ALP attacks Engineer Crop (GE) in Maungdaw : Nasaka

Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh: Burma border security force (Nasaka) accused the Arakan Liberation Party (ALP)- a Rakhine armed groups - for the attack  to GE personnel on November 7, said Lieutenant Colonel Mahabubur Rahman, the 15 BGB battalion commander, Naikonchari, Bangladesh, according to Nasaka’s letter to BGB.

“The Nasaka sent a letter to Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) on November 10, for the help in rescuing three GE personnel who were kidnapped on November 7, after attacking near Bandoullah camp, the Bangladesh-Myanmar border.”

“Nasaka sent this second letter again for rescuing their three GE personnel on November 9 after holding a bilateral flag meeting on November 8 between Nasaka and BGB”.

“Nasaka had sent the letter to BGB in the morning seeking BGB’s cooperation in rescuing three GE personnel of Myanmar.”

BGB personnel launched a search in some suspected areas inside Bangladesh, but were yet to trace those kidnapped Myanmar citizens,  said  BGB official from Naikonchari.

Nasaka said that an armed group with in black uniforms fired onto GE Personnel who were working on the fence, near Bandoullah camp on November 7, morning, leaving one dead. The group later picked up three GE personnel.

Meanwhile, a flag meeting between BGB and Nasaka was held on November 8 at Lemochari BGB outpost under Nikkongchari upon request from Nasaka.

The Burmese army arrested 17 Rakhines with arms and ammunition with this connection and kept in the Nasaka headquarters, but, the authority didn’t expose about the arrestees, according to a reliable source from Nasaka headquarters.

Nasaka arrests four villagers in Maungdaw

Maungdaw, Arakan State: Burma’s border security force (Nasaka ) arrested four villagers in Maungdaw south, over the allegation  that they were holding Bangladeshi mobile setts, said a local villager on condition of anonymity. 

“The arrestees are identified as--- Abdullah, son of Noor Mohamed, Maulvi Sona Ullah, son of Ahmedu, Kefayat Ullah, son of Ullah Meah, and Karim Ullah. They all belong to Aley Than Kyaw village of Maungdaw south.” 

“However, they were released on that day after taking Kyat 100,000 per each.”

“They were arrested by the Nasaka personnel led by Captain Aung Kyaw San of Nasaka area No.7 under the Maungdaw Township on November 3, in the evening.”

The victims were arrested by the captain with false and fabricated allegations. The Nasaka did not find any mobile sets from them, said a close relative from the locality.

The Rohingya villagers are not released without paying any money to the Nasaka officers if they are arrested by Nasaka or police or army by any means.  It is not necessary, whether it is true or false; the authority wants only money from Rohingya villagers which put them dire poverty, said a businessman from Maungdaw Town. 

The Governt’s main policy is to uproot the Rohingya community from Arakan soil and to drive them into awful poverty. At present, the Rohingya community is being kept in their villages and houses across the Arakan state, and has no access to do anything for their survival. Some villagers have no houses and become homeless and shelter less.  Many Rohingyas across the Arakan state are starving, now.    Government and local extremist Rakhines are still blocking aids donated by foreign NGOs and other organizations for refugees, according to a local schoolteacher who did not mention his name for security reason. 

A villager elder said, “When we are free from the repression and oppression of Government and local authorities.”

Foreign aid workers burned by Myanmar’s ethnic fires

BANGKOK, Thailand — Myanmar’s coastal Rakhine State is stricken with just the sort of mess certain international aid groups are designed to relieve.

Roiling conflict between the region’s native Buddhists and a stateless Muslim ethnicity, the Rohingya, has brought on mob killings, torched villages, mass displacement and even bow-and-arrow wounds.

The remote state is cursed with poor public services. With tens of thousands now living in makeshift camps, malaria and tuberculosis outbreaks are worsening. Yet the international aid groups who flock towards such disaster zones — Doctors Without Borders and the United Nations among them — are encountering furious resistance from bands of local Buddhists.

Foreign aid to the Rohingya, who’ve reportedly suffered the brunt of the violence, is interpreted by some as lending aid and comfort to Islamic terrorists.

“In their view, even medical attention constitutes a kind of support,” said Joe Belliveau, operations manager with Doctors Without Borders, the Switzerland-based group also known as Medecins Sans Frontieres.

A wave of death threats — conveyed face-to-face, in pamphlets and on Facebook — has convinced Doctors Without Borders to temporarily shrink its force of 300 or so down to a few dozen staffers. “Luckily, nobody has been the object of a direct attack. The threats are vague but strong enough to scare our staff ... and they tend to very clear in saying, ‘Stop what you’re doing.’”

The upshot: providing foreign aid to the estimated 28,000 people displaced by recent mob raids, perpetrated by both Muslims and Buddhists, is now deemed too hazardous in the region’s most desperate zones. The international groups that remain in force, such as the United Nations High Commissioner of Refugees office, or UNHCR, must travel with armed police or soldiers.

“It’s tense,” said Vivian Tan, a UNHCR information officer. “There are anti-UN, anti-NGO sentiments on the ground. For us to go anywhere, to assess the situation or provide relief, we need to be escorted by the authorities, police or soldiers. Staff are concerned for their safety, quite rightly.”

Among certain factions of Rakhine Buddhists, hatred for the Rohingya runs so hot that almost any overture of sympathy towards the displaced Muslims causes hatred to spill over onto the sympathizer. In their eyes, the Rohingya are invaders run amok from neighboring Bangladesh. They are commonly described by their detractors as “black” or “cruel” or “devilish.”
Myanmar denies citizenship to the estimated 800,000 Rohingya living within its borders. The UN has scoffed at Myanmar President Thein Sein’s contention that they should be moved to UN camps in a “third country.”

Offering citizenship to the Rohingya who’ve lived in Myanmar for generations would be a politically unpopular decision by the government. Few expect such a move: Thein Sein affirmed via his website that it would be “impossible to accept the illegally entered Rohingya, who are not our ethnicity.”

