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| A Bengali-Muslim survivor of Buddhist massacre (2012). |
The couple
screamed at each other. Tun Naing threw another punch. Neighbors joined in the
row. The commotion stirred up ethnic Rakhine Buddhists in the next
village, who began shouting anti-Muslim slurs. Relations between the two
communities were already so tense that six soldiers were stationed nearby. Tun
Naing's village was soon besieged by hundreds of Rakhines. And Myanmar was
plunged into a week of sectarian violence that by official count claimed 89 lives,
its worst in decades.
The unrest
exposes the dark side of Myanmar's historic opening: an unleashing of ethnic
hatred that was suppressed during 49 years of military rule. It is a
crucial test for an 18-month-old reformist government in one of Asia's most
ethnically diverse countries. Jailed dissidents have been released, a free
election held and censorship lifted in a democratic transition so seamless that
U.S. President Barack Obama is scheduled to make a congratulatory visit on
November 19.
State
media have largely absolved authorities of any role in the October unrest,
depicting it mostly as spontaneous eruptions of violence that often ended with
Muslims burning their own homes.
But a
Reuters investigation paints a more troubling picture: The wave of attacks was
organized, central-government military sources told Reuters. They were led by
Rakhine nationalists tied to a powerful political party in the state, incited
by Buddhist monks, and, some witnesses said, abetted at times by local security
forces.
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| "This is a Buddhist's house" the marking declares to rioters. |
Two
townships - Pauktaw and Kyaukphyu - saw the near-total expulsion of
long-established Muslim populations, in what could amount to ethnic cleansing.
One village saw a massacre of dozens of Muslims, among them 21 women.
Interviews
with government officials, military and police, political leaders and dozens of
Buddhists and Muslims across a vast conflict zone suggest Myanmar is entering a
more violent phase of persecution of its 800,000 mostly stateless Rohingya, a
Muslim minority in an overwhelmingly Buddhist country.
Rohingya have
lived for generations in Rakhine State, where postcard-perfect valleys sweep
down to a mangrove-fringed coastline. But Rakhines and other Burmese view them
as illegal immigrants from neighboring Bangladesh who deserve neither rights
nor sympathy.
Rakhines reject the term "Rohingya" as a modern
invention, referring to them instead as "Bengali" or
"kalar" - a pejorative Burmese word for Muslims or people of South
Asian descent.
October's
attacks marked an acceleration of violence against the Rohingya. An earlier
wave of unrest in June killed at least 80 people. Afterwards, the Rakhine State
government imposed a policy of segregating Muslim communities from Buddhists
across an area roughly the size of Switzerland.
More than
97 percent of the 36,394 people who have fled the latest violence are Muslims,
according to official statistics. Many now live in camps, joining 75,000 mostly
Rohingya displaced in June. Others have set sail for Bangladesh, Thailand and
Malaysia on rickety boats, two of which have reportedly capsized, with as many
as 150 people believed drowned.
There is
no evidence to suggest the Buddhist-dominated national government endorsed the
violence. But it appears to have anticipated trouble, stationing troops between
Muslim and Buddhist villages a month ago, following rumors of attacks.
"This
is racism," said Shwe Hle Maung, 43, chief of Paik Thay, where
impoverished Muslim families cram into thatched homes without electricity.
"The government can resolve this if it wants to in five minutes. But they
are doing nothing."
The
Rakhine violence is also a test for Nobel Peace Prize-winner Aung San Suu Kyi,
now opposition leader in parliament, whose studied neutrality has failed to
defuse tensions and risks undermining her image as a unifying moral force. Suu
Kyi, a devout Buddhist, says she refuses to take sides.
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| Body of Thida Htwe a Yakhine Buddhist girl raped and murdered by three Bengali-Muslim men. |
In Rakhine
State, however, the conflict has spread, most recently to areas where Muslims
have long lived peacefully with Buddhists, according to a reconstruction of the
violence from October 21 through October 25.
In Paik
Thay, the Buddhist Rakhine mobs hurled Molotov cocktails at wooden huts, while
Tun Naing and his neighbors fled. Muhammad Amin, 62, said he was beaten with a
metal pipe until his skull cracked. The initial violence ended after soldiers
fired their guns into the air and police arrested a Rakhine.
The
bloodshed was only beginning.
On Monday,
October 22, hundreds of Rakhine men gathered on the southern outskirts of Mrauk-U,
an ancient capital studded with Buddhist temples about 15 miles north of Paik
Thay. Then they marched to Tha Yet Oak, a Muslim fishing village of about 1,100
people, and set alight its flimsy bamboo homes.
