by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
New Delhi : The Supreme Court on Monday directed the Central government to file a comprehensive report detailing the facilities being provided to Rohingya refugees staying at two camps in Haryana, saying “let us try to solve human problems first”.
A bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra, Justice A.M. Khanwilkar and Justice D.Y. Chandrachud said the report should be based on data about basic facilities like water, hygiene, toilets and medical facilities being provided to the Rohingyas in the Mewat and Faridabad camps.
The court order came as the Central government said it could not offer Rohingya refugees more basic facilities than what it was providing its own people including those living in slums.
The next hearing will take place on May 9 when the report will be considered.
Facing a mounting attack by the refugees’s petitioner on the denial of basic facilities, Additional Solicitor General Tushar Mehta raised questions on the spate of petitions filed on behalf of Rohingyas — a point he had made during the last hearing.
The government on March 19 questioned the credentials of the petitioners seeking to block deportation of Rohingya refugees, saying the genesis of the PILs threaten to change the country’s demography and destabilise it.
The petitioners on Monday demanded a court commissioner be sent to inquire into the conditions of the camps while senior counsel Rajeev Dhavan urged the court to ask the National Human Rights Commission — which he described as the custodian of human rights, civil liberty and socio-economic charter — to submit a report on the condition of refugees in Rohingya camps.
Both the suggestions were resisted by the government with Mehta offering to file the report.
The petitioners said the basic facilities that a human being should get under the Constitution’s Article 21 were being denied to Rohingya refugees.
Telling the court that Rohingyas were living in pathetic conditions, Dhavan said Rohingya refugees were a “separate class of people who have nowhere to go. They have no means to support themselves. This is a peculiar situation which is not there in any slums…”.
As Justice Chandrachud said the fundamental right to life is not just confined to Rohingya refugees but to every slum dweller, Dhavan said an Indian slum dweller can approach the elected representatives for help but Rohingyas can’t.
“They are helpless. They can’t approach anybody. Can’t go to anyone,” Dhavan said pointing out that “they are the most powerless of the powerless. They too have rights under Article 21”.
Making common cause with the Central government, senior counsel Mahesh Jethmalani said he supported the position taken by it and there could be no “privilege enclave” for Rohingya refugees.
Jethmalani appeared for one of those supporting the government’s stand on Rohingya refugees.
Defending the “push back” policy to prevent the Rohingya refugees from crossing the border into India, he said accommodating Rohingyas who have already entered was itself a difficult task.
He said “we can’t throw open our border and allow Rohingyas to come” as he taunted the “public spirited” petitioners to also see what happening the next door.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Social Media, World
A girl standing in front of a UN shelter for the internally displaced Rohingya in Myanmar. (Image: Reuters)
Geneva : The UN human rights experts have blamed Facebook for playing a key role in spreading hate speech against the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.
Marzuki Darusman, Chairman of the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, said on Monday that the social media platform had played a “determining role” in Myanmar.
“As far as the Myanmar situation is concerned, social media is Facebook, and Facebook is social media,” ABC Online quoted Darusman as saying.
More than 650,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled Myanmar’s Rakhine state into Bangladesh since insurgent attacks sparked a security crackdown last August.
“(Social media) has … substantively contributed to the level of acrimony and dissention and conflict, if you will, within the public a Hate speech is certainly of course a part of that,” said Darusman.
UN Myanmar investigator Yanghee Lee said that “everything is done through Facebook in Myanmar,” adding it has been used to spread hate speech.
“I’m afraid that Facebook has now turned into a beast, and not what it originally intended,” she said.
Lee was speaking at the UN’s Human Rights Council in Geneva.
Facebook did not immediately comment on the fresh charges.
Lee, who was banned from Myanmar last year after it claimed a previous report by her was biased and unfair, said she had seen evidence that Myanmar’s military was continuing to target the Rohingya, razing their villages.
Last week, Sri Lanka barred social messaging networks, including Facebook, following violence against minority Muslims in Kandy district.
The government ordered internet and mobile service providers to temporarily block Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, as well as messaging service Viber, after officials said these platforms were fueling online hate speech.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Opinions
By Saeed Naqvi,
Incidents, similar in their chilling monstrosity, came to mind when I saw photographs of a row of Rohingya Muslim young men, on their knees, hands tied behind their back. Gun-wielding military police, lurking within the frame, eventually mowed them down.
