand children.
These destruction of monuments can be interpreted as symptomatic of a form of barbarity that does not balk at massacring human beings. In fact the Junta has come to power massacre about 10,000 to 20,000 people in the whole of Burma in 1988 alone. The Talibans are also in the same boat when they massacre their opponents. That fate of the Buddha images both in Burma and Afghanistan can be seen as a symbol of the tragedy endured by the entire people of their respective countries who have been robbed of their rights, and children who have no schools or hospitals to go implemented by these ignorant and bloodthirsty military brutes. Afghanistan''s Pathan normads or the Burmese military have never been a very peaceful nor tolerant people and as such these kind of unreasonable act is to be expected.
The Taliban and the Burmese Junta will go down in the annals of history of the new millennium as the most uncivilized regimes that the world have ever witnessed in this century. In fact the world sympathized with Afghanistan when they were fighting against the Russians as they had with Ne Win''s Caretaker Government of 1958-59, but once they are in power they just show their real mentality. Perhaps what Daw Aung San Suu Kyi in her Freedom From Fear says, "Power corrupts" is universally true.
The common denominator between the Burmese Junta and the Taliban is that they seem to express that they have no interest at all in what the civilized world think of them or what other societies cared about. I am the monarch of all I survey and there''s no one to dispute seems to be their attitude.
On the other hand, we understand that there is an inevitable attrition going on in, a finite number of sites, at a time when demographic, economic and environmental pressures are increasing which suggests mathematically that there will come a turn when much less of the old will be left. Certainly in the case of Afghanistan there is no threat to Islam from a religion that has not existed in that part of the world for many years. So also the Kengtung Saopha?s Haw, a beautiful historical monument, which the Burmese Junta demolished to construct a new hotel, is without justification whatsoever.
The willful destruction of old things demonstrates the animal-like mentality. They cannot stand the sight of simple beauty, grace and history. The Burmese Junta and the Taliban represent the most aggressive
belief system that promotes conquering states, expanding empires, and colonizing minds as well as places. Another classic example is the Burmese forces beheading of the Buddha images of Ayuthia, which the Thai can never forgive nor forget. As homo sapiens we expect people to die; we count on our own lives to end. But the destruction of a monument is something else...an attempt to grasp eternity.
By: Ko Gay, April 10, 2001
Mizzima News Group (www.mizzima.com)
(The author, Ko Gay, contributed this article to Mizzima News Group.)
Title: Junta, the Burmese Taliban
Author: Ko Gay
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Date: 4/10/2001
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