THE INDEPENDENT: Burma’s worst nightmare came a step closer to reality when a spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban’s most hardline faction called on the oppressed Rohingya to “take up the sword and kill in the path of God”.
Other attempts to improve the desperate position of Burma’s Muslim minority were futile, he said last week. “Protest demonstrations, marches [and] condemnation resolutions” were useless. Only violent jihad would make the difference.
This is the great terror of which Burma’s populist Buddhist preachers have for years been warning their congregations, with dire predictions. The hostile climate they have whipped up has led the government to treat the largely stateless Muslim minority in Arakan state ever more inhumanely; and as a result, those predictions could prove self-fulfilling. » | Peter Popham | Sunday, June 14, 2015
