Rohingya Genocide - Updates

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1. The Rohingya: Humanitarian Crisis or Security Threat?


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The Rohingya: Humanitarian Crisis or Security Threat?
Global attention to the Rohingya issue is rising, but not necessarily for the right reasons.
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2. http://www.malaysiandigest.com/news/...-rm10-000.html
3. http://burmatimes.net/no-more-jungle...tell-migrants/
4. US Embassy: Thein Sein Summons on Rohingya ‘Unrelated’ to Policy


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US Embassy: Thein Sein Summons on Rohingya ‘Unrelate...
The US Embassy says America’s Myanmar policy is “unrelated” to a court summons for Thein Sein based on allegations of Rohingya human rights violations.
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5. http://burmatimes.net/increased-secu...maungdaw-town/
6. Suu Kyi says hopes to lead Myanmar despite constitutional ban


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Suu Kyi says hopes to lead Myanmar despite constitutiona...
Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi has said she plans to lead the next government if her National League for Democracy (NLD) comes to power in the Nov. ...
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7. http://burmatimes.net/europes-rohing...-in-the-hague/
8. http://www.rvisiontv.com/ec-seeks-in...-3-ministries/
9. Myanmar elections: 'Burmese cannot accept us' - BBC News


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Myanmar elections: 'Burmese cannot accept us' - BBC News
Jonah Fisher reports on the struggles of Myanmar's Muslims as the country's election approaches.
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10. http://www.elevenmyanmar.com/local/2...ction-campaign
11. From slave to student: Myanmar migrants find abuse, opportunity in Thailand


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From slave to student: Myanmar migrants find abuse, oppo...
By Sarah Hucal for Mongabay
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12. Aung San Suu Kyi calls for transparency in cross-border operations


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Aung San Suu Kyi calls for transparency in cross-border ...
Myanmar opposition politician Aung San Suu Kyi has questioned the secrecy surrounding an operation against Naga militants along the Indo-Myanmar border by the...
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13. Myanmar Needs Peace Before Elections


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Myanmar Needs Peace Before Elections
A new government can't accomplish much in a country wracked by civil war.
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14. Myanmar army attacks Shan State Army-North (SSA-N)


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Myanmar army attacks Shan State Army-North (SSA-N)
Myanmar’s military launched an attack against the Shan State Army-North (SSA-N) in the country’s eastern Shan state on Tuesday, ...
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15. Myanmar's Ma Ba Tha monks flex their political muscle - BBC News


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Myanmar's Ma Ba Tha monks flex their political muscle - ...
The most powerful political force in Myanmar's election has no candidates and will win no seats. But when the monks of the Ma Ba Tha speak, politicians listen.
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16. Myanmar to repatriate 105 Bangladeshi boatpeople


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Myanmar to repatriate 105 Bangladeshi boatpeople
Myanmar authorities are making arrangement to repatriate 105 more verified Bangladeshi "boatpeople" left in a refugee camp in western Rakhine state, an official rep...
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17. Two abducted tourists, guide still traceless


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Two abducted tourists, guide still traceless
Two tourists and their local guide, who were abducted in Bilaichhari upazila under Rangamati district on October 3, are yet to be rescued.
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Where is America?

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http://www.rohingyablogger.com/2015/10/2-minutes-speech-dedicated-to-rohingya.html

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Burma’s Million-Strong Rohingya Population Faces ‘Final Stages of Genocide,’ Says Report
By Rishi Iyengar
TIME
October 29, 2015

The long-persecuted ethnicity is on the verge of "mass annihilation," say experts, with new evidence indicating government complicity



Despite the U.S.-led rolling back of economic sanctions and internationally backed national elections taking place early next month, more than a million people in Burma are facing state-sponsored genocide, according to a new report.

The Rohingya Muslim community of the military-dominated Southeast Asian nation, which is now officially known as Myanmar, has been systematically persecuted and expunged from the national narrative — often at the behest of powerful extremist groups from the country’s majority Buddhist population and even government authorities — to the point where complete extermination is a possibility, according to a damning new study by the International State Crime Initiative (ISCI) at the Queen Mary University of London.

“The Rohingya face the final stages of genocide,” concludes the report.

