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.
The landscape in Meiktila after the violence looked eerily similar to the razed quarters I had seen in Sittwe and Kyaukphyu the previous year. The Muslim quarter was another landscape of ruins and ashes as far as the eye could see. Around 12,000 people, most of them Muslims, had lost their houses and were sheltered in temporary camps. Among them was Mon Hnin, the woman who had seen a mob kill her husband, living with her family in an unofficial camp ten kilometres away from town. In the immediate aftermath of the violence, the government announced it had plans to rebuild the destroyed houses within two months, but few believed in its ability or even willingness to do so. Many Muslim refugees feared their situation might become permanent, as had happened to Muslims in Arakan.
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
