[YANGON] Myanmar has called an emergency Asean meeting to discuss the Rohingya crisis, a diplomat said Monday, as regional tensions deepen over a bloody military crackdown on the country’s Muslim minority.
More than 20,000 Rohingya have flooded into Bangladesh over the past two months, fleeing a military campaign in Myanmar’s western Rakhine state.
Their stories of mass rape and murder at the hands of security forces have galvanised protests in Muslim nations around the region, with Buddhist-majority Myanmar facing diplomatic pressure from its neighbours.
Last week Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak lashed out at Myanmar’s de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi for allowing “genocide” on her watch, speaking before thousands of angry protesters in Kuala Lumpur.
Myanmar, which has vehemently denied the accusations, responded by angrily summoning Malaysia’s ambassador and banning its workers from going to the country.
A diplomatic source in the Philippines confirmed Myanmar had invited them for an emergency Asean meeting to discuss “the Rohingya issue”.
The source declined to give more details on the meeting, which the Nikkei reported would be held in Yangon on Dec 19. Myanmar officials could not be reached for comment.
The bloodshed presents the biggest challenge to Nobel Peace prize winner Ms Suu Kyi since her party won the country’s first democratic elections in a generation last year.
Last week the UN’s special adviser on Myanmar criticised her handling of the crisis, saying it had “caused frustration locally and disappointment internationally”.
Ms Suu Kyi also held talks over Rakhine with the foreign minister of Indonesia, after cancelling a visit to the country in November following protests and an attempted attack on the Myanmar embassy.
State media report almost 100 people have been killed – 17 soldiers and 76 suspects – in the army operation in Rakhine that followed deadly raids on police border posts on Oct 9.
That includes six suspects who died during interrogations, the Global New Light of Myanmar said on Saturday, out of some 575 people who have been detained.
Advocacy groups put the death toll in the hundreds, but foreign journalists and independent investigators have been barred from visiting the area to verify the figures.
With the crisis showing no sign of abating, the government over the weekend extended a 7.00pm to 6.00am curfew across the locked-down area for another two months.
Myanmar State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, reflect on your own complicity in the genocide of my fellow Rohingya people, instead of dismissing well-documented allegations of crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and genocide as “exaggerations” and “fabrications”
Myanmar State Counsellor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, both personally and from her Office, attack the growing allegations of her government’s policies of persecution of Rohingya people.
This is the latest and official attack on the video-clip which has been viewed over 96,000 times on YouTube.
I am a Rohingya activist and professional, fluent in Burmese, Rohingya and English languages, living in exile. I made the 2-minutes video-clip with English language subtitles and posted it on YouTube with the purpose of exposing Aung San Suu Kyi’s culpability and complicity in the crime of genocide against my peoples, including babies, children, women, men and elderly people.
Here is my subtitled video of you LAUGHING OUT LOUD at the genocide allegations.
The clip was a complete Burmese language exchange between a questioner and the State Counsellor from the live webcast of her public meeting with the Burmese in Singapore on 1 Dec 2016.
The literal translation of both the question, submitted in writing, which Aung San Suu Kyi herself read to the audience, and her own Burmese language response, was – and still is -100% impossible. For the whole Q and A exchange was coded.
Therefore, the inferences were made against the backdrop of Myanmar’s overwhelming public and official dismissal as “exaggerations” and “fabrications” the Rohingya identity, existence and genocidal policies – all to the best of my linguistic capabilities and in complete honesty.
This dismissal has dominated the Burmese public discourse, official statements by the governments (both the previous Government of Thein Sein and the current NLD Government or formerly opposition party) and in the social and real time mass media in Burmese language, over the past 4 years since the two bouts of large scale organized violence against Rohingyas broke out in June and October of 2012.
In her press meetings, Aung San Suu Kyi has used consistently the word “exaggerations” in reference to allegations of ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Rohingya people in the months leading up the election in November 2015. She has also reportedly used that expression “fabrications”, “biases” and “exaggerations” in her official meetings with foreign diplomats whom she chided them as relying on false or biased media reports.
