The government of Myanmar, cracking down on the country’s minority Muslims, has arrested at least a dozen people on charges of belonging to a terrorist group that defense lawyers and security experts say does not exist.
The administration of President Thein Sein has refused to disclose any evidence that the “Myanmar Muslim Army” is real — raising the prospect that the government invented an Islamic terrorist threat to justify a new front in its longtime persecution of Muslims. The exact number of people arrested is unclear, but The Intercept has obtained documents and conducted interviews in Myanmar about three cases — one of them involves 12 people accused of having links to the alleged group, the second involves five people accused of plotting to plant bombs in several unspecified places in the country, and the third is against a man accused of funding the group. All of them were arrested between September and November.
“The accused have received training in Myanmar Muslim Army camps, which has been launched and is operating illegally,” reads one of the court documents obtained by The Intercept.
Officially, about 4 percent of the country’s population is Muslim, but the actual number is believed to be higher, perhaps as much as 10 percent. The largest Muslim population, the Rohingya ethnic group, is concentrated in Rakhine State in western Myanmar, while other Muslims are scattered all over the country. The Rohingya are the most persecuted group: the government has denied them citizenship for decades, and according to several human rights groups, they are the targets of an ethnic cleansing campaign that has helped prompt a desperate exodus by boat in which an estimated 300 people died in the first quarter of this year, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
But non-Rohingya Muslims also face discrimination even though they are citizens of Myanmar. In recent years, sporadic explosions of anti-Muslim violence have taken place outside Rakhine State. The Muslims accused of belonging to the “Myanmar Muslim Army” or plotting terrorist actions hail mostly from central and northern Myanmar.
After five decades of military rule, Myanmar launched in 2011 a process of political transition to what its generals have termed a “discipline-flourishing democracy.” A semi-civilian government made up of former generals was established, hundreds of political prisoners were released in successive amnesties, and the pro-democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, was allowed to be elected to Parliament in by-elections held in 2012 after having spent 15 years under house arrest.
The transition has given the government a degree of international acceptance unthinkable a few years ago. In 2005, Condoleezza Rice, testifying at a Senate hearing to confirm her as secretary of state, included Myanmar in a list of “outposts of tyranny,” but in 2012 Barack Obama became the first U.S. president to visit the country, where he praised the transition process. Hillary Clinton has also visited Myanmar and admitted in her 2014 memoir that it’s “hard to resist getting breathless” about the country’s progress. The Myanmar government has even hired the image-polishing services of Podesta Group, a lobbying firm founded by John Podesta, the chairman of Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Nevertheless, improvements in political liberties for the country’s Buddhist majority coincides with a deterioration in conditions for the Muslim minority.
Muslims in Myanmar are widely framed within the Buddhist-majority country as foreigners, because a large portion of them are descendants of migrants from the Indian sub-continent. They are being portrayed by state officials and extreme Buddhist nationalist movements as outsiders and a common enemy, a narrative begun long ago, critics say, in order to distract attention from political conflicts created by the military dictatorship, which lacked popular legitimacy.
It was only when the Bush administration launched its “war on terror” in 2001 that Myanmar’s Muslims began to be presented as a potential terrorist threat; this was seen as a bid to win international favor at a time when the U.S. government was trying to isolate the military regime. Yet there was a glaring problem with the military regime’s portrayal of Muslims: there is no record of any actual terrorist attack by Muslims within Myanmar in recent decades.
Now, with the country in a period of transition applauded by the U.S. and other former foes, and with crucial elections to be held in November, the former generals who make up Myanmar’s government need more than ever to legitimize their grip on power, both in the international arena and among the Buddhist-dominated electorate. The emergence of a new terrorist threat gives new life to long-held claims by the military that they are the only guarantors of security in what they term their “discipline-flourishing democracy.”
