They Would Call Me an ‘Extremist’: Why I Don’t Celebrate Or Send Anyone Any New Year’s Greetings
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 18 Apr 2016
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service
A Hindu-Buddhist New Year Note
14 Apr 2016 – Though a Burmese from Mandalay , Burma’s most popular site for the Thin Gyan or water throwing new year festival, I do not celebrate the New Year–because my country that likes to call itself “Buddhist” is committing a slow genocide against the Muslim Rohingya stigmatizing them as “Bengali”.
For we view them, wrongly, as simply the descendants of British colonial era ‘farm coolies’ who came to Western Burma only after the first Anglo-Burmese war of 1824. Wrongly because many of them have verifiably maintained their historical presence and distinct identity as early as AD1500.
Rohingyas in an IDP camp: Nearly 140,000 Rohingyas, including women, infants, children, men and the elderly being locked up in IDP camps after having been driven out of their homes and neighborhoods across Rakhine state, Western Burma – in 2 waves of organized violence and expulsion in June and October 2012.
Look across the western border, there is a human civilization called Bangladesh. They are a majority Muslim country. Whatever Bangladesh’s national shortcomings as a country and a people they do not stand accused of racist crimes against humanity and the slow genocide in the world – whatever the exact legal name of the crime.
As seen in these fresh images from Bangladesh, that Muslim country – both the government and the Bengali society, honor and respect not only the human and citizenship rights of the Buddhist Rakhines but also their ethnic identity, culture and customs, despite the fact that most of the Rakhine Buddhists in Bangladesh were descendants of the estimated 180,000 Buddhist Rakhine refugees who fled the Buddhist-on-Buddhist war of AD1785 during which the Bama/Burmese Buddhists overran the Rakhine Buddhist kingdom at Mrauk-U and annexed today’s Western Burma into the Ava-based Burmese kingdom in the central Dry Zone plains.
Even as I write the Rohingya remain subjected to the intentional state-sponsored act of group destruction. 140,000 Rohingyas in IDP camps are just the tip of the berg.
Alas, they would call me an ‘extremist’.
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Dr. Maung Zarni is a Burmese activist blogger, Associate Fellow at the University of Malaya, a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment, founder and director of the Free Burma Coalition (1995-2004), a visiting fellow (2011-13) at the Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit, London School of Economics, and a nonresident scholar with the Sleuk Rith Institute in Cambodia. 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.
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 18 Apr 2016.
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