THE United States says it’s concerned over the growing Islamophobia around the world. In its annual report on the state of political and religious freedom around the world, the State Department has denounced a sharp spike in anti-Muslim sentiment and violence: “Government restrictions, which often coincided with societal animosity, resulted in anti-Muslim actions that affected everyday life for numerous believers.” From Western nations like Belgium, home to European Parliament, where the veil is seen as the flag of invading Islamic armies, to emerging Asian giants China and India, many usual and unusual suspects find themselves in the dock. However, it is Burma or Myanmar, lately the scene of raging atrocities against Rohingya Muslims, that justifiably attracts the strongest censure. Senior officials and security forces are seen as openly fanning the waves of attacks that have killed hundreds and displaced hundreds of thousands. The persecution and witch hunt has been so overwhelming that the Rohingyas have been desperately trying to flee Burma using whatever means they could find but with little success. With the authorities turning a blind eye to the growing violence against Muslims and at times even colluding with the assailants, the attacks are spreading to new areas and are now being reported from across the country. News agencies report of mobs armed with machetes, pipes and long bamboos attacking Muslim towns and burning down mosques, shops and homes while security forces stand and stare. Earlier this month, Associated Press pieced together the March 21 massacre of madrassa students in Meikhtila by a mob led by Buddhist monks right when they were apparently being moved by police to safety after their school was burnt down. Based on the testimony of 10 witnesses, AP says that 36 teenagers were slaughtered before the eyes of local officials and police who stood and stared.

“And what has happened since shows just how hollow the promise of change has been for a neglected religious minority that has received neither protection nor justice,” writes the author of AP’s extraordinary report on Burma. “The president of this predominantly Buddhist nation never came to Meikhtila to mourn the dead or comfort the living. Police investigators never roped this place off or collected the evidence of carnage left behind on these slopes. And despite video clips online that show mobs clubbing students to death and cheering as flames leap from corpses, not a single suspect has been convicted.” Rights groups say the lack of justice fuels impunity among Buddhist mobs and encourages more violence. The US report notes that Myanmar promotes Theravada Buddhism at the expense of other faiths. Which seems like a minor offense considering Burma sees Rohingyas as ‘illegal aliens’ and enemies despite their presence in the land for centuries. They do not exist and have no citizenship or rights whatsoever as far as the state is concerned.

Interestingly, Secretary of State John Kerry released the damning report on the day President Obama hosted Myanmar President Thein Sein at White House. Sein is the first Burmese leader in nearly five decades to get the honor, marking a turnaround in relations with Washington and rest of the West. Obama created history of sorts last year when he visited the country that Washington still calls Burma.

The US concern over the plight of Muslims is touching. Some would see it as typical US hypocrisy considering America’s own role in Muslim lands. That said, there’s no denying the fact that with every passing day the witchhunt of Myanmar’s Muslims is turning into an all-out war mocking the world community which has been deafeningly silent on the issue. There’s increasing evidence to suggest that this targeting of Rohingyas at the hands of Buddhist extremists and militant monks enjoys the blessings of powers that be. The government has even stonewalled international relief efforts. President Sein has the audacity to blame the victims themselves. He told CNN’s Christiana Amanpour: “The trouble was started by criminal actions of some (read Muslims).”

Entire neighborhoods and villages have invited the wrath for imagined slights such as the accidental brushing of a Rohingya woman with a monk. These are but mere footnotes in the endless tragedy that is the Rohingya existence. Persecuted and hounded for the past several decades by a ruthless state and an increasingly jingoistic majority, they are strangers in their own land. Deprived of citizenship, they cannot even send their children to schools nor make use of essential government services.

Recently, the ‘reformist’ government issued a new diktat forbidding Muslims in Rakhine province from having more than two children. This is something that even the Nazis and Zionists couldn’t come up with. One wonders if Myanmar is part of the same planet that you and I inhabit? Is this 21stcentury or have we somehow been whacked back in time? Is this the country that is supposed to be swept by winds of change and being warmly embraced by Western nations?

