YANGON: A fiery brand of Buddhist nationalism is burning brighter than ever as Myanmar braces for its first ever papal visit, posing a challenge to the message of religious tolerance Pope Francis is expected to preach next week. A wing of extremist monks have been stirring Islamaphobia in Myanmar for years, earning a reputation as incubators of "Buddhist terror". But their cause has received new support since August, when the army launched a brutal crackdown on the Muslim Rohingya, expelling more than half a million from the country. Global outrage over the violence -- which the UN and the US have called ethnic cleansing -- has triggered an ultra-nationalistic reflex inside Myanmar, pushing the public towards firebrand monks who have long cast the Rohingya as ill-intentioned outsiders. "Our ideas have now won the vast majority of the population," said Ottama, a prominent monk in Buddhist nationalist circles. Speaking to AFP in a temple in Yangon, the saffron-robed monk repeated a well-worn falsehood that Muslims are poised to "swallow the nation" in a demographic assault on Myanmar’s Buddhist majority. "Fifty years ago, only 12 percent people in Myanmar were Muslim. Now their population is about 38 percent," he said. Census figures show Muslims make up less than five percent of the overwhelmingly Buddhist nation. That fraction has been chiselled down further by the latest violence in Rakhine state, which has pushed over half of the 1.1-million Rohingya into Bangladesh. The pope, who will head to Bangladesh after Myanmar, has thrown himself into the centre of the crisis rippling across the two nations’ border. In Yangon he will press for peace in masses expected to draw hundreds of thousands from the country’s Catholic community. But he will also meet with Myanmar’s civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi and army chief Min Aung Hlaing -- a highly symbolic sit-down between a peace icon and a general whose troops are accused murder, rape and arson. Francis is already in the crosshairs of Buddhist hardliners for expressing sympathy for the Rohingya, whom he has referred to as "brothers". His public comments in Myanmar will be closely scoured for any mention of the group by name -- the term is rejected by the army, government and many in the Buddhist public, who insist the Muslims are "Bengalis". "I do not understand why the Pope is coming in the middle of a conflict, many people say he’s coming for the Bengalis," Nyo Nyo Aung, a follower of an ultra-nationalist monk, told AFP. Myanmar’s Catholic leaders have advised the Pope not to use the ‘R-word’, a path Suu Kyi has also taken to avoid triggering backlash from Buddhist nationalists, a powerful political bloc.
