Houses were on fire in Gawdu Zara village, northern Rakhine state, Myanmar, on Thursday. Journalists saw new fires burning in the Myanmar village that had been abandoned by Rohingya Muslims, and where pages from Islamic texts were seen ripped and left on the ground. (Associated Press)

By Al Jazeera

September 15, 2017

UN urges Myanmar's military and its leader to stop the 'catastrophic' violence in Rakhine state.

Global pressure is mounting on Myanmar's army and the country's leader Aung San Suu Kyi to end the killing and displacement of the Rohingya.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called the killings "catastrophic" and "completely unacceptable". 

He says the Myanmar military should suspend its operation in the western Rakhine state and allow the Rohingya to return to their villages.

At least 400,000 people have fled to Bangladesh since the violence escalated late last month.

As more Rohingya flee to Bangladesh, what will it take to stop this violence?

Presenter: Jane Dutton

Guests:

Phil Robertson - deputy Asia director, Human Rights Watch

Maung Zarni - visiting fellow on Myanmar at the London School of Economics and founder of the Free Burma Coalition

Abdul Rasheed - founder and chairman of the Rohingya Foundation Community

By Syed Zainul Abedin Eiffel

Dhaka Tribunal

September 14, 2017

Myanmar's army has great political, economic and strategic interests in keeping the ethnic conflict alive in Rakhine and carrying out the purge of Rohingyas from their homeland

Dr Maung Zarni, a Burmese man exiled from Myanmar, is an academic, activist, commentator and expert on his country’s politics. Currently he is a London-based scholar with the Documentation Centre of Cambodia, at the Sleuk Rith Institute.

In an exclusive interview with Dhaka Tribune’s Syed Zainul Abedin, Maung says Myanmar’s army has great political, economic and strategic interests in keeping the ethnic conflict alive in Rakhine and carrying out the purge of Rohingyas from their homeland.

“My own late great-uncle was deputy chief of Rohingya district and deputy commander of all Armed Forces in Rakhine Division in 1961. That was at the time when the Burmese military embraced Rohingyas as an ethnic group in Burma (Myanmar) as full citizens. They were fighting the Rakhine secessionists at the time,” he says.

Can you tell us what is happening in Arakan and the Northern Rakhine state?

Using the pretext of fighting terrorism, Myanmar Tatmadaw (the armed forces) are engaged in the largest wave of systematic killings and destruction of a large segment of Rohingya population in an area that spans over 100 kilometres. They are using air force, navy and army units, as well as police and urban riot control special units in these attacks which have resulted in 370,000 Rohingya fleeing their villages.

Meanwhile, the Aung San Suu Kyi-led civilian government in partnership with the Armed Forces are selling this large scale scorched earth operation as national defence in the face of Rohingya “terrorist” attack which killed 12 police officers and soldiers. This official narrative is patently false: Myanmar is not fighting terrorism, it is speeding up what its Commander in Chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing reportedly told the rank and file members of the Tatmadaw as pursuing “the unfinished business” of the World War II (1942) during which local Rakhines and Rohingya Muslims fought one another.

Rohingya villages and towns can be described accurately as “vast open prisons” and the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army’s attacks against Burmese border guard posts in Oct 2016 and Aug 2017, resemble the Nazi victims’ uprising at Auschwitz in Oct 1944, more than a properly organised and properly armed “insurgency”. In October 1944, the Jewish inmates killed 4 SS officers in one barrack at the concentration camp called Birkenau and the SS responded by killing about 500 Jewish and Polish prisoners and blowing up the entire barrack. Similar waves of large scale terror campaign by the Burmese military were launched in February – June 1978 and 1991-92, expelling upwards of 260,000 in each wave.

Why is the Rohingya community being targeted by the Myanmar government?

The Burmese military took an anti-Muslim turn when Ne Win came to power in a coup in 1962. The generals have purged the entire armed forces of all Muslim officers in the last 50 years, painted the Rohingyas as having cross-border cultural, linguistic and historical ties to the populous Muslim nation of the then East Pakistan, and framed this as a threat to national security, as early as the mid-1960s. There are other bi-national communities along the Sino-Burmese, Indo-Burmese, Thai-Burmese borders such as Kachin, Chin, Shan, Karen, Kokant, Mon etc, as well as Buddhist Rakhine (with ties to Chittagong). But none of these communities are Muslims, only the Rohingyas are. So despite the Rohingyas’ historical presence in Rakhine or Arakan dating back to pre-British colonial days, the military hatched an institutionalised policy of cleansing Western Burma (Myanmar) of Rohingyas, the largest Muslim pocket in the country, numbering over 1 million. Myanmar is engaged in the destruction of the Rohingya using national laws tailored to exclude, disenfranchise and strip them of any basic rights, using the armed forces and police, educational and cultural institutions to demonise and de-humanise them, and physically debilitate them through denial of proper food, access to food systems (such as farms, rivers, creeks), control of their birth rate through marriage restrictions, denial of access to preventive and emergency medicine as well as restriction of freedom of movement. There are other Muslims throughout Burma (Myanmar) but only the Rohingyas have their own geographic pocket – North Arakan – which was officially recognised in the 1950s and early 1960s as the predominantly official Rohingya district.

