Part 1: Current Situation inside Arakan
Myanmar’s western state of Arakan (Rakhine) is again burning. In Mrauk-U, the former capital of the independent kingdom of Arakan,
hundreds of young Rakhine Buddhist men were on the march: packed on the
backs of pickups, on motorcycles, on trishaws, tuk-tuks and bicycles,
but mostly on foot. They carried spears, swords, cleavers, bamboo
staves, slingshots, crossbows and the occasional petrol bomb. Their
target: the unarmed Rohingya Muslims. As the Economist (dated Nov. 3,
2012) of the UK noted, one Buddhist terrorist tugged at an imaginary beard and made a grisly throat-cutting gesture.
Sadly, Mrauk-U is not the only town where Rohingya Muslims are facing
a genocidal campaign at the hands of Rakhine terrorists. From the
reports collected inside Myanmar,
there is little doubt that the Rakhine Buddhist terrorists, aided by
local and central government politicians, police and security forces,
are carrying out a pre-meditated genocidal campaign to exterminate and
drive out every Rohingya of Burma (Myanmar).
So atrocious and criminal this campaign is even the president of
Myanmar, who had previously tried to hide such targeted violence, had to
admit on Friday, October 26 (as reported in the pro-government
newspaper the New Light of Myanmar) that eight mosques (Muslim houses of
worship) and 2,000 of Rohingya homes were torched to completely destroy
these. His spokesman told the BBC this weekend that "there have been
incidents of whole villages and parts of the towns being burnt down in
Rakhine state." The actual facts and figures, however, are much worse!
It is feared that in the last week of October at least 5,000
Rohingya homes were burned to ashes. Satellite imagery shows the utter
destruction of a Muslim quarter of the coastal town of Kyaukphyu, from where oil-and-gas pipelines are to cross Myanmar to China.
In this latest genocidal campaign, the Muslim villages and localities
in townships are cordoned off and fire bombed. Anyone trying to escape
from their burned homes is shot dead by the Rakhine Buddhist terrorists
and their patrons within the government. Racist Rakhine politicians and
monks are creating an environment of racial/religious hatred and
intolerance which justifies all types of violence against the unarmed
Rohingya population. Many Rohingyas have, therefore, tried to escape to
the forest or the open seas, only to be hunted down there, too. Last
week, hundreds died when their boats sank in the Bay of Bengal. Others are forced to sneak out to Bangladesh.
Denied entry, many have ended up in squalid camps in Sittwe (Akyab) to
join others who have been confined there since early June. Dozens of
Rohingya girls were also kidnapped by the Rakhine terrorists to use rape
and kidnap as weapons of war to terrorize the Rohingya populace.
It is an all out extermination campaign against the Rohingyas of
Myanmar. In a statement dated Thursday, October 25, Ashok Nigam, a
United Nations official in Myanmar,
said, "The UN is alarmed by reports of displacements and destruction.”
He said that access to all affected people is critical and appealed for
immediate and unconditional access to all communities in accordance with
humanitarian principles.
As I have pointed out earlier in my speeches and writings, the Myanmar
government wants to hide its heinous crimes against the Rohingya people
and, thus, have not allowed access of the international media, NGOs,
aid groups and even the UN to the troubled region to investigate,
monitor and assess the scale of the violence. Since the elimination of
the Rohingya people one way or another is the declared state objective,
no aid has reached from the Myanmar
government agencies to the Muslim victims. And what is worse, even the
relief materials sent from the OIC and the Islamic Relief have not
reached the intended Rohingya victims.
Less than 10% of such aids have
trickled down to the victims. The Myanmar government, thanks to the
state-managed protests and demonstrations in October by racist Buddhists
that included monks, has also barred the OIC and Muslim relief agencies
from opening offices inside the Rakhine state to help the Rohingya
victims.
Not a single Buddhist terrorist has been punished for the gruesome
murder of Muslims, not then and not now. All what we heard from the
Thein Sein government was that it had identified the instigators behind
the violence and pledged to bring them to justice. But as we have
witnessed earlier with the June 3 lynching death of 10 Burmese Muslims,
such promises have not translated into justice, let alone created an
atmosphere that protects the lives and properties of the affected
Rohingya minority.
