BBC News
March 26, 2013
The death toll from communal violence in central Burma has risen to 40, state media say, amid reports of more unrest.
Soldiers clearing debris from buildings torched by angry mobs retrieved eight more bodies in Meiktila town, says the New Light of Myanmar newspaper.
This comes amid reports of attacks on a mosque and Muslim shops in Bago region, north of the city of Rangoon.
The US has warned its citizens to avoid travel to parts of Burma due to the violence, which began a week ago.
An argument at a gold shop reportedly sparked riots between Buddhists and Muslims in Meiktila in Mandalay region last Wednesday, displacing at least 9,000 residents.
The government has sent security forces to the area and on Monday issued a renewed call to end "religious extremism".
In a statement on Monday, the US embassy in Rangoon advised US citizens "to avoid travel to the Mandalay region because of escalating violence in that area".
Reports of other attacks on mosques and houses were reported on Monday in towns near Meiktila - Oh the Kone, Tatkone and Yamenthin.
It was not immediately clear who was behind the violence. Details of any casualties in these areas were also unclear.
The conflict is the worst since violence in Rakhine state last year, where nearly 200 people were killed and tens of thousands forced from their homes.
The conflict that erupted in Rakhine involved Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims, who are not recognised as Burmese citizens. Scores of Rohingyas have fled what they say is persecution in Burma in recent months.
IINA News
March 26, 2013
The Secretary General of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu strongly condemned the recent spreading of the violence against Muslims in Myanmar at the hands of extremist Buddhists.
Violence in Arakan in the West of the country continues uninterrupted since last June and has spread to other cities and areas, particularly in the Miektila city in the Mandalay region in the middle of the country, according to an OIC statement. As a result of this violence, scores of Muslims were killed and their homes and properties burnt, in addition to the burning of eight mosques and a number of schools. Hundreds of families fled their homes.
Expressing concern over the Myanmar government’s failure to protect the lives of its innocent civilians, the secretary general urged that such violence should not continue. It is the responsibility of the authorities to address the root causes of the issue and safeguard the lives and property of all the peoples of Myanmar. The OIC chief recalled resolutions passed by the summits of OIC in Makkah in August 2012 and Cairo in February 2013 as well as the meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers (CFM) in Djibouti in November 2012 seeking an end to repression against the Muslim Minority in Myanmar with particular reference to the right of citizenship for Rohingya Muslims in the Arakan Region. He added that the recent outbreak of violence highlighted the urgency for evolving a comprehensive approach to address the root causes of the issue.
The secretary general shared the deepening concern of the international community on the situation of human rights in Myanmar as reflected in the recent Resolution adopted by Human Rights Council in Geneva.
He called upon the government of Myanmar to address the concerns of the international community as reflected in the relevant UN and OIC Resolutions in particular the restoration of the citizenship of the Rohingya Muslim minority as well as the recommendations of the UN Special Rapporteur on Myanmar.
The secretary general clearly indicated that the situation of Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar was a priority item on the OIC agenda and that he was consistently in touch with the international political fora as well as the OIC Groups in Geneva and New York with a view to ensuring all possible assistance by the Organization towards alleviating their sufferings. He reiterated OIC’S willingness to provide humanitarian assistance, without discrimination, to the affected Arakan Region and called on the Myanmar authorities to remove obstacles hindering the delivery of the urgent humanitarian assistance. He added that OIC was willing to cooperate and coordinate for humanitarian assistance with the Aid Agencies, NGOs and other national and international organizations working in the region.
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| Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide Adama Dieng. Photo: Rick Bajornas |
UN News Centre
March 25, 2013
The United Nations Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide today voiced deep concern at reports of increased violence between Muslim and Buddhist communities in Myanmar, and called on leaders to promote respect for diversity and peaceful coexistence.
Last week President Thein Sein reportedly declared a state of emergency and imposed martial law in four central townships after several days of unrest between Buddhists and Muslims, including in Meiktila where at least 30 people were killed.
“The recent episode of violence in Meiktila in central Myanmar raises concerns that sectarian violence is spreading to other parts of the country,” stated Special Adviser Adama Dieng. “In the context of last year’s violence between Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine state, there is a considerable risk of further violence if measures are not put in place to prevent this escalation.”
Mr. Dieng said these measures must address not only the immediate consequences of the current violence but also the root causes of the problem. “Failing to do so can have serious future consequences which the international community has solemnly promised to prevent,” he stated.
“The Government of Myanmar must clearly demonstrate that it is serious about holding accountable those responsible for the past and present violence, regardless of their religious or ethnic affiliations,” he urged. “The Government must also take measures to protect populations still at risk.”
Noting that the State has the primary responsibility to protect its population, the Special Adviser called on the Government of Myanmar to address this situation as a matter of urgency, develop a comprehensive national strategy that upholds international human rights standards and promotes reconciliation and tolerance among Buddhist and Muslim communities in the country.
“I call upon all religious leaders, local leaders and the communities themselves, to promote a culture of respect for diversity and peaceful coexistence that is fundamental in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society such as the one in Myanmar,” stated Mr. Dieng
“As a country that has positively surprised the international community with its recent transformation towards democracy, Myanmar needs to demonstrate that the rule of law will prevail and that all those living within its borders are and will be protected from violence and discrimination, particularly on the basis of religion or ethnicity.”
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| Phuket Immigration is asking for donations for the Rohingya refugees they are detaining. Photo: Kritsada Mueanhawong |
Kritsada Mueanhawong
Phuket Gazette
March 26, 2013
PHUKET: Phuket Immigration is calling for donations of essentials for the 67 Rohingya currently under detention.
“We are requesting donations of food, toiletries and clothes for the Rohingya because we do not know how long they will be detained here, as other shelters are full,” said Capt Angkarn Yasanop of the Immigration office on Phuket Road.
Two groups of Rohingya have been apprehended in the past few days – 91 on Koh Lone on Friday and another 11 on Cape Panwa on Saturday (story here).
Capt Angkarn told the Gazette that “35 men have been transferred to Ranong Immigration. The rest are being detained in Phuket, with women and children now at a shelter in Koh Sireh.”
“We had to transfer some of them because Phuket Immigration was built to accommodate only 50 people,” he said.
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| The group of 39 Rohingya arrested in Phang Nga on Saturday. Photo: Kritsada Mueanhawong |
Another group of 39 Rohingya were arrested by 20 Takuapa Police at Tab Tawan beach in Phang Nga on Saturday.
“Police received a report from fishermen that they had spotted a 'suspicious' boat at sea. At first we saw only an empty boat moored at Tab Tawan beach in Ban Tab Tawan,” Takuapa Police Superintendent Khemarin Hatsiri said.
“Police looked around the area and found the refugees in a sea gypsy village,” Col Khemarin said.
“We arrested 37 men and two women who told us they left Rakhine state in a fishing boat on March 6. They intended to reach either Thailand or Malaysia to look for work,” Col Kemarin explained.
“They said they were very exhausted and hungry from the journey. They survived on water and uncooked rice,” he explained.
“They looked so exhausted, some of them cried out loud when they saw us,” he added.
“We offered them food and water, then brought them all to Takuapa police station to be processed. We intended to transfer them to Phang Nga Immigration,” he said, “but Phang Nga Immigration has no room for them; they are already at maximum capacity with Rohingya arrested previously,” he explained.
“We do not have a place to detain them while they wait to be deported,” he stated.
“I would like to ask the government to resolve the problem of Rohingya as soon as possible,” he added.
Nicholas Goroff
Progressive Press
Progressive Press
March 26, 2013
Human rights advocates throughout the globe are working overtime today to draw attention to the increasingly dire state of affairs in Myanmar. In recent decades, the centuries old ethnic tensions between the majority Buddhist population and the minority Muslim population (known as the “Rohingya,”) have led to increasingly bloody clashes between the two communities.
This month alone over thirty people have died in waves of violence carried out against the Rohingya villages and neighborhoods by Buddhist mobs.
Some reports claim that many of the mobs were led by area monks, who have allegedly been publishing anti-Muslim propaganda and inciting acts of arson and other violent attacks against the Rohingya. One monk in particular, hailing from the Meikhtila area, has been especially concerning to observers, as tensions escalate.
The self described “Bin Laden of Buddhism,” monk Wirathu, has remained a central figure in the conflict for over a decade, having been admittedly responsible for wide scale anti-Muslim propagandizing which in February resulted in a mob of 300 Buddhists descending on and destroying a school reported to be in the process of converting to a mosque.
In a press release by the Arakan Rohingya National Organisation on Saturday, the call was let out to end what they call “the systematic killing of Muslims in Burma.” It continued, claiming that since Wednesday, at least 14 mosques and hundreds of Muslim homes had been destroyed and that upwards of 20,000 ethnic Rohingya had been displaced.