The subtitles were the result of the deciphering of what those “fabrications” might be, when she laughed them out, apparently finding these “exaggerations” and “fabrications” to be nothing more than a laughing matter.
Even a YouTube which was posted by a Facebook user named “Thura Soe”. in Aung San Suu Kyi’s defence in the comment session in the State Counsellor Office’s Facebook page Myanmar State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi needs to reflect on her own complicity in the genocide.
In that alternative deciphering or interpretation of the completely coded Q and A ‘fabrications’ were interpreted as “reference to the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party” or USDP.
The fact is USDP is never referred to by either Aung San Suu Kyi or her government’s Information Committee led by former USDP Government spokesperson ex-Major Zaw Htay. Nor USDP, which NLD dealt a crushing electoral defeat, has presented Aung San Suu Kyi any major headache, unlike the growing and worldwide accusations and criticisms of her complicity and silence.
Furthermore, Aung San Suu Kyi herself has openly dismissed any credible allegations of genocide and ethnic cleansing as “biased” or “fabrications” or “exaggerations”.
Additionally, the Myanmar Information Committee from her office has directly scathing if baseless accusations against Human Rights Watch, BBC, CNA, CNN, Reuters, etc. rejecting even the satellite images of charred Rohingya villages.
Both these pieces of contextual information and the reports of Ms Suu Kyi’s dismissal of our Rohingya people’s collective plight as ‘exaggerations’ as well as her reported and repeated characterisation of Rohingya – including our identity as a once officially recognised ethnic minority of the Union of Burma – as “non-factual” had compelled me to come up with the only plausible deciphering as reflected in my subtitle.
I had also checked with other native speakers of Burmese who are fluent bi-lingual English-Burmese speakers and scholars. They all agreed with my deciphered subtitles.
Of course, you can also deny because the Burmese speech pattern that you resorted to will allow you “the space of deniability.” Admittedly, I could never presume to know exactly what you had in your anti-Rohingya, anti-Muslim racist mind.
However, I would like to ask Ms Suu Kyi to tell me, the accused, what exactly was coded in that Q and A on 1 Dec.
Finally – and more importantly, as a Rohingya in exile, I would like to urge strongly Ms Suu Kyi to search her soul deep and see why she finds these well-researched findings of ethnic cleansing, genocide and crimes against humanity “exaggerations”.
How could you, Ms Suu Kyi possibly know, let alone dismiss, these international allegations, since you have never documented any human rights abuses in your entire life, nor ever bothered to travel to the crime scenes of my birthplace – N. Arakan – and set foot on a Rohingya IDP camp or an impoverished and oppressed Rohingya village?
After all, the name of the crime of Rohingya persecution have been accepted as crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing or genocide by some of the most world’s credible organizations, university research centres, UN special rapporteurs – including Ms Suu Kyi’s friend and teacher Nobel Laureates Amartya Sen, Desmond Tutu, Jodi Williams and Jose Ramos-Horta, Human Rights Watch, Yale University Human Rights Law Clinic, respected legal scholar and practitioners Sir Geoffrey Nice and Katherine Southwick (of Yugoslavia), renowned scholars of mass atrocities Professors Gregory Stanton and Penny Green, Human Rights Watch, Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power, just to name a few.
— Eye-opener on genocide against my People:
Amartya Sen, “The Term ‘slow genocide’ is appropriate because you deny [Rohingya] people health care, nutritional opportunities.” –
George Soros, “In Aung Mingalar, I heard the echoes of my childhood. You see, in 1944, as a Jew in Budapest, I too was a Rohingya. Much like the Jewish ghettos set up by Nazis around Eastern Europe during World War II, Aung Mingalar has become the involuntary home to thousands of families who once had access to health care, education and employment. Now, they are forced to remain segregated in a state of abject deprivation. The parallels to the Nazi genocide are alarming.”
