By Maung Zarni

Prothom Alo

December 13, 2017

Can you imagine BBC, Chatham House, Rand Corporation portraying as potential “Jewish terrorists” the survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ravensbruick, Dachau and other world infamous death and labour camps? Can you imagine young Jewish children and orphans who were rescued through the programme “kindertransport”, being framed by Allied Policy Makers and advisers as “embryonic Jewish terrorists”, who naturally might be seething with the desire for revenge against the Old Europe post-Third Reich, that, with no shame nor conscience, appeased Hitler in exchange for lucrative business deals or anti-USSR intelligence cooperation while millions of Jewish parents were gassed to death?

Of course not. 

But that is precisely what is now happening to the survivors of my Buddhist country’s genocide, whose name even the entire Catholic Church in Myanmar, and by extension, Pope Francis, have dared not pronounce, lest saying the victims’ ethnic identity might irritate Myanmar’s genocidal leaders, the likes of General Min Aung Hlaing and Aung San Suu Kyi

One million Rohingyas are suffering from this double-whammy of oppression: a perceived threat at home in North Arakan or Rakhine State of Myanmar, and a projected threat across the borders in Chittagong of Bangladesh.

The country of their birth – whatever their citizenship status or ethnic identity – falsely, and officially, frames Rohingyas as ‘illegal Bengali migrants’, or worse, ‘communities of Jihadists’. This view has been cultivated and popularized in the Burmese civil society at large, which now behaves more like the Germans in the 1930s’ than the public that is pushing for human rights or democratization. 

In the eyes of the Burmese public, Rohingyas are seen as a demographic threat to the ‘Buddhist Way of Life’ and a national security. Accordingly, they are mistreated genocidally on their own soil. The host country of Bangladesh of 166 million Muslims, which opened its eastern borders when the human tsunami of fleeing Rohingyas cried out for refuge, has long-standing concern about the Rohingyas in need, becoming ‘a non-traditional security threat’ (epidemic, prostitution, narcotic trade, etc.), as well as a potential pool of Islamic terrorists.

Joining these sovereign states and their governments in this pathological orgy of mis-framing the world’s largest stateless people, that is, the most vulnerable and persecuted community who have just survived the most unimaginably sadistic, coordinated and widespread terror, are consultants and journalists who make a living pumping out ‘security analyses’ for national governments and government-funded think-tanks.

To my dismay, even the country’s great humanitarian and Nobel Peace Laureate Mohammad Yunus – not to mention the usual national security types - has shown no qualms about expressing his national security concerns for Bangladesh, emanating from the prolonged Rohingya presence. He has recently done this in his interview with Mehdi Hassan on Al Jazeera English and elsewhere.

It is now widely reported that Rohingya orphans, women and young girls – including the survivors of genocidal gangrape by Myanmar troops – have been preyed on by local Bangladesh and Rohingya criminal networks – to be exploited as prostitutes, drug mules, bonded labourers, and so on.

Deeply troubling is the existence of white-collar crimes, which I will call the symbolic exploitation of Rohingyas, whereby researchers, journalists and other professionals make their living selling analyses and reports framed within the discourses of ‘Muslim insurgency’, ‘Islamic radicalization’ and ‘fundamentalist terror’. Their human objects of professional gaze, that is, Rohingya survivors of Myanmar genocide – are potential drug mules, petty criminals and ultimately Jihadists.

Considering that out of the recent arrivals of 640,000 Rohingyas, 60 per cent are deeply emotionally scarred women, traumatized children, frail elderly men and women the broad stroke portrayal of this population as a ‘threat to regional instability’ and potential for ISIS recruits is as despicable as the genocidal acts that drove these people in deep and visible misery.

These white-collar criminals – again think-tank consultants, seasoned journalists, amateur Myanmar experts - are equally, if not more, deadly and immoral as the local pimps and petty criminals in Chittagong. Both groups prey on the most vulnerable of all human to line their pockets, enhance their expert reputations and climb their professional ladders as ‘experts on terrorism’, ‘security’, etc.

Swallowing my deep outrage, I have forced myself to read think-tank reports, newspaper editorials, political discussions and media interviews where politicians, consultants, NGOs and journalists express what they consider the prospects for radicalisation of what Bangladesh refers to, gingerly, as ‘forcibly displaced persons from Myanmar’. These ‘security experts’ blatantly ignore the fact that no Rohingya has blown him- or herself up in either Myanmar or Bangladesh – or for that matter, any world’s capital, in the last 39 years since Myanmar launched its first wave of genocidal terror in North Arakan under the guise of ‘anti-illegal immigration’ campaign.

Alas, calling the one million Rohingya genocide survivors, which is what they in fact are, would, I would hope, compel the world of national governments, mass media and national security agencies to accord Rohingyas the kind of belated political support and moral stature which the Holocaust survivors were deservedly accorded.

Why then do the integrated world of power, intelligence and money go along with the pathetic mis-framing of these human victims of the crime of barbarity in Myanmar?

I offer two brief but interlinked explanations: Islamophobia and the mental culture of paranoia on which intelligence agencies rest.

First, these agencies and men and women who staff them, are, institutionally and temperamentally, conditioned to view any human individuals as potential criminals while normal, healthy minds view other humans as decent, potential friends, lovers, and partners. A dear friend and university classmate of my late father who held a coordinator position in Burma’s National Intelligence Bureau reinforced my view that national security paradigms are anchored in institutionalized paranoia.

Second and finally, since 9/11 the western media and the powerful culture industry such as the Hollywood have helped spread the Orientalist (read racist) portrayal of Muslims and Islam as terroristic, senseless, ruthless, parochial, and reactionary. Never mind that it is “the Christian West” – if we must put the mega-pathos of humans in religious terms - have been the primary factor behind the greatest number of death and destruction on a global scale over the last 100 years. The Two World Wars, the Holocaust, the Cold War of Gulags and Death Squads, the Korean War, the Vietnam, and the presently expanding wars in the Middle East come to mind. That doesn’t even include the 500-years of Church-blessed and/or financed European colonialisms and the resultant colonial genocides across the globe.

