In Contrast to Huffington Post, the New York Times Misleads the Readers on Myanmar Government’s Central Role in the Rohingya Pogroms
MEDIA, 17 Mar 2014
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service
Sunday, March 16, 2014 – The New York Times and international media continue to report misleadingly – and wittingly – on their reportage about the Rohingya in Myanmar. (See the piece below “Trapped Between Home and Refuge, Burmese Muslims Are Brutalized“, JANE PERLEZ, NYT, 14 March) attributes the brutal treatment and ‘ghettoization’ to ‘an extreme Buddhist ideology’ (held by the local Buddhist Rakhine).
While there were sectarian tensions between these two religious communities in Rakhine state, in the past 70 years, only one major communal/horizontal violent conflict took place between these two religious and ethnic communities – in 1942.
It is in fact Burma or Myanmar military leadership that has self-consciously pursued what amounts to genocidal policies towards the Rohingya, in fact, a borderland people of Burma like Karen, Chin, Kachin, Rakhine, etc, whose roots spread across new boundaries of the post-WWII nation-states. (The violent conflicts in 1942 took place as the result of the British Raj fleeing the country as the Fascist Japanese troops advanced into Burma and occupied the country for the duration of the WWII. The Buddhist Rakhine sided with the fascist Japanese just as the Buddhist Burmese sided with them – while the Rohingya and other non-Buddhist minorities including Indians, Kachin, etc sided with the British. The changing of power equation triggered the violent conflict in 1942 between the Rakhine and the Rohingya.
But the ‘reformist’ military state in Myanmar today has been whipping up the mass mania of Muslim hating and scape-goating the Rohingya as a way of 1) diverting popular frustration and pent-up anger towards land-grab, economic loot, power abuses, etc – all by the military and ex-military leaders in power and their families and family-linked Burmese cronies; and 2) mobilizing the discourse of human rights and democracy – of Aung San Suu Kyi – into the primodial racist sentiments about non-Buddhist others. The Rohingya are the most vulnerable in that its social foundation has been eroded over the past 35 years as the direct result of the military’s anti-Rohingya policies and practies. It is the only ethnic group of sizable population that does NOT have any armed resistance organization to defend its own people and to negotiate for a humane treatment and place in Burmese political system.
The New York Times will need to be recorded here for its culpability in the unfolding state-sponsored genocide of the Rohingya. For New York Times editors and reporters are holding collective nose when it comes to the verfiably instrumental role the State in Burma or Myanmar. The ruling quasi-civilian government of President Thein Sein is now becoming a fast business and strategic partner of Western commercial and strategic interests.
As a Burmese who has done extensive research on the persecution of the Rohingya, I am persuaded by the Times’ coveragae that NYT is culpable in the unfolding Rohingya genocide when it is wittingly creating a verifiably false narrative which puts the blame and responsibility on the Rakhine locals. When it does it it ignores something that an average politically aware Burmese person knows: that the Burmese military leaderships have outsourced the task of death and destruction, including instigating Rakhine protests against any international relief agencies providing survival services to the Rohingya in ghettos and IDP camps, where they have been herded into by the state security troops, which impose and enforce ABSOLUTE BAN on physical movement.
Myanmar’s policy of apartheid with the ultimate purpose of erasing the Rohingya as an identity and a community has been put in place in 1978 by Ne Win’s military dictatorship and maintained to date by the highest Myanmar authorities including President Thein Sein and his quasi-civilian ‘reformist’ government.
Shedding light honestly on the role of the West’s new darling, namely the Burmese military leadership in civilian guises – Aung San Suu Kyi is a spent force who has served a PR cover for the West’s re-engagement with Myanmar’s military – does NOT resonate with the emerging Western narrative about Myanmar and its broad reforms!
Liberal or conservative, don’t expect the corporate mainstream media to take the side of the poor, the persecuted – or Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth.
Zarni
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New York Times: Trapped Between Home and Refuge, Burmese Muslims Are Brutalized
By Jane Perlez
excerpted:
Violence against Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim minority by the Rakhine ethnic group, driven by an extreme Buddhist ideology, has led tens of thousands of Rohingya to flee in the last 18 months through smuggling rings that pledge to take them to Malaysia, a Muslim country that quietly accepts the desperate newcomers.
