British aid for Myanmar ethnic cleansing

July 19, 2013
Asia Times
Dr. Maung Zarni

LONDON - Britain, the largest donor country and former colonizer of Myanmar, is effectively aiding and abetting the unfolding "ethnic cleansing" of Muslim Rohingya by helping to finance the country's controversial 2014 national census.

Ex-general and head of Myanmar's quasi-civilian government Thein Sein made an official visit to Britain this week, during which his hosts announced a new 30 million-pound (US$45.6 million) development assistance package and resumption of arms sales. One third of that amount is earmarked to bankroll the former colony's census, "which is essential to make sure support isgetting to those who need it more", according to an official British government statement.

Because Thein Sein's government is forcing the Rohingya people to register as "Bengali", a continuation of a decades-old policy of stripping the Rohingya of both their citizenship and ethnic identity, Britain's financial support for this process is troubling. The coming census will no doubt be used to reinforce this racist policy and practice of forcibly registering the self-referenced Rohingya and erasing the fact that the Rohingya as an ethnic nationality group ever existed in Myanmar.

During a question and answer session following his beautifully written, liberal sounding speech at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, or Chatham House, Thein Sein was emphatic about his government's policy towards the estimated 800,000 to one million Rohingya whose cultural, economic and historical roots can be found on both sides of the once East Bengal and former Arakan State.

He stated that "to use the term Rohingya, in our ethnic history we do not have the term Rohingya". This official denial and the racist policies that perpetuate the marginalization of the Rohingya is tantamount to ethnocide, a blatant erasure of a verifiable fact that a distinct ethnic community, with all its typical sociological fluidity, exists in Myanmar.

Gregory Stanton of George Mason University, who is president of Genocide Watch and a world renowned scholar in genocide studies, sees in Myanmar's mistreatment of the Rohingya a Nazi-like "us versus them" classification in which the dominant group and its political state dish out discrimination, mistreatment and eventually "final solutions".

In his influential essay entitled "The Eight Stages of Genocide", Stanton writes: "We treat different categories of people differently. Racial and ethnic classifications may be defined by absurdly detailed laws - the Nazi Nuremberg laws, the "one (African blood) drop" laws of segregation in America, or apartheid racial classification laws in South Africa."

Classification is universal across all cultures and political systems. However, when it is carried out in a militaristic state with a deeply Islamophobic "Buddhist" society such as the present-day Myanmar, there is only a short jump between the deliberate act of mis-classifying the Rohingya as "illegal Bengali" or "Bengalis" and being dehumanized as "viruses", "ogres" or the local language equivalent of "niggers". The next stage is mass violence with state impunity against a given dehumanized community.

That is precisely what has happened to the Rohingyas of western Myanmar since 1978. In February that year, the Burma Socialist Programme Party-led government, a one-party, one-man dictatorship under General Ne Win, launched the country's first large-scale ethnic cleansing operation. Known as the Na-Ga-Min, or King of the Snakes, operation, inter-ministerial and inter-agency units from police, customs, immigration, army, navy, intelligence, civil administration and the home ministry's religious affairs department were mobilized against the Rohingya.

Even the government's conservative estimate put the number of Rohingya who fled to neighboring, newly independent Bangladesh at 150,000; other independent sources put the figure much higher. Since then the Rohingya have been living in security grids where virtually every aspect of their lives is severely restricted and monitored as a matter of policy.

A cursory glance at doctor-patient ratios, adult illiteracy and mortality rates among children under five speaks volume about the policy-induced dire conditions under which the Rohingya are forced to live. The doctor-patient ratio for the Rohingya in northern Rakhine State is 1:83,000, adult illiteracy is over 90%, and the mortality rate for under-five children is twice as high as Myanmar's already very high national average.

No longer able to endure decades of a myriad forms of sexual violence, summary execution, forced labor, extortions, and other means of abuse, many Rohingya families - including women, children and the elderly - have attempted to flee the country, willingly risking their lives in rickety boats on the Andaman Sea and facing an uncertain future as stateless people in countries as varied as Canada, Australia, Thailand, Malaysia and neighboring Bangladesh.

Unconscionable policy
Ethnocide may sound like esoteric academic jargon but its consequences are grave and of growing international concern. A policy of ethnocide sets the ideological and social-psychological stage for an otherwise peaceful people to carry out unspeakable and unconscionable atrocities against those whom they have been trained to consider an existential threat.

The military-controlled state in Myanmar - now headed by ex-general Thein Sein and his quasi-civilian government in Naypyidaw - has both paved the way for and carried out ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya. Ethnocide of the Rohingya has empowered the racist, ultra-nationalists among the local Buddhist Rakhine, national leaders and Buddhist society at large to dehumanize the Rohingya.

The fact that Thein Sein felt comfortable enough to repeat his government's ethnocidal stance on the Rohingya at the prestigious Chatham House should ring alarm bells among the British public. His speech spoke volumes about the extent to which Myanmar's former colonial master has become officially complicit in the atrocities against the Rohingya, London's expressed "human rights concerns" notwithstanding.

Apparently designed to hit Britain's subliminal colonial guilt, Thein Sein framed the Rohingya as a problem which the former British colony inherited from the Raj upon achieving independence in 1948. In Thein Sein's words: "During the colonial administration there was a migration of economic migrants from other countries into the Rakhine State (formerly known as Arakan) to work on the lands... So they grew their crops and then they did the harvest and then they went back home. But later on they decided to settle in the region. During the colonial administration there were 50,000 Muslims in that region... Now we have 800,000 Muslim population in the region. That of course caused a lot of tension."

Colonial-era statistics have proven more often than not unreliable and the racial conceptualizations and classifications on which these demographic data rest were often full of racist and pseudo-scientific methodologies that were part and parcel of colonial rule. In 1824, the year of the British annexation of the Arakan, itself a pre-British feudal colony that was depopulated by both Buddhists and Muslims by repressive military conquest, around one-third of the population of Arakan was Muslim, according to colonial records.

Today, out of the estimated three million who live in Rakhine State, around a third are Muslim. This is hardly a demographic threat to the local Rakhines and certainly not a national threat to the predominantly Buddhist country of 50-plus million people. Beyond the numbers' games, there are other people-centered - as opposed to nation state-centric - perspectives that are far more convincing and far closer to Arakan's historical realities than is Thein Sein's dubious explanation.

In a public seminar on the Rohingya held at Columbia University in September last year, Amartya Sen, the world renowned Bengali philosopher and economist and Harvard University professor, perceptively observed: "The Rohingya did not come to Burma. But Burma came to the Rohingya."

Like other borderland ethno-cultural communities, the Rohingya as a people can be found on both sides of the borders of modern nation states, namely the former Burma, which since 1989 has been known as Myanmar, and former East Pakistan, which since 1971 has been known as Bangladesh. The boundaries of once boundary-less feudal kingdoms, many characterized by fluctuating territorial control and administrative powers, were abruptly locked and divided into post-colonial nation states.

In fact, there is nothing strange or persecution-worthy about numerous ethno-cultural and linguistic communities being split and scattered across these manufactured borders as nation states emerged out of wars, conflicts and other processes of exploitation. Even in the case of Myanmar, there are other groups such as the Chin, Kachin, Karenni, Mon, Shan, Tai, and, yes, even the Buddhist Rakhine, who also belong to different neighboring nation states. Notably, none of these communities are facing ethnocide or genocide by Thailand, Laos, Bangladesh, India or China.