Thien Sein, Myanmar’s president (Tatan Syuflana/AP)
AP
Soe Moe Aung’s whole family was asleep, when late on November 17, about six policemen broke into their house in Mandalay, Myanmar’s second biggest city. His mother, Nwe Ni Aung, recounted in an interview earlier this year that the police demanded the family hand over her 24-year-old son. She said neither the police, nor the soldiers who had surrounded the house, bothered to show them an arrest warrant. She didn’t see her son for about 10 days — he was in police custody and denied access to a lawyer — and learned only when his trial started that he was accused of belonging to the “Myanmar Muslim Army.”
“They accuse him of undergoing training in a camp, but I don’t think that’s possible,” she said in an interview in Mandalay. “He’s sick — he suffers from gout — so how could he have received any training?”
Soe Moe Aung’s lawyer, Nandar Myint Thein, is defending four additional suspects in the same trial in Mandalay; a total of 12 people are accused in the trial of belonging to the “Myanmar Muslim Army,” according to documents obtained by The Intercept. They’re charged under the Emergency Provisions Act, passed in 1950, and according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma) “commonly used to arbitrarily detain activists or criminalize dissent.”
Nandar Myint Thein claims the prosecution didn’t submit any “real evidence” and the accused signed confessions after days of torture in custody. She says most of the defendants didn’t even know each other before the trial.
“When I asked the prosecution’s witnesses [from the Police’s Special Branch] for evidence about the Myanmar Muslim Army, they answered that they couldn’t speak about it before the court … that this information came from above,” Nandar Myint Thein said.
In a recent interview for this article, the director of the Myanmar president’s office, Zaw Htay, defended the government’s position. “The Home Affairs ministry has all the evidence on these activities, but we can’t make it public because this is a national security issue,” he said. When asked how the accused can expect a fair trial when the prosecution’s evidence is withheld in court, he answered, “They have the right to appeal in upper courts.”
Zaw Htay declined to say how many people are believed to be members of the group — he said national security concerns prevented him from disclosing more information — but claimed “there are many activities outside the country and they want to promote their terrorist attacks with some people inside the country, so right now we are doing a preemptive strike to protect ourselves against any possible attack.” Legal Aid Documentation Team, a civil society organization, claims that as of February, around 100 Muslims had been arrested on charges of terrorism since last year.
The existence of the “Myanmar Muslim Army” has not been confirmed by terrorism experts, human rights groups, or the U.S. State Department. Rohan Gunaratna, who heads the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research in Singapore, is the only one to have mentioned it, though fleetingly — he wrote in a recent report that “there also have been unconfirmed reports about the emergence of a new group called Myanmar Muslim Army (MMA), which is reportedly using Thai territory for training Myanmar Muslims.”
A State Department spokesperson said in an interview that the U.S. government “does not have any further information” beyond Gunaratna’s reference. Zachary Abuza, a specialist in security issues and politics in Southeast Asia, said he had never heard of the “Myanmar Muslim Army.” “Sounds completely fictitious to me,” he said. “I would doubt that any group fighting the state would even use the term ‘Myanmar’ as that legitimizes the regime.” Myanmar is the name given to the country by the military government in 1989, replacing Burma, and the new name is contested by critics of the regime. “Based on the name and the track record of the Tatmadaw [armed forces], there is a very high likelihood that their ‘confessions’ were extracted through torture,” Abuza added.
One of the three cases involves Khin Maung Shwe, also known as Yusuf, who is accused of helping to establish the “Myanmar Muslim Army.” The 44-year-old businessman was detained in Mandalay in October, but his lawyer, Aung Naing Soe, said the case against his client is founded solely on confessions extracted while in military custody from other detainees who gave his interrogators the name “Yusuf” and little else. Aung Naing Soe says there is no further evidence against his defendant.
The prosecution in these cases has the backing of the minister of Home Affairs, citing the Emergency Provisions Act. The Intercept has obtained the minister’s signed authorization for the case involving Khin Maung Shwe, and defense lawyers say the minister signed the same authorization for the Mandalay case. The Intercept has also obtained the minister’s authorization for a case involving five people accused of planning to make fertilizer bombs. “That’s a big burden for the accused, because the court is afraid of not following orders from the minister himself,” said Aung Naing Soe.
