Myanmar Muslims living in
Malaysia show banners and placards during a demonstration against the killings
of Muslims in Meikhtila, in Kuala Lumpur March 25, 2013. Hundreds of troops
kept an uneasy calm in central Myanmar on Saturday after martial law was
imposed to quell three days of bloody unrest between Buddhists and Muslims that
is testing the country's nascent democracy. Reuters /Bazuki Muhammad
By Aye Win Myint
Reuters
March 25, 2013
MEIKHTILA, Myanmar
(Reuters) - Myanmar's government is struggling to contain anti-Muslim violence
that touched the outskirts of the capital, Naypyitaw, at the weekend and forced
it to send troops to patrol the streets in the town where the recent trouble started.
Four houses and a small
mosque in Tatkon township on the northern edges of Naypyitaw were set ablaze
late on Sunday, a civil servant in the capital told Reuters on Monday.
Communal tension, stifled
under half a century of army rule, has resurfaced since President Thein Sein's
reformist government took office in 2011.
It has released dissidents
and relaxed media censorship, but was also criticised for failing to quell last
year's violence in Rakhine State in western Myanmar. Official figures say 110 people
were killed and 120,000 were left homeless, most of them Rohingya Muslims.
The latest unrest began
last Wednesday in Meikhtila, 130 km (80 miles) north of the capital and sparked
by an argument between a Buddhist couple and the Muslim owners of a gold shop
that escalated into rioting in which 32 people died, official figures show.
Police were criticised in
the media and by local people for making little effort to halt the violence as
ethnic Burmese Buddhists including monks stalked the streets armed with swords
and knives.
More than 2,000 people are
now living in makeshift camps, but calm has been restored by the military, sent
in on Friday when the government declared martial law in the area.
"I think I am safe now
and I can reopen my shop because of soldiers guarding the town,"
52-year-old Khin Mya told Reuters. "Soon after soldiers arrived, we got
peace. The situation had been very, very dangerous in previous days."
Vijay Nambiar, U.N. special
adviser on Myanmar, told Reuters after visiting the area on Sunday that the
government had said to him it would not hesitate to send troops in elsewhere if
needed.
In a statement, the United
Nations warned the sectarian unrest could endanger the reforms initiated by
Thein Sein.
"Religious leaders and
other community leaders must also publicly call on their followers to abjure
violence, respect the law and promote peace," Nambiar said in the
statement.
State-run MRTV said on
Sunday police had arrested 35 people in Meikhtila and two other townships in
connection with the violence.
In one incident late on
Saturday, unknown assailants torched more than 40 homes, 38 belonging to
Muslims, in Ywadan village in Yamaethin township, said Soe Lwin, a local
official. The village is 66 km (41 miles) south of Meikhtila.
"At about 8 p.m.,
around 100 people turned up shouting 'Let's burn it down, let's burn it down,'
and started destroying our house first," said a 35-year-old shop owner in
Ywadan, asking not to be named.
"It didn't look like
they were outsiders. I think it's the people from this area," he said,
speaking through the fence of a school where Muslims had taken refuge. "I
could feel the way they looked at us had changed since Meikhtila
happened."
Tension was high in certain
parts of Yangon, the former capital and Myanmar's biggest city. Police were
stationed outside mosques on Sunday evening.
Myanmar is a predominately
Buddhist country, but about 5 percent of its 60 million people are Muslims.