Donald Kirk has been covering Korean Peninsula issues for decades.
Waging holy wars
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By Donald Kirk
NEW DELHI ― It’s axiomatic that religion is the reason for some if not most of the world’s bloodiest wars. In the name of God or Allah or some other deity, soldiers of the Lord have been slaughtering one another since God created the world.
Koreans can be thankful that South Korea’s enormous religious groupings – mainly Buddhists and Christians ― have been able to survive and flourish since the days when foreign Christian priests faced execution for daring to penetrate a closed society. Subdivided into innumerable denominations, congregations and factions, Korean Buddhists and Christians may feud and fight but refrain from open warfare.
Not so in some of the countries I’ve visited in recent years. In India, home of nearly 180 million Muslims, more than in any other country except Pakistan and Indonesia, the fear of violence always simmers below surface appearances of tolerance. There have been too many bloody episodes since the mass killings that marked the partition of the Indian subcontinent between Hindu-dominated India and Muslim Pakistan in the last days of British rule in 1947 for anyone to imagine that Hindus and Muslims can finally live in perpetual peace and harmony.
Sometimes, though, the bloodiest of holy schemes have a way of failing. Take, for instance, a series of bombings in and around a Buddhist temple complex a few hundred miles east of here last weekend. The bombers had a formula possibly picked up from the Internet. They’d packed little gas cylinders with ammonium nitrate, sulfur and potassium, according to the Indian media, and linked them to clock timers.
When the mastermind of the bombings pressed the button, however, the explosions did not have the tragic impact the terrorists had in mind. Nobody was killed. Only two people were hurt. An 80-foot statue of the Lord Buddha was badly damaged, said The Times of India, but left standing. One explanation was the first explosion damaged the mechanism in other bombs planted nearby so they popped off harmlessly.
The failure of these bombings contrasts with the ``success” ― would that be the right word? ― of incredibly bloody bombings and other forms of killing in recent days from Nigeria to Cairo to Beirut to Syria and Afghanistan and Pakistan. Holy war is a phenomenon that’s spread in an arc from Southeast Asia to Africa.
It’s tempting to blame Muslim forces for most if not all the carnage. The terrorists in the Buddhist temple bombings here were presumed to be Muslims, all right, but they weren’t fighting India’s huge Hindu majority. Rather, they’re believed to have been seeking revenge against Buddhists for having attacked and killed Muslims in neighboring Myanmar, dominated by Buddhists who would like to expel the country’s Muslim minority from their historic communities.
Just what counts as religious war, though, is a matter of definition. Christians may not be waging religious war in the Middle East, but no one forgets that Christians, from the days of the Crusades, introduced rule by Christian European nations over most of the Islamic Arab world. It’s easy then to believe, as I have heard Muslim scholars claim, that the Jewish state of Israel, founded by the descendants of Jews who were expelled from the Middle East to Europe a couple of millennia ago, is continuing the same crusade against Arab Muslims, notably their Palestinian neighbors.
Koreans might think that their society is not susceptible to bloody religious strife, but the Korean peninsula is not immune.
North Korea, from the division of the peninsula at the end of World War II and the founding of the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea under ``Great Leader” Kim Il-sung in 1948, has banned all religions. There is no freedom of religion north of the demilitarized zone. Those two or three churches in Pyongyang that North Korean guides show foreign visitors are strictly for show. Those who do worship secretly if caught are sentenced to death or to years of hard labor unto death.
North Korea’s anti-religious policy marks a total departure from the era when Pyongyang was known as ``the Jerusalem of the east” and ``a city of churches” before the Soviet occupation and the rise of communism. These days North Koreans have to worship the Kim dynasty, the gods of a new state religion.
In an ideal world, people of different religions live side by side. In India, most of the country’s 1.2 billion people are doing just that. It would be nice to think the failure of the Islamic attack on a Buddhist temple showed the weakness if not the inability of the terrorists to do serious harm. Nice but probably not very realistic.
Columnist Donald Kirk, www.donaldkirk.com, having covered war and peace from the Middle East to Northeast Asia, is spending much of this year in India. He’s at kirkdon@yahoo.com.