By Jason Szep and Andrew R.C. Marshall
Reuters
November 12, 2012
On a hot Sunday night in a remote Myanmar village, Tun Naing punched his wife and unleashed hell.
She wanted rice for their three children. He said they couldn't afford it. Apartheid-like restrictions had prevented Muslims like Tun Naing from working for Buddhists here in Rakhine State along Myanmar's western border, costing the 38-year-old metalworker his job.
The couple screamed at each other. Tun Naing threw another punch. Neighbors joined in the row.
The commotion stirred up ethnic Rakhine Buddhists in the next village, who began shouting anti-Muslim slurs. Relations between the two communities were already so tense that six soldiers were stationed nearby. Tun Naing's village was soon besieged by hundreds of Rakhines. And Myanmar was plunged into a week of sectarian violence that by official count claimed 89 lives, its worst in decades.
The unrest exposes the dark side of Myanmar's historic opening: an unleashing of ethnic hatred that was suppressed during 49 years of military rule.
It is a crucial test for an 18-month-old reformist government in one of Asia's most ethnically diverse countries. Jailed dissidents have been released, a free election held and censorship lifted in a democratic transition so seamless that U.S. President Barack Obama is scheduled to make a congratulatory visit on November 19.
State media have largely absolved authorities of any role in the October unrest, depicting it mostly as spontaneous eruptions of violence that often ended with Muslims burning their own homes.
But a Reuters investigation paints a more troubling picture: The wave of attacks was organized, central-government military sources told Reuters. They were led by Rakhine nationalists tied to a powerful political party in the state, incited by Buddhist monks, and, some witnesses said, abetted at times by local security forces.
A leader in the regional party, the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party, denied it had a role in organizing the assaults but conceded the possible involvement of grass-roots supporters. "When the mob rises with very hot ethnic nationalism, it is very difficult to stop them," Oo Hla Saw told Reuters in an interview.
Two townships - Pauktaw and Kyaukphyu - saw the near-total expulsion of long-established Muslim populations, in what could amount to ethnic cleansing. One village saw a massacre of dozens of Muslims, among them 21 women.
Interviews with government officials, military and police, political leaders and dozens of Buddhists and Muslims across a vast conflict zone suggest Myanmar is entering a more violent phase of persecution of its 800,000 mostly stateless Rohingya, a Muslim minority in an overwhelmingly Buddhist country.
CALLED "BENGALIS"
Rohingya have lived for generations in Rakhine State, where postcard-perfect valleys sweep down to a mangrove-fringed coastline. But Rakhines and other Burmese view them as illegal immigrants from neighboring Bangladesh who deserve neither rights nor sympathy. Rakhines reject the term "Rohingya" as a modern invention, referring to them instead as "Bengali" or "kalar" - a pejorative Burmese word for Muslims or people of South Asian descent.
October's attacks marked an acceleration of violence against the Rohingya. An earlier wave of unrest in June killed at least 80 people. Afterwards, the Rakhine State government imposed a policy of segregating Muslim communities from Buddhists across an area roughly the size of Switzerland.
More than 97 percent of the 36,394 people who have fled the latest violence are Muslims, according to official statistics. Many now live in camps, joining 75,000 mostly Rohingya displaced in June. Others have set sail for Bangladesh, Thailand and Malaysia on rickety boats, two of which have reportedly capsized, with as many as 150 people believed drowned.
There is no evidence to suggest the Buddhist-dominated national government endorsed the violence. But it appears to have anticipated trouble, stationing troops between Muslim and Buddhist villages a month ago, following rumors of attacks.
"This is racism," said Shwe Hle Maung, 43, chief of Paik Thay, where impoverished Muslim families cram into thatched homes without electricity. "The government can resolve this if it wants to in five minutes. But they are doing nothing."
The Rakhine violence is also a test for Nobel Peace Prize-winner Aung San Suu Kyi, now opposition leader in parliament, whose studied neutrality has failed to defuse tensions and risks undermining her image as a unifying moral force. Suu Kyi, a devout Buddhist, says she refuses to take sides.
At stake is the stability of one of Myanmar's most commercially strategic regions and the gold-rush of foreign investment that has come with an easing of Western economic sanctions. The United States and the European Union have suspended, not lifted, sanctions, and have made resolving ethnic conflicts a precondition for further rewards.
In Rakhine State, however, the conflict has spread, most recently to areas where Muslims have long lived peacefully with Buddhists, according to a reconstruction of the violence from October 21 through October 25.
In Paik Thay, the Buddhist Rakhine mobs hurled Molotov cocktails at wooden huts, while Tun Naing and his neighbors fled. Muhammad Amin, 62, said he was beaten with a metal pipe until his skull cracked. The initial violence ended after soldiers fired their guns into the air and police arrested a Rakhine.
The bloodshed was only beginning.
"WE HAD NO PROBLEMS BEFORE"
The next morning, Monday, October 22, hundreds of Rakhine men gathered on the southern outskirts of Mrauk-U, an ancient capital studded with Buddhist temples about 15 miles north of Paik Thay. Then they marched to Tha Yet Oak, a Muslim fishing village of about 1,100 people, and set alight its flimsy bamboo homes.
The Muslim villagers fled by boat to nearby Pa Rein village. The Rakhine mob followed, swelling to nearly 1,000, according to Kyin Sein Aung, 66, a Rakhine farmer from a neighboring Buddhist village.
He didn't recognize the mob; he described them as "outsiders" and said he suspected they came from Mrauk-U. Hundreds now poured across a stream separating the villages. Others came by boat. By noon, there were about 4,000 Rakhines, according to both Buddhist and Muslim villagers.
Four soldiers shot in the air to disperse the crowd but were easily overwhelmed, witnesses said. The Muslims fought back with spears and machetes, torching a rice mill and several Rakhine homes. Rakhines fired homemade guns.
Six Muslims were killed, including two women, said M.V. Kareem, 63, a Muslim elder in Pa Rein - a toll confirmed by the military. He and other villagers said they saw familiar faces and uniformed police in the angry crowd.
"I don't know why it started," said Kareem, who has friends in the Buddhist village. Buddhist farmer Kyin Sein Aung was baffled, too. For years, he worked in rice fields shoulder-to-shoulder with his Muslim neighbors. "We had no problems before."
Communities like Pa Rein had avoided the June violence. But new strains emerged with the subsequent segregation of Muslim and Buddhist villages, a draconian order imposed by the Rakhine State government. Intended to prevent more violence, it backfired.
Impoverished Muslim villagers could no longer buy rice and other supplies in Buddhist towns. Transgressors were sometimes beaten with sticks or fists to warn others, according to people interviewed in six Muslim villages. Fishing nets were confiscated.
Desperation grew, with rice stocks dwindling as the monsoon peaked in October. Some Muslim villagers stole rice from Buddhist farmers, further stoking anger, said farmer Kyin Sein Aung.
By 4:30 p.m. that same Monday, several thousand Rakhines were massed outside Sam Ba Le, a village in neighboring Minbya township. By now, a pattern was emerging.
Rakhines flanked the village, hurling Molotov cocktails and firing homemade guns, said a village elder. Muslims fought back, sometimes with spears or machetes, but were overpowered. Government troops shot rounds into the air. By the time the crowd left Sam Ba Le at 6 p.m., one Muslim man had been killed and two-thirds of its 331 homes razed.
As night fell, the townships of Mrauk-U and Minbya imposed 7 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfews. But worse was to come.
"RAKHINES WILL DRINK KALAR BLOOD"
Tuesday began with a massacre. Reuters reporters visited dozens of villages in Rakhine State. But there was only one where their entry was barred by soldiers and police: the remote, riverside community of Yin Thei, in the shadow of the Chin mountains.
What happened there suggested a bolder and better organized mob, aided by incompetent or complicit police.
By 7 a.m. on Tuesday, hundreds of Rakhine arrived on boats to surround Yin Thei, said a resident contacted by telephone. By late afternoon, the Muslim villagers were fending off waves of attacks. The resident said children, including two of his young cousins, were killed by sword-wielding Rakhines. Most houses were burned down.
Musi Dula, a Muslim farmer from a nearby village, said he heard gunfire at about 5 p.m. A Yin Thei villager telephoned Musi Dula's neighbours and said police were shooting at them. Another farmer nervously told Reuters how he watched from afar as police opened fire from the village's western edge, also at about 5 p.m.
The official death toll is five Rakhines and 51 Muslims killed at Yin Thei, including 21 Muslim women, said a senior police officer in Naypyitaw, the new capital of Myanmar. He denied security forces opened fire or abetted the mobs. The Yin Thei resident put the toll higher, saying 62 people were buried in small graves of about 10 bodies each.
As Yin Thei burned, the last of nearly 4,000 Rohingya Muslims were fleeing the large port town of Pauktaw, in a dramatic exodus by sea that had begun five days earlier.
Tensions had simmered since October 12, when four Rohingya fishermen were killed off Pauktaw, said a military source. Afterwards, local authorities had ordered Rohingya to stay in their own villages for their safety. Men couldn't work in town, and few dared to go fishing.
"The government gave us food but it wasn't enough," said Num Marot, 48. "We didn't dare stay."
Pauktaw's Rohingya began cramming into boats for the two-hour voyage to the state capital, Sittwe. Num Marot's new home would be a tarpaulin tent in a squalid camp already packed with tens of thousands of people displaced by the June violence.
About 30 minutes after the last boat pushed out to sea, the two Rohingya neighborhoods in Pauktaw were set ablaze, witnesses said. All 335 homes were destroyed. The charred and roofless frame of a once-busy mosque is marked with graffiti: "Rakhines will drink kalar blood," it reads, using the slur for Muslims.
Kay Aye, deputy chairman of Pauktaw township, insists Rohingya set alight their own homes and blames the communal problems on the Muslim population's doubling in 10 years. "Muslims want all people to become Muslims. That's the Muslim problem," he said. "Most of the Muslims here are uneducated, so they tend to be ruder than Rakhines."
Tuesday night fell. Soon a new inferno began in Kyaukphyu, a sleepy port town 65 miles southeast of Sittwe with strategic significance: gas and oil pipelines lead from this township across Myanmar to China's energy-hungry northwest.
So far, the violence had targeted Rohingya Muslims. About a fifth of Kyaukphyu town's 24,000 people are Muslims, and many of them are Kaman. The Kaman are recognized as one of Myanmar's 135 official ethnic groups; they usually hold citizenship and can be hard to tell apart from Rakhine Buddhists.
Most Kyaukphyu Muslims lived in East Pikesake, a neighborhood wedged between Rakhine communities and the jade-green waters of the Bay of Bengal.
Relations between the two communities had began to unravel after the June violence. The destruction of Buddhist temples by mobs in Muslim Bangladesh in early October further stoked the animosity.
The first fire began in East Pikesake on Tuesday evening, and soon dozens of houses, Rakhine and Muslim, were ablaze. The streets around the Old Village Jamae Mosque, one of East Pikesake's two mosques, became the front line in pitched battles between the two communities.
Rakhines fought with swords, iron rods and traditional Rakhine spears. The Muslims had jinglees - long darts made from sharpened bicycle spokes or fish hooks, which are fitted with plastic streamers and shot from catapults.
