Myanmar Buddhists jeer ex-UN chief on peace mission

Sittwe / AFP

Hundreds of Buddhists jeered former UN chief Kofi Annan as he arrived in Myanmar’s troubled Rakhine state on Tuesday to examine a bitter religious conflict that has displaced tens of thousands of Muslim Rohingya.
Annan has been tasked by the de facto leader of Myanmar’s new government, Aung San Suu Kyi, to head a commission charged with finding ways to heal wounds in the poor western state.
But in a sign of the passions surrounding the issue, protesters turned out as he landed in the state capital Sittwe.
Many booed and shouted “No Kofi-led commission” into loudspeakers as they swarmed around his convoy, carrying signs that read, “No to foreigners’ biased intervention in our Rakhine State’s affairs”.
“We want decisions to be made by our own people. I don’t want foreigners to make decisions, that is why I am peacefully protesting here,” May Phyu said.
Rakhine, which borders Bangladesh, has been scarred since 2012 by bouts of communal violence between ethnic Rakhine Buddhists and the minority Rohingya Muslim population.
Their plight threatens to poison democratic gains in the former army-run country and has damaged Suu Kyi’s reputation as a defender of the downtrodden.
More than 100 people have been killed—the majority of them Muslims —while tens of thousands of the stateless Rohingya have spent the past four years trapped in bleak displacement camps with limited access to health care and other basic services.
The Rohingya are despised by hardline Buddhists, who say they have no right to citizenship and label them “Bengalis”, shorthand for illegal immigrants.
Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, has disappointed rights groups who accuse her of failing directly to address the plight of the Rohingya in a sop to Buddhist nationalist sentiment.