{"id":153907,"date":"2020-02-17T12:01:56","date_gmt":"2020-02-17T12:01:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=153907"},"modified":"2020-02-24T10:57:49","modified_gmt":"2020-02-24T10:57:49","slug":"a-hard-look-into-the-genesis-of-myanmars-genocide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/02\/a-hard-look-into-the-genesis-of-myanmars-genocide\/","title":{"rendered":"A Hard Look into the Genesis of Myanmar’s Genocide"},"content":{"rendered":"

Genesis of sustained, institutionalized destruction of Rohingya is anchored in group\u2019s identity as Muslims.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

12 Feb 2020 – <\/em>The International Court of Justice\u2019s Jan. 23 interim order in a case filed by Gambia against Myanmar is designed to protect the Rohingya and preserve the crime sites. It has brought a sense of vindication to several million Rohingya victims \u2013 in the diaspora, inside Myanmar, and in refugee camps in Bangladesh.<\/p>\n

It was by far the most significant act the international community has taken since the Rohingya have been subjected to a national policy of discrimination, disenfranchisement, displacement and destructive deportation by various organs of the state in Myanmar.<\/p>\n

The case which Gambia brought before the court has focused narrowly on the violent events of 2016 and 2017. However, it is crucial to see this group destruction in the proper context which began under the false pretext of Myanmar\u2019s attempts at cracking down on the \u201cillegal immigration\u201d across Myanmar-Bangladesh borders which stretch 270 miles.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As a matter of fact, today (Feb. 12) marks the 42nd anniversary of the first violently genocidal purge — centrally organized by the then military dictatorship of General Ne Win in Rangoon involving various agencies, not only the government troops and police force but also departments or ministries of religious affairs, customs and various branches of intelligence<\/p>\n

Paradoxically, this is also the date in which Myanmar celebrates \u201cUnion Day\u201d — when the country\u2019s majority Buddhist Burmese public and several national minorities along the borders of colonial Burma agreed to merge their regions voluntarily to form a single federated independent nation in 1947.<\/p>\n

On the very same day, in Rakhine, a state in western Myanmar that borders Bangladesh, Myanmar launched the first-ever violent deportation of literally hundreds of thousands of Rohingya — the majority of whom were born and raised in the region and had official IDs and documentation that proved their Myanmar nationality.<\/p>\n

The purges were carried out in two phases under military-style operations collectively known as Operation Dragon King.<\/p>\n

The first phase was launched in Rakhine state\u2019s capital Sittwe on Feb. 12, 1978, and lasted only a week, involving 200 interagency forces that resorted to various acts of violence and terror. The second phase was carried out in the northern Rakhine towns of Buthidaung and Maungdaw with 400 interagency security forces.<\/p>\n

Myanmar troops resorted to arson, slaughter, rape and other terror methods in the region where the population was peaceful, unarmed and compliant as evidenced in the newspaper reports of the time from Bangladesh, Pakistan and other Asian regions.<\/p>\n

The \u201cterror\u201d or \u201cpanic\u201d run resulted in the first-ever large-scale Rohingya exodus — about 250,000 according to Myanmar intelligence records — across the borders into the new nation-state of Bangladesh which, with India\u2019s direct military intervention, emerged victorious from its civil war of liberation from West Pakistan in 1971.<\/p>\n

In his Burmese language book \u201cThe Problem at Myanmar\u2019s Western Gate\u201d (2016), Khin Nyunt, a former general, chief of Myanmar\u2019s military intelligence services and prime minister, recorded the number of Muslim residents who could not prove their nationality or legal residency — or \u201c(immigration) law breakers\u201d in his words — as 643 (out of the total residents of 108,431) in Buthidaung town and 458 (out of the total residents of 125,893) in Maungdaw town. <\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The minuscule numbers of those found without any proper Myanmar national identification papers indicated the drastic achievement in Myanmar\u2019s attempts to control its porous borders with Bangladesh, one of the world\u2019s largest predominantly Muslim populations.<\/p>\n

In 1959, the Myanmar military had conducted a similar immigration crackdown in the same northern Rakhine region.<\/p>\n

According to \u201cMyanmar\u2019s Journey Towards Democracy and Thura U Tin Oo,\u201d a two-volume authorized Burmese language biography of ex-General Tin Oo, the former commander-in-chief of Myanmar\u2019s Armed Forces (published in Yangon in 2016), the then Lt. Col. Tin Oo, in his capacity as the regional commander of Rakhine, rounded up and deported 11,380 illegal migrants residing in the Rohingya region of Northern Rakhine to East Pakistan.<\/p>\n

Tin Oo recounted that he set up two expulsion points along the two countries\u2019 land borders from where all the East Pakistani residents without any legal documents were made to walk across the borders into Teknaf in Chittagong district in batches of several hundred each. In his words, \u201cmany of these illegals were dragging their feet upon order to cross the borders. And Myanmar troops had to load the guns and point at them as if we were going to fire unless they started crossing the borders as ordered. Under the real threats of violence, these mobs all of a sudden ran into East Pakistan.”<\/p>\n

