Myanmar’s western state of Arakan (Rakhine) is again burning. In
Mrauk-U, the former capital of the independent kingdom of Arakan,
hundreds of young Rakhine Buddhist men were on the march: packed on the
backs of pickups, on motorcycles, on trishaws, tuk-tuks and bicycles,
but mostly on foot.
They carried spears, swords, cleavers, bamboo staves, slingshots,
crossbows and the occasional petrol bomb. Their target: the unarmed
Rohingya Muslims. As the Economist (dated Nov. 3, 2012) of the UK noted,
one Buddhist terrorist tugged at an imaginary beard and made a grisly
throat-cutting gesture.
Sadly, Mrauk-U is not the only town where Rohingya Muslims are facing a
genocidal campaign at the hands of Rakhine terrorists. From the reports
collected inside Myanmar, there is little doubt that the Rakhine
Buddhist terrorists, aided by local and central government politicians,
police and security forces, are carrying out a pre-meditated genocidal
campaign to exterminate and drive out every Rohingya of Burma (Myanmar).
So atrocious and criminal this campaign is even the president of
Myanmar, who had previously tried to hide such targeted violence, had to
admit on Friday, October 26 (as reported in the pro-government
newspaper the New Light of Myanmar) that eight mosques (Muslim houses of
worship) and 2,000 of Rohingya homes were torched to completely destroy
these. His spokesman told the BBC this weekend that "there have been
incidents of whole villages and parts of the towns being burnt down in
Rakhine state." The actual facts and figures, however, are much worse!
It is feared that in the last week of October at least 5,000 Rohingya
homes were burned to ashes. Satellite imagery shows the utter
destruction of a Muslim quarter of the coastal town of Kyaukphyu, from
where oil-and-gas pipelines are to cross Myanmar to China. In this
latest genocidal campaign, the Muslim villages and localities in
townships are cordoned off and fire bombed. Anyone trying to escape from
their burned homes is shot dead by the Rakhine Buddhist terrorists and
their patrons within the government. Racist Rakhine politicians and
monks are creating an environment of racial/religious hatred and
intolerance which justifies all types of violence against the unarmed
Rohingya population. Many Rohingyas have, therefore, tried to escape to
the forest or the open seas, only to be hunted down there, too. Last
week, dozens died when their boats sank in the Bay of Bengal. Others are
forced to sneak out to Bangladesh.
Denied entry, many have ended up in squalid camps in Sittwe (Akyab) to
join others who have been confined there since early June. Dozens of
Rohingya girls were also kidnapped by the Rakhine terrorists to use rape
and kidnap as weapons of war to terrorize the Rohingya populace.
It is an all out extermination campaign against the Rohingyas of
Myanmar. In a statement dated Thursday, October 25, Ashok Nigam, a
United Nations official in Myanmar, said, "The UN is alarmed by reports
of displacements and destruction.” He said that access to all affected
people is critical and appealed for immediate and unconditional access
to all communities in accordance with humanitarian principles.
As I have pointed out earlier in my speeches and writings, the Myanmar
government wants to hide its heinous crimes against the Rohingya people
and, thus, have not allowed access of the international media, NGOs, aid
groups and even the UN to the troubled region to investigate, monitor
and assess the scale of the violence. Since the elimination of the
Rohingya people one way or another is the declared state objective, no
aid has reached from the Myanmar government agencies to the Muslim
victims. And what is worse, even the relief materials sent from the OIC
and the Islamic Relief have not reached the intended Rohingya victims.
Less than 10% of such aids have trickled down to the victims. The
Myanmar government, thanks to the state-managed protests and
demonstrations in October by racist Buddhists that included monks, has
also barred the OIC and Muslim relief agencies from opening offices
inside the Rakhine state to help the Rohingya victims.
Not a single Buddhist terrorist has been punished for the gruesome
murder of Muslims, not then and not now. All what we heard from the
Thein Sein government was that it had identified the instigators behind
the violence and pledged to bring them to justice. But as we have
witnessed earlier with the June 3 lynching death of 10 Burmese Muslims,
such promises have not translated into justice, let alone created an
atmosphere that protects the lives and properties of the affected
Rohingya minority.
It is obvious that the Thein Sein government is playing the
cat-and-mouse game with the world community with false promises made to
divert attention away when the satellite pictures are too obvious and
difficult to hide such crimes, and once the outside pressure is low to
encourage and participate in this heinous crime. As such the pogroms
that started in June 3 with nearly a hundred thousand internally
displaced Rohingyas have only worsened with extra tens of thousands that
are now without any shelter. The once thriving Muslim localities now
look like bombed-out territories. No Rohingya has been allowed back in
to rebuild those properties. They have been caged in camps that look
like the Nazi concentration camps from which they can’t venture out to
fetch their livelihood without risking being shot by the Rakhine
Buddhist security forces. They have been placed there to slowly die.