On Saturday, 106 Rohingya people were found, starving and dehydrated, in a small boat floating adrift off the coast of Phuket.
Though unclear if these 106 are specifically part of the estimated 20,000 displaced from the past week’s violence, a total of 402 Rohingya refugees have been found at sea by Thai authorities alone, since the beginning of this year. Similar and at times greater numbers of refugees and expatriated Rohingya have also been reported throughout the region, with Malaysian authorities struggling to deal with increasing numbers of these desperate and displaced people.
Official state responses to the violence have been muted at best. Over the last two weeks, several hundred police and security forces have been dispatched to the troubled areas such as the state of Arakan, where violence and ethnic clashes have been a regular occurrence for decades. However despite their presence, as recently as last night, fifteen more Muslim homes were burned and destroyed, and as many as seven people were killed.
Concerns over state complicity and potentially even participation in the anti-Muslim violence are very real throughout the both human rights circles as well as area Rohingyas. According to a 2004 report by United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR,) regular violence and forced displacement of Rohingyas by Burmese/Myanmar military and security forces were common during 1990s and early 2000s, with hundreds of thousands being forced from their homes, murdered or otherwise disappeared.
Though historically the conflict has been considered an ethnic/religious one between the Buddhists and the Muslim minority, new concerns regarding economic interests have watchdogs ratcheting up their calls for international attention and possible intervention. The newly developed Shwe pipeline, which is set to open later this year, has caused worries that further forced displacement and violence is impending.
With major Western economic and banking interests such as the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS, owner of the U.S. “Citizens Bank” corporation,) as well as British finance giant Barclays backing the development of the pipeline, numerous calls for divestment throughout the human right advocacy community have been made, dovetailing concerns over further violence.
UK based human rights advocate and founder of “Save the Rohingya,” Jamila Hanan said of the coming developments, in a statement to energy industry watchdog “Priceofoil.org”:
“We are anticipating a third massacre of the Rohingya on the same scale which took place in Rwanda. We have been informed that this will take place sometime between now and mid-April.”
As outrage over both the atrocities taking place in Myanmar, as well as Western media’s relative silence on the matter continues to rise, the “hacktivist” group Anonymous has launched its own initiative to draw attention to the crisis.
Dubbed “OpRohingya,” Anonymous in collaboration with online and grassroots partners, has planned matching “Twitterstorm” and “Paperstorm” actions, aimed at pressuring officials and media outlets throughout the globe and Myanmar specifically, to speak up and condemn the violence which continues to plague the Rohingya.
During a tour of the affected areas in Myanmar on Friday, UN special adviser Vijay Nambiar expressed “deep sorrow” over the violence and destruction and called on religious and community leaders to “abjure violence, respect the law and promote peace”. However, between the long standing, deep rooted nature of the conflict, as well as the Myanmar government expressing little more than lip-service concern over the violence, of which they’ve directly taken part in previously, there is little expectation that any effective Burmese domestic solutions are on the horizon.
Gianluca Mezzofiore
International Business Times
March 26, 2013
March 26, 2013
Buddhist Monk Saydaw Wirathu, the self-styled "Burmese bin Laden", has called for a national boycott of Muslim businesses in Myanmar in a controversial video that emerged on YouTube.
Wirathu, who has led numerous vocal campaigns against Muslims in Burma and was arrested in 2003 for distributing anti-Muslim literature, urges Burmese people "to join the 969 Buddhist nationalist campaign" and "do business or interact with only our kind: same race and same faith".
"Your purchases spent in 'their' (Muslim) shops will benefit the Enemy," says Wirathu. "So, do business with only shops with 969 signs on their facets".
The numerology of 969 is derived from the Buddhist tradition in which 9 stands for the special attributes of Buddha; 6 for the special attributes of his teaching or Dhamma and 9 for the special attributes of the Sangha or Buddhist order.
In the footage filmed from Mandalay's Ma-soe-yein teaching monastery, Wirathu accuses Muslims of entertaining ties with the military junta that ruled Myanmar for five decades. The apartheid-like speech stirred shocked reaction on Twitter, with users calling the monk a "neo-Nazi" inciting anti-Muslim pogroms in Burma.
Wirathu played an active role in stirring tensions in a Rangoon suburb in February, by spreading unfounded rumours that a local school was being developed into a mosque, according to the Democratic voice of Burma. An angry mob of about 300 Buddhists assaulted the school and Muslim-owned businesses and shops in Rangoon. The monk said that his militancy "is vital to counter aggressive expansion by Muslims". He has also been implicated in religious clashes in Mandalay, where a dozen people died, in several local reports.
Sectarian clashes erupted this week in the central Myanmar city of Meikhtila, where mobs of Buddhists, some led by monks, have attacked a Muslim neighbourhood leaving at least 20 people dead.
"Buddhist monasteries have been distributing leaflets that were critical of Muslims on various things, and that has been going on for months" said Burma Campaign UK's director Mark Farmaner. He maintains there were individual reports, around 10, of monasteries around Rangoon and in the Rakhine state distributing anti-Muslim leaflets.
Muslims in Myanmar represent the 4 percent of a total population of 60 million, according to government census. However, according to the U.S. State Department's 2006 international religious freedom report, the country's non-Buddhist populations were underestimated in the census. Muslim leaders estimate that as much as 20 percent of the population may be Muslim.
To report problems or to leave feedback about this article, e-mail: g.mezzofiore@ibtimes.co.uk
To contact the editor, e-mail: editor@ibtimes.co.uk
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| Buddhist Monk Saydaw Wirathu (Facebook) |
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| A Rohingya woman and young child. Photo by Greg Constantine. |
Australian National University
March 26, 2013
A new ANU photographic exhibition is helping people see the world through the eyes of Burma’s persecuted Rohingya, writes OLIVIA CABLE.
Homeless, helpless and forgotten, an unwanted woman clutches her child in her frail arms as she sits forlornly on the road. She is one of many Rohingya, who due to religious and political persecution have had to flee Burma. Unfortunately this image is not so uncommon.
Now, a new photographic exhibition hosted by the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific is bringing Australians face-to-face with the plight of some of Burma’s most persecuted minorities.
The exhibition, Exiled to Nowhere, features the work of award-winning photographer Greg Constantine and forms part of the 2013 Myanmar/Burma Update. The photos focus on the everyday experiences of Rohingya – a Muslim minority from the Rakhine State in Myanmar’s southwest.
It does not paint a pretty picture.
The black and white images are nothing short of harrowing. Some images show those who have fled, like the group of 20 Rohingya who, exhausted from their journey, are detained as their boat crosses a river from Myanmar to Bangladesh.
Others show the malnourished, gaunt and almost dead, those desperately needing medical attention, and the heart broken – their spirits so shattered that it’s hard to see how tomorrow offers any hope.
Desperate to escape Burma, thousands of Rohingya pay brokers to be smuggled by boat to Malaysia. Another photo shows just what can go wrong, depicting a group of refugees, who after being intercepted by the Thai military, have been pushed back to an uncertain fate with no engine, and little food and water. Their faces are drawn, their eyes are empty.
Photographer Greg Constantine says that the inspiration for the exhibition stems from a project he has been working on since 2005, ‘Nowhere People’, which documents minority groups from around the world who have had their citizenship stripped or denied.
“When I started the project back in 2005, I focused specifically on stateless groups in Asia. The Rohingya are probably one of, if not, the most extreme cases of statelessness in the world today. To me, including the Rohingya in this project was essential,” says Constantine.
“I started my work on the Rohingya in early 2006 and it became immediately apparent to me that this story had many levels to it. It was extremely complex, and amazingly almost no one was exploring or documenting it.
“Because the situation for the Rohingya has changed almost every year since 2006, and not for the better, I felt compelled to keep going back. Since 2006, I’ve been to southern Bangladesh (a site where many Rohingya now live in limbo) eight times. Since the ethnic violence in Rakhine last summer, I’ve been to the Sittwe area in Burma twice.”
Almost resigned to their predicament, Constantine concedes that a lot more needs to be done to open the world’s eyes to the Rohingya’s situation.
“I think my main motivation for continuing this project on the Rohingya has been to do everything I can to chronicle their ongoing plight, and use my work to humanise who they are and the challenges they face.”
Granted few social, economic and civil rights, subjected to forced labor, arbitrary land seizure and religious persecution, over the past 40 years some one million Rohingya have been stripped or denied citizenship by the Burmese government.
Around 20 Rohingya from the Burmese Rohingya Community in Australia (BRCA) attended this year’s Myanmar/Burma update. Mohammad Anwar, President of the BRCA says the Rohingya face more and more challenges informing the rest of the world about their suffering.