It is obvious that the Thein Sein government is playing the
cat-and-mouse game with the world community with false promises made to
divert attention away when the satellite pictures are too obvious and
difficult to hide such crimes, and once the outside pressure is low to
encourage and participate in this heinous crime. As such the pogroms
that started in June 3 with nearly a hundred thousand internally
displaced Rohingyas have only worsened with extra tens of thousands that
are now without any shelter. The once thriving Muslim localities now
look like bombed-out territories. No Rohingya has been allowed back in
to rebuild those properties. They have been caged in camps that look
like the Nazi concentration camps from which they can’t venture out to
fetch their livelihood without risking being shot by the Rakhine
Buddhist security forces. They have been placed there to slowly die.
Terrorizing the unarmed Rohingya population has become a Rakhine
national passion. The Border Security Force (NASAKA) continues to remind
the Rohingya people that Arakan is a Rakhine place where there is no
place for the Rohingya Muslims and that they must leave or will be
killed. Newer territories are added to the list of ethnically cleansed
ones to terrorize Rohingya Muslims and exterminate them. The Section
144, which prohibits an assembly of more than five people in an area, is
only applied against the Rohingya. They cannot go out to protect their
homes, shops, mosques, schools and villages from being looted and set on
fire by the Rakhine terrorists who are not stopped from committing such
crimes by the security forces.
In most cases, these criminal Rakhines are aided by the government. There have been cases, e.g., as in Kyauk Pyu Township,
in which instead of dousing the fire with water, the Buddhist firemen
sprayed gasoline into the fire to complete the destruction! "The firemen
threw petrol on the flames, as if it was water! The authorities are
one-sided. We can never trust them," said a local teacher to Pete Pattisson,
a journalist working for the Independent (UK). Last Wednesday, the
entire Muslim community in Kyauk Pyu decided to flee in their fishing
boats, joining thousands of others trying to escape from being killed or
burned alive.
Former Muslim
residents of Pauk Taw told the Independent that a government ferryboat
had rammed their fishing boats at sea, resulting in drowning deaths of
dozens. Those who had fled and made it ashore have been prevented by
government authorities from landing on the coast.
Satellite images of Kyauk
Pyu and its coastal surroundings, released by the Human Rights Watch at
the weekend, show the extent of the devastation. Where once there were
houseboats and floating barges moored along a harbor town packed with
houses, now there is charred desolation, with 811 homes and other
structures destroyed.
All the victims in recent months have also been Muslims and yet the
Thein Sein government tries to portray the violence in the Rakhine state
as an interracial or communal riot.
What is going on inside the Rakhine state is simply a purposeful
policy designed by the Myanmar government in which the members of the
majority Rakhine ethnic group, which is Buddhist by faith, are willing
executioners to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the
civilian population of the Rohingya ethnic community, which are Muslims,
from the geographic areas of Arakan and Myanmar. The United Nations
define such activities as ethnic cleansing. No hog-washing by the
murderous regime and its supporters at home and abroad will succeed to
hide such monumental crimes.
Part 2: Ethnic Cleansing of the Rohingyas of Myanmar
The ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people is a text book case. It has become a national project that is led by the Myanmar
state at the central level and the Rakhine state at the local level,
supported by a good percentage of the Buddhist nation and its dominant
Burman and Rakhine ethnic groups, and which employs large institutional
and material resources. The local Rakhine politicians and terrorists,
the Buddhist monks and mobs, and the entire state apparatus from the
local to the central government level are enthusiastic partners in this
project towards final solution of the Rohingya problem.
It was no accident, therefore, to witness demonstrations of monks,
esp. those organized by Young Monks Association, supporting Thein Sein’s
plan to expel the Rohingyas from Myanmar.
The largest such demonstration was led by Wirathu, considered a
venerable teacher by many Buddhists. He is a criminal who was imprisoned
in 2003 for inciting violence against the Muslims. It is no accident
that Suu Kyi spoke with forked tongues and that her NLD party has
actually been supporting the national project towards elimination of the
Rohingya people. Many of the so-called ‘democracy’ leaders have proven
to be no better than fascists and are actually worse than the KKK
members.
The worst criminals in this extermination campaign are, however, the
fellow Rakhine Buddhists, whose ancestors settled in Arakan beginning in
the 11th century, i.e., centuries after the darker
complexioned Indo-Bengali ancestors of the Rohingya people had already
settled in this coastal territory once ruled by the Hindu Chandra
dynasty, which had closer ties with Bengal (today’s Bangladesh).
