The 'ethnic cleansing' of the Rohingya
Source: Washington Post
The ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya
Scorched earth. Harrowing escapes. Half a million on the move.
By Max Bearak, Laris Karklis and Tim Meko
Sept. 18, 2017
Last week, the United Nations top human rights official called Burmas ongoing military campaign against the Rohingya Muslim minority group in that countrys Rakhine state a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.
This is what he meant: Using a pretext of rooting out Islamist insurgents, Burmas military, together with Buddhist villagers, is terrorizing the Rohingya, emptying and razing their villages, and attempting to hound them out of the country.
Of a total of 1.1 million Rohingya that remained in Burma despite repeated waves of violence since the late 1970s, more than 400,000 have fled to neighboring Bangladesh in just the past month. New arrivals are building makeshift settlements near established camps where hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees from previous exoduses already live. Most are women, children and the elderly.
Conditions are dire. Food is scarce. Aid agencies are worn thin. The monsoon rain is torrential.
The human catastrophe has captured the worlds attention. But it has also caused a lot of confusion. Didnt Burma just undergo a democratic transition? Isnt it led by Nobel Peace Prize-winner Aung San Suu Kyi? Why are Buddhists perpetrating an ethnic cleansing against Muslims?
-snip-
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/world/rohingya/
amalasuntha
(15 posts)Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)Hortensis
(58,785 posts)So similar to the Israeli Jew/Palestinian conflict. Both nations have many good people who wish to live and let live in peace, but both also have hard-core conservative troublemakers who grab every chance to make sure that won't happen.
This current genocide by Myanmar's Buddhist-dominated military was sparked by provocative actions by a new, militant Rohingya separatist group, the ARSA. The ARSA's timing derailed the latest government attempt at a peaceful solution to this terrible dilemma, as intended. All peaceful solutions totally unacceptable to these types, their counterparts in the military joined them in conflict, and hundreds of thousands of innocent people are ground between two vicious, hard-core rocks.
The Atlantic:
Muslims in Myanmar are only 4% of the population, but that reality is no check on the usual fear and hostility of conservative groups toward others: W]e dont want Muslims to swallow our country. They will not finish with attacking just Rakhine. (A tiny region on one coast.) ... Then this country will be a Muslim country. Reminds me of relatives of neighbors upset that "Sharia law" was about to be imposed on Alabama if they didn't do something.