Twisted history
The truth is that the Rohingya were not always denied their existence by the Myanmar state. In contrast to Thein Sein's ethnocidal perspective, and in spite of the contemporary debates as to whether the Rohingya are historical or ancestral "children of the land", four successive Myanmar governments - the parliamentary democracy government of prime minister U Nu (1948-58), the caretaker government of General Ne Win (1958-60), the Union Government of premier U Nu (1960-62) and General Ne Win's early military government, namely the Revolutionary Council (1962-74) - had all officially recognized the Rohingya as a distinct ethno-cultural community.

The Rohingya had their own national ethnic language program based at the state's sole national broadcasting service (Burma Broadcasting Service, or BBS) alongside other national ethnic language programs such as Shan, Lahu, Bama and others. The official social studies textbooks described them as Myanmar's Rohingya ethnic nationality and placed them on the ethnic map of the country.

The household lists and national identification cards bore the word "Rohingya" for those who self-identified as such. All cabinet offices of these aforementioned governments used the word "Rohingya" in their official dispatches and records, while senior military generals in the ministry of defense addressed the Rohingya community and its religious leaders as 'esteemed Rohingya leaders' in the former's public remarks and speeches. The government's official Burmese Encyclopedia (published in 1964, two years after the military government came to power) had a specific section on the Rohingyas of northern districts of the country.

Since the first genocidal operation against the Rohingya in February 1978, successive military leaderships have been relentless in their drive to cleanse western Myanmar of the ethnic group - whom they now derisively and officially insist on calling "Bengali" - both from state discourse and from the land. Ethnocide began under Ne Win's whimsical dictatorship, which was steeped in nationalist and anti-colonial ideologies that justified draconian policies towards the Rohingya. As a result, Myanmar now has an apartheid system for the Rohingya, who have survived various waves of ethnic cleansing since 1978.

Instead of confronting Thein Sein over his past and present role in the ethnocide and ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya, the British government instead gave 10 million pounds for his government's 2014 census, a project that will almost surely drive the final nail into the coffin of the Rohingyas' existence in Myanmar.

This also puts Britain's plan to involve the British Ministry of Defense in training Myanmar's armed forces in the areas of human rights and civil-military relations in a new light. For while British officials talk of human rights and accountability in military classrooms, they will simultaneously be financing a census that will be used to facilitate ethnic cleansing with British tax-payers' money.

For those familiar with Britain's international trajectory, its decision to help fund Myanmar's ethnocidal census, which in turn will be technically assisted by the United Nations Population Fund, should not come as a surprise. Nor should the British government's decision to reward Thein Sein with the export of made-in-UK arms worth $5 million. Foreign Office spin-masters will, one can be sure, soon be justifying this questionable arms deal as one to help end the country's ethnic conflicts.

On July 19, 1947, made-in-England bullets killed independence hero Aung San and a group of the country's co-founders in a British-assisted but locally carried out assassination. Aung San, a staunch anti-imperialist nationalist, was then seen as an obstacle to the unfettered pursuit of Britain's post-colonial, post-World War II commercial and strategic interests in Myanmar.

Sixty years on, the resumption of export of made-in-UK arms to Thein Sein's military-backed, genocidal regime sends an ominous signal to those ethnic and religious minorities who may not be as open to British official and corporate interests as the ethnic Burman military generals and their cronies.

In pursuit of its own hidden and not-so-hidden strategic and corporate interests, Britain is simply repeating the old colonial policy of ethnic divide and exploit. In the days of the British Raj of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the British pursued their imperialist aims and interests through the use of the country's non-Buddhist ethnic minorities along the country's borderlands, then referred to as the "frontier peoples".

In 2013, Britain's new design in Myanmar is about pursuing British interests through the dominant "Buddhist" generals and their repressive state while looking the other way when their colonial era ethnic instruments, namely the frontier or borderland ethnic peoples of the Rohingya, Karen, Kachin, and others are being further marginalized, militarily overwhelmed or ethnically cleansed.

Maung Zarni (www.maungzarni.com) is a Burmese dissident blogger and a Visiting Fellow at the Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit at the London School of Economics. 

The official evidence of the Rohingya ethnic ID and citizenship which the Burmese ethno- and genocidists don't want you to see

DR.Maung Zarni

Since the first wave of Rohingya genocide in Feb 1978 which expelled nearly 200,000 refugees from all across Western Burma in to the neighboring newly independent Bangladesh, Burma's military regimes have committed themselves to erasing that the Rohingya were a constitutive ethnic nationality group (or Tai-yin-thar), who 'are found on both sides of East Bengal (or now Bangladesh) and Burma. Their transboundaries community is not unlike the Shan or Tai of Burma and Northern Siam, the Jeng-hpaw of Northern Burma and Southern China, the Mons of southern Burma and Thailand, the Karens of Eastern Burma and Thailand. Myanmar authorities and scholars, as well as deeply ignorant Myanmar public have denied that these "Tai-yin-thar ever existed in Burma while insisting them to be nothing but 'illegal migrants' from Bangladesh - all despite available mountains of evidence to the contrary. On its part, the international media simply repeats Myanmar's official line - or lie - that the Rohingyas are state-less people, who have never been Tai-yin-thar or a constitutive ethnic group of Burma.

Transcript of Aung Gyi's speech

Brigadier General Aung Gyi, Vice Chief of Staff of the Burmese Armed Forces (Army) and 2nd in command under General Ne Win seen here addressing THE ROHINGYA, singing the latter's praise as a good, cooperative national people, 15 Nov 1960 

Esteemed Malvis, ROHINGYA Leaders, etc. "Today will go down in history as the greatest (modern) milestone, after our country's independence in 1948, in the history of May Yu district which had not seen peace since 1942.

Prime Minister U Nu: "in the Bhu-thee-daung and Maung Daw areas adjacent to East Pakistan are found the Union nationalities called the ROHINGYA. They are Muslims". There are also Mujahaddins (across the borders in East Pakistan) who want to establish an independent Islamic state.

The front cover of the Union of the Socialist Republic of Burma High School Geography Textbook cover (1978)

In the High School Geography Textbook this illustration included ethnic distributions. On the northern most districts closest to Bangladesh in the coastal Arakan state are 'Rohingya", Thet, Khami,and Myo. 

30 Years Anniversary Publication (book) of the Burmese Broadcasting Service, Government Printing Press

Lumyo or race: Rohingya Muslim
Issued by Board of Management of the Rangoon Post
29 July 1968

In order to enhance union spirit among all ethnic nationalities (Tai-yin-thar) several national language programs are added to the existing Shan, etc.

Head of Rohingya Taiyintar Language Program (U Ba Tun, BA, BL)

Rohingya ethnic nationality language (Taiyinthar) is scheduled to broadcast 3 times a week 10 minutes each slot.

The effective administration of the May Yu District of Northern Arakan State begins only in May 1961 for a variety of reasons although it was supposed to be administered directly by the Border Administration. 

