KO NI was shot in the head at close range in broad daylight. He was waiting for a taxi outside Yangon’s bustling international airport, holding his three-year-old grandson in his arms. A prominent lawyer and adviser to the ruling National League for Democracy (NLD) party, he had just returned from Indonesia, where he had been part of a delegation studying democracy and conflict resolution.
Mr Ko Ni was also a Muslim and a prominent defender of religious minorities in a country seething with anti-Muslim sentiment. The climate has worsened since attacks on Burmese border guards last October that have been blamed on the Rohingya, a persecuted Muslim minority group. Since then the Burmese army has taken a scorched-earth approach in northern Rakhine state, home to the largest concentration of Rohingya. Human-rights groups and international monitors have accused the army of torching villages and raping and murdering many of their inhabitants. Mr Ko Ni, who was not himself Rohingya, spoke against the law that long ago stripped them of citizenship. That was daring: most people close to the government see the Rohingya as interlopers from Bangladesh, with no right...Continue reading
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