ISCI uses noted genocide expert Daniel Feierstein’s framework of the six stages of genocide, outlined in his 2014 book Genocide as Social Practice, as a lens through which to view Burma. Through interviews with stakeholders on both sides of what it describes as ethnic cleansing, as well as media reports and leaked government documents, the report enumerates how the Rohingya have undergone the first four stages — stigmatization and dehumanization; harassment, violence and terror; isolation and segregation; systematic weakening — and are on the verge of “mass annihilation.” The sixth stage, which involves the “removal of the victim group from collective history,” is already under way in many respects, the report says.

Stricken from Burma’s 135 officially recognized ethnicities in 1982, the Rohingya have undergone decades of discrimination and disenfranchisement, albeit never to the degree they currently face. The Burmese government’s official position is that the Rohingya are interlopers from neighboring Bangladesh, despite many having lived in the country for generations, and it refuses to even acknowledge their collective name, preferring the loaded term “Bengali.” The report documents a systematic deterioration of the Rohingya’s situation since communal violence broke out in June 2012 in Burma’s Rakhine (formerly Arakan) state.

Although the Burmese government has painted the strife — which saw hundreds of people, mainly Muslims, slaughtered during two main waves of violence that June and October — as a spontaneous outbreak of long-mounting religious tensions following the reported rape of a Buddhist woman, the ISCI report presents compelling evidence that the attacks were premeditated and possibly even organized by local authorities.

Interviews with some of the perpetrators — none of whom have been prosecuted because of a supposed lack of concrete evidence — reveal that they were bused into Rakhine state’s capital city Sittwe from nearby villages, provided two free meals a day and told it was their “duty as Rakhine to participate in an attack on the Muslim population.”

There are also strong indications that the government not only allowed the violence to take place unabated for almost a week, but that police, military and other state security forces participated in the attacks themselves, the report says.

Since then, close to 140,000 Rohingya have been sequestered in squalid camps outside the state’s capital, heavily guarded and prevented from leaving by security forces. The 4,500 that remain in Sittwe reside in a run-down ghetto with similar restrictions on movement. A majority of the Rohingya, numbering about 800,000, are spread out across two townships in northern Rakhine state — another region completely blocked off from the outside world by the military.

A lot of the food rations sent by international aid organizations never make it to the Rohingya camps, and denial of access to adequate health care have turned them into hotbeds for malnutrition and disease. As a result of the apartheid-like conditions, the inhabitants of these camps are also largely prevented from receiving an education and earning any sort of livelihood.

“The abuses that the Rohingya are experiencing are at a level and scale that we have not seen elsewhere in Southeast Asia,” Matthew Smith, the founder and executive director of Bangkok-based nonprofit Fortify Rights, tells TIME. The human-rights organization has been documenting abuses in Burma, and Smith echoes the assertion that there is a strong reason to believe state-enabled ethnic cleansing is taking place in the country.

“The Rohingya don’t have to be annihilated for someone to be held responsible for the crime of genocide,” he says. “They [Burmese authorities] are creating conditions of life for over a million people that are designed to be destructive.”

r1.jpg Children rest at a refugee camp in Bayeun, outside of Langsa, Indonesia, May 20. They were among the 25,000-plus Rohingya Muslim migrants who have fled reported persecution in Burma and Bangladesh this year by crossing the Indian Ocean in search of refugee status in Indonesia and Malaysia. (Photo: JAMES NACHTWEY)

There are more than just physical aspects to the Rohingya’s plight — they have been stripped of their citizenship, with their children no longer being issued birth certificates and laws restricting their marriage and birth rate. The government also excluded the community from the 2014 census unless they registered as “Bengali.”

They have also been denied the right to participate in the upcoming Nov. 8general elections, a complete reversal from the last election in 2010 when Rohingya voted in large numbers and some were elected to the legislature, as the military-backed government yoked their animosity to the Rakhine to see of the challenge of ethnic parties aligned with the latter.

No political party has countered the Islamophobic national narrative, with even the liberal National League for Democracy (NLD) of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi going to the polls without a single Muslim candidate, and the Rohingya’s deplorable situation will likely endure no matter the election’s result.

