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Emdadul Haque
The Daily Star
July 2, 2013

On the face of records of reality, Rohingya people are destined to be persecuted and suffer degrading treatment unabatedly. The ethnic minority people are struggling for survival and facing the threat of existence leading them to deprive basic human rights and dignity, demanding regional and global humanitarian deals.

Widespread controversy as to origin of this community is in flow both in Myanmar and Bangladesh. The haggling of the historians has added their sufferings like insult to injury. Historical exclusion and contemporary marginalization of them have been turned into an age old dichotomy piercing humanity. Myanmar branded them as Bangla speaking migrated Muslim workers community in the Arakan (now Rakhine) state because the term Rohingya was unknown to the country before 1950s and more specifically the term is not even used in the 1824 census, conducted by the British colonial regime. On the contrary, Bangladesh combed through the entire history of this community and found its existence since 8th century. The term Rohingya was in fact used in the late 18th century report published by the British Francis Buchanan-Hamilton and in his 1799 article “A Comparative Vocabulary of Some of the Languages Spoken in the Burma Empire”. He stated that three dialects were spoken in the Burma Empire, evidently derived from the Hindu Nation and among three dialects one was spoken by the Mohammedans, who have settled in Arakan, and who call themselves Rohingya or natives of Arakan.

The Rohingya community both at home and abroad constitutes some 3.5 million people and out of it, about 1.5 million have been uprooted from their motherland and those displaced Rohingya people are leading a gypsy life in different countries of the world mostly in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Thailand, Malaysia and in Middle East. Now, the Rohingya people account for approximately 4% of Myanmar’s population although exact numbers cannot be cited owing to the regime’s refusal to allow independent observers and negligence of the community as well.

The first wave of Rohingya refugees fleeing from Arakan to the area of Cox’s Bazar occurred in 1784 when the Burmese King Bodawpaya invaded and annexed Arakan to the then Kingdom of Ava in central Burma. Apart from the inflow of 1942, two major influxes of Rohingya people took place in Bangladesh in 1978 and during 1991-92 to escape Myanmar governed backed systematic genocidal and ethnic cleaning. Now around 0.5 million documented and undocumented Rohingya people are living in Cox’s Bazaar, Bandarban and its adjacent areas under the generosity of Bangladesh for over 30 years.

Among them only around 30,000 are officially registered in two official refugee camps in the southern part of Cox’s Bazar while the rest of them are undocumented and leading a scattered life. However, in 2012 Bangladesh refused to accept any more Rohingya boat people and sent them back providing basic humanitarian support to them. The overpopulated, poverty stricken and natural disaster prone country is now embittered of the adverse economic, social and environmental consequences and their burden in the future because this issue is not likely to be ended soon.

If Bangladesh in spite of its manifold limitations is to observe the principle of non refoulement upon which the International Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, 1951 is grounded, the country has done a lot despite not being a party to the Convention and its related Protocol, 1967. The principle of burden sharing is beyond the capacity of Bangladesh to obey.

Besides, to some extent as part of its Constitutional pledge the basic rights and minimum dignity of them are recognized and promoted by the country but due to its own vulnerability cannot take maximum protection measures. The country is a state party to eight human rights documents out of nine core international human rights documents and very respectful towards international law.

The track record of observing Constitutional commitment and basic human rights in Myanmar is very deplorable, though it became the UN member 26 years ahead of Bangladesh. Preamble of the Myanmar Constitution, 2008 envisages the principles of justice, liberty, equality, perpetuation of peace and prosperity of the National people with a pledge to uphold peaceful co-existence among the nations. The country is only state party to UNCRC, CEDAW and Four Geneva Conventions of 1949 under which it is duty bound to protect civilians ensuring basic rights. Ridiculously, the state has enacted a draconian Citizenship law in 1982 which excluded the Rohingya from list of 135 races entitled to citizenship. More than 200 Rohingya were killed by the radical Buddhists in 2012. They also injured thousands of them and torched around 10000 houses, businesses and mosques forcing them around 140000 displaced.

One of the moral precepts of the Buddhist philosophy is the ‘promise not to kill’ imbibed with the virtue of non violence but they have undermined such teachings treating the Rohingya as a threat to their life, liberty and religion branding them terrorists. It is puzzling because this Buddhist dominated country is not facing an Islamist militant threat as Muslims here a generally peaceful and ethnic minority.

In fact, mudslinging by the stakeholders cannot bring a durable solution rather can deepen the crisis. Simultaneously, the economic and geopolitical perspectives of the South Asian countries especially of Myanmar and Bangladesh may suit legal deals only after the matured end of humanitarian deals. To materialize humanitarian deals, these two nations in a joint effort should try to explore the avenue of transferring the Rohingya people staying in Bangladesh. Middle East Countries along with Canada, Australia and Europe as a safe destination to negotiate the crisis aptly.

Moreover, the universal 3R model i.e. repatriation, reintegration and resettlement for durable solution to the burgeoning crisis is not properly applied by the stakeholders. The diplomatic failure of Bangladesh to raise voice against Myanmar in International forums and arrogance of Myanmar is also responsible for its stagnated position. The non cooperation of Myanmar is also a major impediment resolve it. Only Nobel Laureate politician in the South Asia Aung San Suu Kyi’s role to advocate resolving the crisis is questionable. Adoption of regional legal instrument like Africa and Latin America understanding the nature of the refugee crisis in South Asia can help minimize the problem. World communities, human rights organizations and even pro-Rohingya regional and national NGOs to be lead by UNHCR should come up with consolidated measures casting neutral eyes to resolve the issue creating mounting pressure on Myanmar.

THE WRITER IS A SENIOR LECTURER IN LAW AT SOUTHEAST UNIVERSITY, DHAKA.
Lt. General Thein Htay is pictured at the Myanmar International Convention Center in Naypyidaw on August 20, 2011. The United States placed the Myanmar general on its sanctions blacklist Tuesday for arms deals with North Korea that violated a UN Security Council embargo on buying weapons from Pyongyang.
June 2, 2013

The United States placed a Myanmar general on its sanctions blacklist Tuesday for arms deals with North Korea that violated a UN Security Council embargo on buying weapons from Pyongyang.

The US Treasury named Lt. General Thein Htay, the head of Myanmar's Directorate of Defense Industries, for the sanctions, saying he was involved in buying North Korean military goods despite his government's support of the Security Council ban.

It also said he acted on behalf of the Directorate of Defense Industries, a Myanmar military agency that was placed on the US sanctions blacklist in July 2012 for arms deals with North Korea.

"This action specifically targets Thein Htay, who is involved in the illicit trade of North Korean arms to Burma," the US Treasury said in a statement, using the former official name for Myanmar.

"It does not target the Government of Burma, which has continued to take positive steps in severing its military ties with North Korea."

The Treasury noted that the Myanmar government last November "publicly announced its intention to abide by" the UN Security Council resolution prohibiting countries from buying military equipment and support from North Korea.

"The international community has repeatedly condemned North Korea's nuclear and ballistic missile proliferation activity," the Treasury said.

"North Korea's arms trade provides it with an important source of revenue to expand and enhance its proscribed nuclear and missile programs, which are a threat to international peace and security."

