Struggle to repair orphanage highlights Myanmar Muslim woes
Nationalists, government and hidden hands are stoking religious and communal tensions.
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“The rioters only knew about one entrance door, so the children and staff were able to escape out the back door,” Dr Tin Aung, a physician and local Muslim community leader, told ucanews.com in a recent interview.
This week marks two years after young men armed with sticks and iron bars tore through Lashio, but the fire-gutted orphanage remains an empty shell.
“The rioters had a map showing where the mosque, the orphanage and the Muslim houses were. They ransacked all of them. It was completely organized,” Dr Tin Aung said. “The fire department did not protect the Muslim buildings. They were put under pressure, and told to only make sure the market didn’t burn.”
The 2013 clashes were sparked by an incident in which a Muslim man reportedly set a Buddhist woman on fire with gasoline. At least one person was killed in the street violence that followed on May 28 and 29, a time during which anti-Muslim attacks were spreading across Myanmar. Sixty homes were ransacked, and 1,400 people temporarily displaced.
Such outbursts of violence appear to have largely abated in Myanmar, but the country’s communal tensions continue to make headlines.
Members of Myanmar’s persecuted minority Rohingya group, along with Bangladeshis, have been taking to the seas to escape oppression and poverty, sparking a region-wide humanitarian crisis this month following the discovery of mass graves in Thailand — and later Malaysia — thought to contain the remains of human trafficking victims. After initially hesitating to provide assistance to these “boat people”, regional governments have now initiated rescue efforts following pressure from rights groups and Western governments, and amid fears of “floating coffins” full of migrants.
Myanmar’s treatment of the Rohingya is widely seen as the source of the crisis, with Buddhist-Muslim violence in western Rakhine state in 2012 fueling regional trafficking networks that have also preyed upon Bangladeshis trying to escape poverty. But discrimination against Myanmar’s non-Rohingya Muslim population also continues, often through official channels.
A package of four laws targeting Muslims is currently sailing through parliament with scant opposition, threatening to bring in limits on interfaith marriage, religious conversion and reproductive rights. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom in April recommended that the State Department should add Myanmar to its list of countries of particular concern, with the commission’s annual report paying special attention to hate speech and other forms of discrimination against the country’s Muslims.
‘It’s the Government’
After the violence two years ago, Lashio’s Muslim community quickly raised the funds to repair the city’s central mosque, which sustained some damage. But their efforts to repair the orphanage have gotten nowhere.
“Really the government should rebuild it, but we are willing to do it ourselves,” said Dr Tin Aung. “But they won’t give us permission.
“I’ve written many letters to the President [Thein Sein], parliament, the human rights commission, everyone. But we’ve had no response at all.”
He added that while no members of the public or religious groups openly stood against rebuilding the orphanage, officials at high levels appeared to be opposed to the reconstruction.
“Nobody, no organization, has opposed rebuilding it,” he said. “It’s the government.”
Given Lashio’s diverse population, the 2013 violence was uncharacteristic. “There are so many religions, so many tribes and all the ethnic armed groups that operate around here,” Dr Tin Aung said, “but we’ve never had [anti-Muslim] problems before [2013].”
Demonstrating the lack of historic animosity between Muslims and others in Lashio, the town’s most prominent Buddhist center, the Mansu Shan monastery, provided shelter to those Muslims displaced at the time.
“The communities have a good relationship, but the violence was caused by people from outside,” said the monastery’s head monk, Ashin Ponnya Nanda. “These outside forces were both Buddhists [migrants from elsewhere in Myanmar] and Muslims from other towns.”
Each time inter-communal violence has broken out in Myanmar since 2013, locals have similarly held people from outside responsible. In Mandalay, the most recent city to be hit by rioting, events followed a “scripted sequence”, with armed gangs of Buddhists being brought in from outside to incite violence, according legal group Justice Trust.
The group’s report on the conflict, published in March, said that interviews on the ground confirm a thesis that “hidden hands” were behind the violence, with most people casting suspicious looks at people loyal to former junta chief Than Shwe. “Their broad purpose in fomenting anti-Muslim violence is to undermine the transition to democracy and maintain their behind-the-scenes power,” the report said.
Other monasteries in Lashio continue to preach the exclusionist creed of the so-called 969 movement. An influential monk-led group promoting the “protection of race and religion” — known as Ma Ba Tha — has also visited the town to preach sermons that include anti-Muslim messages.
“If they come and preach Buddhism, that’s fine,” said Ashin Ponnya Nanda. “But they shouldn't attack other religions. If they don’t criticize other religions, there will be no problems here.”
State Support
Nationalist groups have the advantage of implicit support from the state. While authorities often exercise their legal right to refuse permission to demonstrators fighting for labor or land rights, Buddhist and nationalist groups have no trouble getting the green light for marches and rallies.
On Wednesday this happened: a nationalist group marched through the streets of Yangon as monks and laymen marched against international pressure on Myanmar over the current boat crisis. They carried banners calling Muslims “beasts” and denying the existence of the Rohingya as an ethnic identity.
Earlier this month, conversely, official permission was denied to a group of Islamic leaders attempting to hold a national conference to discuss ways to promote peaceful religious co-existence in Myanmar.
Local authorities refused to authorize the conference after a nationalist political group planned to hold a demonstration outside the venue, promising to cook pork curry and distribute bamboo sticks among nationalist youths.
Officials granted the counter protest, planned by Nay Myo Wai, chairman of the aptly named Peace and Diversity Party.
Resettlement Struggles
Two months before Lashio was swept up in religious violence, the central Myanmar town of Meikhtila also burned. At least 40 people were killed, scores were injured and whole neighborhoods were razed to the ground with some 12,000 residents initially displaced.
The United Nations says most of those who moved into camps have now been resettled, but hundreds of people with proof of ownership of their former homes are still awaiting new plots of land.
Local Muslim leader and lawyer Aung Thein told ucanews.com this week that he believed that opposition from Buddhist nationalists was preventing authorities from resettling Muslims in three different quarters of the town that were burned down during the riots.
Rioters in Meikhtila completely destroyed two mosques, and six others sustained some damage. Five mosques have now been reopened for worship, but eight mosques in the town were still off limits, Aung Thein said, adding that about 6,000 out of Meikhtila’s past Muslim population of some 36,000 had decided to move elsewhere.
“We Muslims have been living here for generations, so we feel that we have a duty to take part in the nation-building of Myanmar,” Aung Thein said.
“But sadly, the government can’t stop the hate speech, which is an essential factor for fueling anti-Muslim violence. So we feel that rule of law doesn’t prevail in Myanmar.”
Source: ucanews.com
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