“There will be no change for the Rohingya,” says Shwe Maung, a Rohingya lawmaker from northern Rakhine state who has been barred from re-election. “The government is totally denying our community, totally denying our ethnicity,” he tells TIME. “Whatever is happening is with the ultimate objective of genocide or cleansing, which is to finish these people … and to drive them out.”

In the absence of a light at the end of the tunnel, there is a growing likelihood that Rohingya will take to the seas en masse in order to flee their country — like thousands did earlier this year — in the coming months, falling pray to people-smugglers with often deadly consequences.

“Many Rohingya tell us that their options are to stay in Rakhine state and face death or flee the country,” Smith says. “Many of them know that attempting to flee the country is in itself life-threatening, and they’re willing to take those risks because the situation in Rakhine state is as bad as it is.”

The previous exodus, which reached its height this June, was not only enabled and encouraged but also enforced by government authorities, interviews conducted by al-Jazeera for its new documentary Genocide Agenda reveal.

“They said, ‘You are Muslim and you are not allowed to live in Rakhine state. Get on the boat and flee wherever you want,’” an elderly Rohingya man says, recounting the presence of members of Burma’s security forces, army and police who forced them into the vessels. When his elder brother tried to resist, Rakhine Buddhists hacked him to death with a sword on the spot, he tells al-Jazeera before breaking down in tears.

The documentary, released on Monday, is the culmination of a yearlong investigation by al-Jazeera and contains stark evidence of government intent to, at the very least, promote an anti-Muslim sentiment among the Burmese population. Classified government documents obtained by the news channel’s investigative unit warn of “countrywide communal violence between Muslims and Burmans” being planned at a mosque in Burma’s capital, Rangoon, (violence that ultimately did not take place), and a presentation given to new army recruits contains sections on the “Fear of Extinction of Race” detailing how “Bengali Muslims … infiltrate the people to propagate the religion” and aim to increase their population and wipe out the Burmese Buddhists.

The film’s findings, as well as Fortify Rights’ research, were also the subject of an eight-month analysis by the Lowenstein Clinic at Yale Law School. The clinic examined the Rohingya’s circumstances according to the 1948 International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and precedents set by international law, and concluded that “strong evidence” exists to substantiate the claim that genocide is being carried out in Burma with intent to destroy the Rohingya.

The clinic’s report, released on Thursday, calls for a commission of inquiry by the U.N. Human Rights Council to conduct an “urgent, comprehensive and independent investigation” into alleged genocidal acts perpetrated against the Rohingya.

“The international community needs to understand in a deeper way, in a clearer way, that the abuses being perpetrated against the Rohingya are widespread, systematic and a matter of state policy,” Smith tells TIME. “The international community needs to take action. These abuses have been going on for decades.”

Neither TIME nor al-Jazeera was able to obtain a response to the allegations from the Burmese government despite repeated attempts, though Deputy Information Minister Ye Htut told us last year: “We never pay attention to organizations such as Fortify Rights, which are openly lobby groups for the Bengalis.”

Such attitudes do not bode well for the Rohingya, whose plight is grimly summed up by a woman living in one of the camps interviewed by ISCI.

“If the international community can’t help us, please drop a bomb on us and kill all of us,” she says.
- See more at: http://www.rohingyab...h.py5MFvcj.dpuf

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Emanuel Stoakes Become a fan

Journalist; producer of the documentary “The Genocide Agenda"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/emanue...t-asia-pacific We Need to

Prevent Genocide of Rohingya Muslims -- Before It's Too Late

Posted: 11/06/2015 9:18 am EST Updated: 11/06/2015 9:59 am EST
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YANGON, Myanmar -- This coming Sunday, Myanmar will hold its first "free" elections for 25 years, an event set to cement the country's status as one of the world's newest democracies. If all goes to plan, the poll will complete the country's recent transition from military to (partial) civilian rule.

It is an exciting moment, not least as there is some hope that the leading opposition party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), could win a landslide victory and reduce the grip that Myanmar's military-backed ruling elite retain over political life. In such an event, there is some hope that the NLD could work with the military, who are allocated a quarter of the seats in Parliament by law, to build on the reform program established by current President Thein Sein.

