THABYU CHAING (Myanmar) — Paralysed from the waist down, Daw Aye Kyi was too heavy for her daughter and granddaughter to carry into the surrounding jungle when a Buddhist mob stormed through the village of Thabbyu Chaing hunting for Muslims. Three men brandishing machetes and knives ignored pleas for mercy and lunged at Aye Kyi. Her daughter and granddaughter fled. Several hours later, Aye Kyi’s body was discovered, slumped next to the smoking cinders of her wooden house. The police said she was stabbed six times. She was 94 years old. Aye Kyi was one of five Muslims killed in the attack on Thabyu Chaing last month, a rampage that also destroyed more than a dozen homes. So far, in a year and a half of sporadic Buddhist-Muslim violence, more than 200 people, mostly Muslims, have died. But the killing of a helpless elderly woman — and what followed — is one of the starkest symbols of the breadth of anti-Muslim feelings in this Buddhist-majority country, the lack of sympathy for the victims and the failure of security forces to stop the killings. The state-run news media obliquely reported the killings as “casualties”, without offering any details. And although President Thein Sein ordered his office to directly investigate the deaths, there has been no national outcry. “For a culture that has such great respect for the elderly, the killing of this old lady should have been a turning point, a moment of national soul-searching,” said Mr Richard Horsey, a former United Nations official in the country. “The fact that this has not happened is almost as disturbing as the killing itself.” After five decades of military rule, Myanmar remains a heavily militarised country. Yet, security forces were unwilling or unable to stop the Buddhist mob here. The match that lit the violence in the western state of Rakhine, as elsewhere, appeared to be the teachings of a radical Buddhist group, 969, that the government continues to allow to preach hatred and extend its influence throughout the countryside. When the first bouts of religious violence broke out in June last year, the fighting was in a relatively circumscribed area near the border with Bangladesh, and involved tensions between Buddhists and a stateless Muslim group known as the Rohingya, which is widely reviled by Myanmar’s Buddhists. But the violence in Thabyu Chaing, several hundred kilometres away, underlines how the strife has metastasised into a nationwide anti-Muslim movement. By the accounts of Buddhists and Muslims, Aye Kyi’s village was a portrait of religious harmony. The citizenship of her ethnic group, the Kaman, has never been in dispute. Aye Kyi was born Buddhist and married a Muslim man, and three of her four children chose to become Buddhist. Muslims say the spiralling hatred is largely due to influences from outside the village. They say Buddhist neighbours became more distant after the spiritual leader of the 969 movement, who preaches on the threat of Islam in the country, gave a sermon in a neighbouring village in April. “They hate Islam and they want it to disappear from the country,” said Ms Daw Than Than Nwe, a Muslim woman from the village. Meanwhile, Buddhists say the immediate trigger for the violence last month was an episode in which a Muslim merchant insulted a Buddhist man for flying a Buddhist flag on his three-wheeled taxi. Mr U Einda Sara, the abbot of a large Buddhist temple in Myanmar’s most famous beach resort, Ngapali, justified the killing of Muslims on the grounds that it was self-defence. “If you encounter a tiger, you run away if possible. But if you cannot run, you have to fight back.” THE NEW YORK TIMES
Posted on: Wed, 13 Nov 2013 21:55:29 +0000
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