Myanmar gives jail term to three Muslims for minor crime

A court in Myanmar sentences three Muslims to 14 years in prison with hard labor for beating a Buddhist customer in a gold shop in the central town of Meiktila.

The gold shop owner, his wife and an employee, were given the jail terms for hitting the customer in an argument over a gold hairpin in Meiktila on March 20.

The argument sparked several days of violence against Muslims across the country. Over 40 people were killed and more than a thousand others injured. A number of mosques and homes of Muslims were also burned down in several towns in central Myanmar.

Myanmar’s Islamic Religious Affairs Council and the Myanmar Muslim National Affairs Organisation later appealed to the government of President Thein Sein to take swift action to stop the ‘violent attacks.’

On March 28, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Myanmar, Tomas Ojea Quintana, said he had received reports that Myanmar’s soldiers and police sometimes stood by “while atrocities have been committed before their very eyes” by well-organized Buddhist mobs in the central city of Meiktila.

The Muslim minority of Rohingyas in Myanmar accounts for about five percent of the country’s population of nearly 60 million. The persecuted minority has faced torture, neglect, and repression since the country achieved independence in 1948.

Last year, scores of Rohingyas were killed when Buddhist extremists carried out atrocities against Muslims in the western state of Rakhine. Thousands of Rohingyas were also displaced.

Myanmar’s government has been repeatedly criticized for failing to protect the Rohingya Muslims.