Clearly, in an age ruled by Mammon, economic interest takes precedence over everything else. Who cares for a powerless people in an isolated land on the far side of the world anyway! Even democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi has chosen to look the other way while Rohingyas are hunted and killed like animals. She has criticized the two-child norm as ‘discriminatory’ though.

His Holiness Dalai Lama, feted in world capitals as champion of world peace, is yet to break his silence on Myanmar-or Sri Lanka for that matter. As in Myanmar, the Bodu Bala Sena’s terror campaign against Lankan Muslims is led by militant monks and apparently enjoys the blessings of the state. After the Tamils, clearly it’s time to discipline Muslims.

All this is unfortunate considering Muslim-Buddhist relations have historically been amicable. Islam and Buddhism have never been at war or in an ideological tussle. Buddha is hailed by Muslim poets as a messenger of peace. What went wrong then? Did it have anything to do with the mindless destruction of Bamiyan Buddhas by Taleban?

But there has been a long history of the Rohingyas’ persecution and systematic dispossession. It goes way back-even before the military took over six decades ago. In recent months and years, it has crossed all limits even as the country flirts with democracy and cautiously opens up to the world after long years of isolation.

If the US, Europe, China and India are salivating over the large economic pie that is the mineral- and oil-rich Burma, it’s understandable. But should everything else including humanity be sacrificed for business? Besides, if the world powers need Myanmar’s virgin markets, it also needs them for investments and development.

It’s time the world held Myanmar to account and push it to respect the fundamental rights granted by the UN Human Rights Charter and that all member states are committed to. As Richard Sollom of Physicians for Human Rights put it, Burma needs to be told that the only path from tyranny to democracy is through respect for human rights.

The US which has lately become close to Myanmar must walk the talk on human rights and religious freedom. Else the State Department’s report isn’t worth the paper it is printed on. Arab and Muslim states for once must put their economic clout to use to help the besieged Rohingyas. But Muslim nations can hold others to account only when they take care of their own minorities.

Given the state of minorities in some Muslim countries, they are in no position to lecture others. Many Muslim nations figure also in the US report for their “egregious and systemic repression” of religious rights.

What is happening in Pakistan, Iraq and elsewhere doesn’t help our case. It also goes against the Islamic history of tolerance and protection of minorities. This needs to change if we want a change in the condition of Muslims in countries like Myanmar.

• Aijaz Zaka Syed is a Gulf based writer. Email: aijaz.syed@hotmail.com

It is common for unpopular governments to be accused by their enemies of committing serious human rights violations such as murder and kidnapping, but it is not often that genocide is included in the charge sheet. Even notorious dictators who are assumed to be guilty of committing the most heinous crimes against humanity are rarely accused of genocide.

When various groups denounce a government’s action or program as being genocidal, it immediately gets global and media attention. Something evil must be really happening to warrant the use of the term.

Two Southeast Asian governments are currently facing such accusations. Myanmar is accused of committing genocide against the ethnic Muslim Rohingya minority. Meanwhile, in the Philippines, a former senator and the influential Catholic Church hierarchy have warned the government that it could be held liable for genocide if it implements the controversial reproductive health law. Really?

Fortunately, there exists an international convention that can help us identify specific acts of genocide. The convention states that genocide involves "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group" through 1) Killing members of the group; 2) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; 3) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; 4) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and 5) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. 

So, using this definition, in the case of Myanmar, the genocide accusation seems solid. Rohingyas have no citizenship rights because the government has still refused to recognize them as a distinct ethnic group in the country. Rohingyas have no government-issued identification cards, they cannot own land, and they are barred from government employment.

In recent years, riots between Rohingyas and other ethnic groups in the state of Rakhine have displaced thousands of villagers, especially the Muslim Rohingyas who are further discriminated against due to their religion. State forces are accused of doing nothing when a mob attacks a Rohingya settlement. An estimated 125,000 Rohingyas are living in refugee camps in Myanmar in dire need of aid. 