Contrast this sentiment to that of the UN, which asserts that the Rohingya are among the world’s most persecuted minorities. Anti-Rohingya groups in two major Myanmar cities, Mandalay and Yangon, have marched in large, monk-led street rallies condemning UN intervention. There are also smaller protests against international interference, such as the one in the Rakhine State capital, Sittwe, against a new Doctors Without Borders clinic. That rally, staged several weeks ago, halted the opening of a health facility in a largely Buddhist neighborhood.

“We’d been in intense discussions with the local community and had a high degree of buy in,” Belliveau said. “Then, at the last minute, a small group demonstrated and threatened our staff ... This event was very confusing. We didn’t realize [the extent] to which there are small groups determined to stop us from operating.”

A UN special rapporteur who has toured the coastal destruction, Tomas Ojea Quintana, has become the anti-Rohingya set’s main lightning rod after stating publicly that Rohingya suffer “long-standing endemic discrimination,” and that those driven from their homes are overwhelmingly Rohingya, not local Buddhists.

These groups are perhaps further convinced of UN biases when Rohingya political wings, such as the Arakan Rohingya National Organization, repeatedly issue requests for multi-national forces to descend on Myanmar and defend their homes. A late October statement urges the UN to “intervene in the matter on grounds of humanitarianism for the purpose of preventing further death, killing, rape and destruction of the Muslims ... and to urgently send UN peace-keeping forces.”

Evidence and eyewitness accounts suggest that, in the tit-for-tat arson sprees waged between Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims, the Rohingya side has seen far more of its shanties and shops burned to ash. Imagery analyzed and published by Human Rights Watch shows a predominately Muslim quarter of Kyauk Pyu, a seaside city in Rakhine, turned to grey cinders.

“We have seen all types of groups, including the Rakhine, who’ve been displaced,” Belliveau said. “The majority are Rohingya Muslims. They camp wherever they can. It’s not organized. Some are on beaches, or the high points in rice paddies or they’re hosted by other communities. They don’t have enough materials to build makeshift shelters and they need food and water.”

Living on the run, in camps thrown together in muddy fields, invites a variety of potentially fatal medical conditions, he said. Doctors Without Borders crews have contended with malnourished kids, malaria scares and pregnant women in dire conditions. “There was one woman who described how, on the boat they were living on, her pregnant sister hemorrhaged,” he said. “There was no one to provide medical assistance. They lost her.”

“We’ve also seen burn victims,” he said, “as well as wounds from arrows, daggers and, occasionally, gunshots.”

Teams dispatched by the UN focus on hauling in food, blankets, water and health services, Tan said, but they’re largely limited to government-sanctioned camps. “We’re not really authorized to work in unofficial sites,” she said.

After the violence kicked off in June, the local courts locked up three UN workers, all Myanmar nationals, on charges ranging from inciting violence to arson. The government has since softened up, Tan said, and even sought help from the UN in managing relief camps.

“When we ask for access, we get it,” she said. “They’re understaffed and have limited capacity ... so we’re trying to work with the authorities to find some balance and convince everyone we’re not there to just help one community.”

“It’s always tricky,” Tan said. “If we’re too visible, if we stick our necks out too much, you never know.”

In Myanmar, ethnic party taps dangerous nationalist fervor

In the 1970s, Oo Hla Saw organized street protests against Myanmar strongman General Ne Win. Today, he faces a very different fight as defender of a political party that is dominated by ethnic Rakhine Buddhists and linked to bloody assaults on Muslims.

The secretary-general of the Rakhine National Development Party (RNDP) denies his party led or organized attacks against Rohingya Muslims in a wave of sectarian violence in late October that killed at least 89 people. But grass-roots members may be involved, he conceded in an interview with Reuters. A military intelligence officer told Reuters RNDP members were among the instigators.

The RNDP, set up in 2010 to run in Myanmar's first elections in two decades, is known for tapping into a centuries-old nationalist fervor. The Rakhine are an ethnic minority within Myanmar who make up a majority in Rakhine State in the country's West. Many RNDP members proudly recall the Rakhine Buddhist kingdom that dominated the area until a 1784 invasion by Burmans - the largest of Myanmar's ethnic groups, who are also primarily Buddhists.

After the first Anglo-Burmese War of 1824-26, the British Raj annexed the region, known then as Arakan, and built a powerful economy with labor from neighboring Bangladesh. The RNDP says descendents of those workers invented an entirely new ethnicity, Rohingya, to stake an ancestral claim to the area and earn Myanmar citizenship. Rohingya contend their roots stretch back centuries in Rakhine State.

"They make many fabrications," said Oo Hla Saw.

The Rakhines' historic rivals, the Burmans, today dominate the country's ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), led by former generals of the military junta that oppressed Myanmar for nearly half a century. USDP Chairman Thein Sein, a Burman former general, leads Myanmar's 18-month-old reformist government.

In Rakhine State, the RNDP remains a powerful force, a magnet for ethnic Rakhine nationalists and tough competition for the USDP in the area.

President Thein Sein has warned the RNDP it could be dissolved if found to have incited attacks on Muslims, according to the RNDP and a military source. But the party doesn't seem worried. Early this month, Oo Hla Saw met Aung Min, a minister in the president's office.

"He told us that the government does not intend to link the violence to any one political party," said Oo Hla Saw. "But lower elements of our party may have been involved in this fighting, he told us." Aung Min didn't reply to a request for comment.

"We only want peace and stability," Oo Hla Saw added. "But on the grass-roots level, our supporters can be involved in this fighting. Some villagers were arrested for holding hand-made guns. They may be our party members."

(Reporting by Jason Szep and Andrew R.C. Marshall; Editing by Bill Tarrant and Michael Williams)

Reuters Special Report | Witnesses tell of organized killings of Myanmar Muslims

(Reuters) - On a hot Sunday night in a remote Myanmar village, Tun Naing punched his wife and unleashed hell.