With the sea behind them, Pikesake's Muslims were cut off from escape by Rakhine crowds so large that the security forces, which numbered about 80 police and 100 soldiers, were overwhelmed, said Police Lieutenant Myint Khin, Kyaukphyu's station commander. "We couldn't control them," he said.
Police fired tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse Muslim and Rakhine mobs, said Police Lieutenant Myint Khin. The military fired live rounds, said a source in the security forces, but evidently not into the crowd. Staff at Kyaukphyu hospital told Reuters they treated injuries from blades, jinglees and fire, but none from bullets.
"TAUGHT THEM A LESSON"
The next morning, the rest of East Pikesake went up in flames. Myint Hlaing, a local official, said the heat was "more intense than a crematorium." It singed the fronds of five-story-high palm trees.
Rakhine men had begun pouring in from surrounding villages. Unpublished video shot by an amateur cameraman shows young men in red bandanas entering the town in convoys of tractors. They helped to terrorize Muslims living elsewhere in Kyaukphyu, according to Muslim and Rakhine witnesses. Police Lieutenant Myint Khin said the security forces were too overstretched to stop them.
Men with swords pulled Susu, 39, and her husband Than Twa, 48, from a house in west Kyaukphyu. "They cut him here and here and here," said Susu, chopping at her arms and legs. She recognised many of her attackers: They were neighbours, she said. Susu ran off to find some soldiers, who escorted her back to rescue her husband. He was dead.
Only two forces could give the mob pause. The first was the national military, which scattered crowds by shooting in the air. The second was Rakhine Buddhist officials such as Myint Hlaing.
Some officials joined the mob, said local Muslims, but others confronted it. Facing cries of "Kill the kalar protector!" Myint Hlaing, 68, pleaded with angry Rakhines outside Kaman Muslim homes in his neighbourhood. "If we hadn't protected the Kamans, their houses would be destroyed and the people dead," he said.
By mid-morning, the military began evacuating Muslims by bus to a guarded refugee camp outside town.
Back in Pikesake, which was still burning, the Muslims had only one exit: the sea. A flotilla of fishing boats was preparing to leave its blazing shores.
"People swam out to the boats but were chased down and stabbed before they got there," said Abdulloh, 35, a Rohingya fisherman. Xanabibi, 46, a Kaman woman, said she watched from a boat as three Rakhine men with swords set upon a Muslim teenager. "I watched them ... cut up his body into four pieces," she said.
Rakhine Buddhists claim they witnessed atrocities, too. Myint Hlaing said he saw a Muslim on one departing boat hold aloft a severed Rakhine head.
By mid-afternoon, at least 80 boats, many overloaded with 130 or more people, had set sail for Sittwe, said witnesses. An additional 1,700 or more Muslims ended up at a squalid, military-guarded camp outside Kyaukphyu.
The official statistics tell of a lopsided battle at Kyaukphyu. Of the 11 dead, nine were Muslims. Nearly all of the 891 houses destroyed belonged to Muslims; nearly all of the 5,301 people displaced were Muslims. Four of Kyaukphyu's five mosques were destroyed.
A prominent Rakhine businessman, who requested anonymity, showed little sympathy for his former neighbours. "The majority taught them a lesson," he said.
"HOT ETHNIC NATIONALISM"
The last spasm of violence took place at Kyauktaw, a town north of the state capital, Sittwe. At that point, the military shot into the crowd - and, for the first time, killed the Buddhists it had long been accused of siding with.
Soldiers opened fire to prevent Rakhine villagers on two boats from storming a Rohingya Muslim community, said Aung Kyaw Min, a 28-year-old Rakhine from Taung Bwe with a bullet in his leg. "I don't know why the military shot at us," he said. Two people died and 10 were wounded, villagers said.
In a separate incident the same day, security forces shot at Rakhines on Kyauktaw's outskirts, killing two and wounding four, a witness told Reuters.
The shootings seemed to send a message to the mobs. The violence stopped that day.
The senior police officer in Naypyitaw acknowledged that police were forced to fire at both Muslims and Rakhines in their attempts to subdue large crowds.
The official death toll from the October violence now stood at 89. The real toll could be higher. The extent of the killing at Yin Thei village remains unclear. Reports persist that scores of Muslims fleeing Pauktaw drowned after Rakhines rammed their boat. Nearly 4,700 homes were destroyed in 42 villages.
In a statement that Thursday, President Thein Sein warned that the "persons and organizations" behind the Rakhine State violence would be exposed and prosecuted. The mobs were well-organized and led by core instigators, some of whom moved village to village, military sources told Reuters.
In Kyaukphyu, however, police have so far arrested only seven people - six of them for looting. In Mrauk-U township, where most killings occurred, only 14 people have been arrested, said the military intelligence officer. The apparent impunity of the instigators is sending a chilling message to Muslim communities across Myanmar.
The intelligence officer, who has direct knowledge of the state's security operations, identified the suspected ringleaders as Rakhine extremists with ties to the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party, or RNDP, which was set up to contest Myanmar's 2010 general election. He didn't name any suspects. Buddhist monks stoked the unrest with anti-Muslim rhetoric, he added.
RNDP Secretary-General Oo Hla Saw denied that his party organized any mobs. But he acknowledged the possible involvement of supporters, low-level officials and "moderate monks who become radical when they think about Muslims."
Oo Hla Saw blamed local authorities for failing to heed rumors of impending violence, and Islamist radicals for inflaming tensions. For many Rakhines, he adds, the term Rohingya has jihadist overtones associated with the "Mujahid," autonomy-seeking rebels in northern Rakhine State from 1949 to 1961, who called themselves ethnic Rohingya. (Independent historians say the rebels did popularize the term "Rohingya," but cite a few references to it since the 18th century.)
Even today, Oo Hla Saw said, the Rohingya want "to set up an autonomous Islamic community. They are systematically scheming to do that."
Most Rohingya struggle simply to get by. A 2010 survey by the French group Action Against Hunger found a malnutrition rate of 20 percent, far above the emergency threshold set by the World Health Organization.
Many arrived as laborers from Bangladesh under British rule in the 19th century - grounds the government now uses to deny them citizenship. Rohingya were effectively rendered stateless under the 1982 Citizenship Law, which excluded them from the list of indigenous ethnic groups. Officials refer to them as Bengalis. Most Rohingya found it hard to apply for naturalized citizenship, since they couldn't speak Burmese or prove long-term residence.
Monks, symbols of democracy during 2007 protests against military rule, have helped fuel the outrage against Muslims. A week before the violence erupted, monks led nationwide protests against plans by the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the world's biggest Islamic body, to set up a liaison office in Rakhine State.
An anti-OIC rally in Sittwe on October 15 "angered Muslims here," conceded Nyar Nar, 32, one of the Rakhine monks who led it. He regards Muslims as foreign invaders. "As monks, we have morality and ethics," he said. "But if outsiders come to occupy our land, then we will take up swords to protect it."
In some parts of the state, the mood is celebratory. "This is the best time because there are no Muslims here," said Zaw Min Oo, a Rakhine shoe seller in Pauktaw township. Nearly 95 percent of a 20,000-strong Muslim community there is now gone.
The peace might be short-lived. The state's clumsy attempts at segregation helped create the conditions for the October violence. Further segregation - including the confining of tens of thousands of Muslims in seething camps - could spark more violence. Curfews remain in force across much of Rakhine State.
In Kyaukphyu town, starving dogs sniff through the ashes while municipal workers heave scrap metal into a truck. The only Muslim left in town is Ngwe Shin, an old woman suffering from mental illness. She can often be found near the market, shuffling past vandalized or shuttered homes.
(Additional reporting by Martin Petty and Reuters staff; Editing by Bill Tarrant and Michael Williams)
The couple screamed at each other. Tun Naing threw another punch. Neighbors joined in the row.
The commotion stirred up ethnic Rakhine Buddhists in the next village, who began shouting anti-Muslim slurs. Relations between the two communities were already so tense that six soldiers were stationed nearby. Tun Naing's village was soon besieged by hundreds of Rakhines. And Myanmar was plunged into a week of sectarian violence that by official count claimed 89 lives, its worst in decades.
The unrest exposes the dark side of Myanmar's historic opening: an unleashing of ethnic hatred that was suppressed during 49 years of military rule.
It is a crucial test for an 18-month-old reformist government in one of Asia's most ethnically diverse countries. Jailed dissidents have been released, a free election held and censorship lifted in a democratic transition so seamless that U.S. President Barack Obama is scheduled to make a congratulatory visit on November 19.
State media have largely absolved authorities of any role in the October unrest, depicting it mostly as spontaneous eruptions of violence that often ended with Muslims burning their own homes.
But a Reuters investigation paints a more troubling picture: The wave of attacks was organized, central-government military sources told Reuters. They were led by Rakhine nationalists tied to a powerful political party in the state, incited by Buddhist monks, and, some witnesses said, abetted at times by local security forces.
A leader in the regional party, the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party, denied it had a role in organizing the assaults but conceded the possible involvement of grass-roots supporters. "When the mob rises with very hot ethnic nationalism, it is very difficult to stop them," Oo Hla Saw told Reuters in an interview.
Two townships - Pauktaw and Kyaukphyu - saw the near-total expulsion of long-established Muslim populations, in what could amount to ethnic cleansing. One village saw a massacre of dozens of Muslims, among them 21 women.
Interviews with government officials, military and police, political leaders and dozens of Buddhists and Muslims across a vast conflict zone suggest Myanmar is entering a more violent phase of persecution of its 800,000 mostly stateless Rohingya, a Muslim minority in an overwhelmingly Buddhist country.
CALLED "BENGALIS"
Rohingya have lived for generations in Rakhine State, where postcard-perfect valleys sweep down to a mangrove-fringed coastline. But Rakhines and other Burmese view them as illegal immigrants from neighboring Bangladesh who deserve neither rights nor sympathy. Rakhines reject the term "Rohingya" as a modern invention, referring to them instead as "Bengali" or "kalar" - a pejorative Burmese word for Muslims or people of South Asian descent.
October's attacks marked an acceleration of violence against the Rohingya. An earlier wave of unrest in June killed at least 80 people. Afterwards, the Rakhine State government imposed a policy of segregating Muslim communities from Buddhists across an area roughly the size of Switzerland.
More than 97 percent of the 36,394 people who have fled the latest violence are Muslims, according to official statistics. Many now live in camps, joining 75,000 mostly Rohingya displaced in June. Others have set sail for Bangladesh, Thailand and Malaysia on rickety boats, two of which have reportedly capsized, with as many as 150 people believed drowned.
There is no evidence to suggest the Buddhist-dominated national government endorsed the violence. But it appears to have anticipated trouble, stationing troops between Muslim and Buddhist villages a month ago, following rumors of attacks.
"This is racism," said Shwe Hle Maung, 43, chief of Paik Thay, where impoverished Muslim families cram into thatched homes without electricity. "The government can resolve this if it wants to in five minutes. But they are doing nothing."
The Rakhine violence is also a test for Nobel Peace Prize-winner Aung San Suu Kyi, now opposition leader in parliament, whose studied neutrality has failed to defuse tensions and risks undermining her image as a unifying moral force. Suu Kyi, a devout Buddhist, says she refuses to take sides.
At stake is the stability of one of Myanmar's most commercially strategic regions and the gold-rush of foreign investment that has come with an easing of Western economic sanctions. The United States and the European Union have suspended, not lifted, sanctions, and have made resolving ethnic conflicts a precondition for further rewards.