It is high time that Rohingya refugees are popularly and officially recognized as survivors of Myanmar genocide, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, or whatever one may choose to call their horrendous experiences.

The last thing these Rohingyas – including over 200,000 children – deserve is to be painted as would be Jihadists and Muslim insurgents. We did not call or treat the Holocaust survivors as potential “Jewish terrorists”. Why should we mis-frame, either out of Islamophobia or Pavlovian-paranoia, the Rohingya survivors as potential “Jihadists” or “Muslim insurgents”? Don’t add insult to the genocidal injury of the world’s most persecuted people whose only crime is that they are Rohingya Muslims. 

Maung Zarni is a Burmese human rights activist, an adviser to the European Centre for the Study of Extremism based in Cambridge, UK and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Sleuk Rith Institute in Cambodia. He blogs at maungzarni.net

The Doctors in Hell

By Ro Mayyu Ali

RB Poem

December 13, 2017

We are a Muslim people, a minority

Once boasting of our tradition and history

But the structure of our house

Where we have resided for generations

Groans beneath the weight of race and religion

And the chauvinism of our junta’s oppression 

It was 1978 in Burma

When the state-sponsored virus infected us

Our symptoms were undeniable

Their cause identifiable

But doctors ignored our suffering

The infection flared with time

In 1992's Myanmar

The disease ravaged our people

And one quarter million forced to leave 

Physicians at last turned their heads

But dismissed, upon examination

Our ongoing extermination

The doctors thought of virus's otherness 

But not the dying patients' goodness 

Our disease progressed to a second stage

In 2012 a heart-stopping crisis

At last a diagnosis was pronounced:

“Systematic killing and racial hatred”

The doctors saw us in our cage

But chose again to disengage

Neither the defense to virus yet

Nor the arrangement of ICU for us

The more the time lagged on

The more the virus spread

From citizenship denied

To killings they tried to hide

Again and again the cycle worsened

While doctors turned their eyes blind

From crimes against humanity

We moved to ethnic cleansing

We are a “text-book example”

Yet the text prescribes no treatment

August 25 delivered us to the final stage

The virus consumes our bodies

And invades out our souls

From hidden killings to genocide

We have progressed without treatment

While doctors avert their gaze

About the poem: The metaphors in this poem portray the inaction of global leaders for Myanmar's genocidal operations against Rohingya people. The poet, himself a Rohingya, feels that the atrocities on Rohingya have been happening in open eyes of the world without required intervention.

By Michelle Nichols

Reuters

December 13, 2017

UNITED NATIONS -- A top U.N. official recounted to the Security Council on Tuesday “heartbreaking and horrific accounts of sexual atrocities” by Myanmar soldiers against Rohingya Muslim women, urging the body to visit the region and demand an end to attacks on civilians.

Pramila Patten, special envoy of U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on sexual violence in conflict, said one woman told her she was held by Myanmar troops for 45 days and raped repeatedly, while another woman could no longer see out of one eye after it was bitten by a soldier during a sexual assault.

“Some witnesses reported women and girls being tied to either a rock or a tree before multiple soldiers raped them to death,” Patten told the Security Council. 

“Some women recounted how soldiers drowned babies in the village well. A few women told me how their own babies were allegedly thrown in the fire as they were dragged away by soldiers and gang raped,” she said.

Patten said the 15-member Security Council should visit Myanmar - also known as Burma - and Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, where more than 626,000 refugees have fled to since violence erupted in Myanmar’s northern Rakhine State on Aug. 25. 

She said that a Security Council resolution demanding an immediate end to violations against civilians in Rakhine state and outlining measures to hold the perpetrators accountable “would send an important signal.” 

Myanmar’s army released a report last month denying all allegations of rapes and killings by security forces. 

“This is unacceptable,” said U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley. “Burma must allow an independent, transparent and credible investigation into what has happened.” 

“While we are hearing promises from the government of Burma, we need to see action,” she said. 

Myanmar has been stung by international criticism for the way its security forces responded to Aug. 25 attacks by Rohingya militants on 30 security posts. Last month the Security Council urged the Myanmar government to “ensure no further excessive use of military force in Rakhine state.” 

China’s Deputy U.N. Ambassador Wu Haitao said the crisis had to be solved through an agreement between Myanmar and Bangladesh and warned that any solution “reached under strong pressure from outside may ease the situation temporarily but will leave negative after effects.” 

The two countries signed an agreement on voluntary repatriation Nov. 23. U.N. political affairs chief Jeffrey Feltman pushed on Tuesday for the United Nations to be involved in any operation to return Rohingya. 

“Plans alone are not sufficient. We hope Myanmar will draw upon the wealth of expertise the U.N. can offer,” Feltman told the Security Council. 

Reporting by Michelle Nichols; Editing by Tom Brown

By Margaret Besheer

Voice of America

December 13, 2017

UNITED NATIONS — The U.N. envoy on Sexual Violence in Conflict urged the Security Council on Tuesday to demand an immediate end to the violence against civilians in Myanmar's Rakhine state, which has seen more than 626,000 mainly Rohingya Muslim residents flee to neighboring Bangladesh since August. 

"I urge this body to do everything in its power to seek a swift end to the atrocities; to ensure the alleged perpetrators of sexual and other violence are brought to justice; and to create conditions for a safe and dignified future for the survivors," Pramila Patten told the council. 

She also urged council members to see firsthand the situation in Myanmar and at the refugee camps at Cox's Bazar in Bangladesh. 

Patten said Myanmar authorities have invited her to visit Naypyidaw and Yangon on Thursday through Saturday of this week, where she plans to meet with de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi, as well as military and security officials.

She did not say whether she would have access to Rakhine state, the source of the exodus. There have been numerous reports and satellite images of the Myanmar military burning villages and killing and terrorizing minority Rohingya there after militants launched deadly attacks on state security forces in August.

