Declaring 969 a Terrorist Group Internationally will Help Get Myanmar’s Democrtatic Transition Right

Declaring 969 a Terrorist Group Internationally will Help Get Myanmar’s Democrtatic Transition Right

June 12, 2013  Dr. Zarni

 Over the past year the western media has rightly exposed Myanmar’s 969 and its leading spokesperson Wirathu for what they are: a state-backed neo-Nazi ideological campaign and a Hitlerite demagogue with substantial following among the tradition-bound Buddhist masse in Myanmar.

Wirathu describes himself as Myanmar’s ‘bin Laden‘.

Professional journalists the world over should go beyond exposing and sensationalizing this hate-soaked nation’s new ideological movement against the Muslims.

As a matter of fact, one of the adherents of 969’s anti-Islam hate ideology, Dr Nyein Chan, a Malaysia’s Swinburne University-based Myanmar lecturer in its maths department, has event made and released a 10-minute YouTube clip calling on Myanmar government to “ban Islam” in Myanmar the way Scientology is banned in a number of Western countries.

Freedom of speech is not absolute, especially when hatred, racism, violence, eugenics and other anti-human and dehumanizing ideologies are packaged as religious ethos or faith-based patriotism.

Myanmar’s 969, which the country’s presidential inquiry commission to investigate last year’s pogroms against the Rohingyas and other Muslims in Western Burma characterizes as “an economic boycott campaign”, should be declared a terrorist organization with international cells and accordingly banned.

For the recent spill-over of violence against the Burmese Muslims in Malaysia by the adherents of the 969 is an early indication of the group’s growing Islamophobic influence among Myanmar diaspora.

According to the sources close to 969, this neo-Nazi “Buddhist” campaign led by extremist monks who operate with complete impunity from Myanmar authorities, is going to be registered as a company first and later as a political party.

Naypyidaw is behind this ideological and political alternative to the resounding looser of the by-elections last April), that is, the ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party.

In the 2nd decade of the 21st century, international bodies and national governments that are waging the ‘war on terrorism’ such as the United States should not allow this Myanmar neo-Nazi movement to grow and spill over, especially its ability to incite large scale violence against the Muslims

This move internationally will certainly be an  important contribution to any attempt to get Myanmar’s transition right.

 

Tags: Burma, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nazism, Neo-Nazism, Terrorism, United States, YouTube