This is the face of the horror the world will remember. In a state of funk, Myanmar’s commander-in-chief, General Min Aung Hlaing, has admitted mass graves in one village: Inn Din, 50 km north of the Rakhine state capital, Sittwe. Journalists have scoured many other mass graves.
The other gruesome episode etched on my mind is Srebrenica in Bosnia (1995). Hashimpura in Meerut (1987), of course, is our very own tragedy, still lingering. In each one of these macabre events, Muslim youth had their hands tied behind their backs and shot by the local army.
In the latest massacre of the Rohingya in August 2017, the local Buddhist clergy and army turned upon the Muslims. The number killed exceeds 6,700, according to the NGO Doctors without Borders.
In Srebrenica, the orthodox Christian troops of the Bosnian-Serbian army murdered 7,000 Muslim youth and expelled 20,000 civilians from the area.
In Hashimpura, 42 young men were lined up along a nearby irrigation canal and shot by soldiers of the Provincial Armed Constabulary. These soldiers were Hindus. Can their denomination be spelt out? Apparently not, given the manner in which Asaduddin Owaisi of the Ittehadul Muslimeen has been shouted down for having dared to mention Muslims as “martyrs” because in the latest outrage it is mostly them who have been killed by terrorists.
Owaisi was making a simple point. Patriotism of Indian Muslims is regularly challenged on prime time television which places them on the wrong side of the secular line. But five out of seven killed in the Sunjwan Army camp happened to be Muslims. Why is this detail missing from reports? Such stories would go some distance in bridging the communal divide. No, said the anchors almost in chorus, “Owaisi is communalising the Army”. Pray, how? “By reporting that five of the seven killed in the camp were Muslims”? Muslims must never upstage Hindu soldiers in the martyrdom stakes?
Given this attitude, the killers of the 42 Muslims in Hashimpura must be seen only as instruments of the “secular” state. That 19 PAC personnel, under platoon commander Surinder Pal Singh, rounded up Muslims in the Hashimpura neighbourhood of Meerut, should be blandly reported without mentioning religious identities. Religious identity must only be mentioned if terrorists turn out to be Muslims, which is what they are when police shoots them down. The number of youth taken away is still unclear, but the police narrative suggests 42, mostly weavers and daily wage earners, who were taken in a truck to the upper Ganga canal in Murad Nagar, near Ghaziabad.
The men were blindfolded and shot. Their bodies were dumped in the canal. This was not the only such operation following a series of communal clashes in Meerut that year since March.
On May 24, 2007, 20 years after the massacre, 36 members of victims’ families filed applications under the Right to Information Act at the office of the Director General of Police in Lucknow. The inquiry revealed that all the accused remained in service. In their Annual Confidential Reports there was not even a hint of their involvement in the Hashimpura massacre. The secular state was protecting its own.
The case has dragged on, zig-zagged without any evidence of the establishment really searching for justice. News is expected from the High Court on February 20. Reporters recall the Minister of State for Home P. Chidambaram outside his North Block office actually scream at officials. “Crush them,” he shouted. He was very hands-on during the Meerut riots and the aftermath. Subramaniam Swamy actually named Chidambaram as an accomplice but the allegation, coming from Swamy, became prima facie suspect. In the fullness of time, the PAC men involved in the case, including Surinder Pal Singh, have all departed to their maker, one by one.
I have given the fairly commonplace details of the tragic saga of Muslims in the Hashimpura case simply to establish the contrast with massacres in Srebrenica and Rakhine in Myanmar. Orthodox Christians in one instance and Buddhists in the other brazenly targeted Muslims and for which they have been or are being punished. But in India the secular edifice would be weakened if the religious identity of police or army men who kill Muslims is mentioned. And the case will be dragged on eternally.
In Serbia-Bosnia, the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia concluded that what happened in Srebrenica was “genocide”. It pinned the blame on senior officers in the Bosnian Serbian Army.
Bill Richardson, former Governor of New Mexico and US Ambassador to the UN, resigned last week from a Myanmar Advisory Board on the Rohingya crisis. He called it a pro-government “cheerleading squad”. Richardson has been a friend of the country’s civilian leader, Aung San Suu Kyi. This did not prevent him from expressing his anger at what he said was a whitewash in which she was complicit. “She has developed the arrogance of power”, he said.
