Jackdaws
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This is probably one of the most startling articles I have read in recent times. I am amazed no one is willing to pick up the cudgels for the Muslim minority of Myanmar - it should be an outrage.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/02/opinion/i-saw-a-genocide-in-slow-motion.html
Extracts -
Sono Wara spent the day crying. And even after her tear ducts emptied, her shirt was still wet from leaking milk.
Her newborn twins had died the previous day, and she squatted in her grass-roof hut, shattered by pain and grief. She is 18 and this was her first pregnancy, but as a member of the Rohingya ethnic minority she could not get a doctor’s help. So after a difficult delivery, her twins lie buried in the ground.
Sometimes Myanmar uses guns and machetes for ethnic cleansing, and that’s how Sono Wara earlier lost her mother and sister. But it also kills more subtly and secretly by regularly denying medical care and blocking humanitarian aid to Rohingya, and that’s why her twins are gone.
Myanmar and its Nobel Peace Prize-winning leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, are trying to make the Rohingya’s lives unlivable, while keeping out witnesses.
Entering Myanmar on a tourist visa, I was able to slip undetected into five Rohingya villages. What I found was a slow-motion genocide. The massacres and machete attacks of last August are over for now, but Rohingya remain confined to their villages — and to a huge concentration camp — and are systematically denied most education and medical care.
So they die. No one counts the deaths accurately, but my sense is that the Myanmar government kills more Rohingya by denying them health careand sometimes food than by wielding machetes or firing bullets.
This is my fourth trip in four years to cover the Rohingya, a Muslim minority despised in a mostly Buddhist country, and initially I used the term “ethnic cleansing.” But along with many human rights monitors, I’ve come to conclude that what is unfolding here probably qualifies as genocide.
One theory is that Myanmar is trying to create such misery and fear that the Rohingya will flee on their own, so that the army doesn’t need to bother with the messy business of massacres. Sono Wara said that she and her husband have discussed trying to escape to Malaysia — a perilous journey that often involves rape, robbery and death.
Myanmar’s ethnic cleansing became impossible to hide with the exodus in August of Rohingya bearing stories of massacres and pogroms. In interviewing those refugees late last year, I was particularly shaken by the account of a woman, Hasina Begum, who told me how soldiers had executed the men and boys in her village, had made a bonfire of their bodies and had then taken the women to a hut to be raped. “I was trying to hide my baby under my scarf, but they saw her leg,” Hasina Begum said. “They grabbed my baby by the leg and threw her onto the fire.”
“We are like a bird in a cage,” Zainul Abedin told me. “They give us less and less, we get smaller and smaller, and then we die. Or we can try to flee, and then they can kill us.”
The Rohingya have been confined to their villages and the concentration camp for almost six years now, with restrictions tightened further after the August massacres. Elders complained to me in particular about the loss of education, as Rohingya aren’t allowed to attend regular schools. Villages try to run informal schools of their own, but without textbooks, desks and proper teachers, not much learning happens, and even the most brilliant children have no hope of ever attending high school or a university. The result is a lost generation.
Many Myanmar readers will find my reporting unfair, for their narrative is very different. Htun Aung Kyaw, a leader of the Arakan National Party, the main political party here in Rakhine State, told me the key points as he sees them: The Rohingya are illegal immigrants, they have been trying for decades to create a separate Islamic state, they include armed insurgents who commit atrocities, and they burn their own villages so as to discredit the Myanmar government.
One moderate Rakhine village leader, U Maung Kyaw Nyunt, told me that the hatred toward the Rohingya has escalated because of the arrival of smartphones and Facebook, resulting in virulent anti-Rohingya propaganda depicting them as murderous terrorists who commit atrocities against Buddhists.
“Young people are using their smartphones a lot,” he said. “They don’t see with their eyes; they just see with their phones.”
“I have arguments with my son about this,” he said, adding, “Facebook has been bad for Myanmar.”