Desmond Tutu, “The government of Myanmar has sought to absolve itself of responsibility for the conflict between the Rakhine and the Rohingya, projecting it as sectarian or communal violence. I would be more inclined to heed the warnings of eminent scholars and researchers including Amartya Sen, the Nobel laureate in economics, who say this is a deliberately false narrative to camouflage the slow genocide being committed against the Rohingya people.” (source: http://www.tutufoundationusa.org/2015/05/29/desmond-tutu-the-slow-genocide-against-the-rohingya)
She was just six years old when her stepfather began sexually abusing her.
He even preyed on the girl on the night his wife was in hospital giving birth to their first daughter.
Out of love for him and not wanting her mother and half-sisters to hate her, the girl kept quiet for about eight years.
But this came at a cost to her own emotional and psychological state. She became deeply affected and would inflict injuries on herself.
She eventually confided in a school counsellor as she did not want her stepfather to perform the same sordid acts on her half-sisters.
These details were revealed in the grounds of decision by District Judge Lee-Khoo Poh Choo, who sentenced the stepfather to 45 months’ jailon seven charges of sexual exploitation on Wednesday.
The accused is now in his 50s and his trial lasted two years. He is appealing against his conviction and sentence.
The judge said in her grounds of decision that the accused got to know the girl’s mother in 1998. They were married in 2002.
The couple cannot be named to protect the girl’s identity.
Judge Lee-Khoo said that the girl, now 21, had testified during the trial that her stepfather first had sex with her when she was six years old.
This continued for about six years until she was in Primary 6, when they stopped for fear she would get pregnant.
It was during this period that the stepfather would also perform obscene acts on her.
Sometime between Sept 7 and 8, 2005, the then 11-year-old girl was asleep in her home when her stepfather touched her private parts.
The girl’s mother was in hospital giving birth, noted the judge.
The accused would repeat the act on the girl six more times until March 2010, when the girl was 14.
She testified he would sometimes tell her he was going to touch her when he picked her up after school in his lorry.
AFRAID
She kept mum about the abuse because she was afraid her mother and half-sisters would turn on her and that no one would believe her.
She shared what had happened with a school counsellor she had been seeing due to her poor grades.
It was later discovered the girl had harmed herself because she had physical urges as a result of the abuse, the judge said.
The girl underwent counselling and therapy for two years – delaying the trial till 2014, the judge said.
In court, the stepfather, who worked as a construction site project supervisor, had claimed that his stepdaughter lied about the abuse as she was angry at him for punishing her for her high phone bill.
But Judge Lee-Khoo said in her grounds of decision that she found the girl forthright, coherent and credible.
She added that the girl had nothing to gain and instead, lost the love and warmth of her family.
After finding the stepfather guilty, the judge said: “His depraved, immoral acts left their marks on the young and vulnerable victim forever.
“He had destroyed the warm, close-knit family life that the victim had with her mother and half-sisters.”
His depraved, immoral acts left their marks on the young and vulnerable victim forever.
TEKNAF, Bangladesh: Horrifying stories of gang rape, torture and murder are emerging from among the thousands of desperate Rohingya migrants who have pushed into Bangladesh in the past few days to escape unfolding chaos in Myanmar.
Up to 30,000 of the impoverished ethnic group have fled their homes, the United Nations says, after troops poured into the narrow strip where they live earlier this month.
Bangladesh has resisted urgent international appeals to open its border to avert a humanitarian crisis, instead telling Myanmar it must do more to prevent the stateless Muslim minority from entering.
The scale of human suffering was becoming clear Thursday, as desperate people like Mohammad Ayaz told how troops attacked his village and killed his pregnant wife.
Cradling his two-year-old son, he said military men killed at least 300 men in the village market and gang-raped dozens of women before setting fire to around 300 houses, Muslim-owned shops and the mosque where he served as imam.
“They shot dead my wife, Jannatun Naim. She was 25 and seven months pregnant. I took refuge at a canal with my two-year-old son, who was hit by a rifle butt,” Ayaz told AFP, pointing to a cut on the boy’s forehead.
Ayaz sold his watch and shoes to pay for the journey and has taken shelter along with at least 200 of his neighbours at a camp for unregistered Rohingya refugees.
