100 dead after week of sectarian clashes in north-west Myanmar
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More than 100 people have been killed in clashes this week between Buddhists and Muslims in Myanmar's north-western Rakhine state, a Muslim party leader and residents said Friday.
The vice chairman of the National Democratic Party for Development(NDPD), Hla Thein, said more than 100 Muslims were killed in the past week.
But official figures and those provided by Buddhists were lower.
The violence peaked late Tuesday, but people have been killed every day this week, he said via telephone.
The NDPD is a Muslim political party with about 10,000 members that won four seats in the 2010 election.
Tun Tun, secretary of the Rakhine Youth Network in Sittwe, the state capital, about 500 kilometres north-west of Yangon, confirmed 12 Buddhists dead. He said that he had heard of more Muslim deaths, but was unable to confirm them.
The violence flared Sunday when minority Rohingyas protested at the lack of aid and food in their villages and burned houses in the townships of Min Bya and Mrauk Oo.
Communal violence between Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims has continued through the week, Tun Tun said Friday over the phone.
This week's violence follows communal fighting in June that left nearly 90 dead and about 90,000 displaced, according to residents. Many of them have been cut off from government and international aid for the past five months.
The government, however, put June's death toll at 50 with about 60,000 homeless.
The unrest began in May after Buddhist men reacted to the rape and murder of a Buddhist woman allegedly by three Muslim men. A mob later killed 10 Muslims unconnected to the crime.
President Thein Sein, in a statement published in the government-run New Light of Myanmar newspaper Friday, put the recent death toll at 12 with another 50 injured.
The United Nations late Thursday expressed concerns about the unrest and called for increased access to those affected.
"The UN is gravely concerned about reports of a resurgence of inter-communal conflict in several areas in Rakhine state, which has resulted in deaths and has forced thousands of people, including women and children, to flee their homes," said the UN resident and humanitarian coordinator in Myanmar, Ashok Nigam.
The UN has received information from various sources that hundreds of homes have been burned down since October 21, the statement said.
Myanmar's national religion is Buddhism, and but Muslim Rohingya, most of who have lived in Rakhine for generations, are widely viewed as descendents of Bengalis from neighbouring Bangladesh, brought in as labourers during the British colonial era.
An estimated 800,000 Rohingya live in the state's three northern townships, but they were rendered stateless by the 1982 Citizens Law and remain vulnerable to persecution and abuse.
Rights groups have called for amendments to the law, which defined 135 ethnic minority groups in Myanmar. The law excluded the Rohingya and denied citizenship to people of Indian and Chinese descent who failed to prove that their ancestry predated the 1824-1948 colonial period.