Burmese Official Government-issued Encyclopedia (1964)

May Yu districts has a total population of about 400,000 to 500,000. Seventy-five % of them are Rohingya and their religion is Islam. There are also Rakhine, Dai-net, Kha-mei, Myo, etc. Many of them are engaged in agriculture and fishing

The future of May Yu (District), second printing, 1960. Ministry of Defense

Top 10 anti-Muslim and anti-Rohingya Statements from Myanmar: Take your pick

May 22, 2013

Dr.Maung Zarni  

Two Rohingya children terrorized, half-starved and perceived as "viruses and threats to Burma's national security" by the pro-democracy dissidents, civil society, Buddhist Order and the military state

A Rohingya child's pictorial memory of life in Rakhine State

A street scene in the Third Reich, 1930's

As chillingly reminiscent of the Third Reich and its Nazism, un-Buddhist, un-factual and ethnocidal as some may sound, these select statements are an accurate reflection of the sub-consciously neo-Nazi world of the ethnically dominant Burmese ruling elite and counter-elite who are forging ahead one grand coalition with their former jailers to turn Burma into 'the last Asian tiger' and build 'discipline flourishing democracy', apparently at the expense of religious and ethnic minorities who make up 40% of the population. 

Ironically, local Rakhines, generally widely disliked by both the Burmese public and the military, and the Rohingya Muslim, one of the world's 'most vulnerable' peoples, have been pitted against one another by the internally colonial State and Society in Burma, since 1940's.

1. Burma's Ambassador to the UN (Geneva)

Rohingya 'as ugly as ogres'

"In reality, Rohingya are neither Myanmar people nor Myanmar's ethnic group. It is quite different from what you have seen and read in the papers. (They are as ugly as ogres)."

- ex-Major Ye Myint Aung, then Consul General of Myanmar Consulate, Hong Kong and subsequent to sending his rather racist and derogatory written note to the UK-based diplomatic missions, was promoted to Ambassadorship in the UN, Geneva, 10 Feb 2009

2. President Thein Sein, the man and his office

2. A "According to our government, we don't have a policy of discriminating based on religion or race."

President Thein Sein, Interviewed by CNN'S AMANPOUR, 20 May 2013

2. B  “There is no Rohingya among our races. We have Bengalis who were brought to do farming during colonial days. Some of them settled.” He spoke approvingly of a 1982 law that has been used to deny them citizenship.

Washington Post (Editorial): Burmese president’s visit gives glimmer of hope for change

2. C "(I)t is impossible for Burma to accept people who are not ethnic to the country and who have entered illegally ... (and Myanmar is) “willing to send the Rohingyas to any third country that will accept them.”

Myanmar Government Official Statement out of President Thein Sein's office, 12 July 2012

2. D “The UN and other organizations have done what they should do. The [Rakhine-Rohingya] situation is moving in a positive direction. A report containing harsh accusations is un-constructive, and does not represent 60 million people.”

Sit Myaing, a former police colonel and a member of the Myanmar (official) Human Rights Commission

3. Madam Aung San Suu Kyi

3. A "I don't know".

Aung San Suu Kyi, (when asked if she thought the most persecuted and vulnerable Rohingya are citizens of her country), a public event in Europe, June 2012 

3. B "She believes, in Burma, there is no Rohingya ethnic group".

Nyan Win, Aung San Suu Kyi's official spokesperson

4. "We, the 88 Generation, who fought for human rights for so many years, are unhappy about the HRW report. I feel that it is an insult to our nation. The main thing is that this is not an ethnic problem, it is the fact that the Rule of Law in Myanmar is so weak."

Min Zay Yar, a well-known former student leader from the 1988 student uprisings

5. Ko Ko Gyi, (considered by his peers as the "brain" of the 88 Generation Peace and Open Society Group, a former international relations undergraduate student, Rangoon University, 1988)

5. A “Rohingya issue”—that is, the status of Arakan State’s Muslim minority — is essentially a matter of sovereignty. 

Ko Ko Gyi - 88 Generation Peace and Open Society Group

(paraphrased by Aung Zaw, Irrawaddy)

5. B "I will resign from this commission if it uses the word 'human rights' in association with these Bengali".

Ko Ko Gyi

(Personal phone conversation with Zarganar, the fellow commissioner on the Rakhine Sectarian Violence Inquiry Commission set up by President Thein Sein, Fall 2012)

5. C "The job of UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Myanmar Professor Tomas Quintana is to investigate human rights abuses. This (violence between the Rohingya and the Rakhine) is ethnic conflict. So, it's not really his job to examine the inter-ethnic violence."

Again, Ko Ko Gyi, to a group of international visitors who research on human rights atrocities in Western Burmese state of Rakhine or Arakan, Rangoon, the weekend of 27-28 Apr 2013

6. Major Zaw Htay, Thein Sein's official spokesperson 

"Although there are some who criticized [Myanmar] quoting the Human Rights Watch's report, [you can see] Myanmar has been praised recently for its human rights progress by the US which promotes human rights activities around the world."

Zaw Htay, the director for the President's Office on his Facebook page on April 22, 

7. Former Mae Sot, Thailand-based exile and human rights educator

“In such a sensitive situation, the use of the phrase ‘ethnic cleansing’ is unacceptable. Ethnic Cleansing means eliminating other ethnic groups. This is not the case [in Rakhine State].”

Aung Myo Min, Human Rights Education Institute of Burma (HREIB)

8. Presidential Inquiry Commissioners (Myanmar Genocide Whitewashers)

Myanmar Presidential Inquiry Commission on the Rakhine Sectarian Violence at the Western donor-funded Myanmar Peace Center (29 Apr 2013)

From left to right (Aung Naing Oo, Dr Kyaw Yin Hlaing (Secretary and President Thein Sein's adviser), Dr Yin Yin Nwe (ex-daughter-in-law of the late despot General Ne Win), Ko Ko Gyi (88 Generation Peace and Open Society Group) and Zarganar

The following are the on-the-record statements/views of Presidential Inquiry Commission on the Sectarian Violence in Rakhine State.

(For my critique of this commission and its blatantly ethnocidal report, see my Myanmar whitewashes ethnic cleansing )

8. A Dr Myo Myint

"They (the "Bengalis" from across Bangladesh) are here already. We can't simply kick them out. What to do?"

Dr Myo Myint (PhD in History, Cornell), former lecturer of history at Mandalay University, retired Director-General, Religious Affairs Department (Ministry of Home Affairs), Chairman of the Rakhine Sectarian Violence Presidential Inquiry Commission, 17 Aug 2013 (YouTube)

8. B Dr Myo Myint

"You don't need to report to the President about the situation on a regular basis. The security and welfare of those people ("Bengali") are not our commission's responsibility". 

Dr Myo Myint, a recorded phone conversation with one of the Muslim Commissioners who was fired, arrested and later released by the Special Branch, 2 days prior to his arrest in November 2012 

{Compiler's note: I listened to the 10-minute recorded conversation earlier this month, and with absolute certainty I can verify that it was THE voice of Dr Myo Myint, my old history tutor at Mandalay University (1982)}

8. C Dr Yin Yin Nwe

"These un-educated Bengali women procreate like mad. On average one woman has about 10-12 children, and men are allowed to have more than 1 wife. I even told them I have only 1 child and even then the cost of education is quite expensive. Because of this population explosion, now 90-plus % of Buthidaung and Maung Daw population is made up of Bengali and only about 5-6 percent are Rakhine and Bama. So, think for yourself who is a majority here and who is minority. That's why, we proposed population control - albeit on a voluntary basis."