She wanted rice for their three children. He said they couldn't afford it. Apartheid-like restrictions had prevented Muslims like Tun Naing from working for Buddhists here in Rakhine State along Myanmar's western border, costing the 38-year-old metalworker his job.

The couple screamed at each other. Tun Naing threw another punch. Neighbors joined in the row.

The commotion stirred up ethnic Rakhine Buddhists in the next village, who began shouting anti-Muslim slurs. Relations between the two communities were already so tense that six soldiers were stationed nearby. Tun Naing's village was soon besieged by hundreds of Rakhines. And Myanmar was plunged into a week of sectarian violence that by official count claimed 89 lives, its worst in decades.

The unrest exposes the dark side of Myanmar's historic opening: an unleashing of ethnic hatred that was suppressed during 49 years of military rule.

It is a crucial test for an 18-month-old reformist government in one of Asia's most ethnically diverse countries. Jailed dissidents have been released, a free election held and censorship lifted in a democratic transition so seamless that U.S. President Barack Obama is scheduled to make a congratulatory visit on November 19.

State media have largely absolved authorities of any role in the October unrest, depicting it mostly as spontaneous eruptions of violence that often ended with Muslims burning their own homes.

But a Reuters investigation paints a more troubling picture: The wave of attacks was organized, central-government military sources told Reuters. They were led by Rakhine nationalists tied to a powerful political party in the state, incited by Buddhist monks, and, some witnesses said, abetted at times by local security forces.

A leader in the regional party, the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party, denied it had a role in organizing the assaults but conceded the possible involvement of grass-roots supporters. "When the mob rises with very hot ethnic nationalism, it is very difficult to stop them," Oo Hla Saw told Reuters in an interview.

Two townships - Pauktaw and Kyaukphyu - saw the near-total expulsion of long-established Muslim populations, in what could amount to ethnic cleansing. One village saw a massacre of dozens of Muslims, among them 21 women.

Interviews with government officials, military and police, political leaders and dozens of Buddhists and Muslims across a vast conflict zone suggest Myanmar is entering a more violent phase of persecution of its 800,000 mostly stateless Rohingya, a Muslim minority in an overwhelmingly Buddhist country.

CALLED "BENGALIS"

Rohingya have lived for generations in Rakhine State, where postcard-perfect valleys sweep down to a mangrove-fringed coastline. But Rakhines and other Burmese view them as illegal immigrants from neighboring Bangladesh who deserve neither rights nor sympathy. Rakhines reject the term "Rohingya" as a modern invention, referring to them instead as "Bengali" or "kalar" - a pejorative Burmese word for Muslims or people of South Asian descent.

October's attacks marked an acceleration of violence against the Rohingya. An earlier wave of unrest in June killed at least 80 people. Afterwards, the Rakhine State government imposed a policy of segregating Muslim communities from Buddhists across an area roughly the size of Switzerland.

More than 97 percent of the 36,394 people who have fled the latest violence are Muslims, according to official statistics. Many now live in camps, joining 75,000 mostly Rohingya displaced in June. Others have set sail for Bangladesh, Thailand and Malaysia on rickety boats, two of which have reportedly capsized, with as many as 150 people believed drowned.

There is no evidence to suggest the Buddhist-dominated national government endorsed the violence. But it appears to have anticipated trouble, stationing troops between Muslim and Buddhist villages a month ago, following rumors of attacks.

"This is racism," said Shwe Hle Maung, 43, chief of Paik Thay, where impoverished Muslim families cram into thatched homes without electricity. "The government can resolve this if it wants to in five minutes. But they are doing nothing."

The Rakhine violence is also a test for Nobel Peace Prize-winner Aung San Suu Kyi, now opposition leader in parliament, whose studied neutrality has failed to defuse tensions and risks undermining her image as a unifying moral force. Suu Kyi, a devout Buddhist, says she refuses to take sides.

At stake is the stability of one of Myanmar's most commercially strategic regions and the gold-rush of foreign investment that has come with an easing of Western economic sanctions. The United States and the European Union have suspended, not lifted, sanctions, and have made resolving ethnic conflicts a precondition for further rewards.

In Rakhine State, however, the conflict has spread, most recently to areas where Muslims have long lived peacefully with Buddhists, according to a reconstruction of the violence from October 21 through October 25.

In Paik Thay, the Buddhist Rakhine mobs hurled Molotov cocktails at wooden huts, while Tun Naing and his neighbors fled. Muhammad Amin, 62, said he was beaten with a metal pipe until his skull cracked. The initial violence ended after soldiers fired their guns into the air and police arrested a Rakhine.

The bloodshed was only beginning.

"WE HAD NO PROBLEMS BEFORE"

The next morning, Monday, October 22, hundreds of Rakhine men gathered on the southern outskirts of Mrauk-U, an ancient capital studded with Buddhist temples about 15 miles north of Paik Thay. Then they marched to Tha Yet Oak, a Muslim fishing village of about 1,100 people, and set alight its flimsy bamboo homes.

The Muslim villagers fled by boat to nearby Pa Rein village. The Rakhine mob followed, swelling to nearly 1,000, according to Kyin Sein Aung, 66, a Rakhine farmer from a neighboring Buddhist village.

He didn't recognize the mob; he described them as "outsiders" and said he suspected they came from Mrauk-U. Hundreds now poured across a stream separating the villages. Others came by boat. By noon, there were about 4,000 Rakhines, according to both Buddhist and Muslim villagers.

Four soldiers shot in the air to disperse the crowd but were easily overwhelmed, witnesses said. The Muslims fought back with spears and machetes, torching a rice mill and several Rakhine homes. Rakhines fired homemade guns.

Six Muslims were killed, including two women, said M.V. Kareem, 63, a Muslim elder in Pa Rein - a toll confirmed by the military. He and other villagers said they saw familiar faces and uniformed police in the angry crowd.

"I don't know why it started," said Kareem, who has friends in the Buddhist village. Buddhist farmer Kyin Sein Aung was baffled, too. For years, he worked in rice fields shoulder-to-shoulder with his Muslim neighbors. "We had no problems before."

