Long time ago I learned never to say ‘never again’ when it comes to
Myanmar’s savagery. The latest mayhem against the Muslims in the Shan
state, far away from the western Rakhine state – bordering Bangladesh,
once again shows that for this religious minority Myanmar is proving to
be hell on earth.
Seemingly, there is no conscientious Buddhist living inside this den
of hatred and intolerance that is bold enough to challenge this status
quo. Daw Suu Kyi, once darling of the West, has long shown her
despicable hypocrisy when she tried to ignore the monumental crimes of
her Buddhist people and the government against the Rohingyas of Myanmar,
considered the worst persecuted people on earth.
For years the Rohingya people living in the western Myanmar state of
Rakhine, formerly known as Arakan, have been subjected to ethnic
cleansing practices, and denied every right enshrined in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights. Now that racial hatred and religious
bigotry is spreading like a cancer all across Myanmar to include other
Muslims in the country.
Rumors now seem to have become a major weapon to justify elimination
of a persecuted minority. Last year (May-October), we saw result of this
evil concoction: with the rumor of an alleged rape and murder of a
Rakhine woman, the brainwashed Rakhine terrorists went on an
extermination campaign that witnessed the gruesome murder and rape of
thousands of Rohingya Muslims, and the wholesale destruction of Muslim
properties, schools, madrassas, mosques and shrines. Nothing of value
was left intact by the marauding Buddhist savages. This ethnic cleansing
drive resulted in internal displacement of some 140,000 Rohingyas
within Myanmar who are living in wretched refugee camps. At least
thirteen thousand Rohingyas have fled the country by sea with some seven
hundred losing their lives while trying to brave the ocean to find
refuge elsewhere.
In March of this year, the extermination campaign moved to towns in
central Myanmar, including Meiktila, which is located nearly 1oo miles
north of the capital city Naypyitaw. There mobs of men, including
Buddhist monks hacked to death at least 44 Muslim women and children
belonging to Kaman, another Muslim ethnic group (which settled in Arakan
during Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb’s time). And all these savagery under
the pretext of a rumor that a Muslim gold shop owner in Meiktila had
harassed his Buddhist customers, which spiraled into a street brawl.
Soon thereafter Buddhist mobs roamed the streets with sticks and swords
and set Muslim-owned buildings including mosques ablaze. Rioting and
arson attacks spread to 11 townships and villages outside Meiktila, as
mobs of Buddhists, some led by monks, continued a three-day rampage
through Muslim areas. Eight hundred Muslim homes and five mosques were
torched. The violence ended with another 12,000 people displaced.
In his report in the New York Times Thomas Fuller wrote, “Images from
Meiktila showed entire neighborhoods burned to the ground, some with
only blackened trees left standing. Lifeless legs poked from beneath
rubble. And charred corpses spoke to the use of fire as a main tool of
the rioting mobs.” President Thein Sein later declared a state of
emergency.
The latest manifestation of extermination campaign came last week in
the northern city of Lashio, where terrified Muslims were sheltering
under army guard after their homes, shops and mosque were burned down.
The unrest in the northern Myanmar city of Lashio, a city located nearly
430 miles from Myanmar’s commercial capital of Rangoon (Yangon), shows
how far anti-Muslim extermination campaign has spread in this
Buddhist-dominated country. For years, the Shan state bordering China
has been a peaceful state. And now in clear reminiscent of Meiktila, its
Lashio city witnessed swarms of Buddhist men roaming Lashio's crumbling
streets, armed with rocks and sticks and machetes. Before police and
army troops stepped in, the Buddhist mob had torched scores of
Muslim-owned shops, sending plumes of black smoke into the sky. The
crowd then rampaged through the town, setting fire to Lashio's largest
mosque. The mob also set fire to a Muslim school and orphanage that was
so badly charred that only two walls remained.
According to official report, one Muslim was killed and five people
wounded including a journalist attacked by a Buddhist mob in Wednesday’s
clashes. Some 1,200 Muslims were moved to Mansu Monastery after
Buddhist mobs had terrorized the city – again showing government’s slow
response to anti-Muslim pogroms.
As reported by Reuters, Thein Maing, who took shelter at the
monastery with his family, said they only dared to leave their house
when they saw soldiers patrolling the streets on Wednesday. “I
approached the soldiers and said, ‘We are afraid and we don’t know where
to go. Please help us’, and they sent us here.” Khin Kyi’s family hid
in the house of an ethnic Chinese neighbor, while Buddhist men with
sticks and swords prowled the area. “We were very scared. This has never
happened before,” she said.
The violence was sparked by a rumor last Tuesday that a Muslim man
had badly burnt a Buddhist woman who sold fuel by the side of the road.
After police detained the man, Buddhists surrounded the police station
and demanded that he be handed over for public lynching. Badanta Ponnya
Nanda, head monk of Mansu Monastery, said he tried to reason with the
crowd, telling them to respect the law. “After that they went and burned
the mosque,” he said.
As I have noted before, it would be wrong to think that these are
isolated events. These are, in fact, part of a highly organized
eliminationist policy in which Myanmar government and its Buddhist
community are joint partners. For years their neo-Nazi intellectuals and
bigot monks have been playing the role of Julius Streicher selling,
rather very successfully, the poison pill of racial and religious purity
in a country that has been multi-ethnic, multi-racial and
multi-religious for hundreds of years.
