Burma risks becoming 'the next Rwanda' as violence grows

July 14,2013
Independent
Jane Merrick

Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary expected to announce fresh trade deals between UK and Burma when they meet President Thein Sein at Downing Street

David Cameron is being urged to demand an end to the violence against Burma's Muslim minority when he meets the country's President in London tomorrow.

Campaigners say Burma risks becoming "the next Rwanda", with chilling echoes of the build-up to the 1990s genocide in evidence.
The Prime Minister and William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, are expected to announce fresh trade deals between the UK and Burma when they meet President Thein Sein at Downing Street. The talks follow Mr Cameron's historic visit to Burma last year, when he also met the pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi. He was the first Western leader to visit Burma since elections took place for the first time in 20 years in 2010.
President Sein's government is military backed and there remain deep concerns over human rights and democratic reform. Hundreds of Rohingya, the Muslim minority people, have been killed and 140,000 have been displaced since violence erupted last year. President Sein has been accused of failing to protect the Rohingya, and some members of the regime have been accused of participating in the attacks.
Avaaz, the global campaign group, which has gathered 970,000 signatures urging the UK and France to back a peace plan ahead of President Sein's visit, noted five parallels between the situations in Burma and Rwanda including making Rohingya second-class citizens, as with the Rwandan Tutsis, ethnic violence erupting after decades of discrimination in both countries, and state participation and complicity in persecution.
As with Rwanda, where the international community was slow to wake up to the genocide, Avaaz says that since the elections replaced the junta with a military-backed civilian government, Western nations such as the UK and France are doing little to stop the deteriorating situation facing the Rohingya.
Ahamed Jarmal, general secretary of the Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK, said: "We are being hacked to death, burned in our houses and driven from our homes. The only way to stop genocide is to prevent it from happening. Before commercial contracts are signed, Cameron must demand that the generals will not wipe the Rohingya off the map of Burma."

Aung San Suu Kyi may become target as hackers launch Burma campaign

(Photo: EPA)

May 7, 2013 

The Independent

Eric Randolph

The “hacktivist” group Anonymous has said its next internet campaign is aimed at protecting Burma’s Muslim community, which has faced mounting attacks and the threat of ethnic cleansing over the past year. 

The group said it was “very possible” that the pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi would be a target.

A member of the Anonymous collective told The Independent that the Burma protest will start on June 1 with a “paperstorm” protest outside the CNN building in Los Angeles, demanding more coverage of the issue. There are also expected to be hacking attacks on Burmese government sites. 

The campaign is partly directed at “the UN, who should be supplying peacekeepers,” said the Anonymous-aligned Twitter account @CassandraRules. 

Democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi may also face pressure from the group over her refusal to directly condemn the attacks. 

Targeting Suu Kyi “is debatable. I cannot speak for my fellow Anons on the matter. Let's just say … it's very possible,” another Anonymous member told GlobalPost.

Members of Ms Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy admitted to The Independent in April that electoral concerns made it difficult for her to openly support Muslims in the overwhelmingly Buddhist country.

“It is true she does not say enough about the problems faced by minorities,” said one party member. “But we have to worry about what the Burmese people will think.”

Burma’s Muslims have faced increasing persecution over the past year. Rohingya Muslims near the border with Bangladesh bore the brunt of two waves of communal rioting in June and October that left at least 180 dead and 125,000 displaced. A report by Human Rights Watch last month accused the government of crimes against humanity for its role in their persecution.

The Rohingya are an ethnic group that is denied citizenship, considered illegal immigrants by locals and trapped in miserable refugee camps.

The Rohingya of Burma are on the edge of disaster. Why won't the world act?

February 27, 2013

 The Independent

Emanuel Stoakes

The international community has been shamefully unresponsive to this crisis

The news last week that around a hundred refugees from Burma had slowly starved to death after 25 days at sea may have shocked those unfamiliar with the current state of affairs in Asia’s newest ostensible democracy. The harrowing reports more recently of mass rapes, involving torture, in the country’s western Rakhine state will likely have had a similar impact. 

