All the leading European countries, France, Britain, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, who are champions of human rights and liberalism today, were in the slave trade in the US, Caribbean, and Brazil. These leading European powers looted Africa of its most precious resources. That is not diamonds, gold, or copper, but it's humans. We today witness the lootings in New York and other places and feel uncomfortable. Leading European nations looted Africa of its humans, making them commodities, chained in the basement of ships.
The slave trading was endorsed by the Catholic Church and the rulers of Europe. The wealth of Europe, all the beautiful cities of Europe, Paris, Amsterdam, Prague were built on the corpses and labor of non-European people.
Therefore, what we are seeing today and the destruction of statues of slave traders goes beyond police brutality. Q: Hate leads to racism and that leads to exclusion which in turn has led to genocide quite often in history.
Rohingya have experienced this all. How much is this phenomenon interlinked to global events happening in Israel, where Palestinians find their backs against the wall. What leads one community to feel it is superior to others, like whites in the West, Jews in Israel. Colonial powers no longer exist, but why the colonial mindset is still alive and kicking?
Who feeds it? MZ: I think fear and hatred are rooted in ignorance. Ignorance is not something that comes naturally. It is taught in school, promoted by demagogic politicians, propagated by religious leaders, and amplified by mass media. I am a Burmese Buddhist from Myanmar. I lived there. We were made ignorant of the fact that Rohingya belong to Burma. Burmese Buddhists susceptible to the propaganda of the Burmese military since the s have been made to believe that they do not want Muslim Burmese whether they are Rohingya ethnic, or Gujarati, or others who may have migrated to Burma centuries ago.
The Burmese military systematically engaged in propagating Islamophobia: Muslims are bad and evil and Islam is invasive and a conquering ideology.
And they will destroy a Buddhist country and Buddha's way of life. Therefore, we, the Burmese public have been made ignorant of the facts about Islam and Muslims. Muslims want peace as much as any other, Christian or Buddhist or Hindu. Because of this manufactured ignorance, Burmese think to get rid of the Rohingya and discriminate and persecute other Muslims.
There are also economic gains that accrue in the Rohingya genocide. Every genocide benefits the killers, the perpetrators.
If you look at Nazi Germany, when the Nazis mass-exterminated the German Jews everything that belonged to the victims was confiscated by the killers — land, building, treasures of all kinds including jewelry, gold, art objects, even shoes! Likewise, the Burmese military and the political state took the abandoned land, warehouses, paddy, un-destroyed buildings, etc.
Q: Out of 14 provinces in Myanmar 11 are embroiled in some or other forms of strife. Rakhine is the only province where the conflict has attained communal proportions.
Why is it so? MZ: Concerning the Rohingya, there is no conflict. Because genocides are no conflicts. Rohingya are not fighting with any community or with the government.
Rohingya wants to live in Burma as peacefully as anybody. They even do not demand independence or regional autonomy — only basic rights, civil rights, and equal citizenship which they had lost at the hands of the Burmese state. So, the conflict in Rakhine is actually between Rakhine Buddhists who lost their old kingdom years ago and the Burmese Buddhists who rule the center. That is the only conflict there. Rakhine Buddhists are fighting through armed struggle against the Burmese Buddhists.
Q: This is something news. But the question is why the world does not know that there are other armed resistance movements and conflicts in Myanmar? MZ: Because the western media wants to focus on Muslims versus the Buddhist paradigm. But in the case of Burma, in the case of Rohingya, the violence is perpetrated not by the Muslims, but by the Burmese military and Buddhist majority.
Q: Almost one-quarter of Myanmar hosts one or more ethnic armed organizations EAOs and most of them practice Buddhism. MZ: Rakhine has a triangular colonial situation. The entire coastline of the ancient Arakan kingdom is a colony of the Burmese Buddhists. The center has made sure that these regional Muslim and Buddhist communities remain divided.
So, this is a classic colonial policy by the Burmese Buddhist and the military against two communities who are equally colonized by the Burmese. Therefore, this horizontal or communal conflict in Rakhine has been actively fanned from the colonial Burmese center.
Just about every single ethnic community, who has a pocket of land that they call their ancestral land or region, has taken up and revolted against the central, ethnically Burmese control, military, or civilian government since independence from Britain in The main reason for widespread armed ethnic rebellion or revolt against the central government in Burma is because of the violation of the principle of ethnic equality, within what was promised to be a federation of different ethnic communities?
That is what triggered widespread ethnic armed rebellions in all non-Burmese regions. And remember, Burma is a multi-ethnic country with borders with about five different countries like big ones like China, India, or smaller ones like Bangladesh, Thailand, Laos.
All these borderland areas belong to ethnic minorities. More importantly, these borderlands are militarily strategic for the Burmese military. And being used as buffers, these regions are rich in teak, agricultural land, and above ground and underground minerals like gold, titanium, jade, copper.
Rakhine coast region also has one of the 10th largest natural gas deposits in the world. So, there are economic elements and military elements that motivate the Burmese military to treat these ethnic communities as if they were colonies of the Burmese military and by extension colonies of the Burmese majority of people like myself.
Q: But again, the question is why they single out Rohingya if they have issues with other communities as well? MZ: There are two reasons. Rohingya happen to be Muslims and are living next to one of the largest Muslim countries in the world, Bangladesh. And through the eyes of the Burmese military, Bangladesh is a smaller country in landmass compared to Burma.
And yet, Bangladesh's population is three times as many as Burma. Bangladesh's population is about million. For that reason, the Burmese military fears that the larger Muslim country of Bangladesh would push the Muslim population into Arakan or Rakhine. And they would take over the land, using Rohingyas as a proxy. Although the earlier generation of Burmese military leaders, including my great uncle had accepted the Rohingya as our ethnic people.
In the mids, Gen. Ne Win and his deputies in the military decided that they must get rid of Rohingya first, to make sure that the Rohingya in Rakhine state could not become proxies that would advance the interest of the then East Pakistan that was the name of Bangladesh before Rohingya have been singled out for this genocidal policy by the Burmese military. Suu Kyi has been widely condemned for her controversial remarks about the Rohingya, as well as her perceived silence on the violence inflicted upon them.
Several commentators have argued the Nobel laureate has lost her moral authority. Her speech this week was also condemned because she did not mention the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya. The Burmese leader repeatedly appealed to the international community to work with the Burmese to find a solution. We regret the error.
Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest. In October , the military carried out a campaign of "devastating cruelty," as described by the U.
Make no mistake: This is ethnic cleansing," said Tirana Hassan, Amnesty International's crisis response director, in a statement. Security forces surround a village, shoot people fleeing in panic and then torch houses to the ground.
In legal terms, these are crimes against humanity—systematic attacks and forcible deportation of civilians," she added. Human Rights Watch's Thapa agrees, arguing that what makes this new wave of anti-Rohingya attacks worse than in previous years is how coordinated they are.
As Myanmar continues to block access to the Rakhine state , Thepa spoke to some of the refugees she met in Bangladesh to document the violence. One woman from Maungdaw Township said she fled on August 26, , leaving her husband and year-old son, after security forces attacked her village and killed her father and many other civilians.
My father was among the dead; his neck had been cut open. I was unable to do last rites for [him]—I just fled," she said. Some refugees arrived in Bangladesh on foot, crossing a border where the Myanmar army is said to be laying landmines specifically to target refugees.
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More than , Rohingya refugees have crossed the border from Myanmar into Bangladesh. By Shashank Bengali. That is the tragedy here.
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