Would you call the persecution being carried out by Myanmar Army on Rohingyas genocide?

Yes, absolutely. As Professor Amartya Sen put it – this is “institutionalised killing” by the state of Myanmar. He based that on the three-year research work done by me and my researcher colleague in London “The Slow Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingya”. Myanmar can be proven to be engaged in the fully fledged crime of genocide, in terms of both the Genocide Convention of 1948 and as defined more broadly sociologically by the original framer of genocide the late Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin. Out of the five acts of genocide in the legal Geneva Convention, Myanmar is guilty of four, except for the last crime which is transferring victim children to a different group to change the character of the population singled out for extermination. Myanmar does not even bother transferring children alive for adoption: the troops and the Rakhine burn and kill infants and children, according to eyewitness survivors.

Could you please speak about the communal divide in Myanmar?

Burma (Myanmar) is a multi-ethnic country of about one or two dozen distinct ethnic communities. The official list of 135 national races, from which Rohingyas are excluded, is really a fiction. But in this multi-ethnic web of people with different faiths, there have been many divisions, prejudices and ethno-racism. The military employs the international, colonial ‘divide and rule’ principle that the British used. So in Arakan or Rakhine state, Rohingya Muslims and Rakhine Buddhists have been divided and there has been mutual distrust and hostilities since WWII. But that is not unique to Rakhine. Many other divisions and past armed conflicts between the majority Buddhist Bama and Karens with 20% Christian population, or Bama and predominantly Buddhist Shan, or Bama and predominantly Christian Kachins and Chins are to be found. Virtually every non-Bama minority group attempted to seek independence from the Bama-controlled Union of Burma since independence – at various points in history. Rohingyas and the Rakhine had their own armed secessionist movements as well.

But other communal tensions and past histories of bloodbath are no longer stoked by the Burmese military. But it has systematically made sure that Rakhine and Rohingya do not seek or achieve communal reconciliation like the rest. One major reason is Rakhine nationalists still maintain the dream of restoring their sovereignty which they lost to the colonising Bama from the central Burma in 1785. The military has pitted the Rohingya and Rakhine Buddhists, who have long shared Arakan as their common birthplace, in order to maintain its colonial domination over Rakhine and focus on extracting valuable resources and control the strategic coast line.

Yes, there are communal aspects to Rakhine and Rohingya conflict. But it is the Burmese central Armed Forces which is the primary player keeping this conflict alive and calibrating it to its strategic goals of the control of Rakhine state economically, strategically, politically and militarily.

Does the minority and majority issue play a role in this situation?

For the non-Rohingya minorities, they have been brainwashed through a systematic campaign of misinformation about the Rohingya to think of the latter as “illegal Bengali migrants”, although many Rohingyas have been in western Burma decades before the British colonial rule, which began in 1824 – and others have put their root down in Rakhine after the British arrived and started the industrial rice economy in the fertile soil of western Burma. These minorities and the Bama majority are brainwashed to think that only they are the true indigenous peoples of Burma, despite the fact that they too migrated to Burma during pre-colonial times in various waves of migration from Southern China, Tibet, Indian subcontinent, etc. So this thinking that “we are hosts and indigenous and Rohingyas, Muslims, Christians etc are guests who live in our country at our pleasure” fuels deep racism towards Rohingyas and to a lesser extent, Chinese and Christians. But China is too powerful for the military to try to stoke anti-Chinese racism. So, the military diverts public discontent and frustration over hardships of life under failed military leaders towards the Rohingya – making them a scapegoat.

How is geopolitics playing a role in this?

