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Time to add Myanmar’s most influential genocidal monk Sitagu to ICC List
Sitagu offered scriptural justifications for ’killing millions of non-Buddhists’
Dr. Maung Zarni is a Burmese educator, academic, and human rights activist | 05.08.2020
In November last year, the International Criminal Court (ICC) moved to begin the full investigation into Myanmar’s violent international crimes and other events connected to the exodus of Rohingya from western Myanmar in decades.
In August 2017, Myanmar Tatmadaw, or the military, launched the ”Security Clearance Operations,” which resulted in the exodus of 750,000 Rohingya from across the borders into the adjacent Bangladesh city of Teknaf.
As the ICC proceeds with its full investigation, it needs to look into the instrumental role of Sitagu Sayadaw, Myanmar’s most influential Saffron-robed hate preacher, in the genocidal and other crimes against predominantly Muslim Rohingya.
The ICC was set up in the Hague in 2002 to try individuals sufficiently linked to grave crimes under international law owing to their criminal responsibility, for instance, political and military leaders of the perpetrating state, militia heads and key civilians.
The proactive involvement of leading Buddhist monks and “race and faith” defense organizations is well-documented. And Sitagu has more than sufficient linkages with the Buddhist monk-led ethno-nationalist movement with its essential Islamophobia. The populist mobilization of public opinion against Rohingya victims is firmly anchored in Islamophobia although there are other driving factors behind the genocide.
For the last eight consecutive years since I first blew the genocide whistle on the systematic and phased destruction of Rohingya people by my country of birth and the state-backed sharp rise in Islamophobia, I found that the TIME magazine dubbed Wirathu “the Face of Buddhist Terror” on its cover, while Wirathu’s patron, namely Sitagu abbot, has largely escaped international scrutiny.
It was Sitagu, who as the head of Myanmar’s state-backed Buddhist Fascist group named Ma Ba Tha (Race and Buddhism Defense League), provided scriptural justifications for the military’s genocidal killings of Rohingya and has helped cement Islamophobia into a national policy.
