PressTV:
April 12, 2013
A court in Myanmar sentences three Muslims to
14 years in prison with hard labor for beating a Buddhist customer in a gold
shop in the central town of Meiktila.
The gold shop owner, his wife and an employee,
were given the jail terms for hitting the customer in an argument over a gold
hairpin in Meiktila on March 20.
The argument sparked several days of violence
against Muslims across the country. Over 40 people were killed and more than a
thousand others injured. A number of mosques and homes of Muslims were also
burned down in several towns in central Myanmar.
Myanmar’s Islamic Religious Affairs Council
and the Myanmar Muslim National Affairs Organisation later appealed to the
government of President Thein Sein to take swift action to stop the ‘violent
attacks.’
On March 28, the UN Special Rapporteur on
Human Rights in Myanmar, Tomas Ojea Quintana, said he had received reports that
Myanmar’s soldiers and police sometimes stood by “while atrocities have been
committed before their very eyes” by well-organized Buddhist mobs in the
central city of Meiktila.
The Muslim minority of Rohingyas in Myanmar
accounts for about five percent of the country’s population of nearly 60
million. The persecuted minority has faced torture, neglect, and repression
since the country achieved independence in 1948.
Last year, scores of Rohingyas were killed
when Buddhist extremists carried out atrocities against Muslims in the western
state of Rakhine. Thousands of Rohingyas were also displaced.
Myanmar’s government has been repeatedly
criticized for failing to protect the Rohingya Muslims.
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