The sanctions announced Tuesday forbid any American from doing business with Thein Htay and freeze any assets he might have in the United States.
Salima Nora Ahmad, a 25-year-old Rohingya woman who rejoined her husband, who left Burma six years earlier, in Malaysia. When she left Burma in April 2011, she was convinced her life as a Rohingya would not be worth living if she stayed. 
Lee Yu Kyung
June 2, 2013

Jani Alam, a 25-year-old, is walking slow and painfully. Having slightly swollen feet, this “exercise” is the only treatment available from 60-year-old traditional doctor, Guramia Saiyid.
Both Alam and Saiyad are stateless refugees from the Rohingya ethnic minority from Arakan state in western Burma. They now live in Malaysia.

Saiyad has lived in the country for 11 years, while Alam has arrived four months ago.

“In the past months, dozens of refugees arrived almost every day,” said 41-year-old Jamar Udin, a neighbor and also a Rohingya.

Udin said many of the newly arrived have difficulty walking due to a lack of exercise.

Fleeing by boat

It was last November that Alam got on the boat in Bangladesh, to where he crossed Naf River from Arakan State. He hardly stretched or moved his legs for months.

During the seven-day journey from Bangladesh to the shores of Thailand shore, two-to-three people died a day, he said. After he arrived at the Thai shore, smugglers used a Toyota pickup truck, in which Alam and others were stacked atop one another. It was near perfection conditions for suffocation.

After terrible ordeals, survivors were dropped off at Penang the northwest coast of Malaysia.

“Rakhine Buddhists armed with arrows, machetes and sticks came to our village to destroy everything,” Alam said of the situation he fled.

“NASAKA [the border police in Arakan State] just watched … My both parents succumbed to their bullet wounds after three days.”

Alam described the first wave of Buddhist riots in Soparan village in one of the two townships in which the Arakan State government has imposed its notorious “two child limit” policy. The violence quickly turned to be a massacre against Rohingya in June last year.

As he saw the second wave of riots in October, when the targets were expanded to Kaman Muslims who, unlike the Rohingyas are recognized citizens, Alam decided to leave the country.

Among thousands of victims of the October riots was 48-year-old Salim Bin Gulban, a Kaman business man, who arrived at Malaysia in mid-January. Salim saw security forces set a fire to six boats in Kyawkpyu on October 23, as he rushed to quay in a bid to flee by boat.

People managed to hurriedly got on remained boats to flee.

Salim and 74 others fled the country on his boat. They have made a direct journey from Arakan to Malaysia with little trouble, unlike Rohingya boat people who normally rely on smugglers.

“We met the Indian navy four days after departure,' he said. “They helped us to direct the way for Malaysia and also have given us drinking water.”

Salim’s troupe arrived on Malaysian shores, where the Malaysian Navy found them and brought them to Lankawi. They were provided food and health check-up at first. Some, including Salim, have been released into community after an interview with UNHCR in May.

According to the UNHCR, about 20,000 people (13,000 last year and 7000 in the first two months of this year) fled Burma by sea since the religious riots broke out June last year. These figures are unprecedented.

It was an utterly dark night in April 2011 when Salima got on the boat in Maungdaw in Arakan state with eight others. Although she fled the country before last years massacre, she was absolutely convinced that life as a Rohingya in Burma was not worth living.

Her husband, 25-year-old Mohamad Tandamia, had already left for Malaysia in 2006, where Salima was hoping to join her husband.

“We have no citizenship, no freedom of movement,” Tandamia said. “And government grabbed our land where I built a house. So I left.”

Salima had waited three days in the Teknaf Bangladesh border town until getting on a fishing boat to travel into international seas in the Bay of Bengal. There, she moved from to a bigger vessel with a capacity to hold 50 people. When it departed, there were 250 people on board.

The captain was Bangladesh and the crew were mainly Thai, Salima said. They were all armed. Salima hardly stretched her legs for 18 days. During the trip, 18 people died.

“14 people were suffocated to death at the bottom of the boat,” Salima said. “The other four were thrown overboard by crews because they asked water. All were young men.”

Among the refugees I interviewed, allegations of people asking for water being thrown overboard for asking for water were common. There were also many allegations of women being raped by the crew.

Fourty-one-year-old Nurul Hessen, who left Burma in January, said rape often occurred on the boat he fled on, which carried 750 people.

“The crew ordered women to stay upper deck, where no one was allowed to be,” Hessen said. “We heard rape sounds very often.”

Like many making the journey, Hessen believed that the boat was heading to Malaysia. However, their boats reached a Thai shore and the human traffickers kicked them off.

Uniformed men

In every interviewees’ accounts, there were “uniformed men” who received the boats, or were called by the smugglers when the boat arrived at Thailand.

From there, the refugees were taken through the jungle to a main camp, where they were released after finalising a deal. Smugglers called the refugees’ family or friends in Malaysia to demand 5500-6000 ringgit (about $2000).

Tandamia remember the moment he received a call for the money so his wife could join him in Malaysia. It took 14 days for him to borrow the needed money.

Who were the “uniformed men” met at sea? The most obvious answer the Thai Navy, which has been implicated in cases involving the smuggling of Rohningya refugees in recent years.

In 2009, the Thai navy forcibly removed the engine of a Rohingya boat before pushing back them to the sea. In February 22, reports suggested that the Thai Navy shot at Rohingya refugees who refused to get into Thai Navy boats. Two people were reportedly killed.

The latter case resembled to the Samila’s accounts, in which she and other refugees were transported by small boats under the command of the “uniformed men”.

In response to an email, the Thai Navy denied the allegation. It said: “In case of detecting for the Rohingya boat if the vessel is located outside the territorial sea, Naval officer will conduct humanitarian assistance by providing food, water and make recommendations for direction to go on.

“If Rohingya people are trying to enter the territorial sea, they will be forwarded to the relevant authorities. The whole procedure are based on the humanitarian principles of law.”

Chris Lewa, the director of Arakan Project, which approaches the matter carefully, said: “It’s very difficult to know who they are.

“To be honest I have no clear evidence that Thai authority involved in trafficking. But I’m almost convinced that it could be some sort of militia.”

Lewa said: “In terms of past atrocities such as ‘pushing back the boat to the sea, they won’t do this without receiving order from high level of command.”

At the hands of smugglers, Rohingya asylum seekers went through terrible ordeal in the jungle camp.

“If we made sounds, the agents would torture us,” Alam said. “They pulled someone’s teeth out.”

While he was in jungle, he said 10 people were killed, including four trying to escape.

Alam spent almost two months there, as he had no one in Malaysia to pay the smugglers. Finally, his uncle in Burma helped him out.

As for Hessen, he was lucky to be released after four days thanks to a friend in Malaysia. When he left the jungle camp, there were about 300 refugees remaining.

What would happen to those who couldn’t pay? It’s highly likely that they would be sold out to Thai fishing boats as modern slaves. The US State Department’s annual report of Trafficking In Person (TIP) released on June 20 states: "There were reports that some Rohingya asylum seekers transiting Thailand on route to Malaysia were sold into forced labor on Thai fishing boats, reportedly with the assistance of Thai military officials.’’

Nowhere to go

After paying the smugglers and finally reaching Malaysia, the refugees hoped they would be, at least, safer from violence.