The military has internet units trained by Russia, and one theory is that the army may be behind part of the social media campaign against the Rohingya.
Do read the full article if you can.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/02/opinion/i-saw-a-genocide-in-slow-motion.html
Extracts -
Sono Wara spent the day crying. And even after her tear ducts emptied, her shirt was still wet from leaking milk.
Her newborn twins had died the previous day, and she squatted in her grass-roof hut, shattered by pain and grief. She is 18 and this was her first pregnancy, but as a member of the Rohingya ethnic minority she could not get a doctor’s help. So after a difficult delivery, her twins lie buried in the ground.
Sometimes Myanmar uses guns and machetes for ethnic cleansing, and that’s how Sono Wara earlier lost her mother and sister. But it also kills more subtly and secretly by regularly denying medical care and blocking humanitarian aid to Rohingya, and that’s why her twins are gone.
Myanmar and its Nobel Peace Prize-winning leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, are trying to make the Rohingya’s lives unlivable, while keeping out witnesses.
Entering Myanmar on a tourist visa, I was able to slip undetected into five Rohingya villages. What I found was a slow-motion genocide. The massacres and machete attacks of last August are over for now, but Rohingya remain confined to their villages — and to a huge concentration camp — and are systematically denied most education and medical care.
So they die. No one counts the deaths accurately, but my sense is that the Myanmar government kills more Rohingya by denying them health careand sometimes food than by wielding machetes or firing bullets.
This is my fourth trip in four years to cover the Rohingya, a Muslim minority despised in a mostly Buddhist country, and initially I used the term “ethnic cleansing.” But along with many human rights monitors, I’ve come to conclude that what is unfolding here probably qualifies as genocide.
One theory is that Myanmar is trying to create such misery and fear that the Rohingya will flee on their own, so that the army doesn’t need to bother with the messy business of massacres. Sono Wara said that she and her husband have discussed trying to escape to Malaysia — a perilous journey that often involves rape, robbery and death.
Myanmar’s ethnic cleansing became impossible to hide with the exodus in August of Rohingya bearing stories of massacres and pogroms. In interviewing those refugees late last year, I was particularly shaken by the account of a woman, Hasina Begum, who told me how soldiers had executed the men and boys in her village, had made a bonfire of their bodies and had then taken the women to a hut to be raped. “I was trying to hide my baby under my scarf, but they saw her leg,” Hasina Begum said. “They grabbed my baby by the leg and threw her onto the fire.”
“We are like a bird in a cage,” Zainul Abedin told me. “They give us less and less, we get smaller and smaller, and then we die. Or we can try to flee, and then they can kill us.”
The Rohingya have been confined to their villages and the concentration camp for almost six years now, with restrictions tightened further after the August massacres. Elders complained to me in particular about the loss of education, as Rohingya aren’t allowed to attend regular schools. Villages try to run informal schools of their own, but without textbooks, desks and proper teachers, not much learning happens, and even the most brilliant children have no hope of ever attending high school or a university. The result is a lost generation.
Many Myanmar readers will find my reporting unfair, for their narrative is very different. Htun Aung Kyaw, a leader of the Arakan National Party, the main political party here in Rakhine State, told me the key points as he sees them: The Rohingya are illegal immigrants, they have been trying for decades to create a separate Islamic state, they include armed insurgents who commit atrocities, and they burn their own villages so as to discredit the Myanmar government.
One moderate Rakhine village leader, U Maung Kyaw Nyunt, told me that the hatred toward the Rohingya has escalated because of the arrival of smartphones and Facebook, resulting in virulent anti-Rohingya propaganda depicting them as murderous terrorists who commit atrocities against Buddhists.
“Young people are using their smartphones a lot,” he said. “They don’t see with their eyes; they just see with their phones.”
“I have arguments with my son about this,” he said, adding, “Facebook has been bad for Myanmar.”
The military has internet units trained by Russia, and one theory is that the army may be behind part of the social media campaign against the Rohingya.
Do read the full article if you can.
