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.
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.”
Police, meanwhile, reported a mosque and some Muslim homes were burned Tuesday in Bago, south of Yangon. No deaths or injuries were reported.
On Monday, the Embassy warned against travel to the region around the central city of Mandalay, where Meikhtila lies. The government’s New Light of Myanmar newspaper reported that eight more charred bodies were found among the debris of burned buildings in Meikhtila, bringing the total number of deaths to 40. The city remains under a curfew enforced by soldiers after police failed to contain the violence.
People in Meikhtila have maintained for days that the death toll was higher than officials have reported, claiming to have seen dozens of bodies piled up on the town’s main roads. “It’s difficult to have a full list of all the casualties,” said Aung Nay Paing, a student at a university in Meikhtila, in a telephone interview.
About 12,000 people, most of them Muslims, remain displaced from their homes in Meikhtila, camped out in sports stadiums and monasteries.
The Meikhtila clashes were sparked by an argument in a gold shop between its Muslim owner and a Buddhist couple and quickly escalated to hundreds of people fighting in the streets. Large parts of the town were consumed by flames.
Hostility between Buddhists and Muslims, some of it fanned by ultranationalist Buddhist monks, has proved to be a major issue destabilizing parts of the country as a reforming civilian administration has taken hold following decades of stern military dictatorship. Last year, Buddhist-Muslim violence engulfed parts of the southwestern state of Rakhine, leaving more than 100 people dead and 120,000 displaced, most of them from the ethnic Muslim Rohingya group.
—Myo Myo in Yangon contributed to this article.
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