The intercommunal tensions between Muslims and Buddhists are very different in central Burma from those in Arakan. In the two cases, religion and ethnicity play a different role. Yet the conflicts have fed each other over the years. The 2012 riots in Arakan reverberated throughout Burma, contributing to rising hostility against Muslims elsewhere. Conversely, the anti-Muslim wave largely provoked by the 969 Movement contributed to a hardening of anti-Rohingya sentiment in Arakan. The living conditions of Muslims are also generally different. In Arakan, most of the Muslim population is rural, and largely concentrated in the north. There have been urban Muslims in places like Sittwe, and even a Rohingya middle class of traders and merchants; but the overwhelming majority of Rohingya are extremely impoverished farmers. Both Rakhine and Rohingya claim the same territory as their ancestral land, based on divergent historical narratives. In central and upper Burma, most of the Muslim population live in cities like Rangoon and Mandalay. They may concentrate in certain neighbourhoods in the cities, but they are scattered throughout the country.
Most Muslims in central and upper Burma are far from wealthy, but they are overrepresented in trade, as a consequence of strong networks and having inherited a somewhat advantageous – though later increasingly precarious – position from the colonial period, while Buddhists are mostly impoverished farmers. Real economic domination in the country is exercised by the generals, Chinese companies and businessmen, and the billionaire ‘cronies’; but the country’s wealthiest people are out of sight of the general population. Muslim traders, usually owners of shops of small and middle size, are more visible to the general Burmese population than the super-rich businessmen, and their marginally better economic position has sometimes caused resentment among the Buddhist population. Chinese traders and small businessmen have flooded several cities in upper Burma in recent decades, most conspicuously in Mandalay, where they exercise huge control over the economy that is resented by many of its Burmese citizens.9 But there has not recently been any sustained anti-Chinese campaign comparable to the 969 Movement against Muslims. Due to the strong links that the military government has maintained with China and Chinese corporations, it has been in its best interests to avoid anti-Chinese sentiment from exploding into violence. In short, the fact that Muslims have a certain degree of control over small trade in towns and cities may make the notion of a Muslim economic threat peddled by the 969 Movement plausible to many Buddhists in central Burma.
In the climate of intercommunal distrust fostered by the 969 Movement, violence did not take long to explode. The first place to fall was Meiktila, a commercial town with a population of around 100,000 in Irrawaddy Division, 140 kilometres south of Mandalay. Wirathu had mentioned Meiktila in one of his sermons, which was uploaded to YouTube during the violence, saying that the NLD office in town was controlled by Muslims – though it is unclear when and where he gave the sermon, and how many people in the town had heard it.10 In the weeks before the violence, a pamphlet was distributed around the town in the name of ‘Buddhists who feel helpless’. The pamphlet claimed that strange ‘kalars’ (a derogatory term used to refer to people of South Asian origin) had been seen around town and that ‘using money Saudi allocated to mosques, they have been buying land, farm and houses both in and out of the town with incredible amount of money under the Burmese names’. These mysterious Muslims were allegedly bribing officials to gain control over the city and marry Buddhist women.11 Such accusations may have had a ring of truth for many because the retail trade in Meiktila was mostly in the hands of Muslims.
The trigger for the violence took place in one of those Muslim-owned shops. Everything started with the breaking of a gold hair-clip.12 On 20 March 2013, a Buddhist woman from a village near Meiktila went with her husband and sister to a downtown gold shop to sell a gold hair-clip. When they were bargaining with the owner of the shop, the hair clip got broken, and a quarrel ensued in which the owner slapped the woman. According to several witnesses, the clients were expelled from the shop and beaten up in the street by three clerks. The police detained the owner and the woman; but a crowd of Buddhists gathered around, soon becoming enraged and attacking the shop, shouting anti-Muslim slurs. Tensions mounted as the story of the incident quickly became known everywhere in the town. That same evening, four Muslims allegedly attacked a Buddhist monk travelling on the back of a bike. They hit him in the head, and when he fell they doused him with fuel and set him on fire. He died in hospital a few hours later. That evening, the Muslim-majority quarter of Mingalar Zay Yone was in flames, when Buddhist mobs attacked the Muslim population in retaliation.
Mon Hnin, a twenty-nine-year-old Muslim woman, told me a couple of weeks later that she had spent the night when everything had started with her daughter and mother-in-law, hiding in terror in the bushes on the fringes of that neighbourhood. Her house had been destroyed by a Buddhist mob, and she and her relatives had to take refuge in the first place they could find. The bushes where they had hidden are in front of a local madrasa, where the worst atrocity of that pogrom took place. According to several eyewitnesses, the next morning a mob of Buddhists attacked the madrasa and killed at least twenty students and four teachers.13 Mon Hnin told me that she saw about thirty policemen arriving in trucks in the morning. From her hiding place, she saw how the students and teachers of the madrasa gave up the weapons they had improvised to defend themselves. 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 them was her husband, a halal butcher who was stabbed to death. The policemen in the area did nothing to stop the carnage. Shortly afterwards, Mon Hnin, her daughter and her mother-in-law were given shelter in the house of a Buddhist neighbour.
Win Htein was then the local MP for the NLD. A former army officer who had spent several years in jail for his political activities, he had been the man responsible for the security of Aung San Suu Kyi after she was released from house arrest on November 2010. ‘I saw with my own eyes two people already dead and five more put to death in front of me’, he told me a few weeks later in the ramshackle local NLD office, explaining what he had witnessed in the madrasa. He assured me that he had tried to protect the Muslims, but the mob had threatened him. Then he called the chief minister of Mandalay Division, General Ye Myint, imploring him to stop the riots. ‘He said he’d already given orders to the police to take action, but there was no action at all’, he told me.
A local video journalist from Mandalay went immediately to Meiktila. When she arrived at the scene of the massacre in the madrasa, she saw a pile of several dozen corpses a few metres away. When she went back four hours later, the pile had been set on fire. In the meantime, in the intersection of the main road, she filmed a group of Buddhists slit the throat of a Muslim man before dousing him with petrol and setting him on fire while he was still alive. The police were there, but they did nothing. She continued recording despite being told to stop, but eventually had to flee the scene on a motorbike when several men chased her. According to her, during the time she spent recording the riots in Meiktila, she saw only Buddhists carrying weapons, and the violence was fundamentally one-sided, the Muslims being always on the receiving end.
Win Htein told me that the attacks were spontaneous and perpetrated by the Buddhist residents of the city; but other witnesses said that the attackers were unknown to them, and seemed to be following a well-coordinated plan. It is difficult to know exactly who carried out the violence, but it is possible that some mobs from outside had led the riots, with local residents joining in. Some of the perpetrators seemed to be Buddhist monks; many Burmese, horrified with the violence, were adamant that those could not have been monks, but must have been thugs dressed as such.
Amid the carnage, there were also stories of heroism, as some monks gave shelter to Muslims in their monasteries. But for two days, Buddhist mobs roamed free through the city, destroying hundreds of houses and killing, according to official figures, at least forty-two people, until the military intervened and restored a semblance of order. Some members of the 88 Generation visited the town to calm the situation down. Ashin Wirathu also visited the city when order had largely been restored, and called for an end to the violence.
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