Atrocities

The U.N. envoy visited Bangladesh in early November and over three days heard horrific testimony from survivors. 

"Women and girls recounted how, upon the arrival of soldiers in their village, they were forced to strip naked and threatened with rape in front of their husbands and fathers while their homes were set ablaze," Patten said. "They related how, in some cases, village leaders were compelled to sign documents stating that they had set fire to their own homes, in order to save the women of their community from rape."

Others were not as fortunate.

"Some witnesses reported women and girls being tied to either a rock or a tree before multiple soldiers literally raped them to death," Patten told the council.

Even Rohingya infants were not spared.

"Some women recounted how soldiers drowned babies in the village well," she said. "A few women told me how their own babies were allegedly thrown in the fire as they were dragged away by soldiers and gang-raped."

She said the accounts of survivors and witnesses were consistent and corroborated by international medical workers at the camps. 

"Ethnic cleansing must never be allowed to achieve its goal," Patten said. 

She also warned that the U.N. and its partners were facing a $10 million funding gap for gender-based violence programs to assist survivors. 

"As regards the alleged sexual violence, the government of Myanmar has made its position clear that it will not condone any human rights abuses," Myanmar Ambassador Hau Do Suan told the council. "If there is concrete evidence, we are ready to take action against the aggressor in accordance with the law, no matter what or who he is."

He said the government would continue to cooperate with the U.N. and its partners to alleviate humanitarian problems and to find a long-term solution to issues related to Rakhine state. 

Aid access needed

U.N. political chief Jeffrey Feltman told the council that humanitarian workers did not have sufficient access to Rakhine. 

"Although Myanmar permitted some ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross] and, more recently, WFP [World Food Program] assistance, access by other U.N. agencies and partners to northern Rakhine is still highly restricted," he said. 

He told the council that although refugee flows had slowed in recent weeks, new arrivals were "exhausted, destitute and traumatized." 

Separately, a coalition of more than 80 human rights and faith-based organizations issued an appeal to the Security Council to impose an arms embargo against Myanmar's military, as well as targeted sanctions against those officers found responsible for serious crimes and human rights violations.

By OCHA

December 12, 2017

To date, there are nearly 860,000 Rohingya refugees in Cox’s Bazar – of whom 646,000 have arrived since 25 August. Not only has the pace of new arrivals since 25 August made this the fastest growing refugee crisis in the world, the concentration of refugees in Cox’s Bazar is now amongst the densest in the world.

Refugees have arrived traumatized and destitute, and are mostly living in makeshift settlements without adequate infrastructure or services. More than half of them (55 per cent) are living in a single site that merges several pre-existing settlements and new land allocated by the Government.

Aid agencies have been working hard to rapidly scale up life-saving aid, but more assistance is desperately needed, and partners urgently require funding to expand operations in line with rapidly intensifying needs. To date, although donors pledged $360 million for the Rohingya crisis response at a conference in October, the Response Plan remains 65 percent underfunded.

In a context where the refugee population is already extremely vulnerable to disease outbreaks primarily due to low vaccination coverage in Rakhine State and overcrowded, unsanitary living conditions in refugee sites in Bangladesh, diphtheria is rapidly spreading in camps in Cox's Bazar. As of 11 December, some 550 suspected cases and nine fatalities had been reported. A specialized team from WHO - to work with the Ministry of Health - is in the country to spearhead the response to the significant increase in Diphtheria cases. A vaccine campaign will begin tomorrow, 12 December, with over 900,000 doses of vaccine expected to arrive in Cox’s Bazar in the next few days. Agencies have committed to supporting efforts to carry out contact tracing, communicating with communities and other efforts curb the spread of diphtheria.

Decongesting the sites and settlements is an urgent priority. Taken as a whole, the Kutupalong Extension site is one of the largest and most dense refugee camps in the world. Overcrowding and lack of space in all settlements is a major concern. Many sites have no access to basic services, and at the others the existing infrastructure is under immense strain. Without additional land and adequate funding, services to scale cannot be delivered appropriately.

Associated Press

December 12, 2017

UKHIA, Bangladesh — The soldiers arrived, as they often did, long after sunset.

It was June, and the newlyweds were asleep in their home, surrounded by the fields of wheat they farmed in western Myanmar. Without warning, seven soldiers burst into the house and charged into their bedroom.

The woman, a Rohingya Muslim who agreed to be identified by her first initial, F, knew enough to be terrified. She knew the military had been attacking Rohingya villages, as part of what the United Nations has called ethnic cleansing in the mostly Buddhist nation. She heard just days before that soldiers had killed her parents, and that her brother was missing.

This time, F says, the soldiers had come for her.

The men bound her husband with rope. They ripped the scarf from her head and tied it around his mouth.

They yanked off her jewelry and tore off her clothes. They threw her to the floor.

And then the first soldier began to rape her.

She struggled against him, but four men held her down and beat her with sticks. She stared in panic at her husband, who stared back helplessly. He finally wriggled the gag out of his mouth and screamed.

And then she watched as a soldier fired a bullet into the chest of the man she had married only one month before. Another soldier slit his throat.

Her mind grew fuzzy. When the soldiers were finished, they dragged her naked body outside and set her bamboo house ablaze.

It would be two months before she realized her misery was far from over: She was pregnant.

___

The rape of Rohingya women by Myanmar’s security forces has been sweeping and methodical, the Associated Press found in interviews with 29 women and girls who fled to neighboring Bangladesh. These sexual assault survivors from several refugee camps were interviewed separately and extensively. They ranged in age from 13 to 35, came from a wide swath of villages in Myanmar’s Rakhine state and described assaults between October 2016 and mid-September.

Foreign journalists are banned from the Rohingya region of Rakhine, making it nearly impossible to independently verify each woman’s report. Yet there was a sickening sameness to their stories, with distinct patterns in their accounts, their assailants’ uniforms and the details of the rapes themselves.

