Burma Muslim Genocide

[aftab]

Welcome brother Saif al-Adel and thank you for removing doubts about the plight of our Afghan brothers and sisters who have lived here for so long.

[stingingnettle]

Saif al-Adel

A warm welcome to the forum.

How long must a person live another country to win the right to be a citizen? There is a huge number of Afghans that were born in Pakistan and have lived here all their lives, so should they not be given Pakistani citizenship if they so wish? I would say yes.

[semirza]

Pakistanis (the government including citizens) are sleeping over Muslims massacres in Burama while East Punjab-India protests:



Jul 23 2012

Hundreds of people staged demonstration outside Jama Masjid in Ludhiana in Punjab state against the killings of Muslims in Myanmar.

(Ahlul Bayt News Agency) - Shahi Imam of Punjab, Maulana Habibur Rahman Sani Ludhianvi led the protest demonstration and demanded the Government of India to take up the issue with Myanmar government and ask it to stop the killings.

The demonstration was organized by Majlis Ahrar Islam, an organization headed by the Shahi Imam of Punjab. Protesters raised slogans against the killings and the silence of Indian Government and Muslim leaders, TCN reported. They also burnt the national flag of Myanmar.

The Shahi Imam urged Central Government to apprise Myanmar government of the sentiments of Indian Muslims.

Talking to media persons, national president of Majlis Ahrar Islam and Shahi Imam of Punjab, Maulana Habibur Rahman Sani Ludhianvi said the killings of Muslims by Buddhist extremists cannot be tolerated. He expressed surprise that international media is constantly hiding the news about the killings of thousands of people killed so far and a number of mosques burnt so far.

While supporting the protest letter from the Muslim world to Myanmar over the killings, the Shahi Imam demanded the Muslim world to cut ties with Myanmar. He also demanded Muslims and Muslim leaders in India to hold protest demonstrations against Myanmar.

The Shahi Imam said that it is shameful that Myanmar's democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, has not uttered a word against the killings.

Condemning the government of India, he said that not only it did not utter a word on the killings, but also did not give political asylum to 200 Muslims who had escaped the killings and ran away from Myanmar.

The Shahi Imam also urged the Buddhist leader Dalai Lama to raise voice against the massacres of Muslims in Myanmar.

Eminent persons present at the protest demonstration included Naib Shahi Imam Maulana Usman Rahmani, Maulana Ateequer Rahman, Mufti Jamaluddin, Mohd Shahnawaz Ahrari and special secretary of Shahi Imam, Mohd Mustaqeem Ahrari.

http://abna.ir/data.asp?lang=3&id=330982

[Mirza Ghalib]

Genocide of Muslims in Burma, the Karen people speak!!!
By: AntiZio on: 30.07.2012

Video here

Muslims have lived in Burma for hundreds of years, although many arrived only after Burma's annexation by Great Britain in the 19th Century. Racial and religious tensions have run high between Muslims and Burmans since independence in 1948. Successive Burmese regimes have encouraged or instigated violence against Muslims as a way of diverting the public's attention away from economic or political concerns. The most recent outbreak of violence occurred in cities across Burma.

The report also examines Karen relations with the Muslim population in Karen State, particularly the persecution of Muslims by the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA), a Karen group allied with the SPDC. The DKBA has been involved in the destruction of mosques and the forced relocation of Muslim villagers. DKBA soldiers have tried to force Muslims to worship Buddhist monks and put up Buddhist altars. Restrictions have also been placed on Muslims to force them to become vegetarian. Both the DKBA and the SPDC force Muslims in Karen State to perform forced labour for them on a regular basis.

This report is based on interviews with Muslim refugees from Karen State and Muslim travellers and traders from central Burma and the Western border conducted by KHRG researchers between October 2001 and February 2002.

All of the interviews quoted in the text are with Burmese Muslims with the exception of Interview #6 with "Moe Zaw Shwe", who is a Karen Christian. There are a higher number of examples in the text from Karen State because more of the interviews were conducted with Muslims from Karen State. Some supporting information and assistance with interviews was provided by the Muslim Information Centre of Burma (MICB).

This report consists of several parts: this preface, an introduction, a detailed description of the situation including quotes from interviews, and an index of interviews. The full text of the interviews compiled for this report is available as a separately published annex and is available from KHRG upon approved request
"Far from being the terrorists of the world, the Islamic peoples have been its victims." — John Pilger

Almost every city or town in Burma has a Muslim community. There are also Muslim and mixed Muslim villages throughout Burma. Rakhine State (also known as Arakan State) in western Burma has the highest concentration of Muslim inhabitants. The families of some of the Muslim inhabitants of Rakhine State have lived there for hundreds of years, while others arrived after the annexation of this part of Burma by the British in 1824.