But in recent weeks, this hope has looked shaky with violence breaking out between Burmese migrant communities in Malaysia.

On June 11, Burma’s deputy minister of foreign affairs Zin Yaw departed for Malaysia to provide protection for who he called, “our Burmese”.

It is difficult to believe the deputy minister included Rohingya, denied Burmese citizenship, count as for “his Burmese”.

A day after Malaysia’s announcement of the repatriation of Burmese migrants, president of Myanmar Ethnic Rohingya Human Rights Organization Malaysia Zafar Ahmad said in a phone interview; “I’ve just got information that one Rohingya was killed hours ago in Ampang area in Kuala Lumpur. But I can’t go there now out of fear.”

Ahmad said: “There’s no place we can move freely. Not in Burma now in Malaysia.”

This is echoed by Lewa, who has researched Rohingya issues for more than six years: “They have nowhere to go. No one wants them in the region.

“I want [the media] to more highlight dire situation in Arakan state rather than highlighting smuggling issues. If you see the condition where they live in Arakan, oh my god, you gonna be on a boat."
Rohingya hamlet Ah Nauk Pyin is surrounded by a ring of Buddhist villages
Jonathan Head
July 1, 2013

It has been a year since sectarian fighting broke out in Burma's westernmost state, forcing 140,000 people from their homes and casting a dark shadow over the promising start made by the new reformist government. 

Ugly anti-Muslim sentiment that was evident in those first clashes between Buddhists and the Rohingya minority in Rakhine state last June and October has now spread, setting off assaults on Muslim communities in several parts of the country.

Nearly all of those displaced in Rakhine state were Rohingyas, and their plight has drawn in substantial international assistance, channelled through major NGOs and UN agencies. 

The Burmese government has become conscious of the negative publicity created by the long-standing discrimination against Rohingyas. It has authorised one official inquiry into the violence, and is co-operating with the international relief effort.

But, as I discovered on a recent visit to Rakhine state, not much has changed for the Rohingyas. 

In fact, their already tenuous status in Burma, also known as Myanmar, appears to be weakening.

Inmates in Rakhine's Rohingya camps are barred from travelling freely
A combination of intense hostility from the Rakhine Buddhist majority, and an official policy of segregation which imposes restrictions on the Rohingyas alone, has forced them to the margins of this already poor region, unwanted and unrecognised. 

My visit coincided with that of the UK International Development Minister Alan Duncan, who had come to see how British aid to Rakhine state totalling £6.4 million was being spent, and to assess the prospects for reconciliation between the two estranged communities.

It was a typically rushed affair, with little time in each of the camps he visited. 

He was accompanied at all times by the jovial figure of Burma's Deputy Minister for Borders, Major-General Zaw Win, in full military uniform, and by squads of police and soldiers. 

Nonetheless, the Rohingyas he met were unabashed in venting their frustration over their situation. 

"We just want to go home," one woman shouted. "I want citizenship, and I want my old life back."

Her camp was just a few kilometres from the state capital Sittwe, but the inmates are not allowed to go there, either for supplies or to seek work. 

Military checkpoints all around Sittwe block the Rohingyas from travelling, although the Buddhists are usually free to go where they want.

Conditions in Rohingya camps can deteriorate quickly in the rain
Some improvements have been made to the camps, but they are limited. 

Enough food is supplied, and the government has made a start building elevated long-houses to protect the Rohingyas from the rain. 

But these primitive barracks are a far cry from the neat, solid rows of individual houses already constructed for the small number of displaced Buddhists, who have been living in settlements far better made and situated than those housing the Rohingyas. 

Their camps quickly become muddy quagmires every time it rains, which it does every day now.

And the ban on travel means Rohingyas cannot go to hospital for treatment, even to have babies.

Unyielding attitudes 

Burmese officials justify these restrictions on grounds of security. But the way they are applied to just one group has uncomfortable echoes of apartheid in South Africa, or segregation in the southern USA. 

One constant obsession is the high birth-rate. 

Buddhists all over Burma believe Muslims are on track to become the majority because of the number of wives and children they have, even though official statistics put the Muslim population at around 4%.

But one exasperated international NGO worker pointed out to me that the attacks on Rohingyas and their subsequent isolation had disrupted a once-successful family planning programme.

Foreigners are rarely allowed in Aung Mingala, the last Muslim town in Sittwe
The hostility felt by the local Buddhists to the Rohingyas is a real problem for the local and central government.

As I was told by a spokesman for the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party, now one of the largest in parliament and often accused of stirring up anti-Muslim feeling, even if the government wants Rohingyas to move back to their former homes in Sittwe, the people won't allow it. 

In a grand old gym in the town I watched young men training hard. 

Some have aspirations to represent their country when it hosts the South East Asian Games later this year, another milestone on Burma's journey away from its former isolation. 

But they were unyielding in their attitude to the Rohingyas. 

"It's not possible to live with them, and we don't want to", Kyaw Lyaw Win, a Taekwondo instructor told me. 

"They invaded our country. It's not just me saying this. Ask any Rakhine Buddhist - they will say the same thing." White ID cards 

There is only one Muslim neighbourhood left in Sittwe, called Aung Mingala, sealed off by checkpoints. Travelling with the British minister, we were the first foreigners allowed in for several weeks. 

I bumped into Aziz, a bright young man who helped me when I was there last November. Now he is trapped in what has become a Rohingya ghetto. 

He told me a small delegation was allowed out twice a week, to visit Muslim districts outside the town. 

Another man who helped me before is Aung Win, one of the most outspoken and respected Rohingya leaders. I had to negotiate with a police checkpoint to meet him in the Muslim neighbourhood of Bumay, where he escaped after being arrested in February for trying to meet the visiting UN Human Rights Rapporteur. 

But this means he is now separated from his wife, children and 95-year-old father, who are still at his home in Aung Mingala. 

He has repeatedly asked for permission to see them, and repeatedly been turned down. 

The situation of those Rohingyas who were not driven from their villages during the violence is little better. 

I travelled two hours north by boat to see the little hamlet of Ah Nauk Pyin, a Rohingya community entirely ringed by Buddhist villages.

In Ah Nauk Pyin, Rohingyas are given ID cards, but no citizenship
Paths into Ah Nauk Pyin were guarded by Burmese soldiers - something the Muslims said they were grateful for.

But they can't leave. Even if they were allowed to, they fear attacks by their Buddhist neighbours, and in any case all their boats, along with their livestock, were taken during the unrest.

They told me the village dated back 200 years - we are not illegal Bengali immigrants, they said. 

Yet none of them had citizenship. They pulled out the white ID cards they are issued. 

"This is very important for us", said Ali Jofar, a young man who has been designated the village medical expert, although he is not a doctor. "If we try to travel outside our village with these cards, we get arrested."

So no one there can reach hospital either.

Moryan says she has no husband, no money, and no one to care for her
18-year-old Moryan sat, pale, shaking and weeping, in her in-laws' straw house. Her house was burned down, and her husband one of 170 men from the village still imprisoned after the conflict. 

She has been seriously ill since she gave birth to her son six months ago. She cannot walk, nor can she breastfeed her baby.

The remaining men in Ah Nauk Pyin walk to the little blue mosque, washing in the village pond before going in to pray. 

They've been given simple tractors by an NGO, so, after a year, they can start farming again. 