In the context of Myanmar’s judicial system, the direct involvement of the Home Affairs minister isn’t an innocent matter of oversight, it’s an expression of the overarching power the military continues to exert over all aspects of life in Myanmar. The constitution requires the Home Affairs minister to be a member of the military, nominated by the commander in chief of the armed forces, which are constitutionally shielded from any civilian oversight. As the International Commission of Jurists noted in a report published in 2013, “political and military influence over judges remains a major impediment to lawyers’ ability to practice their profession effectively. Depending on the nature of the case, judges render decisions based on orders coming from government and military officials.”
Sam Zarifi, regional director of Asia and the Pacific at the ICJ, explained that “there’s every reason to fear for the rights of the accused to receive a fair trial” in these cases, noting that “judicial independence has been undermined by the executive branch’s undue influence and interference, in particular, in politically sensitive cases, including criminal ones.”
Another case in Yangon, Myanmar’s biggest city and former capital, involves Muslims allegedly planning to wage armed struggle. In September last year, five Muslims were detained over smuggling fertilizer. The prosecution claims the fertilizer was intended to fabricate explosives to plant several bombs in Myanmar. One of the accused is a shopkeeper who bought fertilizer from another defendant, according to his lawyer.
The lawyer, Robert Sann Aung, said the suspects were held by the military for three months and tortured to extract confessions. Like other lawyers interviewed for this article, he claims there is no evidence of a terrorism plot, other than the fertilizer itself and the confessions. When asked about his expectations, Robert Sann Aung gave little reason for optimism.
“I won’t win this case,” he said. “I would win if the judge applied the law, but law is not going to be applied.”
Carlos Sardiña Galache, a journalist based in Bangkok, has reported extensively on Myanmar. Veronica Pedrosa, also based in Bangkok, has covered southeast Asia for 25 years.
Photo: Soldiers march in ceremony in Yangon. (Khin Maung Win/AP)
Is it a violation of human rights to outlaw joining a fictional group?
The US Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment provided for a right to association, since people must sometimes join together to effectively exercise their right of free speech. But I don’t know if this extends to joining a fictional group.
In Myanmar of course, free speech is a lower priority, and is tucked away in Article 354 of their constitution. It states that every citizen shall be at liberty to express and publish their convictions and opinions freely, but unlike the US Constitution, provides some sensible limits on such expression for the purposes of protecting national security, public order, public morality, “community peace” and “tranquility”.
I would argue that joining a fictional group diminishes tranquility, and therefore is not constitutionally protected in Myanmar. So I see no problem with the actions of their government.
Fictional means, it doesn’t exist. Which means, they are being charged for bogus reasons.
Unless you were trying to be funny.
Sounds an awful lot like the system they are setting up here in the US. Lots of secrecy so nobody knows, and even more ‘he said-she said’, and it is especially significant when it comes to judges being bought and sold, like most are here in the US. Capitalist, fascist, court of what? Surely not law or justice!
Muslims are the most oppressed religious minority in the world. All across the world, if any politician wants to be elected, the best way to do it is hate on Muslims. Muslims are repeatedly picked on and bullied by the media and fellow citizens and even killed in Central African Republic (436 mosques demolished in the last couple of years), Burma, China, Israel, France, Serbia, India, Armenia, Australia, New Zealand, England, USA, Canada, Belgium, Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, Austria, Croatia, Barbados, Greece, Cambodia, Bosnia, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Angola, Spain, Macedonia, Niger, Nigeria……..
Worse than the above, Muslims are persecuted in their own countries by the tyrants and dictators forced upon them along with religious extremists!
All in all, this is the worst time to be a Muslim in most countries of the world.
There are still many naive fools who think that Buddhist can never be capable of violence never mind genocide. Buddhist groups have always been violent. Not all but many groups have taken up arms and murder other groups. It has happened in Tibet, Sri Lanka and Thailand.
Good work. Zero tolerance for Islamofascist terrorism is the only rational way.
so you’re against Washington, then? Good. The governments and ruling classes of the US and UK have fueled, supported, and used terrorism and right wing terrorist groups to achieve strategic, economic, and political objectives.