Dr Yin Yin Nwe, (PhD Geology, Cambridgae), ex-daughter in law of the late dictator Ne Win, Thein Sein's gem stones adviser, member of the Presidential Inquiry Commission on the Rakhine Sectarian Violence Commission, the Voice of America Burmese TV Interview, 12 May 2013

{Compiler's remark: With this single interview she has become an instant celebrity extremely popular with the Burmese YouTube viewers and social media virtual public, both inside Burma and in diaspora}

8. D Dr Kyaw Yin Hlaing, Secretary and Presidential Adviser

"It's untrue to say that our government is not doing anything. We are doing interfaith dialogues among Buddhist and Muslim leaders in Rakhine and Rangoon. We surveyed about 2,000 people in Western Burma. There is a lot of hatred there". 

Dr Kyaw Yin Hlaing (PhD in Government, Cornell), former student of Commission Chairman Dr Myo Myint and himself, Secretary of the Presidential Inquiry Commission on sectarian violence in Rakhine 

(It was in response to a question by a Burmese Muslim retiree U Win Aung from the Voice of America and the Burmese Broadcasting Service regarding the situation which Human Rights Watch characterizes as "ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity" of the Rohingya of Western Burmese state of Rakhine, the Voice of America Burmese service townhall meeting with President Thein Sein, Washington, DC, 19 May 2013).

8. E Zarganar (a.k.a Dr Thura), a key commissioner member who knew a lot of purposely and verifiably false statements were inserted into the government official inquiry commission report, but he chose to endorse it publicly.

"This is a made-up report (that is, the damning report of the Human Rights Watch on ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya in Burma)". 

- Zarganar

Dr Thura or better known as Zarganar is the country's best known political comedian and recipient of many human rights awards, film educator and 4-times political prisoner, a key member of the aforementioned inquiry commission and a member of the political prisoners verification committee - in reference to Human Rights Watch's damning report indicting the State, its leadership and institutions in the organized mass violence against the Rohingya in the two bouts of violence in June and Oct 2012. (see the report here: http://www.hrw.org/reports/2013/04/22/all-you-can-do-pray-0)

9. The Rakhine Voices

9. A “This is unfair. Our party does not accept the statement at all. All the local people in Rakhine State know the incidents from A to Z. The violence did not occur racially or religiously. It happened between those who want to seize the territory and those who want to defend that territory. Ethnic cleansing is not the matter of that issue.”

Aung Mya Kyaw, Rakhine State Parliament MP Aung Mya Kyaw of Rakhine Nationalities Development Party in reference to Human Rights Watch's report "All You can Do is Pray: Ethnic Cleansing and Crimes against Humanity against the Rohingya of Western Burma", 22 April 2013

9. B “I don’t know whether the HRW’s wording is linked to the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. We will say that their use of term ‘Rohingya’ is wrong.” 

"We don't have Rohingyas in our country. We can only say that they are Bangladeshi or foreign Bengalis. Now, the words used by this group have reached the level of hurting the country and its people. [They] often kept saying ethnic cleaning. Actually, it's not a racial or religious issue. It's called communal violence… Politically, it includes competition of groups living inside the country and abroad. We have been living together with Muslims since a long time ago and we didn't have any problems. The group will know if they come [to Myanmar]".

Dr U Maung, vice chairman of the Araken League for Democracy

9. C "We have to restore Rakhine villages (to the pre-Bengali period). We need to take inspiration from Israel and model our restoration (of Rakhine State only for the Rakhine) from Israel."

MP Aye Maung, Chairman of the Rakine National Development Party, in his interview with Burma's local news magazine - Venus News, Current Politics section, 14 Aug 2012

9. D "How can it be ethnic cleansing? They are not an ethnic group".

Mr Win Myaing, Rakhine State Government Spokesperson, quoted in Reuters, 15 May 2013

10. The Venerable Wirathu, New Ma-soe-yein Teaching Buddhist Monastery

"Whatever (the Muslims) do they do it with their 'national' Muslim interests in mind. They have designs against our country, our faith and our society. They now have monopoly over the construction sector in Rangoon. They have come to dominate Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy. Even she is only riding the niggers' cars. All these national dissidents such as Aung San Suu Kyi and Min Ko Naing dare not speak a word about the Rakhine Crisis (during which our brethen Rakhine are suffering at the hands of the Bangali). Our national political emblem has been replaced by the Islam's symbol of beards! They are the worst violators of human rights and religious freedom. So, you Buddhist lay public must do everything with the (anti-Muslim) nationalist ethos. Only do business and socially interact with those who embrace 969 ethos of economic boycott and societal exclusion and ostracism against the (Muslim) enemy".

It's official now! The new Myanmar has a Nazi party and its reps are sitting in the Parliament.

May 18, 2013

Maungzarni  

Dr Maung Zarni

A group of local Rakhines in Nazi village, driving around in a 2-ton truck painted, approvingly,  with Nazi symbols, including the word "Hitler" during the Rakhine/Burmese Hindu-originated New Year water festival, April 2012

IT's official now!

The new Myanmar has a registered Nazi party.  And it's called the Rakhine National Development Party (RNDP).

I just finished reading "Toe-tet-yay" or Progress, the official publication of the RNDP Information and Research Department, Volume 2, No. 12, 2012.

Naypyidaw has apparently incubated this party while Aung San Suu Kyi has wined and dined publicly with the leaders of the RNDP such as its Chairman MP Dr Aye Maung, a vet.

Nominally separate branches of the State - Presidency of Thein Sein, the Parliament, and the Judiciary - all tolerate, nay, tacitly back,  both the neo-Nazi Buddhist movement known as "969" led by fascist monks such as Wirathu (45) and the RNDP led by Aung Maung, himself a Bangladesh-born Rakhine.

In contrast, the State in Myanmar recently sentenced a Muslim customer who peeled a 969 sticker off the mirror at a street vendor with his motorcycle key to 2 years imprisonment for 'insult to religion'.  Never mind that 969 with its racist, hate-soaked messages isn't about Buddhism, but about the rising Burmese strain of Ku Klux Klan. . Worse, the Thein Sein administration in Naypyidaw has chosen not to bring to justice anyone who participated in the broad-day light slaughter10 Muslim pilgrims in public space in southern Rakhine town of Taung-gok in early June 2012.

With this type of blatant impunity and neo-Nazi biases, it is little wonder that the Rakhine National Development Party (RNDP) openly subscribes to Neo-Nazism, claiming Rakhine and Burma to be a "Buddhist state".

Its official journal "Toe-Tet-Yay" (or Progress) is littered with the word "beasts", reference to all Muslims of Myanmar who are supposedly empathetic to the Rohingya cause.  In media interviews after interviews, as well as in the Parliamentary discussions, the RNDP leaders publicly have with discernible admiration talked about how the Rakhine patriots should look to Israel and its apartheid, colonial state vis-a-vis the Palestinians as a model to handle their enemies - "Bangali", whom they consider neither humans nor ethnic group.

Progress's editorial (Volume 2, number 12, November 2012) endorsed the horrendous view - that Hitler may be a monster for Jews; he was the Hero for the Germans. This is the view that my Germans in their right mind would find extremely repulsive and difficult to sympathize.