Now as vice-chair and co-founder of Myanmar\u2019s ruling National League for Democracy, Tin Oo is Suu Kyi’s closest colleague. Tin Oo’s racist and violent views towards Muslim Rohingya undoubtedly influence the party’s refusal to recognize them as a national minority, a verifiable fact.<\/p>\n

Both of these prominent veterans from Myanmar\u2019s armed forces had the first-hand experience as military commanders tasked with taking care of illegal immigration from across East Pakistan (until 1971) and Bangladesh (since 1971).<\/p>\n

The number of illegal migrants from across Myanmar\u2019s western borders had verifiably nosedived from 11,380 in 1959 to 1,100 in 1978. Despite these well-documented numbers, Myanmar governments since the 1970s, particularly the Ministry of Defense and the state-controlled mass media, have continued to fuel the myth that Myanmar is under the very real threat of a large and uncontrolled incessant influx of \u201cBengali\u201d who take \u201cour Buddhist women,\u201d grab “our Buddhist lands” and overwhelm “our Buddhist villages.\u201d<\/p>\n

In their respective books linguistically inaccessible for international journalists and Myanmar watchers, not once did either general Tin Oo or Khin Nyunt — who knew the region in question expertly — use the words \u201cterrorist threats\u201d \u201csecession by Muslims\u201d or \u201cterritorial grabs,\u201d for neither Rohingya nor Bengalis from across the borders pose any threats to predominantly Buddhist Myanmar — neither demographically nor culturally nor economically.<\/p>\n

Despite Myanmar\u2019s official and popular discourses on the \u201cBengali threat at the Western Gate of Myanmar,\u201d the illegal immigration of unwanted Muslims from East Pakistan or Bangladesh has long stopped being a real issue on the ground. The real issue is the Myanmar military\u2019s attempts to remake the western Myanmar state of Rakhine in line with their ideological vision, according to which the region was once \u201cpurely Buddhist.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his introduction to the aforementioned book \u201cThe Crisis at Myanmar\u2019s Western Gate,\u201d ex-general Khin Nyunt spelled out this historical myth which has long guided the military\u2019s policies of persecution — and destruction — of the Rohingya, a predominantly Muslim community: \u201cRakhine chroniclers have prominently characterized their nation and region as an absolutely Muslim-clean, Bengali-absent region.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over the last eight years since the two bouts of violence in Rakhine in 2012, Myanmar leaders including Aung San Suu Kyi have offered the world evolving narratives about the crisis in Rakhine, including \u201ccounter-insurgency\u201d \u201ccommunal conflict\u201d \u201clack of economic development\u201d \u201cMuslim terrorism\u201d and \u201cexcessive violence\u201d– explanations and justifications for the country\u2019s pattern of violent and institutionalized abuses — or crimes against Rohingya. <\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But the genesis of the sustained and institutionalized destruction of Rohingya is firmly anchored in the group\u2019s identity as Muslims.<\/p>\n

Although the country is bordered by giant neighbors such as Northeast India and Southern China with populations of over 1 billion respectively, both densely populated and both with a thousand years of overlapping migratory histories, neither Indo-Burmese borders nor Sino-Burmese borders are framed in the Burmese military\u2019s narrative as a crisis or threat. Neither China nor India is predominantly Muslim, while both countries — particularly China — are sources of mass irregular immigration to Myanmar.<\/p>\n

Throughout the upper Myanmar region,\u00a0there are estimated 1 million Han Chinese from the bordering Yunnan province who are known to have moved into Myanmar and acquired Myanmar citizenship through bribes and other means.\u00a0Neither Suu Kyi nor the military make any fuss over this.<\/p>\n

Only Rohingya Muslims are falsely made out to be “illegals” and their presence “the crisis”.<\/p>\n

This faith-based framing of Rohingya, a borderland population, as a threat is precisely what qualifies Myanmar\u2019s policies as genocidal.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>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<\/em>Zarni is coordinator for Strategic Affairs for Free Rohingya Coalition and an adviser to the European Centre for the Study of Extremism, Cambridge, UK.<\/em><\/strong> 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). He co-authored, with Natalie Brinham, <\/em>Essays on Myanmar Genocide. Zarni 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

Go to Original \u2013 aa.com.tr<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

12 Feb 2020 – Genesis of sustained, institutionalized destruction of Rohingya is anchored in group\u2019s identity as Muslims. This faith-based framing of Rohingya, a borderland population, as a threat is precisely what qualifies Myanmar\u2019s policies as genocidal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":153908,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40,677],"tags":[240,1692,1688,1198,526,101,100,1199,1782,865,260,487,1644,651,1417,103,107,527,985,99,124],"class_list":["post-153907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","category-asia-updates-on-myanmar-rohingya-genocide","tag-asia","tag-aung-san-suu-kyi","tag-bangladesh","tag-buddhism","tag-burma-myanmar","tag-cultural-violence","tag-direct-violence","tag-ethnic-cleansing","tag-free-rohingya-coalition","tag-genocide","tag-history","tag-human-rights","tag-international-court-of-justice-icj","tag-justice","tag-maung-zarni","tag-racism","tag-religion","tag-rohingya","tag-social-justice","tag-structural-violence","tag-united-nations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153907","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=153907"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153907\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/153908"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=153907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=153907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=153907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}