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February 21, 2006
Burma: Riots Against Muslims
It appears that it is not only Christians who are currently attacking Muslims, as they are in Nigeria. Buddhists in Myanmar or Burma as it is more commonly known, went on a rampage last week. The reasons are altogether different from the situation in Nigeria. Voice of America reports that last week crowds of Buddhists staged violent protests against Muslims.
These began in Sinbyukyun town in central Burma, in Magwe Division. These disturbances spread to the town of Chauk nearby. The reasons given by VOA News was that they happened in response to violence inflicted on Buddhists by individuals from the Muslim community.
Several mosques and homes were destroyed in Muslim communities, and now security forces are said to be on high alert.
Burma/Myanmar is a shadowy country, where foreign journalists are not free to travel, and few outsiders are allowed into the country, save a few tourists who are expected to stick to state-arranged itineraries.
The Democratic Voice of Burma gives more information. The anti-government site states that the riots may have been orchestrated by the authorities.
The riots happened close to the time when Indonesian and Malaysian leaders were due to arrive in Burma.
Ostensibly, the unrest was triggered after a Burmese woman was allegedly raped by three Muslim men at SInbyukyun on 16 February. Two days later, three men at Pwinbyu were the first victims of the mob violence, which involved about 300 people, with a third of them armed with machetes, who surrounded and attacked a mosque..
Prior to this, there had apparently been no conflict between the two communities.
The rioting at Chauk was said to have been triggered by an argument over a business deal. The disturbance here was on a larger scale, with thousands of people arriving to destroy all Muslim-owned shops in the town, and the two mosques there. The authorities imposed a curfew and stationed soldiers and police at the scene.
In Arakan State in northwestern Burma, the situation is similarly bad, according to DVB. Sittwe (Akyab) University was temporarily closed on 18 February, and reopened the following day. However, on 19 February, three women students from the university were pelted with stones thrown by Muslim men, receiving injuries, and violence flared up again.
DVB reports that Amnesty International has accused Burma's junta of abusing Muslims' human rights, depriving the Rohingya Muslims of Arakan State of their ancestral lands and placing them in forced labour. The report was published last May, and states that for many of these Muslims, whose ancestors have lived in the region for generations, the harsh citizenship laws have been discriminatory. These have placed many Rohingyas as "aliens".
Many Muslims fled to Burma in the early 1990s from India, Bangladesh and Malaysia after being persecuted by their respective nations' armies, but most of the refugees were repatriated under the aegis of the UN.
Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at February 21, 2006 6:34 PM
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