Read: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/sep/20/afghanistan.weekend7
OMG, Neville says Brooks went on vacation while Andy’s child was having its heart carved out leaving him to hack up a dead girl’s phone while someone else was baking Raggity’s baby for her, so heartless! So don’t blame Andy if he didn’t guess a COP had hacked Milly’s phone to death and revealed this to the press? BS Neville. Andy spoke to that Raggity Ann how many times while she was in Dubai? They both knew they had hacked, but wanted the police to follow their filthy leeds. Who better to pin them on? Neville, you keep delivering the pizza for Murdoch, has he got you a book deal?
Can you get over Thurlbeck? What a dastard, telling the court he never revealed his source for the Dowler hacks because it was a COP. BS. Trying to avoid his own perjury trial. Got evidence, Thurlbeck? We know Mulcaire hacked the crap out of Milly’s phone, icehole. False parallel construction to put the poop on the scrapers. These guys give public interest a black eye.
So the reason for the big hissing fit between Surrey and NotW was because they knew Surrey knew but wouldn’t follow their leeds? BS, the OTHER idiot editor said in court the paper had handed the transcripts over to police, to be helpful (avoid perversion charges). Then NotW got all uppity because they expected to lead the investigation to their pre type set conclusions, the idiots.
Nice try, Neville, you are a crap liar. So are you, GCHQ. Fuck you, Watson.
Or not, the UK cops are a bunch of running snots from what I can see behind their ubiquitous kleenex.
There had to be SOME reason NotW gave Surrey’s officer’s fund a thousand pounds. They’d already paid the inside copper, if Neville is SNOT lying, so why did they add a thousand to the general trust busting fund? Bribery? He’s my brother.
2012 Strategy Document for the NED
http://www.ned.org/docs/strategy/2012StrategyDocument.pdf
excerpt from “NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR DEMOCRACY” (State Department document, link below)
source: state.gov/documents/organization/181143.pdf
from the National Endowment for Democracy [sic]
Burma 2015: The Make or Break Moment for Democratization
http://www.ned.org/events/burma-2015-the-make-or-break-moment-for-democratization
look at how the imperialist assholes at the Newshour cover (cover up?) the story:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/thousands-rohingya-refugees-fled-myanmar-stranded-sea/
for more see: pbs.org/newshour/tag/myanmar/
Islamophobes (e.g. Louise) will probably have an aneurysm reading the articles at the links below, but I’ll gladly take that chance:
from Feb 2012:
The Grave Threat of “Homegrown Terrorism” | A new report documents that this constantly discussed danger is, in fact, “a minuscule threat to public safety”
http://www.salon.com/2012/02/08/the_grave_threat_of_homegrown_terrorism/
read also: The report from 2014
sites.duke.edu/tcths/files/2013/06/Kurzman_Muslim-American_Terrorism_in_2013.pdf
Clinton [the rapist of Libya and so many other places around the world] and Aung San Suu Kyi pledge to work together for Burma democracy
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/dec/02/hillary-clinton-aung-san-suu-kyi-burma-democracy
US leaders fete Burma’s “democracy icon”
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/10/burm-o09.html
This can’t be good.
from November 2012:
Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton have emotional visit with Burma democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/barack-obama-hillary-clinton-have-emotional-visit-with-burma-democracy-activist-aung-san-suu-kyi
Conditions worsen for refugees trapped on boats in South East Asia
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/05/19/refu-m19.html
The worldwide persecution of refugees
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/05/14/pers-m14.html
Myanmar: Meet Aung San Suu Kyi’s Saffron Mobs
http://journal-neo.org/2015/03/05/myanmar-meet-aung-san-suu-kyi-s-saffron-mobs/
We have achieved great progress in the Middle East, we can leave the balance in the the safe hands of ISIS and their Saudi friends. Now it’s time to move further East and also into Africa proper. The New World Order is developing quite satisfactorily, thanks to active help from our friends and foes.
