Sadly, HR consultancy Mercer recently ranked Yangon as one of the 30 worst cities on earth. All we can say about that is: pfffffft.
But to add insult to injury, Business Insider on Friday published their own alarmist list of the worst cities, citing Mercer’s data and inventing a bizarre justification for Yangon’s poor score (it came in 30th).
“The city formerly known as Rangoon is continually stricken by interreligious violence between Buddhists and Muslims,” the article claimed, “leading to a high murder rate.”
Eh? Not sure what city that is but it’s definitely not Yangon.
By the looks of it, they were thinking about Meikhtila, more than 500km north of Yangon, which was affected by intercommunal violence which killed dozens in 2013. The claim was illustrated with a picture of a mosque burning in Meikhtila.
Er, nope, and that’s still Meikhtila. Photo: Business Insider screenshot
While tensions between religious communities in Myanmar have been high, the violence that took place in 2012 and 2013 was in Meikhtila and Rakhine state, on the western coast. There have been no such “continual killings” in Yangon.
The city recorded 186 murders in 2014, giving it a murder rate of about 3.5 per 100,000 people, about the same as Glasgow, Scotland and Brussels, Belgium. That’s not great, but it’s hardly Caracas (118 per 100,000).
Dear Business Insider, we know Yangon and Dhaka and all these cities deemed so godawful are a long way from New York, but please do us a favor and – if you can’t visit – at least get what’s bad about them right.