Recently, the government imposed a two-child policy on the group in a bid to defuse ethnic tension. This controversial measure finally elicited a response from opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who until then was criticized by many human rights groups for her silence on the persecution of the Rohingya minority.

Almost all major human rights groups in the world have already issued an alarm over the growing repression of the Rohingyas. They are one in urging the Myanmar government to review its laws and programs that curtail the basic rights of Rohingyas. 

Unless the government revamps its discriminatory and repressive policies against the group, it will have a tough time convincing the international community that it is resolving the communal riots and ethnic tensions involving the Rohingya with utmost transparency and fairness.

While the Rohingyas’ plight in Myanmar seems to warrant claims of genocide, in the Philippines’ case the accusation seems flimsy. Early this month, Former Senator Francisco Tatad appeared before the Supreme Court and petitioned for the scrapping of the reproductive health law, which he rejected as an unconstitutional assault against God and family. He argued that the government will commit genocide because the law prescribes “state-mandated birth control” that would lead to the slaughter of innocent souls.

The law, hailed by women’s groups and health advocates as a landmark legislation, lays down the framework for comprehensive reproductive healthcare in the country, principally to prevent maternal deaths. It allows local health centers to provide birth control services to the population in the face of fierce opposition from the Catholic Church. The Philippines is the only Catholic-dominated nation in Southeast Asia. 

“That is not freedom of choice at all. That is not protecting the family as foundation of the nation,” Tatad said of the birth control provisions provided under the law.

He added, “That is not equally protecting the right of the mother and right of the unborn and this is simply putting the family under state supervision and control…Have we become a democracy only to submit to state supervision and control?”

But Tatad conveniently forgot to mention that the law doesn’t force individuals or couples to use artificial birth control measures. Filipino Catholics are still free to practice natural birth control methods or other options approved by the Vatican. The law simply provides for freedom of choice and consent. 

For highlighting the population control agenda of the government, Tatad’s critique deserves to be studied. But for dismissing the law as an instrument of genocide, Tatad’s petition should be outright ignored.

Getting tough is not the answer: Australia and NZ must work with Asian nations to help, writes Grant Bayldon.

The Asia Pacific region is probably the worst part of the world to be a refugee in. Not only does it have more refugees, it has less protection for them than anywhere else in the world.

This month while in Thailand, I visited Rohingya women and children who had fled from appalling atrocities in Burma. I should be used to hearing such stories by now, working for Amnesty International, but the stories are always so far removed from my life in New Zealand that I don't think I ever will be.

These women had been so desperate to escape that they had fled to Thailand, a terrifying three-week journey in a small open fishing boat packed with 100 people. Some were pregnant - one delivered her baby on the boat. All had terrible stories: houses burnt, family members killed.

The Rohingya are a Muslim minority group in Burma who for centuries have faced severe discrimination, and are denied equal access to citizenship in their own country.

Now in Thailand, the women and children have some room to move around, but their husbands have been caged like animals in a separate detention centre where shocking conditions are standing room only - a desperate mix of disease and depression.

In some ways these are the lucky ones. It's believed that many other Rohingya fleeing Burma by boat over the past year have fallen into the hands of human traffickers who have sold them to become what amounts to slave labourers on fishing boats or into the sex industry.

Some have allegedly been towed out to sea by the Thai Navy, stripped of fuel and supplies and left to die.

For those who've made it to Thailand and other countries, their problem is that - like most countries in the region - Thailand isn't a signatory to the Refugee Convention, and therefore asylum seekers have no guarantee of protection.

What's worse is that Thailand even refuses to allow the United Nations to register the Rohingya for the UN refugee resettlement programme. But even if they did, places are scarce. In Thailand, as in most other countries, they are simply illegal migrants liable to fall prey to human traffickers or indefinite detention.

It's no wonder so many people are trying to get on boats to Australia.

But in Australia the issue has become what humanitarian issues should never be - a political football kicked around by politicians desperate to win an election. On Friday the Australian Government announced it will now refuse to resettle asylum seekers who arrive by boat. Instead they will be permanently deported to Papua New Guinea.