But where would they sell their produce, in a country so hostile it has sealed them off from the outside world?
Maung Aurther
RB News 
June 30, 2013 

Than Dwe, Arakan - Around 50 Rakhine members of 969 Rakhine terrorist Franchise in Arakan led by the in-charge of “Ye Aung Hlen” bus station, Kyaw Kyaw, surrounded a Police Station in Than Dwe Township demanding a Muslim boy rumored to have relationship with a Rakhine girl. Subsequently, six houses of Muslims were destroyed in the quarter of An-Taw. Besides, a motor vehicle stop called “Kaung Kin Thit Sar” owned by Muslim was also vandalized. 

When asked to local Muslim in Than Dwe, he explained “there are many rumors being spread by Rakhine terrorists so as to trigger violence against Kaman Muslims again. 

Rumor #1 

A Muslim boy has proposed a Rakhine girl through shaking hands. 

Rumor #2 

A Muslim boy raped a Rakhine Buddhist girl from the village of Myun-Pyin. 

Rumor #3 

Three Muslims on their motorbikes hit a Rakhine girl passing by. They are reportedly put in the Police Lock-Up as well. 

Therefore, Rakhine terrorists surrounding and blocking the Police station are demanding the Police to hand over the three Muslims to them. Burmese military and Rakhine terrorists have been raping and abusing hundreds of Rohingya women and minor girls. Nothing is questioned about that. And they are trying to kill Rohingya and Kaman Muslims for something they haven’t done at all.” 

He further expressed his fear “the way they blocked the Police station today was very much like they had done in Kyauk Ni Maw and Akyab (Sittwe) few days earlier than the violence took place in June last year. Therefore, people are extremely worried if they trigger similar violence again. In fact, people are living under the terror caused by these terrorists.” 

One more local of Than Dwe reported “while the Police station under their blockage, another group of Rakhine extremists from the village of Jit Htaw located at the South-West Part of Than Dwe attempted to come to the Police Station to carry out terrorist attacks. Fortunately, Military could prevent them in time. 

Meanwhile, six houses and a bus station called “Kaung Kin Thit Sar” owned by Muslims were completely destroyed in the quarter of An-Taw. And after authority had imposed Curfew Order (Section 144), the situation became quiet to an extent.” 

Latest Happenings: after six Muslim houses getting destroyed in the quarter of An-Taw, the situation in the town calmed down for a while. Now, Rakhine terrorists have started torching the houses of Muslims again. Reportedly, Fire Brigades also set out to the place where Rakhine terrorists are burning Muslims’ houses down. 

Five More Kaman Houses Burnt Down by Rakhine Terrorists

Five more houses of Kamans in the quarter of An-Taw were burnt down by the Rakhine terrorists even amidst the imposition of Curfew Order 144. The razed houses include the houses belonged to U Myo Thit, Daw Win Kyi (a female Ob-Gyn) and the forester of Than Dwe. Although Military have taken charge of the security, they are doing nothing to prevent the torching of the houses giving an excuse that they have not got any order for action yet.


June 30, 2013

SITTWE, Burma — From inside the neighborhood that has become their prison, they can look over the walls and fences and into a living city.

Stores are open out there. Sidewalk restaurants are serving bottles of Mandalay beer. There are no barbed-wire roadblocks marking neighborhood boundaries, no armed policemen guarding checkpoints. In the rest of Sittwe, this city of 200,000 people along Burma’s coast, no one pays a bribe to take a sick baby to the doctor.

But here it’s different.

Aung Mingalar is just a few square blocks. You can walk it in 10 minutes, stopping only when you come to the end of the road — 7/8 any road — and a policeman with an assault rifle waves you back inside, back into a maze of shuttered storefronts, unemployment and boredom.

In this May 18, 2013 photo, men gather for prayers at Aung Mingalar's main mosque in Sittwe, northwestern Rakhine state, Burma. A year after Buddhist-Muslim violence tore through Burma, the fury of religious pogroms has hardened into an officially sanctioned sectarian divide, a foray into apartheid-style policies that has turned the Aung Mingalar neighborhood into a prison for Sittwe's Muslims and threatens Burma's fragile transition to democracy. (AP Photo/Gemunu Amarasinghe)
In the evenings, when bats fly through the twilight, the men gather for prayers at Aung Mingalar’s main mosque, the one that wasn’t destroyed in last year’s violence.

Zahad Tuson is among them. He had spent his life pedaling fares around this state capital, a fraying town, built by British colonials, full of bureaucrats and monsoon-battered concrete buildings. Now his bicycle rickshaw sits at home unused. He hasn’t left Aung Mingalar in nearly a year.

“We could go out whenever we wanted!” he says. His voice is a mixture of anger and wonder.

What has caused this place to become a ghetto that no one can leave and few can enter? A basic fact: Aung Mingalar is a Muslim neighborhood.

A year after sectarian violence tore through Burma, the fury of religious pogroms has hardened into an officially sanctioned sectarian divide, a foray into apartheid-style policies that has turned Aung Mingalar into a prison for Sittwe’s Muslims and that threatens this country’s fragile transition to democracy.

Muslims, Tuson says, are not welcome in today’s Burma.

It’s simple, he says: “They want us gone.”
___

For generations, Aung Mingalar existed as just another tangle of streets and alleys in the heart of Sittwe. It was a Muslim quarter; everybody knew that. But the distinction seldom meant much.

Until suddenly it meant everything.

Last year, violence twice erupted between two ethnic groups in this part of Burma: the Rakhine, who are Buddhist, and a Muslim minority known as the Rohingya. While carnage was widespread on both sides of the religious divide, it was Muslims who suffered most, and who continue to suffer badly more than a year later.

Across Rakhine state, more than 200 people were killed, 70 percent of them Muslim. In Sittwe, where Muslims were once almost half the population, five of the six Muslim neighborhoods were destroyed. Over 135,000 people remain homeless in Rakhine state, the vast majority of them Muslims forced into bamboo refugee camps that smell of dust and wood smoke and too many people living too close together.

The troubles here were, at least initially, driven by ethnicity as much as religion. To the Rakhine, who dominate this state, as well as to Burma’s central government, the Rohingya are here illegally, “Bengalis” whose families slipped across the nearby border from what is now Bangladesh. Historians say Rohingya have been here for centuries, though many did come more recently. Their modern history has been a litany of oppression: the riots of 1942, the mass expulsions of 1978, the citizenship laws of 1982.

In this May 18, 2013 photo, Muslim men drink tea and listen to a news bulletin on a radio at Aung Mingalar in Sittwe. (AP Photo/Gemunu Amarasinghe)
What started with the Rohingya has evolved into a broader anti-Muslim movement, helping ignite a series of attacks across Myanmar — from Meikhtila in the country’s center, where Buddhist mobs beat dozens of Muslim students to death in March, to Lashio near the Chinese border, where Buddhist men swarmed through the city burning scores of Muslim-owned stores in May.

The violence is about religion and ethnicity, but also about what happens when decades of military rule begin giving way in the nation [also known as Myanmar], and old political equations are clouded by the complexities of democracy.

In 2010, political change finally came to Myanmar, a profoundly isolated nation long ruled by a series of mysterious generals. Opposition leader and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi was freed from house imprisonment. National elections were held. Former political prisoners became politicians.