“We came to the conference to tell the truth of Rohingya history in the Rakhine state. The Burmese RNDP (Rakine Nationalities Development Party) General Secretary will try to deceive the international community and scholars with wrong information about Rohingya history.
“We have seen the Burmese Government, Rakhine historians and the RNDP lie for years, as recently done at a conference in Bangkok. We do not want the Australian community to be deceived by the RNDP and Burmese government.”
With mixed emotions, Anwar expresses his appreciation for the effort Constantine has put into the project.
“On the one hand, we were amazed with the artwork shown at the exhibition. On the other hand, our hearts cry seeing our people suffering in that way. It’s hard to explain our feelings and we are highly appreciative of Greg’s effort to show the Rohingya’s suffering, and their real life in refugee camps.”
Exiled to Nowhere will be on display in the Hedley Bull Centre at the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific until May 2013.
By Maung Zarni – Visiting Fellow (2011-2013), Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit, London School of Economics & Visiting Senior Research Fellow, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur.
Burma’s conflicts are neither new nor are they singular. Conflicts along multiple-lines – class and ideology, civil society and the military, and ethnic groups– have been going on for nearly 65 years, that is, since Burma’s independence from Britain in 1947/1948.[1]Understanding its conflict requires appreciation of the ‘deep’ historical dimensions; Burmese modern history is conflict-soaked(1947-present). Historically, the country was born out of pre-colonial and colonial conflicts in terms of ethnic relations, class divisions, and domestic power cliques, and into a new set of conflicts upon independence in January 1948. We can roughly divide the periods of conflict thus: the Cold War (1945-1989), the immediate post-Cold War period with its signature Western triumphalism (e.g., ‘The End of History’) (1988/89-2008), and the ‘new Cold War’ or new ‘Containment’[2] (2008-present)
When we talk about conflicts and advocacy, this periodization is crucial, because shifting external contexts and macro-level developments in international relations and the world economy have had significant impacts on both the country’s internal conflicts and the Burma advocacy, whether the advocacy is done by the West or the Burmese themselves.
It is inaccurate to frame Burma’s conflicts as ‘internal’ and advocacy as ‘Western.’ The term ‘internal conflicts’ is misleading because it implies neat discursive boundaries, as if Burma’s internal conflicts were simply confined within the country’s geographic national boundaries, with no real or significant outside players or interests (for instance, the U.S., the EU, ASEAN, China, India, and so on).Historically and sociologically, the methods of advocacy, the ethics or official rationale behind certain Western policy stances, and the impacts on the targeted conflict(s) (that is, Burma’s conflicts) shift depending on the discourse of security at play.
Three discourses of security as a macro-analytical framework dominate:
1) ‘National Security’ (i.e., ‘regime security’) – internal interests and value system
2) Global Security (For whom? Toward what end(s)? In whose interest?)
3) Human Security (i.e., security of humans as individuals and communities) (a liberal humanistic discourse of well-being, physical safety, and public welfare, which contrasts sharply with the former two institution-centered securities/interests)
The first two are more or less two sides of the same dominant coin. Interstate global capitalism is stitched together by the UN, ASEAN, the EU, the ANU, the OIC, and IFIs (IMF, World Bank, ADB, etc.), where nation-states, both the institutions and the individuals who manage them, serve as building blocks of the global political economy in which private corporate interests reign supreme. This is a marriage of convenience—although there may or may not be love in these marriages, namely an ideological/cultural affinity or compatibility. And there is certainly room for intra-marriage conflicts and competition, but also internal elite interests and outside/external interests.
The third – human- or people-centered – security trails asa distant third in Western policy making. This reality is opposed to public discussions, where the omnipresent rhetoric of human rights masks its diminished status.
Advocacy in the Burmese context
My discussion will be confined to two periods: the post-Cold War Western triumphalist era (starting with the fall of Berlin Wall in 1989 and ending with the first Obama presidency, which marked the beginning of a radical shift in Washington’s Burma policy) and the new ‘Cold War’ or ‘China Containment.’
In the Post-Cold War era, he chief advocates were (in order of importance and influence):Aung San SuuKyi and her Burmese followers and international supporters, individual and institutional, from grassroots to ‘high-level advocacy’ (a loose global coalition of activists, advocates, lobbyists, and institutions in the fields of Human Rights, Environment, Policy and Legislative Affairs, Corporate Social Responsibility, Religion, Social Justice, and Women’s Affairs); and ethnic minority advocates. Their work was grounded in liberal ideals including freedom, democracy and human rights, as well as non- violence and new environmental/ecological outlooks and ideas.
Their methods of advocacy included old-fashioned face-to-face lobbying, grassroots direct actions, media advocacy, personal connections (the ‘champions,’ GOP Senator Mitch McConnell, Andrew Samak, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and St. Antony’s College web of Michael Aris and colleagues and friends). The policies they advocated were largely punitive, more sticks than carrots. There were three waves of punitive measures since the uprisings and bloody crackdowns in the fall of 1988, further facilitated by the nearing end of the Cold War: starting with the downgrading of U.S. diplomatic relations from Ambassadorial to Charge d’Affairs, eventually culminating in various economic sanctions, including the highly restrictive financial sanctions, denial of ‘development assistance,’ humanitarian aid, and resumption of loans from the World Bank and other IFIs and development banks).
Here it is crucial to recognize the ‘circularity’ or ‘circular nature’ of policy substance, messages, and rationales. To be more specific, the chief advocate in Burma, Aung San SuuKyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD), and Western Burma advocates – Burmese and non-Burmese, individual and institutional, grassroots and high-level – crafted the messages and rationale in a concerted fashion for about twenty years. Some messages originated in Rangoon and were amplified in the West, while others were formulated in key Western capitals such as Washington and London and subsequently ‘blessed’ by the NLD leadership.
Unlike during the Cold War era, with regard to Burma policy advocacy efforts, insofar as they existed, the effective promotion of circular Burma policy ideas and substance was greatly enhanced by the rise of the information technology, such as the worldwide web, personal e-mails, fax machines, and other digital technologies.
Impacts on the conflicts inside Burma—and society at large
Burma has already been isolated for 25 years under the one-party dictatorship of General Ne Win (1962-88),which was fully supported by the West, when, following the Cold War, the West shifted its Burma policy discourse and priorities, and, in line with calls from the NDL activists, further isolated the country internationally. The result was to arrest Burma’s ‘natural’ political and societal evolution with devastating long-term social and institutional consequences.
Contrast this to the Western approach to the equally repressive VietNam, especially Washington’s embrace of VietNam while both Rangoon and Hanoi attempted to open their countries’ economies along the state-led ‘Free Marketization’ process. Western advocacy further inflamed the main society-military conflicts as the former pushed for democratization and human rights in Burma. Among the ruling military circles in Burma and in ASEAN and Asian governments, this was nothing more than a typical Western double standard (as the West continued to support Suharto’s Indonesia and patched up with authoritarian VietNam).
Fearful of the West’s ‘hidden agenda’ under the disguise of human rights and democracy, the military intensified its repression against the Western-backed dissidents led by Aung San SuuKyi, while making ceasefire deals with armed ethnic minority resistance groups, thereby constraining the Burmese generals’ fight to a single-front battle, against the mainstream opposition of Aung San SuuKyi and the West.
This liberal Western advocacy was made possible because Burma was one of the places where the West felt it could afford to live out its liberal values,as it was pursuing its ‘core interests’ in places like the Middle East and, to a lesser extent, elsewhere in East and Southeast Asia. In other words, advocacy of human security was allowed to dominate Burma policy discussions and media coverage because other Western interests in Burma were not deemed very important.
Further, a typical defense of the West’s pro-isolationist and categorically punitive policies towards Burma in those years is that as a liberal democratic bloc it had no choice but to adopt the sanctions against the country under military rule. For the military held the general elections in 1990 and then simply nullified the NLD’s landslide electoral victory, a rather weak rationale considering that the West behaved differently towards Algeria and Nigeria which too held the elections the same year.
One significant negative impact of the last twenty-five years is the manufacturing of Aung San SuuKyi as a human rights icon and the adoption of her as ‘the darling of the capitalist West’ whose messages of individual rights lacked any critical class and economic analyses. Consequently, mainstream society’s conflict with the ruling military came to be personalized, erasing all other important aspects of the domestic conflicts such as class and ideological differences within the pro-democracy opposition and promoting the narrative of an Oxford-educated daughter of a martyred Asian nationalist taking on a beastly military regime of home-grown thugs and brutes This liberal narrative devoid of a crucial class understanding resonated with do-gooding Western audiences that generally view their West as a global force for good.
