When I got back home to a suburb in Yangon after six months of travel, I noticed many new faces speaking ethnic languages that I don’t understand.
Before I set out on my journey, ethnic Rakhine (Arakanese) people were the first to arrive in my neighborhood, followed by ethnic Chin.
Most of them were young men and women. Some had come with their entire families, but few were elderly, since seniors had apparently chosen to remain in their native towns. Some came to join relatives who had already arrived in Yangon.
The new faces came from such conflict zones as Chin, Kachin, Karenni (Kayah), Rakhine and Mon states and central Myanmar.
No doubt other townships across Yangon are seeing many new faces too.
Some of the young migrants were not displaced by fighting but fled to Yangon to dodge mandatory military service. Most of them are learning a foreign language in the hope of working overseas, but in the meantime they are also working low-paid jobs and struggle to make ends meet.
Another group of migrants are family members of active or retired military personnel who dare not disclose their identities, taxi drivers in the neighborhood say.
Escape to Yangon
Many people I interviewed during my travels have sent their adult children to towns where they can work for meagre salaries and keep a low profile to avoid getting conscripted. Well-off parents are trying to send their children abroad. According to the latest reports, the regime imposes tight checks on draft-age people at Yangon International Airport, and they need to bribe their way out at the check-in counter.
I asked a neighbor how the conscription law had been enforced in this neighborhood. Though no one was sitting nearby, he lowered his voice and said: “Lazy jobless guys have enlisted, which is good for others.”
At the bank recently, I had to wait for a long time while the teller served a woman in front of me. She sounded like an ethnic person, and I noticed that she was paying large sums of money to buy an apartment. She clearly belonged to a small group of well-off IDPs.
The next time, I heard a woman ask a bank employee to phone her once the bank sold affordable apartments on mortgages. She asked the bank employee for their phone number, but the teller refused. I did not have the heart to tell her that banks have suspended home loans.
Last year I helped an ethnic woman and her unmarried daughter. The mother wanted to sell food, so I helped her buy a food cart and often bought the ethnic food she cooked. The daughter had passed advanced proficiency tests in a foreign language and was trying to go abroad, so I helped her find students who wanted to learn the language.
Since the two women lived alone, they dared not open the door when someone knocked, and I gave them some phone numbers in case they needed help.
Rent
The high rent is a problem for IDPs who have fled to Yangon. Apartment and housing rents have soared as even people from Pyin Oo Lwin and Mandalay have started to take shelter in the commercial capital.
In the suburb where I am currently staying, the rent has increased from 120,000 kyats to 280,000 kyats a month. No matter how shabby the building may be, a so-called “newly renovated” apartment can ask for 300,000 kyats.
Lessors prefer a one-year leas, so they can get a big downpayment, but six-month and three-month leases are also common as some tenants can’t afford bigger downpayments.
This leads to a lot of sharp practices. Estate agents keep the apartment keys, so tenants usually don’t know who the landlords are. Agents often throw tenants out after the three-month or six-month lease expires so that they can get a fresh agent fee on new leases, lying to the tenants that the landlord is selling the apartment.
Some sympathetic landlords do post for-rent advertisements by themselves and say potential tenants can contact them directly. That saves the agent fee, which is half the monthly rent for a three-month lease and a month’s rent for a six-month or one-year lease.
Overnight guest registration
No IDP in Yangon would disagree if I said that what they’re afraid of most is the knock on the door.
Junta personnel including soldiers, police and ward officials often come to check citizenship IDs, which tell them which parts of the country IDPs are from. If young people, especially young men, can’t show proof that they are either working or studying, junta personnel extort money from them. In some cases, young men are detained and families have to pay a bribe for their release; otherwise they are drafted. Colloquially this is known as “kidnapping”.
Lately the regime has targeted ethnic people and people from central Myanmar in overnight guest inspections of households. Though such checks are usually carried out at night, junta personnel now check particular buildings or apartments in the daytime, acting on a tip-off.
Checks on mobile phones
Another kind of check common in Yangon is examining mobile phones for virtual private network (VPN) apps, usually at traffic junctions, which forces people to use two mobile phones—one to use at home with VPN, and another to take with them when they go out.
A friend of mine needs a VPN for work, so when he goes out he either switches the phone off or turns it flight mode, and when checked he shows a second phone.
But most people leave their mobile phones at home when they go out for a short while. If pressed, they answer that they are taking advantage of the brief periods between blackouts to charge their phone at home.
Traditional ethnic food
But my ward also benefits from more and more ethnic food being sold in the streets. Yangon residents buy from vendors out of sympathy and acquire the taste, and some have fun learning new dialect words.
IDPs also sell food on Facebook, which allows customers to order in advance.
Yangon IDP Camp
The apartment rental business is thriving, and the arrival of so many IDPs also provides junta personnel with opportunities to make money. In some cases refugees find they have jumped out of the frying pan into the fire.
They often ask whether the regime will eventually bomb Yangon. I’m not a military analyst, so I don’t know the answer, but I usually reply that I don’t think so because of the presence of embassies, United Nations offices and businesses of junta cronies in the cities.
Yet it’s not only refugees from conflict zones but also those with ties to the regime who are moving to Yangon.
While low-income families and IDPs are queuing for discounted cooking oil and struggling to make ends meet by selling ethnic food, other people are living it up in nightclubs, free from the fear of raids and arrests. It’s obvious who they are.
The reality is that Yangon is becoming an IDP camp. It is time we realized that the phrase “we only have each other” applies right here in the former capital.
Even as I was writing this letter, I saw many more new faces arriving in my neighborhood.
