Last March, sectarian riots roiled central Burma, and at least 48 people, mainly Muslims, were slaughtered by machete-wielding thugs. Buddhist monks spurred on frenzied mobs in an orgy of bloodshed that will be forever indelible in the minds of the Southeast Asian nation’s Muslim minority. The violence spread to a further 11 townships.
One year on, thousands remain homeless and animosity is entrenched. “It is not stable, and conditions are still very dangerous,” says Aung Thein, a 51-year-old Muslim lawyer in Meiktila, a central Burmese town of 100,000 people, where at least five mosques and more than 800 homes were razed to the ground. “Extremists use hate speech every day, and Muslims are not safe.”
Adding to this already fraught picture, new legislation threatens to isolate the Muslims further. Proposed regulations will restrict religious conversions, make it illegal for Buddhist women to marry Muslim men, place limits on the number of children Muslims can have and outlaw polygamy, which is permitted in Islam.
More than 1.3 million signatures have reportedly been gathered in support of this plan, which is spearheaded by a group of extremist Buddhist monks and their lay supporters. The proposals were forwarded by reformist President Thein Sein to lower-house speaker Shwe Mann late last month, and have now been submitted to relevant ministries to be drafted as bills. They have been dubbed an “intolerance package” by Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch, who says they would be a “recipe for disaster for a multicultural, multireligious country like Burma.”
As part of the marriage proposal, those of other religions must convert to Buddhism before marrying a Buddhist and seek written consent of the bride’s parents. (The consent of the groom’s parents is not required, for it is assumed the non-Buddhist party is always the groom.) Any non-Buddhist who ignores the regulations will be hit with a 10-year prison sentence and confiscation of property.
The proposals are merely the latest incarnation of spiraling religious extremism that has gripped Burma (officially known as Myanmar) since quasi-democratic rule was introduced in 2010. In June 2012, pogroms against the heavily persecuted Rohingya Muslim minority in the country’s far western Arakan state led to more than 280 deaths. Even today, some 140,000 Rohingya languish in squalid displacement camps, where they struggle to receive medical care or sufficient food.
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