Where's the Crime? Is Myanmar the perfect place?

[phazey]

I got thinking and decided to start this discussion. Normally I browse through the local Thai news sub forums to have a bit of a catchup, and all there seems to be are sad stores of murder, rape, fraud, drugs and other wrong doings...There's no such topics for Myanmar.

Does this mean;

1) Crime does not exist

2) Crime is not reported or it's being suppressed by media censors

3) The Police or other agencies do not know about it as it's dealt with by local means..

I brought up 3) as I've been witness to two such events, a fence jumper who subsequently had the cr*p kicked out of him by gate men in the area, and a certain previous owner of a big blue cadillac (DK you may know who i am talking about) be taught a rather brutal lesson by a gan of bat wielding men.

I mean, most expats in Myanmar have experienced petty theft and dealt with it - small amounts of money going mising. shoes or washing line items being half inched...But is that it ?

[gamini]

When I was in Burma a couple of years ago we could not use credit cards or travellers cheques. We had to carry around huge quantities of cash. I question my guide about the possibility of having this money stolen and was told that "our people never rob tourists". I think the reason for this is that they were scared of getting caught and facing severe punishment.
However I think things are still very good. There is very little crime against foreigners. Things might change in the future.

[DagonKhan]

There's tons of crime and it happens everywhere, you just don't hear about it. Almost everyday I pass the paddy wagons loaded up to the brim transferring prisoners from police stations or whatever it is that they do. Visit a police station and the cells are full, seen that a few times myself. I was informed that the majority that were being held were there for stealing, I can actually believe that.

But the majority of the crimes are not violent crimes, and they rarely involve foreigners. There are few high profile cases like the Jap who got murdered at Inya Lake Hotel, but they are rare. Foreigners do get locked up, most of them are unbelievably stupid though and it would be very hard to argue that they didn't deserve it. I believe the vast majority of them get pardoned after a year or two and get deported anyway.

Burglary, theft, stealing in all it's forms is very common. Every Company here has problems with it and it is endemic. Just as government employees believe it's their right to fleece the public, employees see their employer as fair game. Foreign employers who feel that they're not subject to this are either naive or stupid. I personally know of two Companies here, one foreign and one local who had their safes emptied. One was the accountant, the other was the accountants assistant. One lost US$30,000, the other US$50,000.

I've been burgled three times at home, once I caught the guy jumping over the fence red handed, I still have one of his shoes.... I believe they were opportunists, one was caught and spent a year in prison, turned out he was the son of a builder doing some work for me and decided to steal the outdoor a/c unit. Believe it or not, it was the police who actually caught him and the trishaw driver he hired to transport it whilst they were doing their rounds!

But violent crime? No, not really. If I think of the fights I have witnessed, I think most of them have occurred around Thingyan, almost all of them have involved alcohol. Having said that, there are certain parts of Yangon where violent crime is an issue, Hlaing Tharyar would be a classic example.

Bottom line, I feel far, far safer walking around Yangon than I do Bangkok. I also feel far safer in Yangon than I do in certain cities back in the U.K. I think I would go for number 2 Phazey, not because it's censored, it's just not reported by the media because it's not newsworthy.

Edited September 15, 2014 by DagonKhan

[householder]

Violent crime against foreigners has happened in Yangon, but it's rare and isolated.

This incident happened in the very expatty Dagon area in/near downtown:

https://www.dvb.no/news/un-employee-stabbed-by-unidentified-assailant-in-rangoon/28920

There was another report of an expat street robbery but I can't find the link right now.

They're the only two main ones that come to mind.

[onthemoon]

With such a divide between rich (incl powerless expats) and poor, there is bound to be more crime soon.

However, if you feel safer in Yangon than in Bangkok (as DK said), let it be known that I feel much safer in Bangkok than in any Western city.

Just my opinion.

[ezzra]

There are plenty of crimes in Burma, in Yangon in particular, where by a rampant price

gauging going on unchecked with the blessing of the junta, hotels, taxis, restaurants

and domestic airline, for less than one hour flight they charge like 9,000 baht,

This is not a good way to encourage tourism in a new country....

Day light robbery going on there...

[garyinhuahin]

Rioting and burning out Muslim communities, of course, is not regarded as crime. I expect that individual violent crime will increase over time as foreigners spread out and citizen's rising expectations go unmet. I'm not living there, but on my last visit I sensed major undercurrents of hostility and frustration.

All it would take for things to go seriously South for us would be if Westerners were to be painted as threats in the way that Muslims are now. Something to consider.

[NoshowJones]

Rioting and burning out Muslim communities, of course, is not regarded as crime. I expect that individual violent crime will increase over time as foreigners spread out and citizen's rising expectations go unmet. I'm not living there, but on my last visit I sensed major undercurrents of hostility and frustration.

All it would take for things to go seriously South for us would be if Westerners were to be painted as threats in the way that Muslims are now. Something to consider.

I can never see Westerners being painted as threats the way Muslims are. I have never yet come across a westerner who expects the country they are living in to change their way of life to suit them.

[mihalis]

No crime really, hmmm maybe all the crooks go to Thailand and cause havoc...

[metisdead]

Inflammatory troll posts have been removed, apologies to the removed reply post.

