Muslims fear for life in Buddhist-dominated Myanmar

After years of coexisting peacefully, Muslims have become the targets of Buddhist majority.

Night can be very dark in Yangon, a city where street lamps, when there are any, flicker on and off with the uneven electricity supply. For a group of Muslim men guarding their neighbourhood till dawn, it is never clear what is lurking down the potholed roads and alleyways.

“The government cannot guarantee our safety,” said U Nyi Nyi, a businessman who sat on a plastic chair with a half-dozen of the 130 men he has organized for an improvised Muslim neighbourhood watch programme.

After decades of peaceful coexistence with the Buddhist majority in the country, Muslims say they now live with fear and anxiety about the next attack. Over the past year, several rounds of violence across the country led by rampaging Buddhist mobs have taught them a sobering lesson, they say: If violence comes to their neighbourhood, they are on their own. “I don't think the police will protect us,” Nyi Nyi said. The night watch program, a motley corps of men who check for any suspicious outsiders and keep wooden clubs and metal rods stashed nearby, is a symbol of how much relations have deteriorated between Buddhists and Muslims in Myanmar.

About 90 per cent of the country's population of 55 million is Buddhist, with Muslims making up anywhere from 4 to 8 per cent. Since British colonial days, Yangon has been a multicultural city where Buddhists live cheek to jowl with Muslims, Christians and Hindus. Mosques and Buddhist pagodas are literally in each other's shadows.

Now fear and suspicion taint dealings between the two communities, Muslims say.
“We are losing trust with each other,” said U Aye, a Muslim used-car salesman. “Any business transaction between a Buddhist and a Muslim can turn into an incident.”

Religious violence has left more than 200 people dead in Myanmar over the past year. But so far there have been only minor clashes in Yangon, which is by far the country's largest city. Days after Buddhist mobs rampaged through the central city of Meiktila in March, two trucks filled with men showed up in Nyi Nyi's neighbourhood and hurled stones at the night watchmen with slingshots.

A few days later the authorities ruled that a fire at a Yangon Muslim school that killed 13 boys was an accident. But with the current atmosphere of mistrust, rumors have swirled through both the Buddhist and Muslim communities. Muslims say they have become increasingly segregated from Buddhists. Some Muslims with means have fled to Malaysia or Singapore. Muslim-owned businesses are losing Buddhist customers. A growing Buddhist movement known as 969 that has the blessing of the country's top leaders is campaigning for a boycott of Muslim products and businesses and a ban on marriages between the two faiths.

“This is the first time we experience this in our lifetime,” said U Maung Maung Myint, the head of an import-export company and one of the trustees of the Bengali mosque, which is only a few hundred paces from a Buddhist pagoda, a Christian church and a Hindu temple. He was referring specifically to the mistrust between communities.

After a lifetime of feeling he was Burmese, Maung Maung Myint said he felt" betrayed." At least twice during military rule, the Muslim community joined protesters calling for political change, he said. “We marched in front of the American Embassy and chanted, ‘We want democracy!’”

“We hoped our lives would be more peaceful — we didn't expect this,” Maung Maung Myint said in an interview on the third floor of the mosque after Friday Prayer. The mosque installed security cameras last year to guard against arson. Myanmar is now ruled by a nominally civilian government (albeit by a former general, President Thein Sein). But Myanmar's new freedoms have amplified old animosities.

Largely reported

Much of the violence has made headlines both inside the country and beyond. But smaller incidents have gone largely unreported. In one such case, a grocery store owned by U Khin Maung Htay, 59, was attacked in February by a Buddhist mob in Hlaing Thaya Township, directly across the Hlaing River from Yangon.

Khin Maung Htay was the headman of the neighbourhood, and some of his Buddhist friends had warned him that trouble was brewing. “I called police, but they said, ‘Don't worry, there's no problem,’” Htay said.

When the Buddhist mob attacked, the police arrived on the scene, but they left after they failed to persuade the crowd to disperse.  Khin Maung Htay’s shop was destroyed, and everything was looted. He fled his home and is now a refugee in his own city, crammed in a two-bedroom apartment in central Yangon with 22 other relatives.

He attempted to return to the neighbourhood, but angry residents, some of them former customers, shouted abuse and threatened him.

“They said, ‘Go back to India! Go back to Bangladesh!’” Khin Maung Htay said.
The suggestion that Muslims leave the country has been a common refrain during the violence, but it bewilders many Muslims, because they have always considered themselves Burmese. Khin Maung Htay, his father and his grandfather were all born in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.

Myanmar's Muslims are a diverse collection of ethnicities and appearances. In some families, women wear head scarves and men grow out their beards. But many say they have made an effort to blend into Burmese society.

“We have a Myanmar lifestyle. We are Myanmar citizens. We went to Myanmar schools,” said U Maung Maung Myint, the owner of a desktop publishing business who is not related to the head of the import-export business. Ninety percent of the customers at his desktop publishing shop were Buddhists, but early this year many of them stopped coming. It was the first time he had felt discrimination, he said. Buddhists in Myanmar are often candid about their dislike for Muslims.

U Soe Nyi Nyi, the owner of a successful restaurant business that includes the flagship brand Feel, a popular-chain in Yangon, said he generally avoided hiring Muslims be'cause "there are so many differences — their attitude, their manners, their behaviour."

Among his 1,800 employees are only two Muslims, a parking attendant and a man who makes a type of Indian ice cream. The divide between Buddhists and Muslims is widening in the business world, Soe Nyi Nyi said. In real estate, Buddhist building owners do not want to sell apartments to Muslims, he said. “If you sell one apartment to a Muslim family, all the prices in the building will go down,” he said.

For Muslims with means in Yangon, the prejudice and the threat of violence are pushing them toward emigration.

U Myint Thein, who owns a business selling cooking-gas stoves imported from India, said he found it difficult to explain the violence to his children. “I did my best to make sure they didn't hear about these horrible things, but they heard,” he said.

“I never thought about leaving this country before,” he said. “But I don't want my kids to live through more of this.”