Most of the Muslim families in the rest of Burma arrived during British colonial rule. Most of the Muslims in Burma descend at least partly from South Asians, though through the generations there has been a great deal of intermarriage so that many of today's Muslims have ancestors of various ethnicity. Despite this, in Burma non-Muslims tend to use the term 'Muslim' to indicate not only a religion but also an ethnicity, or else they refer to all Muslims as 'Indians' Ka La>'Ka La', which of course they are not.
Muslims usually refer to themselves as 'Muslims' when asked about their ethnicity. The vast majority of Muslims in Burma today were born there, and their ancestors have lived in Burma for generations.

Racial and religious tensions surrounding the Muslims have existed for a long time, but have become worse since Burmese independence in 1948. Much of the abuse against Muslims is similar to that encountered by other ethnic groups.

Muslims also have to go for forced labour and pay extortion fees, they are subject to arbitrary arrest and torture, and are even sometimes executed. Where the discrimination against Muslims differs is in the areas of citizenship and religious freedom.

Most Muslims are not considered as citizens under Burma's strict citizenship law. Based on this they are unable to obtain national identity cards. As a result they find it difficult to travel, get an education, carry on social relations and conduct business.

Racial discrimination and the lack of an identity card make it difficult for Muslims to get employment with private companies. Muslims who are able to get identity cards are barred from holding high office in both the civil service and the military. The majority of them (particularly outside Rakhine State) do not own land, but work as traders or day labourers.

Click to read full report

[semirza]

Muslims are in Burma since a very very long time. I am talking about the Arab traders who married locals and settled in Burma for good. They have every right and should be allowed to live as recognized citizens of Burma. Following article explains further:



TAKEBI, Myanmar: This village in northwest Myanmar has the besieged air of a refugee camp. It is clogged with people living in wooden shacks laid out on a grid of trash-strewn lanes. Its children are pot-bellied with malnutrition.
But Takebi's residents are not refugees. They are Rohingya, a stateless Muslim people of South Asian descent now at the heart of Myanmar's worst sectarian violence in years. The United Nations has called them "virtually friendless" in Myanmar, the majority-Buddhist country that most Rohingya call home. Today, as Myanmar opens up, they appear to have more enemies than ever.

Armed with machetes and bamboo spears, rival mobs of Rohingya Muslims and ethnic Rakhine Buddhists this month torched one another's houses and transformed nearby Sittwe, the capital of the western state of Rakhine, into a smoke-filled battleground. A torrent of Rohingyas has tried to flee Rakhine into impoverished Bangladesh, but most are being pushed back, a Bangladeshi Border Guard commander told Reuters on Thursday.

The fighting threatens to derail the democratic transition in Myanmar, a resource-rich nation of 60 million strategically positioned at Asia's crossroads between India and China, Bangladesh and Thailand. With scores feared dead, President Thein Sein announced a state of emergency on June 10 to prevent "vengeance and anarchy" spreading beyond Rakhine and jeopardizing his ambitious reform agenda.

Reuters visited the area just before the unrest broke out. The northern area of Rakhine state is off-limits to foreign reporters.

Until this month, Myanmar's transformation from global pariah to democratic start-up had seemed remarkably rapid and peaceful. Thein Sein released political prisoners, relaxed media controls, and forged peace with ethnic rebel groups along the country's war-torn borders. A new air of hope and bustle in Myanmar's towns and cities is palpable.
But not in Rakhine, also known as Arakan. It is home to about 800,000 mostly stateless Rohingya, who according to the United Nations are subject to many forms of "persecution, discrimination and exploitation." These include forced labor, land confiscations, restrictions on travel and limited access to jobs, education and healthcare.

Now, even as the state eases repression of the general populace and other minorities, long-simmering ethnic tensions here are on the boil - a dynamic that resembles what happened when multi-ethnic Yugoslavia fractured a generation ago after communism fell.

SUU KYI 'TIGHT-LIPPED'
Even the democracy movement in Myanmar is doing little to help the Muslim minority, Rohingya politicians say.
Democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi last week urged "all people in Burma to get along with each other regardless of their religion and authenticity." But she has remained "tight-lipped" about the Rohingya, said Kyaw Min, a Rohingya leader and one-time Suu Kyi ally who spent more than seven years as a political prisoner. "It is politically risky for her," he said.