The Muslim
villagers fled by boat to nearby Pa Rein village. The Rakhine mob followed,
swelling to nearly 1,000, according to Kyin Sein Aung, 66, a Rakhine farmer
from a neighboring Buddhist village.
He didn't
recognize the mob; he described them as "outsiders" and said he
suspected they came from Mrauk-U. Hundreds now poured across a stream
separating the villages. Others came by boat. By noon, there were about 4,000
Rakhines, according to both Buddhist and Muslim villagers.
Four
soldiers shot in the air to disperse the crowd but were easily overwhelmed,
witnesses said. The Muslims fought back with spears and machetes, torching a
rice mill and several Rakhine homes. Rakhines fired homemade guns.
Six
Muslims were killed, including two women, said M.V. Kareem, 63, a Muslim elder
in Pa Rein - a toll confirmed by the military. He and other villagers said they
saw familiar faces and uniformed police in the angry crowd.
"I
don't know why it started," said Kareem, who has friends in the Buddhist
village. Buddhist farmer Kyin Sein Aung was baffled, too. For years, he worked
in rice fields shoulder-to-shoulder with his Muslim neighbors. "We had no
problems before."
Communities
like Pa Rein had avoided the June violence. But new strains emerged with the
subsequent segregation of Muslim and Buddhist villages, a draconian order
imposed by the Rakhine State government. Intended to prevent more violence, it
backfired.
Impoverished
Muslim villagers could no longer buy rice and other supplies in Buddhist towns.
Transgressors were sometimes beaten with sticks or fists to warn others,
according to people interviewed in six Muslim villages. Fishing nets were
confiscated.
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| Bodies of 10 Bengali Muslims killed by Yakhine Buddhist mob in Taungup as retaliation for Thida Htwe's death. |
By 4:30
p.m. that same Monday, several thousand Rakhines were massed outside Sam Ba Le,
a village in neighboring Minbya township. By now, a pattern was emerging.
Rakhines
flanked the village, hurling Molotov cocktails and firing homemade guns, said a
village elder. Muslims fought back, sometimes with spears or machetes, but were
overpowered. Government troops shot rounds into the air. By the time the crowd
left Sam Ba Le at 6 p.m., one Muslim man had been killed and two-thirds of its
331 homes razed.
As night
fell, the townships of Mrauk-U and Minbya imposed 7 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfews. But
worse was to come.
Rakhines
will drink kalar blood
Tuesday
began with a massacre. Reuters reporters visited dozens of villages in Rakhine
State. But there was only one where their entry was barred by soldiers and
police: the remote, riverside community of Yin Thei, in the shadow of the Chin
mountains.
What
happened there suggested a bolder and better organized mob, aided by
incompetent or complicit police. By 7 a.m. on Tuesday, hundreds of Rakhine
arrived on boats to surround Yin Thei, said a resident contacted by telephone.
By late afternoon, the Muslim villagers were fending off waves of attacks. The
resident said children, including two of his young cousins, were killed by
sword-wielding Rakhines. Most houses were burned down.
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| Nothing left standing after the race riots. |
The
official death toll is five Rakhines and 51 Muslims killed at Yin Thei,
including 21 Muslim women, said a senior police officer in Naypyitaw, the new
capital of Myanmar. He denied security forces opened fire or abetted the mobs.
The Yin Thei resident put the toll higher, saying 62 people were buried in
small graves of about 10 bodies each.
As Yin
Thei burned, the last of nearly 4,000 Rohingya Muslims were fleeing the large
port town of Pauktaw, in a dramatic exodus by sea that had begun five days
earlier. Tensions had simmered since October 12, when four Rohingya
fishermen were killed off Pauktaw, said a military source. Afterwards, local
authorities had ordered Rohingya to stay in their own villages for their
safety. Men couldn't work in town, and few dared to go fishing.
"The
government gave us food but it wasn't enough," said Num Marot, 48.
"We didn't dare stay."
Pauktaw's
Rohingya began cramming into boats for the two-hour voyage to the state
capital, Sittwe. Num Marot's new home would be a tarpaulin tent in a squalid
camp already packed with tens of thousands of people displaced by the June
violence.
About 30
minutes after the last boat pushed out to sea, the two Rohingya neighborhoods
in Pauktaw were set ablaze, witnesses said. All 335 homes were destroyed. The
charred and roofless frame of a once-busy mosque is marked with graffiti:
"Rakhines will drink kalar blood," it reads, using the slur for
Muslims.
Kay Aye,
deputy chairman of Pauktaw township, insists Rohingya set alight their own
homes and blames the communal problems on the Muslim population's doubling in
10 years. "Muslims want all people to become Muslims. That's the Muslim
problem," he said. "Most of the Muslims here are uneducated, so they
tend to be ruder than Rakhines."