Thanks for a very important article. Yes, jgreen7801, I was also struck with the similarities of what’s happening in Burma/Myanmar and what’s happening here. I’m sure everyone must have noticed that official parroting the “national security” line. You hear it from country to country; they’re starting to sound like robots.
Aside from gov’t abuses and brutality, stories such as this make me wonder WHY we can’t as different people – different peoples – live together in some sort of peace. Why do we have to keep hating each other, fighting each other, even killing each other? Is it really so hard to recognize our common humanity and treat each other accordingly? Isn’t it time we did???
“Divided = Conquered, But United = Empowered!”
meanwhile..the dumbest industrialized country on the planet doesn’t have a fucking clue.
Only a cynic would say that the US wants “Myanmar” as an ally now that it’s a democratic state. There are other, more understandable reasons.
http://www.myanmar-oilgas.com/Home.aspx
Read it. It’s really timely material. The lede: “With the lifting of international sanctions, Myanmar’s Government has acted fast in licensing vast regions of its onshore and offshore shelf to foreign investors …”
Funny, isn’t it, how the War on Terror usually comes out at 20-20 SAE.
So, no matter they’re talking about, they’re talking about oil?
Let’s just say that it lubricates the discussion. Certainly there’s spillover in areas that TI is in; the US spying on Petrobras, for example, just as it’s trying to auction off its offshore leases, or the cozy US relationship with Saudi and the Gulf [no pun] states, which is not inspired by common religiosity or culture. I’m sure the US has other matters to talk with the Burmese about — for instance, it would be nice if they were more emphatic about the refugee crisis they’ve caused — but whether it’s in Rangoon, or Ditchley Manor (see other TI article) or our relationships with Saudi and its neighbors (see TI, passim), or the US’s undue interest in the South China seabed, it just happens that there’s oil reserves in the picture.
But of course only a cynic could say that we only have a fraternal interest in the Democratic Military Republic of Myanmar and its people. Signor Mussolini, white courtesy telephone, please!
Erratum: ” … in subjects that TI is interested in …”
from Howard Zinn:
check out articles on Burma by the WSWS:
https://www.wsws.org/en/topics/country/as-burma/
White House welcomes Burmese president as new ally in “pivot to Asia”
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/05/24/burm-m24.html
some thoughts on the US-NATO-Turkey project in Xinjiang http://christophgermann.blogspot.com/2015/02/porkins-great-game-episode-5-east.html
The similarities between Burma and the US are striking if you just read this account and have no other input. Secret evidence, held by the government due to “national security” interests. Using torture coerced confessions. Hmmm. Maybe Burma wants in on the TPP by showing they know how to play the games like the big boys. To your point, Wnt, about Bangladesh, they are being squeezed by several forces that can only get worse from here on out. China and India are tapping their water at the source while salt water intrusion is eating away at their fertile delta farmlands. Back in school, eons ago, the big global problem with which we would be dealing in the future, was Overpopulation. That future is now but you rarely hear that word anymore. We now frame it as several shortages problems. Shortages of potable water, food(distribution), housing, energy, and wealth distribution. By redefining the problem, it allows us to deflect our attention from our own culpability. If we could just solve these many problems, one by one, then everything will be hunky dory. Bullshit. We are all in the same boat when it comes to the mother of all shortages, a planet. Referring back to our similarities, top down rule is the main thing every country has in common. We dress ours up as a civilian democratic rule by electing others to rule as a proxy, yet due to the two party stranglehold on the election process, we rarely break through that hold and elect a person of substance with the heart of a public servant. As far as the US heaping praise on Myanmar, it can only mean they have something that multinationals covet.
On top of these similarities to the US, Myanmar’s politicians are dictating to judges. While we all wait for Il Duce to weigh in, please allow me to point out that our State Dept. should be crowing about this wonderful example of the exportation of American-style democracy to the discipline-flourishing Democracy of Myanmar. Surely this country will soon be receiving additional largesse from the US in the form of military aid. We must reward those who follow our agenda. That has always worked out so well.