Amid the tumult — and with the military still wielding immense power behind the scenes — old animosities and new politicians flourished. Ethnic groups formed powerful regional parties. Buddhist nationalists, with a deep-seated suspicion of Muslims, moved from the fringes into the mainstream.

Political frustration fed on economic frustration, with millions of poor rural residents flocking to Burma’s cities only to find continued poverty in ever-growing slums. In a country that is about 90 percent Buddhist, Burma’s Muslims, who number as little as 4 percent of the population, became political bogeymen.

U Shwe Maung, a top official with the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party, the state’s most powerful party, will tell you about the problems with the Rohingya: They have too many children, they are angling for political clout, they claim to be citizens.

“We are not willing to live with them,” the onetime high-school English teacher says in his quiet voice. He’s an avuncular man, friendly and unfailingly polite. “They want to Muslimize this land. They want power.”

Anti-Muslim sentiment has been magnified by an increasingly virulent strain of Buddhist nationalism, as a once-obscure group of monks nurtures populist fears of a growing Muslim threat. Muslims are criminals, they say, a “poison” driving up land prices and pushing aside the Buddhist working class. Crowds pack monasteries and prayer halls to hear the monks’ speeches. Recordings are sold in sidewalk stalls along Burma’s streets.

“They will destroy our country, our religion, our people. They will destroy the next-generation Buddhist women, since their aim is to mix their blood with ours,” a popular monk, Ashin Tayzaw Thar Ra, said in a speech earlier this year. “Soon, Buddhists will have to worship in silence and fear.”
___

In Aung Mingalar, they know all about fear.

The neighborhood is where Maung Than Win once served hundreds of meals a day at the little restaurant his father had opened, and where residents gathered at the Chat Cafe to gossip in the cool of twilight. It is where dozens of boys showed up every day for classes at Hafeez Skee’s Islamic school, but most children attended secular schools.

It was widely seen as the wealthiest of Sittwe’s Muslim neighborhoods, but it was hardly an island of economic isolation. It was a place where day laborers built thatch huts for themselves, and rich businessmen, their fortunes often made on small fleets of wooden fishing boats that troll the Bay of Bengal, built sprawling houses covered in shiny green tiles. A few families farmed gardens of watercress in a swampy area between some of the alleys. The main streets, once brick or cobblestone, had turned to dirt over the years.

“My grandfather was from Aung Mingalar. My father was from Aung Mingalar. I’m from Aung Mingalar,” says Win, his teeth stained red from years of chewing betel nuts. At 32 he has spent nearly his entire life working at his restaurant, the Love Tea Shop. It filled with people every day, particularly after prayers at the mosque. “I just want to stay as long as I can.”

Not that everything was perfect. Buddhist and Muslim residents of Sittwe agree at least on that.

There were fights, though they tended to be just one person against another. In the last sectarian violence, in 2001, only one person died in Sittwe. The last widespread bloodshed was during World War II, when the Rohingya backed the British colonial forces and the Rakhine supported the Japanese. Hundreds of people were killed.

“I had heard about the troubles then,” says Ferus Ahmad, a pharmacist. “We thought something like this could never happen again.”

But it did. It began last year on May 28, with the rape and murder of a Buddhist woman by a group of Rohingya men in a village a few hours from here. Days later, a bus carrying Muslim travelers was surrounded by a Buddhist mob and ten Muslims were killed. Five days after that, Rohingya mobs attacked Rakhine near the Bangladesh border. It’s unclear how many people died.

With fear spiraling on both sides, trouble came to Sittwe. Over five days, Rakhine and Rohingya mobs battled one another. By the end, hundreds of Rakhine homes had been destroyed, as had nearly every Rohingya neighborhood. Today, other than Aung Mingalar, Muslim Sittwe is little more than destroyed mosques and once-crowded communities grown over with grass and weeds, completely empty of residents.

During the street battles, the women and children of Aung Mingalar were put into a mosque for safety, while the men protected the neighborhood’s edges. Then something unusual happened: The security forces arrived to help.

Across Burma, the army and the police have done little to protect Muslims through a year of violence, and rights groups say they have often joined in the attacks. It’s still unclear why it was different in Aung Mingalar.

But while they arrived as protectors, those soldiers soon became jailers. Today, the security forces enforce the official ghetto. And the dominant story line remains: Not only did Muslims never need protection from Buddhists, but they destroyed their own neighborhoods.

“The Bengalis lit their own houses on fire, because they knew they would get another house” in the refugee camps, says U Win Myaing, the Rakhine state assistant director for communications. “Plus, they thought the fires would spread to Rakhine areas and burn those houses down.”

Increasingly, such stories about Muslims are believed across Burma.
___

Today, Aung Mingalar is consuming itself.

House after wooden house has been torn down for firewood. The dead, who can no longer be taken out to the Muslim cemetery, are buried behind the mosque. Food, which comes from occasional government handouts and the twice-weekly markets some residents can attend, is scarce and expensive.

There are no stores left open, just a few food stalls and a makeshift pharmacy that sells laxatives and herbal headache medicine.

There are also few heroes. Residents say wealthy Rohingya have bought land from poorer or more desperate neighbors. While the authorities occasionally allow some Rohingya into the neighborhood to sell supplies, they charge double what customers pay on the outside.

“People aren’t competing with each other,” says Win, the tea shop owner, “but they are not working together either.”

Officials refuse to say when — or if — Aung Mingalar will be allowed to rejoin the rest of Sittwe.

There is one way to get out. The bribe to pass the checkpoints is 10,000 kyats (about $10) each way, according to current and former residents. That’s a lot of money here, but plenty of people are paying it. While no one is sure of the neighborhood’s size — aid workers say it was probably about 4,000 before the violence — it’s now dropping fast.

“When everything they have is gone, people just want to leave,” Win says.

Thousands have left Burma, paying smugglers to slip them into Malaysia or Thailand. But most head to the refugee camps outside towns, endless rows of bamboo shelters filled with Rohingya. Many of the camps are restricted areas — residents are not allowed to come and go as they wish — but most are also large enough to have their own economies.

Across Burma, many Muslims are now more closed-off than they once were, barricading their neighborhoods at night against possible attackers. But so far, at least, Aung Mingalar is the only sealed ghetto.

Ahmad, the pharmacist, lived in Aung Mingalar for 38 years. Until the violence of 2012, he owned a pharmacy in Sittwe’s main market, a warren of shops near the port. But soon after the trouble started, Aung Mingalar was sealed and Ahmad couldn’t get to his shop. The medicines expired. His customers went elsewhere. The shop has been closed for months.

Ahmad wonders at what has happened to his country. The 2010 transition was supposed to bring change, but he’s seen nothing to encourage him.

“We now have a president, a government,” says Ahmad, his button-down shirt faded from so many washings. “But it’s like there is no ruler.”

For many like him, the main sustenance now is memories. That is what keeps Ahmad going.

A couple of times a week, back when things were good, Ahmad would close his pharmacy, pick up his wife and two children at home and head to the Sittwe beach, barely a mile away. Now, only Rakhine are allowed at the beach and Ahmad has left the neighborhood where he grew up. His family is still there, but he has moved to the refugee camps, where he seeks work and tries to remember what normal felt like.

