Myanmar’s Muslim Minority Confronts Fear and Mistrust

July 2,2013

New York Times

 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.”

A version of this article appeared in print on July 3, 2013, on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Myanmar’s Muslim Minority Confronts Fear and Mistrust.

Mobile Deal in Myanmar Elicits Anger Over Religion

June 27, 2013

 New York Times
Thomas Fuller

The Myanmar government awarded major telecommunications contracts to two foreign companies on Thursday, a milestone in the country’s opening up to the world that was immediately tainted by religious hatred.

 Hours after the announcement, a monk who is one of the leaders of a radical nationalist Buddhist movement called for a boycott of one of the two companies because it is based in Qatar, a Muslim country.

“Did the government have such little choice?” the monk, Ashin Wimala, a leader of the 969 movement, said in a telephone interview after the government announced the winners late Thursday. “Why did they award this to a Muslim company?”

The company, Ooredoo, won a 15-year concession to build and operate mobile phone networks virtually from scratch, as did Telenor Mobile Communications of Norway.

The networks are crucially needed in Myanmar, where less than 10 percent of people have a mobile phone. That is a startlingly low number at a time when mobile phones are ubiquitous even in the poorest corners of the world. In neighboring Laos, a country with similar levels of grinding poverty, mobile phone penetration is 87 percent.

But in a country that is 90 percent Buddhist and where anti-Muslim sermons and hate speech appear to have fueled rampaging lynch mobs, the award to Ooredoo drew fury.

On the Facebook page where the government announcement was posted, critical comments quickly accumulated. “Why? Why? Why Muslim company omg,” said one. “Say no to Ooredoo,” said another.

The government stood by its selection of the company, which operates in more than a dozen countries in the Middle East, North Africa and Southeast Asia. “We selected them for a license on the basis of their services: they have a good telecom service in Singapore,” U Ye Htut, a government spokesman, said by telephone.

In recent months, the leaders of the 969 movement have called for a boycott of shops owned by Muslims and products that they say are linked to companies owned by Muslims. The movement says the country’s Buddhist character is under threat and has proposed banning marriages between Muslims and Buddhists.

Over the last year, Buddhist lynch mobs have killed more than 200 Muslims and forced more than 150,000 people, mostly Muslims, from their homes.

On Sunday, the movement appeared to receive the blessing of President Thein Sein when he issued a statement calling Ashin Wirathu, the spiritual leader of the movement, “a son of Lord Buddha.”

How powerful the movement’s objections will prove remains to be seen. The telecommunication licenses are a potent symbol of Myanmar’s transition from decades of isolation under military rule to newfound freedoms for the country’s 55 million people.

The government pushed ahead with the announcement, even though members of Parliament voted Wednesday to delay awarding the contracts until a telecommunications bill currently being debated becomes law. Mr. Thein Sein wants voters to feel tangible results from the country’s economic liberalization and democratization before general elections scheduled for 2015.

Three years ago, when Myanmar was still under military rule, mobile phones were the preserve of the rich. The conditions of the license calls for a swift rollout: coverage must reach a quarter of the population within a year. Within five years, half of the population must have access to cellular data services and three-quarters must be able to make voice calls.

Both Ooredoo and Telenor have deep pockets, analysts say, a critical factor in Myanmar where the huge scale of the investment will require billions of dollars.

The chairman of Ooredoo, Sheik Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Saud al-Thani, issued a statement on Thursday saying that Myanmar would “undoubtedly become a key market” for the company.

Eric Pfanner and Wai Moe contributed reporting.

Extremism Rises Among Myanmar Buddhists

June 20,2013

New York Times

THOMAS FULLER

Adam Dean for The New York Times

Buddhist monasteries associated with the fundamentalist movement, which calls itself 969, have opened community centers and a Sunday school program for children nationwide. More Photos »

TAUNGGYI, Myanmar — After a ritual prayer atoning for past sins, Ashin Wirathu, a Buddhist monk with a rock-star following in Myanmar, sat before an overflowing crowd of thousands of devotees and launched into a rant against what he called “the enemy” — the country’s Muslim minority.

“You can be full of kindness and love, but you cannot sleep next to a mad dog,” Ashin Wirathu said, referring to Muslims.

“I call them troublemakers, because they are troublemakers,” Ashin Wirathu told a reporter after his two-hour sermon. “I am proud to be called a radical Buddhist.”

The world has grown accustomed to a gentle image of Buddhism defined by the self-effacing words of the Dalai Lama, the global popularity of Buddhist-inspired meditation and postcard-perfect scenes from Southeast Asia and beyond of crimson-robed, barefoot monks receiving alms from villagers at dawn.

But over the past year, images of rampaging Burmese Buddhists carrying swords and the vituperative sermons of monks like Ashin Wirathu have underlined the rise of extreme Buddhism in Myanmar — and revealed a darker side of the country’s greater freedoms after decades of military rule. Buddhist lynch mobs have killed more than 200 Muslims and forced more than 150,000 people, mostly Muslims, from their homes.

