YANGON: European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso has called for an end to communal killings in Myanmar following talks with President Thein Sein, while pledging aid to the former pariah state.
More than 100,000 people have been displaced since June in two major outbreaks of violence in western Rakhine state, about 30,000 of them in the latest clashes between Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims which began last month.
Dozens have been killed in the latest violence and thousands of homes torched.
“We are deeply concerned by these events and by the consequences for the reforms and democratisation of the country. We hope that all religious leaders will call for restraint,” Barroso said in a speech on Saturday.
“The EU stands ready to mobilise ¤4m ($5m) for immediate humanitarian needs, provided access to the affected areas is guaranteed,” he said, according to a copy of his speech released in Brussels.
Barroso, the latest in a series of Western officials to visit Myanmar after a quasi-civilian government led by Thein Sein took charge last year, was speaking at a newly established peace centre in Yangon.
The EU has contributed 700,000 euros to set up the peace centre, which is designed to ease “dialogue between all those concerned by Myanmar’s ethnic peace processes”, a separate European Commission statement said.
Civil war has gripped parts of Myanmar since independence from British colonial rule in 1948, with many of the country’s ethnic minority groups demanding varying levels of autonomy.
Tentative ceasefires have been agreed with many major rebel groups as part of sweeping reform in the former junta-run nation, but fierce fighting between the army and Kachin rebels continues in the north of the country.
Barroso said initial funding for the peace centre would be followed by a “sizable package later this year, also benefitting ethnic communities”, according to the statement, which added that the EU will contribute a total of 30 million euros to the ethnic peace process in 2013.
Earlier this year the EU pledged to provide 150 million euros in additional aid to Myanmar over the next two years.
Andreas List, head of the EU office in Myanmar, said that Barroso had indicated aid was likely to be “significantly increased” in a new package from 2014, although he stressed that this had not yet been agreed.
Barroso’s comments came after he met Myanmar’s president and held talks with opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
The Nobel laureate told the BBC on Saturday that she would not use “moral leadership” to back either side in the Rakhine unrest, which has mainly pitted ethnic Rakhine Buddhists against stateless Rohingya Muslims.
The Nobel laureate, who has caused disappointment among international supporters for her muted response to violence that has swept Rakhine state, said both Buddhist and Muslim communities were “displeased” that she had not taken their side.
“I am urging tolerance but I do not think one should use one’s moral leadership, if you want to call it that, to promote a particular cause without really looking at the sources of the problems,” Suu Kyi said.
Her comments are likely to disappoint rights groups hopeful that she would speak up on behalf of the Rohingya, who make up the majority of those displaced by the fighting.
Agencies