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March 14, 2014 – The Rohingya Crisis: Finding a Way Forward
Michel Gabaudan – Huffington Post (Opinion)
Excerpted:
The Myanmar government still imposes an absolute ban on Rohingyas’ freedom of movement, slowly converting their camps into de facto ghettos. This ban is also causing new displacement: Rohingyas who were not expelled from their homes by violence, but are subject to the same movement restrictions, have no way to support their families, so many are dismantling their houses to sell the wood. They either move into the camps in order to receive assistance, or try to reach Thailand and Malaysia using unsafe boats controlled by abusive people smugglers. An estimated 80,000 have left Myanmar by sea just in the past year, and dozens have died in the process.
The Rohingyas are increasingly left without any sense of what the future holds for them, and the government’s current policies are rapidly pushing them from poverty into absolute misery. Furthermore, many humanitarians are tormented by the fact that their work is practically underwriting segregation and playing into the hands of the authorities.
The international community has expressed concern about the Rohingyas, but it has been careful not to let this crisis poison their broader relationship with Myanmar at a time of major reforms. Western countries are rightly concerned that hard-won changes (including economic liberalization, the release of some political prisoners, and the acceptance of political opposition) could be challenged in the years to come. The elections planned for 2015 could be difficult, and the ongoing review of Myanmar’s constitution will pitch political groups against each other in an atmosphere of growing civil society pressure, demands for federalism from the ethnic states, and defensive posturing by the powerful military and its allies.
In this context, it is hard to imagine that the government will fully address the roots of the Rohingya crisis – namely, the Rohingyas’ legal status and their acceptance within society – during the next few years. But refusing to propose any initiatives or ducking the problem entirely (as the government did recently after a massacre of Rohingyas in northern Rakhine State) is not an option and cannot be tolerated by Myanmar’s international partners. The world should therefore seek concrete, step-by-step improvements in the Rohingyas’ situation, in the hope that they will lead to bigger changes over the long term.
Michel Gabaudan became president of Refugees International in September of 2010, leading RI forward in its mission to bring attention and action to refugees and displaced people worldwide. Prior to his role with RI, Michel served as the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) Regional Representative for the United States and the Caribbean.
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Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar
http://www.ohchr.org/en/countries/asiaregion/pages/mmindex.aspx
19 Feb 2014 – Follow the top link under “most recent special procedures reports”.
during his five visits to Rakhine State, and in particular since the June 2012 violence and its aftermath, he concludes that the pattern of widespread and systematic human rights violations in Rakhine State may constitute crimes against humanity as defined under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
51. Taking into consideration the information and allegations the Special Rapporteur has received throughout the course of his six years on this mandate,[1] including during his five visits to Rakhine State, and in particular since the June 2012 violence and its aftermath, he concludes that the pattern of widespread and systematic human rights violations in Rakhine State may constitute crimes against humanity as defined under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. He believes that extrajudicial killing, rape and other forms of sexual violence, arbitrary detention, torture and ill-treatment in detention, denial of due process and fair trial rights, and the forcible transfer and severe deprivation of liberty of populations has taken place on a large scale and has been directed against the Rohingya Muslim population in Rakhine State. He believes that the deprivation of healthcare is deliberately targeting the Rohingya population, and that the increasingly permanent segregation of this population is taking place. Furthermore, he believes that these human rights violations are connected to discriminatory and persecutory policies against the Rohingya Muslim population, which also include ongoing official and unofficial practices from both local and central authorities restricting rights to nationality, movement, marriage, family, health and privacy. In Myanmar’s ongoing process of democratic transition and national reconciliation, the human rights situation in Rakhine State will be a critical challenge for the Myanmar Government and the international community to address
[1] See reports A/63/341 para 61-62, A/64/318 para 70-80, A/HRC/13/48 para 86-94, A/65/368 para 73, A/HRC/16/59, A/66/365 para 29, A/67/383 para 56-67, A/HRC/22/58 para 46-60, A/68/397 para 46-57.
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Maung Zarni, Associate Fellow, the University of Malaya. Dr. Maung Zarni is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment, founder and director of the Free Burma Coalition (1995-2004), and a visiting fellow (2011-13) at the Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit, Department of International Development, London School of Economics. His forthcoming book on Burma will be published by Yale University Press. He was educated in the US where he lived and worked for 17 years. Visit his website www.maungzarni.com.
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