NLD spokesman Nyan Win wouldn't comment on Suu Kyi's position, but said: "The Rohingya are not our citizens." Suu Kyi is now on a European tour that will take her to Oslo, Norway, to accept the Nobel Peace Prize she won in 1991.

The violence could disrupt Myanmar's detente with the West, however. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on June 11 called for "Muslims, Buddhists, and ethnic representatives, including Rohingya . . . to begin a dialogue toward a peaceful resolution."

The United States suspended some sanctions on Myanmar, including those banning investment, in May as a reward for its democratic reforms. But the White House kept the framework of hard-hitting sanctions in place, with President Barack Obama expressing at the time concern about Myanmar's "treatment of minorities and detention of political prisoners."

The European Union, which also suspended its sanctions, said on Monday it was satisfied with Thein Sein's "measured" handling of the violence, which the president has said could threaten the transition to democracy if allowed to spiral out of control.

ILLEGAL MIGRANTS
Rohingya activists claim a centuries-old lineage in Rakhine, which like the rest of Burma is predominantly Buddhist. The government regards them as illegal migrants from neighboring Bangladesh and denies them citizenship. "There is no ethnic group named Rohingya in our country," immigration minister Khin Yi said in May.

Communal tensions had been rising in Myanmar since the gang rape and murder of a Buddhist woman last month that was blamed on Muslims. Six days later, apparently in retribution, a Buddhist mob dragged 10 Muslims from a bus and beat them to death.

Violence then erupted on June 9 in Maungdaw, one of the three Rohingya-majority districts bordering Bangladesh, before spreading to Sittwe, the biggest town in Rakhine. Scores are feared dead, and 1,600 houses burnt down.
One measure of the pressure the Rohingya are under is the growing number of boat people. During the so-called "sailing season" between monsoons, thousands of Rohingya attempt to cross the Bay of Bengal in small, ramshackle fishing boats. Their destination: Muslim-majority Malaysia, where thousands of Rohingya work, mostly illegally.

Last season, up to 8,000 Rohingya boat people - a record number - made the crossing, says Chris Lewa, director of the Arakan Project, a Rohingya advocacy group based in Thailand. She has studied their migration patterns since 2006.

BANNED IN BANGLADESH
The violence in Rakhine could cause a surge in Rohingya boat people when the next sailing season begins in October, Rohingya leaders say. "The amount of boat people will increase and increase," said Abu Tahay, chairman of the National Democratic Party for Development, a Rohingya political party.

In what could be the start of a regional refugee crisis, many Rohingya are already attempting the shorter voyage to neighboring Bangladesh.

Bangladesh, like Myanmar, disowns the Rohingyas and has refused to grant them refugee status since 1992. Now, according to a Bangladeshi commander, hundreds have been turned away.

At Shah Pari, a Bangladeshi island on the Naf River dividing Bangladesh and Myanmar, Lieutenant Colonel Zahid Hassan of the Bangladesh Border Guard said the force has sent back 14 wooden country boats since the violence flared in early June, bearing a total of some 700 men, women and children.

Hassan said the boat people were given food, water and medicines before being turned back. His men are now holding back local Bangladeshi villagers and limiting how far fishermen can go out into the river to prevent them from helping would-be "illegal intruders." Peace has been restored since Myanmar imposed its state of emergency, he said, and his men are telling the boat people it is safe to return.

Asked to explain why majority-Muslim Bangladesh did not feel an obligation to take the Rohingyas in, he said: "This is an over-populated country. The country doesn't have the capacity to accommodate these additional people."

WAITING FOR DEMOCRACY
Government officials say they already harbor about 25,000 Rohingyas with refugee status, who receive food and other aid from the United Nations, housed in two camps in southeastern Bangladesh. Officials say there are also between 200,000 and 300,000 "undocumented" Rohingyas - with no refugee status and no legal rights. These people live outside the camps, dependent on local Bangladeshis in a poverty-plagued district for work and sustenance.

Among them is 48-year-old Kalim Ullah, a Rohingya father of three living in an unofficial camp where children bathe in a chocolate-brown pond. He fled here in 1992, after violence that followed the watershed 1990 vote won by Suu Kyi and overturned by the military. He holds up a hand to show a half-stump where his thumb had been before he says it was shot off by a Myanmar soldier.

"They tortured me and I was evicted from my house so we came to Bangladesh," he said. "Now I am waiting for repatriation, I am waiting for democracy in my own country."

