The Rohingya people, an ethnic minority in Burma are being slaughtered, as we speak, as I write. I probably wouldn’t have heard about this tragedy that is currently taking place if I had not been actively reading my Twitter feeds. You, too, probably don’t know about it because the mainstream media is not reporting it. Instead, they’ve chosen to hide bury their heads in the sand or god knows what. If you close your eyes, it will not exist? Frightening images of burned villages, massacred babies and children have filled the social media sites. One begs to ask, why is this genocide being ignored by the world?
Emanuel Stoakes, writing for the Independent of the U.K., states that the international community has been shamefully unresponsive to the crisis in his article “The Rohingya of Burma are on the edge of disaster. Why won’t the world act?”
“The news last week that around a hundred refugees from Burma had slowly starved to death after 25 days at sea may have shocked those unfamiliar with the current state of affairs in Asia’s newest ostensible democracy. The harrowing reports more recently of mass rapes, involving torture, in the country’s western Rakhine state will likely have had a similar impact.
But to those who have been keeping up with the daily reports of intimidation, harassment and violence directed at ethnic minorities in Burma news of these latest horrors was heartbreaking, but unsurprising.”
Burma and its government seem unable to deal effectively with the problem and choose also to hide its head in the sand. Will this inaction be classified as a crime against humanity when judgement day comes? Aung San Suu Kyi is delaying taking any action whatsoever. She’s waiting for the three wise men to give her the answers. We all know how long it takes foreign experts and scholars to come up with an idea. She’s pretending there’s nothing wrong, nothing happening in her neighborhood, while human beings are being slaughtered. She’s pretending to believe in that great concept of democracy – what a hypocrite!
“Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi has said that Burma “must decide for itself” whether or not to grant citizenship to the Muslim minority Rohingya, but she added that the government “should listen” to foreign experts and uphold international standards in its citizenship laws. Suu Kyi was responding to criticism by Jose Ramos-Horta, the former president of Timor Leste, and Muhammad Yunus, founder of microfinance institution Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, who wrote in The Huffington Post on Feb. 20 that Burma should amend its laws and grant the Rohingya “full citizenship.” The two Nobel Peace Prize laureates said Burma was failing to address the ongoing “ethnic cleansing” of the group in Arakan State, western Burma.
The government of President Thein Sein has given conflicting signals on how it seeks to resolve the issue of Rohingya citizenship. Most recently, on Feb. 20, Deputy Minister of Immigration and Population Kyaw Kyaw Win told Parliament that Burma knows “no Rohingya” ethnic group.
Since mid-2012 ethnic violence has plagued Arakan State. Scores of people, including women and children, have been killed and about 110,000 people, mostly Rohingyas, were displaced after inter-communal violence broke out between Arakanese Buddhist and Muslim Rohingya communities, according to UN estimates.” Source
Much of the violence has been instigated by the Buddhist monks, led by the self-proclaimed by monk Wirathu who calls himself ‘the Burmese Bin Laden’. Do your own inquiries into the violence led by these orange frocked monks who carry machetes in the streets, slaughtering innocent babies and your opinions will be changed forever. Honestly, there is no holiness or kindness here. The Buddhist principle of non-violence is a load of crap in this case. The saffron /orange frocks worn by this racist, evil group are just another costume for killers.
Wirathu, the tyrant monk’s war crimes include:
Muslims in Burma, looms large over the sectarian violence in Meikhtila.
Wirathu played an active role in stirring tensions in a Rangoon suburb in February, by spreading unfounded rumours that a local school was being developed into a mosque, according to the Democratic voice of Burma. An angry mob of about 300 Buddhists assaulted the school and other local businesses in Rangoon.” Source.
No doubt human rights activists and others who have noticed the genocide in Rohingya will continue to voice their anger and opposition and try their best to bring the issue to the forefront of the agenda of those organizations and people in power. How the world can bury their heads in the sand and pretend that this ethnic cleansing is not happening is beyond believable.
Update: Some of the mainstream media is reporting on the massacre, but are they getting the story right and what took them so long?