Pale-skinned and shaven-headed Buddhist monk Wirathu has become the
public face of a Buddhist campaign, called ‘969’, to exclude and isolate
Myanmar's Muslim minority. Wirathu is a self-confessed admirer of
neo-Nazi groups like the English Defense League of the UK. He says that
his goals and methods are intended to counteract what he regards as
growing Muslim power and numbers. His "969" campaign calls for
boycotting Muslim-owned businesses and opposes intermarriage with
Buddhists. He insists that 22 per cent of the nation's 60 million
people are Muslim - the official estimate is only 4 per cent.
There are many Buddhists in Myanmar who take this hateful monk as
their spiritual guide. It is no accident, therefore, that his 969
campaign has coincided with a surge of bloody violence in which Muslims
have become the main victims. Wirathu is such a diabolical figure that
he has no problem in lying or talking with a twisted tongue. When
hundreds of Muslim villages and townships were burned in the Rakhine
state, he had an explanation: "The Rohingya there burned down their own
houses so that they could live easily in the refugee camps." As to the
burning and killing by the Buddhist mob in Meiktila, he said their
crimes were "forgivable”. He added, "As far as Muslims go, a snake is a
snake. Snakes are dangerous, so we shouldn't let them be."
As I have noted elsewhere Wirathu – the evil preacher - however, is
not alone justifying the elimination campaign against the Muslims of
Myanmar. There have been depraved ideologues like Aye Chan, (late) Aye
Kyaw and Khin Maung Saw who for years have been parroting the
government’s negative stereotypes against the minority Muslims to deny
their ancestral ties to Burma. As Dr. Shwe Lu Maung (Shahnawaz Khan) and
other objective researchers have repeatedly shown the first settlers of
Arakan were the darker-skinned people who are now known as the
Rohingya. Simply put, their ties to the soil of Arakan are older than
those of the Rakhine Buddhists. Obviously, facts are never important to
an ultra-racist and bigot, but myth-making is to justify their
eliminationist policy against a targeted minority. Thus, the indigenous,
and yet endangered, Rohingya are conveniently dumped as the illegals
from Bangladesh and denied their citizenship rights in Myanmar - the
last apartheid state of the 21st century.
"Ahimsa," meaning not to harm others, once considered fundamental to
Buddhism, has become a forgotten principle in today’s Myanmar. The
denial of existence has meant denial of rights for the minority Muslims,
which in turn, has translated into their extermination in which from
top to bottom every Buddhist of Myanmar is intimately linked as part of a
national project to that end. What the past military governments have
always wanted in terms of the minority Muslims is now done by its
civilian partners in crime. After all, what was possible in a military
dictatorship is no longer kosher in a hybrid civil-military government,
run by a reform-minded Thein Sein! What a mockery with people’s
intelligence! It is, therefore, no accident that the government security
forces are silent witnesses, if not active participants, in such an
eliminationist project, and are always the last ones to arrive at the
crime scene when the cleansing task has already been accomplished by
their fellow Buddhist terrorists. It is also no accident that while the
victims are always Muslims, those jailed for taking part in clashes with
marauding Buddhists – whether in the Rakhine state or in central
Myanmar – are always Muslims. Not a single Buddhist has been convicted
so far. What a mockery of justice in Thein Sein’s Myanmar!
In spite of decades-long campaign to eliminate the Muslim minorities
of Myanmar, they are still there. It is not the Rohingya Muslims alone,
there are Kaman Muslims, there are Karen Muslims, and there are Shan
Muslims, there are Panthay Muslims and many others who call Myanmar
their home. And this realization has made the hateful provocateurs and
their local agents very angry, and more determined than ever before to
finish off the eliminationist project. So, the persecuted Rohingya must
now adhere to the two-child policy in clear violation of their human
rights.
Ignored once again in this immoral order is the fact that Myanmar has
ratified the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination against Women, which obliges State parties to respect and
protect the right of women and men “to decide freely and responsibly on
the number and spacing of their children and to have access to the
information, education and means to enable them to exercise these
rights.”
Tomás Ojea Quintana, the Special Rapporteur on the human rights
situation in Myanmar, has condemned the order: “These orders provide
further ammunition to local authorities, including the border security
force Nasaka, to discriminate against and persecute the most vulnerable
and marginalized group in Myanmar.” “Only by addressing this
discrimination against religious and ethnic minorities can the
Government of Myanmar hope to forge integrated communities that live
together in equality, peace and harmony,” he underscored. The UN
Committee on the Rights of the Child has also called on the Government
not to restrict the number of children of Rohingya people.
As to the recent pogroms, the UN has voiced concerns about violence
against the Rohingyas and has adopted a resolution in the General
Assembly (Number 12-59569) on “The Situation of Human Rights in
Myanmar,” which urged the Government of Myanmar to accelerate its
efforts to address discrimination, human rights violations, violence,
displacement, and economic deprivation affecting various ethnic
minorities and, expressing particular concern about the situation of the
Rohingya minority. Unfortunately, the UN fell short of either proposing
any action to save the victims or punishing the major culprits who are
responsible for the tragedy of this unfortunate people. The nuclear
Brahmins, shamelessly, are more interested in getting their shares of
the pie of Myanmar than punishing the rogue, apartheid state for its
monumental failure to protect the lives and properties of minority
Muslims there. More sickening is the attitude of the ASEAN, which as a
regional power, has failed to chastise one of its own. They must demand a
stop to this extermination campaign against the minority Muslims with a
definite timeline. They must ensure full citizenship and human rights
of these Muslims. Otherwise, the local problem will not remain local and
become a regional one endangering regional security and stability, if
it has not already reached that magnitude.
Can ASEAN afford such a catastrophe in the making? How about South Asia?
- Asian Tribune -
