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| A man stands in the courtyard of a partially-destroyed mosque after violence spread through central Myanmar, March 28, 2013. |
April 12, 2013
Press TV
A court in Myanmar sentences three Muslims to 14 years in prison with
hard labor for beating a Buddhist customer in a gold shop in the central
town of Meiktila.
The gold shop owner, his wife and an employee, were given the jail terms
for hitting the customer in an argument over a gold hairpin in Meiktila
on March 20.
The argument sparked several days of violence against Muslims across the
country. Over 40 people were killed and more than a thousand others
injured. A number of mosques and homes of Muslims were also burned down
in several towns in central Myanmar.
Myanmar’s Islamic Religious Affairs Council and the Myanmar Muslim
National Affairs Organisation later appealed to the government of
President Thein Sein to take swift action to stop the ‘violent
attacks.’
On March 28, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Myanmar, Tomas
Ojea Quintana, said he had received reports that Myanmar’s soldiers and
police sometimes stood by “while atrocities have been committed before
their very eyes” by well-organized Buddhist mobs in the central city of
Meiktila.
The Muslim minority of Rohingyas in Myanmar accounts for about five
percent of the country’s population of nearly 60 million. The persecuted
minority has faced torture, neglect, and repression since the country
achieved independence in 1948.
Last year, scores of Rohingyas were killed when Buddhist extremists
carried out atrocities against Muslims in the western state of Rakhine.
Thousands of Rohingyas were also displaced.
Myanmar’s government has been repeatedly criticized for failing to protect the Rohingya Muslims.
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