Burma rioters kill 94-year-old, burn homes in new clashes
President Thein Sein makes first trip to embattled Rakhine state amid latest sectarian violence
President Thein Sein travelled to the conflict-torn western Rakhine state as a new spate of sectarian violence gripped Burma, also known as Myanmar, on Tuesday, with police saying Buddhist rioters have killed a 94-year-old Muslim woman and torched as many as 80 homes.
Police officer Kyaw Naing said clashes broke out in Thabyachaing village, some 350 kilometres from the capital, Rangoon, on the country’s west coast in the afternoon.
He said the 94-year-old, Aye Kyi, died of stab wounds, and that between 70 and 80 houses were set on fire.
The president's visit to the divided region was his first since sectarian violence broke out more than a year ago.
Thein Sein arrived in the Rakhine state capital of Sittwe and was scheduled to travel to several more towns in the area, including Maungdaw to the north and Thandwe to the south, where Buddhist mobs started torching Muslim homes Sunday, a senior official in the president's office said.
The official declined to be identified because he was not authorized to speak about the sensitive trip.
Sectarian clashes that began in Rakhine state in June 2012 have since morphed into an anti-Muslim campaign that has spread to towns and villages nationwide. So far, hundreds of people have been killed and more than 140,000 have fled their homes, the vast majority of them Muslims.
Thein Sein, who has been praised for making moves to transition from half a century of military rule, has also been criticized for failing to contain the unrest and protect the country's embattled minority.
Buddhist cab driver complaint starts violence
The latest flare-up began in the coastal town of Thandwe on Saturday after a Buddhist taxi driver told police he had been verbally abused by a Muslim small business owner while trying to park in front of his shop, according to a state government spokesman.
Police took the shop owner in for questioning but when he was released soon afterwards, a crowd of angry Buddhists is reported to have thrown stones at his home.
Several houses were burned Sunday, prompting authorities to impose a curfew. Two days later, ethnic Rakhine Buddhist mobs began new arson attacks in the region.
Hundreds of rioters burned "many" homes owned by Muslim residents in three villages near Thandwe on Tuesday morning, according to a police officer stationed in Thandwe who declined to be identified. He said the villages included Thabyuchaing, Shwe Hlay and Linthi, all of them about 30 kilometers from the town centre.
A Muslim resident of Thandwe, Myo Min, said three other villages elsewhere had also been hit, and some Buddhist homes were burned in the mayhem.
A similar incident occurred in Thandwe three months ago when two houses belonging to Muslims were burned down after rumours circulated that a woman had been raped by Muslim men.
Mosque, homes burned
Similar episodes pitting Rakhine Buddhists against Rohingya Muslims – who are widely denigrated in the country as illegal migrants from Bangladesh and routinely denied passports as a result – gripped the region earlier this year.
In March, Thein Sein declared a state of emergency in the region and deployed the army after several days of anarchy saw armed Buddhists torch the Muslim quarter in the central city of Meikhtila. The damage included a mosque and 50 homes, which were burned.
Analysts say the emergence of sectarian conflict in Burma is a worrying development and indicates violent anti-Muslim sentiment has spread unabated into the country's heartland. Muslims make up about four per cent of the predominantly Buddhist country's roughly 60 million people.