Thomas Fuller
Muslims on Guard:
In Yangon, Myanmar, the Muslim community is on edge. Many worry the
recent violence between Buddhists and Muslims elsewhere in the country
will arrive in their city.
YANGON, Myanmar — 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
neighborhood until 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 neighborhood watch program.
After decades of peaceful coexistence with the Buddhist majority in the
country, Muslims say they now constantly fear the next attack. Over the
past year, they say several violent episodes across the country led by
rampaging Buddhist mobs have taught them that if violence comes to their
neighborhood, they are on their own.
“I don’t think the police will protect us,” Mr. Nyi Nyi said.
The neighborhood 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, formerly known as Burma.
About 90 percent of the country’s population of 55 million is Buddhist, with Muslims making up 4 to 8 percent.
Since British colonial days, Yangon, formerly Rangoon, has been a
multicultural city where Buddhists live cheek by 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.”
The root of the violence, which has left around 200 Muslims dead over
the past year, appears partly a legacy of colonial years when Indians,
many of them Muslims, arrived in the country as civil servants and
soldiers, stirring resentment among Burmese Buddhists. In recent months
radical monks have since built on those historic grievances, fanning
fears that Muslims are having more children than Buddhists and could
dilute the country’s Buddhist character.
So far, Yangon, which is by far the country’s largest city, has mainly
escaped the violence. But there have been some minor clashes in the city
that intensified worries here, fueling rumors about pending attacks in
both the Buddhist and Muslim communities.
Days after Buddhist mobs tore through the central city of Meiktila
in March, two trucks filled with men showed up in Mr. Nyi Nyi’s
neighborhood and hurled stones at the night watchmen with slingshots.
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 some of the country’s leaders is
campaigning for a boycott of Muslim products and businesses and a ban on
interfaith marriages.
The movement says it is not involved in violence, but critics say that,
at the least, hate-filled sermons are helping to inspire the killings.
“This is the first time we experience this in our lifetime,” said U
Maung Maung Myint, who runs an import-export company and is 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 that he was Burmese, Mr. Maung Maung Myint
said he felt “betrayed.” At least twice during the decades of military
rule, Muslims joined protesters calling for political change, he said.
“We marched in front of the American Embassy and chanted, ‘We want
democracy!’ ” he said.
“We hoped our lives would be more peaceful — we didn’t expect this,” Mr.
Maung Maung Myint said in an interview after Friday Prayer on the third
floor of the mosque, which installed security cameras last year to
guard against arson.
Myanmar is now ruled by a nominally civilian government, but new freedoms have amplified old animosities.
Much of the violence has made headlines 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.
Mr. Khin Maung Htay was the headman of the neighborhood, 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,’ ” Mr. Khin Maung Htay said.
When the Buddhist mob attacked, the police arrived, but left after
failing to persuade the crowd to disperse, he said. Mr. Khin Maung
Htay’s shop was destroyed, and everything inside 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 tried to return to the neighborhood, he said, but angry residents,
some of them former customers, shouted abuse and threatened him.
“They said: ‘Go back to India! Go back to Bangladesh!’ ” Mr. Khin Maung Htay said.
The suggestion that Muslims leave the country has been a common refrain
during the violence, which bewilders many Muslims who have always
considered themselves Burmese. Mr. Khin Maung Htay, his father and his
grandfather were all born in Myanmar.
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,” said U Maung Maung Myint, the owner of a
desktop publishing business who is not related to the head of the
import-export business. “We are Myanmar citizens. We went to Myanmar
schools.”
Ninety percent of his customers 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 because “there are so many differences —
their attitude, their manners, their behavior.”
Among his 1,800 employees are only two Muslims, a parking attendant and a man who makes a type of Indian ice cream.
In real estate, Buddhist building owners do not want to sell apartments
to Muslims, Mr. Soe Nyi Nyi said, adding, “If you sell one apartment to a
Muslim family, all the prices in the building will go down. ”
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. But I don’t want my kids to live through more of this.”
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