In Rakhine State, however, the conflict has spread, most recently to areas where Muslims have long lived peacefully with Buddhists, according to a reconstruction of the violence from October 21 through October 25.
In Paik Thay, the Buddhist Rakhine mobs hurled Molotov cocktails at wooden huts, while Tun Naing and his neighbors fled. Muhammad Amin, 62, said he was beaten with a metal pipe until his skull cracked. The initial violence ended after soldiers fired their guns into the air and police arrested a Rakhine.
The bloodshed was only beginning.
"WE HAD NO PROBLEMS BEFORE"
The next morning, Monday, October 22, hundreds of Rakhine men gathered on the southern outskirts of Mrauk-U, an ancient capital studded with Buddhist temples about 15 miles north of Paik Thay. Then they marched to Tha Yet Oak, a Muslim fishing village of about 1,100 people, and set alight its flimsy bamboo homes.
The Muslim villagers fled by boat to nearby Pa Rein village. The Rakhine mob followed, swelling to nearly 1,000, according to Kyin Sein Aung, 66, a Rakhine farmer from a neighboring Buddhist village.
He didn't recognize the mob; he described them as "outsiders" and said he suspected they came from Mrauk-U. Hundreds now poured across a stream separating the villages. Others came by boat. By noon, there were about 4,000 Rakhines, according to both Buddhist and Muslim villagers.
Four soldiers shot in the air to disperse the crowd but were easily overwhelmed, witnesses said. The Muslims fought back with spears and machetes, torching a rice mill and several Rakhine homes. Rakhines fired homemade guns.
Six Muslims were killed, including two women, said M.V. Kareem, 63, a Muslim elder in Pa Rein - a toll confirmed by the military. He and other villagers said they saw familiar faces and uniformed police in the angry crowd.
"I don't know why it started," said Kareem, who has friends in the Buddhist village. Buddhist farmer Kyin Sein Aung was baffled, too. For years, he worked in rice fields shoulder-to-shoulder with his Muslim neighbors. "We had no problems before."
Communities like Pa Rein had avoided the June violence. But new strains emerged with the subsequent segregation of Muslim and Buddhist villages, a draconian order imposed by the Rakhine State government. Intended to prevent more violence, it backfired.
Impoverished Muslim villagers could no longer buy rice and other supplies in Buddhist towns. Transgressors were sometimes beaten with sticks or fists to warn others, according to people interviewed in six Muslim villages. Fishing nets were confiscated.
Desperation grew, with rice stocks dwindling as the monsoon peaked in October. Some Muslim villagers stole rice from Buddhist farmers, further stoking anger, said farmer Kyin Sein Aung.
By 4:30 p.m. that same Monday, several thousand Rakhines were massed outside Sam Ba Le, a village in neighboring Minbya township. By now, a pattern was emerging.
Rakhines flanked the village, hurling Molotov cocktails and firing homemade guns, said a village elder. Muslims fought back, sometimes with spears or machetes, but were overpowered. Government troops shot rounds into the air. By the time the crowd left Sam Ba Le at 6 p.m., one Muslim man had been killed and two-thirds of its 331 homes razed.
As night fell, the townships of Mrauk-U and Minbya imposed 7 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfews. But worse was to come.
"RAKHINES WILL DRINK KALAR BLOOD"
Tuesday began with a massacre. Reuters reporters visited dozens of villages in Rakhine State. But there was only one where their entry was barred by soldiers and police: the remote, riverside community of Yin Thei, in the shadow of the Chin mountains.
What happened there suggested a bolder and better organized mob, aided by incompetent or complicit police.
By 7 a.m. on Tuesday, hundreds of Rakhine arrived on boats to surround Yin Thei, said a resident contacted by telephone. By late afternoon, the Muslim villagers were fending off waves of attacks. The resident said children, including two of his young cousins, were killed by sword-wielding Rakhines. Most houses were burned down.
Musi Dula, a Muslim farmer from a nearby village, said he heard gunfire at about 5 p.m. A Yin Thei villager telephoned Musi Dula's neighbours and said police were shooting at them. Another farmer nervously told Reuters how he watched from afar as police opened fire from the village's western edge, also at about 5 p.m.
The official death toll is five Rakhines and 51 Muslims killed at Yin Thei, including 21 Muslim women, said a senior police officer in Naypyitaw, the new capital of Myanmar. He denied security forces opened fire or abetted the mobs. The Yin Thei resident put the toll higher, saying 62 people were buried in small graves of about 10 bodies each.
As Yin Thei burned, the last of nearly 4,000 Rohingya Muslims were fleeing the large port town of Pauktaw, in a dramatic exodus by sea that had begun five days earlier.
Tensions had simmered since October 12, when four Rohingya fishermen were killed off Pauktaw, said a military source. Afterwards, local authorities had ordered Rohingya to stay in their own villages for their safety. Men couldn't work in town, and few dared to go fishing.
"The government gave us food but it wasn't enough," said Num Marot, 48. "We didn't dare stay."
Pauktaw's Rohingya began cramming into boats for the two-hour voyage to the state capital, Sittwe. Num Marot's new home would be a tarpaulin tent in a squalid camp already packed with tens of thousands of people displaced by the June violence.
About 30 minutes after the last boat pushed out to sea, the two Rohingya neighborhoods in Pauktaw were set ablaze, witnesses said. All 335 homes were destroyed. The charred and roofless frame of a once-busy mosque is marked with graffiti: "Rakhines will drink kalar blood," it reads, using the slur for Muslims.
Kay Aye, deputy chairman of Pauktaw township, insists Rohingya set alight their own homes and blames the communal problems on the Muslim population's doubling in 10 years. "Muslims want all people to become Muslims. That's the Muslim problem," he said. "Most of the Muslims here are uneducated, so they tend to be ruder than Rakhines."
Tuesday night fell. Soon a new inferno began in Kyaukphyu, a sleepy port town 65 miles southeast of Sittwe with strategic significance: gas and oil pipelines lead from this township across Myanmar to China's energy-hungry northwest.
So far, the violence had targeted Rohingya Muslims. About a fifth of Kyaukphyu town's 24,000 people are Muslims, and many of them are Kaman. The Kaman are recognized as one of Myanmar's 135 official ethnic groups; they usually hold citizenship and can be hard to tell apart from Rakhine Buddhists.
Most Kyaukphyu Muslims lived in East Pikesake, a neighborhood wedged between Rakhine communities and the jade-green waters of the Bay of Bengal.
Relations between the two communities had began to unravel after the June violence. The destruction of Buddhist temples by mobs in Muslim Bangladesh in early October further stoked the animosity.
The first fire began in East Pikesake on Tuesday evening, and soon dozens of houses, Rakhine and Muslim, were ablaze. The streets around the Old Village Jamae Mosque, one of East Pikesake's two mosques, became the front line in pitched battles between the two communities.
Rakhines fought with swords, iron rods and traditional Rakhine spears. The Muslims had jinglees - long darts made from sharpened bicycle spokes or fish hooks, which are fitted with plastic streamers and shot from catapults.
With the sea behind them, Pikesake's Muslims were cut off from escape by Rakhine crowds so large that the security forces, which numbered about 80 police and 100 soldiers, were overwhelmed, said Police Lieutenant Myint Khin, Kyaukphyu's station commander. "We couldn't control them," he said.
Police fired tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse Muslim and Rakhine mobs, said Police Lieutenant Myint Khin. The military fired live rounds, said a source in the security forces, but evidently not into the crowd. Staff at Kyaukphyu hospital told Reuters they treated injuries from blades, jinglees and fire, but none from bullets.
"TAUGHT THEM A LESSON"
The next morning, the rest of East Pikesake went up in flames. Myint Hlaing, a local official, said the heat was "more intense than a crematorium." It singed the fronds of five-story-high palm trees.
Rakhine men had begun pouring in from surrounding villages. Unpublished video shot by an amateur cameraman shows young men in red bandanas entering the town in convoys of tractors. They helped to terrorize Muslims living elsewhere in Kyaukphyu, according to Muslim and Rakhine witnesses. Police Lieutenant Myint Khin said the security forces were too overstretched to stop them.
Men with swords pulled Susu, 39, and her husband Than Twa, 48, from a house in west Kyaukphyu. "They cut him here and here and here," said Susu, chopping at her arms and legs. She recognised many of her attackers: They were neighbours, she said. Susu ran off to find some soldiers, who escorted her back to rescue her husband. He was dead.
Only two forces could give the mob pause. The first was the national military, which scattered crowds by shooting in the air. The second was Rakhine Buddhist officials such as Myint Hlaing.
Some officials joined the mob, said local Muslims, but others confronted it. Facing cries of "Kill the kalar protector!" Myint Hlaing, 68, pleaded with angry Rakhines outside Kaman Muslim homes in his neighbourhood. "If we hadn't protected the Kamans, their houses would be destroyed and the people dead," he said.
By mid-morning, the military began evacuating Muslims by bus to a guarded refugee camp outside town.
Back in Pikesake, which was still burning, the Muslims had only one exit: the sea. A flotilla of fishing boats was preparing to leave its blazing shores.
"People swam out to the boats but were chased down and stabbed before they got there," said Abdulloh, 35, a Rohingya fisherman. Xanabibi, 46, a Kaman woman, said she watched from a boat as three Rakhine men with swords set upon a Muslim teenager. "I watched them ... cut up his body into four pieces," she said.
Rakhine Buddhists claim they witnessed atrocities, too. Myint Hlaing said he saw a Muslim on one departing boat hold aloft a severed Rakhine head.
By mid-afternoon, at least 80 boats, many overloaded with 130 or more people, had set sail for Sittwe, said witnesses. An additional 1,700 or more Muslims ended up at a squalid, military-guarded camp outside Kyaukphyu.
The official statistics tell of a lopsided battle at Kyaukphyu. Of the 11 dead, nine were Muslims. Nearly all of the 891 houses destroyed belonged to Muslims; nearly all of the 5,301 people displaced were Muslims. Four of Kyaukphyu's five mosques were destroyed.
A prominent Rakhine businessman, who requested anonymity, showed little sympathy for his former neighbours. "The majority taught them a lesson," he said.
"HOT ETHNIC NATIONALISM"
The last spasm of violence took place at Kyauktaw, a town north of the state capital, Sittwe. At that point, the military shot into the crowd - and, for the first time, killed the Buddhists it had long been accused of siding with.
Soldiers opened fire to prevent Rakhine villagers on two boats from storming a Rohingya Muslim community, said Aung Kyaw Min, a 28-year-old Rakhine from Taung Bwe with a bullet in his leg. "I don't know why the military shot at us," he said. Two people died and 10 were wounded, villagers said.
In a separate incident the same day, security forces shot at Rakhines on Kyauktaw's outskirts, killing two and wounding four, a witness told Reuters.
The shootings seemed to send a message to the mobs. The violence stopped that day.
The senior police officer in Naypyitaw acknowledged that police were forced to fire at both Muslims and Rakhines in their attempts to subdue large crowds.
The official death toll from the October violence now stood at 89. The real toll could be higher. The extent of the killing at Yin Thei village remains unclear. Reports persist that scores of Muslims fleeing Pauktaw drowned after Rakhines rammed their boat. Nearly 4,700 homes were destroyed in 42 villages.