Ashin Wirathu denies any role in the riots. But his critics say that at the very least his anti-Muslim preaching is helping to inspire the violence.

What began last year on the fringes of Burmese society has grown into a nationwide movement whose agenda now includes boycotts of Muslim-made goods. Its message is spreading through regular sermons across the country that draw thousands of people and through widely distributed DVDs of those talks. Buddhist monasteries associated with the movement are also opening community centers and a Sunday school program for 60,000 Buddhist children nationwide.

The hate-filled speeches and violence have endangered Myanmar’s path to democracy, raising questions about the government’s ability to keep the country’s towns and cities safe and its willingness to crack down or prosecute Buddhists in a Buddhist-majority country. The killings have also reverberated in Muslim countries across the region, tarnishing what was almost universally seen abroad as a remarkable and rare peaceful transition from military rule to democracy. In May, the Indonesian authorities foiled what they said was a plot to bomb the Myanmar Embassy in Jakarta in retaliation for the assaults on Muslims.

Ashin Wirathu, the spiritual leader of the radical movement, skates a thin line between free speech and incitement, taking advantage of loosened restrictions on expression during a fragile time of transition. He was himself jailed for eight years by the now-defunct military junta for inciting hatred. Last year, as part of a release of hundreds of political prisoners, he was freed.

In his recent sermon, he described the reported massacre of schoolchildren and other Muslim inhabitants in the central city of Meiktila in March, documented by a human rights group, as a show of strength.

“If we are weak,” he said, “our land will become Muslim.”

Buddhism would seem to have a secure place in Myanmar. Nine in 10 people are Buddhist, as are nearly all the top leaders in the business world, the government, the military and the police. Estimates of the Muslim minority range from 4 percent to 8 percent of Myanmar’s roughly 55 million people while the rest are mostly Christian or Hindu.

But Ashin Wirathu, who describes himself as a nationalist, says Buddhism is under siege by Muslims who are having more children than Buddhists and buying up Buddhist-owned land. In part, he is tapping into historical grievances that date from British colonial days when Indians, many of them Muslims, were brought into the country as civil servants and soldiers.

The muscular and nationalist messages he has spread have alarmed Buddhists in other countries.

The Dalai Lama, after the riots in March, said killing in the name of religion was “unthinkable” and urged Myanmar’s Buddhists to contemplate the face of the Buddha for guidance.

Wai Moe contributed reporting from Mandalay and Yangon, Myanmar, and Poypiti Amatatham from Bangkok.

Storm Is Threat To Refugees In Myanmar

(Photo: AFP)

May 11, 2013

New York Times
Thomas Fuller



BANGKOK — A tropical cyclone in the Andaman Sea is headed close to an area in Myanmar where tens of thousands of victims of ethnic and religious violence are living in makeshift camps, adding urgency to fears of what the United Nations has termed a looming “humanitarian catastrophe” for displaced families.

Of the more than 130,000 people forced to flee their homes in rioting between Buddhists and Muslims over the last year in western Myanmar, around half are living in low-lying camps near the sea, the United Nations says.

Human rights organizations have issued repeated warnings that the displaced people are at risk of disease and hunger during the rainy season, which begins this month and continues until around September.

“We’re definitely very concerned,” said Vivian Tan, a spokeswoman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the United Nations refugee agency. “We are working around the clock, trying to get as many people out of low-lying areas and into decent shelters.”

Projections on Saturday by the United States Navy Marine Meteorology Division estimated that the cyclone would reach land around Wednesday. According to the same calculations, the center of the storm will be just south of Chittagong, a major city in Bangladesh, and rain and strong winds would also hit areas in Myanmar’s Rakhine State where the camps are.

Although the storm could change direction or lessen in intensity, aid groups say even heavy rains would create very difficult conditions for the displaced families who are camped out in muddy fields vulnerable to tidal surges. Myanmar is prone to violent tropical storms. A cyclone in 2008 killed more than 150,000 people in the country’s Irrawaddy river delta. Another storm in 2010 in western Myanmar, in roughly the same areas as those under threat now, displaced tens of thousands of people and killed more than 100.

The vast majority of those displaced by religious violence in western Myanmar are Muslims who call themselves Rohingya, a group not recognized by the country’s government and denied citizenship.

Continued deep hostility toward the Rohingya by the local Buddhist population has prevented their return to their homes or resettlement in other areas. The Irrawaddy, an online news site, reported last week that the Rakhine State government in April backed down from a plan to resettle Muslims after Buddhist villagers objected. Aid groups say they have been hindered from delivering aid because of threats by Buddhists.

Although a court on Tuesday sentenced 10 Buddhist men to prison terms for destruction of property during the riots, most of the perpetrators of the violence in Western Myanmar, which left at least 167 people dead, remain free, human rights organizations say. Scores more people were killed in Muslim-Buddhist violence in March.