The 'ethnic cleansing' of the Rohingya

[Eugene]

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 Burma’s ongoing military campaign against the Rohingya Muslim minority group in that country’s Rakhine state “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”

This is what he meant: Using a pretext of rooting out Islamist insurgents, Burma’s 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 world’s attention. But it has also caused a lot of confusion. Didn’t Burma just undergo a democratic transition? Isn’t 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]

1. Why have Muslims been perpetrating an ethnic cleansing against Christians?

[Blue_Tires]

2. kicked

[Hortensis]

3. At bottom, this arises from typical hard-core conservative tribalism and fear on both sides.

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:

The Burmese government, under international pressure, has tried to come up with a solution to this issue, setting up a commission under Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary-general. The so-called Advisory Commission on Rakhine State issued a number of recommendations, including a review of the 1982 citizenship law. Suu Kyi, the country’s de-facto leader, embraced those recommendations made on August 25th. But just hours after that report was made public, ARSA carried out its attacks, prompting the military's" ... "what the UN human-rights chief has called a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”

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 don’t 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.