This homegrown Nazi party of the Rakhines calls for the national level authorities in Naypyidaw  not to yield to any international pressure in dealing with the "Bengali 'viruses', to borrow a typical Rakhine reference to the Rohingya, decisively.  They mean to implement forcibly the racist 1982 Citizenship Act designed to exclude any Rohingya who didn't have any documentation to prove that their ancestry has been in Burma before the first British defeat of the Burmese feudal kingdom in 1824.  (Incidentally, printing machines arrived  in the palm-leaf society of feudal pre-colonial Burma only around the mid-19th century, and even then it was thanks to the Christian missionaries.  By this standard, 99% of the 'pure-blooded' Burmese would be rendered ineligible for citizenship.)

Equally, the leadership in Naypyidaw with its version of neo-Nazism as evidenced in the blood-based views reiterated in New York by Myanmar Immigration Minister and ex-police chief Khin Yi will do just that: continue to apply Citizenship Act of 1982 to the Rohingya who survived the pogroms last year.

Khin Yi with no exposure to the liberal West or little in terms of critical education may be forgiven.

Incomprehensibly, Myanmar's cream of the crop, western educated elite with PhDs and other advance credentials from the Ivy League schools and Oxbridge have echoed Khin Yi's home-grown but official racist stance on citizenship.

Watch here the 12 May VOA Burmese interview with Dr Yin Yin Nwe (PhD Geology Cambridge, Thein Sein's gem stones adviser, a presidential Rakhine Inquiry Commissioner, the older daughter of the late Burmese authors Mi Mi Khaing and Shan feudalist Sao Sāimöng Mangrā below where she in effect talked about the Rohingya women with visible disdain and endorsed in effect eugenic.

Her fellow commissioners such as Dr Myo Myint and Dr Kyaw Yin Hlaing (both Cornell PhDs in social sciences), respectively chair and secretary of the Arakan Sectarian Violence Inquiry Commission appointed by Thein Sein have officially endorsed to the very same racist Citizenship Act of 1982 while committing wittingly the ethnocide of the Rohingya.

One of the printed essays in the RNDP's 20-page publication talked about why certain individuals - despite having heads on their shoulders - cannot be considered human beings, hence not being entitled to the universal human rights.

The same article talks about the Rakhines as the only Bumiputra or Tai-yin-Thar of the Rakhine State while the Muslims were not native-sons of the soil and why their own self-referential ethnic name must not be recognized or accepted and their right to co-exist peacefully cannot be granted, from a perspective of "national security".

This 'we-must-privilege-national security-over-human-rights' stance is also shared by the George Soros-funded 88 Generation Peace and Open Society Group leaders such as Ko Ko Gyi since his meeting with the USDP Chairman and the presidential-hopeful ex-General Shwe Mann last year.

As far as the Rakhine State Administration which collaborates with Aye Maung Rakhine National Development Party (RNDP), slaughtering in a coordinated and organized fashion a large number of the Rohingya doesn't qualify as 'ethnic cleansing'.  For the Rohingyas are not really an ethnic group!

Alas, from Presidential spokespersons such as Zaw Htay and Ye Htut and Myanmar's National Human Rights Commission to western-donor-financed Myanmar human rights educators such as Aung Myo Min of Human Rights Education Institute, the self-styled "civil society" leaders and organizations find it equally 'unacceptable' that the two bouts of mass violence in June and October last year which were targeted against the Rohingya and other Muslims of Western Burma be characterized by the Human Rights Watch as 'ethnic cleansing' or 'crimes against humanity'.

Of course, in their warped, Nazi-inspired minds they are right in rejecting the term 'ethnic cleansing' or 'crimes against humanity' against them.  The Rohingyas are neither humans nor ethnic people, or so they apparently believe.

As the Rakhine State Spokesperson Win Myaing recently put it to Reuters, "How can it be ethnic cleansing? They are not an ethnic group".
I wouldn't be surprised if Myanmar's new Nazis among the Rakhine and the multiethnic public at large, may be inclined to learn German so that they could read Hitler's Mein Kampf.

 According to a retired German Ambassador to Burma who wrote a commissioned analysis on the rise of what I call "neo-Nazi Buddhist movement",the German Foreign Ministry was adamant against his use of  the label "Nazi or neo-Nazi" to describe what he sees as a visibly Nazi "Buddhist" movement in my country.  It sounds the word "Nazi" is too close to home for Berlin.

How about Goethe Institute opening, after a long anticipation, an office in Rangoon and offering the Rakhine and the Burmese fascists some German language programs so that they may read Mein Kampf in German original?

Why not?  As early as 2004 the Rakhine dissidents in exile based along the Thai-Burmese border areas such as Mae Sot were found to be reading and discussion Hitler's infamous tract: Mein Kampf or My Story.

The German officials are not alone in feeling increasingly squeamish about the labeling of developments that are genocidal and Naziesque.  Western diplomats in their Rangoon outposts were said to be hostile to anyone who characterizes the definitely coordinated and Naypyidaw-backed mass violence against the Rohingya and other Muslims in Burma as 'ethnic cleansing', not to mention the choice of the term 'genocide'.

After having barked human rights and genuine democratization in Burma since the end of the Cold War, the west-led "international community" has of late come to play the role of "genocide enablers".  That is, from the United States to the European Union, from Britain to Japan, the Paris Club and the ADB, not to mention the "Burma-pernicious" International Crisis Group, as Australian economic adviser to Aung San Suu Kyi, Sean Turnell put it wryly.

Here is my favorite list of concrete ways in which external players have instilled  in Thein Sein's fascist leadership -and his proxy Rakhine Nazis on the ground -  a sense of invincibility - while enabling the latter to carry on with their neo-fascist agenda about the Rohingya - and the Burmese Muslims.

•Obama stops in in Myamar for 6 hours claiming it to be his foreign policy 'success story', Nov 2012
•Paris Club cancels $5.7 billion Myanmar Debt, 25 Jan 2013.
•Aung San Suu Kyi goes to Japan, Apr 13, 2013
•Japan forgives $3.7 billion Myanmar debt, Apr 21, 2013
•HRW releases its report All You Can Do is Pray": Crimes Against Humanity and Ethnic Cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in Burma’s Arakan State, 22 Apr 2013
•International Crisis Group awards Thein Sein “In Pursuit of Peace Award” in New York, 22 Apr 2013
•EU lifts sanctions on Burma, 23 Apr 2013
•Indonesia increases its investment in coal mining and cement industry
•Brunei wants to do joint oil and gas ventures.

With international friends like these little wonder Naypyidaw considers all its critics 'barking dogs barking up the full Moon'.

We can be sure that when President Obama meets his Myanmar counterpart Thein Sein in the White House this Monday, 20 May he would find it too impolite to call the Rohingya ethnic cleansing by its proper name.

After all, who would want to call their business partners a 'genocidist' or a 'criminal against humanity'?

That just wouldn't be politic.  So, Mr President, Heil Thein Sein!  Viva RNDP!  And to Hell with those "Bangali viruses' and Myanmar's 'beastly Muslims'!

Myanmar whitewashes ethnic cleansing

Torching the houses in Oakkan Township on April 30, 2013 (Photo: Facebook)

May 1, 2013

Asia Times

Maung Zarni 

An official report into last year's violence in Rakhine State, launched on April 29 at the government's foreign donor financed Myanmar Peace Center, is intellectually, ideologically, empirically and analytically flawed, underscoring President Thein Sein's bid to whitewash the recent ethnic cleansing of Muslim Rohingya in the western state, which borders Bangladesh. 