For the horrors of Srebrenica, senior commander Ratko Mladic and a host of his accomplices have been awarded long sentences at the International Court of Justice. In Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi and her military accomplices are inching towards global opprobrium and eventual justice.
Why then are the perpetrators of Hashimpura, the oldest of the three massacres, still scot-free?
Supposing Owaisi were to lift the scab from another raw wound and say “wheels of justice, even when the complainants are Muslims, move faster in non-Muslim theocratic states than in pretentious secular ones”. Would he be shouted down again?
Most Indians shy away from a glaring reality. Eruptions in former Yugoslavia and Myanmar took place when Muslims were in bad odour globally after the wars in the Arab world.
Communal clashes in India, particularly police versus people, have been endemic since the Partition of 1947. And the world does not take much notice because it is a routine “internal affair” of a sovereign state.
(A senior commentator on political and diplomatic affairs, Saeed Naqvi can be reached on saeednaqvi@hotmail.com. The views expressed are personal.)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
By Nikhil M. Babu,
New Delhi : It is several days since 17-year-old Nurankis, mother of two, has heard from her husband after he left for Agra to look for a job.
Nurul Salam lost his job in Delhi after the Indian government termed Rohingyas — one of the world’s most persecuted minorities — as a “security threat”.
“I have been cooking only rice and potato for the past couple of days. That too, only twice a day. I have about Rs 20 left. We have nothing else,” Nurankis told IANS while sitting in her dark, one-room shack of blue tarpaulin and cardboard at the Shram Vihar slum of south Delhi.
IANS found several cases of Rohingyas being fired from jobs in Delhi, Jammu and Punjab because of their identity, after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government asked “state governments to identify and deport the Rohingyas”.
The government’s decision was later challenged in the Supreme Court and its judgement is awaited.
“One day, they (the employer) said ‘there is no work from today for people from Burma’,” Nurankis said about how Salam lost his job at Allana, a Ghazipur meat processing company in east Delhi.
Following this, Salam boarded a bus to Aligarh, about 150 km from Delhi, to look for a job, leaving behind his four-year-old son Ubaib and three-month-old daughter Rubina. “He called from Aligarh and said people were asking for Aadhaar Card for hiring him,” Nurankis said. “I do not know where he is now.”
People who lost their jobs after the government crackdown said it had become difficult to pay rent or even eat and in some cases were forced to relocate, leaving behind what little they owned.
Rohingyas, mostly Muslims, are an ethnic minority from Buddhist majority Myanmar, who have been denied citizenship and have been facing brutality from the Myanmar military.
More than 800,000 Rohingyas have fled Myanmar in the last five years as a result of violence, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and there are around 21,500 Rohingyas in India.
At a tea shop near Nurankis’ shack, 22-year-old Sayedul Amin remembered the day when Salam, he and around 30 other refugees lost their jobs.
“It was a normal day and we were working when the contractor came and told us that from that day there would be no jobs for people from Burma,” Amin said.
When the refugees asked for a reason, they were told that the government might deport them any time and the company would face problems for employing them.
“I do not know how I’m going to pay this month’s rent,” said Abdul Raheem, 30, one of the refugees fired from the company.
The company laid off between 25 and 40 Rohingya refugees, according to one of Allana’s security guards.
When reached for a comment, an Allana spokesperson said that Rohingyas were contract employees and they were laid off as a “pro-active measure” after the government’s move.
However, he said only seven or eight refugees were fired.
In Punjab, Mohammad Jubair and other Rohingya refugees were asked to leave from work.
Jubair sold his cycle, gas cylinder and parts of his shack and boarded a train to Hyderabad, where he is yet to find a job or build a shack.
In Jammu, Ashik Khurana, a 17-year-old Rohingya refugee, who used to work as a cleaner at the Jammu Tawi Railway Station with about 30 other refugees, said they were asked for Indian identity cards to continue.
After gathering all refugee workers, the in-charge said: “From today all workers from Burma who do not have an Aadhaar Card won’t be allowed to work here.”
Khurana said: “Where will I go for an Aadhaar Card? The UN had told us not to make any Indian ID card. “Most of us left (the job) after that.”