Tuesday
night fell. Soon a new inferno began in Kyaukphyu, a sleepy port town 65 miles
southeast of Sittwe with strategic significance: gas and oil pipelines lead
from this township across Myanmar to China's energy-hungry northwest.
So far,
the violence had targeted Rohingya Muslims. About a fifth of Kyaukphyu town's
24,000 people are Muslims, and many of them are Kaman. The Kaman are recognized
as one of Myanmar's 135 official ethnic groups; they usually hold citizenship
and can be hard to tell apart from Rakhine Buddhists.
Most
Kyaukphyu Muslims lived in East Pikesake, a neighborhood wedged between Rakhine
communities and the jade-green waters of the Bay of Bengal.
Relations
between the two communities had began to unravel after the June violence. The
destruction of Buddhist temples by mobs in Muslim Bangladesh in early October
further stoked the animosity.
The first
fire began in East Pikesake on Tuesday evening, and soon dozens of houses,
Rakhine and Muslim, were ablaze. The streets around the Old Village Jamae
Mosque, one of East Pikesake's two mosques, became the front line in pitched
battles between the two communities.
Rakhines
fought with swords, iron rods and traditional Rakhine spears. The Muslims had
jinglees - long darts made from sharpened bicycle spokes or fish hooks, which
are fitted with plastic streamers and shot from catapults.
With the
sea behind them, Pikesake's Muslims were cut off from escape by Rakhine crowds
so large that the security forces, which numbered about 80 police and 100
soldiers, were overwhelmed, said Police Lieutenant Myint Khin, Kyaukphyu's
station commander. "We couldn't control them," he said.
Police
fired tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse Muslim and Rakhine mobs, said
Police Lieutenant Myint Khin. The military fired live rounds, said a source in
the security forces, but evidently not into the crowd. Staff at Kyaukphyu
hospital told Reuters they treated injuries from blades, jinglees and fire, but
none from bullets.
Taught them a lesson
The next
morning, the rest of East Pikesake went up in flames. Myint Hlaing, a local
official, said the heat was "more intense than a crematorium." It
singed the fronds of five-story-high palm trees.
Rakhine
men had begun pouring in from surrounding villages. Unpublished video shot by
an amateur cameraman shows young men in red bandanas entering the town in
convoys of tractors. They helped to terrorize Muslims living elsewhere in
Kyaukphyu, according to Muslim and Rakhine witnesses. Police Lieutenant Myint
Khin said the security forces were too overstretched to stop them.
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| Bengali-Muslim survivors of a rare Buddhist massacre. |
Only two
forces could give the mob pause. The first was the national military, which
scattered crowds by shooting in the air. The second was Rakhine Buddhist
officials such as Myint Hlaing.
Some
officials joined the mob, said local Muslims, but others confronted it. Facing
cries of "Kill the kalar protector!" Myint Hlaing, 68, pleaded with
angry Rakhines outside Kaman Muslim homes in his neighbourhood. "If we
hadn't protected the Kamans, their houses would be destroyed and the people
dead," he said.
By
mid-morning, the military began evacuating Muslims by bus to a guarded refugee
camp outside town. Back in Pikesake, which was still burning, the Muslims
had only one exit: the sea. A flotilla of fishing boats was preparing to leave
its blazing shores.
"People
swam out to the boats but were chased down and stabbed before they got
there," said Abdulloh, 35, a Rohingya fisherman. Xanabibi, 46, a Kaman
woman, said she watched from a boat as three Rakhine men with swords set upon a
Muslim teenager. "I watched them ... cut up his body into four
pieces," she said.
Rakhine
Buddhists claim they witnessed atrocities, too. Myint Hlaing said he saw a
Muslim on one departing boat hold aloft a severed Rakhine head.
By
mid-afternoon, at least 80 boats, many overloaded with 130 or more people, had
set sail for Sittwe, said witnesses. An additional 1,700 or more Muslims ended
up at a squalid, military-guarded camp outside Kyaukphyu.
The
official statistics tell of a lopsided battle at Kyaukphyu. Of the 11 dead, nine
were Muslims. Nearly all of the 891 houses destroyed belonged to Muslims;
nearly all of the 5,301 people displaced were Muslims. Four of Kyaukphyu's five
mosques were destroyed.
A
prominent Rakhine businessman, who requested anonymity, showed little sympathy
for his former neighbours. "The majority taught them a lesson," he
said.
The last
spasm of violence took place at Kyauktaw, a town north of the state capital,
Sittwe. At that point, the military shot into the crowd - and, for the first
time, killed the Buddhists it had long been accused of siding with.
