The 2013 Meiktila Riots

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Three days of anti-Muslim rioting struck Meiktila, a town in central Burma's Mandalay Region, from March 20 to 22, 2013. A dispute at a Muslim-owned gold shop escalated after a Buddhist monk was killed by a mob of Muslim youths, and Buddhist mobs then attacked Muslim neighborhoods, mosques and a madrassa across the town over the following days, most horrifically at the Mingalar Zayyone Islamic boarding school, where students and teachers were killed. The victims across the three days were drawn from a town with no significant Rohingya population, a distinction worth naming since Meiktila's violence is often folded into wider reporting on the Rohingya crisis that in fact concerns a different region of the country entirely.

Much of Meiktila's Muslim quarter was burned, and the town's Muslim population was displaced into camps for months afterward. The Burmese government declared a state of emergency in the town, but Human Rights Watch found little accountability followed. Meiktila was the first and deadliest of a wave of similar riots that spread to other Burmese towns, including Okkan, Lashio, Kanbalu and Thandwe, later the same year, establishing a pattern the country would see repeat rather than an isolated local eruption.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Meiktila riots followed weeks of anti-Muslim sermons in the region by the monk Ashin Wirathu, the most prominent public voice of the nationalist 969 Movement, named for the nine attributes of the Buddha, the six qualities of his teaching and the nine qualities of the monastic community. The movement framed Burmese Buddhist identity and culture as under threat from the country's Muslim minority and called for boycotts of Muslim-owned businesses, and Wirathu delivered sermons in the Meiktila area shortly before the violence broke out.

Burmese security forces were widely reported, including by Human Rights Watch, to have stood by during much of the violence rather than intervening. The 969 Movement was nominally banned by the state Buddhist hierarchy that September, but Wirathu's campaign continued the following year under a new name, Ma Ba Tha, showing that the institutional response addressed the movement's label rather than the sentiment driving it. No international body has made a formal determination specific to the Meiktila violence.