But if you've been listening to the political debate in Australia, everything you've heard is probably wrong. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd paints the arrivals as a catastrophe engulfing Australia. The Leader of the Opposition Tony Abbott claims most are economic migrants seeking a better standard of living.

At first Rudd seems right. The numbers are significant, with almost 16,000 arriving so far this year. Until you look at it as a proportion of Australia's total annual migrant immigration, which brings in an additional 185,000 new Australians each year.

And Abbott's claim that most are not genuine refugees? As you'd probably guess, it's not easy to meet the requirements of being a refugee. Poverty won't get you there, you must prove that you are genuinely fleeing human rights abuses or war. But more than 90 per cent of arrivals in Australia are found to be exactly that: genuine refugees.

Then there's the deterrent claim - that tough policies are necessary to stop people dying at sea. Australia set up the offshore processing solution to achieve this, and New Zealand even had a go with our recent legislation to allow for mass detention of asylum seekers.

But the get-tough approach of making asylum seekers wait for years in inhumane conditions in Nauru and on Manus Island didn't work. They kept coming. The biggest group arriving in Australia are Afghanis, mostly the Hazara ethnic group so dreadfully persecuted by the Taliban. Could Australia or New Zealand's policies ever be so terrifying that they'd rather stay and face the Taliban?

The real tragedy is that the Australian move to send the problem on to Papua New Guinea, and the recent legislation change in New Zealand, diminishes what moral legitimacy we have to play the role of respected brokers in the region.

Because what's needed is not more failed get-tough policies, but to work with the receiving countries like Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia to increase recognition and support for refugees so they don't have to get on boats. We need to create opportunities for the most vulnerable people to be settled right across the region.

That's the role Australia and New Zealand need to play - to be leaders in the region, doing their bit and working with other countries to help them do theirs. Not playing pass the parcel.

Grant Bayldon is Amnesty International's New Zealand executive director.

July 24, 2013

Maungdaw, Arakan - Residents of three villages worry of problems that will occur as their elected village administrators have been replaced by Rakhines.

On June, 2013, Maungdaw district administrator and township administrator went to Kyauk Pando, Wachaa and Gawdusara villages and appointed a head for every 10 houses. These head people appointed 5 commissioners and elected village administrators for each respected village. The elected were then trained by Township Administration. The names of the elected Village Administrators are:

(1) U Abdul Karim for Wachaa,
(2) U Rahim Ullah for Kyauk Pando and
(3) U Karim Ullah for Gawdusara. 

The replacement order, which ignores the election by the villagers, saw the appointment of:

(1) U Maung Maung Thein (resident of Mawrawaddy village) for Wachaa,
(2) U Kyaw Thein for Kyauk Pando and 

(3) U Tha Hla for Gawdusara. 

According to villagers, the replacement order has been made by Vice President Dr. Sai Mauk Kham.

July 24, 2013

Maungdaw, Arakan – A Hlun Htaine police officer, Kyaw Zeya, reportedly extorted 400,000 Kyat from two innocent Rohingyas from Maung Tula village tract, Aley Than Kyaw, Maungdaw Township.

Hafiz Ullah, son of Rabiza Ahmed and an unnamed man, son of Litya Ahmed from Maung Tula village tract, were reportedly arrested by Hlun Htaine police officer Kyaw Zeya on July 22, 2013 at about 2:00 am for unsubstaniated accusation that they had stored weapons at their home. Both men were reportedly handcuffed and brutally beaten on location. Later the police brought them to the police station.

Since there was apparently no evidence against either of the men their arrest seems only to be for the sake of extortion.

“We were happy to learn that the notorious Nasaka was disbanded but now the Hlun Htaine police are carrying the same jobs of Nasaka. Now the arrestees are innocents but they were arrested just to extort the money by police” a villager told RB News.

On the following day both detainees were freed after paying 200,000 Kyat each.

For any inquiry:

Zahir Uddin M. Babar: +60 14 528 6300

Chairperson of RSWAP: +60 14 989 5743