Despite the circulation of liberal vocabularies such as human rights or democracy, Suu Kyi’s opposition – and its societal supporters – failed to internalize any ideals they advocated – human rights, ethnic equality, liberty, universal brotherhood (and sisterhood). The opposition’s notable silence, starting with Aung San SuuKyi’s refusal to condemn the state-facilitated violence primarily against the Muslim Rohingya population, to the second and third line leaderships, is a case in point of the absence of any value transformation in the Burmese opposition in particular and in the pro-opposition society in general. This needs to be viewed as the inefficacy of the Western advocacy model to facilitate diverse voices for human rights and democratization. The West was trapped in its choice method of anointing a single voice – that is, Aung San SuuKyi – as the sole voice of the voiceless Burmese people, “the hope of Burma”.
Also noteworthy is that the nearly two dozen ethnic minority resistance groups, with the exception of the Karen National Union (KNU), the oldest armed non-state revolutionary group, did not feel a need to engage with Western advocacy because they were in various disparate ceasefire arrangements with the Burmese military . Even if these groups had engaged with the West on its Burma policies, it is doubtful whether their voices would have been taken as seriously as that of Aung San SuuKyi and the National League for Democracy. The KNU certainly did not gain any support, material or otherwise, from any Western government it had lobbied.
The New Cold War Era (2008-present)
There is a new crop of chief advocates that has come to overpower the old Burma democracy advocates, including Aung San SuuKyi. With regard to outside interests, for instance, Washington and the EU, both national governments and as a bloc, have reassessed and re-prioritized their respective Burma policies in the context of the decline of Western global influence and economic woes at home .None other than Obama’s White House led the charge in shifting Western advocacy from a focus on democracy and human rights, into line with the ‘Asian pivot’ or ‘new balancing’ paradigm. Luckily for the West, because it has long made Aung San SuuKyi the ‘voice of the voiceless’ in Burma, it found it relatively easy to bring on board a single dissident leader to accept the terms of (her) engagement with the ruling military.
Meanwhile, a ‘new’ discourse of ‘civil society’ has been developed and promoted by various Western advocacy groups, INGOs, media outlets, business interests, and faith-based organizations backed by Western governments, international development agencies, the UN, and other multilateral organizations. I put the word ‘new’ in quotation marks because this political and analytical notion has been around in modern political history since the days of the resistance movements against authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe. But, only in the later days of Western advocacy did Western governmental-sponsors of social and institutional change along ‘free market’ lines (for instance, the U.S. State Department and the U.K.’s Department of International Development) begin to promote the language of civil society, breeding a new group of urban elite Burmese tolerated by and/or with symbiotic ties to the Burmese military and its ruling circles.
One of the most crucial developments to note here is that Western advocacy is no longer circular in its direction or substance. In the new era of ‘re-balancing’ or the ‘Asian pivot,’ the West, specifically Washington, no longer needed Burmese dissidents, morally speaking, for the substance of its strategic and policy messages beyond Aung San SuuKyi’s public ‘blessings.’ On their part, the mushrooming of civil society groups and advocates – many of them led by Western-funded and -trained ‘civil society actors’ – are used as an alternative ‘domestic’ social force, a dynamic alternative to the snail-paced, elderly-dominated National League for Democracy of Aung San SuuKyi. Many of these Burmese ‘civil society’ actors are used in Western advocacy at multiple levels: at the grassroots, these local groups are supported by the West in what I call the ‘NGO-ization’ of national and local politics, while the ones with close ties to the generals and ex-generals serve as ‘fixers' or ‘high-level advocacy’ local proxies for Western interests.
Further, since 2008, when the Obama Administration began its Burma policy review as part of its overall national security interest paradigm shift,the West has focused on lobbying the Burmese regime. This time, Washington has a new Burma mission: to create a new comfort zone for the generals and ex- generals wherein they would do business with the West, one step removed from Beijing. The new Western advocacy is about realpolitik while it continues to speak of Burma’s internal national reconciliation, gradual democratic transition, and human rights.
One other important development in terms of the emergence of new chief advocates is the fact that individuals and institutions with close ties to Western strategic and commercial interests (for instance, the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, etc.) have come to occupy the center stage of Burma advocacy. Instead of the usual liberal human rights discourse, Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke of bringing world-class American investors to Burma and sending the CIA chief to Burma in promotion of the country’s reforms. On their part, international financial institutions (IFIs), development banks and organizations, the UN, and humanitarian INGOs have gotten with the program.
As is to be expected, Burma advocates and advocacy groups – with their human rights, environmental issues, corporate social responsibility, women’s and ethnic rights, etc. –have found themselves on their back foot in the face of the ‘new’ Burma advocacy groups who speak the language of ‘political pragmatism,’ ‘economic developmentalism,’ ‘the Middle-Class-before-human-rights,’ ‘gradualism,’ and so on.
Burma’s conflicts are neither new nor are they singular. Conflicts along multiple-lines – class and ideology, civil society and the military, and ethnic groups– have been going on for nearly 65 years, that is, since Burma’s independence from Britain in 1947/1948.[1]Understanding its conflict requires appreciation of the ‘deep’ historical dimensions; Burmese modern history is conflict-soaked(1947-present). Historically, the country was born out of pre-colonial and colonial conflicts in terms of ethnic relations, class divisions, and domestic power cliques, and into a new set of conflicts upon independence in January 1948. We can roughly divide the periods of conflict thus: the Cold War (1945-1989), the immediate post-Cold War period with its signature Western triumphalism (e.g., ‘The End of History’) (1988/89-2008), and the ‘new Cold War’ or new ‘Containment’[2] (2008-present)
When we talk about conflicts and advocacy, this periodization is crucial, because shifting external contexts and macro-level developments in international relations and the world economy have had significant impacts on both the country’s internal conflicts and the Burma advocacy, whether the advocacy is done by the West or the Burmese themselves.
It is inaccurate to frame Burma’s conflicts as ‘internal’ and advocacy as ‘Western.’ The term ‘internal conflicts’ is misleading because it implies neat discursive boundaries, as if Burma’s internal conflicts were simply confined within the country’s geographic national boundaries, with no real or significant outside players or interests (for instance, the U.S., the EU, ASEAN, China, India, and so on).Historically and sociologically, the methods of advocacy, the ethics or official rationale behind certain Western policy stances, and the impacts on the targeted conflict(s) (that is, Burma’s conflicts) shift depending on the discourse of security at play.
Three discourses of security as a macro-analytical framework dominate:
1) ‘National Security’ (i.e., ‘regime security’) – internal interests and value system
2) Global Security (For whom? Toward what end(s)? In whose interest?)
3) Human Security (i.e., security of humans as individuals and communities) (a liberal humanistic discourse of well-being, physical safety, and public welfare, which contrasts sharply with the former two institution-centered securities/interests)
The first two are more or less two sides of the same dominant coin. Interstate global capitalism is stitched together by the UN, ASEAN, the EU, the ANU, the OIC, and IFIs (IMF, World Bank, ADB, etc.), where nation-states, both the institutions and the individuals who manage them, serve as building blocks of the global political economy in which private corporate interests reign supreme. This is a marriage of convenience—although there may or may not be love in these marriages, namely an ideological/cultural affinity or compatibility. And there is certainly room for intra-marriage conflicts and competition, but also internal elite interests and outside/external interests.
The third – human- or people-centered – security trails asa distant third in Western policy making. This reality is opposed to public discussions, where the omnipresent rhetoric of human rights masks its diminished status.
Advocacy in the Burmese context
My discussion will be confined to two periods: the post-Cold War Western triumphalist era (starting with the fall of Berlin Wall in 1989 and ending with the first Obama presidency, which marked the beginning of a radical shift in Washington’s Burma policy) and the new ‘Cold War’ or ‘China Containment.’
In the Post-Cold War era, he chief advocates were (in order of importance and influence):Aung San SuuKyi and her Burmese followers and international supporters, individual and institutional, from grassroots to ‘high-level advocacy’ (a loose global coalition of activists, advocates, lobbyists, and institutions in the fields of Human Rights, Environment, Policy and Legislative Affairs, Corporate Social Responsibility, Religion, Social Justice, and Women’s Affairs); and ethnic minority advocates. Their work was grounded in liberal ideals including freedom, democracy and human rights, as well as non- violence and new environmental/ecological outlooks and ideas.
Their methods of advocacy included old-fashioned face-to-face lobbying, grassroots direct actions, media advocacy, personal connections (the ‘champions,’ GOP Senator Mitch McConnell, Andrew Samak, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and St. Antony’s College web of Michael Aris and colleagues and friends). The policies they advocated were largely punitive, more sticks than carrots. There were three waves of punitive measures since the uprisings and bloody crackdowns in the fall of 1988, further facilitated by the nearing end of the Cold War: starting with the downgrading of U.S. diplomatic relations from Ambassadorial to Charge d’Affairs, eventually culminating in various economic sanctions, including the highly restrictive financial sanctions, denial of ‘development assistance,’ humanitarian aid, and resumption of loans from the World Bank and other IFIs and development banks).