Communities like Pa Rein had avoided the June violence. But new strains emerged with the subsequent segregation of Muslim and Buddhist villages, a draconian order imposed by the Rakhine State government. Intended to prevent more violence, it backfired.

Impoverished Muslim villagers could no longer buy rice and other supplies in Buddhist towns. Transgressors were sometimes beaten with sticks or fists to warn others, according to people interviewed in six Muslim villages. Fishing nets were confiscated.

Desperation grew, with rice stocks dwindling as the monsoon peaked in October. Some Muslim villagers stole rice from Buddhist farmers, further stoking anger, said farmer Kyin Sein Aung.

By 4:30 p.m. that same Monday, several thousand Rakhines were massed outside Sam Ba Le, a village in neighboring Minbya township. By now, a pattern was emerging.

Rakhines flanked the village, hurling Molotov cocktails and firing homemade guns, said a village elder. Muslims fought back, sometimes with spears or machetes, but were overpowered. Government troops shot rounds into the air. By the time the crowd left Sam Ba Le at 6 p.m., one Muslim man had been killed and two-thirds of its 331 homes razed.

As night fell, the townships of Mrauk-U and Minbya imposed 7 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfews. But worse was to come.

"RAKHINES WILL DRINK KALAR BLOOD"

Tuesday began with a massacre. Reuters reporters visited dozens of villages in Rakhine State. But there was only one where their entry was barred by soldiers and police: the remote, riverside community of Yin Thei, in the shadow of the Chin mountains.

What happened there suggested a bolder and better organized mob, aided by incompetent or complicit police.

By 7 a.m. on Tuesday, hundreds of Rakhine arrived on boats to surround Yin Thei, said a resident contacted by telephone. By late afternoon, the Muslim villagers were fending off waves of attacks. The resident said children, including two of his young cousins, were killed by sword-wielding Rakhines. Most houses were burned down.

Musi Dula, a Muslim farmer from a nearby village, said he heard gunfire at about 5 p.m. A Yin Thei villager telephoned Musi Dula's neighbours and said police were shooting at them. Another farmer nervously told Reuters how he watched from afar as police opened fire from the village's western edge, also at about 5 p.m.

The official death toll is five Rakhines and 51 Muslims killed at Yin Thei, including 21 Muslim women, said a senior police officer in Naypyitaw, the new capital of Myanmar. He denied security forces opened fire or abetted the mobs. The Yin Thei resident put the toll higher, saying 62 people were buried in small graves of about 10 bodies each.

As Yin Thei burned, the last of nearly 4,000 Rohingya Muslims were fleeing the large port town of Pauktaw, in a dramatic exodus by sea that had begun five days earlier.

Tensions had simmered since October 12, when four Rohingya fishermen were killed off Pauktaw, said a military source. Afterwards, local authorities had ordered Rohingya to stay in their own villages for their safety. Men couldn't work in town, and few dared to go fishing.

"The government gave us food but it wasn't enough," said Num Marot, 48. "We didn't dare stay."

Pauktaw's Rohingya began cramming into boats for the two-hour voyage to the state capital, Sittwe. Num Marot's new home would be a tarpaulin tent in a squalid camp already packed with tens of thousands of people displaced by the June violence.

About 30 minutes after the last boat pushed out to sea, the two Rohingya neighborhoods in Pauktaw were set ablaze, witnesses said. All 335 homes were destroyed. The charred and roofless frame of a once-busy mosque is marked with graffiti: "Rakhines will drink kalar blood," it reads, using the slur for Muslims.

Kay Aye, deputy chairman of Pauktaw township, insists Rohingya set alight their own homes and blames the communal problems on the Muslim population's doubling in 10 years. "Muslims want all people to become Muslims. That's the Muslim problem," he said. "Most of the Muslims here are uneducated, so they tend to be ruder than Rakhines."

Tuesday night fell. Soon a new inferno began in Kyaukphyu, a sleepy port town 65 miles southeast of Sittwe with strategic significance: gas and oil pipelines lead from this township across Myanmar to China's energy-hungry northwest.

So far, the violence had targeted Rohingya Muslims. About a fifth of Kyaukphyu town's 24,000 people are Muslims, and many of them are Kaman. The Kaman are recognized as one of Myanmar's 135 official ethnic groups; they usually hold citizenship and can be hard to tell apart from Rakhine Buddhists.

Most Kyaukphyu Muslims lived in East Pikesake, a neighborhood wedged between Rakhine communities and the jade-green waters of the Bay of Bengal.

Relations between the two communities had began to unravel after the June violence. The destruction of Buddhist temples by mobs in Muslim Bangladesh in early October further stoked the animosity.

The first fire began in East Pikesake on Tuesday evening, and soon dozens of houses, Rakhine and Muslim, were ablaze. The streets around the Old Village Jamae Mosque, one of East Pikesake's two mosques, became the front line in pitched battles between the two communities.

Rakhines fought with swords, iron rods and traditional Rakhine spears. The Muslims had jinglees - long darts made from sharpened bicycle spokes or fish hooks, which are fitted with plastic streamers and shot from catapults.

With the sea behind them, Pikesake's Muslims were cut off from escape by Rakhine crowds so large that the security forces, which numbered about 80 police and 100 soldiers, were overwhelmed, said Police Lieutenant Myint Khin, Kyaukphyu's station commander. "We couldn't control them," he said.

Police fired tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse Muslim and Rakhine mobs, said Police Lieutenant Myint Khin. The military fired live rounds, said a source in the security forces, but evidently not into the crowd. Staff at Kyaukphyu hospital told Reuters they treated injuries from blades, jinglees and fire, but none from bullets.

"TAUGHT THEM A LESSON"

The next morning, the rest of East Pikesake went up in flames. Myint Hlaing, a local official, said the heat was "more intense than a crematorium." It singed the fronds of five-story-high palm trees.

