Ma Ba Tha

Ma-Ba-Tha take aim at halal businesses

Last year a Muslim businessman called Lwin Tun set up a factory in Labutta, a town in Burma’s Irrawaddy delta. He spent US$330,000 on buildings and cooling systems, but couldn’t buy the product his factory was meant to process: meat. That’s because Labutta’s seven cattle slaughterhouses, also Muslim-owned, had suddenly gone out of business. In January 2014 they had tried to renew their licenses, but local authorities had already sold them to an association led by members of the radical Buddhist group Association for the Protection of Race and Religion, commonly known by the Burmese acronym Ma-Ba-Tha. The Muslim slaughterhouses went bust – and so, after just three months, did Lwin Tun’s meat-processing factory. Burma’s Muslim minority make up about 5 percent of the country’s predominantly Buddhist population and Muslims living in the delta rely heavily on the slaughterhouse business and the beef trade. Religious tensions simmered in Burma for almost half a century of military rule, boiling over in 2012, just a year after a semi-civilian government took power. Now Muslim businesses have become the target of anti-Islamic sentiment propagated by radical Buddhists who have found a powerful voice in Burma’s more open political landscape. Since late 2013, a campaign…