With that intrusion, albeit a violent one, of the Tibeto-Burman
people, the forefathers of today’s Rakhine race, who professed Buddhism,
the original inhabitant Hindus and Muslims gradually became minority
religious groups. However, in 1430 when two contingents of Muslim Army
from Bengal, comprising of more than 50,000 soldiers, restored the
fleeing Arakanese king Narameikhla (Maung Saw Mawn) to the throne of
Arakan, and a great many of them were asked to protect the regime
against any future Burmese invasion, the new settlements of the Muslim
garrison around the new capital city of Mrohang (Mrauk-U) greatly added
to the size of the minority Muslim community.
The Arakanese rulers of Mrauk-U dynasty adopted superior
Islamic culture from nearby Muslim Bengal/India, and issued coins with
Islamic inscriptions. They patronized Bengali literature. They also
adopted Muslim names, a practice that was to continue for generations
well into the 16th century. Muslims played major roles in
administration, courts and defense of this multi-ethnic kingdom that
maintained its independence for centuries until its annexation by the
Burmese king Bodawpaya in 1784.
Bodawpaya was a Buddhist religious fanatic who tried to demolish
everything Islamic. He introduced racism and bigotry into this
multi-religious region. He destroyed mosques that once dotted the
shorelines of Arakan and patronized building Buddhist monasteries and
pagodas. He massacred tens of thousands of Muslims, and took another
20,000 as prisoners during his annexation of Arakan. During his
tyrannical rule, some 200,000 Arakanese also fled to Bengal (today’s Bangladesh),
which by then was under the British rule. After 40-years of Burmese
rule (1784-1824), Arakan was occupied by the English East India Company
who ruled the territory until Burma won its independence on January 4, 1948.
During the Second World War, taking advantage of the Japanese occupation of Burma,
the Buddhist forces which had allied themselves with the Fascist
Japanese Imperial Army against the British Raj, targeted the Indian and
Muslim population and their homes and businesses. Even the Rohingya
Muslims who lived in the western territories did not escape the
extermination campaign. Nearly a hundred thousand of them were killed in
that joint campaign. They were pushed out of the southern parts of the
Arakan state; and many managed to survive by living in northern territories, closer to the Bengal, where they were a solid majority. Another 80,000 settled permanently in Bengal to save their lives. Two hundred and ninety four Muslim villages were totally destroyed.
Even after Burma
achieved its independence, sadly, the mass elimination and targeted
violence against the Rohingya and other Muslims continued. To the best
of my knowledge, at least two dozen campaigns have been directed against
them to ethnically cleanse them. These are:
01. Military Operation (5th Burma Regiment) - November 1948
02. Burma Territorial Force (BTF) - Operation 1949-50
03. Military Operation (2nd Emergency Chin regiment) - March 1951-52
04. Mayu Operation - October 1952-53
05. Mone-thone Operation - October 1954
06. Combined Immigration and Army Operation - January 1955
07. Union Military Police (UMP) Operation - 1955-58
08. Captain Htin Kyaw Operation - 1959
09. Shwe Kyi Operation - October 1966
10. Kyi Gan Operation - October-December 1966
11. Ngazinka Operation - 1967-69
12. Myat Mon Operation - February 1969-71
13. Major Aung Than Operation - 1973
14. Sabe Operation February - 1974-78
15. Naga-Min (King Dragon) Operation - February 1978-79 (resulting in exodus of some 300,000 Rohingyas to Bangladesh; 40,000 died)
16. Shwe Hintha Operation - August 1978-80
17. Galone Operation - 1979
18. 1984 Pogrom in Taunggok
19. Anti-Muslim riots - Taunggyi (western Burma), Pyay and many other parts of Burma including Rangoon - 1987-88
20. Pyi Thaya Operation – July 1991-92 (resulting in exodus of some 268,000 Rohingyas to Bangladesh)
21. Na-Sa-Ka Operation – since 1992
22. Race riot against Muslims – March 1997 (Mandalay)
23. Anti-Muslim riot in Sittwe – February 2001
24. Anti-Muslim full-scale riot in Central Burma – May 2001
25. Anti-Muslim violence throughout central Burma (especially in the cities of Pyay/Prome, Bago/Pegu) after 9/11 – October 2001
26. Joint extermination campaign – June 3, 2012 – to date.
Every attempt has been made by the Myanmar
government since the days of General Ne Win to ethnically cleanse the
Rohingya people and deny them human rights. They were declared
stateless, thus licensing every crime directed against them; not a
single Article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was honored.
