During a speech near Yangon City Hall in 2019, the infamous hate-preaching monk Wirathu told his followers to “worship the military as if they were the Buddha” – but the generals have yet to return the favour.
More than five months after Min Aung Hlaing’s coup, Wirathu is still locked up in Yangon’s Insein Prison on a sedition charge, even though the junta has freed several other prominent figures who were arrested for the same offence before the civilian government was toppled.
Wirathu went into hiding for a year after being hit with an arrest warrant under 124A of the penal code, but turned himself in just days before the November 2020 general election.
The charge related to a series of speeches, including the one at Yangon City Hall, in which he attacked the ruling National League for Democracy party and made lewd comments about its leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
Within a month of the coup, the junta freed Htay Aung, a hotel owner who accused the NLD of taking money from abroad for its election campaign, as well as Buddhist extremist Michael Kyaw Myint and former lieutenant colonel Hla Swe, a former MP for the military’s Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP).
San Aye Kyaw, deputy director of the prisons department, confirmed that Wirathu was still being detained.
“He’s still detained at Insein Prison. It was all according to the law. We’re just the prison department, so we just keep whoever they send here. If he was on the list to be released, he’d be released. That’s all,” he told Myanmar Now.
Since the coup, Min Aung Hlaing has visited other leaders of Ma Ba Tha, the extremist group of which Wirathu was a founding member. They were Ti Lawka Biwunsa, the head monk of Insein Ywama monastery, and Wimala Buddhi, who is the general secretary of Ma Ba Tha and is based in Mon State.
Another ultranationalist monk, Parmaukha, signed an open letter to the junta in June calling for Wirathu’s release.
“It could be that they’re still keeping him inside because it’s unsafe out there now that monasteries, administration offices and patriots are being targeted,” Parmaukha told Myanmar Now. “It must be for his own security after all.”
But nonetheless, he added, Wirathu should still be allowed to go free. “Even other people who went to prison with the same ‘crime’ as Wirathu such as Htay Aung, Bullet Hla Swe and Michael Kyaw Myint have been released while he’s still being detained. Did he really commit such a crime? Or is it because they’re scared of being criticised by him when he is released?”
At a press conference on June 12, a USDP member asked junta spokesperson Zaw Min Tun about Wirathu’s condition in prison.
“We don’t know,” Zaw Min Tun replied.
Than Soe Naing, a political analyst, said it was likely Wirathu was being treated well, and that the junta wanted to keep him safe until the next time they needed him.
“It can be assumed that someone like Wirathu has a high risk of being assassinated if he is outside. And, if that happened, they would lose someone who can create great propaganda. So I think they’re waiting for the perfect time to release him,” he told Myanmar Now.
An officer from the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, who asked not to be named, offered a different perspective: “I think they’re keeping him in prison because he’s no longer useful to them. They’ve already used him… now they’re in a situation that could do more harm than good to them if they used him.”
Wirathu gained international attention after being featured on the front cover of Time magazine with the headline, “The Face of Buddhist Terror” in 2013. Ten years earlier, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison for inciting a deadly anti-Muslim riot in Kyaukse, Mandalay Region.
After being released during the presidency of Thein Sein in 2012, he became a founding member of Ma Ba Tha and spearheaded the 969 movement, which among other things encouraged Buddhists to boycott Muslim-owned businesses.