Rakhine men had begun pouring in from surrounding villages. Unpublished video shot by an amateur cameraman shows young men in red bandanas entering the town in convoys of tractors. They helped to terrorize Muslims living elsewhere in Kyaukphyu, according to Muslim and Rakhine witnesses. Police Lieutenant Myint Khin said the security forces were too overstretched to stop them.

Men with swords pulled Susu, 39, and her husband Than Twa, 48, from a house in west Kyaukphyu. "They cut him here and here and here," said Susu, chopping at her arms and legs. She recognised many of her attackers: They were neighbours, she said. Susu ran off to find some soldiers, who escorted her back to rescue her husband. He was dead.

Only two forces could give the mob pause. The first was the national military, which scattered crowds by shooting in the air. The second was Rakhine Buddhist officials such as Myint Hlaing.

Some officials joined the mob, said local Muslims, but others confronted it. Facing cries of "Kill the kalar protector!" Myint Hlaing, 68, pleaded with angry Rakhines outside Kaman Muslim homes in his neighbourhood. "If we hadn't protected the Kamans, their houses would be destroyed and the people dead," he said.

By mid-morning, the military began evacuating Muslims by bus to a guarded refugee camp outside town.

Back in Pikesake, which was still burning, the Muslims had only one exit: the sea. A flotilla of fishing boats was preparing to leave its blazing shores.

"People swam out to the boats but were chased down and stabbed before they got there," said Abdulloh, 35, a Rohingya fisherman. Xanabibi, 46, a Kaman woman, said she watched from a boat as three Rakhine men with swords set upon a Muslim teenager. "I watched them ... cut up his body into four pieces," she said.

Rakhine Buddhists claim they witnessed atrocities, too. Myint Hlaing said he saw a Muslim on one departing boat hold aloft a severed Rakhine head.

By mid-afternoon, at least 80 boats, many overloaded with 130 or more people, had set sail for Sittwe, said witnesses. An additional 1,700 or more Muslims ended up at a squalid, military-guarded camp outside Kyaukphyu.

The official statistics tell of a lopsided battle at Kyaukphyu. Of the 11 dead, nine were Muslims. Nearly all of the 891 houses destroyed belonged to Muslims; nearly all of the 5,301 people displaced were Muslims. Four of Kyaukphyu's five mosques were destroyed.

A prominent Rakhine businessman, who requested anonymity, showed little sympathy for his former neighbours. "The majority taught them a lesson," he said.

"HOT ETHNIC NATIONALISM"

The last spasm of violence took place at Kyauktaw, a town north of the state capital, Sittwe. At that point, the military shot into the crowd - and, for the first time, killed the Buddhists it had long been accused of siding with.

Soldiers opened fire to prevent Rakhine villagers on two boats from storming a Rohingya Muslim community, said Aung Kyaw Min, a 28-year-old Rakhine from Taung Bwe with a bullet in his leg. "I don't know why the military shot at us," he said. Two people died and 10 were wounded, villagers said.

In a separate incident the same day, security forces shot at Rakhines on Kyauktaw's outskirts, killing two and wounding four, a witness told Reuters.

The shootings seemed to send a message to the mobs. The violence stopped that day.

The senior police officer in Naypyitaw acknowledged that police were forced to fire at both Muslims and Rakhines in their attempts to subdue large crowds.

The official death toll from the October violence now stood at 89. The real toll could be higher. The extent of the killing at Yin Thei village remains unclear. Reports persist that scores of Muslims fleeing Pauktaw drowned after Rakhines rammed their boat. Nearly 4,700 homes were destroyed in 42 villages.

In a statement that Thursday, President Thein Sein warned that the "persons and organizations" behind the Rakhine State violence would be exposed and prosecuted. The mobs were well-organized and led by core instigators, some of whom moved village to village, military sources told Reuters.

In Kyaukphyu, however, police have so far arrested only seven people - six of them for looting. In Mrauk-U township, where most killings occurred, only 14 people have been arrested, said the military intelligence officer. The apparent impunity of the instigators is sending a chilling message to Muslim communities across Myanmar.

The intelligence officer, who has direct knowledge of the state's security operations, identified the suspected ringleaders as Rakhine extremists with ties to the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party, or RNDP, which was set up to contest Myanmar's 2010 general election. He didn't name any suspects. Buddhist monks stoked the unrest with anti-Muslim rhetoric, he added.

RNDP Secretary-General Oo Hla Saw denied that his party organized any mobs. But he acknowledged the possible involvement of supporters, low-level officials and "moderate monks who become radical when they think about Muslims."

Oo Hla Saw blamed local authorities for failing to heed rumors of impending violence, and Islamist radicals for inflaming tensions. For many Rakhines, he adds, the term Rohingya has jihadist overtones associated with the "Mujahid," autonomy-seeking rebels in northern Rakhine State from 1949 to 1961, who called themselves ethnic Rohingya. (Independent historians say the rebels did popularize the term "Rohingya," but cite a few references to it since the 18th century.)

Even today, Oo Hla Saw said, the Rohingya want "to set up an autonomous Islamic community. They are systematically scheming to do that."

Most Rohingya struggle simply to get by. A 2010 survey by the French group Action Against Hunger found a malnutrition rate of 20 percent, far above the emergency threshold set by the World Health Organization.

Many arrived as laborers from Bangladesh under British rule in the 19th century - grounds the government now uses to deny them citizenship. Rohingya were effectively rendered stateless under the 1982 Citizenship Law, which excluded them from the list of indigenous ethnic groups. Officials refer to them as Bengalis. Most Rohingya found it hard to apply for naturalized citizenship, since they couldn't speak Burmese or prove long-term residence.

Monks, symbols of democracy during 2007 protests against military rule, have helped fuel the outrage against Muslims. A week before the violence erupted, monks led nationwide protests against plans by the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the world's biggest Islamic body, to set up a liaison office in Rakhine State.