Here below is a shortlist of such crimes against the Rohingya people:
- •Denial of Citizenship
- •Restriction of Movement or Travel
- •Restriction on Education
- •Restriction on Ability to work
- •Forced Labor
- •Land Confiscation
- •Forced Eviction
- •Destruction of homes, offices, schools, mosques, etc.
- •Religious persecution
- •Ethnic discrimination
- •Restrictions on Marriage of Rohingyas
- •Prevention of reproduction and forced abortion
- •Arbitrary Taxation and Extortion
- •Registration of births and deaths in families and even of cattle, and the associated extortion
- •Arbitrary arrest, torture and extra-judicial killing
- •Abuse of Rohingya Women and Elders
- •Rape as a weapon of war
- •Depopulation of Rohingya community
- •Confiscation of residency/citizenship cards
- •Internally displaced persons or undocumented refugees and statelessness
- •Destruction or alteration of historical Muslim sites and shrines to erase its symbolism or Islamic identity.
Part 3: All Over Arakan It’s Bosnia Again!
In a meeting (in which I was invited to speak on the Rohingya
problem) held in Luton (located 30 miles north of London), UK, on
October 13, a British MP mentioned close parallel between what is
happening today against the Rohingya Muslims in Arakan and what happened
in Bosnia in the early 1990s against the Bosnian Muslims. He is right.
The Arakan state, which per estimates made by Dr. Shwe Lu Maung alias Shahnewaz Khan, in his book – The Price of Silence: Muslim-Buddhist War of Bangladesh and Myanmar – a Social Darwinist’s Analysis
– had probably as many Rohingya Muslims as there were Rakhine Buddhists
living in its four districts before the latest extermination campaign
that began on June 3 of this year, is now almost devoid of any Muslim
village that is unharmed or intact by Buddhist Rakhine terrorism.
The UN and other international human rights groups have called the
Rohingya Muslims, and rightly so, the worst persecuted people in our
planet. Because of their race and religion, they are victims of genocide
in the Buddhist-majority Myanmar.
Truly, no other word in the English language but genocide can
describe what the Rohingya people are facing. The use of this term
should not come as a surprise since the Merriam-Webster dictionary
defines genocide as "the deliberate and systematic destruction of a
racial, political or cultural group.” As noted by experts, the term can
be applied to such destructions in whole or in part of an ethnic, racial, religious,
or national group. By any definition, the Rohingya people of Arakan are
ethnically, racially, religiously different than the Rakhine Buddhists
and majority Burmans in Myanmar.
In his book – Worse than War – Dr. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
cites five principal forms of elimination: transformation, repression,
expulsion, prevention of reproduction, and extermination. Transformation
involves the destruction of a targeted group’s essential and defining
political, social, or cultural identities. As I have mentioned earlier,
in spite of their ties to the soil of Arakan since time immemorial, the
Rohingyas are falsely alleged by the dominant ethnic groups as new
settlers from nearby Bangladesh.
Repression entails keeping the hated, deprecated, or feared people
within territorial reach and reducing, with violent domination, their
ability to inflict real or imagined harm upon others. Such repression
has been a regular feature of Rohingya life inside Myanmar.
Expulsion, often called deportation, is a third eliminationist
option. It removes unwanted people more thoroughly, by driving them
beyond a country’s borders, or from one region of a country to another,
or compelling them en masse into camps. The Myanmar government since the days of Ne Win has been guilty of this crime.
Prevention of reproduction is the fourth eliminationist act, which the Myanmar
government has been employing in conjunction with others. Not only are
the Rohingya families restricted from marrying, the women are often
forcibly sterilized, forced to abort and very often raped. In recent
months, during attacks on Muslim homes, villages and towns the
kidnapping of the Rohingya girls and women have become a recurring
event.
