Rohingya crisis sparks fear among Bangladeshi Buddhists

Ramu : As thousands of Rohingya flee ethnic violence in Myanmar, Bangladesh's small Buddhist community fears the crisis could spark a violent backlash from their Muslim neighbours.

Many Bangladeshis are angry over the treatment in Buddhist-majority Myanmar of the Rohingya, a persecuted stateless minority who they see as Muslim brethren.

The anger is particularly acute in the southern district of Cox's Bazar near the border with Myanmar, where many people have close links with the Rohingya and share linguistic and cultural roots.

But the area is also home to a sizeable Buddhist minority that has suffered hate attacks in the past.

Authorities in Cox's Bazar have deployed 550 extra police in Buddhist areas to prevent a repeat of religious unrest in 2012, when Muslim mobs attacked temples and Buddhist homes.

Buddhist monk Proggananda Bhikkhu vividly remembers the night a Muslim mob torched a 300-year-old temple he looks after. 

He fled when between 30 and 40 Muslims broke into his temple and began looting statues and other valuable artefacts, but he watched the violence from a nearby field.

"When the looting was over, they set fire to the temple," he told AFP at the Kendriya Shima Bihar temple, which had to be largely rebuilt after the 2012 attack. 

"We never imagined this could happen, we had good relations with the local Muslims."

Bhikkhu said the monks had not received any direct threats, but  he had seen some on the internet.

"People on social media are trying to portray this as a religious conflict. But like the Muslims, we are citizens of Bangladesh, and we condemn these actions (in Myanmar)," he said.

Many of the more than 420,000 refugees have accused Myanmar's ethnic Rakhine Buddhists of participating in the attacks on their villages that forced them to seek refuge in Bangladesh.

On Monday at least 20,000 Islamist hardliners took part in a demonstration in Dhaka to demand an end to what they termed a "genocide".