In a statement that Thursday, President Thein Sein warned that the "persons and organizations" behind the Rakhine State violence would be exposed and prosecuted. The mobs were well-organized and led by core instigators, some of whom moved village to village, military sources told Reuters.
In Kyaukphyu, however, police have so far arrested only seven people - six of them for looting. In Mrauk-U township, where most killings occurred, only 14 people have been arrested, said the military intelligence officer. The apparent impunity of the instigators is sending a chilling message to Muslim communities across Myanmar.
The intelligence officer, who has direct knowledge of the state's security operations, identified the suspected ringleaders as Rakhine extremists with ties to the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party, or RNDP, which was set up to contest Myanmar's 2010 general election. He didn't name any suspects. Buddhist monks stoked the unrest with anti-Muslim rhetoric, he added.
RNDP Secretary-General Oo Hla Saw denied that his party organized any mobs. But he acknowledged the possible involvement of supporters, low-level officials and "moderate monks who become radical when they think about Muslims."
Oo Hla Saw blamed local authorities for failing to heed rumors of impending violence, and Islamist radicals for inflaming tensions. For many Rakhines, he adds, the term Rohingya has jihadist overtones associated with the "Mujahid," autonomy-seeking rebels in northern Rakhine State from 1949 to 1961, who called themselves ethnic Rohingya. (Independent historians say the rebels did popularize the term "Rohingya," but cite a few references to it since the 18th century.)
Even today, Oo Hla Saw said, the Rohingya want "to set up an autonomous Islamic community. They are systematically scheming to do that."
Most Rohingya struggle simply to get by. A 2010 survey by the French group Action Against Hunger found a malnutrition rate of 20 percent, far above the emergency threshold set by the World Health Organization.
Many arrived as laborers from Bangladesh under British rule in the 19th century - grounds the government now uses to deny them citizenship. Rohingya were effectively rendered stateless under the 1982 Citizenship Law, which excluded them from the list of indigenous ethnic groups. Officials refer to them as Bengalis. Most Rohingya found it hard to apply for naturalized citizenship, since they couldn't speak Burmese or prove long-term residence.
Monks, symbols of democracy during 2007 protests against military rule, have helped fuel the outrage against Muslims. A week before the violence erupted, monks led nationwide protests against plans by the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the world's biggest Islamic body, to set up a liaison office in Rakhine State.
An anti-OIC rally in Sittwe on October 15 "angered Muslims here," conceded Nyar Nar, 32, one of the Rakhine monks who led it. He regards Muslims as foreign invaders. "As monks, we have morality and ethics," he said. "But if outsiders come to occupy our land, then we will take up swords to protect it."
In some parts of the state, the mood is celebratory. "This is the best time because there are no Muslims here," said Zaw Min Oo, a Rakhine shoe seller in Pauktaw township. Nearly 95 percent of a 20,000-strong Muslim community there is now gone.
The peace might be short-lived. The state's clumsy attempts at segregation helped create the conditions for the October violence. Further segregation - including the confining of tens of thousands of Muslims in seething camps - could spark more violence. Curfews remain in force across much of Rakhine State.
In Kyaukphyu town, starving dogs sniff through the ashes while municipal workers heave scrap metal into a truck. The only Muslim left in town is Ngwe Shin, an old woman suffering from mental illness. She can often be found near the market, shuffling past vandalized or shuttered homes.
(Additional reporting by Martin Petty and Reuters staff; Editing by Bill Tarrant and Michael Williams)
M.S. Anwar
RB News
November 11, 2012
Maung Daw, Arakan - Around 18 fully-armed Rakhine Terrorists plotting to create more terror in the state were arrested by the government of Myanmar. They were arrested with the help Mru people at Aantala Battala (Bandula in Burmese) in northern Maung Daw on 8th November 2012. In the earlier days, they killed one member of G.E Force of Myanmar and kidnapped three of them. It subsequently led to a minor war between Rakhine terrorists and Myanmar military.
“Rakhine Terrorists using fake beard and moustaches in Muslim dress broke into the road construction site of G.E force of Myanmar. They killed a mechanic called Kyaw Kyaw Wai and kidnapped other three. Killing and kidnapping by pretending themselves as though Muslims was an attempt by these terrorists to create more violence against Rohingyas in Arakan state. Expectedly, Rakhine extremists who have the links with these terrorists bucked up the blames on Rohingya Solidarity Organization (RSO) with the help of the biased media such as Burmese Section of Radio Free Asia (RFA). RSO was disbanded many years ago” said Rahim from Maung Daw.
Besides, yesterday (i.e. on 10th November 2012), a Rakhine named Hla Kyaw, a resident of Maung Daw, was arrested together with three grenades by the authority at the Three-Mile Checkpoint of the township. He was a son of U Mai Aung, a business man cum terrorist.
“U Mai Aung known as Foto Maghya and his family are suspected by the government to have the links with those terrorists. So, while his son, Hla Kyaw, was trying to disperse and hide their destructive weapons to their farm-house used as the hide-out at the Five-Mile in Maung Daw, he was arrested by the authority at the three-mile checkpoint. Now, he together with other 18 terrorists have been locked up in the NaSaKa headquarter in Maung Daw” reported by a Rohingya from Maung Daw on the condition of anonymity.
By Dr. Habib Siddiqui
Asian Tribune
November 11, 2012
In a meeting (in which I was invited to speak on the Rohingya problem) held in Luton (located 30 miles north of London), UK, on October 13, a British MP mentioned close parallel between what is happening today against the Rohingya Muslims in Arakan and what happened in Bosnia in the early 1990s against the Bosnian Muslims. He is right.
The Arakan state, which per estimates made by Dr. Shwe Lu Maung alias Shahnewaz Khan, in his book – The Price of Silence: Muslim-Buddhist War of Bangladesh and Myanmar – a Social Darwinist’s Analysis – had probably as many Rohingya Muslims as there were Rakhine Buddhists living in its four districts before the latest extermination campaign that began on June 3 of this year, is now almost devoid of any Muslim village that is unharmed or intact by Buddhist Rakhine terrorism.
The UN and other international human rights groups have called the Rohingya Muslims, and rightly so, the worst persecuted people in our planet. Because of their race and religion, they are victims of genocide in the Buddhist-majority Myanmar.
Truly, no other word in the English language but genocide can describe what the Rohingya people are facing. The use of this term should not come as a surprise since the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines genocide as "the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political or cultural group.” As noted by experts, the term can be applied to such destructions in whole or in part of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group. By any definition, the Rohingya people of Arakan are ethnically, racially, religiously different than the Rakhine Buddhists and majority Burmans in Myanmar.
In his book – Worse than War – Dr. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen cites five principal forms of elimination: transformation, repression, expulsion, prevention of reproduction, and extermination. Transformation involves the destruction of a targeted group’s essential and defining political, social, or cultural identities. As I have mentioned earlier, in spite of their ties to the soil of Arakan since time immemorial, the Rohingyas are falsely alleged by the dominant ethnic groups as new settlers from nearby Bangladesh.
Repression entails keeping the hated, deprecated, or feared people within territorial reach and reducing, with violent domination, their ability to inflict real or imagined harm upon others. Such repression has been a regular feature of Rohingya life inside Myanmar.
Expulsion, often called deportation, is a third eliminationist option. It removes unwanted people more thoroughly, by driving them beyond a country’s borders, or from one region of a country to another, or compelling them en masse into camps. The Myanmar government since the days of Ne Win has been guilty of this crime.
Prevention of reproduction is the fourth eliminationist act, which the Myanmar government has been employing in conjunction with others. Not only are the Rohingya families restricted from marrying, the women are often forcibly sterilized, forced to abort and very often raped. In recent months, during attacks on Muslim homes, villages and towns the kidnapping of the Rohingya girls and women have become a recurring event.
Extermination is the fifth eliminationist act in which the targeted groups are killed, often with the excuse that their very existence poses a mortal threat. It promises not an interim, not a piecemeal, not only a probable, but a “final solution” to the putative problem. It is not difficult to see why in recent weeks, poisoned oil and food were sold to the Rohingya people by Rakhine businessmen to kill them. The latest activities by the Rakhine terrorists, aided by racist monks and others within the larger Myanmar society, including murderous politicians and government authorities, thus, clearly show that Rohingyas are victims of an extermination act.
A comparison with the previously cited list of crimes of the Myanmar government clearly shows that Rohingyas are facing all the five forms of elimination. It is a complete package of annihilation of the Rohingya people!
Genocide requires preparation and planning. It begins in the minds of men and needs mass mobilization to commit the horror against the targeted group. The perpetrators or the executioners must not only feel secure but also must be self-motivated and zealous to commit their horrendous crimes. Often times, the task of preparing the mind is left to ideologues and chauvinist intellectuals who sell the poison tablet of intolerance against the targeted group. Without political leadership the overwhelming majority of the perpetrators would not lift a finger in harm. However, once set in motion, typically with a few encouraging and enabling words, they, both the eliminationist regimes’ shock troops and their societies’ ordinary members give themselves, body and soul, to death. They do so easily, effortlessly. And this is what we are witnessing today in Myanmar, esp. the Arakan state.
Taking a cue from other places where genocides have taken place, the leaders of this greatest crime of our time - the Myanmar government, the local Rakhine politicians and intelligentsia, and their racist Buddhist monks within the general population -- have been feeding many myths for public consumption that not only distort the history of the Rohingyas and other non-Buddhists but also exaggerate the potential benefits that could come from ‘purifying’ the soils of Myanmar and Arakan by eliminating the ‘other’ people, esp. the Rohingya Muslims. Thanks to the poisonous writings of Rakhine chauvinists like Aye Chan, (late) Aye Kyaw, Khin Maung Saw and others, the Muslim population is deemed an ‘influx virus,’ a threat to the Buddhist identity of Myanmar, esp. of Arakan. Thus, a pervasive slogan that is often heard and discussed in the media is that the Rakhine people can’t live any more with the Rohingya ‘terrorists.’ Forgotten in such biased reporting is the mere fact that all the victims of the carnage have been Rohingya people. It is they who are terrorized by Buddhist terrorism, and not the other way around!
The causes of mass murder can often be found in the ideology that the state espouses. Social and ethnic compositions are usually the fault lines along which such elimination projects emanate. As I have noted elsewhere, the Myanmar government espouses a new Myanmarism in which racism and bigotry are the defining ideologies to purify its soil of all the non-Buddhists and non-Mongoloid races. Its mosaic of identities - ethnic, racial, religious, linguistic and cultural, and the resulting diversity, which could have been its greatest strength is seen in this toxic ideology as its greatest weakness.
In 1935, years before the Jewish Holocaust happened in Germany, anti-Jewish racist and bigotry-ridden laws were promulgated in the German city of Nuremberg stopping social and economic contacts with the Jews. The Jews also lost the right to vote and hold office. Within the next eight years, 13 implementation ordinances were issued dealing with the enforcement of the Reich Citizenship Law that progressively marginalized the Jewish community in Germany.
Anyone violating these laws was punished by hard labor, imprisonment and/or fines. Such laws were exploited by hard-core Nazis to destroy properties of a people that the authorities would not generally protect. Truly, it is hard to imagine the Jewish Holocaust in Europe without those Nuremberg Laws. The recently issued religious edicts from Buddhist monks banning social and economic ties with the Rohingya people, in particular, and the Muslims, in general, is a sufficient reminder and a dire warning about the ugly head of genocide that is emerging now in Myanmar, esp. in its western state of Arakan.
