"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.
Source: http://www.news.myanmaronlinecentre.com/2013/07/03/myanmars-muslim-minority-confronts-fear-and-mistrust/
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