But extremely serious allegations leveled against the state suggest all is not well in Myanmar. There is "strong evidence" that Myanmar has committed genocide against a largely Muslim minority known as the Rohingya, according to a recent report by a clinic of Yale Law School for Bangkok-based NGO Fortify Rights. Other reports andexperts have warned that genocide may be on the horizon.

For decades, the Rohingya have endured abuse, statelessness and apartheid in the western edge of the country. Their plight was brought to the attention of the international media in 2012 when two anti-Rohingya pogroms led to mass displacement and hundreds of deaths. These incidents were described by Human Rights Watch as "crimes against humanity" undertaken as part of an ethnic cleansing campaign in which state agencies were allegedly involved.The case for genocide largely rests on an analysis not just of recent violence but of the cumulative effects of decades of state policy.

Earlier this year, attention was drawn again to the Rohingya when thousands of "boat people," among them many from the minority, faced starvation and abandonment at sea in trafficker's boats as part of what became termed " the Asian refugee crisis."

But these events are only the most high-profile agonies that the Rohingya have been subjected to. The group have endured at least three ethnic cleansing campaigns since the late seventies, as well as decades of routine abuses at the hands of the state such as torture, rape and forced labor. Their basic rights have been slowly stripped away by state policy, culminating in total disenfranchisement and new laws designed to control births in measures enacted this year. Throughout this period, an unknown number of killings have taken place.

It is in reference to this history of a cumulative campaign against the group by successive governments in Myanmar, not just recent events, that the charge of genocide is most cogently being argued.

Unsurprisingly, the allegation has been challenged by state representatives. After a period of silence, spokesman Ye Htut told local publication Mizzima that the government "rejects the accusation completely," adding that the Yale report was part of an "an intentional plot" to destabilize parts of the country before the election.Waiting for the appearance of gas chambers is precisely the mentality that has contributed to our world's repeated failures to prevent atrocities.

The claim has also been dismissed by members of the NGO community working in Myanmar, some of whom were quoted in a piece published by The Straits Times this week, which asserted that genocide is "not the issue" for the Rohingya. The article, by veteran journalist Nirmal Ghosh, went on to cite think tank and aid agency sources who said they saw the charge as being incorrect and irresponsible.

However, the case for genocide -- either on the horizon or in the present -- largely rests on an analysis not just of recent violence but of the cumulative effects of decades of state policy. What seems to be rejected by critics is an image of the situation that assumes that, because Rwanda-style mass killings haven't occurred, the allegation is untenable.

Addressing such criticisms, Matthew Smith, Executive Director of Fortify Rights, told me, "Genocide is a crime everyone thinks they understand. We've come to realize that many diplomats, UN officials and analysts don't understand the law of genocide, and we don't necessarily hold that against them."

"We often associate gas chambers and mass killing to situations of genocide, but elevating the crime to the most extreme examples is not necessarily helpful, and it's not required by the law of genocide," he continued. "Waiting for the appearance of gas chambers is precisely the mentality that has contributed to our world's repeated failures to prevent atrocities."

The term genocide inspires political sensitivity and institutional cowardice precisely because it carries with it legal obligations that most states, in theory, have to adhere to. Myanmar has become increasingly important to the West due to its strategic location in the U.S.-led "pivot to Asia." To use the charged term "genocide" publicly could seriously damage ties with Naypyidaw.The term genocide inspires political sensitivity and institutional cowardice precisely because it carries with it legal obligations that most states, in theory, have to adhere to.

However, it's one thing to mindlessly proclaim "genocide!" and advocate the ending of all forms of quiet diplomacy with the government of Myanmar in favor of a single-track confrontational approach. It's quite another to advocate for the continuation of such engagement while calling for an international commission of inquiry to investigate the claim.

It is this latter approach that is recommended by the Yale paper. It's hard to see why it should not be adopted, unless one favors the option of simply doing nothing until the situation deteriorates into a full-blown human catastrophe.
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The elections are tomorrow, 08 Nov. Inauguration of the new govt is in Jan, '16. This is the period that the Buddhist Bamars and their Mogh Rakhine allies will use to eliminate the Rohingyas,ie, the Arakanese Muslims to a man.