An anti-OIC rally in Sittwe on October 15 "angered Muslims here," conceded Nyar Nar, 32, one of the Rakhine monks who led it. He regards Muslims as foreign invaders. "As monks, we have morality and ethics," he said. "But if outsiders come to occupy our land, then we will take up swords to protect it."

In some parts of the state, the mood is celebratory. "This is the best time because there are no Muslims here," said Zaw Min Oo, a Rakhine shoe seller in Pauktaw township. Nearly 95 percent of a 20,000-strong Muslim community there is now gone.

The peace might be short-lived. The state's clumsy attempts at segregation helped create the conditions for the October violence. Further segregation - including the confining of tens of thousands of Muslims in seething camps - could spark more violence. Curfews remain in force across much of Rakhine State.

In Kyaukphyu town, starving dogs sniff through the ashes while municipal workers heave scrap metal into a truck. The only Muslim left in town is Ngwe Shin, an old woman suffering from mental illness. She can often be found near the market, shuffling past vandalized or shuttered homes.

(Additional reporting by Martin Petty and Reuters staff; Editing by Bill Tarrant and Michael Williams)

Numbers of Rakhine Terrorists Arrested in Maung Daw | M.S. Anwar

Sunday, 11th November 2012 Maung Daw, Arakan- Around 18 fully-armed Rakhine Terrorists plotting to create more terror in the state were arrested by the government of Myanmar. They were arrested with the help Mru people at Aantala Battala (Bandula in Burmese) in northern Maung Daw on 8th November 2012. In the earlier days, they killed one member of G.E Force of Myanmar and kidnapped three of them. It subsequently led to a minor war between Rakhine terrorists and Myanmar military.

“Rakhine Terrorists using fake beard and moustaches in Muslim dress broke into the road construction site of G.E force of Myanmar. They killed a mechanic called Kyaw Kyaw Wai and kidnapped other three. Killing and kidnapping by pretending themselves as though Muslims was an attempt by these terrorists to create more violence against Rohingyas in Arakan state. Expectedly, Rakhine extremists who have the links with these terrorists bucked up the blames on Rohingya Solidarity Organization (RSO) with the help of the biased media such as Burmese Section of Radio Free Asia (RFA). RSO was disbanded many years ago” said Rahim from Maung Daw.

Besides, yesterday (i.e. on 10th November 2012), a Rakhine named Hla Kyaw, a resident of Maung Daw, was arrested together with three grenades by the authority at the Three-Mile Checkpoint of the township. He was a son of U Mai Aung, a business man cum terrorist.

“U Mai Aung known as Foto Maghya and his family are suspected by the government to have the links with those terrorists. So, while his son, Hla Kyaw, was trying to disperse and hide their destructive weapons to their farm-house used as the hide-out at the Five-Mile in Maung Daw, he was arrested by the authority at the three-mile checkpoint. Now, he together with other 18 terrorists have been locked up in the NaSaKa headquarter in Maung Daw” reported by a Rohingya from Maung Daw on the condition of anonymity.

Genocide of the Rohingyas of Myanmar – Part 2 | Dr. Habib Siddiqui

In a meeting (in which I was invited to speak on the Rohingya problem) held in Luton (located 30 miles north of London), UK, on October 13, a British MP mentioned close parallel between what is happening today against the Rohingya Muslims in Arakan and what happened in Bosnia in the early 1990s against the Bosnian Muslims. He is right.

The Arakan state, which per estimates made by Dr. Shwe Lu Maung alias Shahnewaz Khan, in his book – The Price of Silence: Muslim-Buddhist War of Bangladesh and Myanmar – a Social Darwinist’s Analysis – had probably as many Rohingya Muslims as there were Rakhine Buddhists living in its four districts before the latest extermination campaign that began on June 3 of this year, is now almost devoid of any Muslim village that is unharmed or intact by Buddhist Rakhine terrorism.

The UN and other international human rights groups have called the Rohingya Muslims, and rightly so, the worst persecuted people in our planet. Because of their race and religion, they are victims of genocide in the Buddhist-majority Myanmar.

Truly, no other word in the English language but genocide can describe what the Rohingya people are facing. The use of this term should not come as a surprise since the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines genocide as "the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political or cultural group.” As noted by experts, the term can be applied to such destructions in whole or in part of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group. By any definition, the Rohingya people of Arakan are ethnically, racially, religiously different than the Rakhine Buddhists and majority Burmans in Myanmar.

In his book – Worse than War – Dr. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen cites five principal forms of elimination: transformation, repression, expulsion, prevention of reproduction, and extermination. Transformation involves the destruction of a targeted group’s essential and defining political, social, or cultural identities. As I have mentioned earlier, in spite of their ties to the soil of Arakan since time immemorial, the Rohingyas are falsely alleged by the dominant ethnic groups as new settlers from nearby Bangladesh.

Repression entails keeping the hated, deprecated, or feared people within territorial reach and reducing, with violent domination, their ability to inflict real or imagined harm upon others. Such repression has been a regular feature of Rohingya life inside Myanmar.

Expulsion, often called deportation, is a third eliminationist option. It removes unwanted people more thoroughly, by driving them beyond a country’s borders, or from one region of a country to another, or compelling them en masse into camps. The Myanmar government since the days of Ne Win has been guilty of this crime.

Prevention of reproduction is the fourth eliminationist act, which the Myanmar government has been employing in conjunction with others. Not only are the Rohingya families restricted from marrying, the women are often forcibly sterilized, forced to abort and very often raped. In recent months, during attacks on Muslim homes, villages and towns the kidnapping of the Rohingya girls and women have become a recurring event.

Extermination is the fifth eliminationist act in which the targeted groups are killed, often with the excuse that their very existence poses a mortal threat. It promises not an interim, not a piecemeal, not only a probable, but a “final solution” to the putative problem. It is not difficult to see why in recent weeks, poisoned oil and food were sold to the Rohingya people by Rakhine businessmen to kill them. The latest activities by the Rakhine terrorists, aided by racist monks and others within the larger Myanmar society, including murderous politicians and government authorities, thus, clearly show that Rohingyas are victims of an extermination act.