At a Rohingya settlement in Kanchan Kunj of Delhi, Mohammad Saleem, 35, leader of the camp, said: “It (settlement) was like a job market, but now hardly anyone comes here to call us for work.”
“When Modi is talking like this, people would obviously see us differently,” Dil Mohammad, 60, leader of Shram Vihar settlement, said, adding: “It’s better that the government rounds us up here and shoots us.”
(Nikhil M. Babu can be contacted at nikhil.b@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Opinions
By Dr. Firoz Mahboob Kamal
The pure genocide
“Genocide” is the cruellest and the most violent form of crime against humanity. It targets people for arson, rape, torture and total annihilation purely based on race, religion, and language. Therefore, no one needs to do any wrong for becoming the definitive target of genocide. His or her faith, race, language or religion is enough to invite the worst type of murderous thugs, robbers and rapist at the doorstep. The case of Rohigya Muslims is the perfect example of that. It is indeed a violent expression of the very fast growing metastasising moral cancer. Now it appears that the cancer has deeply affected not only the whole civil and military institutions of Myanmar, but also the country’s Buddhist monks, the political elites, the intelligentsia, the media and a large section of the common people. Because of such a tsunamic scale of the moral disease, on 30th October 2017, tens of thousands of Burmese people assembled on the streets of Yangon –the former capital of Myanmar, to show full support for the Army. It was indeed a huge homage to the Army for the execution of its policy of killing, raping and ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims.
When a moral cancer is not treated at its early phase, its rapid spread cause massive number of deaths, rapes and arsons on earth. During Hitler era in Germany, the same moral cancer could quickly engulf the whole Europe. It led to a devastating World War. Because of it, more than 60 million people had to die. Moral disease thus proved to more catastrophic than any physical illness. In fact, no other physical illness could cause such a massive and rapid destruction of life and wealth –as done by this moral disease. In Rakhine state of Myanmar, the same moral cancer is showing its destructive and de-humanising power. It could cause the “textbook case of ethnic cleansing” and the “fasting growing refugee” on earth. The disease could also get embedded inside the UN and its powerful stakeholders like the USA, Russia and China. The disease could kill the moral authority and the sense of perception of the leaders of the UN and the affected states. As a consequence, even the most visible symptoms of genocide in Arakan could stay unnoticed in their moral radar. This is why, a robust form of genocide could continue for decades in broad day light. These world leaders showed, how easy to condemn a dead Hitler but difficult to avoid close collaboration with the living ones. The UN and these controlling states failed similarly and terribly in the case of genocide in Bosnia, Rwanda and Cambodia. In fact, the crime of genocide by the Myanmar Army and the crime of inaction by the UN and its stakeholders continued side by side for decades. The recent declaration of support by China, Russia, India and Japan for the Myanmar government has indeed added more fuel to the ongoing genocide. As a direct consequence of such patronisation, the Rohingya villages continue to burn. And the Rohingya people continue to get raped, killed or evicted from them home to Bangladesh.
The word “genocide” was coined with genos (Greek: birth, kind, race) and an English suffix -cide by Raphael Lemkin in his book “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe” in 1944. Now, almost all the international bodies of law label a crime as “genocide” while a state and state sponsored perpetrators of the crime incorporate the “intent to destroy” a population of dissimilar race, language, religion or geographical identity in their operational objective of the crime. In fact, such an intent to destroy the Rohingya Muslims is not hidden in the ruling circle and among the nationalists Buddhists of Myanmar. It is indeed clearly visible in all the anti-Rohingya policy of persecution of the civil and military institutions of Myanmar government. Only in three weeks, ethnic cleansing of more than half a million Rohingya Muslims from Rakhine state, killing of more than three thousands and raping thousands of Rohingya women and girls are the robust expression of such a genocidal intent. Here, the selection of the target for physical extermination, rape and torture are made only on race and religion. And the scale of killing and eviction are conducted only to achieve the stipulated target of elimination of Rohigya Muslims in Myanmar. So, it needs little intelligence or research to uncover the real motive of the perpetrators. Even a Rohingya child can see that. This is why, the Rohingya men, women and children are fleeing from Myanmar amidst harsh difficulties only to save their life.
