Articles by Maung Zarni
We found 241 results.
Revive Aung San’s Original Secularist Multicultural Vision for the New Myanmar
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
22 Jul 2013
Aung San was murdered on 19 July 1947, 66 years go. He was killed by 27 bullet wounds from the British Army-issued machine guns in the British-assisted assassination. When he and his multi-cultural and multi-faith comrades were killed it was not just the men’s lives that were taken away. Aung San’s secularist, egalitarian and multiculturalist vision too was killed and buried along with their remains.
→ read full articleBritish Aid for Myanmar/Burma Ethnic Cleansing
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
22 Jul 2013
Britain, the largest donor country and former colonizer of Myanmar, is effectively aiding and abetting the unfolding “ethnic cleansing” of Muslim Rohingya by helping to finance the country’s controversial 2014 national census.
→ read full articleAn Unfolding Tale of Two Genocidal “Buddhist” Hells: Myanmar and Sri Lanka
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
15 Jul 2013
The Burmese Bama Buddhists are not alone in Nazi “Buddhist” Hell. They are in good company of the equally genocidal “Buddhists” of Sri Lanka.
→ read full articleMetta for “Mus”?!! You must be kidding!: A New Myanmar and its “Buddhist” Tales
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
1 Jul 2013
In our Myanmar A-wee-zi (an abode of Buddhist Hell) – He is our national hero in place of your ‘fallen (liberal) idol’. Mighty is he, commanding 3,000-strong Buddhist monastery amongst the Order of 500,000. “Honestly, I felt I wanted to fight weapons with weapons. I am a Burmese bin Laden”.
→ read full article(Français) Nous Refusons le Silence Face a l’Apartheid et au Nettoyage Ethnique en Birmanie
Maung Zarni, Noam Chomsky et Lilian Thuram – Le Monde,
1 Jul 2013
Les minorités sont exclues du renouveau démocratique et, pour beaucoup, le calvaire a empiré avec des offensives militaires au nord et à l’Est tandis qu’à l’Ouest des populations sont séquestrées sous un régime d’Apartheid.
→ read full articleNeo-Nazi Denial in Myanmar
Maung Zarni – Asia Times,
27 May 2013
Myanmar has a newly registered Nazi party, the Rakhine National Development Party (RNDP), created ceremoniously in the wake of last year’s anti-Muslim ethnic cleansing in western Rakhine State.
→ read full articleAre Aung San Suu Kyi and Myanmar Elites Complicit in the Rohingya Ethnocide?
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
20 May 2013
Is Burma’s Aung Suu Kyi herself complicit in this Rohingya ethnnocide? is a valid, empirical question that needs to be raised.
→ read full articleMyanmar Whitewashes Ethnic Cleansing
Maung Zarni – Asia Times,
13 May 2013
1 May 2013 – An official report into last year’s violence in Rakhine State, launched on April 29 at the government’s foreign donor financed Myanmar Peace Center, is intellectually, ideologically, empirically and analytically flawed, underscoring President Thein Sein’s bid to whitewash the recent ethnic cleansing of Muslim Rohingya in the western state, which borders Bangladesh.
→ read full articleOpen Letter to International Crisis Group
Maung Zarni – Democratic Voice of Burma,
6 May 2013
If the ICG’s award is about honouring President Thein Sein’s “visionary leadership to effect profound social, economic and political changes” that will “bring us closer to a world free of conflict” then the organisation’s empirical understanding of both Thein Sein’s vision and the ugly realities experienced by the Burmese people, including the Rohingya, can only be characterised as delusional.
→ read full articleMyanmar’s Neo-Nazi Buddhists Get Free Rein
Maung Zarni – Asia Times,
15 Apr 2013
Hatred of Muslims is deeply rooted in Burmese society. One of the regime’s favorite tactics was to spread rumors that Muslims had raped Burmese Buddhist women, and plotted to convert the entire Buddhist population to Islam. The “divide and rule” tactic used by the authorities in the recent past possibly grew out of the British colonial regime’s policy of fostering a “plural society” with minimal national unity.