Extermination is the fifth eliminationist act in which the targeted
groups are killed, often with the excuse that their very existence poses
a mortal threat. It promises not an interim, not a piecemeal, not only a
probable, but a “final solution” to the putative problem. It is not
difficult to see why in recent weeks, poisoned oil and food were sold to
the Rohingya people by Rakhine businessmen to kill them. The latest
activities by the Rakhine terrorists, aided by racist monks and others
within the larger Myanmar
society, including murderous politicians and government authorities,
thus, clearly show that Rohingyas are victims of an extermination act.
A comparison with the previously cited list of crimes of the Myanmar
government clearly shows that Rohingyas are facing all the five forms
of elimination. It is a complete package of annihilation of the Rohingya
people!
Genocide requires preparation and planning. It begins in the minds of
men and needs mass mobilization to commit the horror against the
targeted group. The perpetrators or the executioners must not only feel
secure but also must be self-motivated and zealous to commit their
horrendous crimes. Often times, the task of preparing the mind is left
to ideologues and chauvinist intellectuals who sell the poison tablet of
intolerance against the targeted group. Without political leadership
the overwhelming majority of the perpetrators would not lift a finger in
harm. However, once set in motion, typically with a few encouraging and
enabling words, they, both the eliminationist regimes’ shock troops and
their societies’ ordinary members give themselves, body and soul, to
death. They do so easily, effortlessly. And this is what we are
witnessing today in Myanmar, esp. the Arakan state.
Taking a cue from other places where genocides have taken place, the
leaders of this greatest crime of our time - the Myanmar government, the
local Rakhine politicians and intelligentsia, and their racist Buddhist
monks within the general population -- have been feeding many myths for
public consumption that not only distort the history of the Rohingyas
and other non-Buddhists but also exaggerate the potential benefits that
could come from ‘purifying’ the soils of Myanmar and Arakan by
eliminating the ‘other’ people, esp. the Rohingya Muslims. Thanks to the
poisonous writings of Rakhine chauvinists like Aye Chan, (late) Aye
Kyaw, Khin Maung Saw and others, the Muslim population is deemed an
‘influx virus,’ a threat to the Buddhist identity of Myanmar,
esp. of Arakan. Thus, a pervasive slogan that is often heard and
discussed in the media is that the Rakhine people can’t live any more
with the Rohingya ‘terrorists.’ Forgotten in such biased reporting is
the mere fact that all the victims of the carnage have been Rohingya
people. It is they who are terrorized by Buddhist terrorism, and not the
other way around!
The causes of mass murder can often be found in the ideology that the
state espouses. Social and ethnic compositions are usually the fault
lines along which such elimination projects emanate. As I have noted
elsewhere, the Myanmar
government espouses a new Myanmarism in which racism and bigotry are
the defining ideologies to purify its soil of all the non-Buddhists and
non-Mongoloid races. Its mosaic of identities - ethnic, racial,
religious, linguistic and cultural, and the resulting diversity, which
could have been its greatest strength is seen in this toxic ideology as
its greatest weakness.
In 1935, years before the Jewish Holocaust happened in Germany, anti-Jewish racist and bigotry-ridden laws were promulgated in the German city of Nuremberg
stopping social and economic contacts with the Jews. The Jews also lost
the right to vote and hold office. Within the next eight years, 13
implementation ordinances were issued dealing with the enforcement of the Reich Citizenship Law that progressively marginalized the Jewish community in Germany.
Anyone violating these laws was punished by hard labor, imprisonment
and/or fines. Such laws were exploited by hard-core Nazis to destroy
properties of a people that the authorities would not generally protect.
Truly, it is hard to imagine the Jewish Holocaust in Europe
without those Nuremberg Laws. The recently issued religious edicts from
Buddhist monks banning social and economic ties with the Rohingya
people, in particular, and the Muslims, in general, is a sufficient
reminder and a dire warning about the ugly head of genocide that is
emerging now in Myanmar, esp. in its western state of Arakan.