The testimonies bolster the U.N.’s contention that Myanmar’s armed forces are systematically employing rape as a “calculated tool of terror” aimed at exterminating the Rohingya people. The Myanmar armed forces did not respond to multiple requests from the AP for comment, but an internal military investigation last month concluded that none of the assaults ever took place. And when journalists asked about rape allegations during a government-organized trip to Rakhine in September, Rakhine’s minister for border affairs, Phone Tint, replied: “These women were claiming they were raped, but look at their appearances — do you think they are that attractive to be raped?”

Doctors and aid workers, however, say that they are stunned at the sheer volume of rapes, and suspect only a fraction of women have come forward. Medecins Sans Frontieres doctors have treated 113 sexual violence survivors since August, a third of them under 18. The youngest was 9.

The U.N. has called the Rohingya the most persecuted minority on earth, with Myanmar denying them citizenship and basic rights. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees now live in sweltering tents in Bangladesh, where the stifling air smells of excrement from a lack of latrines and of smoke from wood fires to cook what little food there is. The women and girls in this story gave the AP their names but agreed to be publicly identified only by their first initial, citing fears they or their families would be killed by Myanmar’s military.

Each described attacks that involved groups of men from Myanmar’s security forces, often coupled with other forms of extreme violence. Every woman except one said the assailants wore military-style uniforms, generally dark green or camouflage. The lone woman who described her attackers as wearing plain clothes said her neighbors recognized them from the local military outpost.

Many women said the uniforms bore various patches featuring stars or, in a couple cases, arrows. Such patches represent the different units of Myanmar’s army.

The most common attack described went much like F’s. In several other cases, women said, security forces surrounded a village, separated men from women, then took the women to a second location to gang rape them.

The women spoke of seeing their children slaughtered in front of them, their husbands beaten and shot. They spoke of burying their loved ones in the darkness and leaving the bodies of their babies behind. They spoke of the searing pain of rapes that felt as if they would never end, and of dayslong journeys on foot to Bangladesh while still bleeding and hobbled.

They spoke and they spoke, the words erupting from many of them in frantic, tortured bursts.

N, who says she survived a rape but lost her husband, her country and her peace, speaks because there is little else she can do — and because she hopes that somebody will listen.

“I have nothing left,” she says. “All I have left are my words.”

_____

Two months after the men came quietly in the night for F, they came boldly in the daytime for K.

It was late August, she says, just days after Rohingya insurgents had attacked several Myanmar police posts in northern Rakhine. Security forces responded with swift ferocity that human rights groups say left hundreds dead and scores of Rohingya villages burned to the ground.

Inside their house, K and her family were settling down to breakfast. They had only just swallowed their first mouthfuls of rice when the screams of other villagers rang out: The military was coming.

Her husband and three oldest children bolted out the door, fleeing for the nearby hills.

But K was nearly 9 months pregnant, with swollen feet and two terrified toddlers whose tiny legs could never outpace the soldiers’ strides. She had no place to hide, no time to think.

The door banged open. And the men charged in.

There were four of them, she thinks, maybe five, all in camouflage uniforms. Her young son and daughter began to wail and then, mercifully, scampered out the front door.

There was no mercy for her. The men grabbed her and threw her on the bed. They yanked off her earrings, nose ring and necklace. They found the money she had hidden in her blouse from the recent sale of her family’s cow. They ripped off her clothes, and tied down her hands and legs with rope. When she resisted, they choked her.

And then, she says, they began to rape her.

She was too terrified to move. One man held a knife to her eyeball, one more a gun to her chest. Another forced himself inside her.

When the first man finished, they switched places and the torture began again. And when the second man finished, a third man raped her.

In the midst of her agony, she thought of nothing but the baby inside her womb, just weeks away from emerging into a world that would not want him, because he was a Rohingya.

She began to bleed.

She blacked out.

As she awoke, her great aunt was there, tearfully untying her. The elder woman bathed her, clothed her and gave her a hot compress for her aching thighs.

When K’s husband returned home, he was furious: not just at the men who had raped her, but at her. Why, he demanded, had she not run away?

She was pregnant and in no condition to run, she shot back. Still, he blamed her for the assault and threatened to abandon her, because, he told her, a “non-Muslim” had raped her.

Fearful the men would return, she and her family fled to her father’s house in the hills above the village. When they saw soldiers setting fire to the houses below, they knew they had to leave for Bangladesh.

K was too crippled by pain to walk. Her husband and brother placed her inside a sling they fashioned out of a blanket and a stick, and carried her for days.

Inside her cocoon, she wept for the baby she feared was dead.

_____

A few days after the men burst into K’s house, 10 soldiers arrived at R’s.

She was just 13 years old, but R had already learned to fear the military men.

Her parents had warned her to steer clear of them, yet it was her father who first fell prey to their wrath. One day last year, R says, soldiers stabbed him in the head with a knife, killing him.

Yet R’s family had nowhere else to go. And so they stayed in the village. R busied herself by learning Arabic, doting on her chicken and its hatchlings and caring for her two younger brothers.

And then one day in late August, R says, the soldiers barged into her house. They snatched up her little brothers, tied them to a tree outside and began to beat them. R tried to run out the front door, but the men caught her.

Her body is barely pubescent, her limbs still gangly like a child’s. But her youth could not protect her.

R fought back against the men, but they dragged her out of the house. The skin tore away from her knees as her legs scraped along the ground.

The men tethered her arms to two trees. They ripped off her earrings and bracelets, stripped off her clothes.

R screamed at them to stop. They spit at her.

And then the first man began to rape her.

She froze. She was a virgin. The pain was excruciating.

The attack lasted for hours. She remembers all ten men forcing themselves on her before she passed out.

One of her older brothers later found her on the ground, bleeding.

R’s two little brothers were missing, but their mother had no time to search for them. She knew she had to get her daughter over the border and to a doctor quickly to get medicine in time to prevent a pregnancy.