→ read full articleWhy Journalists Generally Get Their Burma Stories Wrong, Horribly Wrong
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
15 Apr 2013
When it comes to reporting Burma the coverage has been beyond being biased. It is generally horribly inadequate, or downright incorrect. From a Burmese perspective, especially from the perspective of those who have borne the brunt of the half-century of military rule under various and evolving disguises, the way Burma is being reported is like adding insult to injury.
→ read full articleBurma/Myanmar: Its Conflicts, Western Advocacy, and Country Impact
Maung Zarni – World Peace Foundation,
8 Apr 2013
Burma’s conflicts are neither new nor are they singular. Conflicts along multiple-lines – class and ideology, civil society and the military, and ethnic groups– have been going on for nearly 65 years, that is, since Burma’s independence from Britain in 1947/1948.
→ read full articleBuddhist Nationalism in Burma
Maung Zarni, tricycle – TRANSCEND Media Service,
1 Apr 2013
The broadcast images of monks of the “Saffron Revolution” of 2007 are still fresh; these monks were seen calling for an improvement in public well-being in the face of the growing economic hardships afflicting Burma’s Buddhists. But in the past year, the world has been confronted with images of the same robed monks publicly demonstrating against Islamic nations’ distribution of aid to starving Muslim Rohingya, displaced into refugee camps in their own country following Rakhine Buddhist attacks.
→ read full articleBuddhist Nationalism in Burma
Maung Zarni, Tricycle – TRANSCEND Media Service,
25 Mar 2013
The rise of genocidal Buddhist racism against the Rohingya, a minority community of nearly one million people in the western Burmese province of Rakhine (also known as Arakan), is an international humanitarian crisis. The military-ruled state has been relentless in its attempts to erase Rohingya ethnic identity, which was officially recognized as a distinct ethnic group in 1954 by the democratic government of Prime Minister U Nu.
→ read full articleMyanmar’s Religious Violence against the Muslims Is Military-Backed and Buddhist Order-Organzied
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
25 Mar 2013
The violence against Muslims in Burma is not SIMPLY sectarian or communal as is typically and incorrectly framed by the mainstream media. It is mobilized by the skin-head elements within the Buddhist Sangha and tacitly backed by the military state, both working in close collaboration and in a symbiosis.
→ read full articleResignation Letter
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
7 Jan 2013
1 January 2013. I believe I was mislead regarding the professional environment at Universiti Brunei Darussalam during the recruitment process, and due to the on-going attempts to gag me on the persecution and slaughter of minorities, including Muslim minorities, in the country of my birth [Burma], I no longer wish to be subject to this level of extreme and unprofessional academic censorship. I need to work at a professional institution where the word ‘politics’ is mentionable, social conscience livable, and compassion honourable.
→ read full articleViolence in the Institutional and Cultural DNA of the United States of America
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
31 Dec 2012
The two of the three pillars of the United States were the ethno- and genocide of the native people and the enslavement of African people — yes, the other is honorably the Enlightenment ideals of equality (of property-owning while males). Both as an economic system and as an ideological edifice, USA is one of the most violent places on earth.
→ read full articleMyanmar’s Step-By-Step Approach toward Rohingya Genocide and Ethni-cide
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
26 Nov 2012
I would call the military’s policy towards the Rohingya “structural genocide”, a systematic and sustained act of policy maintained and pursued, irrespective of which general or ex-general is in charge. Welcome to our ugly majoritarian neo-Fascist democracy run by militarists!
→ read full articleBurma’s Buddhism: A Tale of “Form without Substance”
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
12 Nov 2012
Do not mistake Myanma’s thousands of Golden Temples and Pagodas and thousands of Saffron Robed men, that is, form, for the real practice of Buddhism, that is, the practice of Metta or universal loving kindness for all sentient beings. That, of course, is except Rohingya and Muslims.
→ read full articleWhat Does the World Bank Have to Do with Burma’s Wars, Conflicts and Atrocities?
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
12 Nov 2012
The war in Kachin State has everything to do with the World Bank which funded and promoted the idea of “cross-border energy free market”.
→ read full articleWho and What Gains from Myanmar’s Genocide of the Rohingya and Other Muslims?
