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MEIKTILA, Myanmar: May Thandar Maung, one of Myanmar’s five million young adults, was excited to cast her vote for the first time in the November elections.
But the 18-year-old is Muslim and says that means she will have no voice.
“My religion means that I have not been able to get an ID card,” she tells Agence France-Presse in her hometown of Meiktila, central Myanmar, and not having an ID card means not voting.
She describes how local officials have hampered her attempts for more than a year, while fellow Buddhists faced no such delays, in a city where memories of brutal intercommunal violence in 2013 are still alive.
The Buddhist-majority nation is expected to return Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) party to power on November 8 in the second election since Myanmar emerged from full military rule in 2011.
Almost all of the country’s Rohingya Muslims, whether in refugee shelters in Bangladesh or confined to camps and villages in Myanmar, will be completely disenfranchised.
But Myanmar also has many more Muslims of other ethnic heritage, about four percent of the population, whom the country, in theory, accepts as citizens.
In practice, however, it can be very different.
Muslims complained to AFP about systemic corruption and detailed how they are forced to pay hundreds of dollars, exorbitant fees in a country where a quarter of the population lives in poverty.
Three members of Maung Cho’s family had to pay $ 370 each, the 53-year-old says, many times more than the symbolic amounts of ‘tea money’ demanded of Buddhists.
‘Mixed bloods’
Muslims across the country echo their experiences, says Yangon-based analyst David Mathieson.
“Anti-Muslim sentiment is always present with discrimination in schools, the workplace, and access to government jobs,” he says.
Challenges continue even for those who obtain identification in a country where these cards indicate the ethnicity of the holder.
Many Muslims say that false ethnic identities, generally from South Asia, are increasingly being imposed on the community.
Maung Cho’s family has lived in Myanmar for generations, but when his renewed ID card was returned to him, they labeled him a “Muslim Indian”.
“It must have been my beard,” he tells AFP regretfully.
Like other so-called “mestizos”, he now faces additional scrutiny at each identity check and even has to stand in a separate queue at immigration offices.
Myanmar’s Hindus, numbering around 250,000, are also often branded as “mixed blood” and face similar problems.
Tun Min, 28, based in Rangoon, tells AFP that it took him 10 years to get an identification card.
Last week, she decided to speak up and post a video on Facebook explaining the discrimination her community faces.
“I drove a taxi for eight years, but I only worked nights because I couldn’t apply for a license without an ID card.”
The ‘B’ word
The least desirable label, however, is “Bengali”, a pejorative term commonly used to refer to the persecuted Rohingya.
Myanmar faces genocide charges in the United Nations high court after the army expelled some 750,000 Rohingya in an alleged crackdown on militants in 2017.
Many of the 600,000 who remain in Myanmar live in what Amnesty International calls “apartheid” conditions, denied citizenship and deprived of their rights.
Mathieson says there have been numerous reports in recent years that other Muslims in Myanmar have also been forced to adopt “Bengali” as their identity.
He blames “racist and discriminatory” bureaucratic procedures more than official policy, but cautions that the government has not tried to end the practice.
The NLD has “more important agendas than to reverse engineer a racist system that many of its supporters are comfortable with.”
An immigration department official, who asked not to be named, refuted the allegations of corruption and discrimination and insisted that the identification cards were issued in accordance with the law.
Progress?
But Maung Cho says he believes racism against Muslims is worse now than under the military junta, and describes his community as “disappointed and depressed.”
Many people you know are so disappointed that they plan not to vote in the next election.
A campaign to boycott the vote is accelerating.
Former student leader and political prisoner Sithu Maung is one of two Muslims out of 1,143 NLD candidates. In 2015, the party did not present any Muslim candidates.
He says he understands the disappointment in his community, but denies that times are worse than under the military.
“They should be optimistic about the future. The NLD has only had five years in power. “
But optimism is rare among young people like May Thandar Maung.
“Even though I was born here, I cannot vote and that is discrimination,” he says.