Terrorizing the unarmed Rohingya population has become a Rakhine
national passion. The Border Security Force (NASAKA) continues to remind
the Roingya people that Arakan is a Rakhine place where there is no
place for the Roingya Muslims and that they must leave or will be
killed. Newer territories are added to the list of ethnically cleansed
ones to terrorize Rohingya Muslims and exterminate them. The Section
144, which prohibits an assembly of more than five people in an area, is
only applied against the Rohingya. They cannot go out to protect their
homes, shops, mosques, schools and villages from being looted and set on
fire by the Rakhine terrorists who are not stopped from committing such
crimes by the security forces.
In most cases, these criminal Rakhines are aided by the government.
There have been cases, e.g., as in Kyauk Pyu Township, in which instead
of dousing the fire with water, the Buddhist firemen sprayed gasoline
into the fire to complete the destruction! "The firemen threw petrol on
the flames, as if it was water! The authorities are one-sided. We can
never trust them," said a local teacher to Pete Pattisson, a journalist
working for the Independent (UK). Last Wednesday, the entire Muslim
community in Kyauk Pyu decided to flee in their fishing boats, joining
thousands of others trying to escape from being killed or burned alive.
Former Muslim residents of Pauk Taw told the Independent that a
government ferryboat had rammed their fishing boats at sea, resulting in
drowning deaths of dozens. Those who had fled and made it ashore have
been prevented by government authorities from landing on the coast.
Satellite images of Kyauk Pyu and its coastal surroundings, released by
the Human Rights Watch at the weekend, show the extent of the
devastation. Where once there were houseboats and floating barges moored
along a harbor town packed with houses, now there is charred
desolation, with 811 homes and other structures destroyed.
All the victims in recent months have also been Muslims and yet the
Thein Sein government tries to portray the violence in the Rakhine state
as an interracial or communal riot.
What is going on inside the Rakhine state is simply a purposeful policy
designed by the Myanmar government in which the members of the majority
Rakhine ethnic group, which is Buddhist by faith, are willing
executioners to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the
civilian population of the Rohingya ethnic community, which are Muslims,
from the geographic areas of Arakan and Myanmar. The United Nations
define such activities as ethnic cleansing. No hog-washing by the
murderous regime and its supporters at home and abroad will succeed to
hide such monumental crimes.
The ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people is a text book case. It has
become a national project that is led by the Myanmar state at the
central level and the Rakhine state at the local level, supported by a
good percentage of the Buddhist nation and its dominant Burman and
Rakhine ethnic groups, and which employs large institutional and
material resources. The local Rakhine politicians and terrorists, the
Buddhist monks and mobs, and the entire state apparatus from the local
to the central government level are enthusiastic partners in this
project towards final solution of the Rohingya problem.
It was no accident, therefore, to witness demonstrations of monks, esp.
those organized by Young Monks Association, supporting Thein Sein’s plan
to expel the Rohingyas from Myanmar. The largest such demonstration was
led by Wirathu, considered a venerable teacher by many Buddhists. He is
a criminal who was imprisoned in 2003 for inciting violence against the
Muslims. It is no accident that Suu Kyi spoke with forked tongues and
that her NLD party has actually been supporting the national project
towards elimination of the Rohingya people. Many of the so-called
‘democracy’ leaders have proven to be no better than fascists and are
actually worse than the KKK members.
The worst criminals in this extermination campaign are, however, the
fellow Rakine Buddhists, whose ancestors settled in Arakan beginning in
the 11th century, i.e., centuries after the darker complexioned
Indo-Bengali ancestors of the Rohingya people had already settled in
this coastal territory once ruled by the Hindu Chandra dynasty, which
had closer ties with Bengal (today’s Bangladesh).
With that intrusion, albeit a violent one, of the Tibeto-Burman people,
the forefathers of today’s Rakhine race, who professed Buddhism, the
original inhabitant Hindus and Muslims gradually became minority
religious groups. However, in 1430 when two contingents of Muslim Army
from Bengal, comprising of more than 50,000 soldiers, restored the
fleeing Arakanese king Narameikhla (Maung Saw Mawn) to the throne of
Arakan, and a great many of them were asked to protect the regime
against any future Burmese invasion, the new settlements of the Muslim
garrison around the new capital city of Mrohang (Mrauk-U) greatly added
to the size of the minority Muslim community.