Here it is crucial to recognize the ‘circularity’ or ‘circular nature’ of policy substance, messages, and rationales. To be more specific, the chief advocate in Burma, Aung San SuuKyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD), and Western Burma advocates – Burmese and non-Burmese, individual and institutional, grassroots and high-level – crafted the messages and rationale in a concerted fashion for about twenty years. Some messages originated in Rangoon and were amplified in the West, while others were formulated in key Western capitals such as Washington and London and subsequently ‘blessed’ by the NLD leadership.
Unlike during the Cold War era, with regard to Burma policy advocacy efforts, insofar as they existed, the effective promotion of circular Burma policy ideas and substance was greatly enhanced by the rise of the information technology, such as the worldwide web, personal e-mails, fax machines, and other digital technologies.
Impacts on the conflicts inside Burma—and society at large
Burma has already been isolated for 25 years under the one-party dictatorship of General Ne Win (1962-88),which was fully supported by the West, when, following the Cold War, the West shifted its Burma policy discourse and priorities, and, in line with calls from the NDL activists, further isolated the country internationally. The result was to arrest Burma’s ‘natural’ political and societal evolution with devastating long-term social and institutional consequences.
Contrast this to the Western approach to the equally repressive VietNam, especially Washington’s embrace of VietNam while both Rangoon and Hanoi attempted to open their countries’ economies along the state-led ‘Free Marketization’ process. Western advocacy further inflamed the main society-military conflicts as the former pushed for democratization and human rights in Burma. Among the ruling military circles in Burma and in ASEAN and Asian governments, this was nothing more than a typical Western double standard (as the West continued to support Suharto’s Indonesia and patched up with authoritarian VietNam).
Fearful of the West’s ‘hidden agenda’ under the disguise of human rights and democracy, the military intensified its repression against the Western-backed dissidents led by Aung San SuuKyi, while making ceasefire deals with armed ethnic minority resistance groups, thereby constraining the Burmese generals’ fight to a single-front battle, against the mainstream opposition of Aung San SuuKyi and the West.
This liberal Western advocacy was made possible because Burma was one of the places where the West felt it could afford to live out its liberal values,as it was pursuing its ‘core interests’ in places like the Middle East and, to a lesser extent, elsewhere in East and Southeast Asia. In other words, advocacy of human security was allowed to dominate Burma policy discussions and media coverage because other Western interests in Burma were not deemed very important.
Further, a typical defense of the West’s pro-isolationist and categorically punitive policies towards Burma in those years is that as a liberal democratic bloc it had no choice but to adopt the sanctions against the country under military rule. For the military held the general elections in 1990 and then simply nullified the NLD’s landslide electoral victory, a rather weak rationale considering that the West behaved differently towards Algeria and Nigeria which too held the elections the same year.
One significant negative impact of the last twenty-five years is the manufacturing of Aung San SuuKyi as a human rights icon and the adoption of her as ‘the darling of the capitalist West’ whose messages of individual rights lacked any critical class and economic analyses. Consequently, mainstream society’s conflict with the ruling military came to be personalized, erasing all other important aspects of the domestic conflicts such as class and ideological differences within the pro-democracy opposition and promoting the narrative of an Oxford-educated daughter of a martyred Asian nationalist taking on a beastly military regime of home-grown thugs and brutes This liberal narrative devoid of a crucial class understanding resonated with do-gooding Western audiences that generally view their West as a global force for good.
Despite the circulation of liberal vocabularies such as human rights or democracy, Suu Kyi’s opposition – and its societal supporters – failed to internalize any ideals they advocated – human rights, ethnic equality, liberty, universal brotherhood (and sisterhood). The opposition’s notable silence, starting with Aung San SuuKyi’s refusal to condemn the state-facilitated violence primarily against the Muslim Rohingya population, to the second and third line leaderships, is a case in point of the absence of any value transformation in the Burmese opposition in particular and in the pro-opposition society in general. This needs to be viewed as the inefficacy of the Western advocacy model to facilitate diverse voices for human rights and democratization. The West was trapped in its choice method of anointing a single voice – that is, Aung San SuuKyi – as the sole voice of the voiceless Burmese people, “the hope of Burma”.
Also noteworthy is that the nearly two dozen ethnic minority resistance groups, with the exception of the Karen National Union (KNU), the oldest armed non-state revolutionary group, did not feel a need to engage with Western advocacy because they were in various disparate ceasefire arrangements with the Burmese military . Even if these groups had engaged with the West on its Burma policies, it is doubtful whether their voices would have been taken as seriously as that of Aung San SuuKyi and the National League for Democracy. The KNU certainly did not gain any support, material or otherwise, from any Western government it had lobbied.
The New Cold War Era (2008-present)
There is a new crop of chief advocates that has come to overpower the old Burma democracy advocates, including Aung San SuuKyi. With regard to outside interests, for instance, Washington and the EU, both national governments and as a bloc, have reassessed and re-prioritized their respective Burma policies in the context of the decline of Western global influence and economic woes at home .None other than Obama’s White House led the charge in shifting Western advocacy from a focus on democracy and human rights, into line with the ‘Asian pivot’ or ‘new balancing’ paradigm. Luckily for the West, because it has long made Aung San SuuKyi the ‘voice of the voiceless’ in Burma, it found it relatively easy to bring on board a single dissident leader to accept the terms of (her) engagement with the ruling military.
Meanwhile, a ‘new’ discourse of ‘civil society’ has been developed and promoted by various Western advocacy groups, INGOs, media outlets, business interests, and faith-based organizations backed by Western governments, international development agencies, the UN, and other multilateral organizations. I put the word ‘new’ in quotation marks because this political and analytical notion has been around in modern political history since the days of the resistance movements against authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe. But, only in the later days of Western advocacy did Western governmental-sponsors of social and institutional change along ‘free market’ lines (for instance, the U.S. State Department and the U.K.’s Department of International Development) begin to promote the language of civil society, breeding a new group of urban elite Burmese tolerated by and/or with symbiotic ties to the Burmese military and its ruling circles.
One of the most crucial developments to note here is that Western advocacy is no longer circular in its direction or substance. In the new era of ‘re-balancing’ or the ‘Asian pivot,’ the West, specifically Washington, no longer needed Burmese dissidents, morally speaking, for the substance of its strategic and policy messages beyond Aung San SuuKyi’s public ‘blessings.’ On their part, the mushrooming of civil society groups and advocates – many of them led by Western-funded and -trained ‘civil society actors’ – are used as an alternative ‘domestic’ social force, a dynamic alternative to the snail-paced, elderly-dominated National League for Democracy of Aung San SuuKyi. Many of these Burmese ‘civil society’ actors are used in Western advocacy at multiple levels: at the grassroots, these local groups are supported by the West in what I call the ‘NGO-ization’ of national and local politics, while the ones with close ties to the generals and ex-generals serve as ‘fixers' or ‘high-level advocacy’ local proxies for Western interests.
Further, since 2008, when the Obama Administration began its Burma policy review as part of its overall national security interest paradigm shift,the West has focused on lobbying the Burmese regime. This time, Washington has a new Burma mission: to create a new comfort zone for the generals and ex- generals wherein they would do business with the West, one step removed from Beijing. The new Western advocacy is about realpolitik while it continues to speak of Burma’s internal national reconciliation, gradual democratic transition, and human rights.
One other important development in terms of the emergence of new chief advocates is the fact that individuals and institutions with close ties to Western strategic and commercial interests (for instance, the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, etc.) have come to occupy the center stage of Burma advocacy. Instead of the usual liberal human rights discourse, Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke of bringing world-class American investors to Burma and sending the CIA chief to Burma in promotion of the country’s reforms. On their part, international financial institutions (IFIs), development banks and organizations, the UN, and humanitarian INGOs have gotten with the program.
As is to be expected, Burma advocates and advocacy groups – with their human rights, environmental issues, corporate social responsibility, women’s and ethnic rights, etc. –have found themselves on their back foot in the face of the ‘new’ Burma advocacy groups who speak the language of ‘political pragmatism,’ ‘economic developmentalism,’ ‘the Middle-Class-before-human-rights,’ ‘gradualism,’ and so on.
Despite the same pervasive human rights violations, perpetual humanitarian crises, the genocide against the Rohingya, a full-blown war against the Kachins in northern Burma, and mining and development-induced mass displacement of rural and ethnic communities, President Obama went on to frame Burma, in effect, as ‘a success story’ of his U.S. foreign policy.