A comparison with the previously cited list of crimes of the Myanmar government clearly shows that Rohingyas are facing all the five forms of elimination. It is a complete package of annihilation of the Rohingya people!

Genocide requires preparation and planning. It begins in the minds of men and needs mass mobilization to commit the horror against the targeted group. The perpetrators or the executioners must not only feel secure but also must be self-motivated and zealous to commit their horrendous crimes. Often times, the task of preparing the mind is left to ideologues and chauvinist intellectuals who sell the poison tablet of intolerance against the targeted group. Without political leadership the overwhelming majority of the perpetrators would not lift a finger in harm. However, once set in motion, typically with a few encouraging and enabling words, they, both the eliminationist regimes’ shock troops and their societies’ ordinary members give themselves, body and soul, to death. They do so easily, effortlessly. And this is what we are witnessing today in Myanmar, esp. the Arakan state.

Taking a cue from other places where genocides have taken place, the leaders of this greatest crime of our time - the Myanmar government, the local Rakhine politicians and intelligentsia, and their racist Buddhist monks within the general population -- have been feeding many myths for public consumption that not only distort the history of the Rohingyas and other non-Buddhists but also exaggerate the potential benefits that could come from ‘purifying’ the soils of Myanmar and Arakan by eliminating the ‘other’ people, esp. the Rohingya Muslims. Thanks to the poisonous writings of Rakhine chauvinists like Aye Chan, (late) Aye Kyaw, Khin Maung Saw and others, the Muslim population is deemed an ‘influx virus,’ a threat to the Buddhist identity of Myanmar, esp. of Arakan. Thus, a pervasive slogan that is often heard and discussed in the media is that the Rakhine people can’t live any more with the Rohingya ‘terrorists.’ Forgotten in such biased reporting is the mere fact that all the victims of the carnage have been Rohingya people. It is they who are terrorized by Buddhist terrorism, and not the other way around!

The causes of mass murder can often be found in the ideology that the state espouses. Social and ethnic compositions are usually the fault lines along which such elimination projects emanate. As I have noted elsewhere, the Myanmar government espouses a new Myanmarism in which racism and bigotry are the defining ideologies to purify its soil of all the non-Buddhists and non-Mongoloid races. Its mosaic of identities - ethnic, racial, religious, linguistic and cultural, and the resulting diversity, which could have been its greatest strength is seen in this toxic ideology as its greatest weakness.

In 1935, years before the Jewish Holocaust happened in Germany, anti-Jewish racist and bigotry-ridden laws were promulgated in the German city of Nuremberg stopping social and economic contacts with the Jews. The Jews also lost the right to vote and hold office. Within the next eight years, 13 implementation ordinances were issued dealing with the enforcement of the Reich Citizenship Law that progressively marginalized the Jewish community in Germany.

Anyone violating these laws was punished by hard labor, imprisonment and/or fines. Such laws were exploited by hard-core Nazis to destroy properties of a people that the authorities would not generally protect. Truly, it is hard to imagine the Jewish Holocaust in Europe without those Nuremberg Laws. The recently issued religious edicts from Buddhist monks banning social and economic ties with the Rohingya people, in particular, and the Muslims, in general, is a sufficient reminder and a dire warning about the ugly head of genocide that is emerging now in Myanmar, esp. in its western state of Arakan.

As I have noted in my keynote speech at the Bangkok Conference on “Contemplating Burma’s Rohingya People’s Future in Reconciliation and (Democratic) Reform,” the new Myanmarism, espoused by the Buddhist political leadership inside Myanmar, is totalitarian and is akin to neo-Nazi Fascism. Its leaders and followers erase distinction between politics and religion, wanting to merge their racist and fascist politics with and subordinate to radical Theravada Buddhism that is extremist, fundamentalist, racist, violent and intolerant of all religions except its own. This toxic ideology is a sure recipe for disaster in a country like Myanmar with some 140 ethnic groups and minority Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and Hindus comprising 15 to 20 percent of the total population. It breeds intolerance and promotes violence that is officially sanctioned by people in authority and supported by vast majority of its people as a national project. This hybrid cocktail of Burmese racist supremacy and intolerant Buddhism is a threat not only to its minority races and religions, but also to the entire region.

Sadly, however, because of the western appetite for Myanmar’s natural resources, the crimes of the Myanmar and Rakhine government are overlooked. And instead, the root causes behind the targeted violence against the Rohingya Muslims are falsely attributed to poverty and lack of economic opportunities – points recently made by Victoria Nuland of the U.S. State Department.

There is, however, no doubt that in spite of Myanmar’s enormous natural resources, the country remains the poorest of the ASEAN countries, and South-east Asia. But to say that poverty is at the heart of the genocidal campaign is a linguistic camouflage to justice U.S. State Department’s silence on the grievous nature of the crimes committed by the murderous Myanmar government. We have heard similar excuses during the Bosnian and Rwandan genocidal campaigns. There are many countries with worse poverty but the powerful majority there doesn’t commit acts of genocide against the minority. For genocide to happen, it is always a national project in which people of all walks of life participate, and that is what is happening with the Rohingya problem inside Myanmar.

For years, China, India and other Asia Pacific countries have been doing business with the brutal military regime in Myanmar. Human rights were never a priority. Many of the European and North American countries were left out from a share at that Myanmar pie.

For them to join in, they needed a face change with Myanmar. And that devious process started first with the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Suu Kyi – who did not merit it, and then with the change of the uniform of the old guards who not long ago had donned the military dress to claim that they are reform-minded. It was a Glasnost moment for Burma, which was renamed Myanmar. That claim was followed with a controversial election held in 2010 (followed by a by-election in which Suu Kyi’s NLD enthusiastically participated) to show that Myanmar was moving from a fascist military oligarchy into a democracy, and then the trip of Suu Kyi as Thein Sein’s unofficial ambassador to the western world pleading for opening up trade and commerce relationship with the government. And in this warming up session, the last play was played during Thein Sein’s trip to the UN where he met with Ban Ki-Moon and other western leaders.

