Members of Buffalo’s Burmese community streamed steadily on Sunday into a mint green, vinyl-sided cottage to welcome home a Buddhist monk and pro-democracy activist who had recently been released from a Myanmar prison after almost a year.
The well-wishers were celebrating the return of the monk, the Venerable U Pyinya Zawta, 65, whom the junta that returned Myanmar to a military dictatorship had sentenced to 15 years in prison on charges that human rights groups say are used to crush dissent, including “supporting revolutionary terrorists.”
The State Department had secured his release on humanitarian grounds last month, with the help of the Buffalo Myanmar Association, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, and the Foley Foundation, an advocate for Americans detained abroad.
The Venerable Pyinya Zawta, the abbot at the Metta Parami Monastery, is the most senior of roughly a dozen monks serving in Buffalo’s Buddhist monasteries. He has also been among the most active in the movement to topple Myanmar’s junta.
In recent decades, Buffalo has been a destination for newcomers fleeing oppressive governments. The influx of immigrants and refugees fueled the first population growth in New York’s second-largest city in 70 years, according to the 2020 census, which tallied 3,024 Burmese people in the city. (Some advocacy organizations put the number closer to 11,000.)
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