R was barely conscious. So her two older brothers carried her across the hills and fields toward Bangladesh. R’s mother hurried alongside them, terrified for her daughter, terrified that time was running out.

That R’s family sought treatment for her at all is an anomaly. Despite still suffering pain, bleeding and infections months after the attacks, only a handful of the women interviewed by the AP had seen a doctor. The others had no idea free services were available, or were too ashamed to tell a doctor they were raped.

In a health center overflowing with women and wailing babies, Dr. Misbah Uddin Ahmed, a government health officer, sits at his desk looking weary. He pulls out a stack of patient histories for those treated at his clinics and begins to flick through them, reading the case summaries out loud:

Sept. 5, a patient 7 months pregnant says three soldiers burst into her home 11 days ago and raped her. Also Sept. 5, a patient says she was asleep at home when the military broke in 20 days ago and three soldiers raped her. Sept. 10, a patient says the military came to her house one month ago and beat her husband before two soldiers raped her.

Ahmed says the women who manage to overcome their fear and make it to his clinics are usually the ones in the deepest trouble. So many others, he adds, are suffering in silence.

Though the scale of these attacks is new, the use of sexual violence by Myanmar’s security forces is not. Before she became Myanmar’s civilian leader, Aung San Suu Kyi herself condemned the military’s abuses. “Rape is rife. It is used as a weapon by armed forces to intimidate the ethnic nationalities and to divide our country,” she said in a 2011 videotaped statement to the Nobel Women’s Initiative.

And yet Suu Kyi’s government has not only failed to condemn the recent accounts of rape, it has dismissed the accounts as lies. In Dec. 2016, the government issued a press release disputing Rohingya women’s reports of sexual assaults, accompanied by an image that said “Fake Rape.”

Ahmed seems bewildered that anyone would ever doubt these women. Look at what I have just shown you, he says, gesturing toward his stack of files chronicling one atrocity after another.

Gynecologist Arjina Akhter has witnessed the results of those atrocities. Since August, so many women began showing up at her two clinics, she stopped asking them to fill out patient history forms so she could treat them faster. Among other women, she estimates between 20 to 30 rape survivors visited her clinics in September and October.

She ticks off the injuries: Two women with lacerations to their cervixes they said were caused by guns shoved inside their bodies. One woman with horrific tearing she said was caused by a nail driven into her vagina. Several women with severe vaginal bleeding.

More recently, she says, women who were raped months ago have been coming to her in a panic, asking for abortions. She has to explain to them that they are too far along, but reassures them that officials will take the babies if they cannot care for them.

Still, for some Rohingya women, giving up the babies they never asked for was not an option.

Which is how it was for F.

___

More than three months had passed since the men burst into F’s home, and her despair had only deepened.

Neighbors had taken her in and cared for her. But her house was gone, her husband was dead. And the timing of the attack left little doubt that the baby growing inside her belonged to one of the men who had caused all her grief.

She could only pray that things would not get worse. And then, one night in mid-September, they did.

F was asleep along with the neighbors — a couple and their 5-year-old son — when the men broke down the door, jolting everyone awake.

There were five of them this time, she remembers. They quickly grabbed the boy and slashed his throat, and killed the man.

Then they turned to the man’s wife, and to F. And her nightmare began again.

They stripped off the women’s clothes. Two of the men noticed the swell of F’s stomach and grabbed it, squeezing hard.

They threw the women to the floor. F’s friend fought back, and the men beat her with their guns so viciously the skin on her thighs began to peel away.

But the fight had gone out of F. She felt her body go soft, felt the blood run between her legs as the first man forced himself on her, and then the second. Next to her, three men were savaging her friend.

When it was finally over and the men had gone, the two women lay immobile on the floor.

They lay there for days, so crippled by pain and catatonic from the trauma that they could not even lift themselves to use the toilet. F could smell the blood around them. As the house baked under the punishing sun, the stench from the decaying bodies of her friend’s husband and son finally overwhelmed her.

She would not die here. And neither would her baby.

She reached out for her friend’s hand and clasped it. Then F hauled herself to her feet, pulling her friend up with her. Hand in hand, the women stumbled to the next village. They spent five days recovering there and then, alongside a group of other villagers, began the 10-day journey to Bangladesh.

The monsoon season had begun, but there was nowhere to shelter. So F kept walking through the downpours. She was starving, and her battered body ached with each step. Generous strangers offered her sips of their water, and one man gave her a few sweet rolls.

One day, she came across a 9-year-old boy lying along the side of a road, wounded and alone. He had lost his parents, he told her, and the soldiers had tortured him. She took him with her.

Together, the two made it to the shores of the Naf River and boarded a boat to Bangladesh.

Which is where they live now, in a tiny bamboo shelter between two filthy latrines. And it is here that F prays her baby will be a boy — because this world is no place for a girl.

___

For now, the women are left to wonder how long they will live in the bleak limbo of Bangladesh, and if they will ever return to their homeland.

R, the teen, is not pregnant. Her mother sold all her jewelry and got her to the hospital in time. But R can’t stop thinking about her little brothers, and her sleep is plagued by nightmares.

Since the rape, she has struggled to eat, and her once-curvy frame has shrunk. Before the rape, she says softly, she was pretty.

K, who feared the baby inside her had died, gave birth to a boy on the floor of her tent in a dizzying rush of relief. She had kept her son alive through it all.

But her trauma persists. The thrum of a helicopter hovering over the camp sends her into a panic and she recites the Muslim prayer for the moments before death. She is convinced the aircraft is Myanmar’s military, coming to kill them all.

When told she is strong, she looks up with tears in her eyes.

“How can you say that?” she asks. “My husband says he is ashamed of me. How am I strong?”

F, whose body is starting to ache under the strain of her pregnancy, finds her mind often drifts toward how she will care for the child in the future. She believes God has kept them both alive for a reason.