Soon thereafter one after another of the western governments, too keen to eat their share of the pie, lifted all previous bans against the murderous regime. They promised huge investments. Emboldened by such moves, the Thein Sein government does not feel that it is obligated to honor any previous pledge made to the world community. Soon after his return from the UN session, the racist Buddhist monks conducted stage managed demonstrations asking the government to force out or relocate Muslims. In government managed newspapers, they announced dire consequences against anyone doing any business with Muslims including selling food and buying or renting out homes to and from them. As hinted above, it is a copy of the Nazi era policy. It is a total package of ethnically cleansing Myanmar of the Muslim population, in general, and the Rohingyas, in particular. So insidious is Myanmar’s Buddhist fascism, the Rakhine Buddhists living inside and outside Arakan and their patrons in the Buddhist-majority Myanmar do not want any Muslim, esp. the Rohingya, living inside Myanmar, esp. in the Rakhine state.

As I have noted elsewhere, ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people has now become a national project in Myanmar in which most Buddhists of Myanmar including the so-called democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi are willing participants one way or another. Even when they are not personally participating in this heinous crime, through their sinister silence and/or endorsement of the regime’s anti-Rohingya policy and the genocidal campaign that is carried out by criminal Rakhine Buddhists, they have essentially become partners in this crime. The Rakhine Buddhists now have their own version of Kristallnacht. They are mimicking the Nazi Party's series of pogroms in 1938, whereby one Jewish township after another was attacked. At this rate of destruction, there won’t be any Muslim locality left inside Arakan, their ancestral home.

None of these attacks since June 3 are isolated, unplanned, or spontaneous offenses. Already made stateless by the highly discriminatory 1982 Citizenship Law that is at variance with scores of international laws, the Rohingyas are falsely blamed by fascist Rakhine politicians for crimes that they did not commit so that the Buddhist populace could be incited to accept and assist the progressively savage operations of "race purification." Lynching attacks are organized by Aye Maung’s fascist party - RNDP and other equally racist Rakhine politicians and greedy businessmen to loot Rohingya properties and burn their homes, businesses and mosques.

Rohingya property is confiscated. In this task the Rakhine-dominated security forces and police are willing partners. As a result, the Rohingyas are now caged in concentration-like camps and ghettos or pushed into exile. The genocidal program is progressing in fury and irresponsibility to the "final solution" to make them an extinct people.

We can still stop this extinction if our powerful western governments act. They can pressure the Thein Sein government through the UN Security Council not only to stop this ethnic cleansing and restore Rohingya citizenship, but also ensure that the Rohingyas are compensated for their loss of lives and properties and live with safety and security under UN-monitored safe havens created to the west of the Kaladan River. If the regime resists such tangible changes, the UNSC members can take the criminal leaders of Myanmar and the Rakhine state to a Nuremberg-type trial for committing heinous crimes against humanity, let alone ban all economic transactions with the rogue regime.

Unfortunately, the attitude of the powerful nations towards the Rohingya problem is a reminiscent of the Nazi era; they refuse to see and hear the obvious truth. It is simply immoral and inexcusable. They are buying and parroting the Myanmar regime's argument, that the conflict is basically two-sided with two large racial groups attacking each other. This is a false equivalence. When all the townships that are burning, and refugees, are from one side – the Rohingya, and when renowned activists, Buddhist monks, and local Rakhine politicians and students are using language reminiscent of the Nazi propaganda, something truly catastrophic is underway seeking "final solution" of the Rohingya problem. Nothing can hide this ugly truth!

The Rakhine (Arakan) state now looks like a prison-like ghetto for the Rohingya people. Now, the Rohingya homes are ring-fenced by burnt-out buildings and military checkpoints. Outside the capital city of Sittwe (Akyab), up to 100,000 more Rohingyas are living in a series of sweltering refugee camps where malnourishment and disease are rife and where security forces and local Rakhine activists impede aid workers from operating freely. As a result of years of persecution and a slow but steady genocidal campaign, half the Rohingya population has already been pushed out. Others living inside are counting their days to get out of this living hell. Can our generation allow such an obliteration of an entire community?

How many Rohingya deaths and destruction of their homes would qualify for these powerful nations to act and stop this most far-flung and terrible racial persecution of our time? How can we ignore or tolerate such a calculated, malignant and devastating crime, which epitomizes racial hatreds, religious bigotry, terrorism and violence, and the arrogance and cruelty of power?

It is sad to see that we have not learned anything from genocides of the past – neither from Hitler’s Germany nor from the more recent ones in Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda. Linguistic camouflages are still used to minimize the nature of the crime faced by the Rohingya people. Many reporters relaying the events are using prefixes like “alleged” only to obfuscate what is really happening. Many local reporters are absolutely biased and are guilty of disseminating government propaganda.

In his closing remarks before the International Military Tribunal at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946, Robert Jackson, the U.S. Chief Prosecutor, issued the following warning: “The reality is that in the long perspective of history the present century will not hold an admirable position, unless its second half is to redeem its first. These two-score years in the twentieth century will be recorded in the book of years as one of the most bloody in all annals. Two World Wars have left a legacy of dead which number more than all the armies engaged in any way that made ancient or medieval history. No half-century ever witnessed slaughter on such a scale, such cruelties and inhumanities, such wholesale deportations of peoples into slavery, such annihilations of minorities. The terror of Torquemada pales before the Nazi Inquisition. These deeds are the overshadowing historical facts by which generations to come will remember this decade. If we cannot eliminate the causes and prevent the repetition of these barbaric events, it is not an irresponsible prophecy to say that this twentieth century may yet succeed in bringing the doom of civilization.”

Witnessing the latest genocidal campaign against the Rohingyas of Myanmar, it is obvious that we have failed on both counts - to eliminate "the causes" and to prevent "the repetition of these barbaric events."