Even the Head of UN Human Rights Commission had to describe it as the test book example of ethnic cleansing. Therefore, how such a crime of ethnic cleansing can be delinked from the crime of genocide? Cleansing of a race, religion or ethnicity always operates through massive arson, gang rape, mass killing and forced eviction. In Myanmar, all these genocidal tools are being used against the Rohingya Muslims. The UN Human Rights report stated that the Rohingya Muslims are the most persecuted minority on earth. But how such a worst persecution aimed at a single ethnic and religious community could be different from a planned genocide? All the genocidal crimes in human history gave birth to wholesale migration –as happened in the case of the Red Indians, the German Jews and the Bosnian Muslims. That is happening with the fastest possible speed in the case of Rohingya Muslims, too. This is why, the UN Security General Mr Antonio Guterres had to say that they are the fastest growing refugee in human history. Only a highly motivated genocidal regime in Myanmar could carry out such a man-made disaster of an epic proportion.
The conceptual basis of the genocide
For every genocide, some toxic ideologies, an extreme form moral sickness and a paranoid mind-set must work together to prepare the ground for that. Only because of deep ideological, political and cultural perversion in a huge section of population, Hitler’s gas chambers could operate in broad day light on an industrial scale in the heart of so-called civilised Europe. Only because of such conceptual cum ideological shift towards evil, the criminal herds of Europe could give birth to so many evil ideologies like colonialism, imperialism, fascism, communism, and racism in the past. The colonial wars, the occupational wars, the World Wars, the cold wars, ethnic cleansing and other tools of pure evil could also flourish on the same perverted conceptual premise. It is significant to note that such a perverted psyche still survives. Therefore even today, those who carry the legacy of the colonial crimes take pride in that. This is why, on 2nd of November, 2017, the British Prime Minister Theresa May could join the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to celebrate hundred years of Balfour Declaration –the pure evil of British colonialism, that caused so many wars, so many deaths and evictions through illicit creation of Israel. In the past, the people with such perverted colonial psych didn’t feel any shame or remorse for the most genocidal massacre of the Red Indians of America, the Aborigines of Australis and the Maoris of New Zealand. Rather, they thought such crimes as the part of their civilizational mission! The Burmese nationalists –like the ideological Nazi cousins have taken the same route.
Today, the moral, ethical and political ill health of the world leaders looks seldom any better or different from that of the genocidal colonial past. Because of the same conceptual base of genocide, the same genocide still continues on an industrial scale; only the tools, the targets and the venues are different. Instead of gas chambers, the new tools are the barrel bombs, cluster bombs, mother of all bombs, depleted uranium bombs, drones, and missiles. These are being deployed to commit the same crime with the same cruelty. As a result, hundreds of Syrian and Iraqi cities and villages are turned to rubbles by the US and the Russian bombers. More than a million are killed. And about 6 million Syrians and Iraqis are made refugees. Now, the Muslims are the new target. And, Arakan, Syria, Iraq, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Xinjiang and many other Muslim lands are the new killing fields.
The visible evidence of the genocide
No crime can hide its crime-site, motive and evidences. That is equally true for the genocide in Myanmar. The most important proof of any genocide is the genocidal intent of the perpetrators. In Myanmar, the perpetrators of the crime operate in such a strong anti-Muslim hatred of the local people, the media and the Buddhist monks that they never felt any need to hide their motive. Nor do they need to stay underground for committing the crime. Therefore, the motive of the crime is clearly visible. And the perpetrators of the crime are also well identified. They are the ruling elites of the government, the Army, the Buddhist nationalist monks and the Islamophobic political cadres. The motive of these people is to uproot the Rohimgya Muslims from their birth place. In fact, both the civil and military wings of the ruling ultranationalists are operating with the same motive. Besides, they have a strong delusional base to support that motive. The existence of the Muslims in Rakhine state, is perceived as the existential threat to the Burmese Buddhists. The whole genocidal crime against the Rohingya Muslims operates on such a sick, hateful and delusional concept. Because of that, inside Myanmar, there exists no sympathy for this most persecuted minority on earth. Rather, ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims through arson, mass slaughter, gang rape and forced eviction enjoys huge popularity among the cadre of the ruling party, the Army, the Buddhist monks, the political cadres and the general public.