As I have noted in my keynote speech at the Bangkok Conference on
“Contemplating Burma’s Rohingya People’s Future in Reconciliation and
(Democratic) Reform,” the new Myanmarism, espoused by the Buddhist
political leadership inside Myanmar,
is totalitarian and is akin to neo-Nazi Fascism. Its leaders and
followers erase distinction between politics and religion, wanting to
merge their racist and fascist politics with and subordinate to radical
Theravada Buddhism that is extremist, fundamentalist, racist, violent
and intolerant of all religions except its own. This toxic ideology is a
sure recipe for disaster in a country like Myanmar
with some 140 ethnic groups and minority Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and
Hindus comprising 15 to 20 percent of the total population. It breeds
intolerance and promotes violence that is officially sanctioned by
people in authority and supported by vast majority of its people as a
national project. This hybrid cocktail of Burmese racist supremacy and
intolerant Buddhism is a threat not only to its minority races and
religions, but also to the entire region.
Sadly, however, because of the western appetite for Myanmar’s natural resources, the crimes of the Myanmar
and Rakhine government are overlooked. And instead, the root causes
behind the targeted violence against the Rohingya Muslims are falsely
attributed to poverty and lack of economic opportunities – points
recently made by Victoria Nuland of the U.S. State Department.
There is, however, no doubt that in spite of Myanmar’s enormous natural resources, the country remains the poorest of the ASEAN countries, and South-east Asia.
But to say that poverty is at the heart of the genocidal campaign is a
linguistic camouflage to justice U.S. State Department’s silence on the
grievous nature of the crimes committed by the murderous Myanmar
government. We have heard similar excuses during the Bosnian and Rwandan
genocidal campaigns. There are many countries with worse poverty but
the powerful majority there doesn’t commit acts of genocide against the
minority. For genocide to happen, it is always a national project in
which people of all walks of life participate, and that is what is
happening with the Rohingya problem inside Myanmar.
For years, China, India and other Asia Pacific countries have been doing business with the brutal military regime in Myanmar. Human rights were never a priority. Many of the European and North American countries were left out from a share at that Myanmar pie. For them to join in, they needed a face change with Myanmar.
And that devious process started first with the award of the Nobel
Peace Prize to Suu Kyi – who did not merit it, and then with the change
of the uniform of the old guards who not long ago had donned the
military dress to claim that they are reform-minded. It was a Glasnost
moment for Burma, which was renamed Myanmar.
That claim was followed with a controversial election held in 2010
(followed by a by-election in which Suu Kyi’s NLD enthusiastically
participated) to show that Myanmar was moving from a fascist military
oligarchy into a democracy, and then the trip of Suu Kyi as Thein Sein’s
unofficial ambassador to the western world pleading for opening up
trade and commerce relationship with the government. And in this warming
up session, the last play was played during Thein Sein’s trip to the UN
where he met with Ban Ki-Moon and other western leaders.
Soon thereafter one after another of the western governments, too
keen to eat their share of the pie, lifted all previous bans against the
murderous regime. They promised huge investments. Emboldened by such
moves, the Thein Sein government does not feel that it is obligated to
honor any previous pledge made to the world community. Soon after his
return from the UN session, the racist Buddhist monks conducted stage
managed demonstrations asking the government to force out or relocate
Muslims. In government managed newspapers, they announced dire
consequences against anyone doing any business with Muslims including
selling food and buying or renting out homes to and from them. As hinted
above, it is a copy of the Nazi era policy. It is a total package of
ethnically cleansing Myanmar
of the Muslim population, in general, and the Rohingyas, in particular.
So insidious is Myanmar’s Buddhist fascism, the Rakhine Buddhists
living inside and outside Arakan and their patrons in the
Buddhist-majority Myanmar do not want any Muslim, esp. the Rohingya,
living inside Myanmar, esp. in the Rakhine state.
As I have noted elsewhere, ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people has now become a national project in Myanmar
in which most Buddhists of Myanmar including the so-called democracy
icon Aung San Suu Kyi are willing participants one way or another. Even
when they are not personally participating in this heinous crime,
through their sinister silence and/or endorsement of the regime’s
anti-Rohingya policy and the genocidal campaign that is carried out by
criminal Rakhine Buddhists, they have essentially become partners in
this crime. The Rakhine Buddhists now have their own version of
Kristallnacht. They are mimicking the Nazi Party's series of pogroms in
1938, whereby one Jewish township after another was attacked. At this
rate of destruction, there won’t be any Muslim locality left inside
Arakan, their ancestral home.
