By Associated Press, Published: April 30 | Updated: Wednesday, May 1, 9:35 AM
OKKAN, Myanmar — They slept
terrified in the fields, watching their homes burn through the night. And when
they returned on Wednesday, nothing was left but smoldering ash and
debris.
One day after hundreds of Buddhists
armed with bricks stormed a clutch of Muslim villages in the closest explosion
of sectarian violence yet to Myanmar’s main city, Yangon, newly displaced
Muslims combed through the wasteland of their wrecked lives. Unable to go home,
they faced an uncertain future — too fearful of more attacks even to
leave.
“We ran into the fields and didn’t carry anything with
us,” Hla Myint, a 47-year-old father of eight, said after the mobs overran his
village.
Tears welling in his eyes, he added, “Now, we have
nothing left.”
Thet Lwin, a deputy commissioner of police for the
region, put the casualty toll from Tuesday’s assaults at one dead and nine
injured. He said police have detained 18 attackers who destroyed 157 homes and
shops and at least two mosques in the town of Okkan, 50 miles (80 kilometers)
north of Yangon, and three outlying villages.
The unrest was the first reported since late March,
when similar Buddhist-led violence swept the town of Meikthila, further north in
central Myanmar, killing at least 43 people. It underscored the failure of
reformist President Thein Sein’s government to curb increasing attacks on
minority Muslims in a nation struggling to emerge from half a century of
oppressive military rule.
Muslim residents said a mixture of local villagers and
people from nearby areas were responsible for the attacks around Okkan. Police
gave no details on who was behind the assaults. But a local politician from the
pro-government National Union party, Myint Thein, said members of a Buddhist
campaign called “969” were involved.
The movement, which urges Buddhists to shop only at
Buddhist stores and avoid marrying, hiring or selling their homes or land to
Muslims, is small but has spread rapidly in recent months, and human rights
activists say it has helped fuel anti-Muslim violence.
Stickers and signs bearing the 969 emblem — each digit
enumerates virtues of the Lord Buddha, his teachings and the community of monks
— have been popping up on shops, taxis, and buses in numerous towns and cities,
including Yangon.
Hla Myint said that after the March violence, residents
of Okkan began conducting informal security patrols to protect the village. But
nothing happened for weeks and authorities told them not to worry.
“Things happened unexpectedly,” he told The Associated
Press. “When the crowds came, they shouted things like ‘Don’t defend yourselves,
we will only destroy the mosque, not your homes, we won’t harm
you.’”
They burned his village’s mosque, whose corrugated iron
roof lay crumpled on the ground between the building’s charred walls, and “they
destroyed our houses” anyway, he said.
Around 300 police stood guard Wednesday in the area,
which was quiet. Debris from trashed shops in Okkan spilled into dirt roadsides.
The town’s market was crowded, but Muslims were
absent.
