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Northwestern Burma was tense on Monday, 11 June, after sectarian violence engulfed its largest city at the weekend, with Reuters witnessing rival mobs of Muslims and Buddhists torching houses and police firing into the air to disperse crowds. The unrest might force Burma’s reformist President Thein Sein, a former general, to confront an issue that human rights groups have criticised for years: the plight of thousands of stateless Rohingya Muslims who live along Burma’s border with Bangladesh in abject conditions and are despised by many ethnic Arakanese, members of the country’s predominantly Buddhist majority