Alwaght | News & Analysis Website

Alwaght- Myanmar will be going to the polls on 8 November in what is being claimed as the freest and fairest election in decades but, with religion an increasingly sensitive issue in Myanmar, there has been an upsurge in anti-Muslims rhetoric.
In late August, Myanmar's President Thein Sein approved the last of a package of controversial race protection laws widely viewed as an attack on the country's Muslim minority.  Among other things the new laws impose strict controls on Buddhist women hoping to marry outside their faith, while criminalising polygamy. The legislation was sponsored by a group of extremist Buddhist monks, known locally as the Ma Ba Tha, who claim that Muslims are trying to take over the country.
The Ma Ba Tha movement emerged in the wake of  ethno-religious clashes between Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims in western Myanmar in 2012, shortly after the country embarked on a democratic reform process.
In an overwhelmingly Buddhist country angry anti-Muslim rhetoric is becoming increasingly part of mainstream discourse.
In the current campaign, Muslims are effectively disenfranchised, with just one Muslim candidate standing for parliament. Opposition candidate, Suu Kyi, for all of her credentials and international recognition as a campaigner for democracy, has made little effort, if any, to stand by the Muslim minority. Right now, with days to go, she sides with political expediency.
Khin Maung Thein, as the sole Muslim candidate in Mandalay, Myanmar’s second-largest city and a stronghold for Buddhist extremists, is treading where few would dare.
Not even the front-running National League for Democracy (NLD), led by the hugely popular Aung San Suu Kyi, is fielding a Muslim candidate in Mandalay – or, indeed, anywhere else.
NLD leaders told Reuters they fear antagonising a Buddhist ultranationalist group called Ma Ba Tha or the Committee for the Protection of Race and Religion, which is led by monks and wields huge influence in Buddhist-majority Myanmar.
The silence of Aung San  Suu Kyii is an example of how political calculation has trumped humanitarian efforts even amongst the most respected individuals.
Ma Ba Tha says Islam is eclipsing Buddhism and has called for a boycott of Muslim businesses and a ban on interfaith marriages.
Scores of Muslim candidates have been disqualified and voting rights removed from hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims in western Myanmar.
Experts say marginalizing Muslims could reignite religious unrest, embolden Buddhist radicals and undermine the credibility of what many people hope will be Myanmar’s first free and fair election in 25 years.
Muslims make up over 5 percent of Myanmar’s 51 million population. Religious violence has killed thousands Muslims, since a military-backed civilian government took power in 2011 after nearly half a century of dictatorship.
Meanwhile, more than one million members of the Rohingya Muslim minority, a persecuted ethnic group from Western Myanmar, have been rendered stateless and are ineligible to vote.
Among the wider Burmese Muslim community there is alienation and disenfranchisement compounded by disputes over identity documents.
The anti-Muslim sentiment that is spreading throughout Myanmar is being led by Ashin Wirathu, a  firebrand Buddhist monk .
Dubbed the “Buddhist Bin Laden”, Wirathu believes Muslims – who he refers to as “mad dogs” in his fiery speeches – are plotting to take over the country.
Now, he is one of the leaders of Ma Ba Tha, the extremis Buddhist nationalist group which ahead of the polls has toured the country holding mass rallies to celebrate the passage of laws seen as targeting Muslims and women.
“I just want to protect Buddhists from the danger of Muslims,” he told Britain's Guardian newspaper. “Actually, Muslims started the violence by marrying Buddhist women and forcing them to be Muslim. Almost all Muslim men do that.”
“Extremist nationalists have wielded considerable power, leveraging average peoples’ irrational fear of Muslims for political gain,” says Matthew Smith, executive director of human rights non-profit Fortify Rights.
The United Nations says nearly half a million members of the persecuted Rohingya community in Myanmar are in need of humanitarian aid as the plight of Muslim minorities in the Asian state continues unabated. The Rohingya are subjected to extensive discrimination and restrictions in Myanmar despite living there for centuries.
Myanmar does not consider the Rohingya to be citizens, leaving them virtually stateless.
Many of them now live in displacement camps following the deadly violence by extremist Buddhists in 2012.
The violence against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar has triggered an influx of refugees into neighboring countries, namely Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.
According to the United Nations , Rohingya Muslims are one of the most persecuted minorities in the world.

Rohingya Muslims have lost hope of their voice being heard in their own country, but that not being enough, they have been forgotten and abandoned by the so-called international community and especially western countries which claim to champion for democratic rights of minorities elsewhere. The case of Myanmar Muslims is a classic example of double standard application of benchmarks of democracy.