The Rakhine state, especially North Rakhine of predominantly Rohingya population, is rich in natural resources – off-shore natural gas, fertile agricultural land, untapped titanium, rare earth materials, aluminum, natural deep sea harbours for deep sea port, and land for tax-free Special Economic Zone. The coast line is strategic for China, which wants to have an alternative to the narrow Straits of Mallaca near Singapore, for fear of future conflicts with US and US allies. Rakhine is that alternative. Because it is important to China, it becomes important to players with anti-Chinese strategic visions namely, US, India, Japan, South Korea – all allies and friends.

Just last week Myanmar announced that today’s killing fields of North Rakhine will be turned into a vast Special Economic Zone near the Bangladeshi borders.

How would you explain the situation in light of the emergent democracy in Myanmar and Aung San Suu Kyi’s stance on the military crackdown?

Aung San Suu Kyi is a well-documented and widely reported anti-Muslim racist and a Buddhist nationalist. She is utterly misinformed about the Rohingya situation – their identity, history, politics in Burma (Myanmar) – by her ex-military senior colleagues and Rakhine supporters. The army has cleansed its ranks of any Muslims, and she has cleansed the NLD party of all Muslims.

Both the generals and Aung San Suu Kyi sing from the same Buddhist nationalist hymn book and their vision of Burma (Myanmar) does not have much space for Muslims – and no space for Rohingyas. Her stance is nothing less than 100% genocidal if you take Lemkin’s original conception of a genocide as “destruction of the group starting with the erasure or denial of the group’s identity”. The generals view Western Burma (Myanmar) as originally Muslim-free region and part of kingdom of Burma – despite all evidence to the contrary that Rakhine was a rich, cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic and multi-faith kingdom. So out of this historical misconception and revisionist history, the generals want to make Rakhine a Muslim-free region.

What does Myanmar stand to gain from all this – in terms of economy and politics – in the future?

The army is regaining popularity even among Buddhist monks who were historical threats to the army’s rule as evident in the Saffron Revolt of 2007. The army is making the traditionally hostile Rakhine nationalists who are anti-Burmese and pro-independence dependent on the army for their safety now. And it has derailed Suu Kyi’s majoritarian democratic transition. Economically, the army has the lion’s share of all commercial and development projects in Rakhine.

But the major losers are the peoples of Burma (Myanmar) at large. The society is now moving into the terrorism-obsessed mental space. The public will continue to be reliant on the army and the army’s whims because it is afraid of “jihad”. The military and Suu Kyi are unable to find a Big Tent vision for every ethnic group in Burma (Myanmar). They will continue to work together in the wrong policy framework of preempting “terrorism” from Muslims at large inside Burma (Myanmar) and the Rohingyas. That will become self-fulfilling as their anti-Muslim racist policies and the genocidal violence against Rohingyas has stoked deep rage within 1.7 billion Muslims around the world.

Ultimately, Burma (Myanmar) is going to become a site of major conflicts and terrorism.

The follow interview was originally conducted and published in Burmese language by the Thazin Pan Khaine News Journal. Later, it was published by the media for reasons best known to them. Original link to the interview here:

By Aung Myint Thu (Man Aung)

Tazin Pann Khine, August 29, 2017

Q- Andrew Kyleriley,  we saw that you guys were fleeing from Maungdaw. Can you let us know about the situation? 

Andrew - No! We were not fleeing. The government told us there we could not live, if not we wish to stay there. As people think, there is no terrorism. I think it has happened because of no human rights in there. 

Q- So, is not ARSA a terrorist?

A- ARSA says they have responsibility. They have already stated in social media. They have already told they attacked the police check posts. But they do not attack the civilians. 

Q- In last month, Myo ethnic people were killed. That day, Hindus were killed. Do you know that? 

A- I do not know. It could but very few be included during the attacks. 

Q- There are video files that ARSA collects the children and train them like to terrorize. Do you know that? 

A- I have not found that. I want to ask you is 'Why are you asking about the killing of those few people only'. There are many people have been killed from them. But you do not ask more about them. 

Q- That day, police check posts were attacked in the same. How do you think about that? 

A- Just around (30) police check posts. But there are many check posts. Now, around (30). ARSA takes the responsibility of attacking the check posts. They have no plan to attack the civilians. I totally disagree for any terrorism. But they are not terrorist group. 

Q- UN has been working for these issues by pitching up. Why does that group that says they are Rohingya become so popular in the world? Are they the most miserable human beings? 

A- Who suffers in Myanmar like them? I want to ask that question. Come to see. How they are friendly! They never make violences. Let's say about the boy who comes my office! He says there is no right of movement for him like Rakhine People. Moreover, no right for education. He says he does not know what he can. 

Q- Why are the indigenous people in Myanmar afraid of that terrorists? Do you think it is because of religion? 