None of these attacks since June 3 are isolated, unplanned, or
spontaneous offenses. Already made stateless by the highly
discriminatory 1982 Citizenship Law that is at variance with scores of
international laws, the Rohingyas are falsely blamed by fascist Rakhine
politicians for crimes that they did not commit so that the Buddhist
populace could be incited to accept and assist the progressively savage
operations of "race purification." Lynching attacks are organized by Aye
Maung’s fascist party - RNDP and other equally racist Rakhine
politicians and greedy businessmen to loot Rohingya properties and burn
their homes, businesses and mosques. Rohingya property is confiscated.
In this task the Rakhine-dominated security forces and police are
willing partners. As a result, the Rohingyas are now caged in
concentration-like camps and ghettos or pushed into exile. The genocidal
program is progressing in fury and irresponsibility to the "final
solution" to make them an extinct people.
We can still stop this extinction if our powerful western governments
act. They can pressure the Thein Sein government through the UN
Security Council not only to stop this ethnic cleansing and restore
Rohingya citizenship, but also ensure that the Rohingyas are compensated
for their loss of lives and properties and live with safety and
security under UN-monitored safe havens created to the west of the Kaladan River. If the regime resists such tangible changes, the UNSC members can take the criminal leaders of Myanmar
and the Rakhine state to a Nuremberg-type trial for committing heinous
crimes against humanity, let alone ban all economic transactions with
the rogue regime.
Unfortunately, the attitude of the powerful nations towards the
Rohingya problem is a reminiscent of the Nazi era; they refuse to see
and hear the obvious truth. It is simply immoral and inexcusable. They
are buying and parroting the Myanmar
regime's argument, that the conflict is basically two-sided with two
large racial groups attacking each other. This is a false equivalence.
When all the townships that are burning, and refugees, are from one side
– the Rohingya, and when renowned activists, Buddhist monks, and local
Rakhine politicians and students are using language reminiscent of the
Nazi propaganda, something truly catastrophic is underway seeking "final
solution" of the Rohingya problem. Nothing can hide this ugly truth!
The Rakhine (Arakan) state now looks like a prison-like ghetto for
the Rohingya people. Now, the Rohingya homes are ring-fenced by
burnt-out buildings and military checkpoints. Outside the capital city
of Sittwe (Akyab), up to
100,000 more Rohingyas are living in a series of sweltering refugee
camps where malnourishment and disease are rife and where security
forces and local Rakhine activists impede aid workers from operating
freely. As a result of years of persecution and a slow but steady
genocidal campaign, half the Rohingya population has already been pushed
out. Others living inside are counting their days to get out of this
living hell. Can our generation allow such an obliteration of an entire
community?
How many Rohingya deaths and destruction of their homes would qualify
for these powerful nations to act and stop this most far-flung and
terrible racial persecution of our time? How can we ignore or tolerate
such a calculated, malignant and devastating crime, which epitomizes
racial hatreds, religious bigotry, terrorism and violence, and the
arrogance and cruelty of power?
It is sad to see that we have not learned anything from genocides of the past – neither from Hitler’s Germany nor from the more recent ones in Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda.
Linguistic camouflages are still used to minimize the nature of the
crime faced by the Rohingya people. Many reporters relaying the events
are using prefixes like “alleged” only to obfuscate what is really
happening. Many local reporters are absolutely biased and are guilty of
disseminating government propaganda.
In his closing remarks before the International Military Tribunal at
the Nuremberg Trials in 1946, Robert Jackson, the U.S. Chief Prosecutor,
issued the following warning: “The reality is that in the long
perspective of history the present century will not hold an admirable
position, unless its second half is to redeem its first. These two-score
years in the twentieth century will be recorded in the book of years as
one of the most bloody in all annals. Two World Wars have left a legacy
of dead which number more than all the armies engaged in any way that
made ancient or medieval history. No half-century ever witnessed
slaughter on such a scale, such cruelties and inhumanities, such
wholesale deportations of peoples into slavery, such annihilations of
minorities. The terror of Torquemada pales before the Nazi Inquisition.
These deeds are the overshadowing historical facts by which generations
to come will remember this decade. If we cannot eliminate the causes and
prevent the repetition of these barbaric events, it is not an
irresponsible prophecy to say that this twentieth century may yet
succeed in bringing the doom of civilization.”
Witnessing the latest genocidal campaign against the Rohingyas of
Myanmar, it is obvious that we have failed on both counts - to eliminate
"the causes" and to prevent "the repetition of these barbaric events."