The Messages
Human rights is out. ‘State capacity building’ is in. Ethnic conflicts are no longer to be resolved, but to be allowed to run their course without outside intervention – the kind that Ed Luttwak suggested in the case of the Israel-Palestine conflict and the kind the Sri Lankan army pursued.
In the name of political realism, the same Western advocacy that punished the Burmese generals for refusing to honor the results of the 1990 general elections, which would have made Aung San SuuKyi effectively a new Prime Minister in the post-Ne Win era, is now rewarding the same military, albeit under a new management, for allowing her to take her a largely symbolic seat in the Parliament that was created in accord with the anti-democratic – not just unfair or undemocratic – Constitution written by and for the military.
The Ethics
In spite of the liberal veneer of reforms, democratic transition and the operational rationale behind a new Western advocacy – this time dominated by powerful national security and commercial interests in Western capitals – is realpolitik through and through. When ‘pragmatism’ roars, liberal humanism retreats into quiet if disgruntled quarters populated by marginalized Burmese dissidents and their international Western solidarity groups. The new discourses of civil society, gradual reforms, and democratic transition are still justified in the name of human welfare and the human progress of the Burmese. This new ‘messaging’ can only be fully understood and appreciated if one places the new Western advocacy – insofar as it has been completely taken over by national security and commercial interests – in the typology of the‘three securities’ – national/regime security (of the Burmese regime), global security of commercial and strategic interests, and human security.
This time, the dominant Western advocacy no longer deems the promotion of human rights, beyond the rhetoric of Western and Burmese officials, as something affordable. But the ugly realities of human insecurity as lived by the great majority of Burmese Buddhist farmers, Rohingya Muslims, and Burmese Christians are difficult, if not impossible to address. So, Western advocacy is experiencing a Buddhist turn for the first time in the past twenty-five years: it’s all in the state of mind. If you can’t change the reality, change your perception, and the way you frame it, especially when doing so advances your national interest, however defined – hence, President Obama and his showcasing Burma as ‘a success story’ of his foreign policy.
The Impacts
The full consequences of this new Western advocacy will not be known for a long time. But if history is any indication, Western engagement with Burma’s authoritarian regimes (or, for that matter, with any other unsavory regimes) that is not informed by any humanistic principles but is largely driven by the West’s ‘core interests’ in Burma has not advanced the cause of public welfare.
[1]Post-WWII Britain in effect agreed to Burma’s independence the same year as India’s independence–1947, but for astrological reasons the Burmese nationalist leaders chose to do the formal transfer of power only in the early morningof4 January 1948.
[2]I amusing the Cold War-era vocabularies with full awareness of differences and new developments in the emerging ‘balance of power' scenarios and the Cold War-past.
The Messages
Human rights is out. ‘State capacity building’ is in. Ethnic conflicts are no longer to be resolved, but to be allowed to run their course without outside intervention – the kind that Ed Luttwak suggested in the case of the Israel-Palestine conflict and the kind the Sri Lankan army pursued.
In the name of political realism, the same Western advocacy that punished the Burmese generals for refusing to honor the results of the 1990 general elections, which would have made Aung San SuuKyi effectively a new Prime Minister in the post-Ne Win era, is now rewarding the same military, albeit under a new management, for allowing her to take her a largely symbolic seat in the Parliament that was created in accord with the anti-democratic – not just unfair or undemocratic – Constitution written by and for the military.
The Ethics
In spite of the liberal veneer of reforms, democratic transition and the operational rationale behind a new Western advocacy – this time dominated by powerful national security and commercial interests in Western capitals – is realpolitik through and through. When ‘pragmatism’ roars, liberal humanism retreats into quiet if disgruntled quarters populated by marginalized Burmese dissidents and their international Western solidarity groups. The new discourses of civil society, gradual reforms, and democratic transition are still justified in the name of human welfare and the human progress of the Burmese. This new ‘messaging’ can only be fully understood and appreciated if one places the new Western advocacy – insofar as it has been completely taken over by national security and commercial interests – in the typology of the‘three securities’ – national/regime security (of the Burmese regime), global security of commercial and strategic interests, and human security.
This time, the dominant Western advocacy no longer deems the promotion of human rights, beyond the rhetoric of Western and Burmese officials, as something affordable. But the ugly realities of human insecurity as lived by the great majority of Burmese Buddhist farmers, Rohingya Muslims, and Burmese Christians are difficult, if not impossible to address. So, Western advocacy is experiencing a Buddhist turn for the first time in the past twenty-five years: it’s all in the state of mind. If you can’t change the reality, change your perception, and the way you frame it, especially when doing so advances your national interest, however defined – hence, President Obama and his showcasing Burma as ‘a success story’ of his foreign policy.
The Impacts
The full consequences of this new Western advocacy will not be known for a long time. But if history is any indication, Western engagement with Burma’s authoritarian regimes (or, for that matter, with any other unsavory regimes) that is not informed by any humanistic principles but is largely driven by the West’s ‘core interests’ in Burma has not advanced the cause of public welfare.
[1]Post-WWII Britain in effect agreed to Burma’s independence the same year as India’s independence–1947, but for astrological reasons the Burmese nationalist leaders chose to do the formal transfer of power only in the early morningof4 January 1948.
[2]I amusing the Cold War-era vocabularies with full awareness of differences and new developments in the emerging ‘balance of power' scenarios and the Cold War-past.
Published here
Associated Press
March 25, 2013
YANGON, Myanmar – Anti-Muslim mobs rampaged through three more towns in Myanmar's predominantly Buddhist heartland over the weekend, destroying mosques and burning dozens of homes despite government efforts to stop the nation's latest outbreak of sectarian violence from spreading.
President Thein Sein declared a state of emergency in central Myanmar on Friday and deployed army troops to the worst hit city, Meikhtila, where 32 people were killed and 10,000 mostly Muslim residents were displaced. But even as soldiers imposed order there after several days of anarchy that saw armed Buddhists torch the city's Muslim quarters, anti-Muslim unrest has spread south toward the capital, Naypyitaw.
A Muslim resident of Tatkone, about 80 kilometers (50 miles) from Meikhtila, said by telephone that a group of about 20 men ransacked a one-story brick mosque there late Sunday night, pelting it with stones and smashing windows before soldiers fired shots to drive them away. Speaking on condition of anonymity because of security concerns, he said he believed the perpetrators were not from Tatkone.
A day earlier, another mob burned down a mosque and 50 homes in the nearby town of Yamethin, state television reported. Another mosque and several buildings were also destroyed the same day in Lewei, farther south. It was not immediately clear who was behind the violence, and no clashes or casualties were reported in the three towns.
The upsurge in sectarian unrest is casting a shadow over Thein Sein's administration as it struggles to bring democratic reform the Southeast Asian country after half a century of army rule officially ended two years ago this month.
Two similar episodes rocked western Rakhine state last year, pitting ethnic Rakhine Buddhists against Rohingya Muslims in bloodshed that killed hundreds and drove 100,000 from their homes.
The Rohingya are widely denigrated as illegal migrants from Bangladesh and most are denied passports as a result. The Muslim population of central Myanmar, by contrast, is mostly of Indian origin and does not face the same questions over nationality.
The emergence of sectarian conflict beyond Rakhine state is an ominous development, one that indicates anti-Muslim sentiment has intensified nationwide since last year and, if left unchecked, could spread.
Sectarian and ethnic tensions are not new in Myanmar.
Muslims account for about four percent of the nation's roughly 60 million people, and during the long era of authoritarian rule, military governments twice drove out hundreds of thousands of Rohingya, while smaller clashes had occurred elsewhere. About one third of the population is comprised of ethnic minorities that practice Christianity or animism, and most have waged wars against the government for autonomy.
Analysts say racism has also played a role. Unlike the ethnic Burman majority, most Muslims in Myanmar are of South Asian descent, populations with darker skin that migrated to Myanmar centuries ago from what are now parts of India and Bangladesh.
The latest bloodshed "shows that inter-communal tensions in Myanmar are not just limited to the Rakhine and Rohingya in northern Rakhine state," said Jim Della-Giacoma of the International Crisis Group. "Myanmar is a country with dozens of localized fault lines and grievances that were papered over during the authoritarian years that we are just beginning to see and understand. It is a paradox of transitions that greater freedom does allow these local conflicts to resurface."
"If a democratic state is the nation's goal, they need to find a place for all its people as equal citizens," Della-Giacoma said. "Given the country's history, it won't be easy."
The government has put the total death toll in Meikhtila at 32, and authorities say they have detained at least 35 people allegedly involved in arson and violence in the region.
On Sunday, Vijay Nambiar, the U.N. secretary-general's special adviser on Myanmar, toured Meikhtila and called on the government to punish those responsible.
He also visited some of the nearly 10,000 people driven from their homes in the unrest. Most of the displaced are minority Muslims, who appeared to have suffered the brunt of the violence as armed Buddhist mobs roamed city.