Her parents, her brother, her husband are gone now. This baby will be the only family she has left. For her, the most haunting reminder of the agony she endured also, somehow, represents her last chance at happiness.

“Everybody has died,” she says. “I don’t have anyone to care for me. If I give this baby away, what will I have left? There will be nothing to live for.”

Independent International Fact Finding Mission on Myanmar concludes visit to Malaysia

KUALA LUMPUR - (11 December 2017) – UN human rights experts wrapped up this weekend a five-day visit to Malaysia, during which they focused their inquiries on recent human rights violations and abuses allegedly committed in Myanmar. 

In Malaysia, the experts – members of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar (FFMM) – interviewed persons from Shan and Kachin states, as well as members of the ethnic Rakhine and Rohingya communities.

They talked both with recent arrivals and with those who had been here for some years. They also consulted with government officials, representatives of UN agencies and NGOs, and individual researchers.

While the recent events in Rakhine state have naturally been a significant focus for the FFMM Experts, the Malaysia visit allowed the experts to receive information on situations across Myanmar, including information on recent years from Kachin and Shan states.

“This visit allowed us to examine allegations in various states of Myanmar,” said Marzuki Darusman, former Indonesian Attorney-General and Chair of the FFMM. “We received information about practices and incidents alleging forced labour, abductions, rape and land grabbing.” 

The UN Refugee Agency has registered some 134,000 persons from Myanmar in Malaysia, almost 90 percent of its total caseload in the country. These include Rohingya, Myanmar Muslims, Chin, ethnic Rakhine, Mon, Karen, and various groups from Kachin, Shan among others. The actual number of Myanmar refugees is believed to be much higher.

During the visit, the FFMM experts observed some parallels with information received about Rakhine.

“We were struck by some patterns emerging from the allegations of Shan, Kachin and ethnic Rakhine groups similar to those we heard from the Rohingya we met in Bangladesh,” said FFMM Expert Christopher Sidoti, a former Australian Human Rights Commissioner.

“We heard accounts of events that, if true, would constitute serious human rights violations by the Myanmar military, as well as abuses by armed groups,” Sidoti added. “All those we spoke with said they left Myanmar very suddenly, with little or nothing, which highlights the dramatic nature of what caused them to leave.” 

The use of insults and slurs to refer to ethnic communities was another parallel.

“I’m particularly concerned to hear allegations that, as with the Rohingya, dehumanising language is used to refer to other groups,” Darusman said. “The testimonies point to ingrained prejudices against those who are not from the Bamar majority.” 

Events in Rakhine state remain on the FFMM’s radar. At the special session of the UN Human Rights Council on 5 December, Darusman noted that, while there are signs that the violence has abated in Rakhine, it has not stopped.

“Thanks to fire detection and satellite imagery, we know that villages were still being burned in Maungdaw and Buthidaung townships as recently as 25 November,” he said, cautioning against any plan to repatriate those who had fled until there are guarantees for their protection. 

The Myanmar Government has not yet granted the FFMM access to the country. Nevertheless, according to Darusman, lack of access has not impeded the FFMM’s work. 

Teams of human rights officers have been dispatched by the Fact-Finding Mission to various countries to conduct comprehensive interviews with those who fled Myanmar over recent years. This data, alongside other information sources, will be subjected to verification and legal analysis before being submitted as part of the Fact-Finding Mission’s final report. 

The UN Human Rights Council appointed the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar last March to “establish the facts and circumstances of alleged recent human rights violations by military and security forces, and abuses, in Myanmar, in particular in Rakhine State.” The experts have defined “recent” to mean since 2011. 

The FFMM It is due to submit an interim oral report to the Human Rights Council in March 2018 and a final report in September 2018 to the Council and to the General Assembly. 

ENDS 

For more information and media inquiries: Sylvana Foa +41 22 9179900 / +41 76 6910812 / sfoa@ohchr.org

Published by OHCHR. 

GENEVA -- Peace and stability must be restored in Myanmar’s northern Rakhine state before any Rohingyas can return from Bangladesh, under international standards on voluntary repatriation, the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) said on Friday.

Some 20,000 Rohingya fled Myanmar to Bangladesh in November, and at least 270 so far in December, bringing the total since violence erupted on August 25 to 646,000, according to the UNHCR and International Organization of Migration (IOM).

The two countries have signed an agreement on voluntary repatriation which refers to establishing a joint working group within three weeks of the Nov. 23 signing. UNHCR is not party to the pact or involved in the bilateral discussions for now. 

“It is critical that the returns are not rushed or premature,” UNHCR spokesman Adrian Edwards told a briefing. “People can’t be moving back in into conditions in Rakhine state that simply aren’t sustainable.”

Htin Lynn, Myanmar’s ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva, said on Tuesday that his government hoped returns would begin within two months. He was addressing the Human Rights Council, where the top U.N. rights official said that Myanmar’s security forces may be guilty of genocide against the Rohingya Muslim minority. 

The UNHCR has not been formally invited to join the working group, although its Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees Kelly Clements is holding talks in Bangladesh, Edwards said, adding that discussions were “still at a very preliminary stage”. 

He could not say whether UNHCR was in talks with Myanmar authorities on its role, but hoped the agency would be part of the joint working group. 

Edwards, asked whether the two-month time was premature, said: “The return timeline of course is something that we are going to have to look closely at ... We don’t want to see returns happening either involuntarily or precipitously and before conditions are ready.” 

In all, Bangladesh is hosting a total of more than 858,000 Rohingya, including previous waves, IOM figures show. 

“We have had ... a cycle of displacement from Rakhine state over many decades, of people being marginalized, of violence, of people fleeing and then people returning,” Edwards said. 

“Now this cycle has to be broken, which means that we have to find a way to ensure that there is a lasting solution for these people.” 

WFP spokeswoman Bettina Luescher said that it had distributed food to 32,000 people in northern Rakhine in November. 

“Everybody agrees that the situation is very dire on ground, that all of the U.N. agencies need more access, that the violence has to stop and that these people can live in safety where they want to live,” she said. 

Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay, editing by Larry King

By Maliha Khan

The Daily Star

December 9, 2017

How Rohingya citizen journalists have been documenting the crisis over the years and what's changed now

For years now, the persecution of Rohingya in Myanmar has been broadcast to the world largely through volunteers who use smartphones to send photos, audio and video clips out to the Rohingya diaspora, larger Muslim community and the world. In the camps in the south of Bangladesh, refugees show images and videos of scenes of violence back home on their phones. Members of these WhatsApp or Facebook groups include the Rohingya diaspora in countries as wide-ranging as Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and the UK.

Rakhine state has been “closed” to the outside world with the government restricting access to the region to independent observers, journalists, rights groups, and the UN. “Due to the denial of access to the region, it is essentially impossible to get information,” says Rohingya refugee Mohammed Rafique, founder of The Stateless, a Rohingya community news portal.

What little has come out has been through social media, community outlets, and blogs. Two prominent sources of news online include the Rohingya Blogger and The Stateless.

Nay San Lwin, based in Germany, runs the Rohingya Blogger. The blog has become an important news media outlet for documenting human rights abuses against the Rohingya as well as featuring major international articles doing the same. Lwin's father, U Ba Sein, founded the website in 2005 and Lwin himself has been blogging since 2012. “We have gathered a great deal of evidence which arguably amount to show genocide has occurred against the Rohingya,” stated Lwin recently at a conference organised by the Refugee and Migratory Movement Research Unit (RMMRU) in Dhaka.

The year 2012 marked deadly riots between Buddhists and the Rohingya in the state of Rakhine, with allegations that the subsequently deployed military committed human rights abuses in Rohingya villages. As the national media largely ignored the violence, Rohingya community leaders and members of the diaspora set up their own media outlets to document and report on atrocities being committed in the state.

It was at this time that both Rohingya Blogger and The Stateless came into being. Lwin formed a team of volunteers based in northern Rakhine state. His team members keep tabs on all the villages in the area to document actions of the Border Guard Police (BGP), military and civilian authorities against the Rohingya.

“We also have volunteers in central Rakhine state who are reporting about the situation of refugee camps,” says Lwin. Around 120,000 internally displaced Rohingya have been interned in camps across Rakhine State since 2012 with the government restricting the UN and aid groups from distributing vital food aid or providing healthcare services.

Rohingya Blogger also has volunteers this side of the border, who have covered several incidents in the camps. They do not have problems recruiting, says Lwin, because they are well-known and many are willing to cooperate for the sake of getting information of their plight out to the world. 

The Rohingya Blogger team works discreetly, even among the villagers who are their sources. They are also anonymous online as they could all be sentenced to long imprisonment for their activities, says Lwin.

“Two of our team members were arrested two years ago but they managed to get released by themselves. We didn't publicise that they were our members as they would have been sentenced to imprisonment for their work. Some non-members who sent reports to us were arrested as well and four people from Buthidaung township have been sentenced for six years,” says Lwin.

Mobile phones have been available in the villages of Rakhine state only since 2014. Even without, says Lwin, his sources are tenacious. Lwin says of his experiences over the years, “I used to receive handwritten information. They know how to send information and they know how to reach me. I have even received handwritten reports from prison cells.”

What's changed in 2017? For one, half of Lwin's team is now in Bangladesh, having fled there since the most recent spate of violence August onwards. The rest of the volunteers remain in their villages but mobility is no longer an option. Many of their contacts, too, have fled across the border. This has led to a change in focus for the blog. “As the atrocities against the Rohingya are mostly known to the world by now, we are shifting our attention to writing news updates in Burmese to better inform Burmese Buddhists,” says Lwin.

Lwin and his news site have come under attack by the government. An article published in January of this year was dismissed by the Information Committee of the State Counsellor's Office as “fabricated”. “Our work has been publicly attacked by the government and the military. The official Facebook page of the Office of the President has attempted to attack and discredit us. They claim that our evidence and reporting was fake news,” stated Lwin at the RMMRU conference.

The Stateless is also run by a member of the Rohingya diaspora, based in Ireland. This, too, is run with the help of volunteers based within Rakhine State who operate with no pay and undertaking enormous risk.

Mobile journalism has been crucial for the persecuted Rohingya to get information out, using social media groups in WhatsApp and WeChat among others.“We normally go through a process in the groups to verify the authenticity of information by confirming with other members and video or imagery evidence. Then we proceed in writing the report,” says Rafique.

Recently, there have been reports of journalists documenting the Rohingya crisis going missing, targeted by the military. Since October 9 of last year, nine out of 10 of their mobile journalists have either disappeared or been killed, reports Rafique.

Since August 25 of this year, hundreds of villages have been entirely destroyed by the military with over 600,000 having sought refuge in neighbouring Bangladesh. The Stateless is currently starved of information with no sources left in the villages of Rakhine, says Rafique. This draught of information also has repercussions for human rights activists and international media outlets which depend on community sources in the otherwise “closed” state for information from inside.

Burmese journalists have not been spared, even on this side of the border. In September, Minzayar Oo and Hkun Lat, two photojournalists from Myanmar, were detained for almost 10 days. According to Bangladesh police, they were arrested for conducting their journalist work while on tourist visas. Ironic, considering that the rest of the world's journalists have been going about their work in Cox's Bazar without the threat of arrest.

The international media have finally taken a sustained interest in the matter due to the influx of over a million refugees into Bangladesh over the last year. But the work of these Rohingya mobile journalists remains as important as ever. With Rakhine still closed to the outside world, information from the epicenter of the crisis is vital to the fight of the Rohingya both inside and outside Myanmar.

By Mutasim Billah and Sorwar Alam

Anadolu Agency

December 9, 2017

DHAKA, Bangladesh -- In the wake of Bangladesh and Myanmar signing a deal to repatriate Rohingya refugees to Myanmar’s Rakhine state, most experts see "zero probability" that the deal will be implemented.

