{"id":108537,"date":"2018-04-02T12:01:33","date_gmt":"2018-04-02T11:01:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=108537"},"modified":"2018-03-30T18:18:53","modified_gmt":"2018-03-30T17:18:53","slug":"oh-rohingya-who-art-thou-where-art-thy-homeland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/04\/oh-rohingya-who-art-thou-where-art-thy-homeland\/","title":{"rendered":"Oh Rohingya, Who Art Thou? Where Art Thy Homeland?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>In deep disgust, I wrote the poetry this afternoon after feeling rather outraged and dismayed at what I have been observing everyday about the “Rohingya crisis” over the last 6 years. Ultimately, it is the crisis of Humanity itself, the crisis that exposes this deeply inhumane and immoral world run by those with neither the intellectual vision nor human compassion. <\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>UK, 30 March 2018<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

*********************************<\/p>\n

Oh Rohingya, who are you?\u00a0 And where is your homeland?
\nOh Rohingya
\nyou are many things to many people.
\nOh Rohingya
\nyou are a name 50 million Myanmar are brainwashed to hate who know next to nothing about what’s in a name.
\nOh Rohingya
\nyou are the content to erase from textbooks whose “not real” identity the snake-tongued Suu Kyi seeks to ban in her dubious Diplo-Speak<\/p>\n

Oh Rohingya
\nyou are a fundable project in the name of “local partners”<\/p>\n

Oh Rohingya
\nyou are an award-winning subject of reportage or documentary
\nOh Rohingya
\nYou are a legal volleyball played by human rights rights lawyers
\nOn Rohingya
\nyou are a security threat to nations and regions, potentially as “radical Islamicists”;
\nnever mind that you have not blown yourselves up in 40 years since your lot’s genocide began.
\nOh Rohingya
\nyou are a new ‘boat people’ whose survival flights at night the United Nations bleached as “irregular movements”
\nOh Rohingya
\nyou are a subject of surveillance to many a “anti-terror sickos”
\nFor you pray out loud to Allah when your infants are burned alive, and the world stand idly by.<\/p>\n

Oh Rohingya,
\nyou are a subject of worldwide charity, but the one which triggers no real solidarity.
\nOh Rohingya
\nyou are a subject of interest which neo-Orientalist academics & experts dissect, from Asian Studies to the US Institute of Peace
\nOh Rohingya
\nyou are sources of memories to extract, collate, compile and deposit in some posh Ivory Tower
\nOh Rohingya,
\nyou are an agenda item which UN councils will debate, closed doors, with neither substance nor results, for decades.
\nOh Rohingya
\nyou are creatures whose children have been orphaned by the hundreds of thousands
\nOh Rohingya
\nyou are a people whose women have been widowed, raped, maimed, & terrorised.
\nOh Rohingya
\nyou are this deeply pathetic world’s Celebrities from Hell
\nOh Rohingya
\nyou are a subject of endless TV shows, academic debates, photography exhibits, and policy masturbation
\nOh Rohingya
\nyou are Myanmar Commander-in-Chief’s “unfinished business”,
\nthe High Command’s objects to exterminate,
\nthe ground troops’ preys of mass-rape, whom burn alive, mutilate, blow up, fire upon, bayonet, behead or cut throat, literally.
\nOh Rohingya
\nyou are our world’s largest tribe of Survivors with No Promised Land to run to<\/p>\n

Oh Rohingya
\nyou are a people stranded on our Earth, shoved around like dirt by sovereign states,
\nyou are a people without the Right to Belong or Settle-down<\/p>\n

Oh Rohingya
\nyou are a people in desperate need of a Protected Homeland.
\n________________________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>A Buddhist humanist from Burma, Maung Zarni is <\/em>a member of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>, <\/em>former Visiting Lecturer with Harvard Medical School, specializing in racism and violence in Burma and Sri Lanka, and Non-resident Scholar in Genocide Studies with Documentation Center \u2013 Cambodia.\u00a0 His analyses have appeared in leading newspapers including the <\/em>New York Times, The Guardian and<\/em> the Times. Among his academic publications on Rohingya genocide are <\/em>The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar\u2019s Rohingyas (Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal), <\/em>An Evolution of Rohingya Persecution in Myanmar: From Strategic Embrace to Genocide, (Middle East Institute, American University), and <\/em>Myanmar\u2019s State-directed Persecution of Rohingyas and Other Muslims (Brown World Affairs Journal, forthcoming). He holds a PhD (U Wisconsin at Madison) and a MA (U California), and has held various teaching, research and visiting fellowships at the universities in Asia, Europe and USA including Oxford, LSE, UCL Institute of Education) , National-Louis, Malaya, and Brunei. He is the recipient of the “Cultivation of Harmony” award from the Parliament of the World’s Religions (2015).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

30 March 2018 – In deep disgust, I wrote the poetry this afternoon after feeling rather outraged and dismayed at what I have been observing everyday about the “Rohingya crisis” over the last 6 years. Ultimately, it is the crisis of Humanity itself, the crisis that exposes this deeply inhumane and immoral world run by those with neither the intellectual vision nor human compassion. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":108538,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[182],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-108537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry-format"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108537"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108537\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/108538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}