“We’d just walk along the beach,” he says of those family outings. “I dream about that sometimes.”
Peter Popham
June 30, 2013

Peter Popham on why Aung San Suu Kyi is silent on the murder of Muslims

There is no concealing the disappointment felt by many of Aung San Suu Kyi’s supporters around the world in the face of her failure to denounce the attacks on Burmese Muslims by members of her own community, the Buddhists who constitute more than 90 per cent of the population.

Burma opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi waves to supporters after she attended a ceremony to mark her 68th birthday at the headquarters of her National League for Democracy (NLD) party Wednesday, June 19, 2013, in Yangon, Burma. (Khin Maung Win/AP)
Perhaps she couldn’t stop it, people say, but at least she could have taken a stand. She is seen as the teacher, the mother of her nation; moral rebirth has been at the centre of her mission ever since she signed up with the democracy movement; her most influential essay was titled A Revolution of the Spirit. How can she possibly stay silent as Muslims are slaughtered?

The first attacks came in June 2012, just as she was embarking on her first trip abroad in 24 years. A young Buddhist woman in Arakan state, which borders the overwhelmingly Muslim nation of Bangladesh in the west, was raped and murdered by two Muslim men. In retaliation, a group of non-Muslim men stopped a bus and killed the Muslims on board, and the spiral of murder quickly got out of control. There were many victims on both sides but the Muslims were in the majority. Many thousand lost their homes and were resettled in squalid temporary camps.

Another, even more serious wave of attacks came in October. Unlike June’s events, these were initiated by the majority community and closely co-ordinated, as a recent investigation by Human Rights Watch explained in detail (http://www.hrw.org/features/burma-ethnic-cleansing-arakan-state). And although there have been no recent attacks as vicious or widespread as October’s, the fire has not burned out. Instead it has spread across the country. And still Suu Kyi holds her tongue.

How are we to explain it?

The glaringly obvious reason is that, upon her election to parliament in April 2012, Suu Kyi became a politician. As Hillary Clinton presciently warned her a few months earlier, there is a world of difference between being an activist and a politician. In the heyday of her activism, addressing crowds gathered outside her home in Rangoon in the mid-90s, Suu Kyi happily teased and chastised the ruling military regime. Today she sits alongside them in parliament: one-quarter of the seats are occupied by unelected soldiers.

And not only does she have to share their space, she has to do business with them – serious business.

Burma is scheduled to hold general elections, followed by presidential ones (the president is elected by members of parliament), in 2015. Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), is much the most popular in the country. If the elections are run fairly, like the by-elections in 2012 that brought her to parliament, the NLD is likely to win by a landslide. But if they are rigged, like the general elections of 2010, that victory could be stolen. So between now and then she has two pre-eminent challenges: to retain the support of the great majority of her people; and to persuade the generals who still hold power behind the scenes that she and her colleagues can be trusted.

There is a third challenge: to change the constitution. Suu Kyi has made it clear in recent weeks that she hopes to become Burma’s president. But Section 59 (f) of the 2008 constitution requires that none of the children of a presidential candidate shall “be subject of a foreign power or citizen of a foreign country” – and both of Suu Kyi’s sons are British citizens. It appears that this requirement was written in deliberately to bar her way to the highest office. To remove it would require 75 per cent support in parliament. Until 2015, she is walking on eggshells. 

Suu Kyi, then, has ample reason to choose her words with care. Her recent affectionate descriptions of the army are examples of this. But why can’t she denounce something as grotesque as the attacks on Muslims?

There has been bad blood between Buddhists and Muslims in Burma for many years. In particular in Arakan state, the issue of large-scale illegal immigration of Muslims from Bangladesh has stoked riots and protests over the course of many years. Anti-Muslim prejudice is common even at the top of Suu Kyi’s party, and among leading dissident activists. If Suu Kyi were to speak out loud and clear about the attacks she would win the applause of people in the West. But it would be the quickest way for her to plummet in the approval of the Burmese masses. 

Some believe that senior military figures hostile to her orchestrated the violence in Arakan state last year for precisely this reason: by goading Suu Kyi into speaking out on the issue, they hoped to destroy her popularity. If that is true, she has disappointed them – and proved, perhaps, that she can be as slippery a politician as the next one. That may not endear her to the west, but shrewdness is a necessary attribute of politicians everywhere; even those the world would prefer to regard as saints.
By Dr. Habib Siddiqui
June 30, 2013

In its July 1 issue, the Time magazine has covered the recent genocidal activities against the Muslims of Myanmar. In this, reporter Hannah Beech has done an excellent job analyzing the role played by Wirathu, a Buddhist monk, who has become the face of Buddhist terrorism. Her report has stirred up a hornet’s nest among the Buddhists. They are very upset.

Unlike OBL, whose views had forced him to settle for a life of refuge outside the country, Wirathu who likes to call him ‘the Burmese bin Laden’ is quite popular inside Myanmar. He is an abbot who has a significant following not just within the Sangha but also within the government, military, and civilian population of his Buddhist-majority country. Soon after the publication of the Times issue, President Thein Sein came to his defense and said, "Buddhist monks, also known as Sanghas, are noble people who keep the 277 precepts or moral rules, and strive peacefully for the prosperity of Buddhism.” From such testimonials, it is not difficult to understand the level of support that Wirathu’s 969 Movement – or more correctly creed - enjoys inside Myanmar. And this is troubling. It paints a very damning picture not only about Myanmar – long known for its gruesome records of human rights violations but also about its Buddhist faith sanctioning such horrendous crimes.

After all, there is nothing honorable about the 969 Movement, which Wirathu launched in 2001. It draws its inspiration from fascism and Nazism and is racist, bigotry-ridden and apartheid to the core calling for boycott of anything Muslim the same way Jews of Germany were depicted and treated in the 1930s and 1940s until the fall of Hitler. "We have a slogan: When you eat, eat 969; when you go, go 969; when you buy, buy 969," Wirathu declared at his monastery in Mandalay. (Translation: If you're eating, traveling or buying anything, do it with a Buddhist.) This apartheid 969 creed led to sharp increase in anti-Muslim violence in Myanmar, especially after the Bamiyan statues were destroyed by Taliban in March of 2001. As a result, several mosques were destroyed by Buddhist monks. The sporadic violence which included killing of several Muslims and destruction of Muslim properties and mosques would continue until 2003 when he was arrested. The military regime sentenced him to 25 years in prison for distributing anti-Muslim pamphlets that incited communal riots in his birthplace of Kyaukse, a town near Meikhtila. At least 10 Muslims were killed in Kyaukse by a Buddhist mob, according to a U.S. State Department report.

Wirathu was freed last year from jail during an amnesty for hundreds of political prisoners, among the most celebrated reforms of Myanmar's post-military rule. He is now an abbot in Mandalay's Masoeyein Monastery, an expansive complex where he leads about 60 monks and has influence over more than 2,500 residing there. From that power base, he is again preaching hatred and intolerance. Many monks are highly influenced by his hateful messages, and are directly involved in genocidal campaigns against the minority Muslim population in Myanmar. They are also supported by government agencies at all levels - from local to central.