Established on presidential order, the Inquiry Commission has been conflicted from the day of its inception on August 17 last year. The five individuals who were hand-picked to launch the report on Monday were a curious mix themselves: the country's most famous political comedian, the former daughter-in-law of the late despot General Ne Win, a well-known former student leader, a well-known former exile, and the president's personal adviser and interpreter. 

Thein Sein and his allies are increasingly using various crisis inquiry commissions, including the Aung San Suu Kyi-led Letpadaung Mountain Copper Mine Inquiry Commission and now the Rohingya Ethnic Cleansing Inquiry Commission, as public relations instruments to deflect public attention from its spectacular failures in handling popular discontent, state-sponsored violence against civilian populations, and mass ethno-religious violence. 

In instances where the role of government institutions was instrumental, for instance in last year's pogroms in Rakhine State, inquiry commissions have become useful tools of deflection for Naypyidaw. The latest official report, originally classified as "secret", of the Rakhine Sectarian Violence Inquiry Commission was strategically released to counter the damning and credible April 22 report "All You Can Do is Pray: Ethnic Cleansing and the Crimes Against Humanity in Myanmar", released by US-based rights lobby Human Rights Watch. 

The Inquiry Commission was stacked with cooperative technocrats, ethnic minority leaders, socialites, religious leaders and so-called human rights activists who were prepared or compelled to sign off on the report despite knowing it contained verifiably false and distorted facts about important issues under investigation. 

As a product of such an unholy alliance, the commission's report is patently un-professional, non-independent and unprincipled. Devoid of crucial truths, it is a document utterly uninformed by any well-established analytical concepts such as "ethnic formation", "identity formation", "state's mobilization" in genocide studies, "discourse", "nationalism", "history" - through which all scholars and researchers of the social world attempt to make sense of even ordinary human affairs, including genocides. 

Ethnic labels in Myanmar, including for the Chin and the Kachin, were externally imposed by British colonial administrators and American Baptist missionaries on the "natives". These were disparate groups who originally identified themselves tribally, as clans and along geographic lines. The new ethnic labels were less than 50 years old upon independence in 1948. Mal-informed by the prevailing pseudo-scientific knowledge about race and ethnicity in Europe, the British colonials and American missionaries grouped these "tribal peoples" in borderlands together for administrative expediency. 

As Indian economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen correctly pointed out during a public seminar on Myanmar at Columbia University last September, the geographical areas now known as Arakan or Rakhine State frequently changed hands among neighboring feudal rulers, and boundaries were always elastic in the pre-colonial era. 

The Rohingya Ethnic Cleansing Inquiry report officially stresses how the Rakhine feudal lords expanded their reach over territories in what was then Bengal, while making light of the fact that there were Bengali kings who ruled what was then the Kingdom of Arakan. Academics, especially establishment ethno-nationalist historians, have long proven capable of recounting the past only from a victor's perspective. The two leading scholars on the Inquiry Commission are no exception. 

For a commission that was led by two historically trained Burmese and a retired Rangoon [now Yangon] University history professor, the report's treatment of the history of a people whom the commission insisted on referring to as "Bengali" is anything if not "ethnocidal" - that is, an attempt to erase concrete historical evidence that the Rohingya, a self-referential identity, existed as an ethnic community and was officially recognized by the state under the democratic government of prime minister U Nu. 

This recognition of the Rohingya as an official constitutive ethnic group of the country, as well as their full citizenship status, was not confined to civilian politicians from the ruling political parties. During its two-year caretaker government (1958-60), the army's senior most leadership of General Ne Win and his deputies including Brigadier Aung Gyi officially recognized the Rohingya by their own self-chosen ethnic name: the Rohingya. 

While Thein Sein's commission's historians claimed to have poured over the archival records at the country's National Archives relevant to these "Bengalis", to borrow the standard Rakhine reference to the Rohingya of western Myanmar, they violated professional ethics as researchers by blatantly omitting any concrete evidence that the Rohingya were both an official ethnic group and citizens of Myanmar. 

In fact, one doesn't need to bother going to the archives to verify the Rohingya's ethnic identity and their citizenship status. Photographic copies of the verifiably authentic official records (for instance, Burma's Encyclopedia published by the Government Printing Press in 1964, official transcripts of speeches by the Burmese generals bearing the Rohingya's name, Burmese state newspaper clippings announcing a national radio program for various ethnic languages including the Rohingya language, parliamentary records, etc) are easily accessible in numerous social media sites and on-line archives. 

But the commissioners, either as anti-Rohingya Islamophobes or under duress from the government that appointed them to the Inquiry Commission, especially the professional historians among them, evidently chose to weed out any historical evidence that contradicts Myanmar's racist Citizenship Act of 1982, which was designed with input from Rakhine nationalists and earlier anti-Muslim elements in the Ministries of Defense and Immigration to strip Muslim Rohingyas both of their ethnic identity and citizenship standing. 

Forgotten history

In the hands of the commission's Cornell- and Harvard-trained historians, including the likes of chairman Myo Myint, secretary Kyaw Yin Hlaing and Professor Tun Aung Chain, the Rohingya's migratory history began only in 1824 and going on to the Japanese advent in 1942, when large scale communal violence between the Rakhine and the Rohingya took place. The entire two decades of the 1950s and 1960s, during which the Rohingya were both official ethnic peoples and had citizenship rights, were completely skipped in the report's historical section. This omission highlighted the anti-Rohingya Rakhine nationalist version of history which denies that the Rohingya ever existed. 

State-sponsored ethnocide, which began with the brutal immigration campaign of 1978 which drove out nearly 200,000 Rohingya from the Rakhine state across to neighboring Bangladesh, was "unproblematized" by the commissioners, all of whom insisted that they were "politically independent". The ethnocide is all the more shocking considering the commission's ethnic diversity, including representatives from the ethnic Kachin, Chin, Karen, Shan and other communities that have experienced oppression from state authorities. 

Ethno-religiously, the commission was a good mix - that is, except that there was no Rohingya - nay, "Bengali" - representation. Dr Myo Myint (Bama or Bama-identified), Khun Tun Oo (Shan), Jana Lahtaw (Kachin), Dr Salai Andrew (Chin), U Soe Thein (Bama), Dr Yin Yin Nwe (Shan-Bama), Dr Kyaw Yin Hlaing (Shan-Bama), Zarganar (Bama), Aung Naing Oo (Bama), Ko Ko Gyi (a national security race?), Tin Aung Moe (Bama), Daw Than Than Nu (Bama), (Vet) Dr Aye Maung (Rakhine with neo-Nazi views), Aye Thar Aung (ultra-nationalist Rakhine), Reverend Margay Gyi (Karen), U Tun Aung Chain (Karen). There are also Myanmar Muslims (ethnically Indians) and Myanmar Hindu.

With the exception of the Muslim commissioners, none of these ethno-religious diverse commissioners fought against the state-sponsored ethnocide of the Rohingya in the form of the commission's vehement opposition to the word "Rohingya". The two Muslim leaders who challenged this ethnocide and stood up for the Rohingya's own "imagined identity" were kicked out. Their crime? - frivolous charges of speaking to the press about the inquiry while others who also spoke to the media were left untouched. 

