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Unforgiving history
Why Buddhists and Muslims in Rakhine state in Myanmar are at each others’ throats

http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21565638-why-buddhists-and-muslims-rakhine-state-myanmar-are-each-others’-throats-unforgiving

Please read the linked (or printed) article. Printable version below.

Questions:

1. Name both of the groups and their religions. Which one has themost people in Myanmar?
2. What was amassing at the Shwethaung pagoda? Why were they doing this?
3. How many people were killed? How many displaced, and what does displaced mean?
a. What does it mean that these were “all almost certainly underestimates”?
4. What does “ethnic strife and separatism” mean?
b. How would a dictatorship stop separatism?
c. Do youthink separatism is dangerous and it is worth having a dictator to stop it?
5. What do Rakhines believe about the origins of most Rohingyas?
d. What is the danger in saying that Rohingyas do not exist?
6. What three invasions brought the Rohingyas into Myanmar? Why do the Rakhines fear being “Islamise’d”
7. What do the Rohingyas believe about their origins?
8. Why does theBuddhist controlled government refuse to allow foreign aid to help the Rohingya people?
9. What have the desperate Rohingya people begun to do?
e. What are the consequences to their own lives?
f. What do people predict is going to happen?
10. Take a minute to analyze this situation.
g. What do the Rakhines want for their country?
h. What do the Rohingyas want fortheir country?
i. Can these two wants coexist?
11. Which side is correct? (trick question…)
12. If you were a UN official tasked with saving lives in Myanmar and seeking peace, what would you decide to do? Should the UN even get involved?

Unforgiving history
Why Buddhists and Muslims in Rakhine state in Myanmar are at each others’ throats
Nov 3rd 2012 | from the print editionIN THE morning sunlight, the panorama from the Shwethaung pagoda, on the highest hill in Mrauk-u, looked magical: lush rice paddy, sparkling lakes and wooded hills, many topped by other glinting gilt pagodas. But in one spot, black smoke was billowing. Another village was burning. From October 22nd-24th Mrauk-u, a tourist centre in Rakhine state in Myanmar, and former capital of theindependent kingdom of Arakan, turned into a war zone.

Below the pagoda a spontaneous, medieval army was massing. Hundreds of young men were on the march: packed on the backs of pickups, on motorcycles, on trishaws, tuk-tuks and bicycles, but mostly on foot. They carried spears, swords, cleavers, bamboo staves, slingshots, crossbows and the occasional petrol bomb. Violence between the Buddhist majorityand the mostly Muslim Rohingya minority has wracked Rakhine since June. These were angry Buddhists seeking to avenge the deaths of three of their kin, killed, they said, by Muslims. One tugged at an imaginary beard and made a grisly throat-cutting gesture.

Within days the trouble had spread across Rakhine, a strip of Myanmar’s western coastline that borders Bangladesh in the north. Thegovernment reported 82 killed, 4,600 houses burned and more than 22,000 people displaced—all almost certainly underestimates. Satellite imagery shows the utter destruction of a Muslim quarter of the coastal town of Kyaukphyu, from where oil-and-gas pipelines are to cross Myanmar to China.

Many of its residents had fled by sea for the state capital, Sittwe, to join some 75,000 others, mostly Rohingyas,who have been confined to squalid camps since June, when the conflict flared up after the rape and murder of a Buddhist woman. A state of emergency was imposed. Sittwe has been under curfew ever since, as now are some other parts of Rakhine. Some blame the central government for fuelling the violence: some ministers made inflammatory statements, perhaps hoping to derail Myanmar’s democratic...