Myanmar's neighbors have quietly pressed the country to improve conditions in Rakhine to stop the outflow of refugees. Perhaps as a result, Thein Sein's government this year began easing some travel restrictions, says Rohingya leader Kyaw Min. But these small gains look likely to be suspended or scrapped after the recent bloodshed.
The Rohingya in Myanmar are usually landless as well as stateless, and scratch a living from low-paid casual labor. Four in five households in northern Rakhine State were in debt, the World Food Program reported in 2011. Many families borrow money just to buy food.

Food insecurity had worsened since 2009, said the program, which called for urgent humanitarian assistance. A 2010 survey by the French group Action Against Hunger found a malnutrition rate of 20 percent, which is far above the emergency threshold set by the World Health Organization.

UNDER THE 'NASAKA'
The Rohingya are overseen by the Border Administration Force, better known as the Nasaka, a word derived from the initials of its Burmese name. Unique to the region, the Nasaka consists of officers from the police, military, customs and immigration. They control every aspect of Rohingya life.

"They have total power," says Abu Tahay, the Rohingya politician.

Documented human-rights abuses blamed on the Nasaka include rape, forced labor and extortion. Rohingya cannot travel or marry without the Nasaka's permission, which is never secured without paying bribes, activists say.
The former military government has in the past called these allegations "fabrications."

"There are hundreds of restrictions and extortions," says Rohingya leader Kyaw Min. "The Nasaka have a free hand because government policy is behind them. And that policy is to starve and impoverish the Rohingya."

Burmese officials say the tight controls on the borders are essential to national security. Speaking in Myanmar's parliament last September, immigration minister Khin Yi made no mention of alleged abuses, but said the Nasaka was vital for preventing "illegal Bengali migration" and cross-border crime.

'ANNIHILATE THEM'
At Takebi's market, an agitated crowd gathered before the violence erupted to tell a reporter of alleged abuses by the authorities and ethnic Rakhine: a Rohingya rickshaw driver robbed and murdered, extortion by state officials, random beatings by soldiers at a nearby army post. The stories couldn't be verified.

Some Burmese officials have betrayed bias against the Rohingya in public statements. Rohingya people are "dark brown" and "as ugly as ogres," said Ye Myint Aung, Myanmar's consul in Hong Kong, in a 2009 statement. He went on to extol the "fair and soft" complexions of Myanmar people like himself.

Last week, the state-run New Light of Myanmar published a correction after referring to Muslims as "kalar," a racial slur.

The sectarian hatred in Rakhine towns and villages is echoed online. "It would be so good if we can use this as an excuse to drive those Rohingyas from Myanmar," one reader of Myanmar's Weekly Eleven newspaper comments on the paper's website.
"Annihilate them," writes another.

A nationalist group has set up a Facebook page called the "Kalar Beheading Gang," which has almost 600 "likes."
Meanwhile, the Kaladan Press, a news agency set up by Rohingya exiles in the Bangladesh city of Chittagong, blamed the violence on "Rakhine racists and security personnel."

BOUND FOR MALAYSIA
Not far from Sittwe is Gollyadeil, a fishing village with a jetty of packed mud and a mosque that locals say dates back to the 1930s. The stateless Rohingya villagers here face fewer restrictions than their brethren in the sensitive border area to the north. They can marry without seeking official permission and travel freely around Sittwe district.
Even so, jobs are scarce and access to education limited, and every year up to 40 villagers head out to sea on Malaysia-bound boats. They each pay about 200,000 kyat, or $250, a small fortune by local standards. But the extended Rohingya families who raise the sum regard it as an investment.

"If they make it to Malaysia, they can send home a lot of money," says fishmonger Abdul Gafar, 35.
Many Rohingya in Myanmar depend upon remittances from Malaysia and Thailand. A Takebi elder with a white beard tinged red from betel-nut juice said he gets 100,000 kyat ($125) every four months from his son, a construction worker in Malaysia.

Remittances have lent a deceptive veneer of prosperity to Takebi, where a few houses have tin roofs or satellite dishes.

Ask shopkeeper Mohammad Ayub, 19, how many villagers want to leave Gollyadeil, and he replies, "All of us."
For every Rohingya who makes it to Malaysia, hundreds are blocked, or worse.
Many are arrested before even leaving Myanmar waters. Others are intercepted by the Thai authorities, who last year were still towing Rohingya boats back out to sea, Human Rights Watch reported, "despite allegations that such practices led to hundreds of deaths in 2008 and 2009."

