Salaam
Rather than make a new thread, Ill put this here. Another update on the situation in Myanmar.
Myanmar Watch
Satellite images of Northern Rakhine in Myanmar, obtained by Human Rights Watch, show the remains of more than 500 burned Rohingya villages being bulldozed and erased while neighbouring non Rohingya villages stand unscathed.
It looks suspiciously as if something nasty is being covered up; but social welfare minister Win Myat Aye says goodness no, this ground-levelling frenzy is part of a plan from the newly created Union Enterprise for Humanitarian Assistance, Resettlement and Development (UEHRD) to rebuild villages to a higher standard than before, for when refugees return. Its chief coordinator, Aung Tun Thet, says there is no time to waste (although its not clear why, since not a single Rohingya refugee has yet returned). The UEHRD, which is apparently seeking funding from UN agencies, is, coincidentally, chaired by that known Rohingya champion Aung San Suu Kyi. It’s a small world in Rakhine.
Suu Kyi government insists there has been no cover up, no ethnic cleansing, no genocide – it was all fake news. Myanmars own internal investigation concluded that not a single violation had been committed by security forces, and blamed local villagers for one single (presumably, inconveniently obvious) mass grave. Otherwise, it insists nothing has happened in Rakhine.
Unfortunately ‘nothing’ is a dangerous concept in Myanmar. Two Reuters journalists, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, were arrested in December after speaking to Rakhine policeman and this, er, nothing. Charged under the countrys Official Secrets Act, they remain in detention and face a possible 14 years in jail.
The UN is also unconvinced by the nothing. The High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad AL Hussein, called events in Rakhine ‘a textbook example of ethnic cleansing’. Pramila Patten, the UN special envoy on sexual violence in conflict, visited in December to investigate, but Suu Kyi refused to discuss sexual violence. The UN special rapporteur on torture, Yanghee Lee, has been permanently barred from entering the country.
Myanmar seems convinced that if the UN is kept out, journalists imprisoned and evidence destroyed, this will all go away. It is wrong however. The evidence lies in the words and on the bodies of the 650000 Rohingya now in Bangladesh. To investigators and forensic doctors, human voices and human bodies tell verifiable and consistent stories of soldiers and civilian militas arriving in villiages, separating an shooting men and boys, beating and drowning and burning children in front of their mothers, systematically raping women in groups, then locking them in buildings and burning them alive.
Physicians for Human Rights, who document accounts and injuries according to the internationally agreed Istanbul Protocol, have examined multiple refugees. They report hundreds of gunshot wounds, burns and machete injuries, and widespread evidence of rape and sexual violence. Stories and injuries match. Survivors accuse. Satellites confirm. The bulldozed villages peak. Suu Kyi can put her fingers in her ears and talk loudly as much as she likes. She will never drown them out.
PE No 1465
From Chechnya
occasionally, we are pleasantly surprised when the kindness of strangers helps us out too.