Tibetan Buddhist leader the 14th Dalai Lama has joined the chorus of Nobel Peace Prize winners who have spoken out in support of the Rohingyas in Myanmar, saying the Buddha would “definitely” help them.
“Those people you see who, sort of harassing some Muslims, then they should remember Buddha in such circumstances, Buddha helping. Definitely help to those poor Muslims,” the Dalai Lama told reporters on Friday in India, where he lives as a refugee.
“So still I feel that, so very sad. Very sad,” he added.
This is not the first time the 1989 Nobel laureate has condemned violence against Muslims in Myanmar. In a 2013 interview, he condemned the anti-Muslims sermons of radical nationalist monk Wirathu, saying: “Of course these are wrong. We must respect each individual’s life.”
In June 2016, he told Reuters that Myanmar’s de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi should “make efforts to reduce this tension between the Buddhist community and Muslim community,” adding that ““if Buddha happened, he certainly would protect those Muslim brothers and sisters.”
Myanmar’s population is 88 percent Buddhist, according to the 2014 national census.
The Dalai Lama’s remarks add to a growing chorus of support among Nobel Peace Prize winners for the Rohingya, hundreds of thousands of whom have been displaced by military operations in Rakhine State over the last two weeks. The Myanmar government claims the operations are aimed at rooting out the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), whose members attacked around 30 police outposts in northern Rakhine State on August 25, killing several police officers.
Nearly 300,000 Rohingyas have fled over the border to Bangladesh, while nearly 30,000 Buddhist and Hindu residents of northern Rakhine State have been internally displaced by the conflict.
On September 4, Pakistani education rights advocate and 2014 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai called on Aung San Suu Kyi, who won the prize in 1991, to speak out against the “tragic and shameful” violence being perpetrated against the Rohingya. Her comments were ill-received in Myanmar, eliciting a wave of hateful cartoons and memes.
On September 7, South African anti-apartheid activist and 1984 Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu also released a statement calling on Suu Kyi to intervene on behalf of the Rohingyas, saying: “If the political price of your ascension to the highest office in Myanmar is your silence, the price is surely too steep.”
The statement went on: “A country that is not at peace with itself, that fails to acknowledge and protect the dignity and worth of all its people, is not a free country.”