Bangladesh is definitely one of the most overpopulated countries of the world, yes. I just rechecked the stats at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_by_population_density . But who is more densely populated than they are? Bermuda! And they have less than a fifth of the population density of Singapore. And the mere fact of its overpopulation shows that the burden should be bearable – even if every last Rohingya went there, that’s less than 1 million added to 160 million population there already. So I think there ought to be room for a deal here – Bangladesh needs international aid and cooperation to upgrade its resources and turn back the shortages, and the world wants rid of a pesky refugee problem.
Umm, not so fast. First off, in response to your other post, and to the article itself, the influx of Muslims from what is now Bangladesh who became the Rohingya wasn’t during the 1971 war and they aren’t largely descendants of migrants. The Arakan Kingdom collapsed slowly with the Moghals taking Chittagong in the 17th century, and then the Burmese overrunning them in the late 18th, and finally the British sweeping into the whole area. The Brits moved the Bengali Muslims in as coolee labor in around 1825, actively displacing the Arakanese (some of whose descendants are the nowadays Rakine). In fact, it was the Arakanese dialect which gave the current country the designation “Burma”, in response to someone else here who referred to the dispute over “Burma” v “Myanmar”.
In the minds of many Rakine, by trying to displace the Rohingya as “Bengalis” they are exercising what in Palestine would be called the “right of return”. That doesn’t justify their actions, but it at least puts them in the same camp as Hamas, the Serbians in the early 20th century, or other groups for which some people believe that sometimes there is such a right when actually, it’s always ethnic cleansing when a population is established, no matter why.
The boats are filled with in general majority Bangladeshi men, trafficked out of Cox’s Bazar area in Bangladesh, the minority of the people on the boats are Rohingya. What we hear in the news is that the latter are true refugees and the former are “economic migrants”. That’s I guess true with respect to the 1951 Refugee Convention because the Rohingya are victims of or have a well founded fear of persecution. But the Bangladeshis are in essence climate change refugees, and the population pressure isn’t all from births, Writ, it’s also because by about 2030 or so, nearly 40% of Bangladesh’s population will have been displaced northward and eastward fleeing loss of the Char lands and the corrupt manipulations of those controlling the Khas land there. They hear about boats to Malaysia, some of them pay to leave eastern Bangladesh to get work and send money home. And since the world wants that distinction between smugglers and traffickers to salve over their responsibility like the “economic migrant” theory, they aren’t paying for passage to a job like they think they are, they’re being enslaved.
Bangladesh has 471,000 IDPs from the recent insurgency in Chittagong Hills Tract (which some uber patriotic Arakanese think should be part of Burma) and about 1.1 million IDPs from climate change. Not exactly a place you can pay to take on a million Rohingya, even if it wasn’t a gross violation of human rights to force the Rohingya to displace.
Any other big ideas?
That’s a beautifully detailed analysis – definitely it would have been interesting had you written this article.
Nonetheless, your point seems to me to be that there is (still) a huge problem in Bangladesh. And so it still seems logical to me that the international community should go to that point of origin and fix things, rather than focusing entirely on getting Myanmar to accept the Bengalis as something like citizens. The point of origin that you identify is largely “climate change”, but that explanation doesn’t sound right to me. The sea level is increasing at the same piddling rate all over the world, not all that much faster than it has been since the end of the last glaciation. According to http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/29/world/asia/facing-rising-seas-bangladesh-confronts-the-consequences-of-climate-change.html?_r=0 “Bangladesh relies almost entirely on groundwater for drinking supplies because the rivers are so polluted. The resultant pumping causes the land to settle.” So the solution seems pretty straightforward: the international community digs up some money for sewage and water treatment plants so that Bangladesh can clean up its rivers and use them for good water. Bangladesh ‘pays’ for this funding by instituting reforms against the corruption that you mention, and by agreeing to accept Burmese refugees on a staged basis in proportion to the amount of environmental improvement that the international community pays for. If the people of that country see that for ten people moving back on these lands, three are from Myanmar, I doubt they’ll be all that resentful.