As I have noted in my keynote speech at the Bangkok Conference on “Contemplating Burma’s Rohingya People’s Future in Reconciliation and (Democratic) Reform,” the new Myanmarism, espoused by the Buddhist political leadership inside Myanmar, is totalitarian and is akin to neo-Nazi Fascism. Its leaders and followers erase distinction between politics and religion, wanting to merge their racist and fascist politics with and subordinate to radical Theravada Buddhism that is extremist, fundamentalist, racist, violent and intolerant of all religions except its own. This toxic ideology is a sure recipe for disaster in a country like Myanmar with some 140 ethnic groups and minority Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and Hindus comprising 15 to 20 percent of the total population. It breeds intolerance and promotes violence that is officially sanctioned by people in authority and supported by vast majority of its people as a national project. This hybrid cocktail of Burmese racist supremacy and intolerant Buddhism is a threat not only to its minority races and religions, but also to the entire region.
Sadly, however, because of the western appetite for Myanmar’s natural resources, the crimes of the Myanmar and Rakhine government are overlooked. And instead, the root causes behind the targeted violence against the Rohingya Muslims are falsely attributed to poverty and lack of economic opportunities – points recently made by Victoria Nuland of the U.S. State Department.
There is, however, no doubt that in spite of Myanmar’s enormous natural resources, the country remains the poorest of the ASEAN countries, and South-east Asia. But to say that poverty is at the heart of the genocidal campaign is a linguistic camouflage to justice U.S. State Department’s silence on the grievous nature of the crimes committed by the murderous Myanmar government. We have heard similar excuses during the Bosnian and Rwandan genocidal campaigns. There are many countries with worse poverty but the powerful majority there doesn’t commit acts of genocide against the minority. For genocide to happen, it is always a national project in which people of all walks of life participate, and that is what is happening with the Rohingya problem inside Myanmar.
For years, China, India and other Asia Pacific countries have been doing business with the brutal military regime in Myanmar. Human rights were never a priority. Many of the European and North American countries were left out from a share at that Myanmar pie.
For them to join in, they needed a face change with Myanmar. And that devious process started first with the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Suu Kyi – who did not merit it, and then with the change of the uniform of the old guards who not long ago had donned the military dress to claim that they are reform-minded. It was a Glasnost moment for Burma, which was renamed Myanmar. That claim was followed with a controversial election held in 2010 (followed by a by-election in which Suu Kyi’s NLD enthusiastically participated) to show that Myanmar was moving from a fascist military oligarchy into a democracy, and then the trip of Suu Kyi as Thein Sein’s unofficial ambassador to the western world pleading for opening up trade and commerce relationship with the government. And in this warming up session, the last play was played during Thein Sein’s trip to the UN where he met with Ban Ki-Moon and other western leaders.
Soon thereafter one after another of the western governments, too keen to eat their share of the pie, lifted all previous bans against the murderous regime. They promised huge investments. Emboldened by such moves, the Thein Sein government does not feel that it is obligated to honor any previous pledge made to the world community. Soon after his return from the UN session, the racist Buddhist monks conducted stage managed demonstrations asking the government to force out or relocate Muslims. In government managed newspapers, they announced dire consequences against anyone doing any business with Muslims including selling food and buying or renting out homes to and from them. As hinted above, it is a copy of the Nazi era policy. It is a total package of ethnically cleansing Myanmar of the Muslim population, in general, and the Rohingyas, in particular. So insidious is Myanmar’s Buddhist fascism, the Rakhine Buddhists living inside and outside Arakan and their patrons in the Buddhist-majority Myanmar do not want any Muslim, esp. the Rohingya, living inside Myanmar, esp. in the Rakhine state.
As I have noted elsewhere, ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people has now become a national project in Myanmar in which most Buddhists of Myanmar including the so-called democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi are willing participants one way or another. Even when they are not personally participating in this heinous crime, through their sinister silence and/or endorsement of the regime’s anti-Rohingya policy and the genocidal campaign that is carried out by criminal Rakhine Buddhists, they have essentially become partners in this crime. The Rakhine Buddhists now have their own version of Kristallnacht. They are mimicking the Nazi Party's series of pogroms in 1938, whereby one Jewish township after another was attacked. At this rate of destruction, there won’t be any Muslim locality left inside Arakan, their ancestral home.
None of these attacks since June 3 are isolated, unplanned, or spontaneous offenses. Already made stateless by the highly discriminatory 1982 Citizenship Law that is at variance with scores of international laws, the Rohingyas are falsely blamed by fascist Rakhine politicians for crimes that they did not commit so that the Buddhist populace could be incited to accept and assist the progressively savage operations of "race purification." Lynching attacks are organized by Aye Maung’s fascist party - RNDP and other equally racist Rakhine politicians and greedy businessmen to loot Rohingya properties and burn their homes, businesses and mosques.
Rohingya property is confiscated. In this task the Rakhine-dominated security forces and police are willing partners. As a result, the Rohingyas are now caged in concentration-like camps and ghettos or pushed into exile. The genocidal program is progressing in fury and irresponsibility to the "final solution" to make them an extinct people.
We can still stop this extinction if our powerful western governments act. They can pressure the Thein Sein government through the UN Security Council not only to stop this ethnic cleansing and restore Rohingya citizenship, but also ensure that the Rohingyas are compensated for their loss of lives and properties and live with safety and security under UN-monitored safe havens created to the west of the Kaladan River. If the regime resists such tangible changes, the UNSC members can take the criminal leaders of Myanmar and the Rakhine state to a Nuremberg-type trial for committing heinous crimes against humanity, let alone ban all economic transactions with the rogue regime.
Unfortunately, the attitude of the powerful nations towards the Rohingya problem is a reminiscent of the Nazi era; they refuse to see and hear the obvious truth. It is simply immoral and inexcusable. They are buying and parroting the Myanmar regime's argument, that the conflict is basically two-sided with two large racial groups attacking each other. This is a false equivalence. When all the townships that are burning, and refugees, are from one side – the Rohingya, and when renowned activists, Buddhist monks, and local Rakhine politicians and students are using language reminiscent of the Nazi propaganda, something truly catastrophic is underway seeking "final solution" of the Rohingya problem. Nothing can hide this ugly truth!
The Rakhine (Arakan) state now looks like a prison-like ghetto for the Rohingya people. Now, the Rohingya homes are ring-fenced by burnt-out buildings and military checkpoints. Outside the capital city of Sittwe (Akyab), up to 100,000 more Rohingyas are living in a series of sweltering refugee camps where malnourishment and disease are rife and where security forces and local Rakhine activists impede aid workers from operating freely. As a result of years of persecution and a slow but steady genocidal campaign, half the Rohingya population has already been pushed out. Others living inside are counting their days to get out of this living hell. Can our generation allow such an obliteration of an entire community?
How many Rohingya deaths and destruction of their homes would qualify for these powerful nations to act and stop this most far-flung and terrible racial persecution of our time? How can we ignore or tolerate such a calculated, malignant and devastating crime, which epitomizes racial hatreds, religious bigotry, terrorism and violence, and the arrogance and cruelty of power?
It is sad to see that we have not learned anything from genocides of the past – neither from Hitler’s Germany nor from the more recent ones in Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda. Linguistic camouflages are still used to minimize the nature of the crime faced by the Rohingya people. Many reporters relaying the events are using prefixes like “alleged” only to obfuscate what is really happening. Many local reporters are absolutely biased and are guilty of disseminating government propaganda.
In his closing remarks before the International Military Tribunal at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946, Robert Jackson, the U.S. Chief Prosecutor, issued the following warning: “The reality is that in the long perspective of history the present century will not hold an admirable position, unless its second half is to redeem its first. These two-score years in the twentieth century will be recorded in the book of years as one of the most bloody in all annals. Two World Wars have left a legacy of dead which number more than all the armies engaged in any way that made ancient or medieval history. No half-century ever witnessed slaughter on such a scale, such cruelties and inhumanities, such wholesale deportations of peoples into slavery, such annihilations of minorities. The terror of Torquemada pales before the Nazi Inquisition. These deeds are the overshadowing historical facts by which generations to come will remember this decade. If we cannot eliminate the causes and prevent the repetition of these barbaric events, it is not an irresponsible prophecy to say that this twentieth century may yet succeed in bringing the doom of civilization.”
Witnessing the latest genocidal campaign against the Rohingyas of Myanmar, it is obvious that we have failed on both counts - to eliminate "the causes" and to prevent "the repetition of these barbaric events."
Asian Tribune
November 11, 2012
In a meeting (in which I was invited to speak on the Rohingya problem) held in Luton (located 30 miles north of London), UK, on October 13, a British MP mentioned close parallel between what is happening today against the Rohingya Muslims in Arakan and what happened in Bosnia in the early 1990s against the Bosnian Muslims. He is right. The Arakan state, which per estimates made by Dr. Shwe Lu Maung alias Shahnewaz Khan, in his book – The Price of Silence: Muslim-Buddhist War of Bangladesh and Myanmar – a Social Darwinist’s Analysis – had probably as many Rohingya Muslims as there were Rakhine Buddhists living in its four districts before the latest extermination campaign that began on June 3 of this year, is now almost devoid of any Muslim village that is unharmed or intact by Buddhist Rakhine terrorism.
The UN and other international human rights groups have called the Rohingya Muslims, and rightly so, the worst persecuted people in our planet. Because of their race and religion, they are victims of genocide in the Buddhist-majority Myanmar.
Truly, no other word in the English language but genocide can describe what the Rohingya people are facing. The use of this term should not come as a surprise since the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines genocide as "the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political or cultural group.” As noted by experts, the term can be applied to such destructions in whole or in part of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group. By any definition, the Rohingya people of Arakan are ethnically, racially, religiously different than the Rakhine Buddhists and majority Burmans in Myanmar.
In his book – Worse than War – Dr. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen cites five principal forms of elimination: transformation, repression, expulsion, prevention of reproduction, and extermination. Transformation involves the destruction of a targeted group’s essential and defining political, social, or cultural identities. As I have mentioned earlier, in spite of their ties to the soil of Arakan since time immemorial, the Rohingyas are falsely alleged by the dominant ethnic groups as new settlers from nearby Bangladesh.
Repression entails keeping the hated, deprecated, or feared people within territorial reach and reducing, with violent domination, their ability to inflict real or imagined harm upon others. Such repression has been a regular feature of Rohingya life inside Myanmar.
Expulsion, often called deportation, is a third eliminationist option. It removes unwanted people more thoroughly, by driving them beyond a country’s borders, or from one region of a country to another, or compelling them en masse into camps. The Myanmar government since the days of Ne Win has been guilty of this crime.
Prevention of reproduction is the fourth eliminationist act, which the Myanmar government has been employing in conjunction with others. Not only are the Rohingya families restricted from marrying, the women are often forcibly sterilized, forced to abort and very often raped. In recent months, during attacks on Muslim homes, villages and towns the kidnapping of the Rohingya girls and women have become a recurring event.
Extermination is the fifth eliminationist act in which the targeted groups are killed, often with the excuse that their very existence poses a mortal threat. It promises not an interim, not a piecemeal, not only a probable, but a “final solution” to the putative problem. It is not difficult to see why in recent weeks, poisoned oil and food were sold to the Rohingya people by Rakhine businessmen to kill them. The latest activities by the Rakhine terrorists, aided by racist monks and others within the larger Myanmar society, including murderous politicians and government authorities, thus, clearly show that Rohingyas are victims of an extermination act.
