Chapter 4. The “Buy Buddhist” Campaign and Economic Boycott of Muslims
The economic campaign associated with 969 sought to make religious identity a condition of participation in everyday commerce. Its consequences reached beyond the Muslim shopkeeper losing a sale: customers, contractors, transport operators and property owners faced pressure to reorganize their dealings along religious lines. For Rohingya, the significance lay in the wider acceptance of an exclusionary principle—that a Muslim community could be deprived of economic opportunity in the name of protecting the majority. Contemporary reporting and human-rights documentation show how this principle operated through lost business, intimidation and restrictions on access to property and markets.
Extending the Boycott Beyond Shops
The campaign covered services as well as goods. Reuters documented a boycott of a Muslim-owned bus company in Mawlamyine, demonstrating that religious discrimination could be applied to the ordinary transport connections on which people and businesses depended. Reporting from Minhla also recorded the promotion of this example outside Mon State. The practical message was that customers should assess a service according to its owner’s religion rather than its usefulness, reliability or price. Transport therefore became another channel through which Muslim livelihoods could be targeted, extending economic exclusion beyond a shop’s immediate neighbourhood.
This mattered because a boycott could spread through routine decisions requiring no formal government order. A passenger choosing a different operator, or a customer abandoning a familiar business, could help establish a religious boundary in an otherwise shared market. The economic significance of the bus-company example was the attempt to make that boundary transferable between different kinds of commercial activity.
The Experience of a Muslim Family Business
Reporting from Mawlamyine provides a more specific account of the campaign’s effect on an ordinary household. In an article originally published in June 2013, The Irrawaddy recorded the testimony of U Tin Aung, whose son operated a motorcycle spare-parts shop. He said that the business had lost almost half its trade in recent months. His account placed the economic burden on a family enterprise serving everyday customers, rather than on the powerful commercial interests invoked by nationalist claims about Muslim wealth.
The same testimony also showed that participation in the boycott was uneven. U Tin Aung reported that customers were returning because the shop offered fair prices and good service. This detail preserves the agency of both the affected family and its customers: religious pressure could damage an established business, while practical experience and continuing relationships could help sustain it.
For a family earning its living through a small shop, reduced trade threatens the income available for household expenses and maintaining the business. The harm can accumulate without a building being burned or its owner formally prohibited from working. Economic exclusion can leave a business physically intact while progressively weakening the household that depends on it.
Fear and the Cancellation of Construction Contracts
The campaign also affected transactions involving larger investments. In June 2013, Reuters reported that Buddhist clients had cancelled contracts with Muslim-owned construction companies in northern Yangon. Shwe Maung, a Muslim parliamentarian from the governing party, attributed these cancellations to fears that 969 followers might attack the completed buildings. This account identified a mechanism distinct from a customer personally endorsing the boycott: anticipated hostility could make a commercial relationship appear unsafe.
The reported fear attached to the Muslim identity of the contractor. Its effect was to place an additional obstacle between Muslim firms and potential clients, regardless of the quality of their work. Analytically, this shows how intimidation can distort a market before an attack takes place. A client may withdraw because of expected danger, leaving the targeted company to bear the economic loss.
The same Reuters investigation noted that the largest construction firms involved in multibillion-dollar infrastructure projects belonged to Buddhist tycoons connected to the former dictatorship. That finding challenged the suggestion that Muslim commercial visibility represented control over the country’s most powerful economic interests. The boycott instead penalized businesses whose owners belonged to a vulnerable minority.
Restricting Trade and Access to Property
The United States’ report on religious freedom during 2013 documented campaigns in Karen and Mon States to prohibit business dealings between Buddhists and Muslims. It also recorded reports that Buddhist nationalists impeded economic interaction in Yangon’s Tamwe Township. These observations show that exclusion was expressed through local restrictions on dealings between communities, as well as through the withdrawal of individual customers.
The report further recorded that, in some areas, Buddhists would not sell or rent property to Muslims. Such discrimination affected the conditions needed to establish a home or maintain a business. A person denied access to suitable premises faces a barrier before making any sale; an existing tenant may have fewer alternatives if a tenancy ends. Property exclusion could therefore narrow both economic opportunity and the possibility of remaining in a particular neighbourhood.
These findings should be understood as documented practices in particular places, rather than evidence that every locality operated identically. Their importance is that religious exclusion reached several foundations of economic life: trade, services and access to premises.
Pressure on Buddhists Who Maintained Muslim Trade
Economic separation also depended on discouraging members of the majority community from continuing ordinary relationships with Muslims. A Council on Foreign Relations analysis published in 2013 recorded reports that Buddhist merchants had themselves been attacked for doing business with Muslims. Although this account does not establish how widespread such attacks were, it identifies pressure directed at people who crossed the proposed commercial boundary.
This pressure helps explain why a Muslim business could lose customers or partners even where established relationships remained friendly. Continuing to trade could expose a Buddhist participant to accusations or intimidation. The campaign thus threatened the relationships through which minority businesses might otherwise withstand exclusion.
For Rohingya communities, the protection of such relationships carried particular importance. Human Rights Watch documented testimony from Pauktaw that monks had beaten Arakanese people who were secretly providing food to Rohingya. That incident belonged to the earlier campaign of isolation in Arakan; it was not proof that the nationwide 969 boycott directed every local action. It nevertheless illustrates the severe consequences of punishing majority-community members for maintaining assistance across a religious boundary.
Turning Economic Anxiety Against a Minority
International Crisis Group’s research identified a perception among Buddhist nationalists that Muslim commercial communities restricted markets and capital to people of their own faith. The report presented this as a perception contributing to the boycott. It should not be treated as proof of a coordinated Muslim effort to exclude Buddhists or dominate the economy.
The distinction matters because mutual support within a minority community does not establish wrongdoing by its members. When commercial grievances are attributed collectively to a religious population, an individual trader can be penalized without any evidence that the trader caused the alleged problem. The boycott converted suspicion about a community into a reason to withhold business from its members.
From a Rohingya perspective, this was a dangerous economic logic. It allowed the mere presence of Muslim businesses to be treated as an injury to the majority, making exclusion appear protective. The right to earn a living became vulnerable to collective accusations rather than an assessment of a person’s conduct.
Rohingya Livelihoods and the Wider Meaning of the Boycott
The nationwide campaign affected diverse Muslim communities, whose circumstances were not identical to those of Rohingya in Arakan. Rohingya faced additional state-imposed obstacles. Human Rights Watch documented restrictions affecting employment, economic livelihoods, movement and property, while its February 2013 discussion of humanitarian conditions emphasized the importance of restoring movement so affected people could resume earning a living.
The connection is therefore one of reinforcing forms of exclusion, rather than identical administration. A boycott discourages others from trading with a community; restrictions on movement prevent that community from reaching customers, workplaces and markets. Where both operate, opportunities to compensate for lost income become narrower. This is an analytical reading of the documented conditions, not a claim that every restriction originated with 969.
The economic boycott’s central consequence was to make religious discrimination practicable through ordinary commercial decisions. Lost customers, cancelled contracts, denied premises and pressure against continuing trade weakened Muslim participation in shared economic life. For Rohingya, its broader significance was the normalization of a principle already threatening their survival: that exclusion from livelihoods could be justified as protection of the majority.