What's in a name? Plenty, according to the thousands of Buddhists in Myanmar's Rakhine state who marched through the streets on Sunday to protest against the new government's decision to refer to Rohingya Muslims as the "Muslim communities in Rakhine".
Naypyitaw's bid to lower the temperatures on this incendiary topic is raising hackles in both camps.
Hardline groups who see the Rohingya as illegal "Bengali" migrants suspect that this is a ploy to fuse their belonging to the state. Rohingya groups argue the term erases their ethnic identity and replaces it with a religious one which does not offer much better protection, given resurgent nationalist sentiments in the Buddhist-majority country. (Courtesy of straitstimes.com)
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