Dalai Lama Calls On Myanmar Monks to Protect Rohingya Muslims

TEMPO.CO, Prague - Tibet’s Buddhist spiritual leader the Dalai Lama on Tuesday urged Myanmar monks to act according to their Buddhist principles, in a plea to end the deadly violence against the country’s Muslim minority. 

"Those Burmese monks, please, when they develop some kind of anger towards Muslim brothers and sisters, please, remember the Buddhist faith," the Buddhist leader told reporters at an annual human rights conference in the Czech capital Prague, reported Arab News. 

The Dalai Lama, 78, who fled his homeland for India in 1959 after a failed uprising against Chinese rule, also said there was "too much emphasis on 'we' and 'they',” in the world, and that "this century should be a century of dialogue, not wars". 

More than 200 people died – mostly Rohingya Muslims who were denied citizenship – due to sectarian clashes in Myanmar’s western state of Rakhine last year, leaving some 140,000 others homeless. 

This incident forced some 800,000 Rohingya Muslims to flee Myanmar to Bangladesh and other Southeast Asian nations. 

After being criticized for her failure to clearly condemn the violence, Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar's pro-democracy icon turned opposition leader, said its constitution had to change for the ethnic violence to end.

"The ethnic problem will not be solved by this present constitution which does not meet the aspirations of the ethnic nationalities," Suu Kyi told reporters at the Forum 2000 conference on Tuesday. "We've got to give our people a sense of security first, they must feel they have equal access to justice."

Suu Kyi said last week that she could not stop the anti-Muslim violence alone and the solution was to impose the rule of law.

The Dalai Lama and 68-year-old Suu Kyi, both Nobel Peace laureates, met privately during the sidelines the Prague conference on Sunday.

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