As to be expected, the report made no mention of how politics got in the way of establishing truths about the mass violence in Rakhine State. In fact, the commission sought to confirm the popular anti-Muslim racism without problematizing the recent growth of this increasingly virulent strain of Islamophobia and anti-Bengali sentiment across all indigenous national races of Myanmar. 

The commission did raise passing concern about the 969, a neo-Nazi movement ostensibly led by Buddhist monks from Myanmar's leading teaching monasteries, and its divisive impact on ethnic and social relations in society. But it fell far short of pointing out the need to take seriously the new neo-fascist turn in the country's well-known anti-Muslim, pro-Buddhist racism. The report's authors chose to describe the now world infamous 969 rather mildly as "a campaign among the Buddhist to defend their own faith and to encourage intra-Buddhist commerce and trade". 

All this is troubling but not unexpected. It was under the Religious Affairs Director-Generalship of Commission chair Dr Myo Myint that there was a proliferation of anti-Muslim quasi-religious publications, long before the previous crop of ruling generals allowed for greater freedom of press, assembly and speech. The leading voice of 969, Buddhist monk Wirathu, recently told the Associated Press that his views were formed as early as 2001. 

Sadly, nearly half of the commissioners are my old, and now former, friends. Their collective document is unmistakably Bama racist/Orientalist in orientation, treating both communities in the conflict with a typical popular Bama contempt and dislike. This is adding insult to injury for both parties in the conflict, namely the Rakhines and the Rohingya. 

The Rakhines are portrayed essentially as lazy natives who can not compete with the thrifty, business-savvy, hard-working "Bengalis" without the intervention of the state and its blood-based neo-fascist 1982 Citizenship Act. 

The Rohingya are described as elementary school children-like people who, having obtained commission members' hand-phone numbers from their Muslim contacts in Yangon, kept on calling the commission members to blabber on about their sufferings and whine about their grievances. 

These portrayals repeat a crucial racially charged popular narrative that turns out to be factually incorrect, namely that three Bengalis raped and brutally murdered a 28-year-old Rakhine Buddhist woman, the supposed first spark of the following pogroms. This was pointed out to me personally by a more honest commission member, Myanmar's most famous political comedian and former political prisoner, Zarganar. 

This rape case is vitally important because the commission identified it as a key trigger for anti-"Bengali" mobilization by Rakhine nationalists, politicians and parties, including some of the Rakhine members of the Inquiry Commission, including Aye Maung, a vet-cum-MP in Naypyidaw from the Rakhine National Development Party, an ultra-nationalist group that has claimed to be working for the "purification of Rakhine state". 

But the arrested and alleged rapists were officially registered as two Kaman Muslims and a Rakhine adopted by a Rohingya Muslim family in Pauk-taw Township. Zarganar, one of the five members who was one of the leading spokespersons for the commission at the press conference where the report was launched, told this writer in no uncertain terms that he interviewed the doctor in Rakhine state who performed the post mortem of the raped woman's corpse. 

According to this videotaped interview, the alleged Rakhine rape victim bore no sign of having been raped. Yes, she was brutally murdered and her jewelry was gone. But she was certainly not raped, recounted Zarganar, based on his one-on-one recorded interview with the doctor. The doctor was eventually forced by the authorities to sign the official post-mortem report that established the rape that did not take place. 

Then there was no mention of the "suicide in police custody" of one of the alleged rapists - Htet Htet, a non-Bengali adopted son of a Bengali family. Nor was there any mention of the fact that his freshly widowed wife was also found dead, allegedly having "drowned" in a local well. 

Was there foul play? It appears that Zarganar, the well-respected political comedian and dissident who went to jail four times since the 1988 pro-democracy uprisings crushed by the military, was compelled to put his name to the official commission report which contained statements and misinformation which he himself knows are patently and verifiably false. 

The entire report is riddled with inter-contradictions and inconsistencies that are not explained. For instance, the report raises the issue of the lack of or weak inter-agency coordination among the army, intelligence, civil administration, immigration, attorney general's office and Rakhine chief/prime minister's office. It discusses how and why the security forces and constitutive agencies only listened to direct orders from Naypyidaw. 

But the commission chose not to ask why Naypyidaw failed to issue orders to provide adequate measures to protect the targeted Rohingya communities. Instead, the National Defense and Intelligence Council (or Kar-lon in Burmese) did nothing to mobilize security forces to protect the Rohingya, troops which Thein Sein and his deputies knew would obey only direct orders from ministerial headquarters. 

Perhaps one silver living in the dark episode is that the report accurately states that local authorities in Rakhine State have absolutely no power to order security forces, including army, police, and border-control interagency troops, to do anything to quell mass violence. This was and still is something only Thein Sein's central government can do. 

Command questions

That begs the question: why did the union level leadership of Thein Sein and his deputies on the Council in Naypyidaw choose not to mobilize the troops to restore order while the same security troops were called in to firebomb sleeping Buddhist monks protesting a China-invested mining project at 2 am using canisters containing white phosphorous? Alas, this is a question that fell outside of the purview of the presidential commission. 

Furthermore, vague if not imaginary statistics are cited throughout the 186-page document without accompanying narratives or explanations. The commission did not even bother to account for its own official statistics from the government. The fact is that the greatest number of deaths and destruction were borne by the Rohingya. And yet a highly disproportionate number of the Rohingya vis-a-vis the Rakhine have been tried. 

In the first wave of Rohingya-Rakhine violence in June last year, 4,188 Rohingya homes were destroyed while the Rakhine suffered the loss of 1,150 homes. In the second wave of violence in October, 2,371 Rohingya homes were destroyed as opposed to only 42 homes that belonged to the Rakhine. And again, out of a total of 1,835 arrested in connection with the mass violence, 1,589 are Rohingya and only 246 are Rakhine. 

Perhaps the scholarly presidential investigators on the commission could advance and test a hypothesis that the economic productivity of Rakhine Buddhists (all Buddhists in Myanmar?) must be inversely correlated with the destructive capacity of the group. For the report orientalized the Rakhine as a low-productivity group, or more crudely, lazy natives. 

The commission's official statistic implies the awesome power of a small group of Rakhine - 246 to be exact - to destroy thousands of homes and dozens of mosques in about a dozen different towns and cities and make over 120,000 Rohingya refugees homeless, shelter-less, internally displaced persons in a span of just five months. 

If this number of Rakhine terrorizers, arsonists and slaughters does not seem quite convincing given the magnitude of death and devastation they had wrought throughout northern and southern Rakhine State, then who else aided and abetted the principal terrorizers among the Rakhine who wanted a Rakhine State only for the Rakhine? 

There is no mention in the report of a single case wherein any official, security or civil, was held accountable for his or her leadership failure, or worse, participation in the pogroms. According to Zarganar, his official request that the investigators be allowed unfettered access to all the important officials alive, past and present who have served in western Myanmar over the past 25 years was never granted. He told me that many of the officials were transferred to remote places after the commission was formed on August 17. 

So what is Naypyidaw trying to hide? That question, of course, also lied outside the mandated scope of the Presidential Inquiry Commission. 

The spread of rumors and hate-speech against Rohingya on social media was touched on as an important issue, and yet no attempt was made to point out that Thein Sein's spokespersons, Major Zaw Htay and Deputy Minister of Information Ye Htut, are internationally known figures who use social media to disseminate deliberately false news and engage in hate and fear-mongering. 