Soldiers
opened fire to prevent Rakhine villagers on two boats from storming a Rohingya
Muslim community, said Aung Kyaw Min, a 28-year-old Rakhine from Taung Bwe with
a bullet in his leg. "I don't know why the military shot at us," he
said. Two people died and 10 were wounded, villagers said.
In a
separate incident the same day, security forces shot at Rakhines on Kyauktaw's
outskirts, killing two and wounding four, a witness told Reuters.
The
shootings seemed to send a message to the mobs. The violence stopped that day.
The senior
police officer in Naypyitaw acknowledged that police were forced to fire at
both Muslims and Rakhines in their attempts to subdue large crowds.
The
official death toll from the October violence now stood at 89. The real toll
could be higher. The extent of the killing at Yin Thei village remains unclear.
Reports persist that scores of Muslims fleeing Pauktaw drowned after Rakhines
rammed their boat. Nearly 4,700 homes were destroyed in 42 villages.
In a
statement that Thursday, President Thein Sein warned that the "persons and
organizations" behind the Rakhine State violence would be exposed and
prosecuted. The mobs were well-organized and led by core instigators, some of
whom moved village to village, military sources told Reuters.
In
Kyaukphyu, however, police have so far arrested only seven people - six of them
for looting. In Mrauk-U township, where most killings occurred, only 14 people
have been arrested, said the military intelligence officer. The apparent
impunity of the instigators is sending a chilling message to Muslim communities
across Myanmar.
The
intelligence officer, who has direct knowledge of the state's security
operations, identified the suspected ringleaders as Rakhine extremists with
ties to the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party, or RNDP, which was set up
to contest Myanmar's 2010 general election. He didn't name any suspects.
Buddhist monks stoked the unrest with anti-Muslim rhetoric, he added.
RNDP
Secretary-General Oo Hla Saw denied that his party organized any mobs. But he
acknowledged the possible involvement of supporters, low-level officials and
"moderate monks who become radical when they think about Muslims."
Oo Hla Saw
blamed local authorities for failing to heed rumors of impending violence, and
Islamist radicals for inflaming tensions. For many Rakhines, he adds, the term
Rohingya has jihadist overtones associated with the "Mujahid,"
autonomy-seeking rebels in northern Rakhine State from 1949 to 1961, who called
themselves ethnic Rohingya. (Independent historians say the rebels did
popularize the term "Rohingya," but cite a few references to it since
the 18th century.)
Even
today, Oo Hla Saw said, the Rohingya want "to set up an autonomous Islamic
community. They are systematically scheming to do that."
Most
Rohingya struggle simply to get by. A 2010 survey by the French group Action
Against Hunger found a malnutrition rate of 20 percent, far above the emergency
threshold set by the World Health Organization.
Many arrived
as laborers from Bangladesh under British rule in the 19th century - grounds
the government now uses to deny them citizenship. Rohingya were effectively
rendered stateless under the 1982 Citizenship Law, which excluded them from the
list of indigenous ethnic groups. Officials refer to them as Bengalis. Most
Rohingya found it hard to apply for naturalized citizenship, since they
couldn't speak Burmese or prove long-term residence.
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| No OIC protests led by Buddhist monks. |
An
anti-OIC rally in Sittwe on October 15 "angered Muslims here,"
conceded Nyar Nar, 32, one of the Rakhine monks who led it. He regards Muslims
as foreign invaders. "As monks, we have morality and ethics," he
said. "But if outsiders come to occupy our land, then we will take up
swords to protect it."
In some
parts of the state, the mood is celebratory. "This is the best time
because there are no Muslims here," said Zaw Min Oo, a Rakhine shoe seller
in Pauktaw township. Nearly 95 percent of a 20,000-strong Muslim community
there is now gone.
The peace
might be short-lived. The state's clumsy attempts at segregation helped create
the conditions for the October violence. Further segregation - including the
confining of tens of thousands of Muslims in seething camps - could spark more
violence. Curfews remain in force across much of Rakhine State.
In
Kyaukphyu town, starving dogs sniff through the ashes while municipal workers
heave scrap metal into a truck. The only Muslim left in town is Ngwe Shin, an
old woman suffering from mental illness. She can often be found near the
market, shuffling past vandalized or shuttered homes.
Related posts at following links:
Arakan Burning again with Bengali Race Riots
Arakan Boiling with Anti-Islamic Fever!
Kyauk Phyu Muslim Wards Burning
Related posts at following links:
Arakan Burning again with Bengali Race Riots
Arakan Boiling with Anti-Islamic Fever!
Kyauk Phyu Muslim Wards Burning