If 1.2 million Rohigya Muslims are evicted from their farm lands, gardens, homes, businesses, and community institutions like mosques and madrasa, the local Burmese people will get the opportunity to grab these Muslim properties without any hindrance. This is why, the genocidal intent against the Muslims enjoys a popular base in Myanmar. Such a huge economic temptation pulls people to the crime scene to actively engage in the crime. Thus, the anti-Muslim campaign is being used as a tool of mass-scale robbery, raping, arson and killing against the Muslims. In the past, the same happened in America against the Red Indians and in Nazi Germany against the Jews. Therefore, it raises little wonder that on 29/10/2017, a huge rally was held in Yangon –the former capital of Myanmar, to celebrate the large scale eviction of the Rohigya Muslims and to show their support for the Army. (Source: Al Jazira, 29/10/17). Because of such an evil motive, a cataclysmic crime against the Rohingya Muslims could run for decades with the public support. But the UNO and the world leaders continue to commit their own crime of silence and inaction, too. It is indeed an extreme form of moral collapse as well as the worst form of leadership failure that even the worst genocidal regime in Myanmar could enjoy support from so many states. Such supportive leaders for the genocidal state have indeed proven that they are the part of the same moral disease.
The success of the state-run genocidal scheme in Arakan huge. It is easily visible from drastic downsizing the Muslim population there. In this traditionally Muslim majority state of Rakhine, the Muslims have been reduced to a minority. Now, its two-third population are the Burmese Buddhist. In 1952, the Rohingya Muslims were 1.2 million (Source: Countdown to Annihilation: Genocide in Myanmar, a research study of London’s Queen Mary University, 2015). Now it is 1.1 million. So there is a 8% reduction in Rohingya population in last 65 years. Whereas, in the same period of time, the population in Bangladesh showed more than 4 folds increase. In Pakistan, the increase was 6 folds. (As per census of 1951, the population of former East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) was 42 million; and in 2017 it is estimated to be 170 million. As per same census in 1951, the population was 33.7 million in former West Pakistan; and in 2017, it is 207 million).
Genocide: the literal meaning & the execution
The UN General Assembly’s resolution passed on 9th of December in 1948, brought into effect on 12th of January in 1951 (Resolution 260 (III)), specified the definition of genocide in following terms: “Any of the acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethical, racial or religious group; killing members of a group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to its members; deliberately inflicting on their conditions of life, calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. It is also the intended and the coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of the national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be to disintegrate the political and social institutions, culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of the national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.”
In 2002, Article 6 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court assigned almost similar narrative for the crime of genocide. It stated that “genocide” means any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, such as: (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. As per above definition, the Rohingya Muslims are the victim of all brutal specifics of genocidal crimes committed by the Myanmar Army, the Police, the Buddhist monks and the racially motivated common people. The catalogue of such crimes include arson, mass killings, rape, gang rape, torture, burning homes, deprivation of citizenship and civic rights, forceful eviction, and segregating in concentration camps. In order to facilitate their death, the Rohingya people are not allowed to have any access to healthcare. They are even deprived of basic education, jobs, income generating activities, social and cultural institutions, and mobility in the community. They are not allowed to perform even the obligatory prayers in public. On 2/06/17, AFP reported from Yangon that Myanmar Authority charged three Muslims men for holding Ramadan (Tarawih) prayers on the street. It was also reported that they were performing prayers on the street because of closure of the two local schools that gave premise to hold prayers. The schools were closed in late April 2017 after the ultra-nationalists complained to the ruling authority that the school-premises are used by the Muslims for the congregational prayers. Thus, the congressional prayer was taken as a serious crime to close down the school! And, it is done at a time when Aung San Suu Kyi is the de facto leader of the so-called democratic government.
Malnutrition has also been used as an effective weapon against the Rohingya Muslims. Those who are kept in camps are subjected to slow death through it. They are allowed to survive only on sub-subsistence level through international relief goods. Along with other horrendous means of persecution, such a dreadful situation was created only to promote silent disappearance of the Rohingya Muslims through desperate migration to other countries. Only in three weeks in September-October in 2017, about 600, 000 migrated to Bangladesh. In addition, more than 400,000 migrated to Bangladesh on previous episodes of similar forced evictions. About 400, 000 migrated to Saudi Arabia, about 350, 000 to Pakistan, 40, 000 to India and about 100, 000 to Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia.