At the time of the crisis, Zaw Htay was spreading grossly inaccurate news, including that "a group of armed radical Muslims have entered Rakhine from [the] Bangladesh side". Meanwhile, Ye Htut spread official lies, including the notion that there was "no need for further provision of shelter for the Bengali IDPs because the government has provided them with everything for the coming rainy season". 

The report rightly recommends urgent provision of adequate shelter and other humanitarian assistance because of the dire, overcrowded IDP camps for 100,000-plus "Bengali". Echoing the International Crisis Group's monocausal explanation that communal violence often accompanies democratic openings, the report sees greater freedom of speech as a causal explanation for the spread of hate speech. 

The commission decided it was not worth noting that it purged U Nyunt Maung Shein and U Tin Maung Than, the two prominent and non-pliant Muslim members of the commission who were actually pushing for truths about the communal violence. That push obviously did not go down well with chairman Dr Myo Myint and Border Control Minister Lt-General Thein Htay. 

According to U Tin Maung Than, two days after a 15-minute heated phone conversation last autumn over what should be reported to commission patron Thein Sein and how frequently reporting should be done, he was expelled from the commission in the same manner he was appointed - that is, with no prior knowledge nor explanation. 

Chairman Myo Myint was on record saying to U Tin Maung Than that "the welfare and security of these people are not the commission's responsibility, nor do you need to send President Thein Sein important updates." Although Zarganar pushed to get access to crucial heads of security forces stationed in Rakhine State to conduct a proper inquiry, he later complained that both the commission's chairman and secretary did their best "to derail the inquiry". 

Inquiry commissions are generally not about seeking or finding incriminating evidence that will lead their commissioning presidents to the gallows. Thein Sein may be a liar with a straight face but he ain't dumb. Preemptively, the eight mandates outlined by Thein Sein in fact did not include any study of the role of the state, its institutions, or the responsibilities of the national leadership. 

Above all, the report simply reinforced the state-sponsored Rohingya ethnocide and chose to overlook the elephant in the room: the military-led state and its crucial role in the Rohingya ethnic cleansing. Instead of shedding light on the utter inaction of the characteristically trigger-happy Myanmar security forces, the commission focused instead on highlighting the need to modernize these already heavily and happily armed troops. 

Rigged recommendations

The first dozen recommendations in the four-page English-language Executive Summary of the report are all about security sector modernization, not security reform, while lip service is paid to the need to act in line with international human rights standards and Myanmar's international treaty obligations. 

The report recommends that the international community, spelled Washington, help to equip security forces with new toys, including CCTV capacities, assault speedboats, and various new weapons to deal with the cross-border problem of Bangladesh's "population explosion". Certainly, the US Pentagon would love to help bring the Tatmadaw (Myanmar's army) and other auxiliary units up to the human rights standards exercised at the US-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq or Guantanamo Bay detention facilities in Cuba. 

For a report that bore the signatures of 24 technocrats, establishment historians and academics, wealthy local merchants and traders, socialites and religious leaders, the recommendations about security sector modernization are rather impressive, so much so that one wonders if the report was the commission's gift to the Ministry of Defense and its next generation of generals. 

For a report littered with references to "human rights" and "international legal norms", its contents shows no sign that commissioners even bothered to glance at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or the UN Conventions on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. Nor did the commission deem it worthwhile to consult with either the research findings and reports from the Arakan Project or the National University of Galway's authoritative "Crimes Against Humanity in Western Burma". 

In fact, the commission considered the use of the term "ethnic cleansing" as part of an attempt to unduly internationalize local issues and an act of international nongovernmental organization (INGO) exaggeration. Or, perhaps, the commissioners felt human rights documentation was out of their professional depth without such training or an official political mandate. The commission must have known, however, that other non-native organizations such as Human Rights Watch were going to do an independent and more professional job of investigating the violence. 

Meanwhile, the commissioners seemed very much at ease when advocating "voluntary" population control of the Rohingya. The commissioners were of the view that this rapid procreation or "population explosion" among the people they insisted on calling "Bengalis" made worse the already acute sense of collective existential insecurity among the Rakhine. 

There is detectable patriotic sentiment in the reports finding that 80% of the fertile agricultural acreage in certain locations of Rakhine State are now in the hands of hard-working and thrifty "Bengali" agricultural workers and land-owners while landless and lazy Rakhine have fallen deeper into destitution. 

Even Myanmar's civil society, manufactured by the European Union and international donor funding, must be pleased with the commission's emphatic framing of the genocide as simply "communal violence". Alas, this is the civil society that refuses to call ethnic cleansing in their midst by its proper name. 

In the words of Aung Myo Min, a Myanmar human rights educator from the Human Rights Education Institute: "In such a sensitive situation, the use of the phrase 'ethnic cleansing' is unacceptable. Ethnic cleansing means eliminating other ethnic groups. This is not the case [in Rakhine State]." 

George Orwell, the inventor of the phrase "double-speak", worked in Myanmar during the colonial period in the 1920s. Orwell's ghost continues to roam in "democratic" Myanmar, possessing the dissidents, technocratic and intellectual mountebanks, ethnic nationality leaders, religious figures, human rights educators, and civil society leaders. In sum: Allah bad, Buddha good. 

Buzzword phrases such as "clean government", "good governance" and "transparency" perversely litter the commission's report. No doubt the new policy of this soon-to-be clean government will be to approach the issue of "communal violence" holistically, including through the preventative use of the "weapons of conflict resolution" the report recommends the international community provide to Myanmar's ethnocide-complicit security forces. 

A truly independent inquiry would have recommended the establishment of an early warning system of future genocidal waves. It also would have recommended more empirical research that probed the deeper causes of last year's "communal violence" in Rakhine State. The commission's varnished findings suggests the need for a new resolution research center, located perhaps near the Rohingya mass graves which Human Rights Watch uncovered. 

Scholars in the field of genocide studies have established that extraordinary mass violence, including ethnic cleansings, are seldom simply domestic or internal events in nation states. Rather, they frequently have an international dimension. These dark events generally take place in an international environment where external players are more concerned with their own strategic and commercial interests than large scale human sufferings, be they in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Sri Lanka, and now Myanmar. 

Donor governments of the pro-human rights West have reacted with hostility to Human Rights Watch's characterization of their newfound business and strategic partners in Myanmar as "ethnic cleansers" and "criminals against humanity". Thein Sein's inquiry, on the other hand, is sprinkled with the liberal discourses of conflict resolution, humanitarian management, and national reconciliation. It is thus no doubt more palatable to the international community of diplomats, investors and military strategists determined to cozy up to his self-proclaimed "democratic" regime. 

If anything, the Rohingya Ethnic Cleansing Inquiry Commission report offers a hint of things to come out of Thein Sein's Myanmar Peace Center, into which foreign donors have already poured millions of dollars to pursue state-sponsored "peace" with the Kachin, Karen, Shan, Chin and other ethnic victims of over 50 years of state-sponsored terror. One can only hope that these ethnic communities are not given similar racist treatment as that suffered by the Rohingya. 

Maung Zarni is a Burmese activist blogger (www.maungzarni.com) and visiting fellow of Civil Society and Human Security Research at the London School of Economics.