Nambiar said he was encouraged to learn that some individuals in both communities had helped each other and that religious leaders were now advocating peace. He said the people he spoke to believe the violence "was the work of outsiders," but he gave no details.
"There is a certain degree of fear and anxiety among the people, but there is no hatred," Nambiar said after visiting both groups on Sunday and promising the United Nations would provide as much help as it can to get the city back on its feet. "They feel a sense of community and that it is a very good thing because they have worked together and lived together."
But he added: "It is important to catch the perpetrators. It is important that they be caught and punished."
In Meikthila, at least five mosques were set ablaze from Wednesday to Friday. The majority of homes and shops burned in the city also belonged to Muslims, and most of the displaced are Muslim. Dozens of corpses were piled in the streets, some of them charred beyond recognition.
"The city is calm and some shops have reopened, but many still live in fear. Some still dare not return to their homes," said Win Htein, an opposition lawmaker from the city.
Myanma Ahlin, a state-run newspaper, carried a statement from Buddhist, Muslim, Christian and Hindu leaders expressing sorrow for the loss of life and property and calling on Buddhist monks to help ease tensions.
"We would like to call upon the government to provide sufficient security and to protect the displaced people and to investigate and take legal measures as urgently as possible," the statement from the Interfaith Friendship Organization said.
Muslims, who make up about 30 percent of Meikhtila's 100,000 inhabitants, have stayed off the streets since their shops and homes were burned and Buddhist mobs armed with machetes and swords began roaming the city.
Little appeared to be left of some palm tree-lined neighborhoods, where the legs of victims could be seen poking out from smoldering masses of twisted debris and ash. Broken glass, charred cars and motorcycles and overturned tables littered roads beside rows of burned-out homes and shops, evidence of the widespread chaos that swept the town.
Chaos began Wednesday after an argument broke out between a Muslim gold shop owner and his Buddhist customers. Once news spread that a Muslim man had killed a Buddhist monk, Buddhist mobs rampaged through a Muslim neighborhood and the situation quickly spiraled out of control.
Residents and activists said the police did little to stop the rioters or reacted too slowly, allowing the violence to escalate.
___
Associated Press writers Todd Pitman and Grant Peck contributed to this report from Bangkok.
Dr. Maung Zarni
March 24, 2013
What is 9-6-9 or 969?
Listen to a typical anti-Islam hate speech by 969 leader Wirathu here
It is the most dangerous, but fast-growing neo-Nazi "Buddhist" movement in Burma founded post-Rohingya slaughter last year. It is led, most prominently by a Saffron-robed pseudo-monk Mr Wirathu. In its national network are Buddhist Sar-thin-tike or teaching Buddhist colleges. In broad day light Buddhist lecturers and teachers from this network, for instance, in Moulmein were seen giving hate-speeches disguised as "Buddhist sermons", with absolutely no interruptions from local authorities.
969 is Myanmar's home-grown neo-Nazi group founded and led by extremist Buddhist monks with the avowed aim of defending Buddhist faith, Myanmar race and Buddhist nation from Burmese Muslims.
9 stands for the nine special attributes of Lord Buddha, 6 for the six special attributes of Buddha's teachings and the last 9 for the nine special attributes of the Buddhist Sangha or Order.
969 appears to work in close collaboration with Burma's security forces, the new Burmese media and the People's Relations and Psychological Warfare Division of the Ko Ministry of Defense.
A categorically anti-Muslim/anti-Islam message tinged with the language of nationalist and national security is consistently and commonly coming from these sources:
1) Myanmar's new media such as the late medical Dr Nay Win Maung's The Voice, another medical Dr Than Tun Aung's Eleven News Group;
2) official media outlets and offices such as the Ministry of Defense-run Myawaddy News and President Office's spokesperson Hmu Zaw or ex-Major Zaw Htay; and
3) 969 of Buddhist skin-heads the likes of Wirathu and his fellow skinhead monks
President Thein Sein's reformist government at best tolerates its categorically anti-Islam hate speeches and activities and at worst backs, if tacitly, the group and its incitement of violence against the country's Muslims.
Any democratic country in the world where hate speech is not protected by' the freedom of speech' would certainly arrest the leaders of 969 for their fear-mongering, hate speeches against a particular religious community.
One of the best known leaders of this group is Mr Wirathu, a Saffron-robed fake Buddhist monk and preacher, who was jailed in 2003 for his direct involvement in the massacre of Muslim families and destruction of a mosque in the up-country town of Kyauk-hse, the birthplace of the aging and retired despot Senior General Than Shwe.
969 calls for boycott of Muslim businesses, social ostracism of all Muslims and purging of Burmese Muslims from all positions of wealth, influence and power in Burma. It also stokes the historical anti-Muslim and anti-Indian popular sentiment among the predominantly Buddhist population of the country.
One should not be surprised if 969 turns out to be a strategic proxy organization founded by the radical, hard-line elements within the military leadership that plans to discredit Aung San Suu Kyi and other opposition figures in Burma through the 969's messages of anti-civilian politicians and activists.
969 openly frames Aung San Suu Kyi as a stooge of rich and cunning Muslim enemies who are hell-bent on taking over Buddhist Myanmar nation and destroying Buddhism.
969 leaders position themselves as the ones who are most nationalistically mindful and who are best positioned to defend 'Buddhist faith, Bama or Myanmar race and Buddhist nation' against the sole enemy of Muslims'.
Through its incitement of religious discrimination, Buddhist apartheid, violence against Muslims and acts of grassroots hate-mobilization against the country's Muslims, 969 is most definitely involved in violent crimes against the Muslims in Burma. It is a group whose activities need to be closely monitored by the international community.
Before the next wave of skin-head violence by organized "Buddhist" mobs against the Muslims and other religious and ethnic minorities washes hits the country of otherwise peaceful and acquiescent Burmese of all ethnic and religious backgrounds, the anti-hate speech campaigners and concerned citizens, governments and international NGOs must get pro-active in nipping this home-grown "Buddhist" neo-Nazi movement in the military-ruled Myanmar.
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| (Photo: Irrawaddy) |
Aung Zaw
The Irrawaddy
March 25, 2013
There is no doubt that the violent attacks on Muslims in Meiktila, a garrison city in central Burma, were politically motivated. It has been a gruesome spectacle. Muslims were beaten, dragged out into the streets, doused with petrol and burned alive.
The police were slow to restore law and order. As the attackers, who were armed with knives, machetes and walkie-talkies, roamed the city, the police just stood by and watched. Some thugs allegedly pushed though police lines to attack Muslims, and still the police did little to protect them, according to eyewitnesses.
Min Ko Naing, a former student leader and prominent activist, rushed to the scene with some monks to stop the violence. At one point, a group of people involved in the attacks threatened to kill them.
When he arrived Meiktila, Min Ko Naing pleaded with the marauding mobs to stop their attacks. His words were not well received, however, and he was forced to retreat. Within hours, photos likening him to an Al Qaeda terrorist were posted on Facebook. This came after weeks of anti-Muslim vitriol filled social media sites. Clearly, there has been a very well-orchestrated campaign to vilify Muslims in Burma and discredit anyone seen as sympathetic to them.
Journalists were among those singled out for intimidation. Despite efforts to silence them, however, many said that the violence they witnessed seemed systematic and well-planned.
Several witnesses and reporters on the ground said that the killers rode around the city on motorcycles looking for Muslims to murder. Nobody made any attempt to stop them. In addition, “monks” from other parts of the country joined in the carnage, while local authorities stood idly by.
It’s hard to believe that Burma’s security forces and riot police, who have a reputation for ruthlessly suppressing protests, have suddenly lost their nerve. In 1988, they did not hesitate to gun down people who took to the streets to call for an end to military rule. And in 2007, they violently cracked down on monks without a second’s thought. So what happened in Meikhtila?
Many suspect that last week’s violence in central Burma involved the same people who took part in attacks and riots in Arakan State last year. But so far there is no evidence to support this claim. I’m more inclined to believe that masterminds behind the Meikhtila attacks are people too big to catch. The government has yet to apprehend anyone involved in the recurring spasms of violence that continue to traumatize the country.
So who organized the attacks? One theory is that hardcore elements in the establishment are behind the violence. Some speculate that they may be enemies of the Thein Sein government who want to undermine the president’s reforms. Others suggest that the malefactors may be powerful countries and businessmen who feel that they are losing out because of Burma’s new opening to the outside world.
At any rate, the clear winners here are the military, which was called in to quell the riots after Thein Sein ordered a state of emergency last Friday. In the current atmosphere, the sight of troops in the streets is almost reassuring. This has raised fears that if the situation deteriorates further, the military could take over the reins of power completely to restore law and order.