"When someone tries to enter the country illegally, it's our job to send them back," says Major General Manas Kongpan, a regional director of Thailand's Internal Security Operations Command, which handles the boat people. "Thailand doesn't have the capacity to take them in, so people shouldn't criticize so much."

Sayadul Amin, 16, set sail in March 2012 in a fishing boat crammed with 63 people, a third of them boys and girls. The weather turned bad, and Sayudul's boat was pounded by waves.

"I felt dizzy and wanted to throw up," he said.
By day five, they ran out of water and his friend, also a teenager, died. They prayed over his body, he said, then tossed it overboard.

THE UNCOUNTED
The boat eventually ran aground somewhere on Myanmar's Andaman coast, where local villagers summoned the authorities to arrest the boat people.

The adults were jailed in the southern Myanmar town of Dawei, while immigration officials escorted Sayadul and the other minors back to Sittwe by bus. The journey took several days and he saw more of Myanmar than most Rohingya ever do. "There were satellite dishes on all the houses," he said with wonder.

On her historic visit to Myanmar last year, Hillary Clinton praised the country's leaders for trying to resolve decades-old wars between government troops and ethnic rebel armies. But the Rohingya stir far greater nationalist passions that could prove even more destabilizing and intractable than conflicts in Kachin State and other ethnic border regions.

Rohingya leaders have long called for the scrapping of the 1982 Citizenship Law, which was enacted by the former dictatorship and rendered stateless even Rohingya who had lived in Myanmar for generations.
"We are demanding full and equal citizenship," says Kyaw Min, the Rohingya leader.

Judging by the inflammatory rhetoric pervading Myanmar, that demand is unlikely to be met before next year's potentially controversial census.

The last one, in 1983, left the Rohingya uncounted.(Reuters)

http://www.thenews.com.pk/article-54516 ... mar-Spring

[semirza]

Nothing seems to bother this Noble Laureate, a so called democracy advocate Aung San Suu Kyi. Not even charred bodies of women, children, the elderly and heart piercing wails by mothers of massacre (genocide) victims is enough to move her. This has been going on since weeks in Burma but as it appears the UN has just recently woken up from a deep slumber. What a shame!

This woman was supported by Burmese Muslims as well as Muslims from the world over when she stood up against the Burmese army. After achieving her goals look at her as she stands exposed; due to her brazen hypocrisy. Its obvious now she holds no feelings for Rohingyas Muslims.

[Mirza Ghalib]

Cannot back Myanmar's Rohingya:Suu Kyi

November 04, 2012

YANGON: Aung San Suu Kyi has declined to speak out on behalf of Rohingya Muslims and insisted she will not use "moral leadership" to back either side in deadly communal unrest in west Myanmar, reports said.

The Nobel laureate, who has caused disappointment among international supporters for her muted response to violence that has swept Rakhine state, said both Buddhist and Muslim communities were "displeased" that she had not taken their side.

More than 100,000 people have been displaced since June in two major outbreaks of violence in the state, where renewed clashes last month uprooted about 30,000 people. Dozens have been killed on both sides and thousands of homes torched.

"I am urging tolerance but I do not think one should use one's moral leadership, if you want to call it that, to promote a particular cause without really looking at the sources of the problems," Suu Kyi told the BBC on Saturday.

Speaking in the capital Naypyidaw after talks with European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, who has said the EU is "deeply concerned" about the violence and its consequences for Myanmar's reforms, Suu Kyi said she could not speak out in favour of the stateless Rohingya. "I know that people want me to take one side or the other, so both sides are displeased because I will not take a stand with them," she said.

The democracy champion, who is now a member of parliament after dramatic changes overseen by a quasi-civilian regime that took power last year, said the rule of law should be established as a first step before looking into other problems. "Because if people are killing one another and setting fire to one another's houses, how are we going to come to any kind of reasonable settlement?" she said.

Myanmar's 800,000 Rohingya are seen by the government and many in the country as illegal immigrants from neighbouring Bangladesh. They face severe discrimination that activists say has led to a deepening alienation. The Rohingya, who make up the vast majority of those displaced in the fighting, are described by the UN as among the world's most persecuted minorities

http://www.thenews.com.pk/article-74063 ... ya:Suu-Kyi

[Mirza Ghalib]

One of the west's (and UN's) most long-lasting assets showing her true colours once again. One additional thing to note is no doubt that the Nobel Peace Prize must absolutely be renamed to the Prize for the most Bloodthirsty, in short the Bloodthirsty Prize.