Burmese Buddhist Boy, Sri Lankan Buddhist Boy & Slow Genocide Of Rohingya

By Mass L. Usuf –June 5, 2015 

Mass L. Usuf

Slow Genocide Of The Rohingya People of Myanmar (Burma)

When The New York Times, Pulitzer Prize winner Nicholas Kristof asked a Buddhist boy of around 12 years old, “what would you do if you meet a Rohingya Muslim boy?”. He nonchalantly replied, “I will kill him”. (NYT, The-21st-century-concentration-camp video). Curious about this, I asked a Sri Lankan Buddhist boy (Kavinda), “what would you do if you meet a Muslim boy?” He shyly replied, “I will ask his name”. I then asked him, after that what will you do ? He innocently said, “I will ask him if he will play with me”.

It is not that the Buddhist boy of Burma was a devil and the Sri Lankan boy an angel. What it means is that one is indoctrinated and the other is not. The Burmese boy’s response was not a sudden eruption of religious sentiments but the result of carefully cultivated hatred. Hatred that generates a situation of anger, making one community inflamed against another.

This is exactly what responsible, unbiased, civic minded Sri Lankans should fear against happening to our children, the innocent Sri Lankan masses and, most significantly, to the Samaneras (the novice monks). Hatred and violence should not be seen by these novice monks as the proper way to achieve their goals. Indications are that indoctrination is taking place in Sri Lanka too, in a subtle way, unduly exploiting the honour and respect of the robe.

False Propaganda

The sinister strategy is to alienate or distance a minority people from the majority population. This methodology is adopted by first constructing a negative identity about the targeted minority group. The labeling of Muslims of Sri Lanka as extremists, the bygone halaal issue, symbolization of the Islamic dress code, threat of population increase etc. are good examples of the construction of that identity. This is followed by false, distorted, unfounded, make believe propaganda. The consistent perpetuation of this propaganda creates an unwholesome identity about the Muslims in the minds of the majority. The extent of the bias will be such that whenever a Sinhalese sees a Muslim person, he sees him with the tainted lenses of these carefully fostered lies. This over a period of time cultivates hatredness and alienates one from the other. It is our responsibility to ensure that Kavinda does not become a killer. Nobel laureate Amartya Sen recently speaking at the Harvard Global Equity Initiative describing propaganda against the Rohingyas said, “you can make a people totally beastly by just propaganda and creating a condition in which they feel justified in doing it”.Read More