It is also clear that Burma’s Buddhists—particularly its monks—have suffered an enormous black eye due to the actions of a shadowy group of chauvinists who have used religion as a pretext for terrorizing a segment of Burma’s population.
The sad truth, however, is that this is not the first time that Buddhism has been twisted beyond recognition to serve the interests of a tiny cabal with malicious intentions. After all, for half a century, successive military dictatorships employed a grotesque parody of Buddhism to manipulate the masses.
Non-Buddhists have always had a hard time in Burma’s armed forces, at least since independence in 1948. But the situation deteriorated even further after the military seized power in 1962, after which only ethnic Burman Buddhists stood any chance of rising through the ranks.
The military also sought to impose ethnic purity on the nation as a whole, by relegating non-Burmans and non-Buddhists to the very fringes of society. Eventually, even Buddhists, who watched helplessly as their religion was degraded by power-hungry murderers, were marginalized along with everyone else who did not wear a uniform.
Although they portrayed themselves as devout Buddhists, Burma’s military rulers showed no compassion toward anyone who did not bow before them. They repressed not only ethnic minorities, but also critics and dissidents, often with brutal force.
The outcome is that we now have countless “Buddhist extremists” in Burma. Sadly, they are everywhere. They are out on the streets and sitting in Parliament, wearing military fatigues, business suits and monk’s robes.
So the rise of “Buddhist” fascists in Burma comes as no surprise to anyone who has witnessed the machinations of the country’s rulers over the past half-century. Their presence in the streets of Meikhtila is no more than a throwback to the darkest days of military rule, and one that will not be exorcised easily.
Operation Rohingya
The Peoples Press
March 25, 2013
It is vital the information we are going to share with you is made viral as quickly as possible. The ethnic Rohingya people of Myanmar (Burma) in Southeast Asia are being massacred. These barbarous acts are being carried out by Neo-Nazi racist groups like the RNDP (Rakhine Nationalities Development Party), ALA (Arakan Liberation Army), NaSaKa border police and 969 monks led by Monk Wirathu, the self proclaimed Bin Laden of Buddhism. The Government of Myanmar is at best ignoring the slaughter of these people, just like the rest of the international community, and at worst is participating in the crimes.
The persecution of the Rohingya people is severe. The Burmese junta considers them to be sub-human and denies them almost all basic human rights. Often they are subject to torture, gang rape, starvation, slave labor, and forced to reside in the most dire camps in the world – some call these refugee camps but they are concentration camps.
Over the past few months, thousands of Rohingya have been encouraged onto boats and sent out to sea with not enough food or fuel, and left there to die. Some of the boats were attacked and sunk, with women and children on board.
While the United States claims to defend human rights, their record clearly reflects a government that will only intercede when their business interests are threatened. While politicians occasionally pay lip service to the horrific conditions in Myanmar no action is ever taken.
The only people neglecting the situation in Myanmar worse than the U.S. are the press who consistently ignored these atrocities or reported them as ‘ethnic clashes’. Since they have failed to document these crimes in any way, we consider the media to be complicit in concealing them from the rest of the world.
The acts of genocide being committed against the Rohingya people must no longer be ignored. We call on Anonymous and all supporters of human rights to stand against this great injustice and lend the Rohingya people a voice, before they are completely eliminated.
The Rohingya are now anticipating a third massacre, in which Rakhine have declared they will leave no Rohingya left on the land, just a few left as exhibits for the museum.
Please join us urgently to help prevent this massacre from occuring, through the following actions:
(1) Sign the following petitions:
- http://endgenocide.org/actions/protect-the-rohingya/
- http://www.avaaz.org/en/justice_for_rohingya_muslims/
- http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/36335
- http://www.activism.com/en_CA/petition/petition-to-the-canadian-government-on-behalf-of-the-rohingya-muslims-of-burma/42370
- http://www.petitions24.net/tous_contre_le_massacre_de_rohingyas_en_birmanie
(2) Call, fax, email (FLOOD, SPAM, ANNOY) demanding that URGENT action be IMMEDIATELY taken to save the Rohingya.
Office of the Spokesperson for the Secretary General
Tel. 212-963-7162
Fax. 212-963-7055
http://www.un.org/en/contactus/
Embassy of the Republic of Myanmar
202 332-3344
202 332-4350
202 332-4352
Fax: 202 332-4351
info@mewashingtondc.com
U.S. Department of State
202-647-4000
202-647-6575
http://contact-us.state.gov/app/ask/session/L3RpbWUvMTM2NDAwNDU2OC9zaWQvX2U0VGZSbGw%3D
Departments of MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Government of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar
ASEAN Affairs Department
Director General: U Aung Lin
Deputy Director General: Daw Aye Aye Mu
Political and Security Division: 95-67-412 360
Economic and Functional Cooperation Division: 95-67-412-357
Coordination Division: 95-67-412 345
The World Bank
1818 H Street, NW
Washington, DC 20433 USA
tel: (202) 473-1000
fax: (202) 477-6391
(3) In the coming days we will be releasing a twitter storm package for #OpRohingya. Stay tuned. In the meantime, follow on twitter @OpRohingya, @JamilaHanan, @Aungaungsittwe and @GeorgieBC for Rohingya updates.
We Are Anonymous.
We Are Everywhere.
We Are the voice of Voiceless.
We Are Legion.
Tyrants of the World,
Expect Us!
#OpRohingya Engaged.
 |
| Displaced people rest at a relief camp in Meiktila, central Myanmar on March 24, 2013. |
Phyo Wai Lin, Jethro Mullen and Kocha Olarn
CNN
March 25, 2013
CNN
March 25, 2013
Yangon, Myanmar -- Residents of the city in central Myanmar where clashes between Buddhists and the Muslim minority killed dozens of people last week struggled to resume their daily lives on Monday with a state of emergency still in place.
Even as an uneasy calm prevailed in Meiktila, the city at the heart of the unrest, police reported fresh arson attacks on Muslim properties in other areas, showing the challenges Myanmar authorities face in reining in communal tensions in this nascent democracy.
A group of Buddhists on Saturday night torched 65 houses and religious buildings in Yemethin Township, which is about 40 kilometers south of Meiktila and not under a state of emergency, according to Lt. Col. Aung Min, a spokesman for the Myanmar Police Force.
And on Sunday night, smaller outbreaks of arson took place in other towns further south, including Okpo and Tatkon, he said.
The attacks over the weekend caused property damage, but didn't result in any deaths, Aung Min said. That contrasts with the violence in Meiktila last week, which killed at least 32 people, according to the New Light of Myanmar, a state-run newspaper.
In the Meiktila clashes, which were reportedly set off by a dispute between a Muslim gold shop owner and two Buddhist sellers, rioters set fire to houses schools and mosques, prompting thousands of residents to flee their homes.
State of emergency
As the violence threatened to spiral out of control, authorities declared a state of emergency on Friday, which allows the military to help reinstate order.
Police confiscated weapons such as swords and machetes from groups of Buddhists -- some of them monks -- who were roaming the streets, officials said.
As authorities began to clear up after the mayhem, they found more than 20 bodies so badly burned they couldn't be identified, the New Light of Myanmar reported.
The newspaper said Sunday the unrest had left 8,707 people living in temporary shelters such as a soccer stadium and a monastery in Meiktila, a lakeside city about 130 kilometers north of the administrative capital, Naypyidaw.
But Win Htein, an opposition member of parliament for the area, on Monday gave a higher estimate for the number of people displaced by the unrest, saying 10,000 Muslims and 7,000 Buddhists had been driven from their homes.
"We are facing the problem of not having enough food and blankets," he said.
At the same time, he said, the overall situation in the city had improved,with shops starting to reopen.
Win Htein had said last week that he believed that most of those killed in the violence were Muslims.
Police have detained a total of 36 people in relation to the recent clashes in Meiktila and other towns, Aung Min said Monday.
Concerns after previous unrest
The United Nations and the United States have both expressed concern about the recent violence in Myanmar, which is emerging from decades of military repression and has taken a number of significant steps toward democracy in recent years under President Thein Sein.
The sudden boiling over of tensions between Buddhists and Muslims in central Myanmar follows sectarian troubles that killed scores of people in the west of the country last year.
Those clashes, in Rakhine State, took place between the Buddhist majority and the Rohingya, a stateless ethnic Muslim group.
Most of the victims in that unrest were Rohingya. Tens of thousands more were left living in makeshift camps, and many of them have since joined those who attempt each year to flee to Thailand and Malaysia in flimsy boats.
Journalist Phyo Wai Lin reported from Yangon, CNN's Kocha Olarn reported from Bangkok, Thailand, and CNN's Jethro Mullen reported and wrote from Hong Kong.
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