A new air of hope and bustle in Myanmar’s towns and cities is palpable.īut not in Rakhine, also known as Arakan. Thein Sein released political prisoners, relaxed media controls, and forged peace with ethnic rebel groups along the country’s war-torn borders. Until this month, Myanmar’s transformation from global pariah to democratic start-up had seemed remarkably rapid and peaceful. The northern area of Rakhine state is off-limits to foreign reporters. Reuters visited the area just before the unrest broke out. With scores feared dead, President Thein Sein announced a state of emergency on June 10 to prevent “vengeance and anarchy” spreading beyond Rakhine and jeopardizing his ambitious reform agenda. The fighting threatens to derail the democratic transition in Myanmar, a resource-rich nation of 60 million strategically positioned at Asia’s crossroads between India and China, Bangladesh and Thailand.
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A torrent of Rohingyas has tried to flee Rakhine into impoverished Bangladesh, but most are being pushed back, a Bangladeshi Border Guard commander told Reuters on Thursday. Today, as Myanmar opens up, they appear to have more enemies than ever.Īrmed with machetes and bamboo spears, rival mobs of Rohingya Muslims and ethnic Rakhine Buddhists this month torched one another’s houses and transformed nearby Sittwe, the capital of the western state of Rakhine, into a smoke-filled battleground. The United Nations has called them “virtually friendless” in Myanmar, the majority-Buddhist country that most Rohingya call home. They are Rohingya, a stateless Muslim people of South Asian descent now at the heart of Myanmar’s worst sectarian violence in years.