Chapter 2. Ashin Wirathu and the Monks Behind 969
The rapid rise of the 969 movement cannot be understood through Ashin Wirathu alone. He became its most recognizable public figure, but 969 operated through a wider network of monasteries, travelling preachers, local monks, lay supporters and religious associations. This distinction is important. The movement did not function like a conventional political organization with a single headquarters and formal chain of command. Its influence came instead from the social authority of Buddhist monks and the ability of monastic networks to carry a common nationalist message from monasteries into towns, villages and ordinary households. Contemporary investigations therefore described Wirathu as a leading or principal proponent of 969 while documenting other monks who independently organized and propagated the movement.
Wirathu Before the National Rise of 969
Ashin Wirathu, whose monastic name is Wiseitta Biwuntha, came from Kyaukse near Mandalay. His involvement with the ideological circles that later fed 969 predated the movement's nationwide prominence. Reuters reported that while U Kyaw Lwin was heading the Department for the Promotion and Propagation of the Sasana, he met the young Wirathu, and the two remained in contact after their 1992 meeting until Kyaw Lwin's death in 2001. In that same year, Wirathu began preaching about 969. This personal connection helps explain how ideas that had previously circulated within Buddhist-nationalist and religious-administrative circles acquired a new generation of monastic advocates.
Wirathu's activism soon went beyond abstract religious instruction. In 2003 he was arrested and subsequently sentenced to twenty-five years' imprisonment after distributing anti-Muslim material connected with communal unrest in his hometown of Kyaukse. Reuters, citing a United States State Department account, reported that at least ten Muslims were killed by a Buddhist mob during the violence. His imprisonment therefore occurred years before the Rohingya crisis of 2012 and demonstrates that the anti-Muslim activism associated with his later public career did not originate as a response to events in Arakan.
Wirathu was later released during the political amnesties accompanying Myanmar's political opening. Once outside prison, he entered a very different communications environment from the one that had existed when he was arrested. Restrictions on public organization and information were loosening, recorded sermons could circulate widely, and social media was becoming increasingly important. From his monastic base in Mandalay, he consequently acquired an audience far beyond the people who could physically attend his sermons. By 2013 international observers and human-rights organizations were identifying him as one of the most prominent nationalist Buddhist monks associated with 969.
New Masoeyein Monastery and Wirathu's Platform
Wirathu's position within the monastic world gave his activism an institutional setting that an ordinary political agitator would not have possessed. In 2013, TIME reported that he was based at New Masoeyein Monastery in Mandalay, where he led around sixty monks and had influence within a monastic complex containing more than 2,500 monks. From this base he travelled around Myanmar addressing religious and lay audiences. His importance therefore came not merely from personal notoriety but from his position inside a respected religious institution and his access to extensive Buddhist networks.
This religious status mattered greatly. Monks occupy a position of considerable moral authority in predominantly Buddhist Myanmar, and monasteries have historically functioned as important community institutions. Buddhist monks had also played major roles in political and social mobilization long before 969, including resistance to colonial rule and opposition to military government. Human Rights Watch has documented this much longer tradition of politically active monks. The 969 activists were therefore drawing upon an already established capacity of the Sangha to influence public life, although they redirected that authority toward Buddhist-nationalist and anti-Muslim mobilization.
For Rohingya and other Muslims, this transformation was particularly consequential. Hostility expressed by a politician or private activist could be challenged as partisan speech; when similar ideas were presented by monks, they could acquire the appearance of religious instruction and moral obligation among receptive Buddhist audiences. The significance of Wirathu was therefore not simply that he held anti-Muslim views. It was that he could communicate those views while wearing the robes of the Sangha and speaking from institutions that many Buddhist citizens had been taught to respect.
Wirathu Was Not the 969 Movement
The international focus on Wirathu sometimes obscured the wider clerical structure behind 969. Reuters' investigation identified Wimala Biwuntha, a monk from Mon State, as another prominent 969 preacher. Mon State was especially important to the movement's expansion. In October 2012, Wimala and fellow Mon monks established the Gana Wasaka Sangha network to propagate 969 teachings. By 2013 these monks were travelling and delivering sermons in numerous locations across Myanmar.