A comparison with the previously cited list of crimes of the Myanmar government clearly shows that Rohingyas are facing all the five forms of elimination. It is a complete package of annihilation of the Rohingya people!
Genocide requires preparation and planning. It begins in the minds of men and needs mass mobilization to commit the horror against the targeted group. The perpetrators or the executioners must not only feel secure but also must be self-motivated and zealous to commit their horrendous crimes. Often times, the task of preparing the mind is left to ideologues and chauvinist intellectuals who sell the poison tablet of intolerance against the targeted group. Without political leadership the overwhelming majority of the perpetrators would not lift a finger in harm. However, once set in motion, typically with a few encouraging and enabling words, they, both the eliminationist regimes’ shock troops and their societies’ ordinary members give themselves, body and soul, to death. They do so easily, effortlessly. And this is what we are witnessing today in Myanmar, esp. the Arakan state.
Taking a cue from other places where genocides have taken place, the leaders of this greatest crime of our time - the Myanmar government, the local Rakhine politicians and intelligentsia, and their racist Buddhist monks within the general population -- have been feeding many myths for public consumption that not only distort the history of the Rohingyas and other non-Buddhists but also exaggerate the potential benefits that could come from ‘purifying’ the soils of Myanmar and Arakan by eliminating the ‘other’ people, esp. the Rohingya Muslims. Thanks to the poisonous writings of Rakhine chauvinists like Aye Chan, (late) Aye Kyaw, Khin Maung Saw and others, the Muslim population is deemed an ‘influx virus,’ a threat to the Buddhist identity of Myanmar, esp. of Arakan. Thus, a pervasive slogan that is often heard and discussed in the media is that the Rakhine people can’t live any more with the Rohingya ‘terrorists.’ Forgotten in such biased reporting is the mere fact that all the victims of the carnage have been Rohingya people. It is they who are terrorized by Buddhist terrorism, and not the other way around!
The causes of mass murder can often be found in the ideology that the state espouses. Social and ethnic compositions are usually the fault lines along which such elimination projects emanate. As I have noted elsewhere, the Myanmar government espouses a new Myanmarism in which racism and bigotry are the defining ideologies to purify its soil of all the non-Buddhists and non-Mongoloid races. Its mosaic of identities - ethnic, racial, religious, linguistic and cultural, and the resulting diversity, which could have been its greatest strength is seen in this toxic ideology as its greatest weakness.
In 1935, years before the Jewish Holocaust happened in Germany, anti-Jewish racist and bigotry-ridden laws were promulgated in the German city of Nuremberg stopping social and economic contacts with the Jews. The Jews also lost the right to vote and hold office. Within the next eight years, 13 implementation ordinances were issued dealing with the enforcement of the Reich Citizenship Law that progressively marginalized the Jewish community in Germany.
Anyone violating these laws was punished by hard labor, imprisonment and/or fines. Such laws were exploited by hard-core Nazis to destroy properties of a people that the authorities would not generally protect. Truly, it is hard to imagine the Jewish Holocaust in Europe without those Nuremberg Laws. The recently issued religious edicts from Buddhist monks banning social and economic ties with the Rohingya people, in particular, and the Muslims, in general, is a sufficient reminder and a dire warning about the ugly head of genocide that is emerging now in Myanmar, esp. in its western state of Arakan.
As I have noted in my keynote speech at the Bangkok Conference on “Contemplating Burma’s Rohingya People’s Future in Reconciliation and (Democratic) Reform,” the new Myanmarism, espoused by the Buddhist political leadership inside Myanmar, is totalitarian and is akin to neo-Nazi Fascism. Its leaders and followers erase distinction between politics and religion, wanting to merge their racist and fascist politics with and subordinate to radical Theravada Buddhism that is extremist, fundamentalist, racist, violent and intolerant of all religions except its own. This toxic ideology is a sure recipe for disaster in a country like Myanmar with some 140 ethnic groups and minority Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and Hindus comprising 15 to 20 percent of the total population. It breeds intolerance and promotes violence that is officially sanctioned by people in authority and supported by vast majority of its people as a national project. This hybrid cocktail of Burmese racist supremacy and intolerant Buddhism is a threat not only to its minority races and religions, but also to the entire region.
Sadly, however, because of the western appetite for Myanmar’s natural resources, the crimes of the Myanmar and Rakhine government are overlooked. And instead, the root causes behind the targeted violence against the Rohingya Muslims are falsely attributed to poverty and lack of economic opportunities – points recently made by Victoria Nuland of the U.S. State Department.
There is, however, no doubt that in spite of Myanmar’s enormous natural resources, the country remains the poorest of the ASEAN countries, and South-east Asia. But to say that poverty is at the heart of the genocidal campaign is a linguistic camouflage to justice U.S. State Department’s silence on the grievous nature of the crimes committed by the murderous Myanmar government. We have heard similar excuses during the Bosnian and Rwandan genocidal campaigns. There are many countries with worse poverty but the powerful majority there doesn’t commit acts of genocide against the minority. For genocide to happen, it is always a national project in which people of all walks of life participate, and that is what is happening with the Rohingya problem inside Myanmar.
For years, China, India and other Asia Pacific countries have been doing business with the brutal military regime in Myanmar. Human rights were never a priority. Many of the European and North American countries were left out from a share at that Myanmar pie.
For them to join in, they needed a face change with Myanmar. And that devious process started first with the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Suu Kyi – who did not merit it, and then with the change of the uniform of the old guards who not long ago had donned the military dress to claim that they are reform-minded. It was a Glasnost moment for Burma, which was renamed Myanmar. That claim was followed with a controversial election held in 2010 (followed by a by-election in which Suu Kyi’s NLD enthusiastically participated) to show that Myanmar was moving from a fascist military oligarchy into a democracy, and then the trip of Suu Kyi as Thein Sein’s unofficial ambassador to the western world pleading for opening up trade and commerce relationship with the government. And in this warming up session, the last play was played during Thein Sein’s trip to the UN where he met with Ban Ki-Moon and other western leaders.
Soon thereafter one after another of the western governments, too keen to eat their share of the pie, lifted all previous bans against the murderous regime. They promised huge investments. Emboldened by such moves, the Thein Sein government does not feel that it is obligated to honor any previous pledge made to the world community. Soon after his return from the UN session, the racist Buddhist monks conducted stage managed demonstrations asking the government to force out or relocate Muslims. In government managed newspapers, they announced dire consequences against anyone doing any business with Muslims including selling food and buying or renting out homes to and from them. As hinted above, it is a copy of the Nazi era policy. It is a total package of ethnically cleansing Myanmar of the Muslim population, in general, and the Rohingyas, in particular. So insidious is Myanmar’s Buddhist fascism, the Rakhine Buddhists living inside and outside Arakan and their patrons in the Buddhist-majority Myanmar do not want any Muslim, esp. the Rohingya, living inside Myanmar, esp. in the Rakhine state.
As I have noted elsewhere, ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people has now become a national project in Myanmar in which most Buddhists of Myanmar including the so-called democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi are willing participants one way or another. Even when they are not personally participating in this heinous crime, through their sinister silence and/or endorsement of the regime’s anti-Rohingya policy and the genocidal campaign that is carried out by criminal Rakhine Buddhists, they have essentially become partners in this crime. The Rakhine Buddhists now have their own version of Kristallnacht. They are mimicking the Nazi Party's series of pogroms in 1938, whereby one Jewish township after another was attacked. At this rate of destruction, there won’t be any Muslim locality left inside Arakan, their ancestral home.
None of these attacks since June 3 are isolated, unplanned, or spontaneous offenses. Already made stateless by the highly discriminatory 1982 Citizenship Law that is at variance with scores of international laws, the Rohingyas are falsely blamed by fascist Rakhine politicians for crimes that they did not commit so that the Buddhist populace could be incited to accept and assist the progressively savage operations of "race purification." Lynching attacks are organized by Aye Maung’s fascist party - RNDP and other equally racist Rakhine politicians and greedy businessmen to loot Rohingya properties and burn their homes, businesses and mosques.
Rohingya property is confiscated. In this task the Rakhine-dominated security forces and police are willing partners. As a result, the Rohingyas are now caged in concentration-like camps and ghettos or pushed into exile. The genocidal program is progressing in fury and irresponsibility to the "final solution" to make them an extinct people.
We can still stop this extinction if our powerful western governments act. They can pressure the Thein Sein government through the UN Security Council not only to stop this ethnic cleansing and restore Rohingya citizenship, but also ensure that the Rohingyas are compensated for their loss of lives and properties and live with safety and security under UN-monitored safe havens created to the west of the Kaladan River. If the regime resists such tangible changes, the UNSC members can take the criminal leaders of Myanmar and the Rakhine state to a Nuremberg-type trial for committing heinous crimes against humanity, let alone ban all economic transactions with the rogue regime.
Unfortunately, the attitude of the powerful nations towards the Rohingya problem is a reminiscent of the Nazi era; they refuse to see and hear the obvious truth. It is simply immoral and inexcusable. They are buying and parroting the Myanmar regime's argument, that the conflict is basically two-sided with two large racial groups attacking each other. This is a false equivalence. When all the townships that are burning, and refugees, are from one side – the Rohingya, and when renowned activists, Buddhist monks, and local Rakhine politicians and students are using language reminiscent of the Nazi propaganda, something truly catastrophic is underway seeking "final solution" of the Rohingya problem. Nothing can hide this ugly truth!
The Rakhine (Arakan) state now looks like a prison-like ghetto for the Rohingya people. Now, the Rohingya homes are ring-fenced by burnt-out buildings and military checkpoints. Outside the capital city of Sittwe (Akyab), up to 100,000 more Rohingyas are living in a series of sweltering refugee camps where malnourishment and disease are rife and where security forces and local Rakhine activists impede aid workers from operating freely. As a result of years of persecution and a slow but steady genocidal campaign, half the Rohingya population has already been pushed out. Others living inside are counting their days to get out of this living hell. Can our generation allow such an obliteration of an entire community?
How many Rohingya deaths and destruction of their homes would qualify for these powerful nations to act and stop this most far-flung and terrible racial persecution of our time? How can we ignore or tolerate such a calculated, malignant and devastating crime, which epitomizes racial hatreds, religious bigotry, terrorism and violence, and the arrogance and cruelty of power?
It is sad to see that we have not learned anything from genocides of the past – neither from Hitler’s Germany nor from the more recent ones in Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda. Linguistic camouflages are still used to minimize the nature of the crime faced by the Rohingya people. Many reporters relaying the events are using prefixes like “alleged” only to obfuscate what is really happening. Many local reporters are absolutely biased and are guilty of disseminating government propaganda.
In his closing remarks before the International Military Tribunal at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946, Robert Jackson, the U.S. Chief Prosecutor, issued the following warning: “The reality is that in the long perspective of history the present century will not hold an admirable position, unless its second half is to redeem its first. These two-score years in the twentieth century will be recorded in the book of years as one of the most bloody in all annals. Two World Wars have left a legacy of dead which number more than all the armies engaged in any way that made ancient or medieval history. No half-century ever witnessed slaughter on such a scale, such cruelties and inhumanities, such wholesale deportations of peoples into slavery, such annihilations of minorities. The terror of Torquemada pales before the Nazi Inquisition. These deeds are the overshadowing historical facts by which generations to come will remember this decade. If we cannot eliminate the causes and prevent the repetition of these barbaric events, it is not an irresponsible prophecy to say that this twentieth century may yet succeed in bringing the doom of civilization.”