A- Some could be of religion. However, they are not able to attend a good school like you. No good hospitals. No education. They are very miserable people. 

Q- Andrew, do you know that there are issues of many children giving birth? All say that a family has many children. 

A- That is their choice how many children they wish to give birth. That's human rights. They give birth as many as they wise. Is not that? 

Q- How do you think of new people coming from Bangladesh? 

A- Why do the people come from Bangladesh? How do they come to there where there are killing? No one comes from Bangladesh. 

Q- Andrew, it is heard that your America reduces the supports to UN. During this current American government. So, do you think Islamic countries support more to UN in that situation? 

A- American is continuously supporting. I did not hear that news. 

Tazin Pann Khine- Such thoughts are quite different with what Myanmar people think. So, we'll post it for Myanmar people how the ones like Andrew who work for INGO think about that. 

Andrew- Thank you. I have a thing to add. I totally disagree for any terrorism. But what is happening now in Rakhine is not like the terrorist group what the government say. 

# It is the interview with Andrew at Myay Ni Gone (Yangon) on 28 of August. The reason to start the interview is from seeing the banner of "No Human Rights for Terrorists", a collection for Rakhine Indigenous Victims . Andrew saw the texts in the banner and took pictures. And he told Tazin Pann Khine Journey that he does not agree with that and there are no terrorists in Rakhine. It is the facts of one-hour-long interview with him.

Translated by RB Team.

By PBS News Hour
July 28, 2017

JUDY WOODRUFF: But, first, we turn to Bangladesh and the plight of the Rohingya.

They are an ethnic minority group seeking refuge there, many having been forced from their homes in neighboring Myanmar.

But as special correspondent Tania Rashid found, they are hardly more welcome in Bangladesh. By the tens of thousands, they are stuck in a deadly limbo.

And a warning: Parts of this story may disturb some viewers.

TANIA RASHID: The island is isolated, covered in bushes, and underwater half of the year. It’s called Thenga Chor, and it lies on the coast of Bangladesh.

It’s a hard and long day’s boat ride from the nearest port. This rough spot might be the new home for the Rohingya, a group of more than 300,000 people the U.N. calls the most persecuted minority in the world.

But on a camp on the mainland, Hafez, a Rohingya activist, says that is no place they want to go.

HAFEZ, Rohingya Activist (through interpreter): If we go to Thenga Chor, we will get sick. We can die. We are used to being here, and we feel safe here.

TANIA RASHID: It’s only a relative safety. Close to half-a-million have fled murder and persecution by the army of Myanmar to seek refuge in camps in Southern Bangladesh.

The Muslim Rohingya have lived in mainly Buddhist Myanmar for centuries, but are viewed as illegal ethnic Bangladeshis by the Myanmar government.

The de facto leader of Myanmar, Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, has denied a U.N. charge of ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya’.

But in the last eight months, the numbers of Rohingya fleeing for their lives have surged to more than 70,000. But now their lives are more precarious than ever before.

Monsoon season and a punishing cyclone damaged many Rohingya settlements. So, the Bangladeshi government plans to resolve the Rohingya’s continued displacement by moving 60,000 of the refugees to this remote island.

Aid agencies like the UNHCR and Human Rights Watch have expressed alarm over the planned relocation.

Our journey to the island was difficult. We began a week before the cyclone. We traveled first by ferry, then by a private boat, where a local fishermen agreed to take us to the island.

It was a dangerous journey. Pirates are known to control these seas and take hostages for ransom. But the island is not easy to access. The tides are too high on the bigger ship, so we had to get a smaller boat to take us to the island.

We just made it on the island. We managed to find a muddy bog to land near, and get us across to the island. The government has already moved forward with the plan of making the island more habitable by planting trees. But this local official doesn’t want the Rohingyas moving into his district.

He thinks it will create more problems for his community.

MINAZUR RAHMAN, Local Government Official (through interpreter): In the past, the Rohingya were related to the drug problem. They are linked to drugs, linked to smuggling. Most of the people here, their main livelihood is fishing. The bad character and influence of the Rohingya people will impact the locals here.

TANIA RASHID: But the Bangladeshi government believe the Rohingyas cross the border at will, with the help of smugglers and corrupt border guards.

The government argues the relocation will guarantee their isolation from the rest of the population. But the island is formed by river sediment, making it unstable, and it could be eroded in five years’ time.

Dr. Ainun Nishat is a leading expert on climate change in Bangladesh.

