Mob killing in Burma raises little outcry

Buddhists’ slaying of 94-year-old Muslim woman bares religious divisions

THABYU CHAING, Burma — Paralyzed from the waist down, Daw Aye Kyi was too heavy for her daughter and granddaughter to carry into the surrounding jungle when a Buddhist mob stormed through their rice-farming village hunting for Muslims.

Three men brandishing machetes and knives ignored pleas for mercy and lunged at Aye Kyi. Her daughter and her granddaughter fled. Several hours later, Aye Kyi’s body was discovered, slumped next to the smoking cinders of her wooden house. The police say she was stabbed six times. She was 94 years old.

Aye Kyi was one of five Muslims killed in the attack on Thabyu Chaing last month, a rampage that also destroyed more than a dozen homes. So far, in a year and a half of sporadic Buddhist-Muslim violence, more than 200 people, mostly Muslims, have died.

But the killing of a helpless elderly woman — and what followed — is one of the starkest symbols of the breadth of anti-Muslim feelings in the Buddhist-majority country, the lack of sympathy for the victims and the failure of security forces to stop the killings.

The state-run news media obliquely reported the killings as “casualties” without offering any details. And although the president of the fledgling democracy ordered his office to directly investigate the deaths, there has been no national outcry.

“For a culture that has such great respect for the elderly, the killing of this old lady should have been a turning point, a moment of national soul-searching,” said Richard Horsey, a former United Nations official in the country. “The fact that this has not happened is almost as disturbing as the killing itself.”

The violence that swept through the village took with it the final vestiges of what had until very recently been a peaceful place, where Muslims and Buddhists had coexisted amicably for generations before the loosening of the hard hand of the old junta freed some of Burma’s demons.

The match that lit the violence in the western state of Rakhine, as elsewhere, appeared to be the teachings of a radical Buddhist group, 969, that the government continues to allow to preach hatred and extend its influence throughout the countryside.

Burma is often called Myanmar, a name that ruling military authorities adopted in 1989. Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and other regime opponents have refused to adopt the name change, as have the U.S. and Britain.

After five decades of military rule, Burma remains a heavily militarized country, where the army alone numbers about 500,000 men and where plainclothes intelligence officers are ubiquitous. Yet security forces were unwilling or unable to stop the Buddhist mob in Thabyu Chaing.

Muslim villagers say the authorities were well aware of the danger because they received a telephone call from the local police station Sept. 30, the day before the violence, warning them of looming danger and instructing them to erect a gate at the entrance to the village.

In the early hours of Oct. 1, when villagers received reports that a mob of several dozen men was approaching, they made urgent phone calls to the police and military units a few miles away.

A single police vehicle arrived and dispersed a first wave of attackers before dawn. But the mob that killed Aye Kyi returned midmorning, and the police fled after firing into the air, villagers say.

Lt. Col. Kyaw Tint, a senior police officer in Rakhine state, said “security forces did their best.”

The failure to stop the violence of Oct. 1 was awkward for Burma’s president, Thein Sein, who was on a scheduled visit to the area at the time. Thein Sein said he “urged the social, religious and community leaders to work with each other in finding solutions.”

Under his office’s direction, the investigation of the violence appears to have yielded swifter results than after previous killings; more than 70 people, including about 50 Buddhists, have been arrested, according to the police.

The bodies of two Buddhists were discovered several days later in another village, but the circumstances of their deaths are unclear.

The spiritual leader of 969, a monk named Ashin Wirathu, has said Buddhism is under siege by Muslims, who are having more children than Buddhists. He says his group is not behind any of the killings, but many say his preachings incite the violence.

The immediate trigger for the Oct. 1 violence, Buddhists have said, was an episode in which a Muslim merchant insulted a Buddhist man for flying a Buddhist flag on his three-wheeled taxi.

Einda Sara, the abbot of a large Buddhist temple in Burma’s most famous beach resort, Ngapali, is typical of extremist Buddhist monks who have great influence in Burmese society and are rarely publicly contradicted.

In an interview in his monastery, the abbot offered a version of the killing of Aye Kyi that stands in stark contradiction to police accounts. The abbot asserted that Aye Kyi “ran away and died from lack of oxygen.” Her body was probably mutilated by fellow Muslims to make Buddhists look bad, he said.

The abbot justified the killing of Muslims on the grounds that it was self-defense.

“If you encounter a tiger, you run away if possible,” he said. “But if you cannot run, you have to fight back.”