Myanmar's Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and the Making of a Muslim 'Other' (Asian Arguments)

by Francis Wade

The suspicion among residents of Meikhtila that the violence had been planned in advance was heightened by the arrival of mobs composed of people unfamiliar to locals there. “When I saw them they seemed totally drunk – they had lost their senses,” Sandar said of the men that stalked the streets of the town. Despite their condition, they had still managed to destroy more than 800 houses in less than 72 hours, and without inviting intervention from security forces. Vijay Nambiar, UN Special Envoy to Myanmar at the time of the Meikhtila violence, had spoken of a “brutal efficiency” to the killings14 – that these weren’t the work of blind rage alone, but something more organised.