I AM in Malaysia for the election on May 5th, and up here in the north of the country quite a lot of the political to-and-fro is about political Islam. The opposition Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (better known as PAS) is strong up here in states like Kedah, so the ruling coalition Barisan Nacional is trying to scare people off voting for them by claiming that, if they were to be elected nationally, they would force the opposition coalition into turning Malaysia into an extremist Muslim state. It’s a lame old tactic, but still seems to find some traction.

A fellow-member of ASEAN, Myanmar, is wrestling with its own Islamic problem, but in a much more volatile and blood-soaked manner. This week saw another nasty outbreak of violence between Burman Buddhists and Muslims in central Myanmar, this time in a village called Oakka. It was sparked off by another minor incident, when a young girl apparently bumped into a monk. This set off a chain events that left one person dead and nine injured; reports say that Buddhist mobs torched 77 houses and a couple of mosques.

This follows widespread anti-Muslim riots across central Myanmar in March that left scores dead and thousands homeless—which in turn followed blood-lettings in the western state of Rakhine in June and October last year. What amounted to ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine, and particularly in its capital, Sittwe, killed hundreds and drove over 100,000 Rohingya to squalid refugee camps outside the city, where they still forced to live.

The killings in Rakhine, it is clear, inspired a lot of the subsequent upsurge in general anti-Muslim feeling. So there was much resting on the outcome of a government-appointed enquiry into the violence in Rakhine, which finally came out on April 29th. Yet in the end the long-delayed report was pretty much a cop-out. It makes no concessions to Rohingya sentiment and few concrete suggestions that could help the situation there. Some diplomats and UN officials were looking to it for evidence that the reforming state of Myanmar is genuinely prepared to tackle the fundamental issues of race and religion that have destabilised the country since it won its independence from Britain in 1948—but there were no signs of that in this report.

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