As fouled up as Bangladesh may be, it’s worth noting that the life expectancy there is longer than for the Indian men on the Pine Ridge reservation (the site of the infamous FBI-supported suppression of the American Indian Movement in the early 1970s). In the U.S. the problem isn’t really a lack of resources but a lack of the political will to have things more fairly and sanely done, and while perhaps I am wrong to think so, I suspect the same may be true of Bangladesh itself.
A couple of things wrong with your analysis:
1) No, while it’s true that the sea level rise is about the same all over (slightly more in the tropics than in the arctic because of the oblateness of the earth, but not worth worrying the calculations about it), what isn’t true all over is that such a high proportion of a country, and a highly populated proportion at that, is very very close to sea level. The Maldives arguably are 100% below 3ft above sea level, but there is no one there compared to the char lands. The people living on the char lands have been pushed there by population pressures, yes, but they are also subsistence and low income agriculturalists on those lands, which shift and get created and destroyed, and they can’t necessarily find somewhere else to pick up where they left off when their farm land and their home gets swallowed by the sea. So no, it isn’t the case that they are no more suffering from climate change as anyone else, they are the museum piece for climate catastrophe world wide right now.
2) International law stipulates that a) it’s wrong (illegal) for a government to render someone stateless, and b) forcible patriation is out of the question, it falls in with such international crimes as deportation (a war crime during armed conflict) and ethnic cleansing. The Rohingya have a right to live in Myanmar, even if their history is that they were moved onto Arakan lands at the expense of Arakan people two hundred years ago.
Most of my point was that the world’s analysis of this region, by leaving out the coolee labor movements, by leaving out the Arakan Kingdom history, by leaving out the disputes in the CHT, by leaving out the climate change, by completely dismissing the Bangladeshis who are also on the trafficker’s boats, is failing to understand what the underlying problems are. Yes the lands are settling from pumping: there is a total population pressure on the region not being made any better by everyone moving to Dhaka. The lands have traditionally been replentished by silt from the 3 major and several minor rivers that delta there, silt which now deposits upstream due to hydroelectric dams.
My biggest points are that all problems are more complicated than presented in the media, present website included, and that its possible to find the complexity of the problem by looking at the ignored people in all international press — in this case the so-called “economic migrants” on the boats with the Rohingya. You don’t have to do it that way, you come to the same conclusion if you analyze the distribution of women and children on the boats. Refugees engage in chain migration which tends to move adult males first (except in the Somali famine when it was adult females and babies first), but there are altogether too many adult working age men on the boats for everyone to be a refugee in the persecution sense, and no media will dare use the words “majority” or “most” when saying that there are Rohingya on the boats. Therefore they are in the minority on the boats, and the boats are trafficking in Bengali slaves, onto which the Rohingya are signing on because they either think it’s worth the risk, or because they don’t know they are slave ships bound for ransom camps or the fishing industry.
There isn’t a simple solution to these problems, pointing out their complexity helps people understand that.
I guess I mixed Mali and Burma/Myanmar in my previous comment.
The French and Saudi involvement is about Mali, the rest of my comment still stands.
I guess Muslims are being killed everywhere it’s starting to get confusing. Myanmar, Mali, China, India, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and imprisoned and discriminated against in Saudi Arabia (yes, believe it or not, one of the biggest threats to Muslims is Saudi Apostate Arabia), Tunesia, Egypt, US, Canada, UK, Australia, France, Russia….
Impressive list to say the least.
The government of Myanmar surely has a villainous record, and yet…. how much do we really differ from them? In the U.S. we have repeatedly heard calls for an abolition of the automatic citizenship given to “anchor babies” by “birth tourists”. Had we at any point gone along with this, we would have multiple generations of Mexicans who would be non-citizens like the Bengalis in Burma. I would not like my odds smuggling fertilizer in the U.S. either. Does anyone have a figure for the ammonium nitrate content of what the accused were moving? Nor are forced confessions or guilt by association unfamiliar to U.S. courts – I’m not saying this isn’t bad, but if Waco, Texas can’t stop itself from roundiing up 170 people for death penalty prosecution based on the fact that they stopped at a diner (while not actually banning membership in the motorcycle gangs that is used to justify the prosecution) then what do we expect from Myanmar??