It is widely believed by Dr. Maung Zarni and many other independent researchers that the government of Thein Sein is using Wirathu and his terrorist monks, with wide support within the Buddhist society, to do what it could not do officially. Thus, the crimes of Wirathu cannot be separated from those of Thein Sein. They are in collusion.

Nyi Nyi Lwin, a former monk better known as U Gambira who led the "Saffron Revolution" democracy uprising in 2007 that was crushed by the military told Reuters that if government was serious to stop anti-Muslim pogroms, it could do it. "In the past, they prevented monks from giving speeches about democracy and politics. This time they don't stop these incendiary speeches. They are supporting them," he said. "Because Wirathu is an abbot at a big monastery of about 2,500 monks, no one dares to speak back to him. The government needs to take action against him."

Last year in May-October when Rohingya Muslims were killed in the Arakan state, the Buddhist monks played major roles not only in inciting violence against them, they allowed their monasteries to be used as arms depot and also participated themselves in the slaughter. Government security forces and ultra-racist Rakhine politicians also participated in such raids. The anti-Muslim pogroms last year led to the death of hundreds of Muslims and homelessness of nearly 140,000 Muslims in the Rakhine state.

Seventy Muslims were slaughtered in a daylong massacre in one hamlet alone, according to Human Rights Watch. Children were hacked apart and women torched. In several instances, monks were seen goading on frenzied Buddhists. Muslim townships and villages were totally wiped out from the map. As usual, in this Buddhist country not a single Buddhist was found guilty for committing such horrendous crimes against the minority Muslims.

The communal violence, which the government has done little to check, has since migrated to other parts of the country. In March, dozens were killed and tens of thousands left homeless as homes and mosques were razed in Meikhtila. As widely documented, Buddhist monks led the massacre of Muslims and destruction of Muslim properties there. Rioters spray-painted "969" on destroyed businesses. A knife-wielding Buddhist monk was video-taped holding a Muslim girl. "If you follow us, I'll kill her," the monk taunted police, as a Buddhist mob armed with machetes and swords chased nearly 100 Muslims in this city in central Myanmar. It was Thursday, March 21. Within hours, the Buddhist monks led the mob to kill dozens of Muslims. The killings took place in plain view of police, with no intervention by the local or central government. The police were told not to intervene. The region's military commander, Aung Kyaw Moe, could have stopped the riots with a few stern orders - especially given that thousands of soldiers are permanently stationed in Meikhtila and nearby. [That pattern echoed what Reuters reporters found last year in an examination of October's anti-Muslim violence in Myanmar's western Rakhine State. There, a wave of deadly attacks was organized, according to central-government military sources. They were led by Rakhine Buddhist nationalists tied to a powerful political party in the state, incited by Buddhist monks, and assisted by local security forces.]

Graffiti scrawled on one wall in Meikhtila called for a "Muslim extermination." The Buddhist mob dragged their bloodied bodies up a hill in a neighborhood called Mingalarzay Yone and set the corpses on fire. Some were found butchered in a reedy swamp. A Reuter’s cameraman saw the charred remains of two children, aged 10 or younger. As noted by Min Ko Naing, a revered former political prisoner, bulldozers were used to destroy Muslim properties. Some 1600 Muslim owned homes and businesses were destroyed in Meikhtila. A historic mosque and an orphanage were also burned. By March 29, at least 15 towns and villages in central Myanmar had suffered anti-Muslims pogroms. In many of these incidents, Buddhist monks not only stopped firemen from dousing fire but also participated in killings of Muslims.

In his report, Tomas Ojea Quintana, the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar said he had received reports of "state involvement" in the violence. Soldiers and police sometimes stood by "while atrocities have been committed before their very eyes, including by well-organized ultra-nationalist Buddhist mobs," said the rapporteur.

Wirathu had a quick answer to the question of who caused Meikhtila's unrest: the Buddhist woman who tried to sell the hair clip. "She shouldn't have done business with Muslims."

As I have repeatedly said in my speeches and writings, genocide of Muslims has become a national project in Myanmar in which most Buddhists at all levels – from sly President Thein Sein to ignoble Nobel Laureate Suu Kyi to racist politicians to terrorist monk Wirathu to ordinary monks to criminal members of the security forces to general public – are involved one way or another. That is why Suu Kyi is silent on this greatest crime of the 21st century. Her criminal silence to condemn the anti-Muslim pogroms in her country has disgraced the Nobel Peace Prize!

Naturally, Wirathu's fascist movement is working: 969 stickers and signs are proliferating everywhere like mushroom — often accompanied by violence. Anti-Muslim mobs in Bago Region, close to Yangon, erupted after traveling monks preached about the 969 movement. Stickers bearing pastel hues overlaid with the numerals 969 are appearing on street stalls, motorbikes, posters and cars across the central heartlands. In his speech in a community center in Minhla, a town of about 100,000 people, which is a few hours' drive from Yangon, on February 26 and 27, in front of thousands of Buddhist monks, Wimalar Biwuntha, an abbot from Mon State, explained how monks in his state began using 969 to boycott a popular Muslim-owned bus company.

After the speeches, the mood in Minhla turned ugly. Muslims were jeered. A month later, about 800 Buddhists armed with metal pipes and hammers destroyed three mosques and 17 Muslim homes and businesses, according to police. No one was killed, but two-thirds of Minhla's Muslims fled and haven't returned, police said. One attacker was armed with a chainsaw, he said.

As reported by Reuters a local police official made a deal with the mob: Rioters were allowed 30 minutes to ransack a mosque before police would disperse the crowd, according to two witnesses. They tore it apart for the next half hour, the witnesses said. A hollowed-out structure remains.

Two days earlier in Gyobingauk, a town of 110,000 people just north of Minhla, a mob destroyed a mosque and 23 houses after three days of speeches by a monk preaching 969. Witnesses said they appeared well organized, razing some buildings with a bulldozer.

On April 2, 13 Muslim boys died in a fire at a Yangon religious school. The floors were surprisingly slick with oil during the blaze, clearly pointing out that the blaze was deliberately set by others. However, the local police blamed the fire on electric problem.

For too long we in the West had entertained a very romantic view of Buddhism. Forgotten or ignored there was the ground reality of Buddhist crimes done under the name of religion, let alone its people. As I have noted in my book ‘Rohingya: the forgotten people of our time’, for hundreds of years the Arakanese Buddhist Maghs terrorized Bengal and neighboring territories of Muslim-ruled India. That history is a blood-soaked history of unfathomable cruelty and savagery that devastated Bengal (today’s Bangladesh and the state of West Bengal of India). According to the words of historian Shihabuddin Talish, an eye witness: "They [Buddhist Maghs] carried off the Hindus and Muslims, male and female, great and small, few and many that they could seize, pierced the palms of their hands, passed thin canes through the holes and threw them one above another under the deck of their ships.” He continued, “The Magh did not leave a bird in the air, or a beast on the land from Chatgaon [Chittagong] to Jagdia, the frontier of Bengal, increased the desolation, thickened the jungles, destroyed the land, closed the road so well that even the snake and the wild could not pass through.”