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
5 Nov 2012
The site of massive violence and arson of Rohingya and other Muslim neighborhood in Kyauk Hpyu happened to be the site where China is planning a Special Econ and Technological Zone. Why bother with mass eviction and typical Myanmar land grab when you have locally produced Genocide against the Rohingya and other Muslim inhabitants as a tool of ‘developmental policy’?
→ read full articleMyanmar Travel Reassurances to Westerners
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
29 Oct 2012
President Thein Sein himself – incidentally, a very sincere, soft-spoken and harmless personality – has assured our Ministries that you will not hear gunshot fires, nor will you see boat loads of fleeing “Kulars or niggers” – much less their social media-circulated doctored images of mutilated corpses, charred belongings, and burnt houses. (Off the record: These damn human rights activists tend to sensationalize stories and exaggerate atrocities – it’s just another case of ethnic cleansing. We have other really important business in Myanmar: BUSINESS).
→ read full articleBurma/Myanmar: Did the Government Incite the Racial Violence Targeting the Rohingya?
Dr. Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
8 Oct 2012
Truthful reports by various inquiry commissions and missions can and will go a long way towards restoring a glimmer of hope in the world’s most persecuted minority community, if the investigators are able to get to the bottom of the recent large-scale racial violence, which left nearly 100,000 both homeless and hopeless.
→ read full articleGrowing Up a Proud Racist in Burma
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
17 Sep 2012
Like millions of my fellow Buddhist Burmese, I grew up as a proud racist. For much of my life growing up in the heartland of Burma, Mandalay, I mistook what I came to understand years later as racism to be the patriotism of Burmese Buddhists. Our leading and most powerful institutions, schools, media, Buddhist church and, most importantly, the military, have succeeded in turning the bulk of us into proud racists.
→ read full articlePopular ‘Buddhist’ Racism and the Generals’ Militarism
Maung Zarni – Democratic Voice of Burma,
10 Sep 2012
As a Mandalay-born dissident with deep roots in Buddhism, I find it revolting that thousands of Buddhist monks, human rights dissidents and the public in my hometown of Mandalay staged an anti-Rohingya rally this past weekend [2 Sep 2012]. Where has the vociferous human rights rhetoric gone when it comes to the persecuted Rohingyas?
→ read full articleBurma’s ‘Niggers’
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
3 Sep 2012
President Thein Sein, what really is your analysis of the plight of Burma’s “Bengali Kulars” (or the Burmese equivalent of “niggers”)?
→ read full articleSanctions Have Nothing to Do With Human Rights in Burma
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
11 Jun 2012
Sanctions have, in the final instance, little or nothing to do with the fact that the Burmese are oppressed and persecuted by the regime in Naypyidaw. There are western allies and/or business partners whose human rights records are equally appalling – Israel, Egypt under Mubarak, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, etc., as well as China and Vietnam – and these countries aren’t subject to any sanctions.
→ read full articleWhat Really Explains Thein Sein Regime’s Current Pursuit of ‘Ceasefire’ with the Karens while Killing the Kachins
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
9 Apr 2012
Obviously, the Burmese generals and ex-generals have outsourced the business of “strategic peace” to its commercial elements – Burmese commercial interests. Investors from Norway, Germany, etc. are licking their lips while the locals do the foreplay with the ethnic virgin lands (and untapped resources).
→ read full articleCheerleading Is No Revolution: “Democracy in Burma”
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
5 Mar 2012
Cheerleading is no revolution. That society is not going anywhere humanistic. The current discourse of revolutionary changes is nothing but a self-interested spin from vultures and vampires of all stripes and colours, native and foreign.
→ read full articleNeutralising Burma’s Ethnic Rebellions
Dr. Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
5 Dec 2011
In his Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), Karl Marx wrote: ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.’ Such an assessment is only half-right when it comes to Burma’s internal conflicts, of which ethnicity is of equal importance to class.
→ read full articleDark Economics Fuels Burma’s Perpetual War
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
21 Nov 2011
For the past 200 years at least, Burma has been seen as a strategic venue by outside powers, be they European imperialists such as the French and the British in the 19th Century, or the 20th Century imperial and fascist powers of the US and Japan during the Second World War. These countries have always seen Burma as a commercial backdoor to China and India, a military launching pad, a half-way safe harbour, and a resource brothel.
