Mark Snowiss
When 16 Burmese newspapers are granted operating licenses on April 1, they will become the first independent dailies allowed to publish in nearly 50 years.

While journalists have described the move as a major step toward media freedom in Burma, they have also voiced outrage at the country’s draft media law, released earlier this month, which critics say could roll back government promises to loosen its grip on a long tightly controlled industry.

That bill bans reporting on several topics, including the Burmese military’s battles with ethnic rebels and any coverage critical of the 2008 military-drafted constitution. It also permits six-month jail terms for failing to register news publications with the government.

Tim Marshall – Foreign Affairs Editor (Sky News HD)
Amid the cries for freedom, justice, democracy, few activists lauded by visiting journalists bother with minority rights.
This week’s outbreak of sectarian racist violence in Burma is a reminder that the cliched view of the Burmese as a freedom loving, peaceful people living under the yoke of a fascist dictatorship is not entirely accurate.
 Yes, the democracy movement led by Aung San Suu Kyi has been mostly peaceful. Yes, we did see thousands of smiling, calm, saffron-robed Buddhist monks taking to the streets, and no, most ordinary Burmese do not set about their neighbours with knifes, and their neighbours’ homes with petrol bombs.

But some do. Some of them even wear saffron robes while they do it.

The most recent attempt at cleansing an ethnic group began in Meiktila, 340 miles north of Rangoon. They then spread south as close as 125 miles from the country’s biggest city, where Muslim-owned shops are beginning to close in case of violence.

By Steven Hsieh
Human Rights Watch says Burma’s discriminatory policies against Rohingya Muslims could lead to a permanent, segregated state.
The Burmese government is potentially paving the way for long-term segregation through discriminatory policies against a Muslim minority, Human Rights Watch reports. The New York-based NGO says state officials created a humanitarian crisis by blocking aid from getting to Rohingya and Kaman Muslims displaced in squalid refuges camps.
In June 2012, sectarian violence in the coastal Arakan State forced more than 125,000 Burmese Muslims to take refuge in sordid displacement camps. Since then, the Burmese government has restricted international aid organizations from providing food and medical assistance to the hungry, sick and dying. Additionally, security forces guard the displaced from leaving the camps, further exacerbating the crisis. HRW fears the wet season could turn the already dire situation into a disaster, pointing to heavy rain risks that could “overflow already inadequate and overused latrines, spreading otherwise preventable waterborne diseases throughout the displaced population.”

Sectarian violence spread further into the heartland of Burma on Tuesday, with officials reporting at least two mosques and dozens of homes destroyed in riots.

Police and witnesses say there were no casualties reported in the overnight violence in two communities in the Pegu region north of Rangoon.

The violence has been spreading southward from the central town of Meikhtila, where clashes erupted last week, prompting a state of emergency.

The unrest has not yet reached Rangoon, Burma’s largest city. But tensions are high and many shops are being told to close early because of rumors of clashes.

State media Tuesday said the death toll from the Meikhtila violence reached 40, after eight more bodies were found during cleanup of the riot-hit town.

Buddhist monks and politicians have used an unshackled media to stoke anti-Muslim violence.
By MURRAY HIEBERT
AND GREGORY POLING

Just two years into Burma’s reform program, the country’s transition to democracy is threatened from an unexpected direction. An unshackled media and new freedoms of speech and movement have contributed to religious tensions between Buddhists and Muslims exploding into violence.

Most Burma watchers hoped last year’s outbreak of violence aimed at the Rohingya was an isolated case, but the phenomenon is spreading. On March 20, anti-Muslim rioting swept the town of Meikhtila in central Burma, far from the Rohingya communities of Rakhine state in the west. Mosques and Muslim-owned shops and homes were torched, scores injured and entire neighborhoods left in ruins. Government media say 32 have been killed.

Burmese authorities declared a state of emergency on March 22, sending in the military to restore order. A tense calm hangs over the city and soldiers have begun delivering some food to 6,000 Muslims who fled to hurriedly established makeshift camps. But in recent days, anti-Muslim mobs have attacked several more towns in central Burma, wrecking mosques and burning houses, including in a village near the capital of Naypyidaw.

By SHIBANI MAHTANI

The U.S. Embassy has warned against travel to parts of Myanmar after clashes between majority Buddhists and minority Muslims that authorities said killed at least 40 people last week in the central town of Meikhtila.
The warning comes amid new reports of rising tensions elsewhere, including the Southeast Asian country’s largest city, Yangon.

An Embassy update issued Tuesday urged U.S. citizens to avoid visiting two bustling commercial areas in Yangon with many shops run by Muslim traders “as a result of ongoing tensions.” The statement referred to a fight that broke out in the area and a “heavy police presence.”
The markets appeared peaceful Tuesday but have been on edge. “Yesterday we heard rumors of fights happening somewhere, so we closed our shops at about 2:30 p.m.,” said Ma Ohnmar, a Muslim women who sells clothing and accessories at one of the market areas. “But today most of the shops are open, including mine.”

AFP –

Muslim homes have been targeted with “brutal efficiency” in deadly new unrest in Myanmar, a UN envoy who has just been to the troubled country said Tuesday.

Envoy Vijay Nambiar said that “incendiary propaganda” had been used to stir unrest between Buddhist and Muslim communities which has erupted again in recent days.

Nambiar has just been on a visit to Myanmar during which he met President Thein Sein and was taken to Meiktila where mosques were burned and charred bodies left in the streets in violence that started March 20.

“It seemed to have been done, in a sense, in almost a kind of brutal efficiency,” Nambiar told reporters at UN headquarters from Thailand.

Rioting close to centres of power could be pretext for military to seize power
By Jonathan Manthorpe, Vancouver Sun columnist
The deaths and destruction caused by violence between Buddhists and Muslims in central Burma in recent days were not isolated incidents, but symptoms of deep-seated hatreds that could derail the country’s passage from military rule to democracy.

At least 32 people, mostly Muslims, were killed in five days of communal riots in the central Burmese town of Meikhtila. More than 10 mosques, Muslims’ homes and Islamic schools were destroyed and thousands of people, both Buddhist and Muslim, have fled the town.

There is a dispute about how the violence started. What seems certain is that it started in a gold shop run by a Muslim.