A local madrasa _ an Islamic school _ where one of the worst episodes of the violence took place. According to several eyewitnesses, that morning a Buddhist mob attacked the school killing at least 30 students and four teachers.
Mon Hnin said she saw about 30 policemen arriving in trucks about 8am. From her vantage point, she saw how the students and teachers of the madrasa gave up to police the weapons they had improvised to defend themselves. She claimed that a group of them was offered the chance to be evacuated from the area in police trucks, but they were attacked by the mob before reaching the vehicles.
One of those she saw being killed was her husband, a halal butcher who was stabbed to death. The policemen in the area did nothing to stop the carnage. Extracts from Bangkok Post Article
Tags: Buddhism, Burma, Islam, Madrasa, Min Ko Naing, Muslim, Politics of Burma, Religion and Spirituality
Dr Ko Ko Gyi's Blog 
April 14, 2013 at 5:39 am |
One local reporter who witnessed the carnage, told Spectrum that she arrived at the scene at 5pm and saw a pile of several dozen corpses just metres from the madrasa. When she went back four hours later, the pile had been set on fire.
On March 21, the young reporter saw and filmed a group of Buddhists slit the throat of a Muslim man, before dousing him with petrol and setting him on fire. She continued recording despite being told to stop, but eventually had to flee the scene when six or seven Buddhist men chased her, hitting her on the back.
The reporter said that during the time she was in Meiktila, from March 20-22, she saw only Buddhists carrying weapons and the violence was fundamentally one-sided, with the Muslims always on the receiving end.
April 14, 2013 at 6:07 am |
Ashin Gambira, a former monk and leader of the 2007 ”Saffron Revolution” is one of Ashin Wirathu’s main critics. He said the monk is breaking the Buddhist precept of ”right speech”, which exhorts followers in part to avoid saying anything that could prove harmful to others. According to him, anti-Muslim sentiment was actively promoted by the army during its five decades of dictatorship and the hatred is now ”instilled in the minds of the people” to such a degree that it would not take much of an effort to ”revive it at any moment”.
April 14, 2013 at 6:12 am |
Inter-religious and communal tensions had long existed in Myanmar before Gen Ne Win took full power in 1962. Anti-Indian and anti-Muslim riots exploded in Yangon in 1930 and 1938 due to the resentment of the Myanmar people towards Indians who had entered the country with the arrival of the British colonisers. As today, the riots were often incited by Buddhist nationalist monks.
Ne Win and the military junta that replaced him played this religious ultra-nationalist and racist card for the entirety of their rules. Muslims and other non-Buddhists were barred from the upper echelons of the army and, almost immediately after Ne Win’s coup, he expelled hundreds of thousands of Indians from the country.
He also fostered a sense of a Myanmar identity strongly linked to ethnicity and religion, which has been the breeding ground for waves of anti-Muslim violence, like this most recent one, which threatens to spiral out of control and spread to large parts of the country.