Arakan News Agency
Myanmar’s authorities said on Friday that they had demolished a house owned by a Muslim in the city of Mandalay in response to pressure from a group of Buddhist monks who claimed the building would have been used as a mosque.
In a statement to Anadolu, a police officer explained that the authorities had decided to demolish the house, which is still under construction, “to avoid further unnecessary problems.”
He added that “the demolitions began on Thursday evening, and was not accompanied by any arrests.”
Rumors had that Muslims would use the building as a mosque prompted Buddhists to demand its demolition, according to chairman of the city’s development committee.
“The Buddhist monks thought that the mosque would be used to practice Muslim religious rituals, which is not true, because the house originally belonged to a Buddhist young man who has no reason to grant Muslims the right to convert it to a mosque,” he told Anadolu.
Shortly before the demolition, about 100 Buddhist monks gathered outside the building, in the Kyawk Padaung district, to demand the authorities to demolish it and take action against its owners, according to the city police.
For its part, the newspaper “Frontier Myanmar”, that the city of Mandalay is almost devoid of Muslims, making rumors about turning a building into a mosque “illogical.”
Myanmar’s Muslims account for 4.3 percent of the total population of about 51.5 million, according to a 2014 official census.
Most of the country’s Muslims are descended from the Rohingya minority, whose presence is concentrated in Arakan (Rakhine), one of Myanmar’s poorest provinces.
Since 2012, the province of Arakan (west) has witnessed violence between Buddhists and Muslims, killing hundreds of people and displacing hundreds of thousands, according to international human rights reports.
The Government of Myanmar considers Rohingya “illegal immigrants from Bangladesh” under a law passed in 1982, while the United Nations classifies them as “the most persecuted religious minority in the world”.
