Muslims trapped in ghetto after clashes in Myanmar

SITTWE, Myanmar (AP) — From inside the neighborhood that has become their prison, they can look over the walls and fences and into a living city.

Stores are open out there. Sidewalk restaurants are serving bottles of Mandalay beer. There are no barbed-wire roadblocks marking neighborhood boundaries, no armed policemen guarding checkpoints. In the rest of Sittwe, this city of 200,000 people along Myanmar's coast, no one pays a bribe to take a sick baby to the doctor.

But here it's different.

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EDITOR'S NOTE — This story is part of "Portraits of Change," a yearlong series by The Associated Press examining how the opening of Myanmar after decades of military rule is — and is not — changing life in the long-isolated Southeast Asian country.

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Aung Mingalar is just a few square blocks. You can walk it in 10 minutes, stopping only when you come to the end of the road and a policeman with an assault rifle waves you back inside, back into a maze of shuttered storefronts, unemployment and boredom.

In the evenings, when bats fly through the twilight, the men gather for prayers at Aung Mingalar's main mosque, the one that wasn't destroyed in last year's violence.

Zahad Tuson is among them. He had spent his life pedaling fares around this state capital, a fraying town, built by British colonials, full of bureaucrats and monsoon-battered concrete buildings. Now his bicycle rickshaw sits at home unused. He hasn't left Aung Mingalar in nearly a year.

"We could go out whenever we wanted!" he says. His voice is a mixture of anger and wonder.

Source: http://www.news.myanmaronlinecentre.com/2013/07/01/muslims-trapped-in-ghetto-after-clashes-in-myanmar/