The bilateral deal, signed this Nov. 23, stipulates some nearly impossible conditions for the verification of the residency of the people the agreement calls "displaced persons from Myanmar" instead of their widely known ethnic identity of Rohingya. 

C.R. Abrar, coordinator of the Dhaka-based Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit (RAMMRU), told Anadolu Agency that the agreement was rubbish, as by signing the deal Myanmar only aimed to ease the international pressure on it.

Abrar, one of the most prominent experts in Bangladesh on the Rohingya, said the agreement had “many limitations”.

“There is no way to involve a third party to identify refugees, according to the pact.”

Some sections of the deal would make repatriation impossible, according to him.

“Because all the documents the Rohingya had were taken by Myanmar by force when they fled persecution, and there was no reason to carry the documents under the [dire] circumstances when they had to flee genocide,” he said.

And even if the Rohingya show the documents claiming their residency, Myanmar’s government has the right to reject anyone it wants, according to Abrar.

He added: “We’ve learned that Myanmar’s government has changed the official names of many villages and residential areas in Rakhine state. If the Rohingya mention the name of a village or the city, in light of this it’s doubtful they will be accepted.”

Although Rohingya refugees should willingly return to their homeland, he said: “I see no reason that they will go back.”

“I think this deal is pure rubbish. It will be used by Myanmar’s government as a defense against international criticism.”

He said the deal says nothing about including human rights groups and NGOs providing humanitarian assistance to the repatriation process.

The agreement only envisages that the two governments "will duly coordinate with the UNHCR,” the UN refugee agency, if needed. 

"It’s been said that the returning Rohingya would be held in camps for a short period of time but there’s no fixed duration.

“I don’t think there’s any section in this agreement that protects the Rohingya’s rights, and that's why I don’t think they'll go back."

No provisions for monitoring the process

The Rohingya, described by the UN as the world's most persecuted people, have faced heightened fears of attack since dozens were killed in communal violence in 2012.

Violence erupted on Aug. 25, forcing over 620,000 Rohingya to cross from Myanmar's western state of Rakhine into Bangladesh, according to the UN.

The refugees are fleeing a military operation in which security forces and Buddhist mobs have killed men, women and children, looted homes, and torched Rohingya villages. According to Bangladeshi Foreign Minister Abul Hasan Mahmood Ali, around 3,000 Rohingya have been killed in the crackdown.

M. Humayun Kabir, Bangladesh’s former ambassador to the U.S., said that many issues on the repatriation have yet to be fixed.

"This is only the initial phase of the agreement. Many more things remain to be done. We have around a month-and-a-half" before implementing the deal, he said.

“Actually, the articles of the agreement are referred to as guiding principles, [and] a joint working group will be created. Then I think there will be a chance to talk about documentation. We can mention to them that if we already registered Rohingya refugees this can be used as a document. If it can be done, then the process will be easy,” he said.

Under the Nov. 23 agreement, the only documents acceptable as valid for proving Rohingya residency in Myanmar are “copies of documents issued in Myanmar indicating their residence in Myanmar, such as old and expired citizenship identity cards / National Registration cards / Temporary Registration cards (White cards) and any other documents issued by relevant Myanmar authorities; or Other documents or information indicating their residence in Myanmar, such as addresses, reference to household or business ownership document, school attendance, or any other relevant particulars and information.”

Kabir agreed that there are no provisions for monitoring the repatriation process.

Though the deal emphasizes "the need for sustainable and durable solutions … [for a] process of voluntary return in safety, security, and dignity with options for recommencing livelihoods, after verification that the returnees have been residents of Myanmar," both the experts voiced their concerns over this.

“If the Rohingya can’t be assured that they are safe, then they won’t go,” said Kabir.

But he also praised the deal as a big achievement for Bangladesh, as the Myanmar government had to sit at the negotiating table with Bangladesh and agree to sign the deal due to constant pressure from the international community.

“I think now Myanmar also feels pressure [from the international community], that’s why they agreed to sign the deal,” he said, adding that the international community should continue its pressure on Yangon.

“We would like to be optimistic about this agreement, but at the same time we will remain conscious until it is implemented,” he said. 

‘China pushed for the deal’

Afsan Chowdhury, a veteran journalist and researcher in Bangladesh, told Anadolu Agency that China was the main player in the deal.

He underlined that both Bangladesh and Myanmar have multibillion-dollar financial ties with China.

“The deal was done due to China's influence,” Chowdhury said. 

“In line with China's choice, we made a bilateral agreement instead of multilateral agreements. China has a huge influence on both countries. Now it’s able to control everything…

“Bangladesh gets ultra-low-interest loans from China, and that’s why China has an implicit influence. I’m not very optimistic about this bilateral agreement. Nobody is optimistic.”

He highlighted that China was the first country in the world to welcome the agreement.

Ro Nay San Lwin, a European-based Rohingya activist, told Anadolu Agency that repatriation was “practically impossible”.

Documentation and verification would be main issues of the process, as the Rohingya would be unable to present the required documents since Myanmar has long since stopped providing Rohingya any official citizenship documents.

“There are many ways to prove the residency status of the people who fled to Bangladesh. The most important is that UN organizations must be involved in this repatriation,” Lwin explained. 

“Bangladesh must be very strong when they deal with Myanmar. They should not accept any burden imposed by Myanmar. If they believe anyone is from Myanmar, they have to pressure Myanmar to take them back.”

He added: "At a special session of the UNHRC held Tuesday in Geneva, Myanmar representative Htin Lynn said there will be no camps. But we still need to see the official announcement from Myanmar’s government.

“No Rohingya will go back home unless their citizenship and basic human rights are guaranteed by Myanmar’s government.” 

Lwin said that Rohingya survivors will go back to Myanmar "only if their houses are rebuilt and ready in their original villages, they are offered full citizenship cards at the entry points, and are guaranteed that they would not be persecuted again".