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In Burma, people must state their religion on ID cards. In the midst of these circumstances, many leaflets from both the Muslim and Burmese sides have appeared throughout cities in Burma. Muslim leaflets call Muslims in Burma to participate in anti-American campaigns along with other Muslim communities in the region and to support their brothers in Afghanistan. The leaflets from the Burmese side say the time is right to eliminate the "786" (one of the symbols of Islam), according to sources inside Burma. Many Burmese enthusiastically support the American military campaign against the Taliban. In particular, people who have a lack of education get the wrong idea from this American counterattack on Islamic terrorists. As a consequence, religious clashes between Burmese and Muslims have spread throughout the country. Exiled Muslim groups from Burma have proclaimed that the ruling military government has created this recent religious unrest in the country by propagating negative stereotypes about Muslims over a long period of time. But some analysts say that the military government is also concerned about the current religious unrest, as they have been confronting the challenges of monks in recent anti-Muslim clashes. One instance for the military regime to note is that anti-Muslim clashes took place as a precursor to the famous 1988 democracy uprising 13 years ago. However, while Muslims in neighboring Thailand are free to hold a nationwide boycott on American products without the government’s intervention, as well as hold mass prayers for their brothers in Afghanistan, Muslims in Burma are seeking safe places in advance to escape religious clashes, which could take place anywhere and anytime. The Rohingya: A Muslim Menace? by Maung Maung Oo Much of the concern about possible Islamic radicalism in Burma has centered on Rohingya organizations based along the country’s western border with Bangladesh. When Osama bin Laden spoke of having agents "from Indonesia to Algeria, from Kabul to Chechnya, from Bosnia to Sudan and from Burma to Kashmir" in a recent interview, the governments of both countries immediately directed their attentions to their troubled common border, even as they denied that they were harboring terrorist cells belonging to bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network. Rohingya groups have been fighting against Rangoon for years, but this in itself offers little evidence that they are part of a pan-Islamic movement; after all, Burma has been riddled with ethnic and ideological insurgencies of various descriptions since it attained independence in 1948. Two of these groups—the Arakan Rohingya Islamic Front (ARIF) and the Rohingya Solidarity Organization (RSO)—joined forces in 1988, and later set up the Arakan Rohingya National Organization (ARNO). The group is currently believed to have about 200 militant members. According to Thet Lwin Oo, a spokesperson for the Muslim Information Committee of Burma (MICB), it is unlikely that ARNO or any of its associated groups are involved with bin Laden. "If the news that members of ARNO had been trained at bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan were really true, you would have seen major operations by Rohingya militants along the border. But in reality, their activities are very limited. This proves that they don’t have any connection with bin Laden," maintained Thet Lwin Oo. While ARNO faces growing pressure from Burmese and Bangladeshi authorities, other, non-militant Rohingya groups continue to receive discriminatory treatment from within Burma’s pro-democracy movement. Rohingya organizations seeking to join other exiled dissidents in the struggle to restore democracy are routinely barred from umbrella groups, usually at the insistence of ethnic Arakanese, who say that the Rohingya have never been recognized as a Burmese ethnic group.