It appears Aung San Suu Kyi & the military have given their response to the recommendations of the Kofi Annan commission released just a few days ago: escalation of genocide against the Rohingya people. If Annan has any integrity left he should denounce the regime & its actions & be done with the whitewashing.

Thousands of fleeing Rohingya on banks of Naf river & trying to swim to asylum in Bangladesh

Rohingya on bank of Naf river  Aug 26 2017 (Ittefaq.com) Aug 26 2017

According to a Bangladesh newspaper, there are 3,000 Rohingya on the Myanmar banks of the Naf river dividing Myanmar from Bangladesh trying to get across the river since it is the route taken to flee from military onslaughts. A Bangladesh border guard official estimated there are at least 1,000 Rohingya in the Naf attempting to swim to asylum. There is no report of search & rescue operations for those in the water since Bangladeshi border guards are under orders to turn Rohingya refugees away. That has been policy since at least 2012.

Despite that policy, since October 2016, 87,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh for their lives. This is a humanitarian crisis of gigantic proportions & part of the crisis is the lack of international support to the Rohingya people.

We stand in full solidarity with the Rohingya struggle against genocide & for human, democratic, civil, & refugee rights.

(Photo of Rohingya on banks of Naf from Ittefaq newspaper via Shafiur Rahman on Twitter)

 

Genocide in Arakan (Rakhine) state, Myanmar

Rohingya family (tweeted by Shafiur Rahman) Aug 26 2017

The photo is a Rohingya family from Thami, Buthidaung in Arakan state. One daughter was gang raped, a son-in-law was killed, & one child died in a torched home. The family was bound & beaten.

We stand in full solidarity with the Rohingya struggle to stop the genocide & for human, democratic, civil, & refugee rights.

(Photo tweeted by Shafiur Rahman)

Foreign investments & genocide in Myanmar

Save Rohingya banner

Many are asking “why is the international community silent on the genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar”? If by ‘international community’ we mean phalanxes of human rights activists actively engaged in defense of the Rohingya, the answer is that Rohingya activists are working tirelessly on social media, by organizing rallies & protests where they are in exile, & by holding public tribunals on Myanmar’s human rights crimes to build that movement. But it has a long way to go.

If by ‘international community’ we mean governments around the world, the answer is that the most powerful of them have vested economic interests in Myanmar, human rights issues in their own countries, & don’t give a damn about genocide against Rohingya Muslims.

The economy of Myanmar is controlled by the military, making the capitalist class indistinguishable from the political apparatus. In the past decade, in order to enrich itself even more off the backs of Burmese working people, the military junta initiated a program of neoliberal economics & actively courted foreign investors in oil & gas exploration, manufacturing, mining, hotels & tourism, transport, telecommunications, real estate, livestock & fisheries, agriculture, construction & services. For manufacturing companies (i.e., sweatshop operations), low wages of about $70 a month is the compelling attraction. Other than providing a human rights face to genocide, the primary presidential responsibility of Aun San Suu Kyi seems to be drumming up foreign investment. In fact, the military may have installed her phony civilian regime primarily as a means to attract investment.

The scale of foreign investment is immense: as of about two years ago, 3,032 foreign companies & 32 foreign-invested joint ventures from 36 countries operated in Myanmar. Some of the top investors include China, Thailand, Singapore, Australia, Bangladesh, Brunei, Indonesia, South Korea, Japan, Malaysia, India, Canada, the Philippines, the UK & several other European countries, the US. Do you think the leaders of any of those countries will speak out against genocide in Myanmar when they all have billions of dollars at stake?

Arakan (Rakhine) state is involved in several neoliberal projects because of its resources & key location as a coastal state. These projects include land grabbing from Rohingya farmers. That is a strong motivating factor in the genocide of Rohingya but the primary cause is rooted more in the legacy of English colonialism. As we know from the struggles in Kashmir & Myanmar, the legacy of colonialism is not yet decisively uprooted & defeated.

We stand in full solidarity with the Rohingya struggle to stop the genocide & for human, democratic, civil, & refugee rights.

(Photo is protest in Kuala Lumpur in 2015 from Green Left Weekly)

Facebook asked if I’d like to mark myself safe in Hurricane Harvey. I’d really like to do the drama thing & make you think fortune has pulled me back from the brink of death but all it did here was blow my garbage cans around. So yes, I’m safe from Hurricane Harvey because it didn’t come within 100 miles of here.

Myanmar army raided village & Rohingya’s houses are being burnt down. Vulnerable women with kids are taking shelter in the forest.

#Need_Your_Solidarity.

–from Imran Mohammed, Rohingya refugee

Hawaiian independence from US colonialism

Hawaii independence protest (Zinn History project) Aug 25 2017

August 21, 1959 is the date the US tried to render the theft of Hawaii legitimate by declaring it a state. There is no media coverage of the Native Hawaiian independence movement & no honest history taught in US schools of the forcible acquisition of Hawaii by the US military in league with plantation owners & agribusiness companies. Following the overthrow of Hawaiian rulers in 1893, the entire archipelago was annexed by the US. In 1959, statehood was fraudulently created in a popular vote on the question, “Shall Hawaii immediately be admitted into the Union as a State?” Those qualified to vote were US citizens who had resided in Hawaii for at least one year.

Since the US occupation & annexation in 1893, thousands from the US mainland had migrated to Hawaii, many stationed with the US occupying army. Any Hawaiians who took up US citizenship while under occupation were eligible to vote but those who refused to adopt US citizenship & instead declared themselves Hawaiian citizens were ineligible. That’s how Hawaii became the 50th state of the US–through fraud, chicanery, & theft.

Though Hawaiians continue to fight for self-determination & against the unlawful occupation, they are now less than 10% of the population, with many forced into diaspora on the mainland & replaced by affluent interlopers. Since the Hawaiian language is one of the cultural devastations of the occupation & diaspora, there is no way to say in Hawaiian, “the struggle continues”, la lucha continúa!

(Photo of Hawaiian independence protest from Zinn Education Project)

(This was originally posted in 2012 but has been slightly edited)

New military rampage against Rohingya in Arakan state

The very evening Kofi Annan’s commission issued its final 63-page report on violence in Arakan (Rakhine) state, Myanmar (where per government demand, it did not use the proper name Rohingya) Rohingya activists have been putting out emergency notice of renewed military violence against Rohingya across the state, including aerial siege. Rohingya activists report the military in league with Buddhist nationalists have torched hundreds of homed in several villages, forcibly evicted hundreds, & executed at least 200 so far.

The government claims what set off the murderous rampage is that a Rohingya resistance group raided dozens of border guard & military bases. They used the same claim last October 9th to unleash a reign of terror that forced 87,000 Rohingya to flee for their lives to Bangladesh. They in fact have not investigated & have no idea who carried out the raids on border guards in October–if they weren’t military operatives.

To follow this important development, Rohingya Blogger on Twitter can be accessed at: https://twitter.com/rohingyablogger; Burma Task Office at https://twitter.com/BurmaTaskForce; or Rohingya Vision at https://twitter.com/RohingyaVision

We stand in full solidarity with the Rohingya struggle for human, democratic, civic, & refugee rights.