Last but not least — how much of this is fallout from the U.S. support for Kosovo independence? We set a precedent for a “demographic bomb” where Muslims out-reproduce natives of a province, then use that as grounds for formal independence followed by a lot of serious human rights abuses against any residents that remain.
Oh, it’s easy to put down Burma’s awful government and equally awful monk-politicians like Ashin Wirathu, but this might be a case in which we should look to the original source. Many of the Bengalis fled to Myanmar during the downright genocidal conflict between West and East Pakistan. While it is fair game to ask what Myanmar can do to reduce the oppression of those it has never recognized as citizens, it may be even fairer game to ask why Bangladesh can’t accommodate the people who were driven out of it.
@wnt-The last question in your comment should be the way Americans view “anchor babies.” I use to believe immigration to America was a right. That changed when I befriended immigrants and learned they don’t understand The Declaration of Independence and The US Constitution and don’t care to follow them. They bring their culture of origin and live by it not America’s….
Given some of the situations we’ve seen internationally – oppression of Jews in Malmo, erosion of national power by “passportization” – there is more justification for the immigration bureaucracy than there once was. Nonetheless, the automatic citizenship for those actually born in the U.S. is a crucial safety mechanism to keep things from getting totally out of hand. We see all too often that the INS can dither back and forth over whether someone has a citizenship claim for 25 years and still end up doing a sudden forceful deportation. But if we disallow the automatic citizenship, this paperwork can be inherited from one generation, to the next, to the next. Imagine all those legal papers piling up, all the lawyers eager to dispute the cases back a hundred years for hourly fees. No, when bureaucrats have locked waiting rooms and 1-900 help numbers, there has to be some force that can say enough is enough, when no one else seems to have the stones to.
Well well, this is one the few shy stories I’ve seen about Myanmar Muslims.
Muslims there have been systematically killed, turtured, and burned alive on the hands of the Myanmar buddhist government for years (where are those ignorant Redditors praising Buddhism every 5 seconds?!).
Of course, the French government and their apostate ally, the Saudi Arabian government, have been the driving force of such oppression and genocide; the first covering arms support and propagandistic media, with the second covering financial support to even the food the French ate when they had boots on the ground there.
They’ll all pay greatly.
Victim card played by perpetuators of the crimes.
“They’ll all pay greatly.”
Bring it on, you worthless piece of terrorist trash.
Please *don’t* channel Dubya, the infamous founder of the present terrorist feast. If some crazy Muslims from ISIS or wherever take on the other crazy Muslims in charge of Saudi Arabia, well, you have to watch something like that like a nature video. “The law of the jungle may seem cruel, but this meal will go to sustain the next generation.” I don’t want one thin dime of American money, let alone anything more precious, going to uphold the brutal rule of the House of Saud, nor to till and seed the “4G” version of Iraqi terrorism.
As for the French, they still have some of my sympathy…. but with violations of freedom of religion and censorship prosecutions like that of Dieudonne they are definitely using it up.
“Muslim”:
Pay no attention to Louise’s barking. “Louise” is poorly informed, doesn’t know history, probably doesn’t read, and like many millions of Americans, has been brainwashed by the Islamophobia propaganda. Louise either doesn’t know or doesn’t care to know that the imperial policymakers are covertly using and creating and unleashing terrorist groups, and then turning around and repeatedly telling the public lies about “Muslims”.
You are loved.
Have you read, by the way, Deepa Kumar’s excellent book, “Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire”? Do yourself a favor and a get a bunch of copies, and critically read and discuss the book with friends, colleagues, family, strangers, fellow Muslims and non-Muslims.
The page for the book at the publisher’s website:
http://www.haymarketbooks.org/pb/islamophobia-and-the-politics-of-empire
Here’s a review:
isreview.org/issue/94/handmaiden-empire
And here’s an interview with the author:
mondoweiss.net/2012/07/author-deepa-kumar-on-the-imperial-roots-of-anti-muslim-sentiment