The genocide in phases & the Myanmar style
Genocide always follows a classical pattern –as postulated by a famous social scientist named Mr Daniel Feuerstein in his book Genocide in Social Practice. The case of Myanmar isn’t different either. These are: 1). Stigmatisation; 2). Harassment, violence and terror; 3). Isolation and segregation; 4). Systemic weakening; 5). Extermination and 6). Symbolic enactment. The case of Myanmar indeed presents the textbook example of passing through all such genocidal phases. It starts with the imposed stigmatisation by the perpetrators of genocide between “us” and “them”. Here, “us” are the agents who commit the genocide. In Myanmar, they are the Myanmar government and its civil and military institutions, the Buddhist monks, the ultranationalist political thugs and the state-run gangs of salaried murderers. “Them” are the people who are stigmatised as the target of elimination –either by a process of mass killing or by forced eviction. In Myanmar, the term “them” was assigned for the Rohingya Muslims. They are made scapegoat for all the failures of Myanmar as well as cause of the future threat; hence black listed as the perfect target of genocidal elimination.
In such an appalling situation, it was the duty of the UNO and its Human Right offices to identify such a genocidal phase at its earliest stages. It was also their duty to pressurise the Myanmar government to reframe from such an act of criminalising the innocent people for ethnic cleansing and extermination. The duty of other world players and human right organisations should have been the same to save the innocent people from a man-made barbaric catastrophe. But they could display only the awful failure. None of the prophylactic or curative interventions by the UN or by any other state or international body happened to protect these people from ongoing genocide. Rather, they did exactly the opposite. The US removed the already imposed embargo; and the countries like India, Russia, and Japan increased their political, diplomatic and economic cooperation with the genocidal regimes. And Aung San Suu Kyi -the de facto leader who currently presides over the genocide, was given a Nobel Prize –a certificate of so-called upright moral conscience! As a result of such commission and omission, the whole community of the Rohingya Muslims was thrown into a death trap. Thus, the genocidal process was allowed to march into a phase of protracted harassment, violence and terror.
The final phase
The Myanmar regime deployed all possible tools to carry out the physical as well as the psychological torture against the Rohingya people. These are done deliberated to pass on the message that they have no political, cultural and survival space in Myanmar. Taking away their right of citizenship in 1982 indeed worked as a powerful tool to give them such a message very crudely. It terrorised them psychologically and made them refugee in their own birth place. Living in a state without its citizenship indeed worked as source of all-time fear and agony. Moreover, the Buddhist monks and nationalist extremist leaders were let loose to label them publicly as the foreign infiltrators from Bangladesh and future threat to Buddhists’ existence in Myanmar. Thus, they instigated violence against these captivated poor Muslims and prescribe full elimination from Arakan. As a result, even a few nationalist thugs could feel highly emboldened to snatch domestic cattle, hens, vegetables and other staff from their Muslim neighbours. Thus they became hostage to frequent arson, violence and rape by the state and non-state agents. And the Muslim women became the regular target for the sex predators of the Army and other security apparatus. The state-run violence, terror and harassment were made deliberately the parts of their daily life. As a result, those who had the means, silently left the country. A field research done by London’s Queen Mary University in 2015 gave a very detailed information of such systematic physical, and psychological torture. Even at this phase of state-run protracted genocide, the UN and other agencies kept their eyes closed and showed a policy of total inaction.
The Burmese ultranationalist can’t believe that the Rohingya Muslims have any survival rights or human rights in Myanmar. They could prescribe only a premediated blue print of total extermination for them –as Adolf Hitler had for the Jews. It is the strategy of isolating and segregating the Rohingya Muslims in concentration camps and restricting their food supply and prohibiting their health, social and educational care. These camps are called the Internally Displaced People’s (IDP) camps. In order to feed these concentration camps, the Rohingya Muslims are periodically evicted by force from their homes, farms and businesses. Therefore those who were evicted in 1978, 1991-92, 2012, 2013, and 2015, never had any chance to return back to their own homes, farm or business; rather found their final abode in those concentration camps. Those who wish to return back from Bangladesh to Arakan, they do not see any different or better future either. Thus, only a road of physical, moral, cultural and emotional death through systematic weakening is left open for them. Those who do not finish this way, mass slaughtering and forced eviction to other countries wait for them. Now, the long process of such a forced elimination of the Rohingya Muslims has indeed reached the final point.