→ read full articleChange the Burmese Public Can’t Believe In
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
24 Oct 2011
Burma is undergoing top-down changes, we are being told. Norway’s Deputy Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide, after his whirlwind trip to the country, told the Financial Times on Oct 11, “I almost left the country thinking they’re moving a little too fast. I never thought I would say that about Myanmar.”
→ read full articleUnderstanding the Changes in Burma
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
17 Oct 2011
All the “dramatic” developments in Burma, including the release of 6,000-plus prisoners, are, as US Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell put it, certainly welcome. And yet despite these loud applauses of “changes” in Burma, the Burmese public is finding it very, very difficult to feel hopeful. These changes do not include the change of heart among Burma’s rulers. They are in fact principally related to only two things.
→ read full articleThey Talk the Talk, But Baulk at the Walk
Dr Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
29 Aug 2011
Twenty three years since Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the then freshly minted popular dissident, began her impassioned calls for a resolution to the country’s long-standing problems through dialogue, we seem to have been conditioned like a Pavlovian four-limbed creature.
→ read full articleMeritocracy: A Myth?
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
25 Apr 2011
If you are anti-imperialist, ‘Third Worldist’ type – like I unapologetically am – it may warm your heart to know that historically Oxford produced the highest number of folks who gave the rest of the world ‘the British Empire’, which among other things grew opium in India for export to China – as a brilliant economic policy to address the Raj’s trade deficit. (Cambridge was the runner up). Often our own Daw Aung San Suu Kyi is talked about as ‘Oxford-educated’ as if her Oxford education turned her into who she is and what she is made of. As a matter of fact, it was/is her (self-acknowledged) awareness of her parents’ exemplary lives as citizens that was/is her source of inspiration.
→ read full articleThe Intellectual Crisis of Reporting On Burma by the International Crisis Group
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
11 Apr 2011
When European Union policymakers will meet to review the EU Common Policy on Burma, on 12 April, they will be wise to discard the International Crisis Group’s (ICG) recent call for the unconditional embrace of the country’s military dictatorship… The ICG analysts seem to have chosen only evidence that agrees with a pro-trade, pro-aid policy stance, while critically lacking both conceptual and historical understanding of how dictatorships change.
→ read full articleAnti-Sanctions Chorus Out of Tune
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
10 Jan 2011
The emerging anti-sanctions lobby should be understood for what it is – the bald promotion of Western strategic and corporate interests. Ending sanctions now will only further entrench military rule, giving it a veneer of normalcy and acceptability, at the expense of Myanmar’s long-suffering people and the country’s equitable economic development.
→ read full articleWhen Pixels, Bytes and VJs Unite
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
27 Dec 2010
Everyone could hear the collective gasp that filled the auditorium – and no one would forget – the very moment when the first signal transporting Aung San Suu Kyi’s animated face to a large screen in London arrived last week.
→ read full articleWhat Does Aung San Suu Kyi’s Release Mean for Burma?
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
29 Nov 2010
Since the release of a single dissident Aung San Suu Kyi – while holding 2,100 of her fellow dissidents behind bars who are serving up to 90 years imprisonment – the loud calls for lifting sanctions are repeated by some well-known supporters of Aung San Suu Kyi such as East Timor’s Jose Ramos-Horta, as if pouring more foreign direct investment in Burma’s gas and oil sector and increasing trade with the country’s kleptocratic, dysfunctional State would automatically translate into public welfare.
→ read full articleMyanmar Election Was ‘Categorically Anti-Democratic’
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service,
15 Nov 2010
The constitution also stipulates the commander-in-chief will be above the law, and that the president must have substantial “national security experience”, something which only military officers can claim. Twenty five per cent of parliamentary seats are reserved for the military and any constitutional amendment must have more than 75 per cent of votes, making reform virtually impossible unless, of course, the generals acquiesce. The parliament is required to meet only once a year.
→ read full articleThe Generals’ Election
Maung Zarni – Himal Southasian,
4 Oct 2010
In the run-up to Burma’s fraught polls, some of the junta’s leading cheerleaders are Western governments who are bending over backwards to justify their stance.
→ read full article