DR. AINUN NISHAT: The main history of the coastal belt of Bangladesh is highly vulnerable to storm surges and cyclonic weather.

Due to impact of climate change, we believe that the frequency of climate change may not be increasing, but intensity of the storm surges are definitely going to increase. So, they should be accommodated in good concrete structure, where at the time of emergency people should we — can be moved to a height of 20 feet and above.

TANIA RASHID: Today, about one million Rohingyas live in apartheid-like conditions in internment camps in Rakhine State of Myanmar, separated from the Buddhist majority. They have no citizenship, and need permission to marry or to travel outside of their own villages.

On October 9 of last year, Rohingya militants killed nine Myanmar police officers. The Myanmar military then led a wide and brutal counterinsurgency campaign in retaliation, where they killed more than 1,000 Rohingyas, torched homes and mosques.

The Myanmar government calls these accusations exaggerations and denies charges of ethnic cleansing.

Dil Nawaz is one of 70,000 Rohingya’s who fled to Bangladesh. She was gang-raped by soldiers, and witnessed her husband’s murder in front of her eyes.

I’m looking at a photo of her husband who was hacked to death about five months ago, and this is a photograph she took shortly after she was murdered.

DIL NAWAZ, Rohingya Refugee (through interpreter): They used a machete on my husband in front of me on the road. I saw it with my own eyes. They chopped him into pieces in front of me in a rice field. Then, the army came and took all the women out to the rice fields and took several women.

Five men took turns raping them. They took people’s gold jewelry, rings and earrings. They killed some children. Then they burned all the houses down, followed by the mosque. Then the military went back to a Buddhist area. This is why we fled to Bangladesh.

TANIA RASHID: Activist Hafez says they have found refuge here.

HAFEZ (through interpreter): Bangladesh is small, and overpopulated, but they gave us a place to stand. This is a big thing.

TANIA RASHID: But like many other Rohingya, he wants a sense of permanence.

HAFEZ (through interpreter): Instead of sending us to Thenga Chor, if the Myanmar government could, we request that they grant us citizenship.

TANIA RASHID: Forty-five-year old Dilbar hopes for a last-ditch political solution.

DILBAR, Rohingya Refugee (through interpreter): If the Bangladesh government and the Myanmar government negotiate a deal and send us back, then we will be happy. If this doesn’t happen, then please bomb us. We came here, left our homes, rice. We came here to save our lives. If we have no peace, then it’s better to die.

Our children died there. We sacrificed everything and came here for peace. If you take us to the island, it will be like killing us, slaughtering us. We are like ants. We are nothing. It won’t take much to kill us. Just bomb us. Nobody will make a case against you, because we have no ground under our feet.

TANIA RASHID: Their hope, to find that safe ground one day. But, for now, they remain in limbo, not of this land and not pushed from it.

For the PBS NewsHour, I’m Tania Rashid on Thenga Chor Island, Bangladesh.

By Al Jazeera UpFront

June 9, 2017

Aung San Suu Kyi: Turning her back on Rohingya? 

Since October 2016, nearly 75,000 of Myanmar's Rohingya have fled across the border to Bangladesh, as a United Nations international probe investigates accusations of rape and murder committed by Myanmar security forces. 

According to the UN, Rohingya families "may have had members killed, beaten, raped", in what likely amounts to crimes against humanity. 

With anti-Rohingya violence continuing to simmer in Myanmar, why doesn't the country's de facto leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, put an end to it? 

"We know that Aung San Suu Kyi does not control the armed forces," says Maung Zarni, an exiled dissident from Myanmar. "[But] she controls four other ministries that are directly involved in dismissing, denying, and legitimising the persecution of the Rohingyas." 

But former East Timorese President Jose Ramos-Horta disagrees, claiming Suu Kyi inherited an "extraordinarily difficult situation". 

"She has to deal with the military, who still have enormous power," says Ramos-Horta, a Nobel prizewinner. "She inherits a very fractured society with more than 18 armed insurgencies, ethnic groups, and this is a very difficult transition from military dictatorship to democracy." 

In this week's Arena, scholar and activist Maung Zarni debates with Nobel laureate Jose Ramos-Horta on whether Suu Kyi has the power to help the Rohingya.

A Rohingya refugee girl wipes her eyes as she cries in a Bangladesh refugee camp (Photo: Reuters)

Stories of horror from Myanmar's Rakhine State

The UN's Special Rapporteur to Myanmar tells CNN's Kristie Lu Stout about horrific claims of indiscriminate killings and gang rapes against the Rohingya minority

Watch the interview with Al Jazeera here.