The violence soon spread to other towns and villages in central Burma. In the coming weeks, around twenty towns and villages saw anti-Muslim pogroms of lower intensity, tracing a line that threatened to reach Rangoon, the country’s biggest city. When I visited the country I interviewed some refugees who had been displaced to Rangoon from Minhla, a town 160 kilometres to the north. A group of eighty Muslims were sheltering in a derelict building owned by a Muslim. Maung Win, a teacher at the local madrasa, recounted how a mob of Buddhist extremists had attacked the mosque shortly after afternoon prayers. He and other refugees from Minhla told me that the attacks had come out of the blue, without any prior threat or warning. But they also said that relations between the two communities had steadily soured after a monk had visited the city one month before, when he had given a sermon telling Buddhists to shun Muslims and their shops.
The violence never reached Rangoon, but its Muslim residents feared that the worst could also come to them. Residents told me that people roamed the streets in cars at night, shouting threats and anti-Muslim slurs. After the attacks in Meiktila, the residents of Mingalar Taungyungnunt, the main Muslim quarter in Rangoon, were on edge. The community had taken charge of its own security. At night, men patrolled the streets, and every entrance to the neighbourhood from the main streets was blocked with makeshift barricades. Nobody seemed to trust that the authorities would protect them if what they called ‘Buddhist terrorists’ attacked them.
Many Muslims felt that Aung San Suu Kyi had also abandoned them. Muslims throughout Burma have long supported her in the hope that she would strive to stamp out discrimination against them. Win Htein, the NLD lawmaker who had tried to calm the situation during the riots in Meiktila, denounced the violence in subsequent weeks, and he was denounced by Buddhist extremists as a ‘friend of the kalar’. Meanwhile, Suu Kyi kept silent. A few days after the riots, on 27 March, she surprised observers and Burmese citizens alike by attending a military parade in Naypyidaw for the first time, as part of a celebration of Armed Forces Day.
When I asked Win Htein about her silence, he said that the party was willing to ‘accept the blame for not taking the necessary steps on behalf of the Muslims’, and he added that they would ‘repair the damage later, by getting involved in religious ceremonies and asking committees to get together, but it will be a hard task’. He also told me that he had told Suu Kyi not to go to Meiktila during the riots. ‘I advised her not to come here, because people were blaming me when I supported the Muslims.’ After admitting that this decision was born out of political calculation, he added, ‘She wouldn’t be able to give a reasonable answer to the conflict – that’s why I told her not to come.’ It seemed that he was shielding her from the political damage that defending Muslims might bring.
I visited Meiktila again one year later, and the situation had not changed substantially. Little reconstruction had been undertaken in the Muslim quarter, and around 8,000 people, including Buddhists and Muslims, remained in camps for the displaced. Muslims enjoyed a freedom of movement that was denied to their coreligionists in Arakan, but it was more difficult for them to return to their homes than it was for Buddhists. Even many of those whose houses had not been destroyed were unable to return. The local authorities did not give them permission to go back to Buddhist-majority quarters, arguing that their presence might exacerbate tensions between the communities. The house of War War, a forty-two-year-old mother of four, still stood in downtown Meiktila. Her husband commuted every day from the camp outside Meiktila to work, but the chairman of the quarter refused to grant them permission to live in their home again. ‘We have been asking him for months if we can go home, but he says that the Buddhist people there don’t want us to return. He said there had been an incident involving another Muslim family. But we have visited the old quarter and our neighbours have told us that they want us to come back’, she told me.
The chairman was a sixty-year-old man called U Chaw. ‘Muslims cannot come back because this is a Buddhist-majority neighbourhood’, he said. ‘But they will be allowed back when everything has been rebuilt.’ He claimed that he was following both orders from above and the requests of the Buddhist population of his quarter to prevent Muslim families returning home. ‘People are afraid that returning Muslims will do something. It will take a long time to rebuild trust between the two communities’, he said.
When I visited the quarter and talked with its Buddhist residents, their sentiments turned out to be more complicated. One of them was Kyaw Myaing, a middle-aged man who assured me that he did not blame their Muslim neighbours for the violence, and claimed that it was the local authorities who did not wish to see the Muslims returning. But, like many of his neighbours, he was not pressing the issue, and he thought that ‘there might be trouble’ if Muslims returned to the quarter. Talking with him and other neighbours, I came to the view that they did not harbour any hatred towards the Muslims with whom they had lived in close proximity for many years, but were afraid of a repetition of the riots – and the government and local authorities were not doing anything to dispel such fears. Meanwhile, some people had given up and left. Among them was Mo Hnin, the woman who I had interviewed the previous year. When I tried to find her, the leader of the camp told me that she had left the country and was living in Qatar, working in a textile factory. ‘She couldn’t stand the sadness of living here and had to move away. She now sends money home to her family’, he explained.
Most of the displaced people have returned home over the years. The communities have gradually come to live together again, thanks to the initiatives of local civil society organizations working on interfaith dialogue.14 As in Arakan, Buddhists and Muslims had lived side by side and interacted for generations; but, unlike in Arakan, after the violence the authorities had not kept the communities apart.
Muslims in Burma have not only been demonized by the 969 Movement, but also actively persecuted by the authorities. They have been falsely portrayed by the Burmese government as a potential terrorist threat since the US Bush administration launched its ‘war on terror’ after 9/11, in what was probably a desperate attempt to curry international favour at a time when the Western powers were isolating the military regime. During the Thein Sein administration, that insidious association between Islam and terrorism came back with a vengeance. In May 2015, the police arrested twenty Muslims who were going to attend a wedding in Taungyyi, in southern Shan State. They were eventually sentenced to several years in jail on terrorism charges, including a seven-year term for a fifteen-year-old boy. No evidence was produced by the prosecution at the trial.15
That same year, with the journalist Veronica Pedrosa, I investigated a similar case in Mandalay.16 At least a dozen people had been accused of belonging to a hitherto unknown organization called ‘Myanmar Muslim Army’. There was a powerful reason why nobody had heard of such a group: it did not exist. One of the defendants was Soe Moe Aung, a twenty-four-year-old man. He was arrested in November 2014 and held incommunicado, and without access to a lawyer, for ten days during which, according to his mother and his lawyer, he was tortured to extract a confession that was used in the subsequent trial. ‘They accuse him of undergoing training in a camp, but I don’t think that’s possible’, her mother said in an interview in Mandalay. ‘He’s sick – he suffers from gout – so how could he have received any training?’ While investigating the case, we were able to obtain the authorization for the one of the arrests signed by the minister of home affairs, indicating that the case was, at the very least, given the green light from the highest authority. ‘That’s a big burden for the accused, because the court is afraid of not following orders from the minister himself’, Aung Naing Soe, the lawyer of another accused, told me.
The lawyer of Soe Moe Aung and four other people accused of belonging to the ‘Myanmar Muslim Army’ was a Muslim woman