Witnessing the latest genocidal campaign against the Rohingyas of Myanmar, it is obvious that we have failed on both counts - to eliminate "the causes" and to prevent "the repetition of these barbaric events."
The Rohingya’s statelessness is at the heart of two major outbreaks of fighting between the Buddhist and Muslim communities that has left 180 people dead and forced 110,000 Rohingya into makeshift camps.
Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, told reporters, that a change in the law is required, "This should include a review of the citizenship law to ensure that Rohingya have equal access to citizenship," she said.
The Rohingya have no legal status and are regarded by most Burmese as immigrants from neighbor Bangladesh.
Bangladesh doesn’t recognize them either, leaving them effectively stateless.
Voice of Russia, RT
About ten speakers gave speech including ARNO President Nurul Islam, BROUK President Tun Khin, Mark Farmener from Burma Campaign UK, Baroness Cox from British House of Lords, British MP Rushanara Ali, MP Jonathan Ashworth , Ko Aung from Burmese Democratic Movement Association, Marbur Ahmed Co-Director of Restless Beings, Sohail from Burmese Muslim Association.
ARNO President Nurul Islam Said “The terrible situation of the Rohingya in Arakan is a manmade tragedy, carried out by the extremist Buddhist Rakhine and masterminded by Thein Sein’s Government and Rakhine Nationalities Development Party with Dr. Aye Maung. The government could have stopped the onslaught in the beginning, but it has reinforced it.
ARNO President Nurul Islam said “Burma opposition leader and democracy icon Daw Aung San Suu Kyi is uncharacteristically silent on the mass destruction and racial extermination of Rohingya. She is reluctant to call a spade a spade lest it will hurt the sentiments of the majority Buddhists. It appears that if the Rakhine were in the situation of Rohingya she would definitely speak out. We believe, she could have stopped or reduced the violence in Arakan by simply admonishing the fellow countrymen to respect the human rights of the Rohingyas”.
Baroness Cox from house Lords said she joined to protest to show that how much she care about Rohingya people. She will make sure to pressure British government and international community. She said that now everybody have right interference duty to protect Rohingya people of Arakan. She will be questioning house lords next week to get UN Peace keeping force, Humanitarian aid and try to get Burmese government repeal 1982 citizenship law.
Rushnara Ali MP said “We as parliamentarians are with you. We on labour side twill do as we can to pressure the British government to speak up people for Rohingyas and others the people who are facing HR violations. We keep up the pressure in Parliament and elsewhere to make sure that this issue is not forgotten that we all campaign together to make sure people lives are protected. Later today I will deliver a letter on behalf of shadow front bench team labour party that letter will send to all our colleagues in parliament from labour party to send to Foreign Secretary to take action.
MP Jonathan Ashworth said he raised Rohingya issue last week foreign secretary and he joined to the protest to show solidarity as Member of Parliament. He also said we stand on justice raised it again today houses of Parliament. When we are seeing thousands of home destroyed, thousands people displaced .When we are seeing lives lost we cannot stand by doing nothing.
Rushnara Ali MP said “We as parliamentarians are with you. We on labour side twill do as we can to pressure the British government to speak up people for Rohingyas and others the people who are facing HR violations. We keep up the pressure in Parliament and elsewhere to make sure that this issue is not forgotten that we all campaign together to make sure people lives are protected. Later today I will deliver a letter on behalf of shadow front bench team labour party that letter will send to all our colleagues in parliament from labour party to send to Foreign Secretary to take action.
MP Jonathan Ashworth said he raised Rohingya issue last week foreign secretary and he joined to the protest to show solidarity as Member of Parliament. He also said we stand on justice raised it again today houses of Parliament. When we are seeing thousands of home destroyed, thousands people displaced .When we are seeing lives lost we cannot stand by doing nothing.
BROUK President Tun Khin said “President Thein Sein told the UNHCR in July that Burma/Myanmar will not take responsibility for the Rohingya because they are not citizens of Burma and illegal immigrant.” When he proposed ethnic cleansing they stayed silent, and even when ethnic cleansing takes place they stay silent. He urged it is time to show action from British government and international community to Put pressure on the Burmese government to stop all violence and intimidation against Rohingyas, Support sending UN Peacekeeping Force and International Observers to Arakan, Unhindered delivery of humanitarian aids to the victims,Support for the establishment of a UN Commission of Inquiry in order to establish the true facts and bring those responsible to justice.
Mark Farmener from BCUK said “The international community is now paying attention to the situation in Rakhine State, but is not yet taking practical action. The purpose of the international day of action was to push the international community to take practical action to help pressure the government of Burma to take steps to stop the violence, allow full humanitarian access, and repeal the 1982 Citizenship Law.”
Mabrur Ahmed, Co-Director of Restless Beings, then ended the protest calling for theactivism of ALL, questioning the impotence of the democracy and free world that is hailed all across the world, yet remains silent on this issue. ‘’Where is the democracy when villages are being razed because they’re not the right religion, ethnicity or race, and yet President Obama will meet with President Thein Sein on the 16th November to discuss the supposed Burmese democracy.’’ He went on to question: ‘’Where are YOU when it comes to YOUR freedom and YOUR democracy? One day YOU will be too black, too white, too Muslim, too Christian, too Hindu, too Jewish, too fat, too skinny, one day YOU will not be deemed good enough to exist, who will speak for you on that day?’’
RB News Desk
Mark Farmener from BCUK said “The international community is now paying attention to the situation in Rakhine State, but is not yet taking practical action. The purpose of the international day of action was to push the international community to take practical action to help pressure the government of Burma to take steps to stop the violence, allow full humanitarian access, and repeal the 1982 Citizenship Law.”
Mabrur Ahmed, Co-Director of Restless Beings, then ended the protest calling for theactivism of ALL, questioning the impotence of the democracy and free world that is hailed all across the world, yet remains silent on this issue. ‘’Where is the democracy when villages are being razed because they’re not the right religion, ethnicity or race, and yet President Obama will meet with President Thein Sein on the 16th November to discuss the supposed Burmese democracy.’’ He went on to question: ‘’Where are YOU when it comes to YOUR freedom and YOUR democracy? One day YOU will be too black, too white, too Muslim, too Christian, too Hindu, too Jewish, too fat, too skinny, one day YOU will not be deemed good enough to exist, who will speak for you on that day?’’
RB News Desk
In a joint statement, nine embassies in Yangon urged “all parties to work together to bring an immediate end to the violence”.
They appealed for “a full, transparent and independent investigation” to determine the roots of the Buddhist-Muslim clashes.
“We further encourage the government to enable safe, timely, and unhindered humanitarian access across Rakhine State to all persons in need,” according to the statement, which was also signed by the embassies of Australia, Egypt, France, Germany, Japan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
More than 100,000 people have been displaced and about 180 killed since clashes between ethnic Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims erupted in June, followed by another outbreak of violence in October.
A foreign diplomat in Yangon who did not want to be named said that although Myanmar was showing “a real willingness to cooperate” in aid efforts, security concerns in certain areas were a hurdle to deliveries.
The UN Refugee Agency has warned that the influx of internal refugees has pushed the Rakhine camps “beyond capacity in terms of space, shelter and basic supplies such as food and water”.
Doctors Without Borders said earlier this week its teams were struggling to reach most communities affected by the violence owing to “antagonism generated by deep ethnic divisions”.
Most of the displaced are stateless Rohingya, considered by the UN to be among the most persecuted minorities in the world.
Some ethnic Rakhine leaders have campaigned against international aid agencies in recent months, arguing they favour the Rohingya.
President Thein Sein said last month his government was open to aid from foreign donors, following a series of protests by Buddhists against efforts by a world Islamic body to help Muslims affected by the violence.
The country, which is emerging from decades of military rule, was the target of international criticism over its reluctance to allow outside aid to victims of a cyclone in 2008 that left more than 138,000 people dead or missing.
The UN human rights chief called on Myanmar yesterday to allow Muslim Rohingya to become citizens.
The Rohingya have no legal status, with the government and many Burmese regarding them as illegal immigrants from neighbouring Bangladesh.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay added her voice to calls for the problem to be resolved and urged a change in the law, saying the Rohingya had been excluded from the reform process.
“This should include a review of the citizenship law to ensure that Rohingya have equal access to citizenship,” Pillay said at the Bali Democracy Forum in Indonesia.
She also warned that the violence could hinder Myanmar’s much-heralded reform drive.
“While we can positively commend the government for the progress made towards democratic transition and national reconciliation, the communal violence, if not resolved, can undermine the reform process,” she said.
Local authorities in Rakhine said they had begun a process of verifying the nationality of all the state’s Muslims, amid widespread calls for those deemed “illegal” to be sent to another country. The precise goal of the survey was unclear.
Separately, Pillay said she pressed Myanmar’s Deputy Foreign Minister U Thant Kyaw at the Bali meeting to secure the release of a local UN refugee agency employee detained in Myanmar for almost five months. He gave her no response.
“If the government detains UN people carrying out their professional functions, it doesn’t sit very well with their reform agenda,” she said.
Vivian Tan, a spokeswoman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, said that the agency had asked Myanmar for details of the charges but received no response.
Other UN aid workers were detained earlier this year over their alleged roles in the sectarian unrest, but have since been released.
Source: AFP
LONDON (Alertnet) – Activists from one of the world’s most persecuted minorities have called for U.N. peacekeepers and international observers to be sent to western Myanmar where an explosion of violence has left scores of people dead and displaced more than 100,000.
Simmering tensions between Buddhist Rakhines and Muslim Rohingyas in volatile Rakhine State first boiled over in June. The clashes were followed by further bloodshed in late October.
Rohingya organisations around the world declared Nov. 8 a global day of action to draw attention to the plight of Rohingyas in Myanmar, and called for demonstrations outside Myanmar embassies and foreign ministries.
In a joint statement signed by groups in 10 countries around the world, they called for a U.N. Commission of Inquiry into the violence and full access for delivery of aid. Rights groups have said the Rohingyas' plight has made them one of the world's most persecuted minorities.
An estimated 800,000 Rohingyas live in Myanmar but they are officially stateless. The Buddhist-majority government regards them as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and denies them citizenship.
Bangladesh, which does not recognise them either, has refused to grant Rohingyas refugee status since 1992 and the United Nations calls them "virtually friendless".
Thousands of homes have been destroyed in the recent violence and neighbourhoods have been burned to the ground, according to advocacy group Refugees International.
Tens of thousands of Rohingyas are now living in overcrowded camps with little water, sanitation or medical help. Rakhines have also been displaced but in far smaller numbers.
Melanie Teff, a senior advocate with Refugees International who visited Rakhine State in September, told AlertNet that conditions in the Rohingya camps “ranged from bad to utterly appalling”. A survey in August identified 2,000 acutely malnourished children at risk of dying.
Barriers have been erected on roads separating the two communities. Teff said restrictions on the movement of the Rohingyas meant many people had been cut off from their livelihoods.