The Arakanese rulers of Mrauk-U dynasty adopted superior Islamic culture
from nearby Muslim Bengal/India, and issued coins with Islamic
inscriptions. They patronized Bengali literature. They also adopted
Muslim names, a practice that was to continue for generations well into
the 16th century. Muslims played major roles in administration, courts
and defense of this multi-ethnic kingdom that maintained its
independence for centuries until its annexation by the Burmese king
Bodawpaya in 1784.
Bodawpaya was a Buddhist religious fanatic who tried to demolish
everything Islamic. He introduced racism and bigotry into this
multi-religious region. He destroyed mosques that once dotted the
shorelines of Arakan and patronized building Buddhist monasteries and
pagodas. He massacred tens of thousands of Muslims, and took another
20,000 as prisoners during his annexation of Arakan. During his
tyrannical rule, some 200,000 Arakanese also fled to Bengal (today’s
Bangladesh), which by then was under the British rule. After 40-years of
Burmese rule (1784-1824), Arakan was occupied by the English East India
Company who ruled the territory until Burma won its independence on
January 4, 1948.
During the Second World War, taking advantage of the Japanese occupation
of Burma, the Buddhist forces which had allied themselves with the
Fascist Japanese Imperial Army against the British Raj, targeted the
Indian and Muslim population and their homes and businesses. Even the
Rohingya Muslims who lived in the western territories did not escape the
extermination campaign. Nearly a hundred thousand of them were killed
in that joint campaign. They were pushed out of the southern parts of
the Arakan state; and many managed to survive by living in northern
territories, closer to the Bengal, where they were a solid majority.
Another 80,000 settled permanently in Bengal to save their lives. Two
hundred and ninety four Muslim villages were totally destroyed.
Even after Burma achieved its independence, sadly, the mass elimination
and targeted violence against the Rohingya and other Muslims continued.
To the best of my knowledge, at least two dozen campaigns have been
directed against them to ethnically cleanse them.
These are:
01. Military Operation (5th Burma Regiment) - November 1948
02. Burma Territorial Force (BTF) - Operation 1949-50
03. Military Operation (2nd Emergency Chin regiment) - March 1951-52
04. Mayu Operation - October 1952-53
05. Mone-thone Operation - October 1954
06. Combined Immigration and Army Operation - January 1955
07. Union Military Police (UMP) Operation - 1955-58
08. Captain Htin Kyaw Operation - 1959
09. Shwe Kyi Operation - October 1966
10. Kyi Gan Operation - October-December 1966
11. Ngazinka Operation - 1967-69
12. Myat Mon Operation - February 1969-71
13. Major Aung Than Operation - 1973
14. Sabe Operation February - 1974-78
15. Naga-Min (King Dragon) Operation - February 1978-79 (resulting in
exodus of some 300,000 Rohingyas to Bangladesh; 40,000 died)
16. Shwe Hintha Operation - August 1978-80
17. Galone Operation - 1979
18. 1984 Pogrom in Taunggok
19. Anti-Muslim riots - Taunggyi (western Burma), Pyay and many other
parts of Burma including Rangoon - 1987-88
20. Pyi Thaya Operation – July 1991-92 (resulting in exodus of some
268,000 Rohingyas to Bangladesh)
21. Na-Sa-Ka Operation – since 1992
22. Race riot against Muslims – March 1997 (Mandalay)
23. Anti-Muslim riot in Sittwe – February 2001
24. Anti-Muslim full-scale riot in Central Burma – May 2001
25. Anti-Muslim violence throughout central Burma (especially in the
cities of Pyay/Prome, Bago/Pegu) after 9/11 – October 2001
26. Joint extermination campaign – June 3, 2012 – to date.
Every attempt has been made by the Myanmar government since the days of
General Ne Win to ethnically cleanse the Rohingya people and deny them
human rights. They were declared stateless, thus licensing every crime
directed against them; not a single Article of the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights was honored. Here below is a shortlist of such crimes
against the Rohingya people:
• Denial of Citizenship
• Restriction of Movement or Travel
• Restriction on Education
• Restriction on Ability to work
• Forced Labor
• Land Confiscation
• Forced Eviction
*Destruction of homes, offices, schools, mosques, etc.
• Religious persecution
• Ethnic discrimination
• Restrictions on Marriage of Rohingyas
• Prevention of reproduction and forced abortion
• Arbitrary Taxation and Extortion
• Registration of births and deaths in families and even of cattle, and
the associated extortion
• Arbitrary arrest, torture and extra-judicial killing
• Abuse of Rohingya Women and Elders
• Rape as a weapon of war
• Depopulation of Rohingya community
• Confiscation of residency/citizenship cards
• Internally displaced persons or undocumented refugees and
statelessness
• Destruction or alteration of historical Muslim sites and shrines to
erase its symbolism or Islamic identity.