[onthemoon]

There are plenty of crimes in Burma, in Yangon in particular, where by a rampant price

gauging going on unchecked with the blessing of the junta, hotels, taxis, restaurants

and domestic airline, for less than one hour flight they charge like 9,000 baht,

This is not a good way to encourage tourism in a new country....

Day light robbery going on there...

This is not crime. You may think you pay more than you want to, but these are unregulated market forces, rather than criminal activity.

[DekDaeng]

When I was in Burma a couple of years ago we could not use credit cards or travellers cheques. We had to carry around huge quantities of cash. I question my guide about the possibility of having this money stolen and was told that "our people never rob tourists". I think the reason for this is that they were scared of getting caught and facing severe punishment.

However I think things are still very good. There is very little crime against foreigners. Things might change in the future.

" they were scared of getting caught and facing severe punishment."

Like LOS.

5, 5, 5.

[Tomtomtom69]

Violent crime against foreigners has happened in Yangon, but it's rare and isolated.

This incident happened in the very expatty Dagon area in/near downtown:

https://www.dvb.no/news/un-employee-stabbed-by-unidentified-assailant-in-rangoon/28920

There was another report of an expat street robbery but I can't find the link right now.

They're the only two main ones that come to mind.

Could it be that that particular crime was in any way connected to, or at least motivated by what happened in Sittwe earlier last year? I'm referring of course to the NGOs that got into some controversy regarding how they handled the placement and subsequent removal of a Buddhist prayer flag from one of their offices over there. The American lady who did it was quite ignorant in that she defended the practice due to the NGOs policy of non-religious affiliation, but the removal of that flag clearly inflamed the local Buddhists who already accused the NGOs as biased towards the Muslim Rohingya or as most Burmese know them, Bengalis. Her statement and the general demeanor of that particular NGO did not go down well with local Buddhists in a nation that is very traditionally Buddhist, more so than nearly every other Buddhist nation.

Therefore I think that attack was somehow pre-meditated and not just an isolated crime of opportunity. It was a crime of motive as the worker was a UN employee.

[Tomtomtom69]

Rioting and burning out Muslim communities, of course, is not regarded as crime. I expect that individual violent crime will increase over time as foreigners spread out and citizen's rising expectations go unmet. I'm not living there, but on my last visit I sensed major undercurrents of hostility and frustration.

All it would take for things to go seriously South for us would be if Westerners were to be painted as threats in the way that Muslims are now. Something to consider.

Yes but clearly those undercurrents of hostility and frustration are towards the government, past and present as well as Muslims, who are used as scapegoats. Westerners are warmly welcomed in Myanmar, unless they cause trouble such as the NGOs in Sittwe, Rakhine state did last year but in that case the issue was actually somewhat intertwined with Islam - an American NGO worker took away a Buddhist prayer flag placed on the front gate of the headquarters of an NGO that like others in the area were accused of being unfairly biased towards the Muslim Rohingya or Bengali population. The attitude shown by the American worker who removed the flag was quite arrogant and further inflamed the situation to the point that her actions directly contributed towards her, her entire staff and most other NGO workers in town fleeing the city [sittwe, formerly known as Akyab] and Rakhine state in general.

Last year I made use of a number of drivers and a guide for my business travels within Myanmar. All of them were fiercely Buddhist, much more than you would ever find in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia or anywhere else. One guy, a famous guide who nearly every foreign visitor to Yangon will probably encounter willingly or not is a staunch Myanmar nationalist who is also fervently anti-Muslim. I remember him preventing us from eating at a Muslim restaurant or doing business with a Muslim truck driver to transport my goods, simply because those people were Muslim. He also mentioned how he wanted to write a book about the plan Muslims have to take over Myanmar and the rest of the world, but of course that book would not have painted Islam in a good light as you can imagine.

But his views were not unique - a couple of months later on a subsequent trip, a new driver and his accomplice who drove me from Mandalay to Mu-se on the Chinese border and back was also very suspicious of Muslims. At a rest stop in Lashio on our way back, he didn't want us to eat at a particular restaurant because apparently the owner was Muslim. So we ended up having to eat Yunnan food in a restaurant opened up by a Chinese investor and his Burmese family. The irony was not lost on me because only 3 weeks after I left Lashio a major riot, sparked by a Muslim man who apparently set a young Buddhist girl on fire at a gas/petrol station occurred right there in Lashio. It was the latest example of rioting in a country that has become gripped by such violence. Previous examples were the rioting/burning etc. in Meiktila, which killed some 40 people, mostly Muslims, a couple of months earlier. I stopped at a gas/petrol station on the highway just outside Meiktila days earlier and remembered what happened there not so long prior to my visit. Little did I think it would happen again so soon in Lashio, a town I stopped off in on two occasions, but luckily I wasn't affected.

[Tomtomtom69]

There are plenty of crimes in Burma, in Yangon in particular, where by a rampant price

gauging going on unchecked with the blessing of the junta, hotels, taxis, restaurants

and domestic airline, for less than one hour flight they charge like 9,000 baht,

This is not a good way to encourage tourism in a new country....

Day light robbery going on there...

This is not crime. You may think you pay more than you want to, but these are unregulated market forces, rather than criminal activity.

Well I'd call it greed and taking advantage of people, in particular tourists (which by definition includes business people too), so in a sense it is unethical at least, if not slightly criminal...but of course at the end of the day, any business can charge whatever the hell they want to charge, even if it's a rip-off.