But to those who have been keeping up with the daily reports of intimidation, harassment and violence directed at ethnic minorities in Burma news of these latest horrors was heartbreaking, but unsurprising.

It was likewise grimly un-startling to read that in both cases the victims were from the most vulnerable of all ethnic groups in the country, the imperiled and desperate Rohingya minority.

This is because the Rohingya are perhaps Asia’s most vulnerable race, who for months have lived on the edge of disaster. Effectively stateless in their own country, regarded as illegal immigrants by the Burmese government and denied basic civil entitlements including the right to education, healthcare, employment or land ownership, they have few options to improve their lot. Most subsist on minimal supplies, unwilling to leave their communities for fear of violence apparently perpetrated by organised local agitators and the border security apparatus, known as the NaSaKa.

Persecution

Yet despite their proximity to catastrophe, the plight of the Rohingya is little known. The international media, with a few honourable exceptions, has shown scant interest in conveying the suffering of this persecuted people.

Western politicians have made concerned noises about the Rohingya issue but have done little with their newfound influence within liberalized Burma other than to send enthusiastic trade delegations. News that businesses owned by tycoons associated with the former ruling junta have made profitable deals with US banks are as depressing as they are predictable.

It is fair to say that both the international community and the global media have been shamefully unresponsive to the Rohingya’s plight. This is something they may regret in the coming months. Indications are that the Rohingya face a triple threat from starvation, violence and disease that will result in a devastating but preventable humanitarian crisis; a calamity of such proportions that it will make their previous travails look minor by comparison. 

The signs are already there. At present the threat of mass starvation due to confinement is growing by the day in the towns of Maungdaw, Min Pya and Mrauk , according to a source within Burma. Those that have tried to flee or collect food and goods by boat were drowned by hostile ethnic Rakhine locals, I was told. Similar reports were shared with me by Dougal Thomas, a western photojournalist who came across evidence of a massacre at sea in which dozens of refugees, including whole families, were murdered. 

Survivors, bearing the wounds of the incident told him that "they were stopped by a large fishing boat and... people from the village came out and capsized the Rohingya boats... 97 people were killed that day" he recalled. Needless to say, this incident did not make the UK papers.

Those living in IDP (Internally Displaced Person) Camps, where access to aid is reportedly restricted or entirely denied by the authorities are even more vulnerable. A western visitor to the unregistered camps - those not recognised by the government- in Rakhine state provided photos (see above) of the conditions she saw. In one image you can see a small cup, used to measure out the rice allowance afforded to each person due to the limited nature of the goods brought in by outsiders, their only supply. It was the first delivery of this kind for nearly a month, and may be the latest for far longer. Each person was given three cups of rice to last them indefinitely.

Stateless

“These people are utterly vulnerable. I fear that once the monsoon starts not too long from now, they will die in their thousands” she told me, adding “if the storms [and the subsequent spread of disease] don't get them the they are caged prey for the cauldron of anti-Muslim aggression coming to another boil in the area.”

So what can the international community do to help? I put this question to Matt Smith of Human Rights Watch who advised that “the leverage that the international community has now needs to be used” to ensure “immediate and unfettered humanitarian access to all populations in need… and [to address the issue of Rohingya] citizenship.”

“I think the Burmese government needs to understand that its citizenship law, which has in effect rendered the Rohingya a stateless population, is unacceptable. That law needs to be brought up to international standards… this is something that the international community should be pushing for as a matter of upmost importance” he continued.

For even a single one of these objectives to be realised, Burma’s government and its President - currently enjoying a tour of Europe - need to be placed under sustained and unrelenting political pressure.

Yet when even Aung Sung Suu Kyi won’t speak out in favour of such urgent measures, it is hard to be hopeful about seeing real action from the world until total disaster occurs.