‘DEEP CONCERN’
Many of those seeking shelter in Bangladesh say they have walked for days and used rickety boats to cross into the neighbouring country, where hundreds of thousands of registered Rohingya refugees have been living for decades.
The Rohingya are loathed by many in majority Buddhist Myanmar who see them as illegal immigrants and call them “Bengali”, even though many have lived in Myanmar for generations.
Most live in impoverished western Rakhine state, but are denied citizenship and smothered by restrictions on movement and work.
As the crisis deepened, Bangladesh said late Wednesday it had summoned the Myanmar ambassador to express “deep concern”.
“Despite our border guards’ sincere effort to prevent the influx, thousands of distressed Myanmar citizens including women, children and elderly people continue to cross (the) border into Bangladesh,” it said. “Thousands more have been reported to be gathering at the border crossing.”
TORTURE AND RAPE
Since the latest violence flared up, Bangladesh’s secular government has been under intense pressure to open its border to prevent a humanitarian disaster.
Instead, Bangladesh border guards have intensified patrols and coast guards have deployed extra ships. Officials say they have stopped around a thousand Rohingya at the border since Monday.
Farmer Deen Mohammad was among the thousands who evaded the patrols, sneaking into the Bangladeshi border town of Teknaf four days ago with his wife, two of their children and three other families.
“They (Myanmar’s military) took my two boys, aged nine and 12 when they entered my village. I don’t know what happened to them,” Mohammad, 50, told AFP. “They took women in rooms and then locked them from inside. Up to 50 women and girls of our village were tortured and raped.”
Mohammad said houses in his village were burned, echoing similar testimony from other recent arrivals.
Human Rights Watch said Monday it had identified more than 1,000 houses in Rohingya villages that had been razed in northwestern Myanmar using satellite images.
The Myanmar military has denied burning villages and even blamed the Rohingya themselves.
Jannat Ara said she fled with neighbours after her father was arrested and her 17-year-old sister disappeared, she believes raped and killed by the army.
“We heard that they tortured her to death. I don’t know what happened to my mother,” said Ara, who entered Bangladesh on Tuesday.
Rohingya community leaders said hundreds of families had taken shelter in camps in the Bangladeshi border towns of Teknaf and Ukhia, many hiding for fear they would be sent them back to Myanmar.
Police on Wednesday detained 70 Rohingya, including women and children, who they say they will send back across the border.
“They handcuffed even young girls and children and then took them away with a view to pushing them back to Myanmar,” said one community leader who asked not to be named, adding they faced “certain death” if made to return.
MAUNGDAW, RAKHINE: Sekurang-kurangnya 50 wanita di dua kampung di sini dirogol tentera Myanmar kelmarin sementara 25 penduduk lelaki ditahan.
Kejadian berlaku selepas sekumpulan 200 tentera Myanmar memasuki Kampung Kyar Gaung Taung pagi Ahad lalu. Mereka menggunakan pembesar suara, memanggil penduduk keluar, kononnya untuk menemui mereka. Penduduk lelaki yang bimbang ditangkap melarikan diri.
Mereka yang tidak melarikan diri diarah berkumpul di kawasan sawah, bersama penduduk wanita.
Di situ, tentera berkenaan mengganggu dan ada yang merogol wanita terbabit, sementara penduduk lelaki dan kanak-kanak didera.
“Kira-kira 50 wanita diperkosa oleh tentera itu. Dua puluh lima penduduk lelaki ditahan. Mereka masih ditahan dan tentera belum lagi meninggalkan kampung berkenaan,” kata seorang penduduk, semalam.
Seorang penduduk, Amir Hussein pula melaporkan, seekor kerbaunya dicuri tentera Myanmar sebelum mereka membakar rumahnya.
“Mereka menyembelih kerbau saya dan memakannya,” kata Amir.
Pada masa sama, sekumpulan 300 tentera mengepung kampung Myaw Taung sebelum merogol penduduk wanita dan mendera lelaki tua.
