The Dalai Lama has urged Aung San Suu Kyi to find a peaceful solution to the crisis in Myanmar and expressed concerns about violence that has led around 300,000 Muslim Rohingya to flee the Buddhist-majority country.
The top Buddhist leader wrote to Myanmar’s de facto civilian leader, a fellow Nobel peace laureate, shortly after new violence erupted in Rakhine state in August. He urged her to "reach out to all sections of society" to try to resolve the crisis in Rakhine, where the Rohingya, a stateless Muslim minority, have endured decades of persecution.
"Questions that are put to me suggest that many people have difficulty reconciling what appears to be happening to Muslims there with Myanmar’s reputation as a Buddhist country," he wrote in the letter, seen by AFP on Monday.
"I appeal to you and your fellow leaders to reach out to all sections of society to try to restore friendly relations throughout the population in a spirit of peace and reconciliation." The Dalai Lama is the latest Nobel peace laureate to speak out against the violence, which the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar says may have left more than 1,000 dead, most of them Rohingya.
Nobel laureates Malala Yousafzai and Archbishop Desmond Tutu have also urged her to intervene on behalf of the Rohingya. "If the political price of your ascension to the highest office in Myanmar is your silence, the price is surely too steep," said Tutu, who became the moral voice of South Africa after helping dismantle apartheid there.
Myanmar’s population is overwhelmingly Buddhist and there is widespread hostility toward the Rohingya, who are denied citizenship and labelled illegal "Bengali" immigrants. Buddhist nationalists, led by firebrand monks, have operated a Islamophobic campaign calling for them to be pushed out of the country.
The Dalai Lama said he had spoken to Suu Kyi in the past about religious tensions in her country and was urging her again to curb the violence. "As a fellow Buddhist and Nobel laureate I am appealing to you and your colleagues once more to find a lasting and humane solution to this festering problem," he wrote.
Meanwhile, police fired rubber bullets to break up a mob that stoned the home of a Muslim butcher in central Myanmar, authorities said Monday, as religious tensions rise amid a surge of violence in the west.
The mob attack on Sunday night in the Magway region of the mainly Buddhist nation was fuelled by anger over the deepening crisis in the western state of Rakhine, according to a government press release.
Rakhine has been gripped by violence since militants from the Rohingya Muslim minority attacked security forces in late August, triggering brutal army reprisals that have left hundreds dead and pushed around 300,000 Rohingya across the border to Bangladesh.
The exodus accounts for nearly a third of Myanmar’s Rohingya population, creating a humanitarian emergency as a flood of famished and wounded refugees pour into Bangladesh’s already overcrowded camps. The fighting has also pushed some 27,000 ethnic Rakhine Buddhists and Hindus to flee their homes in northern Rakhine.
The conflict, marked by competing accusations from different ethnic groups, has intensified a long-running mistrust between Myanmar’s Buddhists and its maligned Muslim minority.
Those tensions bubbled over in Taung Twin Gyi township on Sunday night when dozens of villagers in a 400-strong crowd sang the national anthem and lobbed rocks at the home of a Muslim butcher before marching over to the local mosque, where police dispersed the mob.
Police have arrested five people, including 30-year-old Hnin Ko Ko Lin, who said the group acted because "they could not accept the things that happened in Rakhine", according to a statement posted by the government’s Information Committee.
Min Thein, a lower house MP for the township, confirmed to AFP that the butcher was Muslim. "Now we are urging all the people to stay calm and we have already told the Muslim residents to stay in their homes," he added.
Tensions between Buddhists and Muslims have simmered in Myanmar since 2012 when sectarian violence erupted in Rakhine, leaving hundreds dead and pushing more than 100,000 Rohingya Muslims into decrepit camps.
The country’s new civilian government, led by Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, is desperate to avoid a repeat of anti-Muslim riots that swept through central Myanmar in 2013, leaving scores dead.
Since then Buddhist hardliners have led sporadic attacks on mosques and other Islamic sites across the country. But western Rakhine, which is home to the Rohingya, has remained the epicentre of religious unrest.
Myanmar has denied the Rohingya citizenship, claiming they are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, and severely restricted their access to jobs, healthcare and other basic services.
Analysts say years of state-backed repression contributed to the emergence last year of the Rohingya militant group, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, whose attacks have triggered the worst violence to engulf the region in years.