As also noted by British historian G.E. Harvey, “The Arakan pirates, both Magh and feringhi, used to come by the water-route and plunder Bengal. Mohammedans underwent such oppression, as they had not to suffer in Europe. As they continually practiced raids for a long time, Bengal daily became more and more desolate and less and less able to resist them. Not a house was left inhabited on their side of the rivers lying on their track from Chittagong to Dacca. The district of Bakla [Backergunge and part of Dacca], which formerly abounded in houses and cultivated fields and yield a large revenue as duty on betel-nuts, was swept so clean with their broom of plunder and abduction that none was left to tenant any house or kindle a light in that region.”

While the children of abducted slaves of Africa are recognized as citizens in the USA, the children of those abducted Bengali Muslims, settled in Arakan state and elsewhere inside Myanmar, are now denied their due citizenship rights.

I wish I could have said that the savagery of the Buddhist Maghs and Bamars of Myanmar had stopped. Alas, the recent history of Myanmar has once again proven that they are beyond reform. They never understood civility and like to remain buried in their savage past. Thus, rather than condemning the religio-racist violence led by a criminal Buddhist monk, Wirathu is celebrated as a national hero and his horrendous crimes are condoned by the highest authority of the land. Only in Mogher Mulluk can one witness such an amazing thing!

One should thank the Time magazine and its courageous reporter Hannah Beech for a much needed factual account of a war criminal like Wirathu who is a disgrace to any religion. With the religious edicts he and other terrorist monks make they soil the good name of their faith, and portray the ugly side of what Theravada Buddhism has become in Myanmar that scripts and directs genocide against an unarmed minority. It is disgraceful!

Thein Sein cannot hoodwink the rest of the world with his appeasing comments that these terrorist monks are model Buddhists who only strive for Buddhist prosperity. At whose expense is such prosperity earned? Is genocide or pogrom of another people acceptable in that goal of selective prosperity? If not, his government better stop Wirathu and his terrorist supporters now. If the answer is yes, then he better accept the grim reality that Buddhism in Myanmar means genocide of other non-Buddhists, esp. its Muslim population. Period and simple! Thein Sein and other Buddhists of Myanmar cannot have it both ways.

When asked about the Time cover story, Wirathu said, "This is being done because the Islamic extremists want my downfall. ... If I fall down, it will be very easy for the extremist who wants to overwhelm Burma with their extreme beliefs. They want me to be arrested, or killed. That’s why, they put me on the [Time] cover, I think. … Extremists are trying to turn Burma into an Islamic country. There is financial, technological, human resources support for this, even media support. I’ve observed these things and because I’m speaking out to show these things to the world, I have become their number 1 enemy, so they are targeting me."

He repeats the same mantra uttered by every damn Nazi and fascist before him. Pure nonsense to justify their savagery unto the minority people! It is inexcusable.

Is there any hope in Myanmar? I am glad that a monk like U Pantavunsa is speaking out against such monstrosity done in the name of Buddhism. How far such dissent voices would succeed, I don't know.

Nonetheless, it is high time for conscientious human beings inside and outside Burma to condemn the 969 movement and its executioners for the crimes against humanity.

They must also demand restoration of citizenship and human rights for all the residents of Myanmar.
June 30, 2013

KUALA LUMPUR -- Malaysia has urged the Myanmar government to take immediate action to address the ongoing inter-communal violence in the country.

This was voiced by Foreign Minister Datuk Seri Anifah Aman in a bilateral meeting with Myanmar's Foreign Minister Wunna Maung Lwin on the sideline of the 46th Asean Foreign Ministers Meeting (AMM) in Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei which commenced yesterday.

A statement from the Asean-Malaysia National Secretariat, Foreign Affairs Ministry here said Anifah conveyed Malaysia's concerned on the ongoing violence, saying it had also affected neighbouring countries, including Malaysia.

He also urged the Myanmar government to take necessary measures to bring the perpetrators of violence to justice in a fair and transparent manner.

The minister had also sought the agreement of the Myanmar government to allow the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) Contact Group to visit Myanmar and be given fullest cooperation in fulfilling its mandate.

Anifah is leading the Malaysian delegation at a series of Asean-related meetings in Bandar Seri Begawan from June 29 to July 2.

Besides the 46th AMM, other meetings include Post-Ministerial Conferences (PMC), 20th Asean Regional Forum, Asean Plus Three Foreign Ministers' Meeting and the 3rd East Asia Summit Foreign Ministers' Meeting.
Buddhist monk Wirathu (C), leader of the 969 movement, greets other monks as he attends a meeting on the National Protection Law at a monastery outside Yangon, June 27, 2013. 
VOA News
June 28, 2013

RANGOON — This week's Time Magazine cover bearing the image of Wirathu, a monk who has come under international scrutiny for spreading anti-Muslim hate speech was banned in Burma. Has hate-speech on the internet and in sermons delivered by Buddhist monks led to religious violence, and has the government fulfilled its responsibility in dealing with hate speech? 

Burma has only just recently stopped censoring print news media, but when Time magazine ran a cover story detailing the anti-Muslim hate-speeches of influential Buddhist monk Wirathu, the issue was banned because the information ministry feared it could incite further violence. 

Since June of last year, five separate incidents of communal violence perpetrated against Muslims across the country have left scores dead, and over 150,000 displaced. 

Watch related video of the U.S. Embassy in Burma hosting a workshop:




At a workshop on preventing hate speech in Burma on Friday U.S. ambassador Derek Mitchell delivered opening remarks in which he stated that the government's ability to deal with hate speech will determine the country's future, and cautioned against the potential for uncontrolled hate speech to incite violence.

"This country has been at war with itself. For decades the talk has been one of enemies within," he said. "This attitude has been a major cause of this country's underdevelopment. As a close observer who cares deeply about the future of your country, it is very sad to see that talk continue and take new forms."

Wirathu's rhetoric includes calls for Muslim blood at public sermons where audiences number several thousand.

Deputy Minister of Information Ye Htut believes it was necessary to ban the magazine, and blamed social media like Facebook for spreading hate speech. He blamed Burma's tight media controls in the past for contributing to people's inability to effectively deal with newfound freedoms, and said he doesn't believe Wirathu's speeches qualify as hate speech.

"We have to differentiate between what is a strong opinion and what is a hate speech," said Ye. "We have to allow the freedom of speech and also we have to make clear guidelines on what is hate speech. That's why one of the monk reminded U Wirathu to control his emotion."

Wirathu was jailed in 2003 for inciting violence, and released in 2011. He has continued to make speeches without interference from the government.

Many citizens feel dissatisfied with the government's response to controlling anti-Muslim sentiment, among other reasons because Burmese courts that have convicted Muslims after incidents of communal violence have yet to convict a single Buddhist with incitement.

Thet Ko Ko, a Muslim from Moulmein, home to the monastery from which the anti-Muslim "969" movement originated, traveled to Rangoon to attend the workshop, and says he's very disappointed in what was said at the workshop.

"My religion faces discrimination from the state and the majority especially some Buddhist monks. I'm not satisfied," said Ko Ko. "We need government to prevent hate speech in Myanmar [Burma], especially by law. I mean public speeches, there are a lot of information in many villages they distribute. Why they didn't prevent this activities is the main point. Very weak [in not preventing this] prevent in this."

Next week, the Ministry of Religious Affairs is expected to make an announcement about the controversial drafting of a new law that would prevent interfaith marriage between Buddhist women and Muslim men.

    • Rohingya Exodus