Protests greet pan-Muslim body in unrest-hit Myanmar
Yangon (AFP) - Myanmar Buddhist monks led rallies against the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation Friday as delegates from the Muslim body toured western Rakhine state, where religious violence has torn communities asunder.
The delegation from the world's top Islamic body is in the country to discuss the response to several bouts of anti-Muslim violence that have left some 250 people dead and tens of thousands homeless.
But the group is treated with deep suspicion by Buddhists in Rakhine, where communities are now almost completely segregated on religious grounds after last year's unrest, with Muslims making up the vast majority of the 140,000 people displaced.
"No OIC in Rakhine land, respect our sovereignty," one protesting monk told AFP as hundreds of demonstrators converged on the airport in the state capital Sittwe early Friday.
The delegation met local officials inside the airport on Friday before visiting remote areas by helicopter, an official told AFP.
Myanmar remains tense after eruptions of religious unrest across the country that have cast a shadow over much-lauded reforms and caused concerns among the international community.
The OIC group, which includes the organisation's chief Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, met the Myanmar vice president in the capital Naypyidaw on Thursday, accompanied by the ambassadors from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bangladesh and Malaysia.
They discussed the "peace and stability of Rakhine State and rehabilitation" in the region, according to the state-run New Light of Myanmar.
In Yangon on Friday rallies against the OIC were led by hundreds of maroon-clad Buddhist monks, a sight formerly associated with brutally-suppressed peaceful rallies for democracy in 2007 known as the Saffron Revolution.
"The OIC is discriminating in giving assistance here. We believe they help only Muslims," said Rakhawuntha, a protesting monk.
The OIC visit comes soon after a United States, Swiss and British delegation visited Rakhine and concluded that the humanitarian situation there "remains dire", over a year after the first outbreak of unrest.
In a statement released late Thursday, the group said that health services and access to education and livelihoods in some Muslim camps visited "were deeply inadequate to address even the most basic needs".
Humanitarian workers have faced threats and harassment for trying to help Muslim camps.
The statement said inequality between Muslim and Buddhist Rakhine camps was "clearly evident".
"The international community will never accept any interference with the delivery of life-saving humanitarian assistance in any context, or violence against an entire people in the name of national identity or any other circumstance," it said.
"Fear and insecurity are not a licence for abuse, aggression or injustice toward others," the group added.
Radical monks have been accused of fuelling the violence with anti-Muslim rhetoric, while witnesses to violence in central Myanmar in March said some attackers were dressed in clerical robes.
That unrest in Meiktila left dozens of people dead, including students from a local Islamic school.
A recent eruption of violence in Thandwe in Rakhine, near the country's most popular tourist beach, left six Muslims dead, including a 94-year-old woman.
Myanmar's religious violence sparked with two rounds of unrest in Rakhine state in June and October 2012, with fighting largely between local Buddhists and the Rohingya Muslim minority.
Myanmar views its population of some 800,000 Rohingya as illegal immigrants from neighbouring Bangladesh and denies them citizenship.
They are considered by the United Nations to be one of the world's most persecuted minorities.
Thousands of Rohingya have since fled Myanmar, many paying smugglers for passage on rickety and overcrowded boats to Malaysia or further south. Hundreds are believed to have perished at sea so far this year.
Earlier this month a boat carrying almost 70 Rohingya capsized off Myanmar's coast leaving dozens missing.