Donors and aid agencies are worried that the displacement could lead to prolonged segregation which would entrench the Rohingyas’ marginalisation.
The statement, signed by Rohingya groups in Myanmar, Britain, Thailand, Malaysia, Japan, Australia, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark and Norway, also demands Myanmar repeal its 1982 citizenship law to end the Rohingyas’ stateless condition.
Simmering tensions between Buddhist Rakhines and Muslim Rohingyas in volatile Rakhine State first boiled over in June. The clashes were followed by further bloodshed in late October.
Rohingya organisations around the world declared Nov. 8 a global day of action to draw attention to the plight of Rohingyas in Myanmar, and called for demonstrations outside Myanmar embassies and foreign ministries.
In a joint statement signed by groups in 10 countries around the world, they called for a U.N. Commission of Inquiry into the violence and full access for delivery of aid. Rights groups have said the Rohingyas' plight has made them one of the world's most persecuted minorities.
An estimated 800,000 Rohingyas live in Myanmar but they are officially stateless. The Buddhist-majority government regards them as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and denies them citizenship.
Bangladesh, which does not recognise them either, has refused to grant Rohingyas refugee status since 1992 and the United Nations calls them "virtually friendless".
Thousands of homes have been destroyed in the recent violence and neighbourhoods have been burned to the ground, according to advocacy group Refugees International.
Tens of thousands of Rohingyas are now living in overcrowded camps with little water, sanitation or medical help. Rakhines have also been displaced but in far smaller numbers.
Melanie Teff, a senior advocate with Refugees International who visited Rakhine State in September, told AlertNet that conditions in the Rohingya camps “ranged from bad to utterly appalling”. A survey in August identified 2,000 acutely malnourished children at risk of dying.
Barriers have been erected on roads separating the two communities. Teff said restrictions on the movement of the Rohingyas meant many people had been cut off from their livelihoods.
Donors and aid agencies are worried that the displacement could lead to prolonged segregation which would entrench the Rohingyas’ marginalisation.
The statement, signed by Rohingya groups in Myanmar, Britain, Thailand, Malaysia, Japan, Australia, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark and Norway, also demands Myanmar repeal its 1982 citizenship law to end the Rohingyas’ stateless condition.
Sources : Alertnet
November 8, 2012 - Amsterdam, Netherlands: Burmese Rohingya Community in Netherlands demonstrated in front of Netherlands parliament in Den Haag.
The Rohingya activists and sympathizers of Rohingya in Netherlands demonstrated showing their Solidarity with other Rohingya organizations all over the world on the Day of Global Action against the state-sponsored genocides of Rohingyas and Kamans being carried in Arakan since June 2012. They demanded Myanmar government to immediately stop the genocidal killings and to send European special inquiry team and humanitarian aids to effected areas, to place displaced victims in their own land and to restore citizenship of Rohingya and recognize back as ethnic group of Burma.
The demonstration held from 12 pm to 4 pm.
RB News
M.S. Anwar
RB Article
November 8, 2012
Major section of Burmese society have been brainwashed by the hardcore dictatorship ruling the country for decades. They have been drowned in the delusion of racial purity and religious superiority. As a result, that has led them into being racists and fascists today. They hardly care about anyone and other religions besides their Burman race of Mongoloid origin and their religion Buddhism. For the worse, though they claim to be hardcore Buddhists, they never practice the soul principle of Buddhism, Metta (the loving-kindness). They think Metta is only for their own people or the people of their own kind. They seem to forget humanity. Were Gautama Buddha alive, he would be much disgusted with the skinned-head fascists and bigots in the saffron who falsely claim to preach Metta for humanity.
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The violence against Rohingyas and Kamans in Arakan is basically gross human rights violations and ethnic cleansing sponsored by the state. In many aspects, the genocide against them in Arakan is identical to that of Jews in Nazi Germany during WWII, Muslims in Bosnia and Hindus in Sri Lanka. Whoever or whatever Rohingyas are, they are human beings first. That's why all the concerned quarters demand all those countries who care about human rights and human beings to pressure Burmese Authoritarian Regime to stop the violence and to give them their due rights and status.
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And today, though the violence seemed to be anti-Rohingyas in the beginning, it seems that it is anti-Muslims. Many estimate that there will be a religious war targeted against Muslims all over the country. There have been recently nation-wide anti-Muslim demonstrations led by the skinned-fascists in saffron who are indirectly supported by the regime. Reports have it that Muslims in other parts of Burma are often targeted by fascist Monks and fanatic Buddhists. Moreover, there have been some reports that two Mosques in Karen state were destroyed by some unknown people using grenades. So, who are behind and what is in the destabilizing Burma? By the destabilizing the country, the ruling regime has been being able to:
- Divert the attention of people from its failures to tackle political and economic crises throughout their long reigns the way the late dictator Ne Win did by creating anti-Chinese violence from 1967 throughout 1970s.
- Depopularise Daw Aung San Suu Kyi nationally and internationally.
- Gain critically required people supports for the next election in 2015.
- Make foreign-based Burmese media and some foreign media (that have long been damaging them) untrustworthy among the Burmese people.
- Easily militarise Arakan to protect foreign investments benefitting them.
- And will finally be able to crawl back to the previous military dictatorships.
However, it will really be dismal to think that the Burmese regime is the sole stakeholder behind destabilizing the country because there can be many sides of a story rather than two. The purpose of the involvements of Rakhine terrorists in the mass-killings of Rohnigyas and Kamans is crystal clear: they want to have a separate and independent Arakan. Yet, there might be many more unseen powers playing to create unrest in the country so that they can take stronger base in the country and defeat one another politically and economically.
As I were saying, though 4% Muslim population in the country can hardly pose any threats, be it to the sovereignty of the nation or to Buddhism, the fanatic and supremacist Burmese dictators and the ultra-nationalist Burmese see the Muslims or Islam as the biggest threat. Therefore, it has become necessary for them to cleanse the Muslims first. The turns of the people of the faiths of Christianity, Hinduism and others etc might be followed.
Therefore, today’s anti-Rohingya and anti-Muslim movements can turn into anti-Indians, anti-Whites and Anti-Semitism tomorrow. Or it can turn into anti-Hindus, anti-Christians and anti-Jews etc when there are no more Muslims in the country. They are implementing their fascist policy step by step. (Note: In the violence in Arakan, many Hindus, too, have been killed together with Muslims because of their same physical appearances with Muslims. Majority of both Muslims and Hindus in Arakan are of Indo-Aryan descendants i.e. Indians. Indo-Aryans are the natives of the place called Arakan today. In the history, they had their own separate kingdoms. Later, Arakan was invaded by a feudal Burman king called Maung Wai and included into the Burma's map.)
After all, Burman ultranationalists carry resentment against British, Indian administrators and soldiers [whom Burman supremacists think inferior to them (Burman)] for dethroning their Supreme Kings. Besides, they were Indian Chettiers or money lenders, most of whom were South-Indian Hindu's, who did take much land used as collateral on loans that defaulted in the post-1900 economic downturn. It subsequently led Burman fanatics to riot against Indians which later came to be known as Kular-Bamar Riot. Thus, Burmese supremacist regime always wants to avenge these inferior creatures who once challenged their supremacy or supreme kingdoms whether or not it is possible. In short, Burmese supremacists are none other than modern Pro-Nazis and Neo-Fascists who want nothing but the sole Buddhism made up with the people of purely Burman of Mongoloid origin.
M.S. Anwar is an activist and student studying Bachelor of Arts in Business Studies at Westminster International College, Malaysia.
For Muslim Americans and other concerned citizens across the nation, news of still more violence against the largely Muslim Rohingya of Burma highlights the plight of one of the world’s most persecuted communities and the need for a global response. The latest bloodshed, coupled with two prior months of riots and murders, has left more than 700 dead and 80,000 homeless. This violence has been compounded by the behavior of the Burmese security forces who, according to major human rights organizations, have participated in killings and rapes as well as mass arrests against the Rohingya.
Despite recent democratic reforms, Burma’s new civilian government has failed to reverse decades of anti-Rohingya discrimination, including denial of citizenship. As a result, Rohingyas face severe religious freedom restrictions, including limits on the number of Muslim marriage ceremonies in certain villages. Authorities routinely deny them permits to build mosques and often destroy mosques and schools for lacking permits. The military offers charity, bribes, and promises of jobs or schooling for Muslim children converting to Buddhism.
This alarming state of affairs reveals how much farther Burma’s new government must go in advancing reform and protecting human rights, including religious freedom. Until improvements occur, the United States should maintain economic and political sanctions, including its designating Burma as a “country of particular concern” for severe religious freedom abuses.
We recognize Burma’s recent changes and the positive political opening they promise. Yet in the face of massive violations of human rights, and in particular the right to religious freedom, we must address the plight of the Rohingya. Public condemnations and food aid, while necessary, are insufficient when Burma’s 800,000 Rohingya remain stateless and vulnerable. Moreover, Burma’s experiment in democratic change will surely fail if it excludes the Rohingya and other ethnic and religious minorities.
At least three factors contributed to the crisis confronting Rohingya Muslims.
• First, anti-Rohingya animus runs deep. Many Burmese view the Rohingya as an unwelcome foreign presence that the British foisted on Burma in the 19th century. Unfortunately, even Nobel laureate Aun San Suu Kyi stopped short of publicly endorsing Rohingya citizenship.
• Second, Burma has a history of severe religious freedom violations, especially against non-Buddhist ethnic minorities, including both Muslims and many Christians among the Chin, Naga, Karen, and Karenni ethnic minorities.
• Finally, Burma’s military governments for decades maintained power through a divide-and-conquer strategy which pitted Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims against each other, and ethnic Rakhine against their Rohingya neighbors. Reflecting this strategy, Burma’s military in 1982 stripped the Rohingya of citizenship, and subsequently let violence, discrimination, and human rights abuses occur with impunity.
The mistreatment of the Rohingya should arouse the world’s conscience. Besides the ongoing anti-Rohingya violence inside Burma, at least 350,000 Muslim Rohingya languish in refugee camps in Bangladesh, Malaysia, and other Southeast Asian nations.
The new government’s treatment of the Rohingya serves as a bellwether for its treatment of other ethnic and religious minorities. Under military rule, Burma was one of the world’s worst human rights and religious freedom violators. Under civilian rule, it has yet to put that image behind it and fully affirm its ethnic and religious diversity by upholding human rights, including religious freedom, for everyone.
So how can we help the Rohingya?
The international community should speak out against anti-Rohingya violence and encourage Burma to increase the Rohingya’s protection. The United States and the UN have spoken out recently, as have countries like Indonesia, Turkey and Pakistan. This emerging coalition must support immediate security measures and a durable solution for the Rohingya in Burma and throughout Southeast Asia.
Further, the United States and world community must keep challenging Burma to embrace democracy and freedom. There must be coordinated efforts to convince Burma’s new government that protecting religious and ethnic minorities is not only the humanitarian thing to do, but is vital to security and prosperity.
If Burma wants a free and prosperous tomorrow, it must uphold the rights of all of its people -- Rohingya included -- today.
USCIRF
USCIRF
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Amartya Sen: Burma's "slow genocide" of Rohingyas
Watch Professor Amartya Sen speak on what he calls Burma's 'slow genocide' of Rohingya, Harvard, 4 Nov 2014
