A man walks out from a destroyed mosque that was burnt down in recent violence at Tha Pyu Chai village. PHOTO: REUTERS
Flies were buzzing around the bloodied patch of earth outside a ransacked mosque in Tha Phyu Chai village where police removed Khin Naing's body after he was hacked to death by ethnic Rakhine Buddhists.
"He couldn't run fast enough from the Rakhine people," said his son, Tun Tun Naing, 17, who emerged from hiding to identify his father's corpse from what remained of his charred clothing.
Khin Naing was one of five Muslims killed and four Rakhine Buddhists wounded in four days of violence in Thandwe, a township in western Rakhine State popular with foreign tourists for its nearby Ngapali Beach.
Not far from its resorts, Buddhists armed with sticks, slingshots and machetes launched repeated attacks on Muslim villagers from Sunday, burning down dozens of homes, witnesses said.
Sectarian violence in Myanmar has killed at least 240 people and displaced 140,000, most of them Muslims, since June 2012.
The latest bloodshed in Thandwe shows Myanmar's reformist government struggling to curb the spread of a Buddhist nationalist movement known as 969 and control members of an ethnic Rakhine political party implicated in violence.
The numbers symbolise the Buddha, his teachings and the monkhood. Many anti-Muslim attacks have taken place where monks have preached the 969 creed but the violence had ebbed in recent weeks until the Thandwe attacks.
Police in Thandwe say they have arrested six people, including the local chairman of the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party (RNDP) and supporters of the 969 movement. RNDP members were implicated in anti-Muslim violence last October in which at least 89 people were killed, a Reuters investigation found.
The latest violence coincided with a three-day visit to Rakhine State by President Thein Sein. Tension was high as he arrived in Thandwe on Wednesday, with police firing shots in the air to disperse a crowd.
"Enemy bases"
Evidence of 969 activity is hard to miss.
Banners bearing the movement's logo flank roads to Ngapali beach. Muslims said 969 supporters had recently blasted Buddhist nationalistic songs from speakers at Thandwe town hall.
That followed a sermon in Shwe Hlay village by a prominent 969 monk called Wirathu, who once described mosques as "enemy bases".
"After that, we had to be very careful in the village and not bump into Buddhists or make them angry," said Myint Aung, one of scores of Muslim residents of Tha Phyu Chai village huddled near one of the few homes left standing.
Wirathu's admirers include Sann Sint, minister of religious affairs, who told Reuters in June the monk only promoted "love and understanding between religions".
President Thein Sein has called Wirathu "a son of Lord Buddha" and said 969 "is just a symbol of peace".
About five percent of Myanmar's 60 million people are Muslim, according to government estimates. About a million more are Rohingya Muslims, mostly stateless and living in northern Rakhine State.
Maung Myint Htay, a Buddhist resident of Tha Phyu Chai, said he played no part in Tuesday's attacks, but didn't condemn them.
"It's not wrong," he said, adding that Rakhine people had a "historical duty" to protect their homeland from Muslims.
Myint Moe of a group called the Committee for the Protection of Religion and Nationality acknowledged that he distributed 969 stickers and had the support of hundreds of Buddhist monks.
Myint Moe rejected the name "Rohingya" and instead referred to members of that community as "Bengalis", a term that implies they are illegal migrants from neighbouring Bangladesh.
An RNDP official in Thandwe said the arrest of party members could cause more unrest.
"It's the responsibility of the government because they arrested the party leader and religious leaders," said Maung Maung Phyu. "People are angry."
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This is gruesome killing and has been going on for more than one year now. It should stop. However, only China can do something on this. No other country, even UN and OIC can do anything about it. Nothing in this news mentions of any violence started by these muslims and yet they are suffering the anger of the buddhists and they have no one to help them or even take up their cause.
The recent killings in Kenya where the terrorists let out muslims after establishing their knowledge of Islam and killed others was even more gruesome. No muslim country condemned those killings sincerely. In Kenya, those terrorists questioned their captives on their knowledge of Islam. In a way it is similar to Pakistan's ECP who also questioned prospective candidates on their knowledge of Islam. Some muslim countries preach Ummah. Though there is no real Ummah and there has never been any muslim unity for a good cause, non-muslim countries are perceiving more and more that the Ummah is in existence only when it comes to creating trouble in non-muslim countries. This is affecting muslims all over the world. Muslim countries really need to look into this and reverse this. OIC was once a rich organization but it never sent even a penny in aid to benefit the non-muslims of any non-muslim country. Dividing the world into muslim and non-muslim will be detrimental to the muslims themselves as the rest of the world has progressed ahead of the muslim countries in education and economy.
So unfair when it happens to innocent Muslims in Myanmar... So understandable when it happens to kafirs (shiaites, ahmedis, Christians, Hindus) in Pakistan.
While nothing justifies what's happening in Myanmar, don't think Pakistan should be making any comments.
@anwar kamal: Stop the killing.We draw the attention of UN and international diplomatic pressure.
The same holds for Pakistan too. First try to set your house in order before pointing fingers at others. Whats happening in Burma is nothing compared to whats happening in your country.
Stop the killing.We draw the attention of UN and international diplomatic pressure.