New Delhi: Myanmar’s top Catholic prelate has criticized the country’s four new laws reportedly drafted by hardliner Buddhist monks with a staunch anti-Muslim agenda.
The bills have rung “a death knell” to “a great dawn of hope” the South Asian nation woke up five years ago. They are “a dangerous portend for the fledgling democracy,” warns Cardinal Charles Bo, Archbishop of Yangon, in an appeal to the people and rulers of Myanmar.
The Salesian cardinal, who heads the Catholic Church in a country that was under military rule from 1962 to 2011, says the bills were “conceived not by the elected representatives of the Myanmar people, but by an extra constitutional fringe element – with its hate speech, packaging primordial anxieties into a national agenda for parliamentarians and the President.”
The 66-year-old prelate recalls that Myanmar “woke to a great dawn of hope in 2010” after five decades of “silent tears” and President U Thein Sein opened the country to greater freedom of expression and launched a pro active dialogue with the opposition.
“Bold steps taken by his statesmanship brought countries to our shores, greater opportunities for our people who lived under darkness for five decades of suffocating political oppression. A functioning parliament with the opposition in attendance raised great hopes that this long suffering nation is taking its place in the community of nation and its date with destiny has arrived. Streaks of hope filled a nation.”
On August 20, Myanmar’s parliament approved two of the four laws known as “Protection of Race and Religion” bills. The laws allow local governments to impose repressive measures. Their passage came at a time of ongoing racial and religious discrimination and violence, part of a concerning trend in systematic Rohingya persecution. It also coincides with the widespread disenfranchisement of previously registered Rohingya voters.
Earlier in July first week the parliament a passed a new law that requires women to register their intent to marry outside their faith. The legislation gives the government power to halt the marriage of a Buddhist woman to a non-Buddhist man if someone raises objections to the union.
In May, President Thein Sein enacted the first law, a population control bill that mandates a 36-month gap between children for certain mothers and giving regional authorities the power to implement birth spacing in overcrowded areas. Some argue the legislation is aimed at curbing high birth rates among Muslims. The bill is vague about the penalty for unauthorized births less than three years apart, but it could include coerced contraception, forced sterilization, or abortion.
Cardinal Bo says the bills have raised fears and anxieties among the people of Myanmar as well as their friends in the world. “With anxiety the people of Myanmar hope that the dream of a dawn may not turn into an illusion of nightmare,” he says.
He bemoans that the parliament passed the bills that virtually fragments “the dream of a united Myanmar when thousands of men and women battled historic floods.
“Once again Myanmar is at cross roads of hope and despair. Myanmar cannot once again take the path of chronic conflicts. Fifty years of agony is enough. We need peace. We need reconciliation. We need a shared and confident identity as citizens of a nation of hope,” the cardinal asserts.
He urged everyone in Myanmar to be on guard against attempts to institutionalize and mainstream extremist ideologies. “Our future is unity in diversity. United we stand. Divided we invite a sinister future to mutilate us all,” Cardinal Bo says.
Maintaining that the new laws are result of hatred, the Catholic leader urged rulers and elected representatives to review them as they could become “a toxic recipe for more decades of conflict. As a nation we hold in our hands a great promise of prosperity and peace to all. But these laws portend a very perilous future. We plead with you. This is time to sow peace.”
He says those who worry about religious conversion should try to eliminate poverty that has become “the common religion of many of our people.”
“As a nation a real conversion is needed for 30 percent of our people who live in the oppressive religion of poverty. The nation with resources needs a road map to pull out our poor out of poverty. 27 percent of our people do not even have identity cards,” the prelate notes.
Myanmar has the highest infant mortality rate (48 per 1,000 live births” and the child mortality rate (62 per 1,000 live births) in Southeast Asia, the cardinal’s appeal says.
He quoted United Nations Population Fund to highlight that Myanmar’s maternal mortality rate stood at 200 deaths per 100,000 live births, one of the worst in the region.
“These children and mothers belong to all cultures and religions. Will there be a law for a greater protection of the new born? Will our young mothers live to see their children grow rather than die during child birth?” he asks.
He also blasts the marriage law that criminalizes “spontaneous relationships” and denies basic human rights. “Those who configured these inhuman laws and those who voted for them, may spare a thought for nearly two million of our young men and women forced to work under modern forms of slavery in the neighboring countries, whose dreams of marriage are frustratingly postponed because of injustice and unbearable poverty.”
The cardinal wants the “custodians of culture” to facilitate marriage at appropriate age and help end human trafficking and drug abuse in the border areas that “condemn our youth of all cultures to virtual hell.” He also wants positive laws to guarantee the dignified development of young people who form some 40 percent of the population.
The cardinal ends his appeal urging the president and political parties to take courage to withstand “myopic vote bank politics and self defeating exclusivist nationalist discourse.”