This network helps explain how 969 could spread without a centralized political bureaucracy. Monasteries provided venues; monks supplied trusted speakers; lay donors financed religious activities; recordings allowed messages to travel beyond individual gatherings; and local supporters could reproduce the movement in their own communities. Reuters documented Wimala's sermons being professionally recorded and distributed on DVDs, while the easing of internet controls allowed 969 material to circulate through Facebook and YouTube. The detailed content and techniques of that propaganda belong to the next chapter, but organizationally these methods allowed a network of monks to operate on a national scale without requiring a conventional party apparatus.
Wimala's role also demonstrates why it is misleading to describe 969 simply as "Wirathu's organization." Reuters found that the movement drew substantial energy from Mon State monks even after Wirathu had become its most famous face. Wimala and other monks travelled together, organized religious events and developed networks capable of carrying 969 messages into new communities. In June 2013, for example, Wimala and Wirathu were both present at a large monastic convention near Yangon. The evidence points to interconnected clerical actors rather than one man issuing instructions to a disciplined national organization.
Monasteries as a National Network
The strength of this structure lay in its decentralization. A monastery did not need to formally join a national organization before becoming a venue for 969 activity. A sympathetic abbot or monk could invite a preacher, distribute recorded material, display the movement's symbols or encourage lay followers to participate. The religious network could therefore expand through existing institutions rather than constructing an entirely new organizational infrastructure.
Reuters found that Mon State monks had delivered dozens of sermons in locations already experiencing communal tension. It also documented efforts by Wimala and other abbots to reach younger Buddhists through religious education. Their supporters planned instruction for tens of thousands of children at more than 160 schools in Yangon and Mawlamyine, illustrating ambitions extending well beyond occasional public speeches.
The involvement of lay supporters was equally important. Businesspeople, donors, local organizers and ordinary devotees provided money, transportation, venues and audiences. This interaction between monks and lay followers gave 969 a social reach that formal membership numbers cannot adequately measure. Its influence was embedded in relationships surrounding monasteries and religious patronage.
Religious Authority and Political Protection
The movement's growth also occurred in an environment in which senior authorities often failed to confront its leading figures. Reuters reported in 2013 that then Religious Affairs Minister Sann Sint, a former lieutenant general, publicly defended Wirathu's sermons and treated the 969-led boycott of Muslim businesses as a matter of consumer choice. Reuters also recorded Wimala saying that the authorities' willingness to permit 969 monks to give speeches led him to assume that officials supported their activities. These statements do not establish that every 969 action was centrally directed by the government, but they show that important monks could operate with considerable public space and, at times, explicit or tacit approval from officials.
That distinction is essential. Evidence of official sympathy or tolerance should not automatically be converted into a claim that 969 was simply a government-created organization. Reuters described it as both a genuine grassroots movement with substantial support and a movement whose ideological genealogy and contemporary activities intersected with state institutions and senior officials. Its power arose precisely from this combination: autonomous religious mobilization could operate within a political environment where influential authorities frequently declined to restrain it.
The Rohingya Significance
For the Rohingya, the emergence of Wirathu and the broader 969 monk network represented an important expansion of the environment of persecution already visible in Arakan. The Rohingya had long faced restrictions imposed through citizenship policy, local administration and security institutions. What became increasingly dangerous after 2012 was the ability of anti-Muslim narratives to circulate nationally through respected religious networks, connecting hostility toward the Rohingya with a much broader portrayal of Muslims as a threat to Buddhism, race and nation.
This did not mean that every Buddhist monk supported 969. Contemporary reporting documented monks who criticized the movement, and Myanmar's Sangha was never politically or ideologically uniform. The distinction is important both historically and morally. The problem was not Buddhism or the monkhood as a whole, but the political use of Buddhist authority by particular nationalist monks and networks to legitimize exclusionary ideas.
Wirathu became the movement's most internationally recognizable face because of his prominence, provocative language and ability to attract large audiences. Yet concentrating exclusively on him risks misunderstanding how 969 became influential. Wirathu supplied a powerful public personality; monks such as Wimala Biwuntha and the Mon State networks supplied additional organizational energy; monasteries provided trusted institutions; lay supporters supplied resources and audiences; and permissive responses from sections of the state widened the space in which they could operate.
Together, these elements transformed 969 from a body of Buddhist-nationalist ideas into a functioning movement capable of reaching communities across Myanmar. The next stage was the message carried through that network: the sermons, images, slogans, stories and claims through which Muslims—and increasingly the Rohingya within the national imagination—were presented as an existential threat.
Continue reading → Chapter 3. Propaganda, Sermons and the 969 Symbol